20 
Land & Water 
April 25, 1 9 18 
History ot the Rural Labourer :^By Jason 
WHEN Englishmenjwere full of the triumphs of 
the agrarian revolution, Sismondi came over 
on a visit. He had expected to find the 
labourers working on the reclaimed commons 
with the zeal and energy of peasants, and, 
instt ad, he found them in the workhouse, or breaking stones 
on the roads, or serving what looked like a penal sentence as 
roundsmen. For when the practice of paying allowances 
out of the rates spread over the country, the labourer became 
a kind of overseers' property. No farmer paid proper wages, 
but every fanner contributed to the rates, and almost all 
labourers were in part maintained out of the rates. The 
labourer was thus regarded as a kind of parish serf at the 
disposal of any employer sanctioned by the overseers, and 
passed from one farmer to another without any reference to 
his own wishes. Sismondi coming upon this world, of which 
he had heard such glowing rumours, asked a pertinent ques- 
tion : "You tell us you have improved the land ; but^what 
have you done with the labourers ? " 
'The Agrarian Problerrn 
Sismondi's question goes to the root of the agrarian prob- 
lem. Nobody is satisfied with the position of the agri- 
cultural labourer or the life of the ordinary English village. 
Jfien of public spirit in all classes have been groping about 
for remedies for generations. But the truth is that agricul- 
tural life has been seen in a false perspective ever since the 
era of the enclosures, and it is that false view which has 
vitiated all our efforts at reform. Nobody has described 
the situation more accurately or more vividly than Mr. 
Prothero in the concluding pages of his book on English 
Farming : Past and Present : 
Under the older system peasants were rarely without 
some real stake in the agricultural community ; they were 
not members of an isolated class ; they were not exclusively 
dependent on competitive wages for their homes and liveli- 
hood ; they were seldom without opportunities of bettering 
their positions ; they had not before them the unending 
vista of a gradual process of physical exhaustion in another's 
service. Under the modem commercial system the condi- 
tions from which pesisants were generally free are those 
under which the average agricultural labourer Uves, though 
exceptional men may struggle out of their tyranny. They 
have no property but their labour. Even of that one 
possession, such are the exigencies of their position, they 
are not the masters. If they fail to sell it where they are 
now living, or if they lose employment by a change in the 
ownership or occupation of the land on which they work, 
they must move on. Their home is only secure to them 
from week to week. . . . Agricultural labourers believe 
that there is Ufe in the towns ; they know that in the 
villages there is none in which they share as a right, or 
which for them has any meaning. They may be indis- 
pensable, but it is only as wheels in another man's money- 
making. 
The history of the labourer is summed up in the first and 
last sentences of this passage. The Agrarian Revolution, 
like the Industrial Revolution and the philosophy that it 
taught, reduced men and women to the category of instru- 
ments. We have seen in the case of the industrial worker 
the consequences of a creed which beUeved that society had 
to accommodate itself as its first duty to the needs and 
demands of capital. It was supposed that a nation's pros- 
perity depended on the encouragement it gave to capital, 
and that as long as industry earned high profits and the 
State put no restrictions on its power, men and women 
would secure as much happiness and liberty as this imperfect 
world of ours allowed. The whole life of industrial society 
was branded with this doctrine. The Lancashire town 
to-day is not the town of a society with leisure, with tastes, 
with any play of mind and fancy. It is the settlement of a 
population only thought of as workers, as the servants of 
the industrial system. 
