2

The agricultural labourer

 

 

The standard of life from 1800 to 1834 sank to the lowest possible scale; in the south and west wages paid by employers fell to 3s to 4s per week, augmented by parochial relief from the pockets of those who had no need of labour; and insufficient food has left its mark in the physical degeneracy of the peasantry. Herded together in cottages which, by their imperfect arrangements, violated every sanitary law, generated all kinds of disease, and rendered modesty an unimaginable thing … compelled by insufficient wages to expose their wives to the degradation of field labour, and to send their children to work as soon as they could crawl… [the labourers] would have been more than human had they not risen in an insurrection which could only be quelled by force. They had already carried patience beyond the limit where it ceases to be a virtue.¹

Such was the gloomy view of Rowland Prothero, Lord Ernie, the foremost agricultural historian of his day, a view which was fully endorsed by the first-hand evidence of contemporaries and the compilers of Parliamentary Blue Books, and which modern writers would wish to qualify, if at all, only in points of detail. The fact that Ernie’s forecasts for the future of English farming proved to be wrong does not invalidate his judgement of the past.

The food of the agricultural labourer depended upon his general standard of living, and that standard depended, in turn, on the state of the agricultural economy of which he was a part. In good times, he might fare not too badly, in bad ones he was the first to suffer, and the difficulty was that agricultural prosperity was determined by a number of external factors — the demand for farm produce, the movement of prices, the extent of foreign competition — over which he had no influence. Uneducated and unenfranchised, immobilized by poverty and the Poor Laws, the labourer was peculiarly exposed to the vicissitudes of trade and the seasons, and in no real sense the master of his own destiny.

Since the outbreak of the French wars in 1793, farming had been chronically unstable. Increased demand for food from the growing population, inflation caused by the government’s issue of paper currency, and Napoleon’s attempted blockade of our shores between them produced a period of exceptionally high prices from which landed proprietors and farmers benefited more than wage-earners.² Open lands continued to be enclosed apace, heaths and uplands to be ploughed for arable which would just yield a profit at the unprecedented prices which wheat was now fetching.³ Intensive farming for profit on the lines advocated by the ‘improvers’ was the order of the day on all estates large enough to take advantage of the new techniques.

These problems were compounded by a series of particularly poor harvests. Throughout the twenty-two years of war, harvests were of average yield in only six years, and there was a run of disastrous failures between 1809 and 1814,⁴ In Kent, wartime scarcities and inflation pushed up the price of bread by 167 per cent between 1793 and 1812, well ahead of wage rises, forcing labourers to reallocate their expenditure away from relative luxuries such as meat, tea, and sugar. Dr T.L. Richardson has calculated that food and drink absorbed 67.7 per cent of the labourer’s household expenditure at this time, but between 1793 and 1812 expenditure on bread and flour alone rose from 48 per cent of total food outlay to 74.2 per cent, while that on meat fell from 26.2 per cent to a mere 6 per cent.⁵ The expansion of arable farming during the war years also resulted in greater irregularity of employment — a heavy demand for labour at harvest time but, for many day-labourers, underemployment or even unemployment for up to eight months in the year. Even in the 1790s, before many of the worst effects were felt, the Rev. David Davies had noted that in his Berkshire parish no labourer’s family ate fresh meat, and few could afford more than 1 lb of bacon weekly; tea, at 1−1 1/2 oz a week of the poorest quality, was the main drink, beer being quite out of reach ‘except against a lying-in or a christening’. Since enclosure, no labourers kept cows, and milk, which had previously been a principal article of diet, was now virtually unobtainable. Almost all families, however careful, had a budget deficit, which was only made up by poaching, stealing, debt, or parish relief.⁶

