92 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



1887, a sight which he contended marked the English peas- 

 ant as enjoying a " condition of prosperity " greater than 

 in any other country on the face of the earth ! l 



Farmers wholivedhard and adapted themselves to changing 

 conditions seem to have prospered through the depression ; 

 whilst the class of tenant farmers who rushed into farming 

 in the golden era of the 'fifties, 'sixties, and early 'seventies, 

 who occupied substantial farmhouses and hunted, those 

 whose sons and daughters despised the day of little things 

 the dairy, the henhouse and the orchard, went rapidly 

 down hill. They worked less than formerly, kept as many 

 servants, and dressed more extravagantly on their diminish- 

 ing returns. So much was the dairy neglected that we learn 

 of the difficulty of labourers' wives being able to buy milk in 

 the villages, with the result that the children were improperly 

 nourished, as their fathers were robbed of the opportunity 

 of depasturing a cow on a bit of Common land. 



The greatest social change noticed by Dr. Jessopp was 

 in the note of sadness which had settled like a blight on 

 every village, a sadness he attributed to the decay of music 

 and sports. Colour and music had gone out of village life 

 with the disappearance of the parish choir with its sackbut, 

 psaltery, dulcimer, clarionet, flute, bass viol and trombone. 

 In place of these they had the wheezy harmonium and the 

 well-groomed choir boys. 



" How has the deplorable effacement of our rural music been 

 brought about," he asks. " There is only one answer. " It has 

 been brought about by the general deluge of smug and paralysing 

 respectability which has overrun our country villages. And for 

 this I am bound to say the clergy and their families are in a 

 great measure answerable." 



Country clothing had lost its colour, and craft its individ- 

 uality. Black became the symbol of respectability. Village 

 wakes and fairs, dancing round the maypole, club dinners 

 and wrestling matches were denounced from a thousand 

 pulpits. 



" We have become so disgustingly orderly, enlightened, and 

 decently respectable that a farm labourer is a heavy, sancti- 



1 A ready, by Augustus Jessopp. 



