The English Peasant/In Oxfordshire
XIII.
In Oxfordshire.
(Golden Hours, 1872.)
When the Emperor Alexander I. avowed that if he was not Czar of all the Russias he would choose to be an English gentleman, he expressed a view most of us have entertained, when, wandering about England, our way has led us through some noble park, at once stately and historic.
Let us for a moment recall in imagination one of those stately homes, sacred to the gentle and aristocratic life. Through broad ambrosial aisles of lofty lime, we approach the palatial residence, surrounded by its gardens, its orchards, its streams, and its lakes. We enter it, and find the galleries hung with the masterpieces of ancient and modern art, the library stored with the literature of the world, the halls crowded with curiosities from every clime, the terraces adorned with statues and vases and "flowers of all heavens."
We ascend an eminence, and, watching the fallow deer gently trooping up and down the glades, our eyes wander over the great belt of forest which skirts the park. Beyond it, in the broad expanse of peaceful country, Hes dozing here and there a hamlet. Among the distant trees rises the village church, and hard by the parsonage peeps out, its well-cared-for garden telling of cultured ease. Perchance the golden fields are waving in the sunlight, and the old gable-roofed farmhouses stand out in a sort of comfortable solitude, surrounded by their stacks and their barns. Down in the meadows, by the stream which waters the landscape, cattle are grazing; while afar off, on the uplands which shut in the horizon, flocks of sheep feed among the shadows.
And all this, we are told, belongs to one man!
How natural to gaze on such a scene, so peaceful, so beautiful, so suggestive of all kinds of poetical ideas of rural happiness, and instinctively to believe it must be the best possible condition of existence for all who are privileged to live within its borders. How natural to exclaim with the American Republican, entranced by the potent spell of English aristocratic society, "I never realized so forcibly the splendid results of wealth and primogeniture."
So will it appear to those who dwell within the magic walls of the enchanter's castle. Pass beyond the white lodges and get into the sunburnt highway. Stop the first labouring man you meet, enter his cottage, listen to the housewife's tale, and then say what you think of the splendid results of wealth and primogeniture.
Such were my cogitations after paying a visit to the district which has Blenheim Park for its centre, and the Marlborough estates for its circumference. A park fourteen miles round, enclosing an area of 3000 acres, worthy, from its antiquity and beauty, to be compared with Windsor. A regal palace, rather than an old grey hall, standing in a fairyland of gardens and streams and fountains and islands, with picture galleries, whose wealth of Rubens and Titians moved a great German art critic to declare Blenheim alone worthy a journey to England. The possession of such an estate is enough to elevate its owner to the very top of the social column, even if he owed it to modern commerce or to ancient rapine. But Blenheim, as everyone knows, is held by the better title of service done in the cause of European liberty. Still more, its present owner, as a Christian man, and as one who has been a minister of the Queen, must be supposed to take a higher view of his duties than that which ordinarily obtains in rural districts. At Blenheim, therefore, if anywhere, we ought to find the rural system of England producing good fruits.
In passing rapidly through the villages which lie under the Blenheim aegis, one's sense of the orderly and the beautiful is certainly gratified. The white cottages and pretty porches overgrown with jasmine and honeysuckle, the small gardens just now blazing with gorgeous hollyhocks, and often well stocked with fruit-trees, seem at first sight to leave little to be desired.
But look deeper. Talk with the peasantry, and you will find discontent everywhere. Not a grumbling, unreasonable discontent, but a deep sense that things are very far from what they should be.
In his now famous manifesto to his tenantry, the Duke recognises this state of things, and attributes it to agitators and declaimers. No doubt the Union propaganda has done a good deal to produce the present outspoken expression of feeling, but would it have had the amount of influence it has had if it had not found the soil prepared, the seed sown, and the crop itself ready to be gathered in? What the Union chiefly has done has been to help the general discontent to express itself, and to bring about such a mutual understanding as should enable it to do so with some hope of removing the causes.
No one could read Mr George Culley's most favourable report of the condition of Oxfordshire labourers, given in the "Agricultural Commissioner's Blue-book of 1869," and suppose for one instant that the labourers themselves could be contented with it, or that they would not be more and more discontented as they became thoroughly alive to its evils.
What were the labourers' wages in the Woodstock district lately—that is, before the Union movement commenced? Ten shillings a week! At harvest time, with the help of his wife and children, he could make four or five times as much, but it only lasted two or three weeks, and he had to work from early dawn to sunset.
Mr Culley, in his report, gives the following statement, as made to him by a labourer's wife at Combe, a pretty village close by Blenheim, and where some some of the Duke's labourers live.
"My husband is a farm labourer; he has ten shillings a week if they make all time; sometimes he loses a day or two from wet, and they take it off. I can't say what my husband gets in piece work; in harvest, if I help him with a little boy, we can cut and tie an acre a day, and we got nine shillings an acre last har vest; the crops was light, the rabbits had eat so much, you see, sir, or we would have got ten shillings. We had a fortnight at this."
