22 
Land & Water 
April 25, 19 1 8 
(continued from page 20) 
customary rights, which meant food and fuel. He had lost, 
in r^any places, the right of gleaning. He was dependent 
on wages, and his wages were falling. No body of English- 
men will resign themselves to this fate without a struggle, 
and the misery of the labourer broke out in the winter of 
1830 in a rising. The methods of the rioters were crude, 
and consisted mainly in breaking thresliing machines. In 
many cases the whole village would turn out in a threatening 
deputation to the farmer calling on him to raise wages. The 
labourers were, in fact, in revolt against the general degrada- 
tion of their hves, with its squalor, its starvation, its endless 
servitude, and its humiUating bondage to farmer and over- 
seer. A certain amount of damage was done, one or two of 
the rioters were killed, but nobody was seriously injured by 
any labourer or body of labourers. 
If such a tiling happened to-day it would be recognised as 
a crisis demanding attention and remedy. Unfortunately, 
in the state of mind of the ruling class in 1830, it was a crisis 
demanding only repression, for no remedy seemed possible 
to nine people out of ten in the atmosphere of the times. 
And repression took a savage form. Six men and boys were 
hanged for rick-burning, three for rioting, 450 were trans- 
ported, and 400 sentenced to imprisonment at home. Mr. 
Hudson, whose vivid book A Shepherd's Life recalls some of 
the memories of those days, tells us that of the 150 labourers 
who were transported from the Wiltshire Downs only' one 
in five or six ever returned. 
Terrible Events 
These terrible events have received little notice in our 
history books, and the reader of Cobbett's Political Register 
is at first a Uttle bewildered when he comes upon them. It 
is probable that few of the country gentry to-day hear much 
about them ; that, as a rule, the country parsons and the 
immigrants from the towns who have /found quiet retreat in 
a village where they spend their week-end or part of the year, 
have never heard of them. They may know a great deal 
about the history of their nation and yet be quite ignorant 
of that passionate and very important chapter in the history 
of their own district. The story of the conduct of the judges 
who compelled the prisoners at Winchester to see their 
comrades hanged would read to them as more in keeping with 
the stories of the French Terror than with the gentle and 
amiable traditions of the English upper classes. They would 
find it difficult to beUeve that the peaceful village where 
they watch the sunset on a still evening and contrast 
the silence of the countryside with the distracting noise of 
London is the home of such fierce and cruel memories, and 
that so many hearts and homes were broken there only 
three generations ago. But the legend of that retribu- 
tion still lingers in the labourer's home, as any traveller in 
the villages of Hampshire and Wiltshire may discover if 
once he can break the ice and find out what the labourers 
are really thinking. One boy from a HampSliire village 
who was hanged at Winchester for striking a countrj' gentle- 
man was buried in liis village churchyard with every circum- 
stance of respect from Ms neighbours,, who looked on his 
execution as murder, and to-day — nearly ninety years later — 
it is still beheved in the cottages that "the snow never lies 
on his grave," as a villager said to the writer. 
If Hampshire and Wiltshire have burning memories of 
that winter, the Dorsetshire labourers have their own martyrs 
in the Tolpuddle exiles. In this httle village a few labourers 
tried to form a union in 1833 (wages had just been reduced 
from gs. to 7s. a week). Next year the chief promoters were 
arrested and sent to prison. The village parson visited them 
in jail to tell them that the labourer was better off than his 
master, to which Loveless, the men's leader, rephed that he 
found it difficult to believe this when he saw what a number 
of horses were kept for no other purpose than foxhunting. 
The men were tried under the Act passed in a moment of 
panic at the time of the Mutiny at the Nore, and the judge 
sentenced them to seven years' transportation, not for 
anything they had done, but as an example to others. 
The authonties in that year determined to crush the spirit 
of revolt, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. 
The agricultural labourer, whose ancestors, as Mr. Prother^ 
has pointed out, were members of a community, has been 
the most isolated and lonely figure in our society. Take 
any aspect of his hfe. No class of workman stood more in 
need of the help and power of trade unions, and in no class 
has the struggle for trade unionism been so hopeless. 
