Country Life in the Poetry of John Clare

About forty years before the birth of the Poet Clare, (1793) there began in England a land revolution which by the end of the eighteenth century pauperized a great part of the rural population. Up until 1750 fully half of the land of England was worked in “common”, or in accordance with what was known as the open field system. This open field system means that there were special fields set aside for plow land. These fields were divided into very small strips which were alternately cultivated and left unplowed. Besides this plow land, there was a definite area of grazing land, known as the commons. With the coming of enclosures this open field system was abolished. (By the term ‘enclosure’ is meant that all the strips of any one man scattered throughout the holdings of the village were given to him in equivalent in a single, consolidated acreage, which he had to fence, ditch, etc. Or again, the term applies to a large district, as very frequently the commons, that was fenced in for the wealthy landowner’s sheep-pens.)

An enclosure began with a private bill introduced into Parliament—often by a wealthy landlord. This bill, showing the advantages of enclosing, was sent to a committee, whose leader or chairman might have been the selfsame landlord who had proposed the bill. After being considered and passed upon by the house of lords, which was in turn composed of wealthy landowners only, the bill was put into the hands of a commission to be executed. Such a commission, perhaps headed by the nobleman wanting the enclosure, descended upon the district and distributed the land according to their wishes.

Enclosures no doubt increased the national wealth immensely in the long run. Of course, no modern system of farming could survive in which an acre was divided into ten or more strips each with a different crop and different owner. And modern methods were just then being introduced into England, and were finding an obstacle in the old system that was almost identical with the Anglo-Saxon system of a thousand years earlier. But the change was too rapid and altered the character of the national life of England to such a degree that it wrought untold hardships for more than half a century. The people of the villages were robbed of the barest means of making a living. Just as today the small manufacture has no chance against the big one in his line, so then the small landowner could not compete against the wealthy ones, especially since new and expensive machinery and fertilizers were becoming more and more essential. The wealthy landowners improved their estates so that they might raise the rent and make a profit that could be compared to the profit made by the fast-rising merchant aristocracy. The rent on these improved farms was so high that the small farmer had to give up farming altogether. The commons were enclosed and in a majority of the cases went to the wealthy landowners who raised a better grade of sheep with heavier wool on the pasturage thus afforded: but the small farmer and in fact all the rest of the agricultural population did not have a place to graze a cow. The small sum of money given them for the loss of their rights in grazing stock on the commons and gathering wood from the waste, was soon spent for the bare necessities of living; and when this was spent, the economic independence of the laboring population was gone.

The enclosures were thus fatal to three classes of the rural population: the small farmer, who had at most thirty acres; the cotter or cottager, who had perhaps five; and the laborer who had less than that or none. The process of enclosing their allottments after the consolidation mentioned, was so expensive that it could not be borne except by a man with some capital to start on. The man who was called upon by the enclosing committee to promptly ditch and fence his little land, and who could not do so, was compelled to sell at whatever price he could get. The small farmer of thirty acres might possibly have borne this expense but he received no adequate recompense for his rights of common; and such advantages as he received from the consolidation of his thirty acres could not make amends for the loss of common rights. For, without pasture he could not keep sheep; with no sheep he could not fertilize his land; without fertilizer the land soon wore out. The small farmer then could emigrate to America, or go to an industrial town, or become a day laborer. Thus it was that a small, independent farmer in a few years became a laborer and in another few years was perhaps thrown upon parish relief.

The effect upon the cottager can best be described by saying that before the enclosures he was a laborer with land; and after the enclosure he was a laborer without land. For the inability to fence and ditch his holdings operated even more sternly in his case than in that of the small farmer. A great part of the land, moreover, that was enclosed was turned to pasture by the large owners, and the laborers formerly employed on it were discharged. Where fifteen men farmed, one man herded. The cottager and the laborer were thus made dependent on wages alone at a time when competition for work was beating wages down to a starvation level. The squatter was a poor alien on the land. He settled on the waste, built a cottage, and got together a few geese, perhaps a cow and a horse; and began to cultivate the land. With the coming of the enclosure he lost his common right; and thus uprooted he could start on a wandering journey of beggary.

Perhaps we can get an idea of the misery and universal wretchedness of the rural population if we quote a few words from an eye-witness, Cobbett, in his PARISH REGISTER:

“Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds; and the looks would indicate that their food is not nearly the equal of that of a nig. The wretched hovels are stuck upon little plots of ground by the road-side where the space was wider than the road demanded. . . . Yesterday morning was a sharp frost; and this had set the poor creatures digging up their little plots of potatoes. In my whole life I never saw such wretchedness, not even among the plantation negroes.”

