Many histories have been written of the governing class that ruled England with such absolute power during the last century of the old régime. Those histories have shown how that class conducted war, how it governed its colonies, how it behaved to the continental Powers, how it managed the first critical chapters of our relations with India, how it treated Ireland, how it developed the Parliamentary system, how it saved Europe from Napoleon. One history has only been sketched in outline: it is the history of the way in which this class governed England. The writers of this book have here attempted to describe the life of the poor during this period. It is their object to show what was in fact happening to the working classes under a government in which they had no share. They found, on searching through the material for such a study, that the subject was too large for a single book; they have accordingly confined themselves in this volume to the treatment of the village poor, leaving the town worker for separate treatment. It is necessary to mention this, for it helps to explain certain omissions that may strike the reader. The growth and direction of economic opinion, for example, are an important part of any examination of this question, but the writers have been obliged to reserve the consideration of that subject for their later volume, to which it seems more appropriate. The writers have also found it necessary to leave entirely on one side for the present the movement for Parliamentary Reform which was alive throughout this period, and very active, of course, during its later stages.
Two subjects are discussed fully in this volume, they believe, for the first time. One is the actual method and procedure of Parliamentary Enclosure; the other the labourers’ rising of 1830. More than one important book has been written on enclosures during the last few years, but nowhere can the student find a full analysis of the procedure and stages by which the old village was destroyed. The rising of 1830 has only been mentioned incidentally in general histories: it has nowhere been treated as a definite demand for better conditions, and its course, scope, significance, and punishment have received little attention. The writers of this book have treated it fully, using for that purpose the Home Office Papers lately made accessible to students in the Record Office. They wish to express their gratitude to Mr. Hubert Hall for his help and guidance in this part of their work.
The obligations of the writers to the important books published in recent years on eighteenth-century local government are manifest, and they are acknowledged in the text, but the writers desire to mention specially their great debt to Mr. Hobson’s Industrial System, a work that seems to them to throw a new and most illuminating light on the economic significance of the history of the early years of the last century.
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Ponsonby and Miss M. K. Bradby have done the writers the great service of reading the entire book and suggesting many important improvements. Mr. and Mrs. C. R. Buxton, Mr. A. Clutton Brock, Professor L. T. Hobhouse, and Mr. H. W. Massingham have given them valuable help and advice on various parts of the work.
I. the Concentration of Power, 1
Comparison between English and French Aristocracy--Control of English Aristocracy over (1) Parliament; (2) Local Government--The Justices--Family Settlements--Feudal Dues.
Ii. the Village Before Enclosure, 26
The Common-field System--Classes in the Village--Motives for Enclosure--Agricultural Considerations--Moral Considerations--Extent of Parliamentary Enclosure.
Iii. Enclosure (i), 43
Procedure in Parliament--Composition of Private Bill Committees--Proportion of Consents required--Helplessness of Small Men--Indifference of Parliament to Local Opinion--Appointment and Powers of Enclosure Commissioners--Story of Sedgmoor.
Iv. Enclosure (ii), 71
Standing Orders--General Enclosure Bills--Consolidating Act of 1801--Popular Feeling against Enclosure--Proposals for Amending Procedure--Arthur Young’s Protest--Story of Otmoor.
V. the Village After Enclosure, 97
Effects of Enclosure on (1) Small Farmers; (2) Cottagers; (3) Squatters--Expenses--Loss of Common Rights--Village Officials--Changed Outlook of Labourer.
Vii. the Remedies of 1795, 123
The Remedies proposed but not adopted: (1) _Change of Diet_--Cheap Cereals--Soup; (2) _Minimum Wage_--Demand from Norfolk Labourers--Whitbread’s Bills, 1795 and 1800; (3) _Poor Law Reform_--Pitt’s Poor Law Bill---Amendments of Settlement Laws; (4) _Allotments_--Success of Experiments--Hostility of Farmers--The Remedy adopted: Speenhamland System of supplementing Wages from Rates--Account of Speenhamland Meeting--Scale of Relief drawn up.