This appears an average case. Whatever way we look at it, an Oxfordshire labourer's wages, all things considered, can hardly amount to much above twelve shillings a week. These people had only two children, but most labourers, as we know, have many more. Could such a pittance keep more than bare life in their bodies?
In my late perambulation through this district, in one day I came across several cases, showing what is the result of this semi-starvation on the constitutions of the people,
Early in the day at Bladon I met with a poor distorted creature, who had had erysipelas in his legs for the last thirteen or fourteen years, brought on by overstraining himself at his work. He had commenced labour at nine years of age, and his was doubtless an extreme form of a common evil, noted by Dr Batt, of Witney, in his evidence given in the Government Report:—"Children are employed too young in heavy ploughed land, it tells on them later in life; when they get about fifty they go at the knees, and are very much bent."
But that it became more than mere distortion with this poor man was certainly due, as Dr White of the Woodstock Union says, in referring to the fact that farm labourers are not so healthy as they should be, "to the low wages, which will not allow men with families to procure food in quantity or quality sufficient to keep up the standard of health, and they are therefore more easily affected by outside influences inimical to health."
At the next village. Long Handborough, I came up with a man who had a most wretched look. He had caught a severe cold a year or two before, mowing, and ever since his eyes had been so bad that he could not do any regular work, but was obliged to live by such jobs of porterage as he could pick up at the railway station. And late in the same day I met with another.
No one can walk far along a country road or enter a village without meeting those who in its heaviest form have borne the primeval curse. Poor, rheumatic creatures, dragging their unwilling limbs over the stones, deaf, dark, and dull. Or you enter a cottage, and as the woman talks with you she holds her hand to her side. She has a heart complaint. And yet she has t been regularly in the fields, bringing up a family at the same time, V working sometimes as many as fourteen hours on a stretch. But all she says is, "that she must if they would get bread;" nevertheless she adds, "this fieldwork ruins many a woman's constitution." You ask her about the children. It is a common tale, the natural result—she has lost four out of seven.
And thus the lives of men, women, and children are as really sacrificed now as ever they were in old heathen times, not certainly to appease some cruel deity, but in order that England may produce a highly-bred race of men and women, living a life so perfect in all its conditions of happiness as to excite the envy and the admiration of the world.
Much may doubtless be said on the question of cottages being built as farm buildings, to be used by the tenant's own labourers, and his alone; but in the Duke's manifesto, the reason avowed for putting both cottages and allotment-grounds into the hands of the farmers is The attitude of the labourers in forming a Union. Moreover, these cottages are mainly in villages, so that the result is to place one class of the community directly under the control of another. This is still more shown in the determination to take away the allotment-grounds, since it proves that it is considered unwise to allow the labourer to feel, even in the smallest degree, independent of his employer. As there are 914 allotments, the greater proportion of which are forty poles each in extent, and 360 cottages on the Duke's estates in Oxfordshire, it will be seen how numerous are the persons likely to be affected by the manifesto.
And this brings me to speak of the cottages themselves as the second item in the grounds of discontent which an intelligent and religious labourer may righteously feel as he contemplates his condition.
Not that I mean to say that the cottages in this district are worse than elsewhere, or perhaps so bad as I have seen them in some parts, nevertheless such is the condition of numbers in the Woodstock Union, that the Medical Officer of Health ascribes the unhealthiness of the people to the two causes of low wages and the unwholesomeness of many of the cottages.
As illustrations of the sort of places the Oxfordshire labourer inhabits, I will describe two cottage interiors I sketched. The first, at Long Handborough, was clean and tidy enough for the most scrupulous persons, but there was no floor but rough stone flags. The draught was kept out by a thin screen of calico, but it must be very cold in winter. The fire-place was a most primitive arrangement; a couple of bricks, with a rest placed transversely to support the saucepan, a few sticks and a little coal.
The other was at Wootten, and was a cottage in which the good dame had dwelt since her birth. She allowed me to go up into the sleeping-room to sketch. As far as I can remember, it would have accorded with the average size of rooms in Wootten, and would probably be nine or ten feet square. The great four-post bedstead, finding as it does its last refuge with the rural poor, after it has been discarded everywhere else, touched the unceiled roof. Many gaudy little pictures adorned the walls, and a quantity of crockery from the pedlar's basket loaded the narrow shelves. Flower-pots filled up the long window-sill; the window itself only opening in one compartment. Nevertheless it afforded a pleasant view of the mediaeval-looking village of Wootten, with its precipitous winding streets, crowned by the old church, and the river Glyme running at its base, spanned by a many-arched bridge.
