VIII.
Degradation and Death.
I suppose that the English agricultural labourer has never had two more faithful limners than William Langland and George Crabbe. Let anyone compare "Piers the Plowman" and "The Village," and he will be forced to the conviction that in the 400 years that elapsed between those works the English labourer had fallen wofully. In the fourteenth-century poem we have a man animated by the noblest moral purpose, one who in the strength of that purpose takes a position of equality with the highest, yet without a shadow of insolence; a man, in fact, who is Christ's freeman. But if we turn to the eighteenth-century picture, we meet with nothing but a poor, wailing, broken-hearted slave. He has toiled early and late, and has laid up for his old age such a store of aches and pains that he never knows what rest is; his food has been stinted and unwholesome, and now that he is growing weak, he who won the prize for the straightest furrow, can only get a day's work here and there, "and when his age attempts its task in vain," he is then taunted with being one of the lazy poor; his children find him a burden and look coldly on him. His only refuge will be the workhouse, where in dirt, neglect, starvation, and noise, he ends his days to be thrown into a pauper's grave,—
"There lie the happy dead, from trouble free,
And the glad parish pays the frugal fee."
So great a fall must have had many stages, of which we can only gather an indication here and there. For instance, I have seen a copy of a play performed by labourers in the presence of King Charles I., and to this proof of their intelligence in the early part of the seventeenth century, we may add one of their independence at its close. Defoe writes in terse though unpoetic lines,—
"The meanest English plowman studies law,
And keeps thereby the magistrates in awe.
Will boldly tell them what they ought to do,
And sometimes punish their omissions too."
