The English Peasant/The English Via Dolorosa
I.
THE ENGLISH VIA DOLOROSA;
OR,
GLIMPSES OF THE HISTORY OF THE AGRICULTURAL LABOURER.
THE ENGLISH VIA DOLOROSA.
(1884.)
I.
An English Epiphany.
About the year 680 there lived near the monastery of Whitby a herdsman who knew so little of music and singing that when he saw the harp coming towards him at festival gatherings, he, for shame, rose up, and went home.
Having on one occasion thus left his companions, he withdrew to the stable to tend the cattle. Here he lay down to rest, and dreaming saw a man standing by his bedside, who said, "Cœdmon, sing me something;" to whom he answered, "I cannot sing anything; therefore it was that I left my companions and came hither." "Yet thou must sing to me," the visitor replied. "What must I sing?" said the dreamer. "Sing me the origin of created things." Thereupon the herdsman began to sing verses in praise of God the Creator, the words of which he had never before heard. Then he arose from his sleep, and having in mind all that he had sung, he added to the words many others worthy of God in the same measure.
In the morning he went to the town-reeve, under whose authority he served, and told him of the gift he had received, who forthwith brought him to the abbess. St Hild caused Cœdmon to sing the poem in the presence of all the learned men in the monastery, to whom it seemed that the herdsman had, from the Lord Himself, received a heavenly gift. So they expounded to him more of the sacred history, bidding him, if he could, turn the words into melody of song, which he did, returning the next morning with another poem. Then the abbess began to make much of and to love the grace of God that was in the man, exhorting him to forsake the secular life and to become a monk. And she received him into the monastery with all his, causing him to be taught the Holy History and the Gospel, which he, pondering over, turned into sweetest verse, his song and his verse being so winsome to hear that his teachers themselves wrote and learned from his mouth.
Thus King Alfred relates Bede's story of the inspiration of the Father of English Poetry. The Divine Messenger came and awoke the Soul of this English Labourer in a stable; fitting birthplace for the first cry of the humble representative throughout English History, of the Man of Sorrows and the Acquaintance of grief.
Over its cradle bent holy women like St. Hild, saintly men like the venerable Bede, and godly kings like Alfred the Great.
If twelve hundred years ago an English Labourer was capable of writing poems which would appear the prototype of Paradise Lost, what treasures must have lain hid in the souls of the agricultural poor, condemned through all these long ages to ignorance, to heavy labour and grinding poverty: an ignorance, a labour, a poverty ever increasing.
To trace this Via Dolorosa is a sad work; but the poet will come who will find in it the material not only of a Paradise Lost, but of a Paradise Regained, for if he has to tell how this great mute Soul was made an offering for National wrong-doing and has to describe its suffering even unto death, he will have the joy of singing its resurrection, an event accomplished in our own day.
II.
In Worse than Egyptian Bondage.
Those crouching figures that we see sometimes supporting the roof of a great building are fit emblems of the vast mass of the European peoples during the Middle Ages. Both in the lands under Roman and under Teutonic law, the great majority were in a state of slavery. Among the Saxons the landless man must belong to somebody, or he had no legal existence; he became an outlaw, and anyone might slay him.
This servile condition rendered him the man of his lord; he could be bought and sold together with his family and his goods and chattels; he could not marry nor give his daughter in marriage without permission of the lord; a serf, in fact, was so entirely at the mercy of his master, that where the latter had judicial authority he could torture his serf and put him to death. Outside the manor-house stood the dreadful symbols of his power: the gallows whereon to hang the men, the pit wherein to drown the women.
Nevertheless a serf could, saving his lord's right, possess property; and there must have been a certain limit to the torture that could be inflicted, since the German law fixed the highest number of blows a slave could receive at two hundred and twenty. When it was his fate to have a good master, existence was not intolerable; but under a bad one, or in times of anarchy, human imagination could hardly outstrip the fiendish cruelty of his tyrants.
The process by which the fat kine eat up the lean kine had been going on in England long before the Conquest, the old Saxon freeman losing ground before the new noble class. The Norman Conquest drove him down still lower, levelling into one common condition of serfdom, the ceorles and thrælls on the confiscated estates. The old order, however, was not swept away everywhere. Sir Henry Maine seems to think that the Village Community which arose out of relationship and the common possession of a tract of land maintained itself in England through all the revolutions of the feudal system.
This primeval communism which secured its members in the enjoyment of a certain degree of liberty, equality, and fraternity was continually broken up and lessened in its area by the ravages of the banditti, who, step by step, had founded another social system. That the Norman rulers were capable of anything, we may learn from the well-known passage in the Saxon Chronicle, describing the atrocities practised on the people by some of the barons in the reign of Stephen, and by the fact that, in 1102, the Synod of Westminster, over which Anslem presided, denounced "the wicked trade of selling men like brute beasts, which had," they said, "hitherto been the common custom."
Under the Normans all except the higher classes of villeins whose services were limited to seed-time and harvest, were bound to do the work needed on their lord's private domain. By them his land was ploughed, dunged, and dyked, his harvests reaped, his barns filled with sheaves, his stables provided with stubble, his cattle, sheep, and pigs tended, his grain turned into malt, his nuts gathered, his woods cut, his fires kept alive with fuel. A whole army of slaves toiled for him as ploughmen, herdsmen, shepherds, malsters, woodmen, carpenters, and smiths, while the borderers scattered on the edges of the commons were bound to provide him with a good stock of poultry and eggs.
The sole reward for all this labour was the right to existence and protection. The only consolations the labourers enjoyed, were the pleasures in which they could indulge on holidays, or the mystic hopes which the services of the Church inspired. Dwelling in dark cottages made of wattles and daubed with mud, they lived on salt meat half the year, and for vegetables, ate onions, cabbages, and nettles.
How the lords fared we may judge from an account Holingshed has preserved of the Earl of Leicester's expenses in 1313. By that time there were labourers in the country working for daily wages; a thatcher in this same year received 3¼d. a day. If we deduct Sundays and Holidays, such a labourer would have been able to earn about £4 a year; and as the Earl's expenses reached £7,309, less £8, 16s. 7d. given in charity, it appears that the latter spent on his family and people an amount equal to the wages of 1825 labourers. More than half of this went on eating alone, while an idea of the revelry indulged in may be gathered from the fact that the Earl's household drank 371 pipes of wine, and burnt 2,319 pounds of tallow candles as well as 1,870 pounds of Paris candles.
Well might a deep-seated ill-will exist between the oppressor and the oppressed. It comes out in the legendary Vision of Henry I., who one night dreamt that he saw gathered round him a number of labourers bearing scythes, spades, and pitchforks, looking angry and threatening. And reason enough they had, if Walter Mapes, a clerical pluralist, royal favourite, friend of Beket, and author of the "Quest of the Holy Graal," is an example of the feeling with which they were regarded. He would not have a serf taught anything. "My soul," he said, "naturally detests serfs, this being my sentiment towards them, circumstances must determine when they are fit to have kindness shown them." It is an English proverb, "Have hund to godsib and stent thir oder hand." (Go about with a dog and clench your fist.)
Nevertheless the labourers could work in hope, for one of their own class, a Carpenter's Son, one who had died the death of a Slave, was held to be Sovereign Lord of this feudal society. The innate royalty of the labourer was thereby acknowledged, the Christian Conscience was on his side.
And so was the course of events. The Crusades, the Rise of Commerce, the French Wars, all worked to pull down the mighty from their seats and raise those of a low degree. The Crusades brought many a baron into pecuniary difficulties, what with the outfit and the expensive tastes he acquired; so that he was glad to get out of embarrassment by selling his serfs their liberty. The rise of Commerce created great towns, and towns obtained markets at which the toilers sold their produce and thus obtained the means to purchase freedom.
The change, however, came so gradually that serfdom was a possible condition for Englishmen even in Tudor times. But the revolution had commenced three hundred years earlier, so that by the close of the thirteenth century there was a large class of serfs who had been able to commute their services into money payments, and in the fourteenth century working for wages had become common.
III.
The Ploughman Prophet.
The Vision of William concerning Piers the Plowman would be well-nigh as popular to-day as it was in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries if the language had not become archaic, for there is no book more thoroughly English in the best sense, none that better expresses the genius of the English labourer.
Langland's aim, however, was not to delineate the labourer but to expose the corruptions which were destroying the State, and he sought its reform by trying to arouse in its various members a determination to do their duty in that station of life to which God had called them. But there was only one upon whom he could look with satisfaction: the hardworking husbandman; the others, and above all those whose office it was to guide the people into the highest truth, being given over to selfishness and hypocrisy.
To the labouring class he pointed, not only as an example of life, but as the only one which at that difficult crisis had light enough to guide the rest, and accordingly Piers the Plowman is represented as occupying in relation to England very much the position of one of the Prophets in the old Hebrew Commonwealth. In the midst of a world in which all manner of men are working and wandering with no other reward for their pains but that of finding themselves prisoners in the Castle of Care, Piers the Plowman is ready and willing to lead them into the Truth. Saturated through and through with the thoughts that gave rise to Lollardism, social and religious, he is no mere leveller. He accepts the constitution of things into which he has been born; the king is to rule, the bishop to guide, the knight to defend, while he is to labour for the common weal. But this constitution of things he looks upon as implying a mutual covenant. When a knight tells him that he will try to do as he has been taught, Piers replies,—
"Ye profre yow so faire
That I shall swynke and swete and sow for us bothe,
And other laboures do for thi love al my lyf-tyme,
In covenant that thow kepe holikirke and myselve
Fro wastoures and fro wikked men that this world struyeth."
This idea of a mutual covenant was as revolutionary as Wiclif's theory of Dominion. As the latter relieved the Christian conscience from the necessity of obedience to rulers who were traitors to the Suzerain of the Universe, so the former destroyed the right of an undutiful lord over his serfs. In either case the appeal lay to the Individual Conscience and the Common Sense; thus it is that at the very outset Langland shows Conscience resisting the King and supported by Reason.
But the Plowman's theory is thorough; all classes are parties to this covenant, the labourer as well as the knight. Therefore, he is continually preaching "hard work" to the "dikeres and the delveres" and other workmen on the land; and is ceaseless in the expression of his abomination of idle and lazy vagabonds who waste what others win; and he has no toleration for beggars, especially of the canting sort, who array themselves as "heremites" and "freres," "ancres" and "pilgrymes," who,
"With hoked staves.
Wenten to Walsingham and here wenches after;
Grete lobyes and lenge that lothe were to swynke."
The stern way in which he carries out in his own family this duty of fulfilling by hard work the labourers' part of the covenant, is seen in the names of his wife and children,—
"Dame-worche-whan-tyme-is Pieres wyf highte,
His doughter highte Do-righte-so-or-thi-dame-shal-the-bete,
His son highte Suffre-thi-sovereynes-to-haven-her-wille-
Deme-hem-nought-for-if-thow-doste-thow-shalt-it-dere-abugge (suffer for it)."
Behind this stern exterior he hides so tender a heart that he cannot bear even to see "wastoures wolves kynnes" starving; nevertheless he clokes his compassion in rough words. But his heart once opened, his pity for the miserable idlers increases with every beat, and from letting them "eat with hogges," he soon rises to feeding them on "melke and mene ale." For real poverty his sympathy is unbounded even if they have done evil; let God be the avenger. He has evidently known what it was himself to feel "Hunger at his maw."
