The English peasant. Studies: historical, local, and biographic

Preface

THE ENGLISH VIA DOLOROSA; oR, GLIMPSES OF

THE HISTORY OF THE AGRICULTURAL LABOURER THE COTTAGE HOMES OF ENGLAND . WALKS AND TALKS WITH ENGLISH PEASANTS—

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IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

A VILLAGE FAIR IN SUFFOLK

FEN-LAND AND FEN-MEN

PEASANT LIFE IN THE NEW FOREST

THE KENTISH WAGGONER

SUSSEX SHEPHERDS

A SOUTHDOWN VILLAGE ;

SUSSEX COMMONS AND SUSSEX SONGS

IN OXFORDSHIRE.

IN SOUTH WARWICKSHIRE .

TYPES OF ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LIFE—

I. WILLIAM COBBETT Il. JOHN CLARE

III. WILLIAM HUNTINGTON

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THE various papers of which this book is composed were written

‘for different periodicals, at different periods between 1870 and 1884, without thought of their being brought together and forming

a whole.

My interest in the subject began with a study of the Reports of

the Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture (1867), which I took up in order to gain information for some illustrated articles I was planning on ‘the various types of cottages in the different English counties. These Reports soon convinced me that the subject was too ‘serious to be treated in the pretty fashion I intended, and the result was the paper here reprinted and entitled “ Zhe Cottage Flomes of England.”

The interest thus awakened led me, between 1870 and 1874, to ‘make a number of pedestrian tours in various parts of the country, and to give the information gathered, and the sketches made, in a

‘Series of papers. While I was thus going about and talking to various types of English peasants, the Warwickshire strike vl PREFACE.

occurred, making it clear that a new era had begun for the Agricultural Labourer ; and this fact may lend an interest to these ““ Walks and Talks” beyond their intrinsic merit.

After this came the sketches of typical English Peasants here reproduced. William Cobbett, John Clare, and William Huntington are types of the tangled, distorted lives lived by men of genius who come from the lower ranks of English rural life. It is not so much in what these men did, as in what they were unable to do; not so much in the degree of fame to which they individually attained, as in the warping of their lives, in the positive sacrifice of their souls, that the interest lies. In this trilogy each life is a tragedy, and each tragedy is more tragic than the one it follows ; and the lives of these men represent those of thousands that have been lived in England. On whom must the blame fall, but on those who have hitherto monopolised power and authority in the rural districts, as well as all the means of higher education ?

The articles latest in point of date are those placed at the opening and conclusion of this book. As expressions of the growth of convictions resulting from practical experiences, supplemented by a careful looking up of authorities, those articles are, I venture to think, the more important of the series. “With regard to the “ English Via Dolorosa: or, Glimpses of the History of the Agricultural Labourer,” if any one cares to look at the former Edition, they will find a long list of the sources consulted. Chief among them I must mention Sir Frederick Eden’s “ History of the State of the Poor.” This precious work, now relegated in the Library of the British Museum to an obscure place on the

PREFACE. vil floor, will ere long be fully acknowledged to possess a living historical importance, transcending most of the well-bound Chronicles and Histories which to-day are in the place of honour.

In the last paper of all, ‘‘ Zhe Poor Man’s Gospel,” I have pursued the subject in the historical vein characteristic of the whole series, and have striven to show what has ever been the faith of the poor and suffering since the new Revelation men had of God and Duty in Jesus Christ.

The thought with which it concludes, though taken from one of the very earliest of the representatives of the English Agricultural Labourer, exactly harmonises with the one great thought of the “Via Dolorosa,” and thus suggests that that thought is a very old one ; that it is, in fact, the very soul of the Christian Religion: God revealed to us throughout the ages, suffering in human form.

I thank the Editors of the ‘Contemporary Review,” the “Leisure Hour,” and “Golden Hours” for courteously agreeing to the reprint of the articles which appeared in those periodicals. I bueht, perhaps, to add, that in some cases these articles have been abbreviated, and that all have been revised. ‘To Dr Whittemore I owe further acknowledgment, since it was under his encouragement that I began the “ Walks and Talks ” which, more than anything else perhaps, led me into the heart of my subject.