She seemed much depressed at the struggle going on in Wootten between the farmers and the labourers, as in no place have the former shown themselves more determined to crush the attempt on the part of the men to form a Union.
It appears that the labourers at Wootten, on the 29th of May last, formed themselves into a Union. They began with only sixteen members, and their first requests coming when the excitement about the Warwickshire strike was at its height met with success Their employers agreed to advance them first to eleven shillings and then to twelve shillings. After a time, the labourers, finding their numbers increase, and the principles of the Union more thoroughly understood and accepted, thought themselves justified in asking still better terms: sixteen shillings a week, nine hours work per day, and fourpence an hour overtime. This request the farmers determined to resist. They accordingly commenced a out, and discharged every man belonging to the Union. The consequence was 120 hands were immediately thrown out of work,
The husband of the woman whose cottage I have here described was one who thus lost his situation. With the exception of eighteen years, he had worked for the same family since he was a boy, and his wife had served them also.
As I stood talking, two soldiers crossed the bridge. "A'n't that a sight to aggravate one?" she exclaimed; and truly it was a shame to think that the Queen's troops should be sent to take the bread literally out of the mouths of the poor.
Not a greater mistake has been committed during the whole of this struggle than this obtaining soldiers to gather in the harvest. It is a mistake which the people will not forget, and which has envenomed a dispute hitherto carried on by the men without the least desire or sign of violence.
Whether it is to be attributed to the Farmers' Protection Society, or to some individual farmer at Wootten, or to more potent influence, does not appear certain; however it was, some one had sufficient interest to induce a commanding officer at Aldershot to send down ten men of the 46th Foot to Wootten. Accordingly the day after Parliament rose, to the chagrin of the people, the red-coats marched into the fields.
The whole thing was done without the, knowledge of the War Office, and in direct violation of Article 180 of the Queen's Regulations for the Army, which says that soldiers may be allowed to assist in gathering in the harvest, when application is made for that purpose, "provided that the employment of the population is not interfered with."
As there were more than sixty or seventy able-bodied men ready to work, no plea could be advanced as to the scarcity of labour; on the contrary, it is manifest that the introduction of these soldiers, who thus laid aside the sword for the sickle, took the labourers' harvest away; robbing them of the only opportunity they have in the year to make a little money to pay their debts. Moreover, it was a most unfair interference in the struggle between the employer and the employed, destroying the only chance the latter had of making better terms with his master; and in view of the long winter, with its scarcity of work, and cold, pinching poverty, it would certainly have compelled the labourer, if it had not been for the National Union, to cast himself entirely on his master's mercy.
It is said that when the soldiers arrived at Wootten, they were somewhat disconcerted at the sight of groups of sad-eyed men standing about in enforced idleness, and they told the farmers that they hoped the people would be civil, as they could easily get the assistance of 200 or 300 men in a couple of hours. "Don't be alarmed," was the reply; "our men are the quietest people in the world." But although the Wootten people may be quiet and peaceable, it may not be so elsewhere, as may be seen by a letter published in the Daily News, from an Essex labourer, some time in August. It was an act cruelly exasperating, very much like brandishing the red flag in the face of the poor, worried, badgered bull.
It is a happy thing that the new movement for union among the labourers is under the leadership of Christian men, who in their own religious communities have had some practice in fellowship; for the labourers, feeling their ignorance and inexperience, follow their leaders unreservedly. A little while ago the men of Wootten and the neighbourhood marched into Woodstock to the number of 200 or 300 men. One who witnessed the sight, said that he never saw a more orderly procession in his life, and when it was over their leader dismissed them all, saying, "Now go home, lads, and don't let any one have a word to say against you."
For the mass of the labourers are like men feeling their way in the dark; they crave for guidance. As my informant, a young labourer, whose health had been ruined by the abject slavery of his great employers to bad customs of modern society, very touchingly put it, "They want some one to tell them whether their thoughts are right or not." They have no helps; they are too poor to buy books or to take in magazines. An occasions Cottager or British Workman or Police News finds its way amongst them, and is preserved and pasted on the cottage walls for the sake of its pictures.
But it is evident that Methodism has been quietly doing a good work amongst them. The Primitive Methodist United Free Church has a circuit in this neighbourhood with eighteen chapels each managed by its own congregation, and ministered to by local preachers. Two regular ministers superintend the whole circuit. Under this system Oxfordshire labourers have learnt something of the art of self-government, and how to submit loyally to the men of their own choice. It has taught the leaders how to organize and how to sustain the burden of a great undertaking. Thus they have learnt to have faith in the ultimate triumph of a principle; thus they have obtained power to endure in hours of weakness and apparent defeat; and thus they have learnt how to retain calmness in hours of prosperity.
Nothing is more energising than the Gospel of the Kingdom of Heaven, even though narrowed by present-day forms, provided it comes from the heart and lips of sincere, child-like men and women.