Another development also produced an important change in the position of the labourer. In former times, large numbers of farm servants had lived in the farmhouse, boarded and lodged as part of their wage, and by all accounts boarded very well. In Hampshire, labourers ‘living-in’ with their employers generally fed on pork and pudding the greatest part of the year, ‘except on Sundays, when a joint of meat is sometimes allowed’.⁷ Well-fed labourers did not regard the pig as being in the same class as beef. In Middlesex, they had ‘bread and cheese and pork for breakfast, coarse joints of beef boiled with cabbages and other vegetables, or meat pies or puddings for dinner, cold pork, bread and cheese, etc. for supper; and with every meal, small beer’.⁸ But now the farmer produced for the market, and the less his household consumed, the more he had to sell. Increased wealth also engendered more polite manners and a desire for social segregation. Midday dinner in the farmhouse kitchen with the servants survived on some old-fashioned farms, especially in the north, though even here the trend was for the farmer and his family to eat at a separate, clothcovered table while the labourers sat round a plain, scrubbed board at a distance. Beginning in the last decade of the eighteenth century, in the southern and midland counties, labourers were increasingly put on board wages and forced to live out, and although they r’eceived more money their standard of comfort unquestionably fell. The budgets of these ‘free’ labourers, collected by Davies and evaluated in present-day nutritional terms by Professor D.J. Oddy, indicate very inadequate levels of intake — only 1,900 kilocalories of energy value per person per day, 49 g of protein, 31 of fat, and 0.25 of calcium.⁹

Boarding-out was, then, the consequence of the high prices of the ‘good years’. Even more disastrous for the labourer were the effects of the depression and the low prices which began in 1813 and lasted for more than twenty years. With the fall of Napoleon fell the best protection the English farmer had ever had, and not even the Corn Law could compensate him adequately. In 1813, wheat had still fetched 120s a quarter; in 1815 it stood at 76s and in 1822 only 53s. ‘What we need is another war,’ complained one farmer to Cobbett in that year.

In 1816 a melancholy Report on the Agricultural State of the Kingdom was issued by the Board of Agriculture, which chronicled the industry’s rapid descent from prosperity to depression. For landowners and farmers it was a story of disastrous falls in profits, untenanted farms, and uncollected rents, for labourers of conditions of misery ‘beyond all experience’. Of 273 letters received from all parts of the country in reply to the Board’s questionnaire, 237 described lack of employment and evidence of labourers’ distress. In Berkshire there was ‘a great want of employ’, in Buckinghamshire the labourers were ‘very wretched from want of employment’, in Cambridgeshire conditions were ‘dreadful … healthy young men working for 4s a week’, in Norfolk between one-quarter and one-third were out of work. Only in a minority of cases, where the labourer was allowed a little land to keep a cow or two, was he described as ‘in a comfortable state, and … very generally equally sober, honest and industrious’.¹⁰

Falling prices, not only of wheat, but of meat and other foods, might, of course, have benefited the labourer had not his wages also fallen and become artificially determined by the extraordinary operation of the Poor Laws. Since the period of rapid inflation in the late eighteenth century a new problem of poverty had appeared in England, of labourers, who although fully employed, could not support themselves, their wives and families, out of their earnings. As early as 1795 the Rev. David Davies had concluded from his survey of the budgets of his parishioners in Berkshire that the earnings of a labourer and his wife were not sufficient to support a family of more than two children without parish relief, and the gap between wages and the prices of necessities was to widen in succeeding years. Less fortunate still were the growing numbers of those who could obtain work only from spring until harvest, and in winter would be utterly destitute. The old Elizabethan Poor Law was incapable of dealing with the new problems, and new remedies were proposed. First, in 1782, Gilbert’s Act provided that work should be sought for the unemployed by the parish officers: wages would be paid directly to the parish, which would then reimburse the labourer with a sufficient maintenance. Next, in 1795, as a result of the decision of the Berkshire magistrates at Speenhamland, a similar system was extended to the employed poor whose wages were inadequate: they were to receive an ‘allowance’ from the parish calculated by reference to the prevailing price of bread and the number of children in the family.¹¹

The effects of the new policies were fully manifested only in the years of depression after 1813. Widespread unemployment was inevitable as wheat prices tumbled and land went out of cultivation. However little the farmer paid, the labourer’s wage was now made up to something approaching subsistence level by the ‘bread and children’ scale. Speenhamland now came in for strong criticism — that it had the positive effect of keeping wages artificially low, probably of favouring the lazy and shiftless because the unemployed labourer received exactly the same as the man who toiled for fourteen hours a day, possibly, as the Rev. Thomas Malthus claimed, of encouraging large families. By 1830, it had pauperized much of the agricultural south and east, and had reduced thousands of labourers into miserable dependence on parsimonious charity. Within one generation, high prices had first transformed the farm servant into a day labourer; low prices and the Poor Law had turned the day labourer into a pauper. The wave of incendiarism which spread over East Anglia and the home counties in the winter of 1830–1 was a modest demonstration by a population brought to breaking-point.¹²

