6 INTRODUCTION. 



It is a reflection upon English literature that the history 

 of this class of workers, possessing the greatest English tradi- 

 tions, which has never failed to play its part in every national 

 pageantry of peace and war, with an ancestry as old as the 

 manorial system, should have been left to a foreigner to 

 write. Dr. Hasbach was the first man to write a history of 

 the English agricultural labourer. His work has been accom- 

 plished with painstaking industry, but it contains one grave 

 omission a record of the revolt of the labourers of 1830, 

 and for an account of this students should turn to the pas- 

 sionate pages of J. L. and Barbara Hammond's book The 

 Village Labourer, 1760-1830. He also failed to describe the 

 great lock-out of 1874. 



Dr. Hasbach's history takes us only to 1894. There are 

 certainly half a dozen pages which go beyond that year, but 

 there are no more, and these do not profess to be more 

 than a glance at the few succeeding years. 



Very much has happened in the life of the agricultural 

 labourer since 1894, the story of which I shall attempt to 

 tell in these pages. I begin my history at 1870 because 1872 

 was an epoch-making year in the industrial life of the agricul- 

 tural labourer. It was the year when Joseph Arch appeared 

 as a force in the industrial and political life of the country. 



There are two men who stand out as historical figures, 

 from the ranks of the agricultural labouring community in 

 the nineteenth century William Cobbett and Joseph Arch. 

 To understand the character of the English peasant ; to 

 understand Joseph Arch and his movement, it is necessary 

 to realise the character of his great forerunner, William 

 Cobbett, for what Cobbett sowed with his Political Register 

 and Rustic Harangues in the twenties and thirties, Arch reaped 

 in the seventies. There was much in common between the 

 two men. Both were skilled farm workers. Cobbett, 

 like Arch, was bred at the plough-tail. Cobbett's father 

 when a boy went out to plough for twopence a day, and 

 probably Arch's father performed the same skilled work at 

 much the same wage. Cobbett, like Arch when he came 

 home from scaring crows as a boy had to sup off bread and be 

 content with the smell of the cheese, as his granny would tell 