Viii. After Speenhamland, 166
Prosperity of Agriculture during French War--Labourers not benefited--Heavy Taxation--Agricultural Depression at Peace--Labourers’ Rising in 1816--Poor Law Legislation of 1818, 1819 to relieve Ratepayers, compared with Whitbread’s Scheme in 1807--Salaried Overseers--Parish Carts--Drop in Scale of Relief for Labourers after Waterloo--New Auxiliary Resources--Poaching--Game Laws--Distress and Crime--Criminal Justice--Transportation.
Ix. the Isolation of the Poor, 207
Attitude of Governing Class towards the Poor--An Ideal Poor Woman--Gulf between Farmers and Labourers due to Large Farms--Bailiffs--Lawyers and the Poor--The Church and the Poor--Gloom of the Village.
X. the Village in 1830, 225
Poor Law Commission Report of 1834--Effects of Speenhamland System: Degradation of Labourer; Demoralisation of Middle Classes--Possible Success of Alternative Policies--Minimum Wage--Cobbett’s Position.
Xi. the Last Labourers’ Revolt (i), 240
Rising in Kent--Threshing Machines--Sussex Rising: Brede--Spread of Rising Westwards--Description of Outbreak in Hampshire, Wiltshire, Berkshire--Alarm of Upper Classes--Melbourne’s Circular--Repressive Measures--Archbishop’s Prayer.
XII. THE LAST LABOURERS’ REVOLT (II), 272
Special Commissions--Temper of Judges--Treatment of Prisoners--Trials at Winchester, Salisbury, Dorchester, Reading, Abingdon, Aylesbury--Cases of Arson--Position of Whig Government--Trials of Carlile and Cobbett--Proposals for helping Labourers--Lord King--Lord Suffield--Collapse of Proposals.
The Concentration of Power
‘Là l’aristocratie a pris pour elle les charges publiques les plus lourdes afin qu’on lui permît de gouverner; ici elle a retenu jusqu’à la fin l’immunité d’impôt pour se consoler d’avoir perdu le gouvernement.’
De Tocqueville has set out in this antithesis the main argument that runs through his analysis of the institutions of ancient France. In England the aristocracy had power and no privileges: in France the aristocracy had privileges and no power. The one condition produced, as he read history, the blending of classes, a strong and vigorous public spirit, the calm of liberty and order: the other a society lacking vitality and leadership, classes estranged and isolated, a concentration of power and responsibility that impoverished private effort and initiative without creating public energy or public wealth.
De Tocqueville’s description of the actual state of France during the eighteenth century has, of course, been disputed by later French writers, and notably by Babeau. Their differences are important, but for the moment we are concerned to note that in one particular they are in complete agreement. Neither Babeau, nor any other historian, has questioned the accuracy of De Tocqueville’s description of the position of the French nobles, from the day when the great cardinals crushed their conspiracies to the day when the Revolution destroyed the monarchy, whose heart and pulse had almost ceased to beat. The great scheme of unity and discipline in which Richelieu had stitched together the discords of France left no place for aristocracy. From that danger, at any rate, the French monarchy was safe. Other dangers were to overwhelm it, for Richelieu, in giving to it its final form, had secured it from the aggressions of nobles but not from the follies of kings. Tout marche, et le hasard corrige le hasard. The soliloquy of Don Carlos in Hernani contains an element of truth and hope for democracy which is wanting in all systems of personal government, where the chances of recovery all depend on a single caprice. It was the single caprice that Versailles represented. It was the single caprice that destroyed Richelieu’s great creation. When Louis XIV. took to piety and to Madame de Maintenon, he rescinded in one hour of fatal zeal the religious settlement that had given her prosperity to France. Her finance and her resources foundered in his hurricanes of temper and of arrogance. Louis XV. was known in boyhood as ‘the beloved.’ When he fell ill in the campaign of 1744 in Flanders, all France wept and prayed for him. It would have been not less happy for him than it would have been for Pompey if the intercessions of the world had died on the breeze and never ascended to the ear of Heaven. When thirty years later his scarred body passed to the royal peace of St. Denis, amid the brutal jeers and jests of Paris, the history of the French monarchy was the richer for a career as sensual and selfish and gross as that of a Commodus, and the throne which Richelieu had placed absolute and omnipotent above the tempests of faction and civil war had begun to rock in the tempests of two sovereigns’ passions.