A few years before this, in 1824, Parliament had made the first serious attempt to investigate the labourer’s position by conducting a survey of agricultural wages.¹³ That they had become miserably depressed there could be no doubt. In some southern counties they were as little as 3s a week for a single man and 4s 6d for a married man — no more, that is, than the scale permitted for a pauper — in some they were 5s, in others 8s or 9s. Astonishing variations were disclosed within small areas: in the district of Wingham in Kent, for example, wages in some parishes were 6d a day, and in others Is 6d. Although bread prices had fallen by up to half by 1824 most wages had been reduced in line, and the labourer’s purchasing power was no greater than in the years of high prices; in any case, his standard of life was now primarily determined by whether he could obtain, and keep, regular employment. Over the country as a whole wages were lowest in the south and east, where the ‘allowance’ system was general, highest in the north and west, where it was not so universal and where there was often alternative industrial employment to be had. In Oldham, for example, a labourer could earn 12s a week, and in Cumberland up to 15s.

Wage figures indicate the fact of wide variations in the labourer’s standard of life, but not much more. They do not tell us for how many weeks in the year wages were drawn, the extent of the wife’s and children’s contribution to the total earnings, the amount of the ‘allowance’, if any, or the value of ‘extras’. We know that the price of many necessaries remained high, and it would also appear that house rent, an important item in the labourer’s budget, soared in the 1820s:

It is one of the chief causes of the agricultural labourers being in a worse state than they ever were [one witness told the 1824 Committee]. Before the War, the average rent of cottages with good gardens was 30s a year; it is now in our own neighbourhood commonly as high as five, seven, or even ten pounds per annum, and where cottages are in the hands of farmers, they always prohibit the labourers from keeping a pig, and claim the produce of the apple trees and of the vine which usually covers the house.¹⁴

The Committee was concerned with the amount of wages, and not with how they were expended, but one labourer, Thomas Smart, gave some description of his standard of life. He was then forty-six years old, having married at eighteen. He had had thirteen children, seven of whom were living, and the only parish relief he had ever had was for the burial of his children. By good luck and hard work he had always enjoyed steady employment. In 1812, just before the depression, he had earned 12s a week: now it was 8s. At harvest he made an extra 40s, and three of his children earned between them 6s a week. He lived almost entirely on bread and cheese, had often touched no meat for a month, got now and then a little bacon and sometimes a halfpennyworth of milk, but the farmers did not like selling it. His usual drink was tea. He had no pig, but he did have a garden where he grew potatoes. House rent and fuel cost £5 a year, shoes 15s for himself and £I for the family. The fall in the price of salt had been a great help to him.

The eye-witness account can sometimes enliven the sober pages of Parliamentary reports. In his Rural Rides, compiled between 1822 and 1830, Willam Cobbett described the conditions of agriculture in southern England in a tone of passionate indignation. For all his prejudices, Cobbett was a countryman with a sharp eye and a sound judgement of land and men, and it was the decay and the miserable faces of the poor that everywhere most struck him. Derelict farms, farmhouses, and parsonages were everywhere to be seen, and churches large enough for a congregation of a thousand crumbled in deserted villages. But, by contrast, there were still grand houses and rich estates, the properties of absentee landlords, politicians, stockjobbers, and sinecurists from ‘the great Wen’ (London). Honest farmers were forced to sell out and emigrate, and the peasants were ‘the worst used labouring people upon the face of the earth. Dogs and hogs and horses are treated with more civility, and as to food and lodging, how gladly would the labourers change with them!’¹⁵ Cobbett estimated the needs of a family of five in bread, meat, and beer alone at £62 6s 8d a year: the labourer’s wage in the wealthy parish of Milton was 9s a week, and the maximum parish ‘allowance’ would give another 7s 6d, so at best he could only earn half of the minumum necessary for what Cobbett, the traditionalist, regarded as ‘basic foods’.¹⁶ So it was throughout almost the whole area — starvation wages, and for the unemployed, an ‘allowance’ to support a family which was less than the pay of a single soldier. Near Warminster, the overseer had set thirty men to dig a twelve-acre field: at a wage of 9d a day it was as cheap as ploughing, though how the men could live on 4s a week was not disclosed:

The labourers here look as if they were half-starved…. For my own part, I really am ashamed to ride a fat horse, to have a full belly, and to have a clean shirt upon my back when I look at these wretched countrymen of mine; while I actually see them reeling with weakness; when I see their poor faces present me nothing but skin and bone.

