# The English Peasant/The Cottage Homes of England

THE COTTAGE HOMES OF ENGLAND.
(Leisure Hour, 1870.)
I.
With their gable roofs of cosy thatch or of red tiles bright with moss and lichen, with their ornamented chimneys and walls of plaster laced and interlaced with heavy beams, the Cottage Homes of England, peeping out from the green lanes of Kent, or fringing the Surrey commons, or nestling in the wooded vales of Sussex, are always picturesque. They are, moreover, the one form of human habitation always in harmony with the scenery around them. In Yorkshire and in Wales their aspect is bleak as the moor or the mountain side; in Cumberland and in Devonshire they are alike built of stone; but in the north their architecture is in keeping with the stern form Nature presents among the Cumbrian hills; while in the south, covered with ivy and hidden amongst gardens and orchards, each little cot appears a poem in itself. This harmony is partly due to the fact that the same soil which produces the natural scenery produces the material of which the cottages are built. In the north wood is scarce, stone plentiful: hence the stone villages of Lancashire and Yorkshire. In the pottery districts and the midland counties clay is abundant; here, therefore, brick cottages are the rule. In Westmoreland the red sandstone is used; in Kent the ragstone, in Lincolnshire the Ancaster stone, in Cornwall granite, in Essex and Herts flints from the chalk hills, in Hampshire mud mixed with pebbles, in Norfolk and Suffolk lumps of clay mixed with straw.
Picturesque and harmonious from the artist's point of view, these cottages are in most other respects a scandal to England, and to write as Mrs Hemans did concerning them an unconscious satire. ​Crabbe, who saw things as they really were, disposed long ago of the sentimental view of the Cottage Homes of England—
"Ye gentle souls who dream of rural ease,  Whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please,  Go! if the peaceful cot your praises share,  Go look within, and ask if peace be there;  If peace be his—that drooping, weary sire.  Or theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire;  Or hers, that matron pale, whose trembling hand  Turns on the wretched hearth th' expiring brand!"
Even Crabbe's photographic painting gives but an inadequate idea of the moral misery of these pretty cots,—"smiling o'er the silvery brooks, and round the hamlet-fanes."
The Rev. James Fraser, afterwards Bishop of Manchester, one of the Assistant Commissioners in the inquiry made in 1867-68 into the conditions of agricultural labour (an inquiry nominally confined to the employment of women and children, but really extending to the whole subject), reports that "the majority of" cottages that exist in rural parishes are deficient in almost every requisite that should constitute a home for a Christian family in a civilised community. They are deficient in bedroom accommodation, very few having three chambers, and in some chambers the larger proportion only one. They are deficient in drainage and sanitary arrangements; they are imperfectly supplied with water; such conveniences as they have are often so situated as to become nuisances; they are full enough of draughts to generate any amount of rheumatism; and in many instances are lamentably dilapidated and out of repair.
"It is impossible to exaggerate the ill effects of such a state of things in every aspect, physical, social, economical, moral, intellectual. Physically, a ruinous, ill-drained cottage, cribbed, cabin'd, confined, and overcrowded, generates any amount of disease, fevers of every type, catarrh, rheumatism, as well as intensifies to the utmost that tendency to scrofula and phthisis which, from their frequent intermarriages and their low diet, abound so largely among the poor.
​"The moral consequences are fearful to contemplate. … Modesty must be an unknown virtue, decency an unimaginable thing, where in one small chamber … two and sometimes three generations are herded promiscuously, … where the whole atmosphere is sensual, and human nature is degraded into something below the level of the swine. It is a hideous picture, and the picture is drawn from life."
In the summer 1864 a careful and elaborate inquiry was made by Dr H. J. Hunter into the house accommodation of rural labourers, and embodied in the seventh report of the medical officer of the Privy Council for presentation to Parliament. Every page testifies to its insufficient quantity and miserable quality. Summing up the results of the inquiry, the report says: "Even the general badness of the dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than their numerical insufficiency," a statement proved by the fact that in 821 separate parishes or townships in England a destruction of houses had been going on during the previous ten years notwithstanding increased local demand for them. "People," the report says, "do not desert villages, villages nowadays desert people."
Certain provisions of the Poor Law relating to chargeability and settlement rendered it the pecuniary interest of every parish to lessen the number of the poor residing within its boundaries. When, therefore, a parish was the sole property of two or three great landlords, "they had only to resolve that there should be no labourers' dwellings on their estates, and their estates were thenceforth free from half their responsibility for the poor." The Union Chargeability Act has changed all this, but the evil done remains. Other causes have doubtless been at work, but this has been the principal one. When we come to understand the wretched pauperism into which the agricultural labourers have drifted, we can see how powerful the temptation to shift the burden of the poor-rates must have been to large proprietors. "Agricultural labour," says this report, "instead of implying a safe and permanent independence for the hard-worked labourer and his family, implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism."
What are the causes which have brought agricultural labour into this wretched condition?
In feudal times land was held in great masses from the Crown, ​and as the importance of every lord depended upon the number of retainers he could bring into the field, it was his interest to divide his estate into as many farms as he could find tenants to cultivate them, and to grant rights of common to each one over the remaining portions.
Thorold Rogers, in his "History of Agriculture and Prices in England," says:—"In the 14th century the land was greatly subdivided, and most of the inhabitants of villages or manors held plots of land which were sufficient in many cases for maintenance, and, in nearly all cases, for independence in treating with their employers. Most of the regular farm servants—the carter, the ploughman, the shepherd, the cowherd, and the hog-keeper—were owners of land, and there is a high degree of probability that the occasional labourer was also among the occupiers of the manor. The mediæval peasant had his cottage and curtilage at a very low rent and in secure possession, even when, unlike the general mass of his fellows, he was not possessed of land in his own right held at a labour or a money rent, and he had rights of pasturage over the common lands of the manor for the sheep, pigs, or perhaps cow, which he owned."
This prosperity continued to the close of the 15th century, when the Wars of the Roses broke out, ending in the destruction of the feudal system. Manufactures rose on its ruin, the woollen trade increased greatly, and large tracts of land were required for sheep-walks. This caused at the time a wholesale destruction of villages, so that, in a petition presented to Parliament in 1450, it is stated that sixty-five towns (villages) and hamlets within twelve miles of Warwick had been destroyed.