And now, at the very moment that I conclude the work of vill PREFACE.

bringing together these various articles in one book by writing this Preface, a great and well-conceived measure, instituting a complete system of democratic government throughout rural England, is being introduced into Parliament. Parish and District Councils form another step towards the realisation of that England which has been the ideal of thinkers and seers. A day, as joyous as those in the past have been sorrowful, seems about to open for “the Agricultural Labourer, oppressed and depressed for a thousand years.”

| RicHarD HEATH. — :

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mie ENGLISH VIA DOLOROSA: OR,

CLIMESES, OF THE HISTORY OF SLAL, AGRICULTURAL LABOURER.

le An ENGLISH EPIPHANY.

AxoutT the year 680 there lived near the monastery of Whitby a herdsman who knew so little of music and singing that when he saw the harp coming towards him at festival gatherings, he, for shame, rose up, and went home.

Having on one occasion thus left his companions, he withdrew to the stable to tend the cattle. Here he lay down to rest, and dreaming saw a man standing by his bedside, who said, ‘‘ Coedmon, sing me something ;” to whom he answered, “I cannot sing anything ; therefore it was that I left my companions and came hither.” “Yet thou must sing to me,” the visitor replied. “ What must I sing?” said the dreamer. “Sing me the origin of created things.” ‘Thereupon the herdsman began to sing verses in praise of God the Creator, the words of which he had never before heard. Then he arose from his sleep, and having in mind all that he had sung, he added to the words many others worthy of God in the same measure.

In the morning he went to the town-reeve, under whose authority he served, and told him of the gift he had received, who forthwith brought him to the abbess. St Hild caused Coedmon to sing the poem in the presence of all the learned men in the monastery, to whom it seemed that the herdsman had, from the Lord Himself, received a heavenly gift. So they expounded to him more of the sacred history, bidding him, if he could, turn the words into melody of song, which he did, returning the next morning with another poem. Then the abbess began to make much of and to love the grace of God that was in the man, exhorting him to forsake the secular life and to become a monk. And she received him into the monastery with all his, causing him to be taught the Holy History and the Gospel, which he, pondering over, turned into sweetest verse, his song and his verse being so winsome to hear that his teachers themselves wrote and learned from his mouth.

Thus King Alfred relates Bede’s story of the inspiration of the Father of English Poetry. The Divine Messenger came and awoke the Soul of this English Labourer in a stable; fitting birthplace for the first cry of the humble representative throughout English History, of the Man of Sorrows and the Acquaintance of grief.

Over its cradle bent holy women like St. Hild, saintly men like the venerable Bede, and godly kings like Alfred the Great.

If twelve hundred years ago an English Labourer was capable of writing poems which would appear the prototype of Paradise Lost, what treasures must have lain hid in the souls of the agricultural poor, condemned through all these long ages to ignorance, to heavy labour and grinding poverty: an ignorance, a labour, a poverty ever increasing. :

To trace this Via Dolorosa is a sad work; but the poet will come who will find in it the material not only of a Paradise Lost, but of a Paradise Regained, for if he has to tell how this great mute Soul was made an offering for National wrong-doing and has to describe its suffering even unto death, he will have the joy of singing its resurrection, an event accomplished in our own day.

ie In WoRSE THAN EGypTiaAN BONDAGE.

THOSE crouching figures that we see sometimes supporting the roof of a great building are fit emblems of the vast mass of the European peoples during the Middle Ages. Both in the lands under Roman and under Teutonic law, the great majority were in a state of slavery. Among the Saxons the landless man must belong to somebody, or he had no legal existence ; he became an outlaw, and anyone might slay him.

IN WORSE THAN EGYPTIAN BONDAGE, 5

This servile condition rendered him the man of his lord; he could be bought and sold together with his family and his goods and chattels ; he could not marry nor give his daughter in marriage without permission of the lord; a serf, in fact, was so entirely at the mercy of his master, that where the latter had judicial authority he could torture his serf and put him to death. Outside the manor-house stood the dreadful symbols of his power: the gallows whereon to hang the men, the pit wherein to drown the women.