For although the labourers' position was rising so fast that they would no longer dine of stale vegetables, and were not even content with penny ale and bacon, but expected fresh meat or fish fried or baked, and that straight from the fire, the husbandman who preferred independence to a full stomach had many a struggle, especially during the month preceding harvest.
"'I have no peny,' quod peres, 'poletes forto bigge,
Ne neyther gees ne grys, but two grene cheses,
A fewe cruddes and creem, and an haver cake,
And two loves of benes and bran, y-bake for my fauntis.
And yet I say, by my soule, I have no salt bacoun;
Ne no kokeney, bi cryst: coloppes forto maken.
Ac I have percil and porettes, and many kole-plantes,
And eke a cow and a kalf, and a cart-mare,
To draw a-felde my donge, the while the drought lasteth,
And bi this lyflode we mot lyve, til lammasse tyme.'"
All this indicates hard and careful living, and the ploughman's clothes "y clouted and hole," tell the same tale.
But what is most striking is that a ploughman should have so great a concern for the common weal, and should not only have been desirous to find the Truth for himself, but anxious to guide others to it. This independence of character combined with strong conservative instincts does not suggest a serf or one who had lately emerged from that condition. But in the fact that the Ploughman had not only his "half acre by the highway," but possessed a little homestead of his own, it seems far more probable that he was a member of one of those rural townships where there were "common fields" and "lot meadows."
Of course I recognise that Piers the Plowman is continually passing from a real into an allegorical character; but just as Bunyan's "Christian" was a fair type of the best Christians found among the poor in the seventeenth century, so Piers is a fair type of the English husbandman who has never been submitted to the degradation of personal slavery.
The popularity of the book, proved by the many copies extant in a rough penmanship, and still more by the fact that the leaders of the insurrection of 1381 couched their appeal to the country in its phraseology, renders it evident that Langland sketched from life.
IV.
The Labourer Demands Justice.
The stars fought in their courses during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to set the labourer free. Whether Wiclif was the product or the producer of the awakening that during these centuries went on all over the Continent, it would be hard to say, certain it is that England was one of the chief springs, if not the spring-head of the movement. It was, as is well known, a movement in favour of a return to primitive Christianity and the regeneration of Europe in harmony with it. It was therefore socialist and democratic, and awakened in the hearts of the population of Europe the memories of a golden age and the promise of the Millennium.
The Black Death in 1349 swept away more than half the population of England. Those that remained soon found that their labour had doubled in value, and the labourer became at once an important person in the realm. Parliament representing only the landlords, accordingly enacted in 1349 and 1350 Statutes by which the Labourer under pain of imprisonment and fines was bound to work at the same wages that he had received before the Plague. These iniquitous statutes acted like goads to the new life stirring in the soul of the English serf.[1]
The first Statutes of Labourers having been disregarded. Parliament in 1360 passed a severer law. Instead of three days in the stocks, a labourer refusing to work at the old wages was to be imprisoned for fifteen days. If he fled from his service to another town or county he was to be outlawed and a writ for his recovery to be sent to every Sheriff in England, and if taken he was to have the letter F burnt into his forehead for his falsity. Towns harbouring such fugitives were to deliver them up under penalty of Ten pounds to the King and one hundred shillings to the master, an enormous fine when tested by such wages as these statutes allowed: for example, 1d. a day to weeders and haymakers. This Act of 1360 strictly forbade all combination among workmen.
While these statutes if obeyed would have rendered existence by labour almost impossible, wheat at this time averaging 7s. the quarter, the people managed to obtain such high wages, that Parliament in 1363 passed another Act to restrain the sumptuousness of their apparel! Carters, ploughmen, plough-drivers, ox-herds, neat-herds, shepherds, pig-drivers, deyes and all other attendants on cattle, threshers and other labourers employed in husbandry were to use no other cloth than what was called blanket or russet of the value of 12d. a yard, and to wear linen girdles suitable to their condition. The same statute restrained their diet.
Notwithstanding facts patent to all but the wilfully blind, Parliament confirmed the Statute of Labourers by several subsequent Acts, relying perhaps on a clause by which it hoped to entangle its subjects' consciences: labourers were to be sworn twice a year to observe these impossible regulations.[2]
What wonder that such legislation produced in pious men a horror of oaths, and in the more daring a reckless contempt of all law. Eden tells us many became staff-strikers and wandered in parties of two, three, and four from village to village; others became "sturdy rogues," and infested the kingdom with frequent robberies. Iniquitous laws are the chief authors of crime.
This was the state of things when Langland composed his second edition of Piers Plowman, and the rising tide of discontent is pictured in the Prologue, where he introduces the fable of the rats and mice holding a council to protect themselves against the ravages of the cat; the rats and mice being the town and country labourers, or perhaps the husbandmen and the labourers. Langland describes the lords as treating their people in such a way "that us loathed the lyf." The object of the council was to find out "if they might by any wit their lords' will withstand."
Whether Langland meant to spur the people by representing them as infirm in purpose and in courage I cannot say, but as a matter of fact they were quite the opposite. They had evidently made up their minds they would submit to these tyrannies no longer. They began to refuse their customary services, and the stewards were so little able to enforce them, that the lords' corn was left uncut. Later on the lords complained that their villeins were flying to the towns, and that those who remained behaved insolently, knowing that the masters were afraid to exercise their powers lest they should lose the serfs irrecoverably.
For now town and country were one. In the former the system of forced labour being applied even more vigorously than in the country, the lower craftsmen were in alliance with the agricultural serfs.
This discontent began to make itself felt, and came to a height during the exhaustion that followed after the Peace of Bretigny. The Black Prince died, the King was falling into dotage, John of Gaunt was unpopular in London and with the Church: all things rendered the Government feeble. A universal upheaving commenced: while the serf was striving to obtain liberty and a fair wage, the classes immediately above him thought it a good opportunity each to push its way a grade higher. Meanwhile there were some few who only sought the reign of Justice on earth, who had no personal ends in view, but who for that very reason were gibbeted in their own day and stoned and pelted with ugly names ever since. Such an one was John Ball, the so-called "crazy priest of Kent." Which, however, was most crazy, the Parliaments which made laws such as the Statute of Labourers, or the Servant of Christ who preached the Kingdom of Justice?
John Ball had half England at his back. A thousand voices sent his messages over the land with as much precision and almost as quickly as the nineteenth century telegram, "John Ball greeteth you all, and doth for to understand he hath rung your bell, now right and might, will and skill, God speed every dele." And again:—
"Johan the Miller heth y grownde smal, smal, smal,
The Kynge's sone of heavene shalle paye for alle;
Be ware or ye be wo;
Knoweth your frende from youre foo,
Haveth ynowe and seythe 'Hoo,'
And do welle and bettre, and fleth synne
And seketh pees, and holde therynne;
And so biddeth Johan Trewman and alle his felawes."
The actual cause of the explosion was the Poll-tax of 1380, and the outbreak commenced the following summer in Kent.
John Ball was in prison in Canterbury, hither therefore the people surged, and the whole town being of their mind Ball was soon set free. The men of Kent marched triumphant to London, killing all the lawyers that fell in their way, burning the houses of the stewards of the manors, and flinging the rolls of the manor-courts into the flames.
When they reached London the poorer artizans within the city rose and flung open the gates. The people proudly boasted that they were seekers of Truth and Justice, not thieves or robbers, so instead of wasting their time in rioting, they went direct to their object which was to gain possession of the king. For though the people did not love their lords they had a firm faith in the king as the fountain of Justice and the avenger of the oppressed. Sad to say it was this beautiful faith that ruined their cause. Richard II., educated in that haughty contempt of labouring-men which comes out in Froissart's courtly Chronicle, where these very labourers are called vermin,—Richard II. played as false a part as any king ever played. In his eyes it seems to have been no more a crime for a prince to circumvent vile and odious rustics than to trap stoats and weasels; to catch them in his net and hang them by hundreds no worse than slaughtering wild hogs. With his pretty face he did to perfection the ingenuous young king, willing himself to become the leader of his people and to redress all their injuries. When they cried, "We will that you free us and our lands for ever, and that we be never named or held serfs!" "I grant it," was the ready reply, and thirty clerks were sent for, who sat hard at work, writing out charters of manumission. In the same glib manner the king stilled the Kentishmen, furious at the infamous assassination of their leader, Wat Tyler. The neck of the rebellion broken by this timely mixture of cajolery and truculence, and the danger over, Richard quickly threw off his mask. When the Commons of Essex came to remind him of promises hardly a fortnight old, he cried out contemptuously, "O vile and odious by land or sea, you are not worthy to live compared with the lords whom ye have attacked; you should be forthwith punished with the vilest of deaths were it not for the office you bear. Go back to your comrades and bear the king's answer, you were and are rustic, and shall remain in bondage, not that of old but infinitely worse. For as long as we live, and by God's help rule over this realm, we will attempt by all our faculties, powers, and means to make you such an example of fear to the heirs of your servitude as that they may have you before their eyes and you may supply them with a perpetual ground of cursing and fearing you."
And now Richard knew how to keep his word: 1,500 of these brave men were searched out in various parts of the country, and hung and gibbeted as an example of fear to the heirs of their servitude.
V
A Parliament of Pharaohs.
The boy-king was only a tool in the hands of his Council. The Council itself was powerless before the determination of the lords not to let the people go. When the royal message addressed to the Parliament that met immediately after the quelling of the Insurrection, suggested that it would be well to enfranchise and set at liberty the serfs, Parliament replied, that the king's grant and letters were null and void, their serfs were their goods, and the king could not take their goods without their own consent. "And this consent," they declared, "we have never given, and never will give, were we all to die in one day."
And in this Pharaoh-like spirit they persisted. The impossible Statutes of Labourers were re-affirmed, their execution being enforced by cumulative penalties, and in case of final inability to pay, the labourer was to have forty days' imprisonment; anyone attempting to leave his place of residence without an official letter was to be put in the stocks; all who up to the age of twelve years had been employed in husbandry must remain in that occupation, even if already apprenticed to another.
In fact, the attempt on the part of the landless labourer to free his children by apprenticing them in the towns was directly forbidden by the Statute 7 Hen. IV., c. xvii., on pain of a year's imprisonment. And not content with closing to the poor serf emancipation by way of trade, they tried to prevent him getting it through the door of learning; Parliament praying the King to ordain that no bondman or bondwoman shall place their children at school, as had been done, with a view to their entering into the Church. And the same influence induced the new College at the Universities to close their gates to villeins.
To render the bondage still tighter. Parliament gave the Council the right to arrest and imprison, regardless of all former statutes, any person speaking evil of dukes, earls, barons, nobles, and gentlemen (gntz), or of any of the great officers of the realm (12 Rich. II., c. xi.).
However, it was one thing to make laws, another to compel a reluctant people to give them obedience. But the labourers were isolated; each set of serfs had to settle matters with their individual lord, each particular serf to make the best of his position. The audacious, the violent, the unscrupulous, forced their necks out of the collar; the meek, the faithful, bore a double load, and sank a grade lower. The first alone received a place in history. Their growing wealth, all through the fifteenth century, rendered them an important addition to the middle class, and helped greatly to increase its power.