Many efforts were made to restore the former widely-spread prosperity of the English peasantry. An Act passed in 1487 forbade any one to take more than one farm, and the value of that farm was not to exceed ten marks yearly. Five or six times in the 16th century Acts were passed imposing penalties for not keeping up "houses of husbandry," and for not laying convenient land for their maintenance. An Act of 1549 secured to small cottiers land for gardens or orchards. Another, passed in the year 1589, is peculiarly noteworthy as forbidding the erection of cottages unless four acres were attached; the object being, as ​Lord Bacon said of the Act of 1487, "to breed a subject to live in "convenient plenty and no servile condition, and to keep the plough in the hands of the owners, and not mere hirelings."
And the result sought was obtained, for, towards the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries, contemporary authorities declare that the condition of the labourers and small tenants in husbandry " had grown to be more powerful, skilful, and careful, through recompense of gain, than heretofore they had been."
This prosperity, dimmed for a time by the Civil War, was not seriously affected by it, for in the reign of Charles II. there were, according to the best statistical writers of the time, not less than 160,000 proprietors, who, with their families, must have made up a seventh part of the whole population who derived their subsistence from little freehold estates. This second era of agricultural well-being continued until the middle of the 18th century, when, from all accounts, it culminated. Prior to the American War, the English peasantry were, generally speaking, in a comparatively prosperous condition. They were reaping the advantage of the expanding commerce of the country without any corresponding diminution in their resources.
But with the improvement and extension of modern husbandry commenced the depression and decay of the husbandmen. It was found that large farms could be managed more profitably than small ones. Thus the poor and the weak began to fall into the ranks of the hired labourer, while their richer neighbour rose in the social scale.
Few things had more helped the mass of English peasants than the freedom they had enjoyed to use the common lands. But from about the middle of the last century commenced that wholesale private appropriation of common property which has so largely helped to complete the ruin of the English peasant. Between 1710, the date of the first Inclosure Act, and 1760, only 334,974 statute acres were inclosed, while, in the century which followed, more than seven millions of statute acres have been added to the cultivated area of Great Britain.
In a speech made by Mr Cowper-Temple (Lord Mount-Temple), on the second reading of the general Inclosure Bill, ​March 13th, 1844, he said:—"In former times every cottage almost had some common rights, from which the poor occupants derived much benefit; the privilege of feeding a cow, a pig, or a goose on the common was a great benefit to them, and it was unfortunate, when a system of inclosing commons first commenced, that a portion of the land was not set apart for the benefit of every cottager who enjoyed common rights, and his successors; but the course adopted had been to compensate the owner of the cottage to which the common rights belonged, forgetting the claims of the occupier by whom they were enjoyed."
Had the loss of these common rights been balanced by a share in the material progress of the country, the agricultural labourer would not have been much worse treated by these Inclosure Acts than the bulk of the community, but since 1815 their wages have declined, while there has been an increase in the cost of living.
The fictitious prosperity that arose during the war only made the subsequent destitution harder to bear. From 1815 to 1846 was a period of continually recurring distress amongst the agriculturists, and the unhappy labourers sank almost universally into pauperism. Their wages fell to zero, if we may use that term to imply the lowest point to which they could fall compatible with continued existence. In different countries they varied from 7s. to 12s. a week. In Cambridgeshire the farmers paid 8s. and beer, which made it 9s. 6d., but they said it was only intimidation made them pay such prices. The labourers grew desperate, and in 1830 there were a series of incendiary fires, extending for more than eighteen months, in the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire.
But these efforts were like the struggles of a dying man, fitful, and each time perceptibly weaker During the winter of 1845-46 the agonised sufferer was dimly seen writhing in the dark. In the newspapers of the time there were accounts of gatherings of the labourers, with their wives and children, at night, on moors and commons, under circumstances that gave a weird-like character to the proceedings. At one held near Wootton-Basset, on a cold winter's night, the speakers, one after the other, gave accounts of their own sufferings and those of their families, quite ​inconceivably cruel. Nearly a thousand Wiltshire peasants were present, and it was a heart-rending sight, when the moon shone out from time to time behind the clouds, and revealed the upturned faces worn with anxiety, want, and hunger.
Nearly twenty years later, Elihu Burritt, in his walk to Land's End, relates the result of a conversation he had with a hedger in Wiltshire. After detailing his own hardships, the man told him "that his son-in-law had six children, all too young to earn anything in the field, and he had to feed, clothe, and house the whole family out of eight shillings a week. They were obliged to live entirely on bread, for they could not afford to have cheese with it. Take out one-and-sixpence for rent, and as much for fuel, candles, clothes, and a little tea, sugar, or treacle, and there was only five shillings left for food for eight mouths. They must eat three times a-day, which made twenty-four meals to be got out of eightpence, only a third of a penny for each."
Thus, in the progress of modern civilisation, the English agricultural labourer has been a constant loser. From a condition in which he might hope, by industry and thrift, to become a small farmer, he can now hope for nothing better than to perform like a hireling his day, and then to find a pauper's grave. One privilege after another has gone, until at last he is driven from the land which the toil of many generations of his ancestors has rendered fertile, to burrow with his children in the slums of some outlying village, and thence to trudge with gaunt face and discontented heart to and fro from the scene of labour, no longer sweetened by bygone memories or future hopes.
There are times when the yearnings of humanity claim to be heard, and when those who, from any motive, good or bad, have allowed themselves to be carried away by the tendencies of the day, will be forced to exclaim with the greatest of modern English agriculturists, "It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country. I look around, and not a house is to be Seen but mine. I am the Giant of Giant Castle, and have eaten up all my neighbours."
II.
Let us see what the Parliamentary reports, from which we have already quoted, have to say about the dwellings of rural labourers in the Eastern Counties. We will select two as respectively types of the evils complained of—Lincolnshire, for the insufficient quantity; Norfolk, for the miserable quality of its cottages.
Lincolnshire is comparatively a new country. Before this century the greater part of the lowlands was given up to the wild goose and the bittern. Even the heights were only partially cultivated. There was a large tract of land, twenty miles north and twenty miles south of Lincoln, called the Heath, a dreary waste, so vast and featureless that it was thought necessary in 1751 to erect upon it a sort of land lighthouse. The result of this state of things was that the villages were built on the high roads, while the parishes extended for miles into the rear, composed of wild moor or fen according to the district. In our day everything is changed, and the whole country brought under cultivation. Dunston Pillar, a monument of former desolation, now stands surrounded by field after field of waving grain, or of turnips set in matchless order, upon which thousands of long-woolled sheep may be seen in winter-time feeding in their netted folds. Above the neatly-clipped hedgerows rise white farm buildings, surrounded by clusters of stacks. But where are the cottages? Everything has been provided for but the human machine, by whose labour all this wonderful change has been wrought. He must find his lodging miles away from the scene of his daily toil.
