130 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



urging the men to demand a rise of wages. Having no work, he 

 applied to the landlord's agent, who set him to work to pull 

 down his own cottage and two others adjoining." 1 



" As long as there are squires," writes Mr. P. Anderson Graham, 

 in his Rural Exodus, " it is desirable that they should be encour- 

 aged to shoot. The keenest sporting landlord, when out with 

 his gun does far more than make a bag. It is his surest way of 

 acquiring an accurate and detailed knowledge of his property. 

 On the stubble or among the roots in the partridge season, it 

 becomes second nature to him to note the result of the tillage of 

 his various tenants. Let him be bogged in pursuit of snipe or 

 stranded in some miry field, and he will not easily forget where 

 the drains should be." 



This is a curious manner of picking up one's education 

 as a landowner. In the instance quoted above the keen 

 sporting landlord, in acquiring a detailed knowledge of 

 his property when out with his gun, must have considered 

 that there were a superfluous number of cottages upon his 

 estate. 



" In North Herefordshire," we learn, " some landlords take a 

 special interest in having their cottages kept in good order and 

 the sanitary inspector's influence is occasionally apparent. 

 Still many dwellings are described as ' not fit for a pig to live 

 in ' and one labourer complained that he had to keep a bucket 

 on his bed during wet nights to catch the rain coming through 

 the roof. During the existence of the N.A.L.U., Government 

 pressure was brought to compel several large landlords to make 

 very substantial improvements in their cottage property. But 

 it appears that immediately the active organisers of that Union 

 had left the district the repairs in hand were discontinued and 

 have never been touched again to this day." 2 



" As a general rule, the cottages of Berkshire were found to be 

 shockingly bad, and frequently the health of the inmates is 

 endangered by the proximity of open drams and stagnant 

 sewage. 3 



" It is in Wiltshire and Norfolk that the evil of tied cottages 

 is most severely felt : in the former county returns have been 

 obtained from forty-five parishes, showing 1,660 tied cottages 

 out of a total of 2,958 ; and in some of the villages every cottage 

 is under the control of the farmer or farmers for whom the men 



1 Amongst the Agricultural Labourers, 1891. 

 1 Ibid., 1892. 3 Ibid. 



