# The English Peasant/Surrey Commons

VI.
Surrey Commons.
(Golden Hours, 1872.)
Very few, even of those who dwell in Surrey, have any adequate idea of the number and extent of its commons. In Brayley's "History of Surrey," published in 1841, it is stated that the heaths, greens, commons, and such-like tracts of land within the county, number no less than 280. But not to speak of the greens, which are sometimes small, one could easily count on the inch-to-a-mile ordnance map more than a hundred commons or heaths having distinct names.
Indeed, the western part of the county is a series of commons. It is still almost true that a man may ride from Ascot Heath, in Berkshire, across Surrey, to Bexley Heath in Sussex, a distance of thirty miles, and hardly leave common land the whole way. Mr Marshall, the author of the "Rural Economy of the Southern Counties," estimates this extensive waste as covering in his time an area of 150 square miles, or 100,000 acres, the chief portion of which was in Surrey. And even now, although some considerable patches here and there have been enclosed; and along the slips by the sides of the streams which intersect it has always been found some well-cultivated land, it still remains generally true that the western side of the county is mainly common or commonable land.
This sort of land may, in fact, be said to be the characteristic feature of Surrey, for there are very few parts in which extensive commons may not be found. Captain Maxse, in his valuable map, published in the Fortnightly Review for August 1870, sets down the waste land in Surrey as amounting to 147,709 acres. As ​the area of the county is 478,792 acres, it follows that nearly one-third of its soil is given up to waste.
A century or two ago, when English agriculture had hardly emerged from the barbarous state in which it is found during feudal times, persons having common rights no doubt considered them a very valuable appendage to their farms. They were contented with the diminutive sheep and cattle which they raised upon them, little dreaming of the wonderful improvement which superior diet and careful breeding would one day effect. But now, when the great thing aimed at in pastoral science is the quality of the herds and flocks, it must be less than ever worth a farmer's while to turn his stock out to feed on the bare and boggy common. Except during summer-time, the cattle and sheep which are allowed to wander over these commons have a miserable and degenerate look. The author of the "Rural Economy of the Southern Counties" thus refers to the degeneracy which takes place in animals pastured on Surrey commons: "Those which are most conspicuous, on the barren flat heaths of Surrey, are small, mean-looking cattle. Yet they must be of a quality intrinsically good, or they could not exist on so bare a pasture. The breed of sheep … are, in general, small and ill-formed animals. Their mutton, however, is in high repute; and they are probably well-fleshed, having been starved into their present state."
Besides thus reducing the quality of his stock, the commoner is in continual danger of losing his animals, unless they are under the care of a herdsman or shepherd; or at all events of being fined by the wayward if they are found straying on the high road, or by the common-driver, should he come across the lost beast and impound it. Moreover, the practice of giving up the commons to geese is destructive of its use for cattle, for the latter turn away with disgust from land where geese have been.
Thus it appears that a common is of very little use to those who farm on a large scale and for profit, and of no use at all to the commoner who keeps a few beasts for his own service, since the cost of a man to watch them would swallow up any possible advantage.
It follows then that the only persons to whom the common is of use are the poor cottagers, who dwell upon it, and who can turn ​out a cow or a few sheep, some geese or clucks, and watch their property all day long with their own eyes.
It is these people who appear to be, and, as a matter of fact are, the real commoners now; although, when the question comes to be legally dealt with, and an enclosure takes place, they are as' completely put out of court as any stranger would be.
For few of them can produce, as one boasted to me she could, "papers," proving their title to the holding. In the majority of cases they were originally squatters with about as much "legal" right to the land as the gipsy who settles for a night on the village green. It was a notion held among the peasantry in olden times, that he who could in one night erect a "Mushroom Hall" or a "now-or-never," without hindrance from the officials of the manor, had obtained a copyhold right to the land. Thus frequently it happened that labourers, and sometimes travelling tinkers, or basket-makers, would set up a few hurdles in a night and enclose a piece of land. If no interference ensued, a wall soon took the place of the hurdles, ere long it was roofed in, and thus arose many of those wretched little hovels, in which it is grievous to think any English family should be reared. A hedge or trench was then thrown up a few yards from the cot; year by year it was removed a few feet further, fruit-trees were planted, and the ground stocked with vegetables. Thus many a little plot of cultivated land came into existence, the origin of which was as complete a myth in a generation or two as if it had arisen in pre-historic ages.