The report of 1867 says concerning the Heath district—"Two lines of villages, from four to seven miles apart, form its eastern and western boundaries, and between them there is not only an absence of villages, but almost of cottages too. The main feature of this district is that the labourers are all congregated into the larger towns." The report of 1864, speaking of North Lincolnshire, says there are "people, women as well as men, who take an hour's walk twice a day, starting in the dark and returning in the dark, to obtain the privilege of selling a day's hard work for ​shilling." In the northern half of the Wold district, where the farms are often of 800 or 1000 acres, the villages, though numerous, are so small that there is only one room for the regularly-hired labourers; the large class of "catch-work" men, with their wives and families, have to herd where they can. In the Fen district it is even worse. The population is crowded into small villages standing close to the high road, while the parishes stretch miles away into the Fen, and in consequence the labourer has to walk in some cases five or six miles to his work. "At Baston," a few miles from Market Deeping, "a man had for many years walked 56 miles a week to and from his work, and all for twelve shillings. At Langtoft, two miles from Baston, a man was found living in a miserable house of three rooms, with his wife, her mother, and five children. The bedroom was a garret, the wall's of which, leaning to, formed a ridge at the top, with a dormer window in front. 'Did he live there to be near his work?' 'No, men have to trail a long way to work. The man was working in Braceboro', six miles from home, and came back to his family every night! He lived there because he could get a tenantable cot, and was glad of it at any price, anywhere, and in any condition.'"
The Lincolnshire cottages are not as a rule bad in quality, although in one parish a farmer speaks of some as "not fit to put a pig in," but their insufficient quantity is the cause of evils quite as destructive of home life, and perhaps more so. Over crowding, of course, is one of the first results, with all its deleterious consequences. A girl belonging to a family of nine children was asked "how they all got into one small bedroom," and she replied "that they had to lie like pins, heads and tails, next each other." In Grainthorpe a case was reported to the Board of Guardians, in which the father and mother and seven children were found in a room with only one bedstead, all ill of fever, no window except one in the roof. At Easttoft the incumbent writes:—"Some cottages here are dreadfully crowded, especially by the Irish. I know a case where a farmer had to send for a labourer earlier than usual, and his foreman, when he went to the cottage, could not open the door, the whole cottage being covered with sleeping people packed close together."
​The frightfully immoral system of ganging, prevalent in Lincolnshire, is largely to be attributed to insufficient cottage accommodation. Mr Bramley, a farmer of more than 2000 acres of land, says:—"Want of cottages has given rise to the ganging system, and also to increased employment of women and children." "We want," says Mr Little, another farmer of 1700 acres, "all the children, as soon as they are old enough to be available." Few cottages, few people; every hand must be pressed into service, even mothers with infants.
Depressed by dismal scenery, oppressed by noxious vapours in summer, and cold, clammy fogs in winter, eaten up by rheumatism and ague, with homes debased and brutalised, the unhappy natives of the Fen district fill up their cup of misery by becoming opium-eaters.
"All England may be carved out of Norfolk," says an old English writer. Pasture land and arable land, heath and wood and fen, with the sea skirting two-thirds of the country; if its scenery is never grand, at least it is varied. Coke, the eminent agriculturist, turned West Norfolk from a rye-growing district into a wheat-growing one. His sheep-shearings were famous all over the civilised world. He taught the Norfolk farmers how to improve their stock, and his example led the way to most of the triumphs of modern husbandry. He is said to have raised his rents from tens to hundreds, and yet to have enriched his tenants as well as himself. Doubtless the same results have taken place on other Norfolk estates, so that the position of both landlords and farmers has vastly improved.
But what has modern improvements in husbandry done for the poor labourer? In Norfolk, the county of agricultural progress, his lot is worse than ever. At an agricultural dinner which took place at North Waltham in 1863, Mr W. Cubitt, the eminent agriculturist, thus portrayed the homes of Norfolk labourers. "They had long known," he said, "as employers of labour, that one great source of that demoralisation of which there had been such just complaints, arose from the overcrowded dwellings of the poor. In too many instances the common decencies of life were disregarded; and if the children were not contaminated, they were sent ​into the world devoid of that shame which is the natural safeguard of youth. He had not lived forty years amongst the poor without seeing the evil influences of over-crowded houses. In fact, he saw it from his very door. Where was immorality bred? But too often under the influences arising from miserable and crowded dwellings."
The Rev. E. Gurdon, in a paper read before the Norwich Diocesan Work Association, stated that when cottage-building is left to speculators, instead of the comfortable, old-fashioned, clay lump building, with its thick walls and deep, heavy, substantial, thatched roof, a small clay lump house, with a red-tile roof, and walls thin and pervious alike to heat and cold, is generally erected. And this is only one sample of the benefit the poor get from the arrangements of modern civilisation.
In the winter of 1863-64, the proprietors of the Norfolk News sent one of their staff to report on the state of the cottages in various parts of the county. The tours were made in company with Mr Samuel Clarke, sanitary inspector to the city of Norwich, and some idea may be formed of the extent of the inquiries made by the fact that the reports give in detail the condition of two hundred cottages.
