Fragments of Two Centuries Part 21

"Order'd that Mr. Simons apply to the justices and inquire of them whether they can compel labourers who have decent earnings to pay their rent"!

The following incidents are mentioned from Over in Cambridgeshire:--

"A widow with two children had been in receipt of 3s. a week from the parish, and was able to live upon this. She afterwards married a butcher, and still the allowance of 3s. for the children was continued.

But the butcher and his bride came to the Overseer and said 'they were not going to keep _those children_ for 3s. a week, and if a further allowance was not made _they should turn them out of doors_ and throw them on the parish altogether.' The Overseers resisted; the butcher appealed to the Magistrates, who recommended him to make the best arrangement he could as the parish was obliged to support the children"!

The law and its administration, on behalf of the parish, actually put a valuable premium on b.a.s.t.a.r.dy.

The Parish Beadle was tempted to bribe the young woman to lay an information against someone in another parish, "a compulsory marriage"

was brought about and the woman and b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and all future liability, were sometimes got rid of at one stroke! A Parish Beadle, in addition to looking after little Oliver Twists, often had these delicate negotiations to manage, and whether Mr. b.u.mble was able to ingratiate himself with 'Mrs. Corney' or not, he often did a good stroke of business for his parish in the matrimonial market, when, as I have mentioned in an earlier chapter, a labourer could not even go into another parish to work without a certificate from the parish he belonged to. In the report of the Commission, to which I have referred, occurs this significant little item:--

"A Beadle in a small district a.s.sured me he had alone effected fifty marriages of this description in the course of a few years."

The labour market was the parish, and this was completely disorganised and demoralised. The old law of settlement made it practically impossible for labour to find the best market. Even if a young man had an offer of a situation in another part of the country at double wages he would often refuse to go lest he should "lose his parish," or it might be that the parish where he was asked to go was considered a "bad" parish compared with his own. Each parish {164} was thus considered as a sort of freehold, with a family cupboard bound to provide for nil its children.

It was almost impossible for any individual farmer to stand out and follow an independent course, for if he paid his men full wages he would also, as a ratepayer, be paying part of the wages for the other farmers in the parish. In some cases the masters combined with the men and gave false certificates as to the amount of their wages in order to get more "make up" from their parish.

The farmer preferred to employ men with large families to keep them off the parish, but single young men, finding they were not wanted, contracted early and improvident marriages, to make sure of being "provided for by the parish." Population increased to beyond the requirements for local industry; the law of settlement was squeezed to the utmost against removals, and thus the farmer was creating the Nemesis he was seeking to flee from.

In many cases wages were as low as 8s. per week, the difference being made up according to the labourer's increasing family, and "if he makes more, still he receives his allowance in order that industry may not be discouraged."

At Over on one occasion, Mr. Robinson, the overseer, refused payment to men who would not keep their proper hours at work upon the road. "They complained to the Bench at Cambridge, and beat him as usual," so says the report, and not only that, but they returned home wearing favours in their hats and b.u.t.ton-holes, and in the evening collected in a body before Mr. Robinson's house and shouted in triumph!

The report for the parish of Bottisham showed that the effect of the scale for single young men when not working, or receiving less wage than the scale, was that one family, consisting of man, wife, and seven children, were ent.i.tled to and were at that time receiving 19s. 6d. a week (over and above their earnings) from the parish, several of the sons being grown up!

"At Little Shelford," says the Commissioner, "a worse case than this was given me by the Acting Overseer, of one family, a man, wife, and four sons, living together, receiving 24s. weekly from the parish"!

The effect of this pauperising system could not fail to be very disastrous--it placed a direct premium upon idleness, as a man was sure of a living from the rates even if he did not work, and also a bounty upon wages, or an inducement for the farmer to pay a much lower wage than he could afford. The ultimate effect of both these circ.u.mstances was that there was such a large amount of pauper labour that it became necessary, in order to relieve the rates, to take care that such labour should be employed before any other. In some cases the unemployed men were actually put up to auction, or rather {165} their labour, and an instance is mentioned in the Commissioners' report of ten men in one parish being knocked down to one farmer for five shillings, and that out of a body of 170 men, 70 were let in this manner! The parish also meddled and muddled in the labour market by making a contract with some individual to have certain work performed by the paupers at a given price, the parish paying the paupers. The making of the Newmarket Road Cutting, near Royston, was an instance of this.

Parochial affairs presented this extraordinary condition of things that for the industrious, thrifty man who was desirous of laying up something for a rainy day, there was no hope! Take the following, which I copy verbatim from the Commissioners' report--

"We have already quoted from Mr. Cowell's report a letter from Mr.