This impetus given to industry by the wide-spread hope of rising a step in life, added greatly to the national wealth. We have abundant proof that the poor man, and especially the small husbandman, was far better off at this period than at any other. The labourer, according to Statute, received 4d. a day, if not fed in the house, and this continued his nominal wage throughout the century. At this rate, about eighteen days' work would buy him a quarter of wheat; six days, a calf; seven or eight days, a hog for fatting. A lamb would cost him between sixpence and a shilling; a hen, 2d.; a pullet, 1d. Eggs he could get at the rate of twenty for a penny; butter was a penny, and cheese was three-farthings a pound. His garden produced no potatoes, but it gave him fat peascods, and good apples and cherries. As to his drink, Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice in 1442, merrily says, "He drank no water except at certain times, and that by way of doing penance." The same authority tells us that in these days English labourers were clothed throughout in good woollens; the bedding and other articles in their houses were of wool, and that in great store. And if the sumptuary law of 1464 was not a malicious satire, the labourer indulged in broadcloth of which the yard sometimes reached the price of two shillings.
It is clear that the Statute of Labourers was frequently violated, and that the labourer's actual income was even better than the prices just quoted would suggest. Engaged by the year, and frequently living on the farm, he must often have saved money enough to become a husbandman himself. This position, though it involved harder living than that of the labourer, was the most happy in the realm. Too lowly to be troubled by the storms of jealousy which raged over the surface of society, he ate the bread of independence, and lived surrounded by such an England as Chaucer depicts.
A revolution had clearly taken place, a revolution which was completed by the Civil Wars in which this century closed, and which gave the coup de grace to feudalism. For the Day of Judgment had come for the old slave-holding baronage of Norman and Angevin England. In the wars of the Roses it committed the happy dispatch; and at the accession of Henry VII. the House of Lords had been reduced to twenty-eight members.
How envenomed the English barons were against each other, we may learn from what Stow tells us of the battle of Northampton, "The earls of March and Warwicke let crie through the field that no man should lay hand upon the king, ne on the common people, but on the lordes, knights, and esquires." As the war grew this could not be maintained. After the battle of Towton it is said that nearly 40,000 men lay dead on the field. These were not labouring men, but the retainers of the barons, a class of beings who were to the country what the vulture was to Prometheus. Towton and the Tudors cleared the air of these hawks and kites.
VI.
The Tudor Kingdom of Heaven.
The Tudors and the Middle Class rise together, they symbolize each other, they are the makers of modern England. No noble plays a leading part in the revolutionary reign of Henry VIII.: Wolsey, More, Latimer, Cromwell, all came from the middle class.
During the reign of Edward, the Sixth, the turbulent spirit of aristocracy prevails, but only to accelerate the Nemesis which fell on the old families even to their remotest branches. One of the most striking facts in English history is the steady support given by the Tudor Parliaments to every bill of Attainder. Noble after noble went to the block, one great family after another was crushed, each stroke was an advantage gained.
But the rising power had another arm equally effective, the nobles it did not crush, it bribed. The Church was made to disgorge wealth, which to-day would equal in value the total annual revenue of Great Britain, and the greater part of this was spent in getting great Lords to support the Revolution.
Not that the Revolution owed all its success to force and fraud. The spread of knowledge through the revival of letters, the invention of printing, the rapid development of Commerce, and above all the tremendous blow given to the clerical aristocracy by the Reformation, all concurred to put wealth and power into the hands of the Middle Class.
But the Labouring Class reaped but little benefit from this change, the legislation in which Middle Class interests prevailed proving if possible more tyrannical and corrupting than that more purely aristocratic.
The new régime, however, commenced with some signs of relenting. The Statute of Labourers of 1426 speaks of "his Grace's pitty," but the notion of royal pity, held by Henry the Seventh's Parliament, was compatible with putting "vagabonds and idle and suspected persons," i.e., persons apparently without a master, in the stocks three days and three nights with no sustenance but bread and water.
In former times the chief object had been to retain the labourer in servitude, but now he was free; the point was to extract from him as much labour as possible. Thus it is that the Tudor cry is always, "Ye are idle, ye are idle." "Go therefore now and work."
The Tudors gave themselves to the work of ruling with all the ardour of the founders of a new and successful business. Henry the Eighth is said himself to have written the Act relating to labour passed in the 27th year of his reign, as he probably did that of the 22nd. Sympathy with his vigorous efforts to extirpate "Ydelnesse, mother and rote of all vyces" from the land will be lessened when we reflect what a bitter tyranny we should feel it to be if we were bound down to a certain spot, compelled to pursue an occupation we disliked, and that, during the whole of our lifetime, on penalty of being tied to the cart's tail, whipped until our bodies were bloody, with the prospect of being hanged if we were so foolhardy as to be caught more than twice loitering in parishes other than our own.
But all the Acts made from the time of Richard II. downwards concerning the returning and departure of labourers from the hundred in which they dwelt were in force, so that any person so wilful as to assert his natural liberty came under the title of vagabond. The refusal of Parliament to pass a general Act of Emancipation, as advised by Richard the Second's Council, had led to hundreds, perhaps thousands defying the law, and being branded as criminals at the outset. The villein who fled from servitude was by that fact a "vagabond and a sturdy rogue." And our feeling concerning these Tudor laws will change considerably when we understand that they are simply such decrees as Pharaoh would have issued against the fugitive Israelites.
To compare the Tudor tyranny to that under which the Hebrews groaned in Egypt is to give an inadequate view of the case. That under which the poor Englishman suffered was far worse because it was practised under the sanction of the religion in which he believed. Never, perhaps, in all history has there been a race of monarchs who attempted so to mould the consciences of their people as did the Tudors. Not content with arranging the national religious services, they ordained both a catechism and a private book of prayers to be used by individuals, and in the latter they prepared a special prayer for labourers; a prayer which strings together all the texts in the New Testament which can be forced into an incentive to work.
Looked at from the position of a man well-to-do in the world, these primers were probably edifying and sometimes elevating. But the faith they undoubtedly possessed was linked in the minds of the poor with profound injustice. The same authority which taught them how to pray, refused them their liberty under terror of the stocks, whipping, and the gibbet, and more, took from them their children to be subjected to the same mingled system of drudgery and catechism, slavery and prayer. By the Act 27 Hen. VIII., c. 27, the children of vagrants over five years of age were to be taken into custody and put out to husbandry and other crafts, and any such children above the age of twelve running away were to be whipped with rods.
The English outlaw has a charm for the curious reader, when his adventures are pictured in a ballad like Robin Hood, or Clym of the Clough; but let it not be forgotten, these are the primeval heroes of the history which was continued by Harry the Eighth's Vagabonds and Sturdy Rogues. Only as the age advances, and the Chivalrous gives place to the Commercial Spirit, these unfortunate pariahs sink from high-spirited banditti—with a certain code of honour—into gangs of wolfish marauders and mean thieves.
And their numbers were vastly increased by an Act, needful no doubt, but performed with the usual injustice to the poor and helpless. The Suppression of Monastic Establishments in 1536 and 1540 turned adrift 50,000 persons, most of whom were incapable of earning their own living. The property taken from these unhappy people, and in which they certainly had a life interest, is calculated to have been worth a rental of £350,000 per annum, which at twenty years' purchase would be £7,000,000, a sum equal in value to-day to the whole annual revenue of Great Britain. Yet all they got was: forty shillings and a gown to the men in priests' orders; a gown simply to the women.
This property, held in trust by the Church for the Poor, and which by a double right belonged to God, being His primarily, and His again as the gage of the repentance of the covetous and the grasping, was scandalously seized by the authority of Parliament, and being made over to the King, as general trustee of national property, was fraudulently given away by him to his adherents and friends. The satellites of Cromwell and the Catholic Lords who had to be propitiated, got the lion's share; but, in the scramble, city merchants, wool dealers, and manufacturers became landowners.
So now the commercial spirit invaded agriculture. It had for some time past been found more profitable to raise sheep than corn, and arable land was largely turned into pastures. But husbandmen and small yeomen could not make this pay and were obliged therefore to sell their land. A number of little estates in the market, an ever increasing demand for wool, and laws supplying the farmer with labour at much below its real market value: here was a truly golden opportunity for capitalists; and traders of all sorts began to compete for the farms. This raised rents, and numbers of poor yeomen were soon ruined, and they and their families turned into the streets.
"These covetous cormorants," cried Bernard Gilpin, "take it for no offence to turn poor men out of their holds, for they say the land is their own." And not content with doing what they pleased with what they thought "their own," the landholders took what they knew was not and enclosed common land, thus taking from the poor property to which they had a better right than any nobleman to his estate. "They lick," says Harrison, with graphic earnestness, in his "State of England," "the sweat from the poor man's brow."
No one took up the parable against the rapacity of landlords more persistently than old Latimer and Bernard Gilpin; nor were they alone. It is the cry of all the earnest preachers and the greatest thinkers of the age; men like Sir Thomas More and Lord Bacon. But opposed to them were practical economists, such as Fitzherbert, author of The Boke of Husbandrye (1534), and Surveyinge (1539), who argued against the waste involved in the Common Field system, by which a man's rights of property were scattered about, so that he was put to a far greater expense in its management than if he had it all compact in one farm. This was perfectly true, and from a merely commercial point of view quite unanswerable; but he forgot that this communistic system was the surest protection that the men not gifted with business ability could have against those that were. Fill men with the idea that the summum bonum of social economy is to get the greatest pecuniary results at the least possible expense, and they will stop at nothing for so great an end.
Bernard Gilpin, preaching before Edward VI., described how Lady Avarice set on the mighty men, and the gentlemen, and all rich men, to rob and despoil the poor, and turn them from their livings and their right, and ever the weakest go to the wall. "And in the meantime these mighty and great men say that the commonalty live too well at ease, and grow every day to be gentlemen and know not themselves; their horns, say they, must be cut shorter by raising their rents and by plucking away their pastures. And hereby the commonalty come to hate the gentry, for they murmur, and grudge, and say that the gentlemen have all; and there were never so many gentlemen and so little gentleness." "Alas! noble Prince," said the preacher, turning to the King, "that the images of your ancestors graven in gold, and yours also, contrary to your mind, are worshipped as gods, and all the poor lively images of Christ perish with hunger."
A still more striking proof of the general impression of the extreme greed of the landlord class is the existence of a prayer for landlords, to be found in the Primmer or Boke of Private Prayer set forth in 1555, two years after this discourse by Gilpin, to be taught, learned, read, and used of the King's loving subjects.
"The earth is Thine, O Lord, and all that is contained therein, notwithstanding Thou hast given possession thereof unto the children of men, to pass the time of their short pilgrimage in this vale of misery. We heartily pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be Thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and their lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes after the manner of covetous worldlings, but so let them out to Others that the inhabitants thereof may be able to pay the rents and also to honestly live, to nourish their families and to relieve the poor; give them grace to consider that they are but strangers and pilgrims in this world, having here no dwelling-place, but seeking one to come; that they, remembering the short continuance of their life, may be content with that which is sufficient and not join house to house, nor couple land to land to the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands, and pastures, that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling-places; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."
VII.
Another Struggle for Justice.