The misery revealed was both shocking and scandalous. Take this picture of a Norfolk village. "A stranger cannot enter the village without being struck with surprise at its wretched and desolate condition. Look where he may, he sees little else but thatched roofs—old, rotten, and shapeless—full of holes and overgrown with weeds; windows sometimes patched with rags, and sometimes plastered over with clay; the walls, which are nearly all of clay, full of cracks and crannies; and sheds and outhouses—where there are any—looking as if they had been overthrown very early in the present century, and left in the hopeless confusion in which they fell." The first hut entered was a fair sample of the whole. Notwithstanding the cracked clay walls, half-dismantled roof, and tottering chimney, it was occupied by a man and his wife and six children, who advanced in age from one to fourteen. The six children slept in one small, ill-ventilated chamber, and the parents in another. Both these rooms were without plaster, and the sides of the roof were supported by sticks placed across—"for," ​said the occupants, "whenever there is a little wind, the place shakes, and we lie in fear of being smothered by its falling." It was no uncommon thing for seven or eight—in one case as many as eleven—persons of all ages and both sexes to be found sleeping in one room. And then, as would only be too likely, one or more would be ill with fever. In one case, where seven poor children slept on two stump bedsteads, five had been ill with fever for two months. Sometimes the bedroom was approached by a ladder and a trap-door, and the slanting roof was so low that only in the middle could a person stand upright. When there were two bed-rooms, the children's roof was found at times perfectly dark. Fancy five or six little wretches creeping into the horrors of such a hole, and lying huddled up there like so many mice. Sometimes there was too much ventilation—holes in the roof—so that if rain came on, the pillows were, as one woman observed, "as wet as a pit." Who can be surprised "that the average duration of life amongst the industrial classes is scarcely one-half that of the wealthy"!
And this is only the physical side of the evil. With reference to its moral results the Government Commissioner says:—" Mr Clarke, of Norwich, can tell anyone who will ask him tales of things he himself has seen, horrifying enough to make the very hair stand on end."
III.
Some may say that this question of the Dwellings of the Poor in Agricultural Districts is a passing question of the hour, and that it is not really so great an evil as is represented. I would answer. Go into the country and see for yourself." So writes the Hon. E. B. Portman, and he does it with authority, for this is just what he has been doing himself. He and his fellow-Commissioners have, during the last two or three years, been traversing the country in all directions—calling meetings of landowners and farmers, receiving letters from hundreds of clergymen and other parish authorities, examining persons of all classes and every condition. On the labour question, on the ​education question, opinions differed; but on the cottage question there was the most striking unanimity, a stream of testimony pouring in from every quarter denouncing the present condition of things as a terrible evil and a national disgrace.
In this article we propose to see what light these reports throw on the condition of cottage homes in the heart of England.
The farther north we go, the better the condition of the labourer. Thus, in the Midland Counties, the more they lie to the north, the less there is to be said against their cottages.
In Notts the condition of things which prevails is similar to that found in Lincolnshire, but in a modified sense.
The picturesque old cottages of Cheshire are generally in bad repair, but scarcity of any sort of cottages is a still greater evil. This works in a way quite destructive of the labourer's home. To ensure regular assistance, the farmer only cares to employ men who will lodge and board in the house. Married men therefore, eating a good portion of their wages at their master's table, have only about 5s. or 6s. a week left to give their wives to keep house with. Terribly pinched on such an allowance, and without the benefit of the presence and control of the father, the house soon breaks up.
In the south-west of Shropshire there is a district shut in among the hills, and cut off from the outer world by the Severn and the Thame, where the state of the peasantry is described as deplorably bad. But the Commissioner says:—"The point especially deserving of attention in this county is the infamous nature of the cottages. In the majority of parishes that I visited, they may be described as tumbledown and ruinous, not watertight, very deficient in bedroom accommodation, and indecent sanitary arrangements. On many estates cottages are to be found belonging to the owners of the soil which are a disgrace to any civilised community." At Bishop's Castle the Commissioner had a conversation with the vicar and others. It was stated that "it was not at all an uncommon thing for a bolster to be placed at each end of the bed, so that all the family sleep in it with their feet towards the middle." The vicar, going to baptize a child, found five or six children in bed with the mother.
​In some parts of Herefordshire, owing to failing population and former poverty, many of the small homesteads have become labourers' cottages. Although these places are always old, and generally dilapidated, they are large and airy. Surrounded by gardens and outhouses, they have room to breed pigs, and chickens, and ducks, making all the difference between independence and penury.
The great bulk of the cottages, however, in this county, have been built by the labourers themselves on pieces of ground cribbed from the waste. "They are generally constructed of wattle and dub, and thatched, and contain only bedroom and sitting-room. In one village many of the cottages were found in the last stage of decay, windows broken, doors far from wind-tight, roofs not water-tight, bedrooms unceiled."
From Upton-on-Severn, in Worcestershire, comes the statement, "Nine-tenths of the cottages are abominable; they are overcrowded, damp, and not air-tight." Elsewhere they are described as deplorably bad and overcrowded. Archdeacon Sandford says: "The housework often remains undone till evening, and the infants and babies are consigned to some busy neighbour, or small child, unfit for the care of other children, who ought herself to be at school."
The same practice prevails in Warwickshire, and there, strange to say, it would appear that field-working is confined to married women. It is said that the men expect the wife in this way to help towards the support of the family. A Medical Officer of the Warwick Union says: "I have known at least eight cases in which children left at home have been burned or scalded—three or four of these have resulted in death. I have occasionally known an opiate in the shape of Godfrey's Cordial, or Duffy's Elixir, given by the mother to the children to keep them quiet." Another surgeon, who has practised at Knowle for twenty-seven years, says: "Almost all the illegitimacy is due to crowded cottages. The drainage is abominable. We have outbreaks of fever which we can trace entirely to nuisances."
Leicestershire is a county suffering from the two opposite evils of congestion and depletion. The stocking villages are ​overcrowded, while in the Vale of Belvoir the population is near extinction. The cottages have no gardens, and are built up close against the side of the road. "Mushroom halls" and "charity houses" exist largely in this county, and this is perhaps the chief reason why its cottage accommodation is so peculiarly bad. "Mushroom halls" are cots originally erected by squatters on the edge of a common or waste, rapidly put together to avoid interference, only just serving for shelter, and patched up from time to time to keep out wind and weather. "Charity houses" are dwellings built expressly for or devoted to the use of the poor by private benevolence, or sometimes by the parish. Negligent administration is generally the fate of these well-meant charities. No rent being demanded, after a time the inmates frequently become the virtual owners, and sell or in various ways get rid of the property. Of course it falls into the hands of the worst class of proprietors, as none else would purchase houses with no title.
In the close parishes of Northamptonshire the cottage supply is insufficient for the amount of labour; in the open ones the accommodation is rarely, if ever, adequate to provide for the health, comfort, and morals of the inhabitants. As an instance of the sort of building supposed to be good enough for a labouring family: "Four cottages stpod together in a village near a malt-kiln. They had gardens. A speculator bought them. He turned the kiln into six cottages, and built five others on the ground which had been used for gardens." In almost all the villages of Northamptonshire instances are to be met with of overcrowding. "A cot, measuring 16 feet by 18 feet," the report states, "was inhabited by a grandfather, aged eighty-four, father, mother, and eleven children—fourteen in all; and at the time the place was visited the mother of the family was engaged in washing out clothes in the only living-room." This is spoken of as the worst case, but others very bad are mentioned.