One half-hearted attempt had indeed been made to change the form and character of the monarchy. When he became regent in 1715, Orleans played with the ideas of St. Simon and substituted for the government of secretaries a series of councils, on which the great nobles sat, with a supreme Council of Regency. As a departure from the Versailles system, the experiment at first excited enthusiasm, but it soon perished of indifference. The bureaucrats, whom Orleans could not afford to put on one side, quarrelled with the nobles: the nobles found the business tedious and uninteresting: the public soon tired of a scheme that left all the abuses untouched: and the regent, at the best a lukewarm friend to his own innovation, had his mind poisoned against it by the artful imagination of Dubois. One by one the councils flickered out; the Council of the Regency itself disappeared in 1728, and the monarchy fell back into its old ways and habits.
As at Versailles, so in France. If the noble had been reduced to a trifling but expensive cypher at the Court, the position of seigneur in the village was not very different. In the sixteenth century he had been a little king. His relations with the peasants, with whom his boyhood was often spent in the village school, were close and not seldom affectionate. But though he was in many cases a gentle ruler, a ruler he undoubtedly was, and royal ordinances had been found necessary to curb his power. By the eighteenth century his situation had been changed. There were survivals of feudal justice and feudal administration that had escaped the searching eye of Richelieu, but the seigneur had been pushed from the helm, and the government of the village had passed into other hands. It was the middle-class intendant and not the seigneur who was the master. The seigneur who still resided was become a mere rent receiver, and the people called him the ‘_Hobereau_.’ But the seigneur rarely lived in the village, for the Court, which had destroyed his local power, had drawn him to Paris to keep him out of mischief, and when later the Court wished to change its policy, the seigneur refused to change his habits. The new character of the French nobility found its expression in its new homes. Just as the tedious splendour of Versailles, built out of the lives and substance of an exhausted nation, recorded the decadence and the isolation of the French monarchy, so in the countryside the new palaces of the nobles revealed the tastes and the life of a class that was allowed no duties and forbidden no pleasures. The class that had once found its warlike energy reflected in the castles of Chinon and Loches was now only at home in the agreeable indolence of Azay le Rideau or the delicious extravagance of Chenonceaux. The nobles, unable to feed their pride on an authority no longer theirs, refused no stimulant to their vanity and no sop to their avarice. Their powers had passed to the intendant; their land was passing to the bourgeois or the peasant; but their privileges increased. Distinctions of rank were sharper edged. It was harder for a plebeian to become an officer under Louis XVI. than it had been under Louis XIV., and the exemptions from taxation became a more considerable and invidious privilege as the general burdens grew steadily more oppressive. Nature had made the French nobleman less, but circumstances made him more haughty than the English. Arthur Young, accustomed to the bearing of English landlords, was struck by the very distant condescension with which the French seigneur treated the farmer. The seigneur was thus on the eve of the Revolution a privileged member of the community, very jealous of his precedence, quarrelsome about trifles, with none of the responsibilities of a ruler, and with few of the obligations of a citizen. It was an unenviable and an uninspiring position. It is not surprising that Fénelon, living in the frivolous prison of Versailles, should have inspired the young Duke of Burgundy with his dream of a governing aristocracy, or that Mademoiselle de Lespinasse should have described the public-spirited members of this class as caged lions, or that a nobleman of the fierce energy of the Marquis de Mirabeau should have been driven to divide his time between the public prosecution of his noisy and interminable quarrels with his wife and his sons, and the composition of his feeling treatise on L’Ami des Hommes.
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