# The English Peasant/Fen-land and Fen-men

III.
Fen-land and Fen-men.
(Golden Hours, 1873.)
King George the Third and the author of the "Political Register" have given the best descriptions of Fen-land to be met with. The king's is the briefer and more comprehensive. "What, what!" he exclaimed, "Lincolnshire? All flats, fogs, and fens—eh, eh?" But Cobbett's is the most graphic. "Here," he writes, "I am in the heart of the Fens. The whole country is level as the table on which I am now writing; the horizon like the sea in a dead calm. You see the morning sun come up just as at sea, and see it go down over the rim in just the same way as at sea in a calm. The land covered with beautiful grass, with sheep lying about upon it as fat as hogs stretched out sleeping in a stye. Everything grows well here; earth without a stone as big as a pin's head, grass as thick as it can grow upon the ground, immense bowling-greens separated by ditches, and not a sign of a dock or thistle."
Nevertheless it lacks several features necessary to complete the picture.
The cottages standing beneath the roadway, surrounded by water, and reached by bridges or planks across the ditches,—the road itself a long straight causeway, locally called a rampire, running for miles by the side of a dyke, and on which you may trudge for an hour without a turn or change in the scene; the moist meadows below, intersected by innumerable sluggish streams, "where the dwarf sallows creep," and where the ducks paddle away their time, or spend it searching for hidden treasure in the rich mud,—the black boat aground on the dyke bank, or lying in the outfall of some ditch with nets and snares nigh at hand;—and last of all, standing out against the gloomy sky there are the ​windmills, and the solitary trees, and the black poles of the sluices. Journey where you will, such are the scenes which meet the eye. 'Tis ever the same,—
"The level waste, the rounding grey."
But the rich and prolific soil, dark in colour, and as fine in substance as flour, and when cut deep down into with a spade, like a piece of hard butter, compensates its owners for the entire absence of natural scenery.
Only the combined force of the three Ridings of Yorkshire can outdo it in general results.
At the meeting in connection with the agricultural labourers' movement, held in Exeter Hall towards the close of last year (1872), the Lincolnshire fen district was represented by a labourer, who, in an eloquent speech, described the sufferings of himself and his companions. He admitted that Lincolnshire Fen-men received a money wage higher than other parts of the country, and yet the burden of his speech seemed to be that semi-starvation and debt dogged their footsteps through life. "I remember," he said, "working as a boy for twopence a day, and for years going without stockings to my feet; I remember going hundreds of times to work with a bit of bread and a herring for dinner, having had bread and hot water for breakfast."
During the autumn I was present at an open-air meeting which took place in the dark and in the rain at Croyland, where I believe that I heard the same speaker, together with a fellow-labourer from the Cambridgeshire fens. The latter, in a woe-begone strain, harped on a like string, relating the hardship and misery he and his people had at times endured from want of food, saying bitterly that it would be better if those who professed to feel so much for the labourer would leave off talking about good cottages, education, or sanitary reform, as the one thing needed, and, first of all, give them enough to eat.
Now, as this meeting was composed entirely of labouring people, with a few of the farmers and the tradesmen of the locality—men who knew by a life-long experience the true state of the case—it is evident this Cambridgeshire fen-man would not have made this want of the necessaries of life a leading point in his harangue if ​he had not been sure that it was here where the shoe pinched. For, though wages may be half as much again in Lincolnshire as they are in Dorset, what, after all, is 15s. a week to support a family of five or six persons? And this is the case of many a young married man. Deduct 1s. 6d. or 2s. for rent, and you have about a couple of shillings for the weekly food and clothing of each individual,—just one-sixth of the amount usually allowed a servant for board wages, and which may therefore be considered the sum judged necessary for one person's maintenance per week.
Better a thousand times for the labouring man was that old Hebrew legislation which forbade the agriculturist to muzzle the ox which trod out the corn, than a so-called Christian civilisation which, while pretending to treat the Bible with reverence, really sets aside the great bulk of its teachings with contempt, and prefers to take the rules and regulations of its social life from political economy; whose laws it professes to believe are so immutable, yet so salutary, that it can look down on its workers, half starved in the midst of plenty, with the same kind of pity that it regards the victims of a flood or an earthquake.