In the old days the agricultural labourer was not friendless 
in his own village. The economy of small farming encouraged 
the labourer holding land or enjoying common rights, for by 
that means the small farmer could have labour when he 
wanted it, without pajdng for it, all the year round. It was 
often difficult to draw the Hue between the smaU farmer 
and the agricultural labourer. The village was a society of 
men and women understanding each other, whose arrange- 
ments and lives fell into a common scheme of mutual help 
and sympathy. The new type of farming isolated tlie 
labourer, setting up two hostile interests — the larjge f.trmer 
and the shopkeeper. 
The New Village 
The farmer of the new type believed that if the labourer 
had land or any kind of independence he would be a less 
diligent worker ; the new shopkeeper who supplied the food 
that was formerly supplied by the small farm thought that 
if the labourer could grow his own food again he would lose 
his customers. Thus, in respect of its economic structure, 
the new village was just the opposite of the old ; economic 
influences were adverse and not favourable to the ambitions 
of the labourer. 
Nobody took the place of the old village, for Parliament 
and the Church were under unsympathetic influence. In 
1872 the labourers embarked on a great campaign to organise 
trade unions. Their leader was Joseph Arch. They had 
good friends in politicians like Fawcett, Auberoh Herbert, 
Jesse CoUings, WilHam Morrison, and the great Bishop 
Eraser and Canon Girdlestone, who preached to his farmers 
that the cattle plague was a just punishment for their treat- 
ment of their labourers. 1 But those were exceptions. The 
Liberal Government allowed soldiers to be used as strike- 
breakers ; landlords sided with the farmers, and the Church 
followed suit. The labourers met by moonhght ; they 
faced the dangers of eviction ; they tried emigration on a 
large scale ; but in vain. They were beaten. A year before 
the war there was a labourers' movement in Lancashire, 
and a union had made progress in Norfolk. But trade 
unionism has still to win its first considerable battle. 
Or take again the labourers' home. It matters enormously 
to most of us in what kind of a house we live, whether it is 
adequate, comfortable, dry, wami, healthy. It does not 
matter less to people who have to work day after day in all 
weathers. Rather it matters more. In 1867 the commis- 
sion on the employment of women and cliildren in agricul- 
ture reported that there was nothing injurious in the work 
itself, but that serious evils arose because fuel being so 
difficult to get on their meagre wages, they were unable to 
dry their clothes, and had consequently to go to work the 
next morning with the wet clothes they had taken off the 
day before. This difficulty still exists. 
Nobody who reads the reports of the County Medical 
Officers of Health can suppose that the houses of the 
labourers arc, as a rule, adequate, comfortable, warm, dry, 
or healthy. But the labourer has no choice in the matter. 
Often he has to live in a tied house, and if it is asked why 
houses are not built either by private landlords or by local 
authorities, elected in part by agricultural labourers, the answer 
comes back again to the labourer's circumstances, for it is 
explained that his wages are so poor that he cannot afford to 
pay a proper rent, and that therefore houses can only be built 
at a loss. Our ancestors, who thought they could build up 
a prosperous industry by sacrificing every consideration to 
that of giving the landowner and the farmer a free hand, 
have reduced this industry to such a predicament that it is 
not self-supporting. 
Take again his pleasures and his whole life. Social life 
and recreation are specially necessary to the agricultural 
labourer. The man or woman who works in a factory meets 
other people constantly in the course of his or her work, 
whereas the man who ploughs and trims hedges and hfts 
turnips, works often in solitude and sees scarcely a soul. 
One reason why allotments are popular with townsmen is 
that they provide opportunity for quiet and private occupa- 
tion. For the same reason, it is specially important to have 
theatres, pictures, clubs, cricket and football grounds, and 
libraries in villages. Yet, as a rule, there is scarcely any 
recognition in our village of this urgent need, and the village, 
which two hundred years ago had dances and music, is too 
often destitute of all the essentials of social life. 
Such have been the consequences of treating the men and 
women engaged in agriculture as if their condition was less 
important than the state of the crops or the attractiveness 
of country life to the country gentry. If at any time the 
ruling class had said to itself that it was the first duty of 
society to see jthat the conditions necessary to a free and 
civihsed life were within the reach of all classes, they would 
have set to work to build up village life on a different basis. 
To-day that is the conviction of the nation as a whole, and 
rural life will be reconstructed on new lines. 
