12 INTRODUCTION. 



" We do not want to consume your time," he wrote, " over a 

 dozen pages about Edward III dancing at a ball and picking up 

 a lady's garter and making that garter the foundation of an order 

 of knighthood, bearing the motto of Honi soil qui mal y pense. 

 It is not stuff like this ; but we want to know what was the 

 state of the people ; what were a labourer's wages ; what were 

 the prices of food ; and how the labourers were dressed in the 

 reign of that great king." 



But Cobbett did something better than write history. 

 He made history. It was his turbulent vital force surging 

 through England in his day that swept away the worst 

 degradations of our Poor Law administration in rural dis- 

 tricts, and that gave the English labourer the status of a 

 man in place of a cypher in an endless line of dependents 

 waiting upon public charity for the right to live. No man 

 has pictured rural England as vividly as Cobbett has done, 

 and no one has fought more valiantly for its redemption from 

 a soulless feudalism which neither acknowledged the ties and 

 duties o f kinship nor the right to freedom of thought and action . 



He lived through the terrible year of the Labourers' 

 Revolt of 1830, and the influence of Cobbett during that year 

 which had so tragic an issue for the English labourer was so 

 great that " Cobbett, who spent his superb strength in a 

 magnificent onslaught on the governing class, might have 

 made of the race whose wrongs he pitied as his own, an 

 army no less resolute and disciplined than the army O'Con- 

 nell made of the broken peasants of the West." x 



Cobbett 's supreme effort was made in his seventieth 

 year. Within seven days of the scandalous trial and brutal 

 sentence of seven years' transportation of the six Dorset 

 farm labourers, whose sole crime was that they had 

 sworn loyalty to a trade union, Cobbett presented at the 

 Bar of the House of Commons a petition signed by 12,000 

 persons. His hand lighted a beacon which blazed over the 

 whole of Britain. 



The next year 1835 Cobbett died. In that year, a 

 Warwickshire lad but nine years old was scaring crows for 

 twelve hours a day for a wage of 4d. a day. His name was 

 Joseph Arch. 



1 The Village Labourer, J. L. and Barbara Hammond. 