The same thing has happened to the village and the village 
population. . At the beginning of the nineteenth century 
there was boundless optimism about the expansion of agri- 
culture. This in itself was not surprising, for it was a time 
of xemarkable achievements and progress. Every year from 
1778 to 1821 Thomas Coke, the great Norfolk Whig, used to 
collect celebrities from all parts of the world at his annual 
sheep-shearing. This event grew out of his custom of 
bringing all his tenants together to talk over agricultural 
topics and discuss discoveries and suggestions. As the fame 
of Coke's farming spread over the world, these annual 
shearings developed into a great pageant attended b)- rejire- 
sentatives from all rcuntries who came to admire Coke's 
farms and =tock, and to discuss with him and with Arthur 
Young and the chief scientists of the day the virtues of 
this or that fertiliser and this or that breed. The ambas- 
sadors of foreign countries used to attend, and nobody who 
valued his reputation as an agriculturist faikd to witness 
one of these famous gatherings. [ 
Coke was the most celebrated of a class of improving 
landowners who vied with each other in promoting scientific 
agriculture. His position in the agrarian revolution may be 
compared roughly with that of Arkwright in the industrial 
revolution. He supphed brains as well as capital. He made 
scientific farming the fashion in a country which had been 
conspicuous for its attachment to obsolete methods. He 
introduced Southdowns in place of the Norfolk sheep; he 
set the example in planting and in heavy stock farms ; he 
taught the wonders of marhng and draining, and he con- 
verted Norfolk from a corn-importing county into one of 
the chief corn-producing counties of England. A large part 
of the estate that he created was originally composed of 
salt marshes on the coast of the North Sea, and it had been 
believed that wheat would not grow between Holkham and 
King 's Lynn. 
Coke, unhke most landlords of his time, , retused to 
rent his tenants on their own improvements, and gave them 
the relative security of long leases. He represented the best 
aspect of the new system. Cobbett, whose appreciation of 
the moral consequences of enclosures as a general policy 
made him a bitter critic of the landlords of his day, noted 
Coke's great popularity in his own county. "Every one," 
he said in the diary of his rural rides, "made use of the 
expression towards him which affectionate children use 
towards their parents." 
Coke's generation drew from the spectacle ot the jiew 
agriculture two morals. The first was the moral that in 
agriculture, as in industry, the one test was the test of pro- 
duction. The second that development of agriculture 
demanded the capital and the personal interest of the large 
landowners, and that therefore the most important thing 
was to make country life attractive to that class. These 
two views are illustrated in the legislation of the time ; the 
first in the wild and "uncontroUedFprocess of enclosure, the 
second in the passing of game laws that can only be described 
as barbarous. * . 
Game Lawsi 
In 1816 an^Act'was passed of which Romilly said that[ no 
parallel to it could be found in the laws of any country in thd 
world. By that Act a person who was found at night with 
a net for poaching in any forest or park could be punished 
by transportation for seven years. Next year Parliament 
modified the law to the extent of hmiting this punishment 
to persons found with guns or bludgeons. When anybody 
tried to reform the game laws he was met with the question : 
"Do you wish to drive the country gentlemen off their- 
estates ? " Y'et these laws were playing an immense part 
in disturbing the peace of the countryside. In three years, 
between 1827 and 1830, 8,500 persons were convicted under 
these laws, many of them to be transported for hfe. 
As the labourers' condition grew more and more desperate, 
poaching as the alternative to starving grew more common 
and bolder in its methods, and magistrates more severe in 
the punishments they inflicted. A Member of Pariiament 
stated before a committee of the House of Commons in 1831 
that as men who had been transported were not brought 
back at the public expense, they scarcely ever returned, and 
that agricultural labourers specially dreaded transportation 
because it meant entire separation from former associates, 
relations, and friends. Readers of Marcus Clarke's famous 
novel For the Term of his Natural Life will remember the 
scene on the transport ship, with the village labourer thrown 
into the society of forgers, housebreakers, and footpads. 
"The poacher grimly thinking of his sick wife and children 
would start as the night-house luffian clapped him on the 
shoulder and bade him with a curse to take good heart and 
be a man." 
During the opening chapters of the nineteenth century 
the agricultural labourer passed through a period of distress 
and growing destitution comparable to that of the hand- 
loom weaver in Lancashire. He had lost nearly all his 
{continued on page 22) 
