THE UPSTANDING CROP. 35 



Union), afterwards conducted the Labourers' Union Chroni- 

 cle, which gave the union a wide publicity and acknowledged 

 in its columns every donation sent to its treasurer. 



Though this historic meeting took place in the heart of 

 Shakespeare's England, it is doubtful if many of the men 

 and women who raised their voices or gave in their names, 

 had ever heard of their national poet. Certainly, we know 

 that Mr. Richard Heath on making a visit to Wellesbourne in 

 the same year questioned a baker's boy at Shottery within a 

 stone's throw of Anne Hathaway 's cottage if he had ever 

 heard of Shakespeare, and the boy said he had not. 



Mr. Richard Heath 1 gives us a glimpse into the cottage 

 homes out of which streamed these men and women of 

 Shakespeare's England. In a cottage he visited stood a 

 great old grandfather's clock which nearly touched the ceil- 

 ing. On a rack stood a number of plates of the willow pat- 

 tern. The walls were decorated with religious pictures. 

 The woman had worked continuously in the fields couching 

 and weeding, haymaking and harvesting, picking up potatoes 

 and cleaning turnips, for lod. a day in summer and a 

 is. a day in winter, working from eight in the morning 

 until five in the afternoon. The little children were often 

 left at home to mind themselves, and every now and then a 

 baby was burnt or scalded to death. " I have known 

 at least eight cases in which children left at home have been 

 burnt or scalded to death," reported a Medical Officer of the 

 Union of Warwick. " I have occasionally known an opiate 

 in the shape of Godfrey's Cordial, or Daffy's Elixir given by 

 the mother to the children to keep them quiet." A boy 

 would have completed his education at the age of eight years, 

 and be sent out to work in the fields scaring crows or minding 

 sheep from six to six, getting up sometimes at half-past four 

 in the morning. At twelve years of age he would be driving 

 a dung cart. 



Mr. Heath measured four old cottages standing in a row 

 together. He said they could not have been more than 

 eight feet wide and fifteen feet deep. Each contained two 

 rooms. " In one I found a woman with four children and 



1 Golden Hours, 1872. 