Education is very defective in Northamptonshire, not for want of schools, but owing to the indifference and want of affection on the part of the parents. This is attributed to the demoralisation resulting from bad cottages, and to the poverty of the people and consequent want of hope.
​"Bedfordshire is very inadequately supplied with cottages. They are few and small, and their condition is often a mere precarious holding together of rotten materials; the stitch in time has not been applied, and there are hundreds on which no repairs can now be bestowed with advantage." This was the state of things in 1864. In 1867 Mr Culley reports that in about half of fifty-five parishes of which he received descriptions, the cottage accommodation was either mixed, bad and good, or generally bad—so that we may take the above as descriptive of the cots in such parishes. Of one district it is said: "Most of the men are intemperate. The causes are the aggregation of cottages in the villages, the wretched condition of the cottages, the entire absence of a proprietary considering themselves in any way responsible for the moral and physical well-being of their tenants, and lastly, the very defective legislation about public-houses."
In Buckinghamshire the labourer's home is no better than elsewhere. Here is an interior drawn by a landowner at Coleshill. "Look into a cottage in Bucks. You see a want of furniture, scanty bedding, perhaps the remains of a quartern loaf, and a mug smelling of beer. The family, not having a good meal of victuals once in twelve months, do their work (except piecework) accordingly without a will. As a rule, they are honest and well-conducted, but their enemies are want of economy, ignorance, and the beershop."
In the autumn of 1863 the Morning Star published a series of articles, entitled "Rural Life in Buckinghamshire." Mr Culley mentions that in seven of the worst parishes exposed in these articles there has only been improvement in two. Of cottages in other parts he speaks in such language as "very wretched dens," "wretched hovels," "very bad cottages, quite unfit for human beings to live in."
In the "Burnham Magazine" of May 1868 were some strong remarks about the cottages in that town, ending thus:—"Human nature caged up in them must become degraded, and when these homes are emptied from the sheer impossibility of living in them, the beer-shops of course are filled."
​Oxfordshire is a thoroughly agricultural county, and in its farming arrangements still maintains some old-fashioned ideas and practices. Boys are still lodged at the farmers' houses, and instead of looking to factories and mines for an improvement in their position, they aspire to be grooms, and the girls to go out to service. The boys are employed on the land, as they are in most other parts of the country, too early, and, trudging about in their heavy boots on the sticky soil, contract a weakness in the legs, which leaves its indelible mark in an awkward gait.
Oxfordshire cottages are not so bad as those of Beds or Bucks; but in treating of Oxon and Berks Mr Culley attributes the loose morals of the female population to the overcrowding of cottages.
From Berkshire come a series of denunciations. The Rev. W. J. Butler, Wantage, says: "Wretched pigsties of hovels destroy decency, self-respect, and the love of home. I could mention frightful results from the present system of dwelling-houses."
Speaking of the Union of Newent, in Gloucestershire, a union comprising eighteen parishes with a population of 12,500, Dr Fraser says: "The physical, social, and educational condition of the labouring classes appeared to me to be low. Many cottages which I saw in the parishes of Newent, Linton, and Taynton, are simply unfit for human habitation." In a note he says, "In Linton I was informed very few of the cottages have a staircase; the bedrooms are reached by a ladder or steps. The cases in which the roof—particularly when it is old thatch—is so utterly unsound as to be unable to resist anything like a downpour, and where people's bedding, in consequence, constantly gets deluged, are too numerous to mention."
Mr Cattle, a surgeon practising at Newent, took Dr Fraser a drive one afternoon through his district, and showed him some of the worst of these dens; and he says that, "speaking generally, anything more deplorable than the way large masses of the population in the neighbourhood of Newent, in Kilcote, Gorsley, Linton, and on Glass House Hill, are housed cannot be conceived. The state of their homes tells on the physical condition of the people. Many of them never wash; the flannel undervest ​is perhaps only taken off when it is worn out. The dietary is correspondingly low—many families have nothing but bread from one week's end to the other." He speaks of the depression that he felt on his return from the drive, in which he had seen type after type of social life almost degraded to the level of barbarism.
IV.
The charges these Reports bring against the cottages in East Anglia and those in Mid England are, upon the whole, true of those in the southern counties; and of the metropolitan counties the same dark tale is told.
In Essex Dr Hunter found that a destruction of houses had been going on in twenty-two parishes, without arresting the growth of the population, so that in 1861 a larger number of persons were squeezing themselves into a smaller number of houses than had been the case in 1851. At Great Chesterford he describes some of the cots as "pictures of misery." At Little Chesterton were "plenty of tumble-down houses with most wretched thatches." At Wendon were "some most melancholy cottages; the crumbling clay exposed the ribs, and none but the poorest materials seem used." At Little Hallingbury the floors were of large pebbles set in concrete, which of course busy little fingers were hard at work day by day pulling out. Washing such floors must have been out of the question—a pail of water would leave them as full of pools as a bad road on a rainy day.
In Surrey the commons are skirted by cottages of the poorest description, originally built by squatters out of the waste. In course of time some have been sold, and so rebuilt or repaired as to become decent habitations, but numbers may be found only containing one bedroom and one sitting-room, totally destitute of drainage, and in a wretched condition. Those who live near such commons must have often heard—"they have the fever on the common," that is, the "scarlet fever." Even the pretty, comfortable-looking Surrey towns have their dark spots, and these are just ​the habitations of the poor labourer—Epsom, for example. Of Godstone it is said, "We have many cottages unfit for human habitation; they are small and crowded, without ventilation or drainage, outhouses, gardens, or water supply." At Farnham the Commissioner saw a cottage in which a man and his wife and ten children lived. The whole family slept in one room, divided by a wooden screen, carried partially across. There was only one window to supply light and air to the whole room on both sides of the screen.
