THE AFTERMATH OF THISTLES. 79 



An official attempt has been made to prove that the 

 poverty was not so great at this time by giving the figures of 

 the reduction of outdoor paupers, but this is counterbalanced 

 by the increase of the number of indoor paupers occasioned 

 by the rigour of the new Poor Law. 1 Altogether the general 

 report on Labour issued by the Commission must be dis- 

 counted by the extraordinary omission of the evidence 

 of the labourers' representatives. 



In trying to compose a picture of the labourer's life in the 

 early 'eighties we must remember that he was still outside 

 the pale of citizenship, and that nearly everything that the 

 English peasant held dear, such as the opportunity of staking 

 out a cow, of being able to keep a pony or donkey or fowls 

 on a bit of common land, of cutting furze to heat the bread 

 oven, or fern as bedding for pigs, or cutting turves for firing 

 had been taken from him by successive Enclosure Acts, and 

 that instead of being able to produce much of his food or 

 acquire fuel close to his cottage door he had to buy nearly 

 everything, and more and more he was being reduced to the 

 position of the seller who has only one article to sell his 

 labour, and the price of this he knew was being driven down. 



Arch had long harped on the need of three or four acres 

 for every cottager. He said he could get a living from five 

 acres, and we can trace in Arch's statement the genesis of the 

 agitation which was afterwards known as the " Three Acres 

 and a Cow," cry of Mr. Jesse Collings. There were the 

 Charity Lands left expressly for the poor which had been 

 mal-administered. These Charity Lands were the crumbs 

 left to the labourer after the landowners had fed themselves 

 to repletion under successive Enclosures Acts. But even 

 these Charity Lands were not being used by the labourers. 

 Allotments, it is true, had been in existence for some time ; 

 but that was largely throughthe enterprise of a private society 

 known as the Labourer's Friend Society founded in 1834, 

 for the old Act of 1819 had become a dead letter. Charity 

 Commissioners were unsympathetic, if not hostile to labourers 

 using charity land ; and the country clergy even, when 

 they wished to let their Glebe land were often prevented 

 1 Vide Dr. Flasbach p. 293. 



