80 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



from doing so, though Canon Tuckwell in a famous con- 

 troversial battle fought down the opposition of his Bishop 

 successfully. 



In spite of the Bishop's inhibitions he did cut up his glebe 

 farm of about 200 acres into allotments, and after two years 

 he could write : " Already throughout the village I found 

 corn bags ranged along the walls, potatoes under the beds, 

 hams hanging from the ceilings wrapped up in old Reynolds' 

 weekly newspapers ; the housewives for the first time in 

 their lives facing winter unemploy without alarm. l 



Canon Tuckwell however by no means regarded allotments 

 as a solution of the problem of rural poverty. Far from it ; 

 for he became a convinced land nationaliser. A farm at 

 Assington, near Sudbury, Suffolk, was sold to some labourers 

 by the Liberal member for Mid Norfolk. It had a struggle 

 during the depression, but has managed to survive to this 

 day (1920) and I am informed by a member of it that a share 

 sold in 1899 changed hands in 1910 for 130. 



The discovery that the Act of William IV. applied to 

 ah 1 charity lands lies to the credit of Mr. J. Theodore Dodd, 

 the son of an Oxfordshire clergyman. An agitation arose hi 

 the House of Commons, powerfully backed by Mr. Jesse 

 Collins and Sir Charles Dilke, to bring in an Allotment Act 

 in 1882, which instituted the principle of compulsion, and 

 made the County Court and not the Charity Commission 

 the final arbiter. Mr. Howard Evans, who devoted a tre- 

 mendous amount of energy in getting up facts, was the real 

 author of the Act. This was successfully passed through 

 the Lower House in 1882, but unfortunately, the House of 

 Lords destroyed the validity of it by making the Charity 

 Commissioners the supreme judges as to whether land should 

 or should not be let. The land which could be used as allot- 

 ments under this Extension of the Allotments Act, 1882, 

 was by no means inconsiderable, and it was calculated that 

 excluding land allocated to Church, or educational purposes, 

 the value for purely allotment purposes would be 1,000,000.* 



Amongst labourers there was a strong feeling of injustice 



1 Reminiscences of a Radical Parson, by the Rev. W. Tuckwell. 

 1 Report on Charitable Trusts Acts, 1884. 



