The Age of Elegance (22 page)

These skilful, simple and generous-hearted men, with the gaunt bony frames, slow gait and stolid, patient eyes, followed husbandry in all its branches, including wood-cutting, hurdling, thatching and sheep-shearing. They were more efficient than any machine, for their exactitude was based on a sensitive knowledge of nature learnt from childhood. Their industry was prodigious. They worked from first light till dusk. In a day a good dibbler would sow a bushel and a peck, and a mower- cover two acres. They wasted little or nothing; a reaper with his sickle would cut the ears of corn with so short a straw that scarcely a weed found its way into the sheaf. In their spare time—often only achieved after a walk of several miles home—they kept pigs and bees and cultivated their gardens, those long irregular slips with gooseberry bushes, neatly tended vegetables and flowers, which Cobbett thought distinguished England from the rest of the world; "we have only to look at these gardens to know what sort of people English, labourers are."
¹

While their husbands and fathers toiled in the fields, the wives and children at home added their own contribution to England's wealth. They worked at the loom, made lace—particularly in Buckinghamshire and Nottinghamshire—buttons, string, netting, packthread and gloves, and plaited straw into a thousand useful and beautiful shapes.
²
In season they tramped into the woods or orchards to gather fuel, nuts and fruit, or worked in gangs in the hay and

¹
Cobbett,
Rural Rides,
I, 81,
idem,
I, 61; Clapham, I, 109-201; Eland, 21, 70-1, 127-8; Grote, 22-3; Howitt, 107-18;
Boy's Country Book,
83; Mitford,
Our Village,
7-8, 14, 43, 65; Newton, 188: Simond, I, 181, 184; II, 86, 293.

⁴
Bamford stumping the country in the summer of 1808 encountered in the fields north of Loughborough a company of young women with forks and rakes on their shoulders; the kind, merry creatures made a ring around him and danced, afterwards regaling him with brown bread and cheese and a draught of home-brewed ale.

harvest fields. In the pasture lands the unmarried women watched and milked cows, going out in traditional fashion with cans balanced on their heads and wooden milking-stools in their hands.
¹
Their younger brothers, in patched round smocks, took service on the farms at eight or nine years of age, learning their fathers' lore of life and working as long as their elders. For all their hard usage they seemed healthy and happy—"wild, nimble, gleesome beings," as Bamford, looking back, remembered: the "open, spirited, good-humoured race" of Mary Mitford's village, with brown and ruddy cheeks and merry eyes, always ready for a bird's nesting or a game of cricket, "batting, bowling and fielding as if for life" at the end of twelve or fourteen hours' field labour.
²
They grew up to be farmers' boys or "chawbacons"—bucolic, round-faced, hardy—the "clods" of whom the county regiments were made and who held the ridge at Waterloo. With their grey slouch hats, bright neck cloths and ribbons and proverbial pitchforks, they could be seen in the aggregate at the hiring fairs in the county towns or at the traditional farm feasts of harvest and sheep-shearing.

The farm labourer's work was supplemented by a host of rustic craftsmen. The drover with his lacquer-back curry-comb, the swearing carter, the shepherd with his dog and crook and eye watchful for tick, foot-rot or blow-fly, the wood-cutters, sawyers, hurdlers, spoke-choppers, faggoters, rake and ladder-makers of the forest lands, the village blacksmiths, saddlers, tailors, wheelwrights, masons, carpenters, glaziers, clock-makers, millwrights, carriers, reddlemen, shoemakers and pedlars who kept the rustic economy self-sufficient, were part of an army many times larger than Wellington's and without which his could neither have been recruited nor maintained. Many were craftsmen of exquisite quality, like Miss Mitford's humble neighbour, "famed ten miles round and worthy all his fame," whom few cabinet-makers, even in London, surpassed. They were the hard core of England, and her wealth rested on the fact that they were able and willing in their lifetime of unresting work to do so much in return for the food, clothing, shelter and modest comfort which in all ages, whatever the nominal money-level of wages and prices, remains the reward of manual labour. The nation which

¹
In the north at Keswick the girl who served the town with milk rode a pony with two large barrels slung on either side. Newton, 184.

.
²
Witnesses as temperamentally diverse as Mary Mitford, William Howitt, Samuel Bamford, the handloom weaver, and Mrs. Grote of East Burnham, the Radical's wife, paint the same picture from close personal observations in four different counties.

employed them received for their keep a
per capita
return in skill and industry probably greater than that enjoyed by any other in history.