The sort of building put up on these encroachments was about equal to an ordinary tool-house in a gentleman's garden. One I saw and sketched on Epsom common contained two apartments? and I was informed by the man residing there that the old lady to whom it belonged brought up twelve children in it. He himself lived there with eight children. His case was an illustration of the numerous accidents to which the agricultural labourer is liable. Twelve years ago he had had his foot crushed in a wheel-rut, rheumatism had seized the leg, and had at last taken possession of his whole body, so that he had never been able to do a day's work since. His wife set to work bravely, sometimes leaving home at live in the morning to stand at the wash-tub all day. The baby, five months old, had already become so resigned to its hard life, ​as to be willing to go to bed and to sleep when it grew dark without a whimper. The father said he could not read or write, but he sent all his children to school, for he "knew the miss of it," and he told me with a glow of pride that the schoolmistress said that the little bright, intelligent girl by his side was the best scholar she had.
The house he said had "common rights," and possibly it had, as it was evidently an old one, and might from its mere continuance for sixty years have itself become a freehold, and turned the privileges it had taken into legal rights. On this common, through the kindness of the late lord of the manor, every poor cottager has permission to turn out ten sheep; while upon another I found the lord doing all he could to encourage the people to keep cows, but it did not appear that in either case many avail themselves of the opportunity. There are no doubt some cases where from exceptional causes the people make good use of their common, but as a rule the majority are too poor to take advantage of their situation. A cow or a sheep implies food and housing in winter, and they have neither the means to purchase the one nor the convenience for the other.
Perhaps the most general use made of the commons is to cut the fern, to make litter for the pigs, and to get firing for the house. In some places coal has superseded the necessity for seeking much of the latter, but in the more remote parts wood and turf is the only fuel known. With fires made from them the cottagers still smoke the bacon which they hang up their chimneys. In seasons when fruit is scarce, the blackberries and other wild fruit found on these commons afford quite a little addition to their year's income.
Fowls are not much kept. They, too, cannot live solely on the land, and are a constant source of ill-will where there are neighbours. Geese and donkeys are characteristic features of every Surrey common. Notwithstanding the objection to the former, they are found everywhere. Not that they are always the property of the cottagers; in some cases they only watch them for others. Bees are much kept in some parts, and produce fragrant honey, feeding as they do on the wild thyme and marjoram, and the purple-blossomed heather.
​Since the Inclosure Act has been passed, a clearer idea has obtained of the legal aspect of the question, and accordingly on some commons the freeholders have succeeded in entirely stopping the cottagers from exercising any privileges whatever. On other commons, where the cottagers are numerous, it would be impossible to do so without force. I know of one common where few of the persons who use it could probably prove their legal right to do so. As the common-driver told me, he could rise up any morning and drive off all the cattle and sheep on it, but he is not likely to attempt it. This common adjoins another belonging to a different manor, and yet the sheep of people living in one wander at their own sweet will over the boggy slopes of the other.
In the middle of the latter common I found a poor woman, living in a very comfortable cottage. Her husband was a labourer, and they had brought up a numerous family on 2s. a-day, but it did not appear that they had ever thought of making any use of the common. And yet she told me of one man who had about 200 sheep which he turned out every day. Of course he had no right, or at least no right to pasture for one-tenth part of the number. All he could have urged in support of his encroachment would be contained in the old saying—
"Let him take that has the power,  And let him keep that can."
The fact is, the majority of the lords of the manors do not care to stop these encroachments. They know they can make no use of the common themselves, and they have no wish to play the part of the dog in the manger.
And this leads me to speak of those for whose advantage these extensive wastes really exist.
There is a class of self-willed, determined, acquisitive sort of men, to the production of which common life is especially favourable, because it gives freedom from all restraint; permits the development of peculiarities without hindrance, and in the doubt which hangs over the character and extent of its rights, gives a stimulus to such natures to get all they can. These are the people who make a living out of the commons.
I got into company with such a man on a walk I made to a ​common in the north-west of the county. I had trudged for miles along a solitary but almost straight road, hemmed in by lines of pines and other trees on either side. Not a sound was to be heard, except the distant shouting of a crow-boy. The only sign of life were the enormous ants, which kept up a perpetual motion over the sandbanks that enclosed the woods. At last I heard a cart coming along, and, begging a lift, found myself seated beside a little jolly, apple-cheeked man, who was carrying bread from a neighbouring town to the very common to which I was bound. He had commenced work as an agricultural labourer at eight years of age, and had, since he had been a man, worked at 14s. a week. Now, however, he lived on the common, and sold beer and grocery. As we passed along he remarked that, had he known what he did now, he would have had a bit of land.
"How?"
"Built on it," he replied, "asked no one."
"Couldn't the waste not yet enclosed be turned to account?"