"My father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions." These words, which Scripture gibbets as the last degree of princely arrogance and folly, exactly symbolize the opening acts of the reign of the most pious, most conscientious young prince England has possessed since the Conquest. That the reign of Edward the Sixth commenced more wickedly than that of Rehoboam was due to the rabid greediness of the new aristocracy. "Covetousness," as Gilpin told the King, "had brought the nation to such a pass that every man scraped and pilled from others, every man would suck the blood of others, every man encroached upon another;" and of the truth of this, there was no more flagrant example than that given by the men who, at Henry the Eighth's death, seized on power, helping themselves to great titles and to the public wealth.
It is a fact that ought not to be hid, because it throws a flood of light on the present condition of England, that the same authority that gave this country the Common Prayer Book enacted the most atrocious law against its Poor that has ever disgraced the Statute Book.
By the 1 Edward VI., c. 3, Men or Women able to work, and who lived idly for three days, were to be branded with a red-hot iron on the breast with a letter V, and to be slaves for two years to the informer. The master was to feed his slave with bread and water, with small drink, and such refuse meat as he thought proper, and to cause his slave to work by beating, chaining, or otherwise, in any work or labour however vile it might be. If the slave ran away from his master for the space of fourteen days he was to be his slave for life, and to be branded on the forehead or cheek with the letter S; if he ran away a second time he was to suffer pains of death as a felon. The master could put a ring of iron on the neck, arm, or leg of his slave; he could sell, bequeath, or let out his slave after the like sort or manner he might do with any other of his movable goods or chattels. Any attempt to maim or wound such masters or mistresses either during or after the time of slavery, or any conspiracy to burn their houses or corn was to be deemed felony unless some person would take such offender as a slave for ever.
Any child above five years and under fourteen, found wandering with or without such vagabonds, might be seized by any person, and being taken before a justice of the peace, could be adjudged the servant or apprentice of the apprehender; if a girl until twenty years of age, if a boy until twenty-four; and if such child ran away he was to be treated as a slave, and punished with irons, or otherwise.
Well might the pious young king clasp his hands, and lift up his eyes to heaven, at the response in the Order for Daily Prayer: "O Lord, save Thy people!"
Robbed of their wages, and reduced to semi-serfdom by the Statutes of Labourers; robbed of their legal provision in unforeseen distress, or unprotected old age, by the confiscation of Church property for the benefit of the aristocracy; robbed by the commercial greed of the new gentry of their little farms and of the common land, the English poor were met by an atrocious law which condemned all who did not yield submissively to their fate to feel the hot iron plough into their own breasts, and into those of their wives and children, to be reduced to the vilest form of slavery, and to find no relief except in a felon's doom.
Such wrongs could only be met by insurrection, and the people rose in the East, and in the West, and in the Midland counties. The rulers of England, the men who had done the people these horrible wrongs, now maintained their power by the aid of Italian and German mercenaries, scourges of whom the German proverb said, "Rather the Turk than the Landsknecht."
Let anyone read the story of the rebellion of the Peasants in Norfolk, as given by Holingshed, whose sympathies may be judged from the fact that he describes his poor countrymen as "vile wretches and cruel traitors " for slaying an Italian mercenary; and such reader must be very blind, or prejudiced, if he does not see that the Norfolk men had a better cause than any that English troops were ever employed to defend; and that these 16,000 "ungratious unthrifts," conducted the struggle with admirable order, and displayed at last an obstinate gallantry worthy of the Highlanders at Waterloo.
The insurgents demanded a removal of the King's evil councillors, a prohibition of enclosures, and a redress of the wrongs of the poor. They associated three or four middle class persons of approved respectability (one was the Mayor of Norwich,) with Robert Ket, their leader, and gave them a certain obedience as representatives of the King, whom throughout they professed to serve. They had also for chaplain the Vicar of St. Mary's, in Norwich, who offered up prayers morning and evening that they might have prosperous speed. Preaching went on every day from the Oak of Reformation, and the insurgents even listened to preachers who tried to induce them to give up their enterprise. They had a small parliament of their own, two deputies being chosen from every hundred, twenty-six different hundreds being represented. Contributions were levied on the gentry in the neighbourhood after the manner of more orthodox armies, they manacled some of the more unpopular gentlemen and put them in prison, and took possession of Norwich, where they had many friends.
Parr, Marquis of Northampton, was sent against them; but though he got into Norwich, they defeated him and his Italians, and in the melée Lord Suffield was slain. At last the Earl of Warwick, the most unscrupulous of the whole set of adventurers who called themselves the King's Council, came down to Norwich with a thousand German landsknechts in his army. He got possession of Norwich, but could hardly keep it, the people constantly getting in and slaying his men. For three days the fighting was desperate; he meanwhile killing his prisoners, and sending herald after herald to offer pardon to all who would lay down their arms. This the Peasantry obstinately refused to do, not trusting the herald's word. At last they risked all on a pitched battle, and were defeated, 2,000, according to King Edward, being slain. The remainder entrenched themselves and determined to die fighting. Warwick sent heralds again and again, but they would not believe them; at last he offered to come himself and pledge his word. Then, and then only, these sturdy rebels threw down their arms.
Warwick, we suppose, hung none of this final batch of prisoners, but of the others he choose nine of the leaders to be hanged on the Oak of Reformation. Forty-five others were drawn, hanged, and quartered in the market-place at Norwich, and their quarters exposed to inspire terror. Robert Ket, the leader, was hanged in chains on the top of Norwich Castle, and his brother on the top of Wymondham steeple; these high places being no doubt chosen for the same reason. Altogether three hundred persons are said to have been executed. Some would have persuaded Warwick to put to death a great number more, but he replied, "What shall we then do? hold the plough ourselves, play the carters, and labour the ground with our own hands?"
The annals of the Poor are nearly always lost or distorted. They have no friendly scribes to chronicle their doings, but what comes down to posterity, even when honest, is full of misconception through want of sympathy. Thus the chroniclers of the Norfolk insurrection leave unexplained its suddenness, its unity of purpose, its order, its persistent courage, above all its religiousness. Holingshed gives us a hint when he tells us that they were misled by "certain vain prophets which they had among them." And again, that of the nine hung on the Oak of Reformation two were prophets. This word prophets leads us back to the preachers of the Gospel of the Poor, who with hardly an exception were believers in the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It was the time when Anabaptist doctrine was held by thousands of the poor in Holland and Germany. Their preachers were ardent propagandists, travelling over Europe to disseminate their doctrine. We have several records of Dutchmen arrested in England, some of whom were burnt for Anabaptist opinions. East Anglia, from its traditional connection with the Low Countries, was exactly the place to which they were most likely to come, and the poor disinherited sons of toil would be just the men to whom they would communicate their message, and by whom it would be received.
The immediate result of this insurrection and of those in other parts of England was the repeal of the atrocious law against so-called vagabonds and their children, passed in the first year of Edward VI., and a return to the more gentle legislation of which Henry VIII. was himself the author.[3]
What that tenderness was may be judged from the fact that Harrison in his description of England tells us that during Henry the Eighth's reign 72,000 great and petty thieves were put to death! This heroic surgery, however, did not extirpate the disease. It recommenced and became worse than ever. The same Chronicle tells us that in Elizabeth's reign rogues were trussed up apace, and there was not one year commonly wherein 300 or 400 of them were not devoured and eaten up by the gallows in one place or another. Adding to these numbers those who suffered under the reigns of Henry VII., Edward VI., and Mary, there can hardly have been less than 100,000 persons sent to the gallows under the Tudors. How many were whipped until their backs streamed with blood, how many were branded with the red-hot iron, or had their ears cropped, how many rotted in prison, how many died on the galleys in the Thames, how many were enslaved, no historian has told us; but it is evident these draconian laws engendered their own prey, for work them as they would the prisons were so full that to make room for fresh comers quantities of desperate persons were set free at each assize.
Such numbers had taken to this bandit life that there were not sufficient labourers to do the ordinary tillage of the land. What with rack rents, what with the competition of men who had made money in towns, what with the scarcity of labourers, what with the necessity of watching their flocks day and night, what with the rates for keeping up gaols and maintaining hosts of prisoners, the small yeomanry of England, the twenty-pound men, were ruined and sank themselves to farm labourers or sturdy rogues. No wonder the latter proclaimed deadly war against society. "They must live," they said; "they would not starve." No wonder they thought it a sufficient excuse for highway robbery, burglary, and sheep-stealing, to cry, "The rich have gotten all into their hands and will starve the poor."
The prosperous members of the body politic were in despair at the ill-success of their efforts to get rid of what King Edward in one of his Essays describes as its "spittle and filth." There had never been more idle persons than in his day, he writes, and after puzzling his wits as to the cause, he comes to the conclusion that "slack execution of the laws has been the chiefest sore of all."
The truth was the selfish tyranny of the ruling classes had perverted the very conscience of the nation, and a secret sympathy was not only felt through the lower strata of society for "the sturdy rogue" and "the valiant beggar," but probably avowed openly, for King Edward speaks of the "disobedient and contentious talking and doing of the foolish and fond people," as one great cause of the wilful breaking of the laws of the realm. Many who appeared to get an honest living were really in league with thieves. Receivers of stolen goods were everywhere—the tinker's budget, the peddler's bag, the glassman's basket, all were ready receptacles. In 1596 we are told that in every county there were three to four hundred able-bodied men who lived by rapine and theft, and such daring deeds as they did could never have been successful if they had not found a sympathetic public. Men who were robbed would not prosecute, either through fear or from what King Edward calls "foolish pity;" juries would not convict, and judges were bribed or terrorised. "A piteous case for a Commonwealth!" says Bernard Gilpin, and well he might.
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."
But the English labourer had already then fallen, as Defoe's descriptions elsewhere prove, and from Defoe's times to those of Charles Dickens, the descent went on with increasing speed. The causes have been numerous, but all have had their origin in the persistent selfishness of those who have had the presumption to think that wealth and learning gave the right and the ability to manage the labourer's affairs without asking his opinion or obtaining his consent.
The idea the ruling classes have had of their position comes out in a phrase used by a noble lord in the debate in the House of Lords on the Spirituous Liquors Bill in 1743, "If any accidental public misfortune should render the people likely to mutiny." But the ruling classes of England have never been equal even to the military conception of duty, for they have cruelly and persistently sacrificed the lives and morals of the myriads of privates they pretend to command. Take, for instance, the Distilleries Act of 2 William and Mary. Its object was to ruin French commerce and to encourage the distilling of English brandy and spirits. What was its result? Little more than sixty years had passed away when Fielding and Hogarth drew their appalling pictures of the result of gin-drinking in England. Gin Lane, "full of strange images of death," shows vividly the moral murder which had been going on. "Should," said Fielding, "the drinking of this poison be continued at its present height during the next twenty years, there will be very few of the common people left to drink it."
But the interest of some powerful class has constantly outweighed the moral welfare of the people. Take the brewers, for instance. Hundreds of them in former times were spread all over the country, and their profits enabled them to almost rank with the gentry. How were these profits obtained? From innumerable alehouses in the district, many of which were actually the property of the brewer. Dunning, a writer on Pauperism at the time of the Revolution, connects the small country alehouses with the brandy-shops, as affording incredible returns to the Excise.