Nevertheless a serf could, saving his lord’s right, possess property ; and there must have been a certain limit to the torture that could be inflicted, since the German law fixed the highest number of blows a slave could receive at two hundred and twenty. When it was his fate to have a good master, existence was not intolerable ; but under a bad one, or in times of anarchy, human imagination could hardly outstrip the fiendish cruelty of his tyrants.

The process by which the fat kine eat up the lean kine had been going on in England long before the Conquest, the old Saxon freeman losing ground before the new noble class. The Norman Conquest drove him down still lower, levelling into one common condition of serfdom, the ceorles and thrells on the confiscated estates. The old order, however, was not swept away everywhere. Sir Henry Maine seems to think that the Village Community which arose out of relationship and the common possession of a tract of land maintained itself in England through all the revolutions of the feudal system.

This primeval communism which secured its members in the enjoyment of a certain degree of liberty, equality, and fraternity was continually broken up and lessened in its area by the ravages of the banditti, who, step by step, had founded another social system. .That the Norman rulers were capable of anything, we may learn from the well-known passage in the Saxon Chronicle, describing the atrocities practised on the people by some of the barons in the reign of Stephen, and by the fact that, in 1102, the Synod of Westminster, over which Anslem presided, denounced “the wicked trade of selling men like brute beasts, which had,” they said, ‘‘hitherto been the common custom.”

Under the Normans all except the higher classes of villeins whose services were limited to seed-time and harvest, were bound to do the work needed on their lord’s private domain. By them his land was ploughed, dunged, and dyked, his harvests reaped, his barns filled with sheaves, his stables provided with stubble, his cattle, sheep, and pigs tended, his grain turned into malt, his nuts gathered, his woods cut, his fires kept alive with fuel. A whole army of slaves toiled for him as ploughmen, herdsmen, shepherds, malsters, woodmen, carpenters, and smiths, while the borderers scattered on the edges of the commons were bound to provide him with a good stock of poultry and eggs.

The sole reward for all this labour was the right to existence and protection. The only consolations the labourers enjoyed, were the pleasures in which they could indulge on holidays, or the mystic hopes which the services of the Church inspired. Dwelling in dark cottages made of wattles and daubed with mud, they lived on salt meat half the year, and for vegetables, ate onions, cabbages, and nettles.

How the lords fared we may judge from an account Holingshed has preserved of the Earl of Leicester’s expenses in 1313. By that time there were labourers in the country working for daily wages ; a thatcher in this same year received 34d. a day. If we deduct Sundays and Holidays, such a labourer would have been able to earn about £4 a year; and as the Earl’s expenses reached 475309, less £8, 16s. 7d. given in charity, it appears that the latter spent on his family and people an amount equal to the wages of 1825 labourers. More than half of this went on eating alone, while an idea of the revelry indulged in may be gathered from the fact that the Earl’s household drank 371 pipes of wine, and burnt 2,319 pounds of tallow candles as well as 1,870 pounds of Paris candles.

Well might a deep-seated ill-will exist between the oppressor and the oppressed. It comes out in the legendary Vision of Henry I., who one night dreamt that he saw gathered round him a number of labourers bearing scythes, spades, and pitchforks, looking angry and threatening. And reason enough they had, if Walter Mapes, a clerical pluralist, royal favourite, friend of Beket, and author of the “Quest of the Holy Graal,” is an example of the feeling with which they were regarded. He would not have a

THE PLOUGHMAN PROPHET. 7 serf taught anything. “ My soul,” he said, “naturally detests serfs, this being my sentiment towards them, circumstances must determine when they are fit to have kindness shown them.” It is an English proverb, “‘ Have hund to godsib and stent thir oder hand.” (Go about with a dog and clench your fist.)

Nevertheless the labourers could work in hope, for one of their own class, a Carpenter’s Son, one who had died the death of a Slave, was held to be Sovereign Lord of this feudal society. The _innate royalty of the labourer was thereby acknowledged, the Christian Conscience was on his side.