Outside their homely circle, yet auxiliary to it, were the independent
tirailleurs
of the industry—the vermin-catchers with their skin caps, gaiters and leather bags, the samphire and herb-gatherers of the cliffs and moors, the twine-makers of the Derbyshire caves, the hurdle-makers of Cranborne Chase and the bodgers of the Chilterns, the dog-breakers and gamekeepers, understrappers and wild rovers who were all to be found labouring in their place and season. These, too, were masters of their crafts, like the rat-catcher in
The Romany Rye
who described his trade as the best in the world and the most diverting and one that was likely to last for ever.
¹
So were the raggle-taggle gipsies—makers of saucepans and basket-weavers—encamped with their ponies and beautifully painted caravans in the dingles and grassy rides: "Can you," ran their song,

"speak the Romany tongue?

Can you make the fiddle ring?

Can you poison a jolly hog

And split the stick for the linen string?"

A grade higher in the national economy were the yeomen—the men who worked and owned, whether by freehold or copyhold, their own land. They ranged from the great Norfolk yeom
an, ninety years old and worth
£90,000, whom Borrow remembered riding into Norwich in a white corduroy suit and snuff-coloured greatcoat, to the "smock-frock farmer" who entertained the Romany Rye on a holding of two acres cultivated with four kinds of grain—wheat, barley, peas and beans—and whose garden, pollinated by bees, was as full of scents as an orange grove. Such men knew how to keep themselves and their families self-sufficient, quartering their lands in husbandly rotation and manuring them from the cow, mare, foal, sow and poultry that filled their little yards, fortressed round by hayrick, beanstack, wheatrick and

¹
"When you see the rats pouring out of their holes and running up my hands and arms, it's not after me they comes, but after the oils I carries about me they comes."
Romany Rye,
226-7. See also Cooper, 18-19; Daniel, I, 23; Harris, 1-2; Eland, 42, 65, 74-5, 127-8fBamford, I, 33, 37, 71; Bewick, 10-11; Clapham, I, 66, 73, 169-70;
Cranbourn Chase,
59-60, 65-7; Grote, 21-2; Howitt, 112;
Lavengro,
XIII, 29, 240, 319-20;
Old Oak,
3; Simond, I, 199; II, 103; Mitford,
Literary Life,
177;
Our Village, 10,
13, 89, 155;
Sea-Bathing Places,
272.

orchard. They followed the plough and carted muck like labourers, while their wives handled the churn, pressed curd in cheese-pan, boiled whey, salted and turned cheese, fed calves, geese, turkeys and fowls, and, seated on a stuffed sack, jogged weekly to market, bringing up their children in the process and starching flounces and shirt-frills for their richer neighbours. On such holdings the whole family worked without cessation but enjoyed liberty and a share of the good things they created.
¹
They were most numerous in the unenclosed north, where the "statesmen" of Westmorland and Wensleydale lived in grey mossy stone houses on the hillsides; "to this day," wrote Bewick, recalling them in old age, "I can see their broad shoulders and their hardy sunburnt looks." Historically speaking, the yeomen were fast declining, but in 1815 between a quarter and a fifth of England's farmlands was still owned and cultivated by them. Their greatest contribution was the immense quantity of poultry, ducks and geese they kept on the commons and marginal lands; Cobbett saw ten thousand on a single common between Chobham and Farnham. What they did not eat themselves they sold to feed the nearest town, setting up their standings of butter, eggs, poultry and vegetables in the market place. Like their neighbours, the cottage labourers, they also kept pigs fed on household waste and surplus milk products. Theirs, measured by England's needs, was the truest economy.