From the neighbourhood of Maidstone, in Kent, we get evidence similar in character to that concerning Norfolk. "Cottage accommodation is generally miserable, especially as to bedrooms; no decency can be observed. The sitting-rooms are too often stone or brick floored—draughty, cold, wretched places, from which the father and grown-up sons are only too glad to escape to the warm public-house near. The sanitary arrangements are horrible, and, in short, the cottages of the working man are so curiously contrived as to sap the foundations of morality, religion, and health."
In East Kent it is said many of the cottages are quite uninhabitable. What, then, must be the misery of the Cottage Homes of England, when, in the face of such evidence, the Commissioner says, "and yet it appeared to me that they were better in Kent than in any county I have visited"?
When in these reports we continually read such remarks as: "Our cottages are better now," "There is not much to complain of now," and find the whole matter spoken of as "the evil growth of many generations," we become conscious of a continuity of misery, under which generation after generation has dragged out a painful existence. Forty years ago, travelling through Leicestershire, William Cobbett thus described the homes of the peasantry: "Look at these hovels made of mud and of straw; bits of glass, or of old cast-off windows, without frames or hinges frequently, but merely stuck in the mud wall. Enter them, and look at the bits of chairs or stools; the wretched boards tacked together to serve for a table; the floor of pebble, broken brick, or of the bare ground. Look at the thing called a bed, and survey ​the rags on the backs of the wretched inhabitants, "and then wonder, if you can, that the jails and dungeons and tread-mills increase." If after years of effort on the part of some landowners, the above description is scarcely now an exaggeration of certain parts of the country, how universally true must it have been before the national conscience was aroused on the matter!
Pent-up city folk often envy the fresh complexion and the stalwart frame of the farmer or country gentleman, while they wonder how labourers who breathe the same air have such a feeble and dejected look. Who can wonder, when he once knows the secret of those "Black Holes," miscalled bedrooms, in which they nightly inhale draughts of poisoned vapour?
One of the most evident results of bad dwellings is physical debility. One surgeon in Norfolk "observes the want of muscular development in the agricultural labourer: he has no calves to his legs, and no development of the biceps muscle of his arm." Another notes the blanched and unhealthy-looking condition of the children in a particular locality. Some places are scourged by fevers, some decimated by consumption—everywhere the aged are cruelly tortured by rheumatism.
"There is a want," writes Lord Sydney Godolphin Osborne, "of physical energy, of what I may call labour pluck, a deadening of mind and body force. They may work up to what they are worth as regards the value of what they do in the labour market, but even this is done after a very listless fashion. They form farm machinery in the mass, but the motive power is weak."
In the south and west of England, agricultural labourers live on I the verge of pauperism, and have no hope of bettering their position. "A labourer who is ill one day, or whose child is sick, as a matter of course applies to the parish doctor, and a week's illness always sends him to the parish. Even the best and most industrious labourers are discouraged from joining friendly societies lest it should interfere with their right to come upon the rates. And too often the management of these societies is calculated to make them think that it is far wiser to rely wholly upon parish relief. In hundreds of cases, after years of patient self-denial, and of saving against a day of trouble, the poor labourer has been ​sent on the parish because there is nothing 'in the box of his club,' or because he and others were getting old, and were likely soon to come on its funds, the younger members of the club having dissolved it and reconstituted it without him." Sickness and want of work bring many labourers into debt against their will, and the system of the tally-men with whom he deals is so tempting as to render it with many a confirmed habit.
The reports frequently refer to the indifference to chastity, attributing it to the wretched sleeping-places so often the lot of labouring families. "The rage for beer" is described as such that if a man gets an extra shilling it goes in drink, while mop fairs, club festivals, and harvest homes are usually scenes of intoxication. What with the overwhelming force of a propensity, the result of a habit of many generations, due largely to wretched cottages and the abominable little beer-shops which are spread like devil-traps over the country-side, the labourer has no chance. "If the Queen means to do any good to us," said a poor wife to Mr Culley, "she had best begin by putting down them alehouses; they makes gentlefolks' fortunes [the italics are mine], they do; look at this, captain; and they won't put them down, but the Queen might, or, leastways, shorten their hours. It's Saturday night till twelve o'clock, and they ain't well out o' church on Sundays till they're in again. Them alehouses is our curse, they are."
Human nature gets used to the circumstances around it, and nothing at last becomes so painful as a change. Thus the labourer gets used to his wretched cot, and dislikes the change involved in his removal to a better one. A great landlord complained that he had given a very good cottage to a labourer, and found it was not appreciated at all. The tenant put his apples in one room, did not inhabit another, and would put his pig into another, if allowed to do so. Another landlord said: "If you built a palace, and furnish it to match, you would scarcely induce the people to leave these places into which you would hardly put a pig to live." Could any sadder proof be given of the moral depression into which the men have fallen on whose labours these great landlords live than this clinging to wretchedness, this habit of living in misery?
"In the eye of the moralist," says Dr Fraser, "the most ​malign aspect of poverty is in its power to generate the loss of natural affection. Poverty is emphatically hardening—at any rate, in its influence on the natural man." In Cambridgeshire the children go to work as young as six years old; many at seven or eight. The reason appears to be in many cases that the parents compel the ganger to take the little one on condition of getting regularly the labour of the bigger child of the same family. But what is to be expected of people who see their families suffering under such wretched physical evils, and are themselves depressed and disheartened by them? "For," says the report, "the formidable difficulty of all is not the apathy of their parents, but their poverty. It is impossible for men with large families to look beyond the present hour. To be warmed and filled is to them the one great object in life, and to talk to them about improving the minds of their children, while they are unable to provide those things which are needful for their bodies, must seem to them like mocking."
Can a mother forget her sucking child? Think of the Lincolnshire babies, drugged by their mothers with opium; of poor Betsey B—— who did not remember how many babies she had had. Think of mothers driving their poor little weeping children out to work before it is light, threatening to beat them if they do not go. Think of fathers sitting all day outside beer-shops, like lazy hogs basking in the sun, while their children break their backs to supply the means of parental dissipation. "Without natural affection." This is the result of a wretched home. And what can come of such a home? The poor girls often add shame to their wretchedness. In Norfolk one child out of every ten is illegitimate. The boys grow up to be young ruffians, who care for nobody. If they are wild, they will turn poachers, and perhaps get hanged for killing a gamekeeper, or they will be picked up by the recruiting sergeant; or if they are steady, they will continue to tread the same weary round as their father, and, unless these things be not speedily altered, perpetuate this misery to future generations.
