THE ENGLISH PEASANTRY.*
Ma. Haarn's book, while it is very interesting and very im- portant, is also somewhat disappointing. Because, though he calls it the English Peasantry, and says, in his preface, that it seemed to him "that a work on the English peasantry, giving, in a concise, accessible, and popular form, reliable facts," &c., "would be invaluable as a text-book," we find that it treats only -as did his little book entitled the Romance of Peasant Life- of that part of the West of England which comprises Somerset and an adjacent portion of Devonshire. No doubt this is the part of England where reform in the condition of the peasantry is most urgent, and much that is related of the Somersetahire labourer is doubtless true of the luckless brotherhood in other counties ; and many chapters of the book are of universal application, treating of the relations between landlord and tenant, farmer and labourer, Acts for protecting women and children and for supply- ing education, proposals for securing to the tenant the value of unexhausted improvements, of emigration, the future of the peasantry, &c. ; but the book, except in its first chapter, has not a word to say of the actual condition of the peasantry beyond the district we have named, and the facts which illustrate the arguments throughout, are taken, without exception, from the same district. The first chapter is a résumé of the reports of the Agricultural Commissioners for 1868-69, and of the Poor Law returns for 1870, and though supplying valuable data, is a The Englieh Peasaelvy. By Francis George Heath. London: Frederick Warne and Co. bare succession of figures, showing wages, cottage rent, and pro- portion of pauperism to population in all the English counties. We regret that this chapter has not been tabulated. Divided as it is into ordinary paragraphs, it is useless to the reader for re- ference until he has tabulated it for himself. We gather the following results from the table we have made. Somersetshire is at the bottom of the scale, and Devonshire only just above it, wages ranging in the former from 7s. to 8s., and in the latter from 8s. to 9s. Dorset follows, standing at 9s. Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Durham, mining counties, are at the other extremity, wages ranging from 15s. to 18s., show- ing how direct an effect the wages of labour in other immediately surrounding occupations, have upon agricul- tural labour. Lancashire and Yorkshire follow. Thus the field labourer's wage in England ranges between 7s. and 18s., and the average, taken exactly, is only 11s. 100. per week. From these wages, has to be deducted- the cottage rent, ranging from is. to 2s. 6d., but generally amounting to Is. 6d., and the same whether the wages are 18s. in Durham or 9s. in Dorset, so that the disparity in wages is not all, and the poor peasant of the south-west has, as we might expect, to take from the hand that offers so niggard a recompense in money for time and strength, as niggard a contribution towards the comforts of life, in the shape of cottage, fuel, or farm produce. Our table shows us further, what we could guess for ourselves, that pauperism is in an inverse ratio to wages. In the nine counties in which wages are highest, and range from 12s. to 18s., paupers average only 31 per cent, of the population (from 2-4 to 3-8)-it is worth remark that these are all mining counties-in the six where wages are only between 7s. and 12s. pauperism rises to 7-0 per cent. (from 6-8 to 7-2).
In this very same chapter, in prefacing the paragraphs which thus succinctly describe the wealth or poverty of the agricultural labourer in the English counties, arranged alphabetically, Mr. Heath seems to apologise for calling his book the English Peasantry, by observing that "although there is no doubt that the very worst phase of our agricultural system-in so far as it relates to wages, cottages, and to the general treatment of the peasantry- is to be observed in the West of England, more particularly in Somersetshire, the agricultural system in the West of England is, in the same general way, with few exceptions, more or less repre- sentative of all the English rural districts." Now it is so entirely "less representative" of the six northern counties and of the mining counties of central England, that it is unfair to class them all together in this way ; and it is unwise, because those who know something of the comfortable state of things in these prosperous agricultural districts, on being told that all rural districts are much alike, will treat lightly the accounts of physical privation and moral degradation that come to us from the unhappy South- West. In Yorkshire the present writer happens to know that in the purely agricultural districts, 20 to 30 miles from any large town, and many more from any manufacturing town, farm wages to men in the summer half-year are 15s and upwards, besides lodging and board ofthe most generous kind, including four meals a day, and meat of some kind at three of them, with unlimited supplies of milk, coffee for breakfast, and an equal share of the farmer's own sumptuous dinner on Sundays. Big boys are getting 11s., and eat more food than the men, as is the way with growing boys. Now let us look on the medium picture, taken from the balance-sheet of a Warwickshire labourer with a wife and five children :-" Wages : father, 12s.; son, 3s. =15s. per week. The week's bread and flour, 9s. 4d. ; one cwt. of coal, is. id. ; school- ing for childern, 2d. ; rent of allotment (1 chain), id; total, 10s. 8d- Leaves for butcher's meat, tea, sugar, soap, lights, pepper and salt, clothes for seven persons, beer, medicine, and pocket-money, per week 4s. 4d." And we observe that the rent has been for- gotten, so we may safely put the balance for meat, clothes, and these numerous sundries at not over 3s., that is, 5d. per day, or id. per day per head. We have yet to learn what the Somersetshire labourer at the lowest point of the scale can command, and we will not take the worst case, for the Agricultural Commission put down the wages here as from 7s. to 8s., and the labourer whose case we are going to quote received 9s. :-" Edwin II- was the occupier of the cottage (in the Isle of Athelney). He was a regular farm labourer, and he received for the support of himself, a wife, and eight children, all of whom I saw [says Mr. Heath], 9s. per week from a modern English farmer. The eldest of the children was a girl of twelve, the youngest was a baby of three months ; seven were girls, and the infant in arms was the only boy. 2.5 a year was the sum paid to the landlord for rent, and a little more than 7s. a week was therefore left to supply the bodily needs of ten persons, with the addition of a few pence earned occasionally by the eldest girl for willow-stripping "—that is, one and one-fifth of a penny per