What need to paint the results? In the drawings of Moreland we see the labourer, bloated and lazy, seated on a bench of the village alehouse, drinking away his wages, or ascending the steps of the roadside inn, to get another draught of ale, or it may be, a quartern of gin, while wife and children are waiting for him in the cart below, Crabbe speaks of the "riots of the Green, that sprang at first from yonder noisy Inn," and he indicates, in a strong touch, how furiously brutal the heavy drinking often made the churl. Fruitful source of most wretched poverty and dastardly crime, its profit has been too great for the brewer, the maltster, the innkeeper, and all the money-makers of the country-side, for a middle-class Parliament to do other than give its control to the country magistrates, men, who if not brewers, maltsters, and distillers themselves, have lived in immediate connection with them, often as friends or as landlords. Besides, many of them were as hard drinkers as the most besotted clowns on their estates. " A poor man," said Defoe in 1700, "gets drunk in a country alehouse. 'Why, are you not ashamed to be such a beast?' says a good, honest neighbour to him next day. 'Ashamed!' says the fellow. ' Why should I be ashamed? Why, there was Sir John ——, and Sir Robert ——, and the Parson, and they were all as drunk as I. And why a beast, pray? I heard Sir Robert —— say, that,—
"'He that drinks least,
Is most like a beast.'"
These were the sort of men who had the licensing of country alehouses in those days. Such men as these were Justices of the Peace, and with the clergy and the overseers, had the fate, moral as well as material, of the English labourer in their hands. During the latter part of the seventeenth century and the commencement of the eighteenth century, the power of these rural magnates must have been overwhelming. The dissenting yeomen who, during the middle of the century had taken so important a stand, had to choose between losing their souls or becoming criminals; as to the clergy, they played the part of the shepherd's dog rather than the shepherd, barking at and biting the poor sheep in the interest of their masters, the gentry. The spirit of their religion is set forth in the Conventicle Act, 16 Car. II., c. 4, which enforced anew the Statute of 35 Eliz. 1, by which all above the age of sixteen absenting themselves from church without cause for the space of a month, persuading others to be present at a Conventicle, were to be imprisoned without bail till they conformed and made submission.
The ideas of the clergy and the ruling classes on religion are well expressed by Mandeville, a clever writer of the period:
"The Poor more especially and their children should be made to go to church on Sunday, both in the fore and afternoon, because they have no time on any other. By precept and example they ought to be encouraged and used to it from their very infancy; the wilful neglect of it ought to be counted scandalous, and if downright compulsion to what I urge might seem too harsh and perhaps impracticable, all diversions at least ought to be strictly prohibited, and the poor hindered from every amusement abroad that might allure or draw them from it."
What Mandeville meant to effect by this careful church-going there can be no manner of doubt. He was philosopher enough to know that you can never be sure of a slave until you have mastered his conscience. The ancients did not understand this art, whence their terror of servile revolt. The Tudor statesmen were profoundly Machiavelian, and knew the value of mixing up respect for their position with reverence for the Almighty.
The Church of England, supported by the two Houses of Parliament, the Magistrates, and all the nobility, gentry and great landowners, had had its own way with the agricultural labourers of England for a good deal more than a thousand years. Every hostile influence has been crushed, and the whole formation of their moral and intellectual being had been in its hands. What the Church of England had done with this great trust, what it had made of its wards, to what a fate it had brought them let Crabbe, himself a clergyman, tell us. Let anyone read and ponder well "The Village," let him note that it is supported by all Crabbe says elsewhere, that it is in accord with what Clare and Bloomfield say; let him read those wonderful pieces of autobiography by another agricultural labourer:—Heaven taken by a Storm, The Bank of Faith, etc.; let him gather together such incidental references as he can find in books like that in which Hannah More recounts her work in the Mendip Hills, together with the whole literature of the Methodist Revival, and he will not be able to escape the conclusion that upon the labourer as the weakest member of the body politic all its ills have fallen.
The Game laws had their origin in that period so disastrous for England when the ruling classes managed, by means of the pretty lies of a young prince, to deceive and crush the People. From the preamble to the 7 Ric. II., c. iii. & iv., it would seem that the labourers were not disposed to accept their defeat as final, but that on Sundays and holidays, they collected in parks and warrens, under pretext of hunting; but really to confer and conspire with a view to a new rising. It was accordingly enacted that no artificer, labourer, etc., should keep any dog to hunt, nor use any means for taking deer, hares, conies or other "gentleman's game" on pain of a year's imprisonment.[4] Thus the protection up to that time limited to the game in the King's forests was now extended to that of all the great landowners.
We have seen how the destruction of the old nobility, and the stepping into their shoes of the successful among the middle classes made no real difference in the burdens laid on the people, but rather increased them. So in this question of the protection of their game, the landlord parliaments, which sat from the reign of Henry VII. to that of William and Mary, kept adding new provisions to the laws, until they related not only to deer, hares, and rabbits, but to pigs, pheasants, partridges, to heath, moor, and fen-fowl, and to various kinds of fish. Quite a network of prohibitions was constructed with reference to the possession of dogs, ferrets, guns, bows, snares, and every means used for taking wild animals. The popular notion of every Englishman's house being his castle was conspicuously demonstrated to be a fallacy, by 22 and 23 Car., 2, 15, which authorised a lord of the manor to license his gamekeeper not only to seize all prohibited means of taking game, but to search dwelling-houses and seize setting dogs, nets, etc., found in them. By the 4 and 5 William and Mary, c. 23, the private search was made more certain and odious by the promise of half the booty to the informer, and the detected poacher was subjected to the whip.
Nothing but fear of these penalties ever prevented our forefathers from taking possession of any wild creature which might come across their path, for it was long before Englishmen could believe in the right of any individual to the sole possession of the game of a district. This contempt for the Conscience is in itself a temptation to crime. The first step in opposition to the law appears very like the vindication of Justice, but the rubicon once passed, a disregard of all law ensues.
Lord Suffield, writing sixty years ago, showed that it was the most natural thing in the world for an English labourer to become a poacher. At that time over the greater part of England by incessant toil the agricultural labourer could scarcely earn more than ninepence or a shilling a day, while a gang of poachers had been known to take as much as three sacks of game in one night. Wherever there were game preserves the whole country side was demoralised, the most apparently respectable persons being implicated. A case occurred in 1816, in Gloucestershire of a large gang fully organised, having at its head the collector of the rates and taxes in the parish, who was looked upon as a respectable farmer. These gangs were co-operative societies, for they not only provided guns and other instruments, but hired men at wages little above that given to the gamekeepers to do the actual poaching while they took the booty, or at least the lion's share of it, and if these servants of the gang were arrested, money was forthcoming to pay the penalties.
It would have been bad enough if the moral ruin had been confined to a few, but it was widespread, for in some villages the whole of the inhabitants were poachers. And the law by making the taking of a wild creature as much a crime as stealing a domestic animal rendered the step from poaching to sheep-stealing perfectly natural and easy; and thus the man who commenced by snaring a rabbit frequently ended by stealing a horse, for which he was hanged or transported to Botany Bay.
If under the softened régime of the Game Laws introduced in the first year of William IV., there were, between 1833 and 1846, fifty inquests on gamekeepers found dead, twenty-nine of the cases being returned as wilful murder, and in the years 1844-1846 11,392 convictions for offences against the Game Laws in England and Wales, we may judge what must have been the amount of crime under the old régime, a régime which was in operation between four and five hundred years.
The same policy that made the English people gin-drinkers turned them into a race of smugglers. During the great struggle which William III. carried on with France all trade with that country was prohibited. The natural result was that an immense impetus was given to smuggling all along the Southern coast. The trade was so profitable that large capitalists took it up, and the people in the southern and eastern districts gave themselves up to its seductions.
Law after law was enacted to suppress this traffic, but it was found impossible to carry them out. The smugglers terrorised the people by murdering those who gave evidence against them; the Government sought to terrorise the smugglers by hanging in chains such as were convicted of these crimes. Many a dreary common or lonely spot by the sea-shore thus became invested with mysterious horror.
But men in these days were not hanged only for crimes of this sort. Blackstone refers to 168 offences in England punishable with death, four-fifths of which were made so during the reigns of the first three kings of the House of Hanover. But as late as 1812 a woman was hanged at Manchester for assisting to seize a man's potatoes, and compelling him to sell them for a lower price than he asked for them. The offences other than murder for which the agricultural labourers suffered death would be: Sheep, Cattle, and Horse stealing, and Highway robbery. Mandeville has given a picture of an execution in his day, which, with much abridgment, and an additional touch or two from other sources, will serve to show how many a wretched English labourer passed out of this life.
Debauched by the alehouse, corrupted by poaching or smuggling, he has joined on some fatal night in sheep-stealing. Some weeks have elapsed, the fear of detection has passed away, when suddenly before it is light two constables are in the village; they make their way to Robin's cottage, and, instead of going to work that morning, he is handcuffed and marched off in the cold grey dawn to the county gaol. A true bill is found, and during the assize, pale, haggard, and speechless, Robin stands in the dock. Too bewildered to follow the evidence, he only knows that the chief witness is the worst of the gang, the man who persuaded him into the act, and nothing is clear to him until he hears the foreman of the jury say, "Guilty, my lord," and he sees the judge put on his black cap. He knows then what is going to happen, and trembling from head to foot he awaits the dreadful sentence. Taken back to prison, he is loaded with heavy irons, and led down into a loathsome dungeon, where he finds a number of other convicts; some are swearing or laughing, while one or two appear agonised at the thought of their fate.
On the morning of the execution they have all been brought up into the prison yard, and a hubbub goes on almost as bad as a Jews' market. Loud curses from angry quarrellers, shouts for the pot-boys who scuttle about, pouring out ale and other liquids, blows of the blacksmith's hammer, as he pinions those who are going to suffer. At last all is in readiness, the prisoners have mounted the cart, the Ordinary has got up behind, and Jack Ketch in front; the soldiers press round for fear of a rescue, and the great gates of the prison are swung open.
If it was hubbub within, 'tis the roar of the ocean without. Jack Ketch and his unhappy freight are received with a storm of oaths and coarse ribaldry, in which some of the convicts join for most of them are already half drunk. The sorry procession makes its way through a thick mob, which sways to and fro; the sellers of gin and other liquors bawling loud enough to be heard above the general din. Again and again the hangman's cart stops before a public-house, and while the condemned are taking another draught, the mob rush round them to shake their hands. So eager indeed are the people to show this mark of sympathy, that the struggling and fighting get worse at every stage, until at last the cart is hemmed in. Then heavy blows are struck, pieces of swinging sticks go flying, people are knocked down and trampled under foot, every one gets spattered with blood and dirt; screams groans, and brutal cries of all sorts produce a tumult beyond description.
At last the cavalcade reaches the gallows, around which a number of hackney carriages are assembled. These vehicles have brought or contain the people's betters, who have thus come by a more convenient route, and secured the best places to see the show. The Ordinary and the Hangman dispatch their duties with small ceremony and equal unconcern, and very soon half a dozen human bodies are dangling in the air.
What the people thought of these sights, no one has cared to tell us. We may be certain, however, of one thing, their whole sympathy went with the sufferers and not with the law.
IX.
How to Destroy a People's Soul.
