202 BRITISH RURAL LIFE AND LABOUR. 



from human neglect on the part $i those responsible 

 for the recorded condition of things/ Good water supply 

 is a characteristic of the county of Devon, which abounds 

 with springs ; and the goodness of the gardens is largely 

 due to the natural richness of the red sandstone soil ;./ 

 but absence of drainage, insanitary rooms, and the 

 general badness of structures for the accommodation 

 of man and beast, are due to the farmers' culpable 

 laxity. 



With rare exceptions the same tale was told of 

 Somersetshire : 



" A special complaint," remarked Mr. Boyle, the Com- 

 missioner, in his report, " and that I found urged by all 

 classes alike, was the deficiency of cottage accommodation 

 throughput the whole of the West of England. In this 

 county it is not an uncommon thing to find large families 

 brought up in a cottage of two rooms, sometimes even in a 

 cottage of only one room. At Butcombe a cottage was 

 shown to me in which a man and wife and family of little 

 children live, a mere lean-to against the wall of another 

 house, with open thatch, and the sky visible through the 

 thatch in many places." 



It may fairly be said that little if any improvement 

 in dwellings had occurred in the thirty years from 1843 

 to 1873 ; and the following brief summary of the present 

 writer's eye-witness experiences during 1872 and 1873 

 will probably be admitted as confirming this general 

 statement, if comparison be made between this summary 

 and the statements already extracted from the reports 

 of the Poor Law Commissioners. A previous careful 

 description may best, perhaps, be quoted verbatim 

 the scene being near a village in Somersetshire : 



" A little further on we saw a strange sight. Lying a little 

 way back from the road, we descried what might have been 

 taken for a pigsty, but for the fact that a man was standing 

 in its doorway, engaged in cutting up the body of a sheep. 

 Upon calling him out and questioning him concerning him- 

 self and his cottage, we were invited to visit the interior of 

 the latter. Unless we had seen it we could scarcely have 

 believed that such a place could exist in England. It was 