And so was the course of events. The Crusades, the Rise of Commerce, the French Wars, all worked to pull down the mighty from their seats and raise those of a low degree. The Crusades brought many a baron into pecuniary difficulties, what with the outfit and the expensive tastes he acquired ; so that he was glad to get out of embarrassment by selling his serfs their liberty. The rise of Commerce created great towns, and towns obtained markets at which the toilers sold their produce and thus obtained the means to purchase freedom.

The change, however, came so gradually that serfdom was a possible condition for Englishmen even in Tudor times. But the revolution had commenced three hundred years earlier, so that by the close of the thirteenth century there was a large class of serfs who had been able to commute their services into money payments, and in the fourteenth century working for wages had become common.

ie THE PLOUGHMAN PROPHET.

THE Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman would be well-nigh as popular to-day as it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries if the language had not become archaic, for there is no book more thoroughly English in the best sense, none that better expresses the genius of the English labourer.

Langland’s aim, however, was not to delineate the labourer but

8 THE &NGLISH VIA DOLOROSA.

to expose the corruptions which were destroying the State, and he sought its reform by trying to arouse in its various members a determination to do their duty in that station of life to which God had called them. But there was only one upon whom he could look with satisfaction: the hardworking husbandman ; the others, and above all those whose office it was to guide the people into the highest truth, being given over to selfishness and hypocrisy. To the labouring class he pointed, not only as an example of life, but as the only one which at that difficult crisis had light. enough to guide the rest, and accordingly Piers the Plowman is represented as occupying in relation to England very much the position of one of the Prophets in the old Hebrew Commonwealth, In the midst of a world in which all manner of men are working and wandering with no other reward for their pains but that of finding themselves prisoners in the Castle of Care, Piers the Plowman is ready and willing to lead them into the Truth. Saturated through and through with the thoughts that gave rise to Lollardism, social and religious, he is no mere leveller. He accepts the constitution of things into which he has been born; the king is to rule, the bishop to guide, the knight to defend, while he is to labour for the common weal. But this constitution of things he looks upon as implying a mutual covenant. When a knight tells him that he will try to do as he has been taught, Piers replies, —

‘* Ve profre yow so faire That I shall swynke and swete and sow for us bothe, And other laboures do for thi love al my lyf-tyme, Li covenant that thow kepe holikirke and myselve Fro wastoures and fro wikked men that this world struyeth.”

This idea of a mutual covenant was as revolutionary as Wiclif’s theory of Dominion. As the latter relieved the Christian conscience from the necessity of obedience to rulers who were traitors to the Suzerain of the Universe, so the former destroyed the right of an undutiful lord over his serfs. In either case the appeal lay to the Individual Conscience and the Common Sense; thus it is that at the very outset Langland shows Conscience resisting the King and supported by Reason,

But the Plowman’s theory is thorough ; all classes are parties to this covenant, the labourer as well as the knight. Therefore, he

THE PLOUGHMAN PROPHET. 9 is continually preaching ‘hard work” to the “ dikeres and the delveres” and other workmen on the land; and is ceaseless in the expression of his abomination of idle and lazy vagabonds who waste what others win; and he has no toleration for beggars, especially of the canting sort, who array themselves as ‘‘ heremites” and “ freres,” “ancres” and “pilgrymes,” who,

*¢ With hoked staves.

Wenten to Walsingham and here wenches after ; Grete lobyes and lenge that lothe were to swynke.”

__ The stern way in which he carries out in his own family this duty of fulfilling by hard work the labourers’ part of the covenant, is seen in the names of his wife and children, —

** Dame-worche-whan-tyme-is Pieres wyf highte, His doughter highte Do-righte-so-or-thi-dame-shal-the-bete, His son highte Suffre-thi-sovereynes-to-haven-her-wille- Deme-hem-nought-for-if-thow-doste-thow-shalt-it-dere-abugge (suffer for it).