Certain it is that the question of mere existence must be uppermost in these fen-men's minds, or they could not possibly have forgotten some far worse evils of their social condition. I refer to the wretched slavery into which scientific improvement and material progress has brought their wives and children. For not i a word did these representative fen-men say at either meeting concerning the infamous gang system.
It looks ominous, and, taken in connection with the singular reticence which I have found in getting information on the subject, I am inclined to think that a certain blindness has come upon the inhabitants of the district with regard to its wickedness.
The labouring men may dislike any interference with their supposed rights as fathers to sell their children into slavery; the farmers and the landowners may deprecate any interference with the labour market which would lessen their profits; but if England recognises its responsibility to God as a nation, it must believe that He will not be satisfied with the plea of ignorance, or the plea of the exigencies of trade, or even with the plea of parental rights. The righteous Ruler of the universe will undoubtedly ​demand at its hands the blood of its young children destroyed body and soul by this agricultural gang system.
But before I proceed to unfold the evils which have followed in the wake of scientific improvement, let me record one benefit which has proceeded from it. It has vastly improved the health of the district. Malaria and other similar diseases which constantly lurked in the watery atmosphere have been banished, and the Fens, with one alarming exception, stand high in the Registrar-General's report.
But the very cause which has brought about this one advantage, the bringing of so much land under tillage, has led to evils of such magnitude as far to counterbalance this solitary good.
These enormous tracts of land require constant labour to keep them well cultivated. The soil is so prolific that the weeds would soon choke everything else if they were not vigorously kept in check. The farms are generally very large, and run a long way into the fen. As a. rule, there are no cottages upon them, and they therefore depend almost entirely for their labour on the native supply in the various villages, which lie on the highways, or rather, below them. The want of house-room naturally prevents any influx from other parts of the country, and the consequence is, that for about eight months in the year, every available woman and child is pressed into service.
As this kind of labour has been found to be more effectual under direction and in concert, and as, moreover, it is not always wanted to the same extent, a system has arisen whereby a man, called a gang-master, contracts to supply labour when and where it was wanted. He is generally of the class called "catch-work labourers," that is, a man who prefers jobbing to regular employment. He makes it his business to collect a number of women, young persons, and children, sometimes as many as forty, and form them into a gang, which he leads out day by day to those parts of the fen where he has engaged to work.
This system commenced in the Lincolnshire fens about forty years ago, the natural offspring, as I have said, of the great improvements science had there made.
It went on for a whole generation demoralizing the people. At last, in 1865-66, a Commission was appointed, and the evils it ​revealed from the corruption which ensued in these mixed gangs of women, boys, and girls were of such a nature, that the very same year that the report was published Parliament passed an Act by which it was forbidden to employ any child under eight years of age in a public gang, or any female in the same gang with a male. It was also enacted that every gang-master should take out a licence, and, in the case of a female gang, a woman was to act as gang-master as well as the man. The Act further gave the Justices power to limit the distance t o which a child should walk, if they thought fit.
No doubt this Act has largely mitigated the evils of public gangs, but private gangs are in no way affected by it. A large occupier near Spalding says: "The result of legislation for public gangs will be great evasion of the Act under the form of private gangs, which will require dealing with just as much."
A private gang is one formed and employed by a farmer on his own land; he therefore feels a personal responsibility in its character and proceedings. This is undoubtedly a great advantage, and if the farmer will really trouble himself about it, it may be made a very real one. But the enormous size and great length of the fen farms renders personal supervision in many cases a practical impossibility. How can a man who has perhaps farms miles apart, perhaps two or three hundred acres each in extent, and stretching in elongated fashion for miles into the fen, know much about the behaviour of his work-people? He must leave it to the master of his gang. If the latter is a strictly upright man, things may go on well; but if otherwise, a perfect sink of corruption may exist on the estate of the best-intentioned master in the world.
And even supposing that by strict and careful supervision the grosser forms of evil are kept down, the private gang system does not afford any alleviation in the labour-slavery which has been the lot of these poor fen women and children for two generations.