The laborer, to keep from starving, often turned to poaching and petty thievery. But the noblemen had their parks enclosed against trespassers. Spring-guns were set up on the estates. Poaching offenses were made punishable by death, or at the least by transportation to Australia. The poor might seek charity from the parish pauper work-house. Or they might starve.

Many reforms to better these conditions were proposed, mainly because the English Aristocracy had just seen in a sister nation what a desperate proletariat could do if pushed to extremes of misery. The reform that was adopted goes under the name of The Speenhamland System. In brief, it provided that if a laborer did not receive a certain minimum wage (which was set on a sliding scale to correspond to the price of wheat), he was to be given from the parish relief to make up the set amount. Nothing was done to force the employer to pay this minimum wage; and since he could depend upon the parish having to pay it, he seldom did give the laborer a living wage. The result was that those who were not already paupers speedily became so. The scheme was the culmination of a series of strokes that pauperized an already impoverished nation.

The laborer was separated from the land by the enclosures in a greater degree than can be readily realized. Before the industrial and agrarian revolutions, Arthur Young estimated that out of a population of 8,500,000, the agricultural portion was 2,800,000, or one-fourth of the total number. In the second decade of the nineteenth century the total number engaged of farms and dairies was 1,300,000: that is not half the actual number engaged in the century before; while the proportion had sunk from one person in four to one in twenty-five.

The main features of this land change were; the open field system was abolished; the plow and grazing lands were enclosed; small farms were consolidated into larger ones; new methods and machinery were introduced; and the laborer was separated from the land. It was in this change of rural conditions that the poet John Clare was born and reared—in Northamptonshire, which was a purely agricultural district and felt the misery and universal pauperization that went with the agrarian revolution.

PART II The Life Of John Clare (1793–1864)

John Clare was horn in the little village of Helpstone in Northamptonshire, in 1793. His family, one of the poorest in the village, was enrolled in the parish pauper list. When the poet was seven, his father by the greatest privations sent him to a certain “Dame-School”; but the money could not be spared to keep him there very long, and John was hired out to tend the geese and sheep on the commons. He saved up his few pennies during the next two or three years; and again, at the age of ten, went to school for a few months. This was all the formal education that the poet received; for at twelve he was already working regularly in the fields. With hardly strength enough for the slightest labor, so small and weak-armed that his father made him a special flail to thresh with, he must have endured sufferings of body and spirit those years.

When he was thirteen, the reading of Thomson’s “Seasons” led him to believe that he was a poet himself. He had already showed a poetic temperament: as a very young child he had set out one day to walk towards the horizon, that he might touch it. As he grew older he was unusually credulous of supernatural things, fancying all kinds of ghosts and goblins in the swamps ready to attack him. Then, when he read the “Seasons”, he scribbled down on a piece of paper the lines which were afterwards known as “The Morning Walk.” He wrote other verses on scraps of paper which he would stuff into a hole in the wall. When his mother would find them, she used them for lighting the fires. The poet showed some of his verses to a Mr. Thomas Porter living near Helpstone, and was advised to learn grammar. The attempt to do this kept him from writing any more poems for several years.

During these years, Clare engaged in various forms of day labor to support himself. For a time he worked among the gardeners in Burghley Park, where he acquired the habit of carousing and drinking. He ran away for a few months but after wandering about, went back home to work on a farm. Later he found work at a lime-kiln; where, though the work was hard, he found time to write half a dozen poems in the course of a day. It was at this time, in 1817, that he met Martha Turner, the “Patty” of some of his poems, whom he married after many hesitations and differences.

Between the meeting with Patty and his marriage, three years later, Clare became almost a beggar, and put down his name, as his father did, on the pauper list, claiming relief from the parish. The money he had saved when he worked at the line-kiln had been spent on the printing of a hundred copies of a prospectus, which he called: “Proposals for Publishing by Subscriptions a Collection of Original Trifles on Miscellaneous Subjects, Religious and Moral, in Verse, by John Clare of Helpstone.” He intended to raise money on this subscription and get married. As the title might indicate, only seven subscribers could be found; and it seemed as if the poems would never be printed. But by good luck they fell into the hands of a Stamford bookseller called Drury, who sent them to London to his relative, Mr. Taylor, a prominent printer. Taylor saw the value of the poems, and announced them in the first issue of his new “London Magazine”. On January 16, 1820, he published the “Poems Descriptive of Rural Life, and Scenery, by John Clare, a Northamptonshire Peasant.” He attached an introduction that was almost an appeal to charity.