These reports do not give any direct statements as to the religious condition of the agricultural poor, but we note that the greater part of the information is obtained through clergymen, and that its tone is, as a rule, depressing, carrying the conviction that ​religion is at a very low ebb indeed in our rural districts. The conclusion to which an Oxfordshire clergyman has come may fairly be accepted as descriptive of the condition of things throughout the country: " I am satisfied, from observations which I have made during a period of thirty-five years passed in the ministry of the Church, that before our teaching and preaching can have the effect we look for, we must house the labourer in a better manner."
V.
Devonshire cottages look quite idyllic, standing among the gardens and orchards of that picturesque county, but the report describes them as being, except upon the estates of a few landowners, in a deplorable condition. In one place they are spoken of as "wretched," in another as "ruinous hovels," in a third as "damp, dark, unhealthy holes." Usually the walls are made of "cob," a concrete formed of mud, straw, and pebbles. The roofs are of thatch, but too often open and out of repair. The usual form is a kitchen and back room, with two bedrooms above; small cots of only a kitchen and a bedroom are comparatively rare. The interior of these cots is cheerless enough. Enter one, and it will be found dark and dingy for want of light—no bright coal fire, but a grate with a solid front, into which are dropped the roots that have been grubbed up for fuel. The floors are of concrete, or paved with slate, occasionally nothing but earth, and at times very rough. Mount the stairs to the low-pitched bedroom, and you may sometimes find such holes in the floor that your legs are in danger of slipping through into the chamber below. According to Dr Hunter, the people say they feel oppressed and heartless about furnishing their rooms or keeping them tidy. Sometimes they only use two of the rooms; of the rest, one will be turned into an ash-bin, the other into a store-room for potatoes, or into a general receptacle for rubbish. An occasional show of crockery suggests that, under happier circumstances, the Devonian labourers could make themselves bright and cheerful homes.
​One secret of their depression is the empty larder. They rarely get butcher's meat, but eat coarse, brown bread, washed down by too much rough, sour cider. If moderately well off, their usual diet is bread in milk and water for breakfast, bread and cheese for luncheon and dinner, and potatoes and bacon for supper. Everywhere there is depression and hopelessness, owing partly perhaps to the damp, humid climate, partly to a decay of the prosperity which once distinguished the western counties, but mainly to the fact that they are miserably housed and under-fed.
Women work to some extent in the fields, but no one will allow that it has a demoralising influence. The men receive three pints of cider a day as part of their wages, a custom which adds to their depression by leading them to drink apart from their wives and families. Immorality is directly traced to the conditions of cottage life. Little value is set on education, and unless the Vicar pays the penny, the parents will frequently plead poverty or any other excuse to keep the children from school. In one district—probably a sample of others—the boys are described as a rough, coarse lot. "There is a marked class of lads," says the clergyman writing, "from the ages of fourteen to twenty and twenty-four, who are most difficult to handle, shifty in their work, ignorant. Very few can read or write, and they are utterly regardless of authority. 'Juvenile rowdyism' is on the increase, and is a marked and bad feature in our present social position, full, to my mind, of future evil."
In the annual report for 1868 of the South Devon Congregational Union, a missionary, whose work lies about Dartmoor, gives the following instance of belief io-fiitchcraft, as significant of the condition of the people:—"A poor man suffering from an internal complaint had been sent to the Torquay Infirmary. His disease completely baffled the skill of the medical men there, and also of others whom he had consulted. But this occasioned him no surprise. He was quite satisfied that he had been 'ill-wished,' and all efforts to shake this conviction were fruitless. In conversation one day he said, 'he was better, and able to do a little work again. I asked him how it came about, and the following was his account of the matter: 'I knew all along it was not God's affliction, and now I have proved it was not. A man came to me and ​said, "I think you are bewitched, and I will tell you what to do. Take a lump of salt, and put it into the fire at twelve o'clock at night, and if it gets hard you are ill-wished." Well, I did so, and sure enough it did get hard, and then I knew what was up. After that I got some pins, and threw them into the fire, and while I was burning them there was such a noise on the outside of my door that I was frightened. I did this for three nights, and after that a woman near me was taken ill, and I got better, and since then my wife has been cured in the same way—and after that you mustn't tell me there is no such thing as ill-wishing.'"
To pass on to Dorset. There the cottages have long been "a bye-word and a reproach." Much has been done, and still they remain more ruinous and contain worse accommodation than in any county the commissioner visited, excepting Shropshire. Several villages mentioned and described in the evidence are said to contain many cottages unfit for habitation. "I saw," the commissioner says, "whole rows of cottages abounding with nuisances of all kinds. Remonstrance is generally disregarded, and the state of filth in which many parishes are left calls aloud for active interference."
The Dorset cottage is usually built of mud, with a thatched roof. Many have only one bedroom; three is a luxury to which few can lay claim. Enter one: a more dreary place it would be difficult to imagine. There is no grate, but a huge open chimney, with a few bricks upon the hearth, on which the miserable inhabitants place their fuel—sometimes nothing but clods of peat, emitting wretched acrid vapours. Owing to the low open chimney, the house is constantly filled with smoke, rendering the ceilings, where they have them, black and dingy enough. Dr Aldridge stated at a meeting of the Farmers' Club at Dorchester, in January 1867, that "the cottages at Fordington were so bad that he ventured to say that they would not put their animals in such places^ and yet they were occupied by families of five or six individuals. In many of these cottages one could not stand upright, and the smoke, dirt, and filth together made a state of things not to be equalled in St Giles's."
Around these wretched hearths the poor family crowd on a winter's night, stretching out their chilled hands and feet to gather ​what warmth they may. But some are so poverty-stricken that they can only afford to light a fire at meal-times; often their wet clothes can never be dried, but are put on damp again the next morning; for fuel is very expensive. One woman stated that it cost them £2 in the winter for firewood. Here is a case mentioned in the Labour Circular, Feb. 1868. "E., 10s. per week; wife and six children. Son, 3s. 6d. per week; total income, 13s. 6d.; no grist or other allowance; rent, 1s. 6d., leaving only 12s. a week to support and clothe eight persons, a little more than than 2½d. a day for each member of the family."
No wonder there is a "want of labour pluck" in such people, a deadening of mental and physical force. No wonder that such circumstances send the father to the public-house; no wonder that the mother, disheartened at the difficulty of keeping her smoky, dilapidated house decent and clean, gives up the task in despair.