Only in Sussex did Cobbett find conditions which pleased him. Here the labourers’ cottages had an appearance of comfort, with neat gardens full of vegetables — and not the cursed potato, ‘Ireland’s lazy root’. Near East-dean, he talked to a young turnip-hoer who was sitting under a hedge at breakfast:

He came running to me with his victuals in his hand; and I was glad to see that his food consisted of a good lump of household bread and not a very small piece of bacon…. In parting with him I said, ‘You do get some bacon then?’ ‘Oh yes, Sir,’ said he, with an emphasis and a swag of the head which seemed to say ‘We must and will have that’. I saw, and with great delight, a pig at almost every labourer’s house… . What sort of breakfast would this man have had in a mess of cold potatoes? Could he have worked, and worked in the wet too, with such food? Monstrous! No society ought to exist where the labourers live in a hog-like sort of way.¹⁷

Cobbett was, of course, a traditionalist, who roundly condemned the labourer for his new-fangled foods of tea and baker’s bread, and exhorted him to return to the proper food of an Englishman. His greatest strictures were reserved for the potato, which he found was becoming the staple article of diet in many southern and south-western counties: it was not long since it had only been used to any great extent in Lancashire and Cheshire, but poverty and the potato, in Cobbett’s eyes, went together. ‘It is an undeniable fact that in proportion as this root is in use as a substitute for bread, the people are underfed.’¹⁸ Certainly, Ireland was wretched enough in Cobbett’s day, but the Irish peasant on his diet of potatoes, a little fat, and milk, was often better fed than the English labourer. Apparently what Cobbett particularly objected to was the fact that it was so easy to cultivate and cook, and therefore engendered ‘slovenly and beastly habits amongst the labouring classes’.

Most contemporary writers who offered advice to the labourer in the form of cookery books and manuals of domestic economy followed Cobbett’s line. Esther Copley, whose Cottage Comforts and Cottage Cookery circulated widely in the 1820s and 1830s, also condemned the beer-shop and the tea-kettle and suggested that the labourer might drink instead pure water or infusions of rue and strawberry leaves, ‘which will give the flavour of green tea’. Possibly Miss Copley was right in saying that ‘The want and misery of many families arise more from want of discretion in managing their resources than from the real scantiness of their income’,¹⁹ but to feed a family adequately on 4s or 5s a week would have required more than ‘discretion’. The lady advised the poor that, when wheat was dear, good bread could be made out of mixtures of maize, barley, and rye, which was common practice anyway, and suggested that fuel could be saved by placing a lump of chalk under the coals, which would retain the heat for a long while. Her Cottage Cookery was a collection of economical recipes — potato-pie, stirabout, stewed ox-cheek, scrap-pie and so on — not all of which sound very appetizing; the directions for ‘mutton chitterlings’, for example, suggest that they should be obtained immediately the animal is killed, scoured many times in salt and water, and put to soak, the water being frequently changed for twenty-four hours: ‘this must be repeated till they are quite white and free from smell’.²⁰

Contemporary writers were unanimous in blaming the labourer for his extravagant diet, and tireless in demonstrating that by better management he might have more meat and more variety in his meals. None of them seemed to appreciate the obstacles to domestic baking and brewing which we have discussed earlier, or to recognize that white bread and tea were no longer luxuries, but the irreducible minimum below which was only starvation. These foods were not, in fact, extravagant. White bread, unlike the coarse, household bread, could be eaten without the addition of costly butter or cheese, and 2 oz of tea a week, costing 8d or 9d, made many a cold supper seem like a hot meal. In the margin of my copy of Cobbett’s Cottage Economy, against the section on ‘home baking’, is the comment in a contemporary hand, ‘Homes have ceased in England and that is why we emigrate’.