Behind this stern exterior he hides so tender a heart that he cannot bear even to see “wastoures wolves kynnes” starving ; nevertheless he clokes his compassion in rough words. But his heart once opened, his pity for the miserable idlers increases with every beat, and from letting them “eat with hogges,” he soon rises to feeding them on ‘‘melke and mene ale.” For real poverty his sympathy is unbounded even if they have done evil; let God be the avenger. He has evidently known what it was himself to feel “Hunger at his maw.”

* For although the labourers’ position was rising so fast that they would no longer dine of stale vegetables, and were not even content with penny ale and bacon, but expected fresh meat or fish fried or baked, and that straight from the fire, the husbandman who preferred independence to a full stomach had many a struggle, especially during the month preceding harvest.

*« «T have no peny,’ quod peres, ‘ poletes forto bigge, Ne neyther gees ne grys, but two grene cheses, A fewe cruddes and creem, and an haver cake, And two loves of benes and bran, y-bake for my fauntis. And yet I say, by my soule, I have no salt bacoun ;

® Io THE ENGLISH: VIA DOLOROSA.

Ac I have percil and porettes, and many kole-plantes, And eke a cow and a kalf, and a cart-mare,

To draw a-felde my donge, the while the drought lasteth, And bi this lyflode we mot lyve, til lammasse tyme.’ ”

All this indicates hard and careful living, and the ploughman’s clothes “‘y clouted and hole,” tell the same tale.

But what is most striking is that a ploughman should have so great a concern for the common weal, and should not only have been desirous to find the Truth for himself, but anxious to guide others to it. This independence of character combined with strong conservative instincts does not suggest a serf or one who had lately emerged from that condition. But in the fact that the Ploughman had not only his “half acre by the highway,” but possessed a little homestead of his own, it seems far more probable that he was a member of one of those rural townships where there were “common fields” and ‘“‘lot meadows.”

Of course I recognise that Piers the Plowman is continually passing from a real into an allegorical character; but just as Bunyan’s “ Christian” was a fair type of the best Christians found among the poor in the seventeenth century, so Piers is a fair type of the English husbandman who has never been submitted to the degradation of personal slavery.

The popularity of the book, proved by the many copies extant in a rough penmanship, and still more by the fact that the leaders of the insurrection of 1381 couched their appeal to the country in its phraseology, renders it evident that Langland sketched from life.

TV: THE LABOURER DEMANDS JUSTICE.

THE stars fought in their courses during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to set the labourer free. Whether Wiclif was the product or the producer of the awakening that during these centuries went on all over the Continent, it would be hard to say,

THE LABOURER DEMANDS JUSTICE. Ii certain it is that England was one of the chief springs, if not the spring-head of the movement. It was, as is well known, a movement in favour of a return to primitive Christianity and the regeneration of Europe in harmony with it. It was therefore socialist and democratic, and awakened in the hearts of the population of Europe the memories of a golden age and the promise of the Millennium.

The Black Death in 1349 swept away more than half the population of England. Those that remained soon found that their labour had doubled in value, and the labourer became at once an important person in the realm. Parliament representing only the landlords, accordingly enacted in 1349 and 1350 Statutes by which the Labourer under pain of imprisonment and fines was bound to work at the same wages that he had received before the Plague. These iniquitous statutes acted like goads to the new life stirring in the soul of the English serf.1

The first Statutes of Labourers having been disregarded, Parliament in 1360 passed a severer law. Instead of three days in the stocks, a labourer refusing to work at the old wages was to be imprisoned for fifteen days. If he fled from his service to another town or county he was to be outlawed and a writ for his recovery to be sent to every Sheriff in England, and if taken he was to have the letter F burnt into his forehead for his falsity. Towns harbouring such fugitives were to deliver them up under penalty of Ten pounds to the King and one hundred shillings to the master, an enormous fine when tested by such wages as these statutes allowed: for example, 1d. a day to weeders and haymakers. This Act of 1360 strictly forbade all combination among workmen.

