SEED-TIME FOR REVOLT. 17 



at any rate an official view of the conditions of the agri- 

 cultural labourer in England and Wales five years before 

 Arch's movement. 



We find the Northumberland hind then as to-day was 

 the aristocrat of agricultural labourers, and with him might 

 be plaxed the dalesmen of Cumberland and Westmoreland, 

 the men of Durham and North Lancashire. These men, 

 hired yearly, receiving continuous wages in fair or foul wea- 

 ther, boarding and even sometimes sleeping with their 

 employers, retained some of the benefits of an old-world 

 feudalism which the southern labourer had entirely lost, 

 receiving nothing in its place. 



He was much better fed than the southern labourer, 

 and when married and living in his own cottage, his wife, 

 instead of going out to work in the fields, stayed at home. 

 The daughter, though, worked out of doors at every kind of 

 farm work, from loading dung carts to driving horses and 

 working in the barns. 



Illegitimacy was rife, and this was largely due to the 

 fact that cottages were scarce, bad, and overcrowded, and 

 the hired unmarried man who wished to marry, very often 

 the maidservant in the house, had to wait many years 

 before he could get a cottage of his own. 



There was a certain disadvantage in being paid in kind, 

 which was a common practice in these northern counties, 

 in that when the harvest was bad the labourer was paid in 

 bad corn and bad potatoes. 



It can be readily understood that where " living in " 

 was the custom, allotments were not popular. The married 

 men preferred the use of a field where they could keep 

 a cow. The income of a Northumbrian family was reckoned 

 at 60 95. 6d. The children seem to have had an abun- 

 dance of milk and the girls who worked in the fields devel- 

 oped into a more muscular race than their sisters of the 

 south who were driven to resort to indoor industries for 

 a living. 



In Yorkshire, cash wages, as in the more northern counties, 

 were on an average 2s. 6d. a day for the man, is. for his 

 wife, and lod. to is. for a child, apart from harvest earnings, 



VOL. II. C 