The radical reform of the Poor Law undertaken in 1834 seems to have had little immediate effect on the labourer’s standard of life. The two most important principles of the new Act — the substitution of workhouse relief for the ‘allowance’ for the able-bodied, and the abrogation of the parish’s responsibility of finding work for the unemployed — were designed, in part, to force him into independence and to dissipate the pools of labour which had kept wages low. Once wages were freed from the depressive effect of the ‘allowance’ it was hoped they would gradually climb back to a subsistence level. What the Amendment Act could not do, however, was to create employment in areas where there was still a surplus of labour, and in a period of renewed agricultural distress in the late thirties, it is scarcely surprising that the hopes of higher wages remained unfulfilled. A Parliamentary report in 1836 stated that ‘wages still only suffice for the necessaries, I cannot say for the comforts’,²¹ while a similar report the next year showed that of fifty people relieved in one parish in 1834, only eighteen were in full work three years later; of the rest nineteen were in casual employment, four ‘gone away’, two transported, one in prison, one dead, five old and infirm.²² Wage-levels seem, in fact, to have followed closely on changes in prices — a fall down to 1837 as prices fell, thereafter a slight increase as prices rose — and to have been largely independent of the new Act. A calculation by Purdy that the average wage rose from 9s 4d per week in 1824 to 10s 4d in 1837²³ means little because it does not take account of the increased price of corn or the fact that at the earlier date the labourer was probably receiving an ‘allowance’ in aid of wages.

The disappearance of the ‘allowance’ almost certainly meant that the labourer was compelled, to a much greater extent than formerly, to sell the labour of his wife and children in order to maintain his standard. This meant that the economic position of a man with a family of employable age (usually ten and upwards, though not uncommonly from seven or eight) tended to become considerably better than that of the single man — Dr Kay calculated that with four children in work, the family’s earnings were more than doubled.²⁴ The expansion of the ‘gang system’ of employment of women and children was, therefore, an important though indirect effect of the New Poor Law.

Clearly, it is impossible to generalize about the standard of living of the labourer at this period. It varied with the size and age of his family, with different parts of the country and different times of the year, and, not least, with the degree of skill of the man himself, for it is wrong to suppose that all farmworkers were unskilled, and equally rated. The ‘yearly men’ with responsible positions, whom no farmer could afford to have underpaid or discontented, fared very much better than the day-labourers who, unfortunately, constituted the majority. The former were described as having ‘the comfortable supper of Norfolk dumplings, potatoes, and, now and then, a little bacon or other meat’, and living in cottages ‘brightened with pictures, brass candlesticks, and perhaps a clock’.²⁵ Equally noticeable was the contrast betwen north and south, first mentioned by Sir Frederic Eden in the 1790s, but still true in the 1830s and later. A Scottish contributor to the Quarterly Journal of Agriculture in 1836 said that:

In Scotland, milk and oatmeal make a plentiful house, and our ablest plough-men take nothing more. Potatoes, which the children of our gentry prefer to bread, are regarded with considerable scorn by labourers in the south of England. What an English labourer spends on his bacon, beer, and white bread is, in the hilly parts of Scotland, spent by the Scottish labourer on the education of his children.²⁶

For ‘Scotland’ here may be read Cumberland, Westmorland, and the northernmost counties generally, but the strictures on the diet of the southern labourer were unjust. In the north, oatmeal was made palatable by the addition of milk, which was rarely available to the southern labourer who had no cow-pasture of his own and could not persuade farmers to go to the trouble of selling him a pint or two. More important, the conditions of service were quite different in the north. The yearly hiring of labour persisted much longer here, and it was still customary for the labourer to receive part of his wages in meal or grain, irrespective of the market prices, and to be given cow-pasture or accommodation for pig or poultry. For all these reasons the economic position of the northern labourer was more stable, and more conducive to thrift and frugality than it was in the south, where the only ‘perquisite’ many labourers ever received was a gallon of ale or cider in the harvest-field.²⁷

