2 INTRODUCTION. 



rather than to any \visdom on the part of the governing 

 class. Robbed of his common rights by a succession of 

 overwhelming Enclosure Acts ; ill-nourished in his infancy 

 and badly paid as a hired, landless labourer ; degraded by a 

 gang system of service barely distinguishable from slavery ; 

 deprived of any form of agricultural education ; unrecog- 

 nised as a citizen until 1884 ; the wonder is that the English 

 agricultural worker has been able to retain any of his 

 old traditional peasant-crafts after a hundred and fifty 

 years of divorce from the soil. 



Professor Thorold Rogers, one of our greatest authorities 

 on industrial workers, stated in 1878 that the agricultural 

 labourer possessed five or six more qualifications to the title 

 of skilled worker than did the artisan ; but no Government, 

 apparently, took the slightest heed of his words. Professor 

 Rogers might have added even more qualifications than five 

 or six to the title of skilled worker. 



There is technique displayed in even the simplest of 

 agricultural work. You can detect it in the green-ribbed 

 meadows when harrowed and rolled with unerring uniform- 

 ity, in the dark and silver-green bands visible at the season 

 of the year when the blackthorn flings its bridal wreath 

 across the hedge to May. It is discernible even through a 

 cloud of dust to the practised eye when the harrow follows 

 the sower, and no derelict islands of exposed seed are left to 

 tempt the birds of the air to descend in flocks and give 

 thanks for some prentice hand that cannot draw a straight 

 line with a team of horses. 



Spreading farmyard manure, digging an allotment, or 

 hoeing turnip-, may appear to the novice to be unskilled 

 labour. But there is skill and artistry displayed even in 

 filling a tumbril, and dumping down the manure so that the 

 field looks like a chessboard covered with black pawns, so 

 regularly placed are the little pyramids of manure. The 

 unskilled a>thcte would not know that this effect was pro- 

 duced by spacing out these little heaps of manure six yards 

 apart ; nor would he know by the texture of the dung if it 

 be " long " or "short," or how to spread it so that it docs 

 not he in wasteful lumps. The imaginative field-dresser 