Let us picture to ourselves the life of one of these families, and we shall see more clearly how little benefit they have derived from the great wealth with which science has enriched their land; how, ​on the contrary, it has made their lives more miserable and more utterly hopeless than they otherwise would have been.
In their small cottages—for some are so small, that they have sometimes to turn the children into the street, the room is so stifling—they have passed the night, withfor six persons in one bedroom it can hardly be more; and this not imaginary. In one row of twelve houses at Langtoft (1864), a ganging village, the average to one bed«9airL_was more than six~persons. Up at earliest dawn, for they must start for work at half-past five or six, breakfast is scrambled through, and the children hurry out into the street, to meet like a company of factory hands at a given rendezvous. Boys and girls, big and little, corrupt and innocent, they flock together; and there in the pure morning light the more depraved give the tone to the assemblage, by commencing some disgusting badinage. Croyland triple bridge is a spot where they thus assemble, and one of the farmers in the neighbourhood thus writes to the Government Commissioner in 1866:—
"You should see the children and women at Croyland; they all meet at the bridge at six a.m. before they start for work, and you should hear the talk that goes on then."
The gang-master appears, and under his guidance they commence the toils of the day. Three, four, five, sometimes six miles they trudge into the fen, where in companies they begin their task, pulling weeds or potatoes, or topping beets, or peeling osiers, or whatever else may be the work of the season. And how do they work? Continually stooping to grub up weeds or potatoes, at other times kneeling on the damp earth, as in weeding carrots, and occasionally wet up to their middles, as, for instance, in weeding standing corn. "It is dreadful," says a large farmer at Spalding, "to see the little things coming out wet and draggled. It is as bad for their health as their morals."
If the ganger be a decent man, he will do his best to suppress such evil as he may chance to see and hear; but if, as not unfrequently happens, he is a man of no principle, he will permit the evil to have full sway, as the easiest means of preserving his power. Nay, it is on record that he himself is sometimes the leader and inciter of moral corruption. Anyhow, all are left to themselves during meal-times, and then untaught, hard-worked, ​overstrung humanity runs amuck; and innocent children witness scenes and hear words which corrupt their whole lives. Toil and sin—this seems the hard, the terrible lot of these poor fen-children.
After all, it is the system itself as applied to children of all ages and both sexes, not its mere accidents, which is the motive cause of vice.
A justice of the peace in the Isle of Ely says: "I fail to see how the children thus usefully and profitably employed in the field are likely to have their morals less safely guarded than they would in a school-yard or in the village streets." Happy man! he can never have known what it is to have the mind oppressed by a monotonous and disagreeable employment, or the nerves overstrung with protracted labour. If he had, he would have been aware how fearfully open such a condition of body and mind leaves even a man of strong principle to the most horrible temptations. And when the subjects of it are children of all ages, any one who has had the slightest experience of such a life will acknowledge that it is only too natural for them to run into all kinds of devilry.
Strong artisans, strong in the consciousness of their power, consider nine hours a day enough work for the father of a family, with all the responsibilities of life upon him, and they could quote the wisest of our kings in their favour; but here in Lincolnshire children are made to work ten to twelve hours a day.
Ernest Hare, a boy of eleven, living at Deeping, St James's, told the commissioner that he was in a private gang. He left home at 5 and got back at 7. He was employed by a farmer who had two farms, the nearest of which was three miles from his home; the other at Deeping St Nicholas, six miles away; and with reference to this latter he adds, "We'd have sometimes to go to t'other end of it," which was three miles further.
Well might an inhabitant of this same village tell me that some people in Deeping never see daylight there all the winter from Monday morning to Saturday night. They go off in the dark, and come home in the dark. Well might the police superintendent at Spalding say, " They go too far, and work too long; ten or twelve hours is too much for a young child."
​And yet the landowners and farmers of Lincolnshire met in conference in their Chamber of Agriculture, and being interrogated by the Commissioner what they thought should be done, answered, first and foremost, that it did not appear to them that the present hours of work of women and children employed in agriculture are excessive, or injurious to the physical condition of either; and that, secondly, "no restrictions should be placed on the distances to which it should be lawful for them to go to work."
