PART ONE 



SEED-TIME FOR REVOLT 



CONDITIONS PRIOR TO 1872. 



THOSE of us who are not old enough to have any vivid 

 recollection of rustic life in the 'sixties and 'seventies are 

 dependent upon the imaginative writers for our impressions 

 of that period. When we were young the impression 

 these writers left upon our minds was that the English far- 

 mer was either a stern and just person, or a genial, hospit- 

 able man, fond of his bottle ; and the labourer, a submissive, 

 uneducated creature, with an inordinate respect for " the 

 gentry," and a giant consumer of beer and bacon. 



Though the farmer appears in many of the novels of the 

 period as a full-length portrait, an outline only of the 

 labourer is sketched. More often than not he appears as 

 one of a village chorus, for even in the novels of Thomas 

 Hardy and George Eliot, the villagers portrayed were 

 carriers, or " tranters," wheelwrights, publicans, small shop- 

 keepers, and dairymen or blacksmiths. The toiler of the fields 

 by reason of his isolation and unceasing hours of labour was 

 often deprived of entering into much of the social life of 

 the village. 



Perhaps the fullest picture we have of rural life in the 

 Midlands is to be found in the leisurely pages of Middle- 

 march, and of an earlier date in Adam Bcdc, with its 

 incomparable Mrs. Poyser. Middlemarch was published in 

 1872, and yet in it we get no intimate study of the men and 

 women who form by far the largest part of the agricultural 

 community ; no indication of an unrest leading up to the 

 climax of the "revolt of the field" of that year. 



Amongst the lords of the soil who shone like stars in 



13 



