1921.] AoEicuLTrRAL Labour Early Last Centxry. 595 



luany cases, only the wages received during the last week or 

 fortnight were taken into account, and thus the allowance would 

 he paid sometimes to persons who were not in need. This 

 accounts for the fact stated by Thorold Rogers that there were 

 labourers who actually saved money under this system, but 

 generally speaking it was true that it was impossible to maintain 

 life on the allowance fixed in the years after the war. In this 

 extremity the labourers kept themselves and their families by 

 poaching. At no time since the old forest laws were passed by 

 the first Norman Kings has poaching been so important an ele- 

 ment in English life as it was in the first thirty years of the 

 nineteenth century. One witness before the Committee on the 

 Game Laws said that in a village of which he knew the whole 

 village poached, the constable included. The Duke of Richmond 

 stated in the House of Commons that one in seven of the crimin^^l 

 convictions of the country in the years 1827-1830 were convic- 

 tions under the Game Laws. The number of persons so con- 

 victed was 8,502, many of them being under eighteen. Cobbett 

 tells us that a gentleman in Surrey asked a young man who was 

 cracking stones on the road side, how he could live on half a 

 crown a week. " I don't live on it," he said. " How do you 

 live then? " " Why," said he, " I poach: it is better to be 

 hanged than to be starved to death." 



The Visiting Justices of the Prisons in Bedfordshire reported 

 in 1827 that more than one -third of the commitments durixAg 

 ihe ]ast quarter in that county had been commitments ior 

 •offences against the Game Laws. " In many parishes in tlus 

 county the wages given to young unmarried agricultural 

 labourers, in the full strength and vigour of life, seldom exceed 

 3s. or 3s. 6d. a week, paid to them generally under the descrip- 

 tion of roundsmen, by the overseers out of the poor rates : and 

 often in the immediate vicinity of the dwellings of such half- 

 starved labourers there are abundantly stocked preserves of 

 game, in which, during a single night, these dissatisfied young 

 men can obtain a rich booty by snaring hares or taking or killing 

 pheasants." It was in consequence of the steady increase of 

 poaching amid the great distress of the time that the Game Laws 

 were made more and more drastic until our code became in some 

 respects the most severe in Europe. 



Schemes for Improvement of the Conditions of Labour. — It 



must not be supposed that the governing class was indifferent 

 to all this wretchedness and poverty. The speeches of land- 

 'Owners in both Houses of Parliament are full of laments about 



B 2 



