PEASANT REVOLTS 177 



but these and all other efforts were on the voluntary 

 system. The policy of withholding from the labourers 

 any rights in the land was steadily continued/ 



Even those who were most liberal in granting 

 allotments were opposed to any legislation which 

 would give the labourer the shadow of a right to 

 demand them. He was to be kept dependent, in this 

 respect, on the goodwill of his employers, who, as a 

 class, too often objected to his having land at all. 



Even the Statute of Queen Elizabeth, which re- 

 quired that every cottage that was built should have 

 four acres of land attached to it, had been quietly 

 repealed.^ 



In 1845 Mr. Cowper (afterwards Lord Mount 

 Temple) brought in a Field Gardens Bill for the 

 legal provision of allotments, but it failed to pass. 

 In introducing the Bill, Mr. Cowper put forward the 

 old arguments at that time so well known and so 

 fruitless. He referred to the time when, as he said, 

 "all labourers above the condition of serfs had land 

 in their own occupation, and in addition to this had 

 common rights over the waste tracts." Referring to 

 the voluntary system, he said, ** A great number of 

 non-resident landed proprietors did not take the 

 trouble to establish allotments." He stated his belief 

 that a generation would pass away before there would 

 be, by voluntary action, a general allotment of garden 

 ground to the rural labourers.^ 



^ No notice is here taken of a number of allotment measures passed 

 at dififerent times in connection with the PooK-law. 



^ Unrestrained by any measure of this kind, the speculative builder, 

 by erecting rows of unsightly cottages with httle or no land attached to 

 them, has destroyed the beauty and rural character of many of our old 

 English villages. 



3 Hansard, Vol. VII, p. 308. 