Nash, of Royston, in which he states that he had been forced by the Overseer of Reed to dismiss two excellent labourers for the purpose of introducing two paupers into their place. Mr. Nash adds that of the men dismissed, one,

"Was John Walford, a parishioner of Barley, a steady, industrious, trustworthy, single man, who, by long and rigid economy, had saved about L100. On being dismissed, Walford applied in vain to the farmers at Barley for employment! _It was known that he had saved money, and could not come on the parish, although any of them would willingly have taken him had it been otherwise_! After living a few months without being able to get any work he bought a cart and two horses, and has ever since obtained a precarious subsistence by carrying corn to London for use of the Cambridge merchants; but just now the current of corn is northward and he has nothing to do; and at any time he would gladly have exchanged his employment for that of a day labourer, if he could have obtained work. No reflection is intended on the Overseers of Barley; they only do what all others are expected to do; though the young men point at Walford and call him a fool for not spending his money at a public-house as they do; adding that then he would get work"!

A somewhat similar instance is supplied to the Commissioners by Mr.

Wedd who is spoken of in the report as "an eminent solicitor of Royston."

Here is another case:--"A man without children in this neighbourhood emerged from poverty and bequeathed many pecuniary legacies, some L100 apiece, and others larger and smaller, to a number of agricultural labourers who were his distant relatives. As soon as the legacies are paid the legatees would not be able to obtain any employment in husbandry until the legacies are spent! The employment in this parish is all wanted for those who from deep poverty can claim it of the Overseers, and these legatees will have no {166} t.i.tle to claim employment till they have reduced themselves again to poverty by having spent all their legacies!"

It was not, however, so much in favour of the farmer as the system might seem, for they got the worst of the labour--of the two whom Mr.

Nash was obliged to take in the above instance, one killed a valuable mare, and the other he was obliged to prosecute for stealing corn--for the farmer was obliged to take his share of the unemployed labour, and often had a dozen idle worthless men on his hands at times when five or six would have done the work.

Those of us to whom the memory of the bent-backed figure of the "wheat-barn tasker" in every village, is now but a dim vision of the past, can hardly realize how bitter must have been the feeling when the threshing machine came to do away with the flail. A simple matter it may seem, yet the peasant revolt which it brought about was for the time more universal, and more effective, than Wat Tyler's rebellion, because, without Wat Tyler's organization, it found a means of working in every village. To the mind of the labourer this uprooting of the habitual daily work of a thousand years, taken in connection with the coming movement against allowing the labourer to go to the overseer to make up his wages out of the rates--these things together presented to his mind an outlook which was bad enough to arouse the sluggish mind of the peasant in every village. So he set about upon a course of retaliation and unreasoning revenge. The threshing machine was threatening their work, and so upon the threshing machine wherever they found it the labourers set with a vengeance. The effects of that vengeance are traceable in the criminal returns for the period. Thus the number of criminals for trial for malicious offences against property, which for the previous five or six years had scarcely averaged fifty a year, in the year 1831 went up at a hound to a total of 1,245, of which no less than 921 were for "destroying threshing machines." Riots, incendiarism, and sending letters threatening to burn houses, &c., also went up almost to a corresponding extent.

One or two local examples of pauper insolence and tyranny may be given from the Commissioners' report:--

"The tone a.s.sumed by the paupers towards those who dispense relief is generally very insolent and often a.s.sumes a more fearful character. At Great Gransden, the Overseer's wife told me that two days before my visit, two paupers came to her husband demanding an increase of allowance; he refused them, showing them that they had the full allowance sanctioned by the magistrates' scale; they swore, and threatened he should repent of it; and such was their violence, that she called them back, and prevailed on her husband to make them further allowance. Mr. Faircloth, by a stricter system, reduced the rates at Croydon; he became unpopular among the labourers, and after {167} harvest they gathered in a riotous body about his threshing machine and broke it to pieces. At Guilden Morden, in the same neighbourhood, a burning took place of Mr. b.u.t.terfield's stacks to the amount of L1,500 damage. Mr. b.u.t.terfield was Overseer, and the Magistrates have committed, on strong circ.u.mstantial evidence, a man to whom he had denied relief, because he had refused to work for it. I have found that the apprehension of this dreadful and easily perpetrated mischief has greatly affected the minds of the rural parish officers, making the power of the paupers over the funds provided for their relief almost absolute as regards any discretion of the Overseers."

Report of Mr. Power, a.s.sistant Commissioner for Cambs.:--

"If an Overseer refuses relief, or gives less than the pauper thinks himself ent.i.tled to, he (the Overseer) was liable to be summoned before Justices to defend himself against the charge of inhumanity and oppression, and unhappily the applicant, who has been refused relief, has frequently recourse to a much more summary remedy than the interference of the Magistrates. The tribunal which enforces it sits, not at the Petty Sessions, but at the beershop--it compels obedience, not by summons and distress, but by violence and conflagration. The most painful and the most formidable portion of our evidence, consists of the proof that in many districts the princ.i.p.al obstacle to improvement is the well-founded dread of these atrocities."

But worse than mere insolence of words were the acts of lawlessness and crime which prevailed. These items occur in a number of typical questions and answers in the report of the Commissioners, extracts from which I give below, with the name of the Overseers or other informants:--

BOURN (Mr. Whittet.)

