12 INTRODUCTION. 



" We do not want to consume your time," he wrote, " over a 

 do/.en pages about Edward III dancing at a ball and picking up 

 a lady's Barter and making that Barter the foundation of an order 

 of knighthood, bearing the motto of Ihmi u>i/ t;ni nuil v pcusc. 

 It is not stuff like this ; but we want to know what was the 

 state of tlu- people ; what wi re a labourer's wages ; what were 

 the prices of food ; and how the labourers were dressed in the 

 reign of that great king." 



But Cobbett did something better than write history. 

 He made history. It was his turbulent vital force surging 

 through England in his day that swept away the worst 

 degradations of our Poor Law administration in rufal dis- 

 tricts, and that gave the Engli:-h labourer the status of a 

 man in place of a cypher in an endless line of dependents 

 waiting upon public charity for the right to live. No man 

 has pictured rural England as vividly as Cobbett has done, 

 and no one has fought more valiantly for its redemption from 

 a soulless feudalism which neither acknowledged the ties and 

 duties of kinship nor the right to freedom oi thought and action. 



lie lived through the terrible year of the Labourers' 

 Revolt of iS\;o, and the miluenee of Cohbeti during that year 

 which had so tragic an issue for the English labourer was so 

 great that " Cobbett , who spent his superb strength in a 

 magnificent onslaught on the governing class, might have 

 made of the race whose wrongs he pitiid as his own, an 

 army no less resolute and disciplined than the army O'Con- 

 nell ma.de of the broken peasants of the West." l 



Cobbeii's supreme effort was made in his seventieth 

 year. \Yiihin seven day< of the scandalous triad and brutal 

 sentence of seven years' transportation of the six Dorset 

 fa. nn labourer-, \\hose sole crime wa,s ihal they had 

 sworn lovalty to a trade union, Cobb<ti presented at the 

 Bar of the ilou-e of Common, a petition signed by u.ooo 

 persons. \\[^ hand lighud a beacon whieh bla/cd over the 

 whole of Britain. 



The next year -1^.55 Cobbett died. 

 Warwickshire lad but nine years old was 

 twelve hours a day for a wage of .}d. a day. Hi 

 Joseph Arch. 



1 1 he ri.'.'if.'/' I-al'J'-iicr, J. L. and Barbara Hammond, 