Frequently, however, the home does not get the benefit of her presence, the custom prevailing in Dorsetshire of hiring a whole family. Thus the wife goes to work as well as the husband, and takes her place in the barn, or the field, or beside the threshing-machine. The poor little ones are locked up all day, or left under the care of some young girl of seven or eight years of age, who has enough to do to mind the baby; and, when the mother comes home, smashed crockery and sullen tempers have been the result of the family left without proper guardianship or control.
But they are so poor that every member of the family must earn a crust as soon as he can. Boys of seven or eight go to work—nay, sometimes they begin as early as six. Their poverty, again, and the unconscionable way the farmers have of paying their wages fortnightly, or even monthly, causes them to run into debt with their masters or the tally-men, destroying every atom of independence, or power of improving their condition.
One advantage they have—larger allotments than in any other part of the kingdom, and to most cottages ample gardens are attached. And here, if they had the energy, they could add considerably to their domestic comfort. If every penny was not of such immediate consequence to them, they could cultivate these plots of ground to great advantage.
"What wi' dungèn, diggèn up, and zeedèn,  A thinnèn, cleänèn, howèn up, and weedèn,  Hodge, an' the biggest o' the childern, too,  Could always vind some useful jobs to do."
To conclude, however, with a brighter picture, one that will show that there is nothing in agricultural labour of itself to depress a man, or to prevent his realising domestic happiness.
The Northumbrian peasantry are described as stalwart, vigorous, and healthy, independent yet courteous, provident and sober, with a profound belief in the advantages of education, and considerable religious principle. They enjoy good wages, and frequently rise to the position of stewards. Enter one of their cots. It is often but one apartment, lit up by a single window, with nothing but a concrete floor, and some are unceiled, or only have a partially ceiled roof. In one corner stands a large bedstead, the family heirloom, completely shrouded by white dimity; while a box-bed, closed in the daytime, is the children's resting-place at night. The stores of bacon overhead, the butter, and cheese, and meal in the half-open cupboard, the variety and whiteness of the bread and cakes on the table, attest the truth of the good wife's assertion when, with simple pride, she assures her visitor "that they are not poor."
The mahogany furniture, bright with hand-polish, the display of crockery and ornaments, the easy comfort of every arrangement, seen in the dancing light of a brilliant coal-fire, all tell of good housewifery and ample incomes. Every fire-place, too, has its set-pot and oven, both being in constant requisition, for they have plenty of meat. Yet the good wife will tell you that they had a "sair" fight for it before the children earned anything, for, if there was a point upon which they were determined, it was that the bairns should not go to work unless they spent at least the autumn and the winter in getting a little schooling. Surprising indeed are the facts related, showing the belief both parents and children entertain of the value of instruction. Shepherds club together to hire a perambulating schoolmaster, and they have their children taught Latin, and sometimes French and Euclid. In one district it is stated that there is not a person who cannot read and write.
​On a winter's evening the family circle gather round the cheerful fire, the women knitting, the father mending shoes—an art nearly all acquire—while one of the younger ones reads for the benefit of the whole group.
Notwithstanding such a high degree of domestic happiness as these facts suggest, the report speaks strongly concerning the miserable accommodation many of the Northumbrian cottages afford. Formerly they were mere sheds, without window frames, partitions, grates, or ceiling; the unfortunate tenant had to bring all these things with him, so that if the weather was wet he frequently found a great puddle on the earthen floor.
Even yet there are cots to which this description exactly applies, and the miseries the inhabitants have to undergo, especially with their taste for the comfortable, must be great. Under any circumstances it must be extremely "confusing," as one woman mildly put it, to have to perform all the operations of bedroom, parlour, and kitchen in one apartment, and quite distressing when any member of the family is sick.
The "bondager" system peculiar to Northumberland, by which every farm labourer is bound to provide a woman whose labour shall be at the disposal of the master whenever he may require it, and whom the labourer is therefore obliged to have lodging in his house, does not conduce to domestic comfort. So favourable, however, are his other conditions, and such is the superiority of his character, that these two circumstances—a miserable cottage with only one room, and a stranger lodging with him—do not prevent the Northumbrian peasant possessing a decent, happy home.
No doubt something is due to the fact that he comes of a race which has dwelt for generations on the battle-field of English history, developing a power of struggling with and conquering difficulties. Something also may be attributed to the climate. The average mortality in the Glendale Union, one of the largest agricultural districts in Northumberland, from the year 1851 to 1860, was only fifteen per thousand, whereas the general average of Great Britain is twenty-two per thousand. And again, to the favourable conditions of his service, he being hired by the year, and paid alike in wet weather or dry, in sickness and in health. And perhaps more than to any of these causes, though they all ​work together to the same end, he owes his comparatively happy position to his superior education.
Thus the great exception of the Northumbrian peasant destroys the theory that evils attending the lot of the English labourer are mainly due to his miserable, unhealthy cottage. His material wants are signs rather than causes of the evil that besets and ruins his life. That evil must be sought in a circumstance with which these reports do not deal, a condition into which they make no inquiry. Yet, after all, nothing is so important to men as their religious environment.
The Northumbrian peasant is largely influenced by a form of Christianity that not only recognises that he is a man, but that, without ceasing to be a labouring man, tending sheep, or following the plough, he can be chosen, and is chosen, if found worthy, an elder of the Church. The labourers in most other parts of England have been regarded as a helot race, born to be hewers of wood and drawers of water,—brothers and friends in much the same sense that horses and dogs are brothers and friends. That this is no unfair view of the lordly way English gentlemen have of looking at the labouring classes is amusingly illustrated in these very reports, one of the Chief Commissioners giving it as his opinion that the cause of the happy position of the Northumbrian labourer compared with the southern labourer is "that he is better, educated, and hence is both mentally and physically a superior animal." The writer of these pages is no denominationalist, but so far as he has personal tastes and sympathies, they are not with Presbyterian forms, but with the liturgy of the Church of England. All the more he is bound to point out the superior educative power of the Presbyterian to the Church of England system, as seen in the higher form of the manhood and womanhood of the people under its control.
The reason is clear—the one is a democratic religion, the other the most aristocratic in the world. It is this characteristic of the Church of England which is mainly responsible for the degraded condition of the English rural poor.
* ↑ Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture (1867).
* ↑ The Times, January 7th, 1846.