With the agricultural changes which were uprooting them, the yeomen were yielding to the large tenant-farmers who paid the rents that supported the aristocratic splendour and display of the English capital and country-houses. Some of these farmed a thousand or r lore acres, employed sixty or seventy labourers and kept hunters ar
d
banking accounts—a thing almost unknown on the Continent, ^ihey laid out lawns and shrubbed gardens before their substantial farmhouses and had their daughters taught the piano. They would sometimes pay more for a prize-bull or blood-stallion than their

¹
. . The father, mother and children returning from the wheatfield, the little ones laden with bristling, close-tied bunches of wheat-ears, their own gleanings, or a bottle and a basket which had contained their frugal dinner, whilst the mother would carry her babe hushing and lulling it, and the father and her elder child trudged after with the cradle, all seeming weary and all happy."
Our Village,
73. Mary Mitford, though an educated woman, knew rustic life at first hand, for after her father's ruin she spent her life in a tiny cottage in a country parish. See also
idem,
32, 70-1, 73, 86, 125-6; Ackermann,
Microcosm,
III, 73; Bamford, I, 22, 71, 206; II, 21; Bewick, 30-1, 40-1; Cobbctt, I, 12, 50-1; Clapham, I, 33-4, in, 113-14, 183-4; Fowler, I, 260; Grote, 9, 21-3; Howitt, 108-9, 124; Jekyll and Jones, 114; Larpent, III, 68;
Lavengro,
120; Mitford,
Literary Life,
199-201; Newton, 184;
Picturesque Representation,
Plate II; St. John Priest,
General View of Agriculture of Buckingham
(1810); Simond, I, 338; Smith, I, 331; Woodward, 8.

fathers had handled in a year. Such a one was Thomas Bates of Halton, later of Kirklevington, who laid the foundation of his herd of shorthorns in 1810 with a cow bought for 185 guineas. To their landlords, though not always to their labourers, they seemed fine fellows "who talked of beef and ate pudding and drank like true-born Britons.'' Ruddy and broad of beam, in their blue tailcoats, Kersey small-clothes, top boots and waistcoats of crimson or yellow swansdown, they represented the very substance of the England of their time; John Bull himself in his hour of thriving. "Everything prospers with him,
^,,
wrote Mary Mitford, "money drifts about him like snow. . . . There is a sturdy squareness of face and figure and a good-humoured obstinacy, a civil importance. He never boasts of his wealth or gives himself undue airs; but nobody can meet him at market or vestry without finding him the richest man there.'' The same observer drew the greatest farmer of them all, as she remembered him in the closing years of the war at his massive red house at Botley by Bursledon River. "I never saw," she wrote, "hospitality more genuine. . . . There was not the slightest attempt at finery or display of gentility, and every tiling was in accordance with the largest idea of an English yeoman of the old time. They called it a farmhouse and
...
everything was excellent, everything abundant— all served with the greatest nicety by trim waiting damsels."
¹
The garden was full of wonderful wall-fruit, Indian corn, Caroline beans and water-melons, and glowing in the autumn sun with pyramids of hollyhocks and masses of China-asters, cloves, mignonettes and geranium. Over all towered Cobbett himself, tall, stout, sunburnt, with his good-humoured face and never-tiring activity, rising at dawn to mow the lawn with a giant's sweep and rewarding the first of his children downstairs and at work in farm or garden with the coveted title of Lark of the Day and the privilege of making his mother's nosegay.

In one of his outbursts against the social changes that were destroying the England of his youth Cobbett declared that, though no theologian, he loved any religion that gave men plenty to eat and drink. In this he spoke for his country. The English ate as though eating were an act of grace; the very sick were prescribed beefsteaks

¹
Mitford,
Literary Life,
199-201. See also Howitt, 87-106.

and port. They ate more than any people in the world, because they grew more. A Hampshire farmer at his wedding dinner fed his guests from his own land on beef, fowls, a gammon of bacon and a sucking pig, a green goose, river-fish, plum pudding, apple-pie, cheese-cakes, custards, home-brewed beer, home-made wine and syllabub. From the wholemeal bread baked at home according to some immemorial family recipe
¹
to the oysters which the seamen of the Ratcliffe Highway ate with such relish on their holidays, the English enjoyed the best of everything. Their seas afforded harvests as rich as their fields; the submarine plants round their shores sustained the world's finest eating fish, and cross-Channel passengers, wind-bound off the Kentish coast, would borrow lines from the captain and fill their baskets with whiting, mackerel and gurnet.