"Pauper ubique jacet," said Queen Elizabeth as she made a progress through the kingdom, and found herself everywhere surrounded by vast flocks of poor people. In the midst of individual wealth and national greatness the complaint was ever rising, "There is no country with so many poor as England." The reason was simple: "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon." Henry and Elizabeth so merged the Church and State one into the other that those who dared to say nay became guilty of a sort of treason, and were thrown into prison, whipped, pilloried, mutilated, or sent to the gallows.
In thus asserting the nation to be a Church of Christ, Parliament proclaimed the English people a Society of Brothers, and on the ground of this very brotherhood commenced their first essay in making provision for the wants of the impotent poor. But, as we have seen, everything had combined to stir up the spirit of selfishness in England, so that, from the court to the city, from the baronial hall to the counting-house, there never was a time in which individual greed had more thoroughly taken possession of a nation. Gentle asking of every man and woman what in their charity they would be contented to give weekly towards the relief of their poor brethren in Christ; charitable ways and means of persuading obstinate persons and parishes to take their share in this duty, had to be given up, and the recalcitrants handed over to the Justices of the Peace, who were to tax them in a weekly sum, and commit them to prison until it was paid.
By the end of the reign of Elizabeth the voluntary offering had given place to a regular system of taxation, the amount being settled by the overseers of each parish, who were appointed every Easter Day by the Justices of the Peace. The two statutes of the 39th and 43rd of Elizabeth became the system upon which England dealt with its poor for 230 years. It was in principle a system of Christian Socialism, but being worked throughout by persons animated by secular motives, its action was vacillating: at once feeble and hard, and, in its final development, it came as near to the work of the devil as it is possible to imagine.
The Christian Socialism of the Elizabethan Poor Law distinguished, in the most forcible manner, between the idle and industrious, the wilful and the impotent. For the one class there were stripes and imprisonment, and in the end the gibbet; for the other, relief and shelter. Everything, however, depended on the honesty, capacity, and Christian spirit of the Justices of the Peace and Overseers into whose hands the whole care of the poor was confided. As early as 1622 we find signs that many shirked the work. In a tract of that date, called, "Greevous Grones for the Poor," we are told, "The poor dailie increase, in many parishes there being no collection for them, so that they are driven out of these parishes to beg, and filtch, and steal for their maintenance."
Each parish began jealously to guard its frontier, fearing that the surrounding parishes would shift upon it the burden of their poor. This led to a series of acts which virtually imprisoned the labourer in the limits of his parish, tying him down for a third time to the soil. The place of a man's nativity being originally the parish from which he could claim assistance, it became the object of every parish to prevent any being born in its limits who might come on the rates. If a young man who had no right of settlement in a parish attempted to get married, the officials immediately sought to have him removed, lest he should have a family, some of whom might become chargeable. This deterred young men from matrimony, and the result was a large number of bastard children. That unfortunate being whom the English law pursued so relentlessly: the homeless wanderer, was still more cruelly dealt with. In the reign of James I. it was enacted that a woman wandering and begging, if delivered of a child in a parish to which she did not belong, was to be liable to whipping and six months' imprisonment. Yet notwithstanding all this severity the poor were ever on the increase.
Some seventy years after the Elizabethan Poor Law had been in operation the rates had risen to no less a sum than £840,000 a year. Twelve years later, 1685, the poor were numbered at 1,330,000 heads, 400,000 of whom were in receipt of parish relief. By the reign of Queen Anne the maintenance of the poor cost one million sterling.
During the early years of the eighteenth century the rapid growth of pauperism occupied many powerful minds, but the remedies they proposed were not adopted, or quite failed to arrest its progress; so that in 1795, Mr. Fox told the House of Commons "that the greater part of the working classes of the country were lying at the mercy and almost lay on the charity of the rich." Mr. Fox was far from exaggerating the disease, for English pauperism was now entering an acute stage. By the end of the War it could be said to have risen fifty per cent., and there were very few of the labouring classes out of its grasp.
To estimate the full force of this steady growth of pauperism we must never lose sight of the fact that it took place side by side with an ever-enlarging commerce, with the development of the manufacturing system and the enormous increase in the wealth of the ruling classes.
The writers of the early part of the eighteenth century—Locke, Defoe, Sir Joshua Child, Mandeville, and Henry Fielding—more or less attribute it to relaxation in discipline and corruption in manners. They appear to have thought, and probably with reason, that through careless management, a great deal of the money went in the support of idleness and debauchery. When we recall the laws by which, in addition to their long education in servility and dependence, the labourers were drawn into the practice of poaching, smuggling, and the worst forms of drinking, our surprise will be how any virtue could remain in the labouring poor, how it was possible for any of them to have escaped this cesspool of moral misery into which their whole class was falling.
Defoe tells a story which gives us a pretty idea of the kind of men who in the seventeenth century had the fate of the agricultural labourer in their hands. "Jack," said a gentleman of very high quality, when after the debate in the House of Lords, King William was voted on the vacant throne; "Jack," says he, "God damn ye; Jack, go home to your lady, and tell her we have got a Protestant King and Queen; and go and make a bonfire as big as a house, and bid the butler make ye all drunk, ye dog."
To ask legislators of this sort to listen to proposals like those of Mr. Locke, even though they had King William's support, was casting pearls before swine. So nothing came of the idea, borrowed from the original Elizabethan legislation, of founding working schools where the children of those unable to maintain their families could be fed and employed instead of money for the purpose being directly given to the heads of those families.
A similar fate at first befell Sir Humphrey Mackworth's scheme for setting up workhouses, perhaps owing to Defoe's clever pamphlet entitled, "Giving Alms no Charity" However, in 1723, Parliament determined to try the workhouse system and by 9 Geo. I., c. 7, it was enacted that relief should only be given on condition of entering a workhouse; i.e., that an Englishman who fell into poverty should only be relieved on condition of surrendering what has been trumpeted forth as the birthright of every native of this country.
It was soon seen that to make this system effectual, the workhouse must be more miserable and the diet poorer than that to which the labouring class were accustomed. Workhouses were accordingly managed by contract, and ere long they became one of those horrors, the frequent end of institutions founded on one principle and worked on another. Crabbe, whose profound sympathy for the poor and photographic pictures of their misery will render his fame immortal, thus describes the Village Workhouse in 1783. He is speaking of the final fate of worn-out agricultural labourers—
"Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor.
Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door;
There, where the putrid vapours, flagging, play,
And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day—
There children dwell who know no parents' care:
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there!
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed;
Rejected widows with unheeded tears,
And crippled age with more than childhood's fears:
The lame, the blind, and, far the happiest they!
The moping idiot, and the madman gay."
In the very year of the appearance of Crabbe's most touching poem of the Village, Mr. Pitt brought in a bill repealing the 9 Geo. I., c. 7, which prohibited relief to any not entering a workhouse, on the ground that this provision was "inconvenient and oppressive, inasmuch as it often prevented an industrious person from receiving such relief as is best suited to their peculiar case, and held out conditions of relief injurious to the comfort and domestic situation and happiness of such poor persons."
That the Act, known as 33 Geo. III., c. 23, proved one of the most disastrous bits of legislation ever perpetrated, was not so much the fault of its promoters as of that fatal English blindness to harmony, which does not see that you cannot bind together the Spirit of Christianity and the Practice of the World, that you cannot found an institution on the ground of human brotherhood and then work it in the spirit of competitive commerce.
In 1796 Mr. Pitt made a remarkable speech on the Poor Laws, in which, after referring to the great abuses of the System, he laid down the principles essential to a good Poor Law. One of the most important was—Relief according to number of children.
The following year Mr. Pitt brought in a bill in which he proposed to realise this principle. This bill and its failure — for it was withdrawn at the manifest repugnance of the House of Commons to make it law—show two things: first, that Mr. Pitt understood the meaning of the French Revolution better than his supporters; second, that they understood the condition to which the Agricultural Poor were reduced better than he did.
English Statesmen had had time to understand the great storm which had raged across the Channel, and had comprehended that it resulted from the mass of people suddenly discovering that they had been cheated, robbed, and trampled under foot for ages, in order that a small section of the community might live in pride and luxury; and knowing that the same conditions existed here, they were in terror lest the like should occur in England. We know from Lord Stanhope that in 1794, Pitt believed himself surrounded by thousands of bandits, and that he might wake one morning and find London in flames.
The truth, however, about the Revolution had not reached the majority of his supporters, and their nerves being less sensitive, they judged the state of the country more correctly. As to the agricultural labourers, they knew them to be what we see them depicted in the drawings of Morland, and in the writings of Crabbe, Blomfield, and Clare; an artless, patient, gregarious herd, who went on plodding from day to day, hopeless and aimless, with no other relief than an occasional burst of frantic merriment, of which horse-play and hard drinking were the chief features. Freed from all anxiety concerning the future, mostly ignorant of any higher good than the satisfaction of their senses, there was nothing to fear from such a people.
However, the soul of the Agricultural Poor was not quite dead. It fluttered still in the breasts of a few sufferers, and came out as such deep vague sorrows do in verse.
Blomfield and Clare, these poets of the people, have throughout the same undertone of melancholy, arising from the conviction that they belonged to a class which is day by day falling into a deeper, more abject state of poverty or crime. When the former, as he reflected on the distance the increasing wealth made between different ranks, cries out—
"Has Wealth done this ?—then Wealth's a foe to me;
Foe to our rights; that leaves a pow'rful few
The paths of emulation to pursue:—
For emulation stoops to us no more:
The hope of humble industry is o'er"—
we have, as it were, a throb from a slumbering volcano.
And the conviction that the sleeper might awake seems to have been the result of Mr. Pitt's bill, for though dropped, its main proposition, the making up out of the rates of the deficiency of a labourer's income, came to be the general practice throughout the country. This suggested the necessity of a scale, and the amount a labourer ought to have was fixed, from time to time, by the price of the quartern loaf, which might vary from 6d. to 2s.[5]
By this system it was admitted that every man in the country had a right to an adequate maintenance, whether he was idle or industrious, honest or dishonest; and that he ought to receive public aid in proportion to the number of his family. English people are frightened at the word Socialism. Who ever conceived a worse type of Socialism than this?
When the Parliamentary Commission of 1833 inquired into the effect of this system, they could not find words strong enough to paint their dismay. They found the poor's rates in 1830 had reached an annual amount of six to seven millions sterling; that in some parts of the country, nearly all the labourers were paupers; that the rascally idler was better off than the honest and laborious; the latter, one after the other, being driven to the conviction that the man who worked hard was a fool; they found, however, that employers liked the system, because it enabled them to give low wages, knowing the deficiency would be made up by the parish.
Never, perhaps, in history has there been a state of things so ridiculously immoral.
X.
Descending into Hell.
In that remarkable parable— where Jesus Christ sets forth the judgment of the nations—He gives but one test of righteousness, and that test turns on the absolute identification of Himself with the poor and needy. "Forasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto Me."
If this be so, what truer word can be said of the history just narrated than that "Jesus Christ has been evidently set forth crucified among us." And not only "crucified," but "dead and buried," His very soul being made an offering for sin. For that soul which awoke in the cowherd Cœdmon, which touched the conscience of Norman kings, which appeared in Plantagenet times as the prophet and guide of the people, which stood forth boldly in the fourteenth century to claim our common rights, and in the sixteenth century to recall a government of adventurers to its duty; —that soul finally gathered on itself all the penalties due to national sin, until, exceedingly filled with contempt, it sank lower and lower in the mire, uttered a plaintive cry and entered the tomb. Do not say this is rhetoric, each phrase represents various facts, and a still more cruel story has to come, for the soul of the English labourer has not only passed through those stages fittingly described by the words "crucified, dead and buried," but in our own age, it has "descended into hell."