The poverty which compelled the farmer to use the threshing machine, bore down the labourer to unprecedented distress, and drove him to desperation.

FOWLMERE.

The lawlessness, &c., here was "Chiefly attributable to a long course of bad execution of the Poor-laws. The cause of the riots and fires was chiefly the cruel policy of paying the single men much below the fair rate of wages. The object of the riots and fires was the same, not the wanton destruction of property, but to obtain higher wages which was too generally the result.

"Immediately after the fire at Guilden Morden, in 1831, I went to the parish and found the farmers a.s.sembled in Vestry, the very morning after the fire, consulting what they had better do to put their labourers in a better state by raising their wages. I remonstrated with them upon the impolicy of doing it then, as it would be a bonus for such wickedness." [William Metcalfe and William Wedd.]

{168}

MELDRETH.

John Burr (churchwarden) gives this answer:--

"Keep up the price of labour or there will be always cause to fear." A very fair echo of the Guilden Morden farmers' sentiments referred to above.

ROYSTON.

Dissatisfaction at the decreased parish allowance tended to produce these acts of insubordination. [Gamaliel Docura, Vestry Clerk and a.s.sistant Overseer.]

WIMPOLE.

The fires were lighted up by malice in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the labourers because the farmers pinched them in their wages; the riots may be called an effort to recover their former rate of wages, and answered their object. [Robert Withers, Land Agent.]

STOTFOLD.

At Stotfold the late Mr. John George Fordham, of Royston, with a foresight and courage that did him lasting credit, used his influence, at personal risk to himself, in suppressing the riots.

During the years of 1830-5, a period of great discontent ensued, and incendiary fires continued to be of alarming frequency. Ashwell and Ba.s.singbourn suffered severely. Of the former it is said that nearly all one side of the place was burned, and of the latter, in the course of three or four years, most of the farm homesteads were destroyed.

The fires at Shelford deserve notice here, on account of the remarkable circ.u.mstances surrounding them. In the first place the perpetrator, John Stallan, was the last man executed for the crime of arson, and in the second place his conviction was brought about by a strange piece of circ.u.mstantial evidence. Stallan was a labourer of respectable character and in constant work, and became one of the men attached to the fire engine. The fire in respect to which he was convicted, was discovered in time for the owner to run to it and pull out some of the thatch, and with it came out a ball of rag, and in it a piece of ignited tinder. This was found on examination to be made up of material including a piece of a lady's dress of which the pattern was distinct, and was found to be a piece of a dress given by a Mrs.

Headley, to Stallan's wife, the remaining part of the dress being found in his cottage! He was arrested, and at first tried to fix the taking of the rag for the tinder upon a half-witted lad, but being unable to shield himself behind this subterfuge, he next went so far as to try and fix the crime upon his own wife, and again in this he conspicuously failed, and at the Cambs. a.s.sizes was convicted and sentenced to be hung, and was executed in December, 1833, after confessing that he had been the author of all the ten Shelford fires, and that his only motive for {169} committing the crimes was _to get the ale and the money he received for helping to extinguish the fires_!

Under such a condition of things as that described above, the farmer had considerable difficulty in getting any insurance offices to insure his produce.

One notable riot occurred at Fowlmere (about 1833-35). Warrants were obtained for the apprehension of the ringleaders, and for executing this warrant the Earl of Hardwicke, as Lord Lieutenant, came to Royston and swore in about twenty special constables, whose ornamental staves sometimes turn up now amongst local curiosities. These constables went over to Fowlmere on horseback, under the command of a justice of the peace, Mr. Hawkins, who then lived at the Priory, and was an uncle of Mr. Justice Hawkins. On arriving at Fowlmere the posse of armed "specials" found most of the labouring population of the village--male and female--a.s.sembled in the open s.p.a.ce near the Swan, armed with sticks and other weapons, prepared to resist the execution of the warrant! After some persuasion and the reading of the Riot Act, a skirmish ensued, in which sticks, fire-irons and shovels, mixed with constables' staves, produced some cuts and bruises, and some torn clothes. Eventually the party of the law triumphed, the ringleaders were secured, and marched off under escort of the special constables to Cambridge gaol.

Out of the parochial inertia and the demoralization, discontent and lawlessness, which we have seen springing up, a full crop, from the old Poor-law, the Commission of 1831 presented a report which left no alternative but a sweeping measure of reform of the parochial life if England was to be saved from its own children, who, living a parasitical life, were eating away the vitals of that upon which they thrived. Salvation from within the parish was now well-nigh impossible. So the new Poor-law of 1834 swept away the parish as a unit of Poor-law administration--the Churchwardens and Overseers were no longer to meet after service in Church to consider applications for relief or the apprenticing of pauper children. The new order provided for grouping a score, more or less, of such parishes into a Union, with some uniform system of administration which should be less dependent upon the circ.u.mstances and prejudices of an individual parish.