England's fat cattle were among the wonders of the age. On feast days the roast beef of Old England was eaten with musical honours, and legislators rounded off debates with beefsteaks broiled over a clear, strong fire and served hot, juicy and tender. Borrow thought that nothing in nature surpassed a leg of Welsh mutton, "rich but delicate, replete with juices derived from the aromatic herbs of the noble Berwyn and cooked to a turn." Yet in other cuts the mutton of many parts of England excelled it. The verdure that raised such meat produced also the butter and cheeses, the delicious draughts from the can which the Manchester handloom weavers bought on Sunday rambles from their loves, the milkmaids of Hoolswood and Gerrard-hey, the curds and clotted cream which Mother Hundrell, the Devonshire milk-woman, gave little Thomas Cooper and of which he used to dream in hungrier years. "Then we went to the dairy," wrote a young Englishwoman, "so fresh and cool and clean —glittering with cleanliness, overflowing with creamy «riches! And there I had the greatest enjoyment of my whole day, the printing with my own hands a pat of butter."
²

Every part of the island had its peculiar delicacies: Lincolnshire acelet and collared eel, Norfolk dumplings, Oxford John, Dee salmon, Pegwell Bay shrimps, Solomon Gundy, Banbury cake, Mansfield gooseberry pie, Isle of Wight crabs, and the cheeses—

¹
Walter Scott always insisted on a brown loaf made and cut according to his neighbour Mrs. Shortrede's recipe for making yeast, baking and cutting bread; a specially designed bread-barrel and knife were kept at Abbotsford for the purpose. Lockhart, IV, 194, 242.

²
Mary Mitford,
Literary Life,
116-19. See
Our Village,
154; Bamford, I, 109, 143, 154, 168, 188, 217; Borrow,
Wild Wales,
47; Cobbett,
Cottage Economy,
98; Cooper, 5; Eland,
12,
23; Fowler, I, 251; Howitt, 91-6; Lucas, I, 35; Simond, II, 164; Osb
aldeston, 30;Raumer, III, 142-3

Stilton, and Cheddar, Cheshire, Double Gloucester, Blue Vinney, Lancashire Leigh, York, Colwick, Wensleydale—which were among England's regional glories. There seemed so much to eat that many found it hard to stop eating. A Yorkshire squire at a- single sitting absorbed a plateful of haddock, another of veal, two of tongue, three of mutton, two of roast pig, a wing of duck, and half the tail of a lobster. It was not surprising that bulging veins, mottled noses and what was politely termed a full habit were common among the English upper and middle classes. Statesmen, judges, merchants, poets, all engaged in the national vice of stuffing; when Coleridge dined with a rich friend in the victory summer of 1814, it was on turbot, lobster sauce, boiled fowls, turtle, ham, a quarter of lamb and cauliflowers, ducks, green peas, a gooseberry and currant pie, a soft pudding, grapes, pineapples, strawberries, cherries, champagne, burgundy and madeira. Charles Lamb, celebrating the glories of roast pig, was writing for a ready public. Even divines shared the ruling passion; Dr. Paley, author of the
Evidences,
always ate everything on the table and finished with a raid on the side dishes which he called skirmishing.
¹

What there was on the table is shown by contemporary menus. Spiced mulligatawny and turtle soup, salmon and turbot set in smelts, saddle of mutton and roast beef, boiled fowls, tongue and ham followed one another at dinner parties with splendid, indigestible monotony. When the Reverend Benjamin Newton stayed with his wife and daughter at a Cocker mouth inn, they sat down with twenty-two other guests to dine on a trout, a salmon, a pair of soles, a fillet of veal, a ham, two boiled fowls, a round of beef, a loin of mutton, pies, puddings, gooseberries, currants and cherries. For supper they had roast rabbits, a round of cold beef, shrimps—a local speciality—potatoes and "etceteras," and for breakfast meat and eggs. The inclusive charge was four shillings a head a day. "My wife and Anne ate ravenously," the parson noted, adding that, while so long as they were moving such liberties did no harm, now that they were stationary the salmon, gooseberries and currant-and-apple pies were beginning to tell.
²

¹
He was described by a friend as "a great sensualist in eating." Farington, VIII, 180. See
idem,
II, 194; VII, 185; Bamford, II, 330; Brownlow, 125; Coleridge,
Unpublished Letters,
II, 122;
English Spy,
II, 98; Gronow, I, 217-18; Jekyll and Jones, 109; Leigh Hunt, II, 65; Mytton, 18-19; Newton, 122-3; Simond, I, 8, 22, 284; II, 35, 242.

²
Newton, 188-91; Fowler, 222-4. "Good apple pies are a considerable part of our domestic happiness," wrote Jane Austen. Austen, II, 424-5.