When the war closed, the glory of Trafalgar and of Waterloo was soon forgotten in the collapse which followed the inflation of trade, caused by the extravagance which had spent £625,000,000 in order to overthrow the French Revolution. And not only were the people of this country saddled for ever with this overwhelming debt, but the Nemesis also came in an ever-widening estrangement of classes.
The war found the farmer and his men living and working together in a somewhat patriarchal fashion; it left the master a gentleman, the labourer a pauper. The latter, no longer an inmate at the farm, lodged in some hovel and took his meals at the alehouse. But the widespread ruin the collapse produced led to the consolidation of farms in fewer hands. The separation between master and men became more complete; financial success the one end aimed at—"buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest"—the one principle that prevailed. But such was the state of things that the masters were able not only to take full advantage of this law, but to go beyond it. For not only did one large farm require less labourers than the same area divided into several smaller ones, not only was the labour market abnormally increased by the stimulus given to human production by the Poor Law System, but that same system rendered the men careless of the amount of wages they received, since they knew the deficiency would be made up by the parish. Wages were accordingly given which, without this parochial dole, could not have kept the labourer alive. Seven, eight, or at the highest nine or ten shillings a week, when the quartern loaf averaged eighteenpence, simply meant wholesale murder. But the screw was put on gradually, and in a few years, when bread had fallen to 11½d. the quartern loaf, there were places, Northamptonshire for example, where the magistrates fixed the parish allowance at 5s. a single man, 6s. a man and wife, and 2s. each child, whatever the family earned to be deducted from the allowance.
As 14s. or 15s. was the least a single man could live upon when bread was still cheaper, it is manifest that the wages which have been given to the Agricultural Labourer during the greater part of this century—7s., 8s. or the utmost 9s. or 10s. have meant starvation during the lifetime of at least one generation and a portion of two others. For be it remembered that on these miserable sums not one person, but very frequently four or five have had to live. It was only done by reducing the quantity of bread, bacon and beer, and taking in their place gruel, potatoes, suet and rice puddings, with decoctions of washed-out tea leaves. But even such fare was hardly possible under the varying prices which obtained during the Protective system. An old man told me that he remembered the time when the bread they had to eat was almost black, and so hard that they had to chop it. At such times, and perhaps many others, parents were glad on dark winter afternoons to fill their children's stomachs with a fluid made of hot water and coarse brown sugar, flavoured with a modicum of milk, and putting them to bed, get rid of their cries for food until the next morning. "No wonder," as Cobbett said to one of his labourers, "no wonder that you are all as thin as owlets, and that that son of yours there, who is nineteen years old, and is five feet nine inches high, is as you told me last summer, 'too weakly to do a man's work.' No wonder that his knees bend under him, and that he has a voice like that of a girl, instead of being able to carry a sack of wheat and jump a five-barred gate."
In Warwickshire I met two infirm men crawling like beetles along the road. After some conversation the elder of the two told me that he had brought eight children into the world and had buried five. What they died of he could hardly tell. Decline, one died of that, he knew—they called it "consumpted decline." Phthisis and scrofula, as every country practitioner has known, found its most frequent victims amongst this famine-struck race.
The degradation of pauperism is far worse than that of slavery, and of all pauperism none surely exceeded in cruelty this which fell to the lot of the English Labourer. Pampered at first, led even into a coarse luxury, he was rapidly let down until he was treated to such degradations as being put up to auction, and his labour sold to the highest bidder, or to being made to drag gravel carts like a beast of burden.
Left in ignorance so dense that probably not one in five could read or write, was it surprising that agricultural labourers should view the introduction of threshing machines as calculated to put the finishing stroke to their ruin? When a prairie has been dried up by a long drought the merest spark will produce a conflagration, carrying destruction over hundreds of miles; so it is with a popular movement, no one knows how it began or where it will end. Thus in the autumn of 1830, Agricultural England was panic-stricken by the news that the labourers were rising everywhere, destroying machines and setting fire to ricks. The movement spread through the southern, eastern and midland counties, and even showed itself in Cumberland. Sometimes it was a mere riot with an onslaught on some poor-house, parsonage, or manor-house, sometimes it was content with merely destroying machinery, but the most usual form was rick-burning. Night after night in many parts of England the blazing sky told that Captain Swing had been at his work.
In the roughly printed booklet from whence this mythic personage sprang, he is made to say: "I am not the author of these burnings. What can have caused them? Those fires," said I, "are caused by farmers having been turned out of their lands to make room for foxes, peasants confined two years in prison for picking up a dead partridge, and parsons taking a poor man's only cow for the tithe of his cabbage-garden. These are the things that caused the burnings and not unfortunate 'Swing.'"
No, these rick burnings, this machine breaking, these attacks on manor-houses and parsonages had in them nothing preconcerted. Men who in the morning had gone quietly to their work found themselves before day was out, part of a great mob, the infection siezed them in a moment, and laying hold of some pitchfork or chopper they hurried on to riot in the rector's garden or break up the farmer's machine.
The contrast between the tremendous energy displayed by the Government, and the extreme feebleness of the unhappy rioters, was suggestive of the great gulf between rich and poor. Neither had the least idea of each other's real power. The greatest general England has ever had was sent down into the disturbed districts to support the Judges in the special assize held during December 1830.
Three hundred prisoners, many of them convicts expecting sentence of death, lay in the gaol at Winchester. We are not told if the old cathedral city muffled its joy-bells on that unhappy Christmas morn, most probably with our characteristic indifference to sentiment they pealed forth the conventional—
"Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
Peace and goodwill to all mankind."
Anyhow the Judges did not forget to go to church nor to omit their lugubrious sermons to the men they condemned to death.
When on the 30th of the month the Court, met, the jury-box and the dock were filled with convicted felons. The three judges in scarlet robes, supported by Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, proceeded to condemn these poor rustics according to the cruel English law. They were brought up in batches of twenty at a time, and every one had sentence of death recorded against them. Six were actually sentenced to suffer on the gallows, twenty were transported for life, the remainder for periods varying according to judicial discretion.
The real nature of the crimes committed was shown by the youth of some of the offenders. In another part of the country a child of fourteen had sentence of death recorded against him; and two brothers, one twenty, the other nineteen, William and Henry Packman, were ruthlessly hanged on Penenden Heath on the 24th, whither they were escorted by a regiment of Scotch Greys. At the sight of the gallows one exclaimed to the other, "That looks an awful thing." "Brother," said the eldest, "let us shake hands before we die." The younger refused at first to have the cap drawn over his eyes, saying he wished to see the people as he died. Poor heart, he knew well where there was sympathy, and expected strength from the sight.
Terrible fact! it was only by means of these lurid flames, these black corpses dangling in the wintry wind, these English slaves sent to the antipodal hell at Botany Bay, that the consciences of the well-to-do ruling classes could be brought to the conviction that there was something rotten in the social condition of the country and that the ground beneath their feet was volcanic.
The Times newspaper for December 27, 1830, commenting upon the Winchester trials, made the danger-signal scream in quite revolutionary accents.
"We do affirm that the actions of this pitiable class of men (the labourers), as a commentary on the treatment experienced by them at the hands of the upper and middling classes; the gentlemen, clergy (who ought to teach and instruct them), and the farmers who ought to pay and feed them, are disgraceful to the British name. The present population must be provided for in body and spirit on more liberal and Christian principles, or the whole mass of labourers will start into legions of a banditti—banditti less criminal than those who have made them so—than those who by a just but fearful retribution will soon become their victims."
The Parliamentary Commission appointed in 1833 to inquire into the operation of the Poor Laws, declared itself horrified at the results of its inquiries. "The condition of the rural labours in too many districts was," it affirmed, "brutal and wretched; their children during the day were struggling with the pigs for food, and at night were huddled down on damp straw under a roof of rotten thatch."
A reform conceived in the hard, inhuman spirit of modern science was the outcome. I once read of a hospital nurse who, disgusted with the dirty habits of some miserable patient, dragged the trembling wretch half-naked out of her bed and forced her into a cold bath. Such was the humanity of the New Poor Law.
The shivering labourers, accustomed to their dirty hovels, struggled long with grim famine before they would go into the Bastilles, as they named the new Workhouses. For this title there would have been no justification if honest families could have avoided their use, but that that was impossible is proved by the fact that the ordinary dietary of the workhouse fed the paupers twice as well as nine-tenths of English labourers could feed on the wages they obtained.
On a bleak winter's evening in January 1846, the Wiltshire labourers held a mass meeting in a cross-road near Goat-acre. Standing on a hurdle supported on stakes driven into the ground, the speakers read, by the flickering light of a candle or the glare of a lanthorn, their woe-begone statements. One who had come twenty miles told the story of his struggles to provide for a wife and six children out of eight shillings a week. At last he applied to the relieving officer, who gave him an order for one of his children to go into the workhouse. "Now, fellow-labourers, is not one child as dear to you as another? I could not part with ne'er a one. I said to my oldest girl, 'You are to go into the workhouse.' She did not like to go, and then I spoke to the others, and then I had the cries of my poor children, which were piercing to my heart, 'Don't send me, father! don't send me!'"
Here we see the main cause why English labourers called the workhouses Bastilles. They lacerated their bruised souls in the only spot where feeling was left; the law tore asunder husband and wife, parents and children.
So these miserable people preferred to starve in their horrible lairs, called cottages. If you think this phrase mere rhetoric, study the Report of the Medical Officer of Health, 1864, and the Reports of the Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, 1867, and you will find that no phrase you can think of will be adequate to express the truth. Crazy, dilapidated hovels, shaking with every wind, vast numbers containing but one bedroom, in which parents and children, grown-up brothers and sisters, even grandparents and aunts and uncles, and occasionally lodgers, all pigged together, where a whole family had to be ill of fever and to lie in the same room with a corpse,—rooms through the ceilings of which the water poured, where the walls reeked with damp, where fever lurked in the saturated floor, so that the very accent of the people seemed to have grown clammy,—such were vast numbers of English cottages up to within the time that I began to study this subject, and, by numbers of pedestrian tours, to realise the truth with my own eyes. Charles Kingsley refers to these facts in his terrible ballad, "The Bad Squire," which I only refrain from quoting for want of room.
Every horror went on in such homes. The same loathsome crimes that startled us so in "The Bitter Cry" have been perpetrated in our English villages, and every now and then the newspapers have had to record some atrocious murder, or series of murders, committed in one of these slumbering hamlets.
Degraded by pauperism, harried by the game laws, brutalised by drink, maddened by starvation, are you surprised that such homes produced a state of mind only to be paralleled in an old-fashioned lunatic asylum, where people were kept in cages like raging beasts of prey? Some blessed angels have been at work all over the land restraining these poor devils, binding up their wounds, sitting at their bedsides, filling their minds with a hidden hope—a hope quite undefined, but for that reason the more vast and consoling. So you may enter these hovels, and find a resignation, a peace of mind, a trust in God absolutely sublime. It is the Spirit of Jesus Christ which we have driven to dwell in the nethermost hells of English society. But it is by such means He has preached to the spirits in prison—spirits from whom all hope has long fled—spirits lost to natural affection and all decency, foul-tongued and malicious, hating themselves and hating each other, apparently lost in this world and to all eternity.