"Not for wheat, but," quoth he, "if I were the parish of C—— I know what I'd do with it. I'd enclose it, and take all these 'ere paupers, that are doing nothing, and make 'em plant trees upon it, and then work in tending 'em."
He was evidently well-to-do, and spoke with a sort of contemptuous pity of those who inhabited the miserable cots we saw, huddled together in little groups on various parts of the common.
He realized the expression "As merry as a sand-boy," giving me with much humour the notes of the birds which frequent the common. Thus he described the yellow hammer's as asking for "a little bit of bread and no cheese," the chaffinch for "some bread and no beer," while the wood-pigeon cried moodily, "you old foo', you old foo'."
Upon another common I met with a still more singular character. Over the door of a cottage, standing in a large garden on the side of a common, was this sign-board
"——— ——— Worm Doctor. Professor of Medical Botany. Herb Medicines prepared for every complaint. Advice Gratis."
​The owner thereof was a shrewd, taciturn old man, of the American rather than the English type. He had been a soldier, and had stood guard over Napoleon in St Helena, and was there till the captive emperor died, leaving the island on the day of the funeral. He told me some interesting facts about Bonaparte, but I was more anxious to talk to him about the art he practised.
How he came to be a herbalist was on this wise. When a boy he had suffered so from chilblains in the winter that his hands were of no use to him. One day he saw a herb in the hedge, and wished to pluck it, but his father told him it would "pisin" him. Genius, however, was not to be restrained, so he gathered it, rubbed his blains with the berries, and to his joy they departed, never to trouble him again.
Ever since that time he had been a believer in the wonderful potency of herbs, and had scraped together such knowledge as a shrewd man, who had lived in various countries, must have many opportunities of acquiring. His garden was full of marvellous herbs and ordinary kitchen stuff, growing together in happy confusion. Pointing to one, he told me it was worth its weight in gold. Speaking of what disease each herb was good for, he assured me that he had cured one young man of the King's evil, but it had taken him months to do it.
The house he lived in was the inheritance of his wife, and whether by worm-doctoring, or by his native savoir faire, I cannot say, but the old stocking was so full that he was about to purchase the adjoining plot of ground for £300.
Such characters, perhaps, serve to maintain a spirit of independence and self-reliance among the class to which they belong. "I'm a Hindependent," said one of them to me; and it was true in every sense. He was evidently a man of independent means and independent views. He declared himself an independent in religion, and he was equally so in manners.
But it does not follow that because a few hardy natures flourish on these wastes, the majority can do so. We have seen that where the strict letter of the law is understood and enforced, they can be deprived of their imagined rights, and that when they are permitted and even encouraged to make use of them, their poverty prevents them doing so.
​To all, however, there surely remains one great advantage,—the situation. To live on the edge of a breezy common, where the children can scamper about all the livelong day, would seem to many a parent, compelled to bring up his family in the close street of a city, an advantage impossible to over-estimate. Glorious indeed looks one of these commons on a bright summer's morning. How vast and wide the expanse seems to stretch, skirted here and there by lines of deep green foliage. On one side, elbowing into the common land, stand a group of cottages, while afar off in the centre is a wind-mill slowly winding its sails. The heather is in full bloom, bluebells nod their pretty heads, and the wild thyme scents the breeze.
Or it is a day more in accordance with the wilder scenery of a West Surrey common. The wind blows gustily, and dark, angry clouds rapidly alternate with patches of blue sky. The rugged, broken waste is covered with black furze, while on its skirts, here and there, are little homesteads, enclosed in thick quickset hedges, and surrounded by stunted, wind-bitten trees. In the foreground here comes the donkey and the geese, and perhaps the roadside inn, with its signboard standing some distance off on the green, flapping to and fro in the breeze. Imagine such a picture, backed off with a distant horizon of purply grey pines, and what scene can be more suggestive of health and enjoyment? And doubtless, where a common is on the uplands, where the oil is sandy and pebbly, where, in fact, Nature never intended the land for a much better fate, the people who live upon it are healthy. But when a common is wet clay, only needing to be drained to become valuable land, there hideous malaria rises every autumn and winter, and woe to the unhappy people who dwell upon its borders.
One evening this summer I was passing over a common not twenty miles from London. It was a wild spot, broken up by pools of water, and skirted by tall trees, amongst which the little cots hid themselves. The great red sun was sinking over the woods which crowned the western height. As every sight was beautiful, so every sound was pleasant. The tinkle of the sheep-bell, the soft "baa" of the lambs, the merry voices of the boys playing at cricket in one corner, the sudden blow of the ball, all was suggestive of rural poetry.
