178 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



labourers began to turn their attention not only to trade 

 union organisation, but also to a political organisation 

 independent of the two historic parties. Writers who 

 were interested in agriculture began to tour the country 

 making notes. Articles appeared with greater frequency 

 on the social conditions in rural England followed by a 

 crop of books which in 1912-13 amounted to a rural 

 literary Renaissance. 



Whilst Sir Daniel Hall was busy with his Pilgrimage of 

 British Farming for The Times I was making my notes in 

 England and Ireland, which bore fruit as The Awakening of 

 England ( 191 2) and The Tyranny of the Countryside (1913). * 



In the year 1912 Lord Ernie published a new edition of 

 his memorable book English Farming : Past and Present ; 

 J. L. and Barbara Hammond their Village Labourer, 1760- 

 1830 ; George Bourne his Change in our Village ; Chris- 

 topher Holdenby his Folk of the Furrow ; the Fabian Society 

 The Rural Problem ; Seebohm Rowntree and May Kendall, 

 How the Labourer Lives ; Miss Dunlop, The Farm Labourer ; 

 and finally in 1913 The Land Enquiry which supplied the 

 ammunition for Mr. Lloyd George's great Land Campaign. 



The crop was a big one, yet it was significant that every 

 investigator's hand found its way to the one upstanding 

 thistle which he grasped with unpleasant prickings, and that 

 was the lowness of the labourers' wage. 



The right agricultural atmosphere had been created and 

 Mr. Lloyd George was too keen a politician not to take 

 advantage of its favouring breezes. But of this, later. 



Labourers, who were existing on 135. a week with rising 

 prices, could not live on political promises, nor wait for 

 " Enquiries " to mature. Week by week, unceasingly, the 

 wolf was knocking at the door. In May, 1910, a strike 

 broke out at St. Faith's, Norfolk, which, though limitecl 

 in area, attracted a great deal of public attention, and was 



1 I might be pardoned for mentioning these two books of my own, not 

 because of the publicity which they had in the Press several of our dailies 

 praising or condemning them in leading articles but because many men 

 who have been farm labourers and are now branch secretaries of unions, 

 or organisers, have been kind enough to inform me whilst I was writing this 

 history of their indebtedness to these books. 