It is, as I have said, now forbidden to any public gang-master to have a mixed gang. But though this may prevent positive acts of immorality, it does not prevent that demoralizing influence which always ensues when a company of young people of all ages work unrestrained by the presence of their masters. This is especially the case with girls, since it is just the roughest and most depraved of the sex who are most constantly employed in this kind of labour, and who, by force of their audacity and superior skill, naturally assume the leadership of the gang. Their coarse and lewd conversation soon corrupts the whole gang, and so the moral evil spreads. This is the kind of training the future womanhood of the district has to go through, and it can easily be foreseen what sort of homes such young persons will form. Their slovenly and slatternly cottages, full of discomfort, alienate their husbands and drive them to the beer-shop. Their ignorance of the arts of sewing and mending causes the children to go in tatters. As a farmer in Deeping Fen truly observes, "No amount of wages will make the husband better off, for the wife does not know how to use the money." In fact, a comfortable and happy home is an idea they have never been permitted to entertain, many being driven by the stress of their wretchedness to be themselves instrumental in destroying its very possibility.
Let any one look into th e Sixth Report of the medical officer of the Privy Council (1863), and he will there find a tale of horror as to some facts of social life amongst the labouring people of the fen districts. The account I refer to is Dr H. J. Hunter's report on the alarming mortality amongst infants in certain rural districts in England. And these districts are just the very ones ​of which I am writing, and others like them,—that is, the reclaimed marsh lands lying near the mouths of the principal rivers which fall into the North Sea.
With wonderful accord this mortality was traced by seventy medical practitioners and other gentlemen well acquainted with the habits of the poor, who were consulted on the subject by Dr Hunter, the commissioner, "to the bringing of the land under tillage, i.e., to the cause which had banished malaria, and had substituted a fertile though unsightly garden for the winter marshes and summer pastures of fifty or a hundred years ago. It was generally thought that infants received no harm from malarious evils, but a much greater enemy had been brought against them when their mothers were forced into the fields."
By such authoritative testimony the cause is shown to be mainly due to the destruction of the maternal instinct in women whose lives are hardened and brutalized by unsuitable toil and continual contact with moral corruption, and by the neglect that must ensue when they are obliged to leave their babies to the care of others.
One-fourth of the infants lawfully born in these districts die under one year of age, while of the remainder the average amounts to one-third. Whatever the immediate occasion of death, all the medical men agree in believing the real cause to be the mother's neglect, while "the degree of criminality they attributed to the women varied from a sympathising excuse for their ignorance to a downright charge of wilful neglect with the hope of death,—in fact, infanticide."
The history of many an unfortunate infant is thus traced in the report:—Perhaps it is the immediate offspring of the gang system. Born into a household already burdened with too many mouths, its appearance in the world is unwelcome to every one. The young mother, called away to work, gives up her child to an old woman, who professes to keep a school for such babies. All the food the child gets from its mother is morning and evening. During the night she is too fatigued to attend to its wants; in fact, if she is to do her day's work, she cannot afford to lose her rest.
Both by day and night the child is either deprived of food, or ​fed, not with a bottle, but with a spoon, and it accordingly soon acquires a taste for the unnaturally solid food given it. Milk is dear, and not to be had, and so sugar-sop—a lumpy mass of bread, water, and sugar—is used instead. This is either given cold, or is left on the hob in a cup, seldom or never changed or cleaned, and from time to time this fermenting and sooty mess is heaped into the infant's mouth by the nurse.
Older mothers, after losing two or three children, begin to view the subject as one for ingenuity and speculation. The neighbours will say, "So-and-so has another baby; you'll see it won't live," and treat it as a sort of joke. A medical man is called in to the wasting infant, "because there is so much bother about the registration." The mother says the child is dying, and won't touch food. But when the doctor offers food, the child is ravenious, and "fit to tear the spoon in pieces."
The above is almost a literal quotation from the report, which then goes on to say: "It was more than once related that women who had lost two or three successive children lost no more after it had been plainly signified to them that their proceedings were watched."
Should the unhappy little creature struggle through this period of semi-starvation, its life is threatened by another domestic demon.
