The Years of Endurance (4 page)

¹
The great agricultural innovator, Jethro Tull of Hungerford, complained that serious farming was often made impossible by the independence and excessive conservatism of the English peasant. " The deflection of labourers is such that few gentlemen can keep their lands in their own hands but let them for a little to tenants who can bear to be insulted, assaulted, kicked, cuffed and Bridewelled with more patience than gentlemen are provided with.
...
It were more easy to teach the beasts of the field than to drive the ploughman out of his way."—
Horse-H
oughing Husbandry
(1731).

own freedom by opening new avenues to wealth. The tragedy of the enclosures is not that they changed the older basis of farming and land tenure, which was ill-suited to the needs of a growing country, but that they did so without making provision for that continuing stake in the soil for the majority which had made the English a nation of freemen. When the Parliamentary Commissioners offered a poor commoner a few years' purchase for his hereditary rights of grazing and turfing, they were depriving unborn generations of their economic liberty. This was forgotten by a vigorous gentry exercising untrammelled legislative power in Parliament and possessed by an enlightened if selfish desire not only to enrich themselves but to improve on the wasteful and obstructionist farming methods of the past. In their impatience they overlooked the fact that freedom—their own most prized privilege—generally appears inefficient in the short run.

At George Ill's accession half the cultivated land of England was still farmed on the old open-field system. But during the last forty years of the century, nearly three million acres were subjected to Enclosure Acts and at an ever-accelerating rate. The shadow of an acquisitive society was falling fast on the old world of status and inalienable peasant right. The loss in general social prosperity of an enclosed village was as marked as the ground landlord's gain in freeing his land from antiquated restrictions. In the former, farms were few and large. In the latter, the small farmer still predominated. In one typical enclosed village the labourer's wages had dropped to
7
/-
a week and poor rates had risen to
5/2
in the pound: in an unenclosed village a few miles away a labourer could earn from
1/3
to
1
/6d
day at piece rates as well as the perquisites— butter, eggs, cheese, milk, poultry and fuel—of his common rights, while poor rates were only
3 /4d
.

In the decade before the start of the great wars the new rural poverty had still not banished good living from a great and perhaps the greater part of rural England. Coming home through Hampshire after foreign travel, George Rose in
1783
sought refuge from a shower in a small public-house, " the extreme neatness of which I could not help contrasting with the dirt and inconvenience of the

¹
The comparison is taken from the North Buckinghamshire villages of Winslow, enclosed in 1766, and Maid's Morton, still unenclosed in 1800. —Fremantle, I, 33.

houses by the roads on the Continent. The parlour in which the family were going to sit down to dinner was as clean and neat as possible; and on the table were a nice piece of roasted beef and a plum pudding—articles I had not seen for a long time." He would have seen them at the same hour in the corresponding place in most English parishes.

For, though decline and decay had set in, the average eighteenth-century village had not yet become a rigid community with a sprinkling of gentry and tenant farmers and a mass of landless labourers. It was still a
little
microcosm of the greater England of which it was a part, whose members included every social type from the squire who administered the law to the barber who cupped veins and drew the rustic tooth. Here was the blacksmith whose smithy was at once the ironmongery of the community and the wayside repair-station of an equestrian age, the wheelwright with his cunning craft, the clockmaker, the tailor seeking orders from door to door, the upholsterer, glazier, miller, cobbler, farrier, maltster, reddleman and tranter. Arthur Young, writing in
1789
,
enumerated in a Norfolk parish of
231
families
38
husbandmen,
26
spinners,
12
farmers,
12
publicans,
8
carpenters, with a total of
57
different classes of employment. Here was a closely-associated community rich in diversity, and because in diversity in vital and self-renewing life.

Such employments were intricately interwoven. The farrier, the miller and the maltster generally also held or rented farms; each village craftsman had his garden and, in an unenclosed village, his holding in the common fields. Few were solely dependent on their craft. The rustic world, by geographical measure, was narrow, but there was choice in it. In many counties a subsidiary form of employment was afforded by the cloth industry, then scattered throughout the rural counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon. Like other local crafts such as the cottage lace industry and straw plaiting of Buckinghamshire, it afforded domestic occupation and employment not only to men but to women and children, endowing every member of the family with a measure of independence. The wealth thus acquired and diffused, as Wilberforce said, was not obtained at the expense of domestic happiness but in the employment of it. Such trades had their ups and downs, and with the rapid expansion of machinery it was soon to be mostly downs. But in the last decade before the great war, the weavers of the North Country were doing well, often employing journeymen and apprentices in addition to their families. The new mechanical spinning frames gave them cheap and plentiful supplies of yarn. They enjoyed well-furnished dwellings bright with clocks, prints, mahogany furniture and Staffordshire ware, and plenty of butcher's meat, oatmeal and potatoes cooked as only the housewives of the North know how.

Good fare was still regarded as the Englishman's birthright. In many counties a gallon of beer a day was not thought an excessive allowance for a working man. Men still lived on the fresh fruits of the earth they tilled: the germ of the wheat remained in the bread, the waste of man and beast went back into the soil and the healthy cycle of nature was unbroken. Every substantial cottage had its flitches of home-cured bacon hanging from the smoky beam and its copper for brewing ale. Eggs, geese, poultry and rabbits abounded, though the wild game which in earlier days had come easily to the peasant's pot was disappearing with enclosures and the growing passion of the rich for the chase. But although a term was being set to all this prosperity and a stormier horizon lay in the path of the poor, the age of comparative rustic plenty lingered into the 'eighties of the Hanoverian century. Rochefoucauld in
1784
noted how much greater the consumption of meat was in England than in any other country and even claimed that in East Anglia the labourer enjoyed butcher's meat every day.
¹
This was almost certainly an exaggeration: but in France such a claim would have seemed fantastic.