A series of vivid and harrowing pictures of the life of this period was brought together in a volume published in 1904 by T. Fisher Unwin entitled The Hungry Forties: Life Under the Bread Tax. It was a collection of letters and other testimonies from contemporary witnesses, most of them agricultural labourers, and contained many references to the food which they had as children in the 1840s. This is, incidentally, apparently the first use of the term ‘hungry forties’, which was not a contemporary expression.²⁸ A Sussex woodman, Charles Robinson, told how in his ‘younger days’ (he was eighty-three at the time of the inquiry) the usual wage for field work was 9s a week, and a half-gallon loaf of bread (4 lb 5 1/2 oz) cost Is 2d, and so the family often lived on ‘crammings’:

Made of what was left after the flour and the bran was taken away, and … mixed with a little bread flour, we called crammings, but more often we made a sort of pudding with it. You ask ’ow the people did get on? Well, they got into debt, and then again they lived on ‘taters’ and kept pigs, but butcher’s meat we never ’eard of, never saw it except in the shops. Salt was 21s a bushel, and when we killed a pig we ’ad to sell ’alf of it to buy the salt to salt down what was left.²⁹

Charles Astridge of Midhurst also spoke of ‘crammings’, and testified:

We mostly lived on bread, but ’twasn’t bread like ’ee get now; ’twas that heavy and doughy ‘ee could pull long strings of it out of your mouth. They called it ‘growy bread’. But ‘twas fine compared with the porridge we made out of bruised beans; that made your inside feel as if ’twas on fire, and sort of choked ’ee. In those days we’d see children from Duck Lane come out in the streets of Midhurst an’ pick up a bit of bread, and even potato peelings.³⁰

Other witnesses spoke of the way that tea was eked out with burnt crusts of bread — at least it coloured the water and looked not unlike the real thing — of supper which consisted of a small pot of potatoes or a swede or turnip stolen from the fields, and of relieving the pangs of hunger with pig pease or horse beans. The melancholy picture which emerges is of a population which spent its life in semi-starvation, existing on a scanty and monotonous diet of bread, potatoes, root vegetables, and weak tea. Fresh meat was scarcely ever seen, unless the labourer dared to incur the severity of the game laws by poaching a rabbit or a hare; ‘meat’ meant salt pork or bacon, and a family was fortunate if it could afford these more than once a week. It is also clear that wheat flour was often of poor quality, and that rye bread and the even less attractive barley bread were still extensively used in the 1840s especially in the midlands and north. The one redeeming feature in the diet seems to have been the considerable quantities of vegetables — potatoes, beans, onions, turnips, cabbages, and so on — which the labourer unwillingly consumed.

As a picture of rural life in the 1840s, the accounts are probably substantially true. But they could be equally true as a description of the 1830s or the 1850s — indeed, some of them specifically refer to periods earlier or later than that which was supposedly the most ‘hungry’. A Hertfordshire labourer spoke of the 1820s as his time of special distress, and at least two witnesses referred to the Crimean War (1854–6) as the worst in their memories. Again, for many the hungriest time was their early married life when they had families too young to be employed. Personal factors of this kind — the number and age of the children, the health of the chief breadwinner and his wife — were what mattered most, together with the state of the harvest and the demand for labour. During a period of good yields in the mid-1830s few complaints are heard, but scarcity and high prices in 1838–9, followed by a depression in industry which reduced the demand for agricultural produce, brought renewed troubles and discontent which found expression in a fresh outbreak of rick-burnings.

This time, however, a growing social conscience interested itself in the causes of the labourer’s plight. Letters and articles appeared in The Times and in the local presses. Both Houses of Parliament debated the situation at length, and in 1843 an official report was issued which is of the highest importance for the revealing picture it gives of labouring life.³¹ Although it was concerned primarily with the work and wages of women and children in agriculture, much evidence was given incidentally about diet, housing, and the standard of life generally, and again it is abundantly clear that this standard varied greatly with the circumstances of different families. The man’s wage might be as little as 8s a week, but total family earnings as much as 18s — most incomes lay somewhere between the two extremes. Wiltshire, Dorset, and the south-western counties were still the poorest of all, East Anglia somewhat better, Yorkshire and Northumberland best of all; but all parts of the country had some grievances in common. Everywhere there were complaints about the high cost of house rents, the profiteering by village shopkeepers who often exploited their indebted customers, and the farmer’s ‘allowance’ of beer or cider which both reduced wages and encouraged drunkenness.