Space fails me to speak of the innumerable miseries which rendered these miserable homes still more miserable—the toilsome journeys to the work, often many miles a day—the occupation of the mothers in the fields—the corruption of the young by the ganging system; all these causes assisted to destroy domestic affection—the one humanising influence left to the labourer amidst all his trials and temptations. When this was gone, there was nothing for him but drink, and this reacted on the home, and made its wretchedness still more wretched.
And thus the English labourer sank too often into a Caliban, whose sole enjoyment was to make night horrible as he rushed with whoops and yells from the village alehouse to terrify wife and cowering children. When the poor monster of the island of Lampedusa cries—
"Sometime am I
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues,
Do hiss me into madness! Lo, now, lo!
Here comes a spirit of his, and to torment me,"
we seem to hear the poor hell-bound rustic blindly groaning in his anguish, but not so blind but that he feels his misery to be chiefly due to that wily enchanter to whom, notwithstanding his vile brutality, he is indispensable.
"We cannot miss him : he does make our fire,
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices
That profit us."
XI.
The First Faint Streak of Dawn.
"Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre? And when they looked they saw that the stone was rolled away; for it was very great." From 1834 to 1872 is not a long time in such a history as we have been pursuing; but how great the change! Day had broken; the shadows were flying.
In 1834, the Dorsetshire labourers, among the gentlest and most down-trodden of their class, formed a Trades-Union. The Government caused six labouring men concerned in getting it up to be indicted at the Assizes at Dorchester, under an obsolete statute made to prevent mutiny in the Navy. They were found guilty of administering an oath which this statute made penal, and were sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. Notwithstanding a burst of popular indignation, these six labourers were transported to Van Dieman's land, the Government being so determined about it as to make preparations to sweep the streets of the Metropolis with cannon.
In 1872 the South Warwickshire labourers formed a Trades-Union, and though the example soon spread through the country, thus showing itself to be a far more formidable movement than the Dorset one, not a hand was raised to stop its progress.
Few movements have been less the result of premeditation. Some labourers at Weston asked for an increase of wages; one or two of the Wellesbourne men noticed the fact in a local paper, and, talking about it to a labourer who had been in the Black country, he suggested that the Wellesbourne people should combine for the same end. They were willing, but wanted a leader. They knew a man at Barford who they thought would do: he was a day labourer, but his soul was lifted above the clods. To Barford they accordingly went. The good wife was at the cottage door. "We want," said they, "to talk to Joe about forming a Union; other trades have a Union, and we don't see why we should not have one."
"You form a Union!" she replied; "why, you ain't got spirit to form a Union."
"Yes, we have," they replied; "only Arch must lead us."
"Very well," she answered, "you must tell him so yourselves, and he will do it."
They did as she said, and Arch threw himself heart and soul into the work. The first thing done was to hold a meeting at Wellesbourne. From farm to farm, by word of mouth, the tidings spread, and on the 14th day of February 1872, beneath a noble chestnut, which adorns the village green, the agricultural labourers of England shook off the fetters of ages. A thousand persons or more were present, and adhesions poured in so fast to the new Union then formed that the Secretary could hardly write the names. Notices were served on the farmers asking a rise of wages to sixteen shillings a week; the demand was refused, and the labourers struck.
But their faith and courage were not severely tried, for the agricultural labourers throughout the country took up the move ment, until the Agricultural Labourers' Union became a National organisation. The labourer had boldly marched into the social citadel; he was henceforth a citizen de facto, and to-morrow will be so de jure.
What had given the labourer courage to claim his rights? I will answer that question by the following narrative:—
It was a cold winter's day, and the snow lay on the ground hard and crisp, when an old man might have been seen trudging, staff in hand, to his "appointment" at a village in the depths of the country. Ben was a working bricklayer by trade, but he had a higher calling, namely that of a minister of Jesus Christ. The temple in which he was to preach had been an old cow-house. It was lighted by a few candles fastened in tin slides and stuck against the walls, and by a huge fire, around which a number of children were warming themselves. When he arrived the people were singing, so, joining in the hymn, he got into the wooden box which served as a pulpit. He could neither read nor write, but his knowledge of the Scriptures was so extensive that he always had a verse appropriate to the occasion. This knowledge he owed to his wife, who taught him to recite whole chapters. Janet was just dead, and this was the first time he had preached since his loss. He took for his text 2 Tim. ii. 7, 8. The sermon over, the children flocked round "dear old Ben," and an aged man, stretching out his trembling hand to him, cried: "The Lord be praised for what we have heard to-night!" The old man invited him to have a "dish of tea" before he went home, and the preacher left the little meeting-house amid many a fervent "God bless you" from the poor people who had heard him.
"I kept the kettle boiling," the good wife said to Ben, as he entered the humble dwelling of his host. "I know'd you'd be coming. So Janet's gone, aye—hoo's better off now, Ben." "Bless the Lord! hoo is," said Ben; "but it's wearying without her. Hoo says, a bit afore hoo died, 'Ben,' hoo says, 'thee'l not be long after me;' and then hoo says, 'Ben, Ben,' hoo says, 'tell us about Jacob's lather;' so I told her; and then hoo says, 'Ben, Ben,' hoo says, 'the lather's coming down, Ben,' and then hoo died. Five and thirty years hoo'd been my wife, and it's lonesome like now to be without her, for I'm an old man, ye sees, and my work's nearly done, bless the Lord! I've tried to serve Him more years than I served the devil—forty years this very night since I first know'd Him, and He's been very good to me ever since." His pent-up feelings overcame him, and the old man stopped to give them way. It was a solemn scene, those two poor old creatures out of their poverty ministering to the bodily and spiritual comfort of "dear old Ben." The dish of tea was drunk; and then, kneeling on the cold bare floor, Ben prayed. It was the last prayer he offered up in the presence of others, for three hours later he was found, with his head resting on a stone by the roadside, dead; a smile had overspread his features, and his face was turned upward as though he too had seen the ladder coming out of heaven, and the angels descending to beckon him away.
Many respectable people would have called old Ben a "ranter." I should call him a primitive Christian, for though I do not believe the poor in Judæa had fallen at any time so low as the English poor have done, some of the apostles were not in a much more exalted station than old Ben. Poor and ignorant as he was, it was men like he who woke in the dull, sad minds of his fellow-sufferers a new hope, a belief that there was indeed a Kingdom of Heaven worth struggling to obtain. The very ignorance and poverty of the labourers cut them off from knowing anything of the Gospel, even in its narrow English form. They were too ignorant to understand anyone who did not speak their language and think their thoughts, too poor to support any kind of ministry.
In the source from whence the foregoing narrative has been taken will be found, through a long course of years, the obituaries of Christian apostles, some of whom laboured all the week for a wage of a few shillings, and then on Sunday walked twenty or thirty miles to preach the Gospel. One such, having six children, for weeks ate nothing but bread, although he had five miles to walk daily to a barn where he was employed as a thresher. "Yet," we are told, "he sometimes so felt the presence of God that he seemed to have strength enough to cut the straw through with his flail." Believing literally in our Lord's promises, he realised their fulfilment, and in moments of dire necessity received help apparently as miraculous as that given Elijah. Nobody, of course, will believe this who supposes that there is no other kingdom but that of Nature. However, these things are realized by the Poor who have the least faith, "for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven."
These were the kind of men who prophesied in "the valley of the dry bones;" but, of course. Resurrection is no agreeable task to unhealthy souls. Like the sickly sleeper, who has passed a night full of horrible dreams, and has just fallen into a heavy slumber before dawn, the benighted villagers cursed the heralds of the coming day and bid them begone. They pelted them with mud, stones, and rotten eggs; sometimes threw ropes over them to drag them to the river; often sought to drown their praying and preaching with fire-shovels and tin kettles. In these persecutions they were sometimes led on by the authorities; and constables wishing to ingratiate themselves with the upper classes laid information against these poor preachers as disturbers of the peace. On such a charge John Ride and Edward Bishop were cited before the magistrates of Winchester, in 1834. No breach of the law being proved against them, the magistrates offered to let them go if they would promise not to preach again at Micheldever. Refusing to do this, they were bound over to be tried at the Quarter Sessions, and during the twelve days they were finding bail, they were kept in the same prison in which the victims of 1830 had been confined. I do not suppose that they had any idea of the dignity of their martyrdom, or how really they were being associated with the sufferings of Christ. For we must not expect the thoughts of even the poorest among English evangelists to rise above the level of nineteenth-century Christianity. However, no one can preach the Gospel of the Kingdom or sincerely pray that that Kingdom may come without helping to bring about a revolution of the most radical description.
But if the religious awakening brought about by the instrumentality of such men gave the labourers energy enough to claim their rights, the public mind had itself been prepared to admit their demand by an awakening far more widespread and discernible.
A great earthquake had taken place; an angel had descended from heaven, and rolling back the stone, sat upon it. Yes, we in England saw only the pale aurora of that Resurrection-morn, and little believed its import. We fancied ourselves a peculiar people, to whom a European Sunrise was only a matter of curiosity. But who that remembers the literature and the movements of 1848 but must feel, even if he thinks only of England, that he lived in a true springtime, when buds were bursting, and birds were singing, and rocks gushing with living water?
The streams have mingled now and widened into a river, which rolls on sluggishly enough; but no dam will be made sufficiently strong to stop its progress. The light has fairly broken, and though the clouds keep gathering, they cannot hide the rising sun. Already the pedestrian, wandering in various parts of rural England, fails to see many of the signs of the long night through which the labourers have toiled and suffered. The cottages are rapidly improving, and the labourer begins to look strong and hopeful. Give him power ungrudgingly, and he will in fifty years redress the evil done in five hundred—but on condition that he delivers himself not only from the tyranny, but also from the teaching of his old masters; that he worships "the Suffering God," and not "the almighty dollar."
- ↑ Sir G. Nicholls, History of the Poor Laws, chap, i, p. 45, agrees that the object of these laws was to restore the expiring system of slavery, a suggestion which Sir James Stephen in his History of English Criminal Law, vol. 3, p. 204, admits has much plausibility. Anyone who will take the trouble to read the preamble of the second Statute will soon see how wroth the upper classes were at the thought of losing their thralls. "Whereas," it says, "late against the Malice of Servants which were idle and not willing to serve after the Pestilence without taking excessive wages, etc., an ordinance was passed to which the said servants pay no regard, but considering only their ease and singular covetise do withdraw themselves from Great Men and others," etc.
- ↑ Re-enacted 7 Henry IV., c. xvii., refusal incurred three days in the stocks, which every town or seigniory was to provide under fine of a hundred shillings.
- ↑ Branding, however, was reintroduced by the 2 Jac. I., c. i, but then on the left shoulder instead of the breast or forehead, and with the letter R instead of an F.
- ↑ 13 Ric. II., 1. c. xiii.
- ↑ The highest price reached was 1s. 11d. during the scarcity of 1799.— Tooke's Prices, v. 77.