1 Sir G. Nicholls, History of the Poor Laws, chap. I, p. 45, agrees that the object of these laws was to restore the expiring system of slavery, a suggestion which Sir James Stephen in his History of English Criminal Law, vol. 3, p. 204, admits has much plausibility. Anyone who will take the trouble to read the preamble of the second Statute will soon see how wroth the upper classes were at the thought of losing their thralls. ‘‘ Whereas,” it says, ‘‘ late against the Malice of Servants which were idle and not willing to serve after the Pestilence without taking excessive wages, etc., an ordinance was passed to which the said servants pay no regard, but considering only their ease and singular

covetise do withdraw themselves from Great Men and others,” etc.

re THE*ENGLISH VIA DOLOROSA.

While these statutes if obeyed would have rendered existence by labour almost impossible, wheat at this time averaging 7s. the quarter, the people managed to obtain such high wages, that Parliament in 1363 passed another Act to restrain the sumptuousness of their apparel! Carters, ploughmen, plough-drivers, oxherds, neat-herds, shepherds, pig-drivers, deyes and all other attendants on cattle, threshers and other labourers employed in husbandry were to use no other cloth than what was called blanket or russet of the value of 12d. a yard, and to wear linen girdles suitable to their condition. The same statute restrained their diet.

Notwithstanding facts patent to all but the wilfully blind, Parliament confirmed the Statute of Labourers by several subsequent Acts, relying perhaps on a clause by which it hoped to entangle its subjects’ consciences: labourers were to be sworn twice a year to observe these impossible regulations.!

What wonder that such legislation produced in pious men a horror of oaths, and in the more daring a reckless contempt of all law. Eden tells us many became s/af-strikers and wandered in parties of two, three, and four from village to village; others became ‘sturdy rogues,” and infested the kingdom with frequent robberies. Iniquitous laws are the chief authors of crime. |

This was the state of things when Langland composed his second edition of Piers Plowman, and the rising tide of discontent is pictured in the Prologue, where he introduces the fable of the rats and mice holding a council to protect themselves against the ravages of the cat; the rats and mice being the town and country labourers, or perhaps the husbandmen and the labourers. Langland describes the lords as treating their people in such a way “that us loathed the lyf.” The object of the council was to find out “if they might by any wit their lords’ will withstand.”

Whether Langland meant to spur the people by representing them as infirm in purpose and in courage I cannot say, but as a matter of fact they were quite the opposite. They had evidently made up their minds they would submit to these tyrannies no longer. They began to refuse their customary services, and the

1 Re-enacted 7 Henry IV., c. xvii., refusal incurred three days in the stocks, which every town or seigniory was to provide under fine of a hundred shillings.

an

THE LABOURER DEMANDS JUSTICE. 13 stewards were so little able to enforce them, that the lords’ corn was left uncut. Later on the lords complained that their villeins were flying to the towns, and that those who remained behaved insolently, knowing that the masters were afraid to exercise their powers lest they should lose the serfs irrecoverably.

For now town and country were one. In the former the system of forced labour being applied even more vigorously than in the country, the lower craftsmen were in alliance with the agricultural serfs.

This discontent began to make itself felt, and came to a height during the exhaustion that followed after the Peace of Bretigny. The Black Prince died, the King was falling into dotage, John of Gaunt was unpopular in London and with the Church: all things rendered the Government feeble. A universal upheaving commenced: while the serf was striving to obtain liberty and a fair wage, the classes immediately above him thought it a good opportunity each to push its way a grade higher. Meanwhile there were some few who only sought the reign of Justice on earth, who had no personal ends in view, but who for that very reason were gibbeted in their own day and stoned and pelted with ugly names ever since. Such an one was John Ball, the so-called “crazy priest of Kent.” Which, however, was most crazy, the Parliaments which made laws such as the Statute of Labourers, or the Servant of Christ who preached the Kingdom of Justice ?

John Ball had half England at his back. A thousand voices sent his messages over the land with as much precision and almost as quickly as the nineteenth century telegram, ‘‘John Ball greeteth you all, and doth for to understand he hath rung your bell, now right and might, will and skill, God speed every dele.” And again :—

‘* Johan the Miller heth y grownde smal, smal, smal, The Kynge’s sone of heavene shalle paye for alle ; Be ware or ye be wo ; Knoweth your frende from youre foo, Haveth ynowe and seythe ‘ Hoo,’