"There can be no doubt," says the report, "of the truth of the horrid statement made by almost every surgeon in the marshland, that there was not a labourer's house in which a bottle of opiate was not to be seen, and not a child but who got it in some form."
Each village has its own peculiar preparation, the favourite form for infants being Godfrey's Cordial, a mixture of opium, treacle, and sassafras. Each mother buys the "Godfrey" she favours most, so that, when she leaves her baby in the morning, she will leave her own bottle with the nurse. Should the nurse substitute her own, and should it turn out more potent, as is sometimes the case, the children will sink into such a state that, in a fright, she sends off for the surgeon, who on his arrival finds half a dozen babies, some snoring, some squinting, all pallid and eye-sunken, lying about the room. Happily, he is prepared for ​the emergency, applies the stomach-pump, and the poisoned infants come round.
Supposing they clear this danger and grow up, the habit thus induced often stays with them for life. It is well known that in no part of England is there such a quantity of this drug consumed as in the Fen-land. Wholesale druggists report that they send immense quantities into these districts, and retail druggists often dispense as much as 200 lbs. a year. It is sold in pills or penny sticks, and a thriving shop will serve 300 or 400 customers on a Saturday night, the largest consumers being the inhabitants of small hamlets or isolated cottages in the fens.
It is true that this is a report of a state of things which existed ten years ago in the fens; but it cannot be supposed a practice so widely spread should suddenly have ceased. In a late report, that of 1867, Mr Ellis, a surgeon at Crowle, in the Isle of Axholme, says: "The mothers leave their children to go out to work; even children that are suckling are left a whole day—often thirty-five children in the charge of one old woman. Sometimes they give them Godfrey (opium) to keep them quiet while they are out. Twins and illegitimate children almost always die. I know a case here where a woman has had five or six children, all of whom have died, having been given opium to keep them quiet." And when the writer was in Spalding last autumn, he was told more opium was sold there than in any part of the kingdom. Under such a system none but the strong live, and wretched as in a moral sense their companionship in daily labour too often is, it is probable, on the whole, that the open air and constant exercise prove the very best restorative these poor little ones can have, and cause many to grow up, in spite of such terrible odds, strong men and women.
As soon, too, as they can work they get enough to eat. To this end they are sent to work as young as a master will employ them, and each generation repeats its parents' experience, beginning a little earlier, and growing more and more insubordinate than the last.
As to the boys, they soon learn to master their mothers, and will not go to school even when the winter months come on and there is not such a demand for their labour. The grossest ignorance accordingly prevails.
​Mr Leaper, the police superintendent at Spalding, reports that scores of farm labourers apply for admission into the Force who cannot even write their own names.
The Vicar of Langtoft says, "This year, out of twenty boys who came to me averaging sixteen years old, seven could not read at all, and ten could not write at all, while with others the power was too small to be of any practical use." But it is contrary to the spirit of the god worshipped in these regions that the human machine should be too enlightened. As the Vicar of Burgh-le-Marsh says, "The employers of labour do not wish the children to be wholly ignorant, but think that a very moderate share of scholarship is sufficient. Their view is that 'more than a little is by much too much;' they are afraid that the labourers will be spoilt for field work."
Parents bemoan the home misery, schoolmasters bewail their empty schools, and clergymen are in despair. It is impossible to cope with the evil, "I despair," says one, "of making the good overbalance the evil in this parish." A few philanthropic farmers and landowners deplore the system, and individually fight against it, striving to repress its greater evils, or at least to keep their own lands free from them. But, notwithstanding its science, this enlightened age has its gods just as the most barbarous ages that have gone before it. And perhaps, of the whole Pantheon, none is adored more sincerely by Englishmen than that cruel Moloch, the Trade Spirit. At his altar the inhabitants of the fens are compelled to sacrifice their children. For if the facts I have stated be correct—and they mainly rest on the authority of the Government Commissions, which have never been, as far as I know, refuted—is it too much to say that these unhappy people are compelled to a sin not unlike that into w^hich Israel fell in its most prosperous days—the sin of "causing their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire"—a fire more terrible in reality than a material furnace—the fire of physical, exhaustion and moral pollution?