​But look a little longer. Try to cross the common, and dry as the weather is, you will find your feet continually sinking into the mud. Look at those pools; they are black and stagnant, and emit a smell like the vilest sewer. Pass along the skirts of the common where these miserable little cottages stand, and you will find a Styx-like ditch, widening in one part into a filthy pond. Around this pond the children are playing, and upon one of the planks which cross this rivulet of death sits a mother and babe» while, stretched along another, sprawling flat upon his stomach, lies a father.
I asked a man if the place was healthy.
"Oh, dear no," he replied; "we've had the scarlet-fever bad enough, eight or nine died. My son lost his only child, a sweet, engaging little thing; it's near broke the mother's heart."
Well might the poor fellow ask me for a bit of "bacca," the only disinfectant the unhappy people knew of. He said they had no drainage, but spoke of the cottage we were looking at as having a great pool behind, where they threw their chamber stuff, and all their slops, and only emptied it as the garden wanted manure.
But while evils of this kind are more or less local, there are moral disadvantages incident to the very nature of all common life.
Any one passing through the more secluded parts of Surrey must have been struck with the extraordinary dearth of inhabitants. In some parts you may walk for miles, and scarcely meet a soul. It is quite clear that "the great Wen," as Cobbett delighted to call the Metropolis, has depleted the whole county, and that its rural population is getting more and more sparse. In the decade 1851-1861, while the total population of Surrey increased rather more than 20 per cent, the number engaged in agricultural pursuits did not increase 3 per cent. The total area of land in Surrey, exclusive of that devoted to cities, towns, villages, water, roads, or railways, is 420,900 acres; and to cultivate this there were, in 1861, 19,086 persons of both sexes engaged in agricultural pursuits, giving one person to 22 acres. It is manifest, therefore, that their life must be one of increasing isolation, and this must be especially the case on the commons.
​Nothing brutalises human beings so rapidly as withdrawal from the influences of society; and when the morality of a common is said to be comparatively good, as I am told in some cases it is, I think it will be found that the cottagers to whom the statement refers live in small villages, not in isolated dwellings. When this is the case, a standard of morality is maintained among them, according to the ideal of those who, from position or character, are their guides and leaders.
But, as a rule, life on a common is an isolated one. And when this is the case, to quote the testimony of a clergyman living in the neighbourhood of the extensive commons in the south-west of Surrey, "people who live at a distance from the villages always fall away in morality." A minister who has laboured for the last ten years on very extensive commons in the centre of Surrey speaks of their morality and religion as being in the lowest state. The young people of both sexes are very corrupt—little virtue, in fact, is to be found anywhere; much drunkenness prevails, and a disposition to live without regular employment. The corruption of the young is mainly due to want of regular employment and gross ignorance. They often do not go to school at all, but spend their time wandering over the common gathering wood, or wild fruit.
In such places they are, practically, of the same religion as their forefathers, "the Heathens." The dark superstitions which once held sway over every part of rural England still haunt these wild wastes. The people yet believe in witchcraft, and think that the person bewitched has the right and the power to kill the witch by certain enchantments. My friend assures me that such opinions not only prevail, but that he has known them acted upon in several cottages.
"To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away that which he seemeth to have." This is the rule of the present system of enclosure. But it is so bad that, until it is altered, it would be better to leave things as they are. It is hardly fair that a few persons who have allowed their so-called rights to lie dormant for years, perhaps centuries, should now, when the country has awoke to the value of its waste lands, come forward and quietly divide them among themselves. The rich are ​made richer in proportion to their riches, while the poor are made poorer in proportion to their poverty. Indeed, in some places it has been observed that enclosure has been succeeded by a decrease rather than an increase of the population. The Inclosure Commissioners are imbued so strongly with the legal notion of the freeholders being the only persons interested in these manorial wastes that they forget the public have a larger right and a deeper interest in the matter. They proposed to enclose a Surrey common lately extending over 380 acres, only reserving two acres for the public, and nothing for the poor!
If vested interest and the force of custom is to rule in this question, then I say none can show a better title to the possession of these commons than the poor cottagers. But vested interest or a dead system cannot be allowed to rule in a question of such vital importance to the vast majority of English families. If they are, then we may anticipate for the English race a degeneracy similar to that observed in the cattle and sheep which pasture on these commons, and future historians will describe our unhappy posterity in similar language to that which I have quoted from the author of "The Rural Economy of Surrey." "These people," he will say, "are probably of the ancient stock, but they are in general small and ill-formed, having been starved into their present state."