How much well-to-do folk contrived to eat staggers the modern imagination. With transport still predominantly dependent on the beast and the soft cart-track, the bulk of what was raised could only be consumed locally. Every place and season had its own peculiar delicacies. Our stout forebears, reckless of pot-belly and rubicund countenance, took care that they were not wasted. " My dinner (I love to repeat good ones)," wrote John Byng over his slippered ease in his inn at nightfall, " consisted of spitchcock'd eel, roasted pidgeons, a loyn of pork roasted, with tarts, jellies and custards."

¹
On one of Coke of Holkham's farms he was told that the harvesters had meat three times a day and as much small beer as they could drink.—
Roche
foucauld,
230.

Woodforde, a Norfolk parson with a modest living, entertained his neighbours to such fare as " fish and oyster sauce, a nice piece of boiled beef, a fine neck of pork roasted and apple sauce, some hashed turkey, mutton stakes, salad, etc., a wild duck roasted, fried rabbits, a plumb pudding and some tardets, desert, some olives, nuts, almonds and raisins and apples." " The whole company," he added apologetically, " was pleased with their dinner, and considering we had not above three hours' notice of their coming, we did very well in that short time." Nor was such feasting confined to the days when the good parson entertained. He and his niece Nancy, and one can be sure his domestics below stairs, did themselves almost equally well on ordinary days. " We returned home about three o'clock to dinner. Dinner to-day boiled chicken and a pig's face, a bullock's heart roasted and a rich plumb pudding." Small wonder that Nancy sometimes felt ill of an afternoon " with a pain within her, blown up as if poisoned "; that the parson was forced to complain after a somewhat restless night " mince pie rose oft"; and that itinerant Torrington after his inn fare found himself so frequently battling—with true English stubbornness—against postprandial slumber.

They drank as deep: even when it was only tea. Miss Burney's mother once made Dr. Johnson twenty-one cups in succession. After dinner, bottles of spirits of various kinds—brandy, rum, shrub —moved in ceaseless procession round the table. At Squire Gray's— " a fine jolly old sportsman "—the cloth was not cleared until a bottle of port had been laid down before a mighty silver fox's head, out of which the squire filled a bumper and drank to fox-hunting preparatory to passing it about.
¹
Parson Woodforde did not scruple to entertain five fellow-clergymen with eight bottles of port and one of Madeira besides arrack punch, beer and cider.

It was the hallmark of your true Englishman that he " loved his can of flip." In London alone there were more than five thousand licensed houses within the Bills of Mortality. From the Royal Family to the poor labourer " being in beer "—a state so habitual that it was ordinarily held to excuse almost any excess
²
—there was

¹
Dyott,
1,
17.

²
Mr. Newton, Secretary of
the
Royal Academy, dining with some friends in Somerset and being " a little affected by liquor," found his coachman and footman much more so, so put them into the carriage and himself mounted the coachbox.—
Farrin
gton,
I, 68.

a general contempt for heeltaps: the King's sailor son, the Duke of Clarence, whenever one of his guests stopped drinking, would call out, " I see some daylight in that glass, sir: banish it." " We m
ade him welcome," wrote Ramblin
Jack of the fo'c'sle, " as all Englishmen do their friends, damnabell Drunk, and saw him safe home to Dean's Square, Ratclife way."
¹
Even the livestock on occasion seemed to partake of the national passion: a clergyman noted how two of his pigs, drinking some of the beer grounds out of one of his home-brewed barrels, got so drunk that they were not able to stand and remained like dead things all night: " I never saw pigs so drunk in my life."

Foreigners, less blessed with plenty, were profoundly impressed, if sometimes a little appalled. All this exuberant grossness seemed part of the genius of England: these robust islanders, with their guzzling and swilling, were like so many pieces of animated roast beef with their veins full of ale. It appeared a point of pride with them—a mark of their superiority to other starveling nations—to fill themselves up. A farmer at the Wheel at Hackington Fen ate for a wager two dozen penny mutton pies and drank half a gallon of ale in half an hour: then, remarking that he had had but a scanty supper, went on for the sheer love of the thing and consumed a
3
d. loaf, a pound of cheese and a leg of pork. " Sir," said the great Dr. Johnson, the very embodiment of England, " I mind my belly very studiously, for I look upon it that he who will not mind his belly will scarcely mind anything else."

The foundation of this good living was the wealth of the English soil. Few countries were more blest by nature: in none had nature been turned to such advantage by the cultivator. Since the Revolutionary settlement a succession of remarkable men— aristocrats, hedge squires and farmers—had devoted their lives to the improvement of crops and livestock. Bakewell's new breed of Leicester sheep in the 'sixties and 'seventies were said to have given his country two pounds of mutton where she had one before. In 1776 young Thomas Coke began his great work of transforming the Holkham estate from a sandy desert into the agricultural Mecca of Europe.

It was due to such efforts that England in the grim years ahead

1Ramblin’
Jack
(ed. R. R. Bellamy), 204.

was able to sustain the long burden of blockade and feed her industrial population.