day per head for everything that soul and body require except the shelter of a roof. How is the wonderful problem of making both ends meet solved in this and in thousands of similar cases, if it is solved at all ? "Private benevolence was the secret," says Mr. Heath ; "a private gentle- man in the neighbourhood filled the kind and useful office of bene- factor." Let those who cry out against the demoralising effects of alms-giving ponder such facts as these. The demoralisation is certain, but it is the result of the maladministration, and not of the benevolence of man. A slight—very slight—amelioration has taken place since the time—two years ago—of which this book is speaking. The labourers' strike, the formation of the Labourers' Union, and the exodus of labourers from the south-west, initiated by Canon Girdlestone, have together created a rise in wages in Somersetshire of from is. to 2s. a week. There is a worse kind of demoralisation than that which comes of alms-giving in these suffering districts ; it is that which is engendered by small and crowded dwellings,—the word " cottage " gives too respectable an idea of the Somersetshire peasant's domicile. In these crowded hovels coarseness and indecency spring up as in a hot-bed, like fungi on a dunghill,—and who can wonder? One of these abodes, for which is. 3d. a week was paid, consisted of one lower room, and over it "a kind of attic, almost entirely denuded of furniture. There was a window on each side, but several panes of the glass had been broken, and the holes stuffed with rags. In this one small, wretched apartment, in some parts of which I could not have stood upright, the eight persons composing this family had to sleep, father, mother, and six children. The mother told me that at one time the family living at home consisted of no less than thirteen persons, who had all to sleep in the one small bed-room of the cottage." In some of these, to eke out the miserable pittance, lodgers are taken, room to spare or not ; and it is need- less to dilate on the horrors that follow such herding together of ages and sexes—of the loss of all delicacy, all morality, almost of all humanity. And the discomfort of these ruinous dwellings is as great as their dimensions are small. Mr. Heath tells us, of one hovel, that "the squalor of the place was indescribable. The tiny downstairs room had not even the -ordinary stone flooring. The ground-floor was literally the earth it was much more like a hole than a room." Every misery of smoke, and draught, and muddy floor, and penetrating rain—and darkness and cold, of course—is felt in some or other of these cottages, which, almost always, the owner declines to repair. And is not the labourer's work hard enough, even were he surrounded with every comfort of home? A writer in last month's Fraser, in an article on the farm labourer's daily life, gives a vivid picture of the winter miseries which he has to face, however great may be the comforts of his home :— " To rise at five of a summer's morning, and see the azure of the sky and the glorious sun, may be, perhaps, no great hardship, although there are few persons who could long remain poetical on bread and cheese. But to rise at five on a dark winter's morning is a very dif- ferent affair. To put on coarse, nailed boots weighing fully seven pounds, gaiters up above the knee, a short great-coat of some heavy material, and to step out into the driving rain, and trudge wearily over field after field of wet grass, with the furrows full of water; then to sit on a three-legged stool, with mud and manure half-way up the ankles, and milk cows with one's head leaning against their damp, smoking hides for two hours, with the rain coming steadily drip, drip, drip,—this is a very different affair. The logger (term used for the man who attends to the fodder) on a snowy morning in winter has to encounter about the most unpleasant circumstances imaginable. Icicles hang from the eaves of the rick, and its thatch is .covered with snow. Up the slippery ladder in the dark morning, one knee down upon the snow-covered thatch, he plunges the broad hay-
knife in, and cuts away an enormous truss then the truss, well bound round with a horse-hair rope, is hoisted on the head and shoulders. This heavy weight the logger has tb carry perhaps half a mile through the snow ; the furrows in the field are frozen over, but his weight crashes through the ice, slush into the chilly water. Rain, snow, or bitter frost, or still more bitter east winds---' harsh winds,' as he moat truly calls them—the logger must take no heed of, for the cows must be fed."
The too common indifference, often cruel and heartless, of the farmer towards his men, is another terrible aggravation of their lot. Mr. Heath gives us several instances of this hard-heartedness to labourers during illness, even when it has been caused by zeal for, or in defence of their masters' interests ; a hardness that stopped all wages, that would contribute no comforts, that made no in- quiries after the invalid, that even swore at him for idleness. The present writer knows an old cowman who has for many years worked on one farm ; his services are still so valuable, from his great experience in cows, that his coming is eagerly looked for ; yet he has never earned over 10s. a week, and now, though he
has grown very old and quite lame in his master's service, and suffers from disease in his legs and feet—brought on from cold and wet, and the hard cobbles with which cowhouses and yards are paved—he and his old wife are left partly dependent on the parish, because whenever he is too ill to work his full wage is deducted, and not the least help or kindness is ever ex- tended to him at such times. It is a great additional hardship that there are no cottages on the farm, and this lame old man must hobble painfully a mile to his work, from the neighbouring town, and a mile home, whenever he is well enough to go at all. And this is not in any way a singular case. The farmer is a gentleman-farmer of considerable property, and not worse than his neighbours, and stands well with his acquaintances and with the world in general. There can be no doubt, then, that Mr. Heath makes out a strong case for union amongst themselves on the part of the agricultural labourers, and for immediate and energetic help from without ; and we question whether any more urgent claim on our sympathies can be found than that of the poor farm labourer, whether we consider his severe bodily wants and privations, his biting poverty, and his partial but pressing dependence upon alms, or his state of mental and moral degrada- tion entailed by such dependence and such poverty, and all their miserable shifts. We regret our want of space for any remarks on the more general chapters of Mr. Heath's valuable book.
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