330 ENGLISH AGRICULTURAL LABOURER. 



even by those who have no children to care for, is not to be 

 condemned as an example of the perverse snobbery of the 

 poor. Its roots lie deep in the rank soil of social degradation 

 when poverty drove their mothers to work as field labourers 

 in gangs hovelled promiscuously like swine. In those 

 dark days to be a female worker in a gang was to be a social 

 outcast ; and the miserable pittance meted out to women 

 for milking cows or cleaning roots since the gang system 

 was abolished did not compensate for the damage done to 

 their health, their skirts, or their boots in wet weather. 1 



To work at haymaking, harvesting, and fruit-picking 

 when the sun is shining was one thing, but to get your 

 skirts saturated by wet sprouts or roots, or soiled by the mire 

 of the cow-yard, even for is. 6d. a day, was another matter. 

 The sensible introduction of breeches and leggings ; the 

 higher wages fixed by the Agricultural Wages Board ; and 

 the greater respect shown by farmers to women workers 

 on the land effected a speedy transformation. 



The farm -worker is once more taking his place in the 

 social life of the village as he did in the more leisured days 

 of a hundred and fifty years ago. As a member of a Trade 

 Union, of a Sports, of a District Wages Committee, or of a 

 Food Control Committee ; as a parish councillor, or even as a 

 county councillor, though still a farm labourer, he is a worker 

 who is able to hold his head higher than has been his lot for 

 many a long year. He walks, even on heavy clay soil, with 

 a more elastic step, and since demobilisation he joins in 

 country dances and impromptu concerts. He has expressed 

 himself in drama at Glastonbury of Arthurian legends ; and 

 across the melancholy meres of Cambridge, the deep-throated 

 fenman sings a song in which the cadences are in flawless 

 unison with life. His manners are not to be judged by the 

 conventions of other classes. The gentleman who is the 

 first to open a door to a lady is often the first to shut it in 

 the face of Woman. His manners are not- the manners of 

 those who live on terms of good-humoured friendship with 

 their wives. 



1 Even as late as May, 1916, a case was reported by the Somerset 

 Women's War Service Committee of a labourer's wife who was paid only 

 43. 8d. a week for milking twelve cows morning and evening. 