Of Wiltshire, the report said:

The food of the labourer and his family is wheaten bread, potatoes, a small quantity of beer, but only as a luxury, and a little butter and tea. To this may sometimes be added (but it is difficult to say how often or in what quantities) cheese, bacon, and in the neighbourhood of Calne, a portion of the entrails of the pig — a considerable trade being carried on at Calne in curing bacon. I am inclined to think that the use of bacon and these parts of the pig occurs where the earnings of the family are not limited to those of the husband… . Where from poverty bacon cannot be obtained, a little fat is used to give a flavour to the potatoes.³²

A doctor of Calne testified that four out of every five women labourers who came to him for treatment suffered from complaints traceable to their food being ‘insufficient in quantity and not good enough in quality’ — he categorized diseases of the stomach, general debility, liability to fever, indigestion, and slow and difficult recovery from any illness. Among children scrofulous diseases were ‘very common’. This witness went on to point out that in the Union Workhouse, where food was bought more cheaply by tender, the average cost of feeding each inmate was Is 6d a week. How, he asked, could a labourer support even two children on 8s a week when, in addition to food, there was house rent, fuel, clothing, boots, medicine, and so on? ‘When I reckon up these things in detail I am always more and more astonished how the labourers continue to live at all.’³³ The diet of a Calne stonemason, who earned almost twice as much as this (15s a week) was scarcely lavish. ‘In the garden we raise plenty of potatoes. We have about a shilling’s worth of meat a week; a pig’s milt sometimes, a pound or three-quarters of a pound of suet, seven gallons of bread a week, sometimes a little pudding on a Sunday.’ But this would have seemed like luxury to a poor widow and her eight-year-old son. When her husband was alive:

We did very well, and lived very comfortable, for then we had four gallons of bread a week, 1 lb or 1 1/2 lb of cheese, bacon, salt beef, butter, tea, sugar, candles, and soap, with beer on Saturday night. Since my husband’s death, the Guardians allow Is 6d a week for the child, and I earn 4s 6d a week. I pay:

The Is 8d that is left goes for firing, shoes, which cost a great deal, etc. My husband hired 54 lugs of land, and I continued it after his death; without it, I could not get on. It produces just potatoes enough for me and my child, also this last year, three bushels of wheat. I manage the ground entirely myself.³⁴

The diet of East Anglia followed a similar pattern — bread and potatoes the great staples, small amounts of butter, cheese, tea and bacon, fresh meat rarely, if ever, flour dumplings and a red herring the occasional treats. From Lavenham, in Suffolk, comes a detailed account of earnings and expenditure from a woman ‘whose family always appears clean and neat, and whose children are brought up to industrial [sic] habits’. In this family of two adults and five children, the husband’s wage went entirely on bread; the earnings of his wife and three children, the youngest only eight, had to cover everything else:

But there are numbers of families who, although in the possession of the same amount of wages shown above, do not dispose of it with such frugality, but appear in the greatest state of destitution; many others, with the same number of children, do not get the wages this man’s family have. The family I have given as an example is more to show you that with industry and frugality, their diet consists principally of bread and potatoes. There are, however, some who, when their families are grown up, by putting their earnings together, occasionally get a piece of meat at their supper-time, and their Sunday dinner.³⁵

The vicar of Bexwell in Norfolk also testified that the food of his parishioners was principally bread, potatoes, and tea. The best and most careful labourers have bacon, and other meat twice or perhaps three times a week; but I have no hesitation in saying that no independent labourer can obtain the diet which is given in the Union Workhouse.’ In mid-century, the amount of money spent each week by an adult worker in rural Norfolk was estimated at only 2s OVfcd, the lowest amount in any agricultural county and only half that of a Northumbrian worker. Even so, Dr Anne Digby has noted that the Norfolk labourer’s wife was renowned for her economical housekeeping and her ability to conjure a nutritious meal out of a few ingredients:

A typical cheap meal for a growing family was provided by a vegetable stew enlivened by a few scraps of meat or bacon and made more substantial by the addition of Norfolk dumplings… . Once a week there was butcher’s meat, or bacon from a home-reared pig, while in coastal areas there might also be herrings… . Some tea or sugar, but very little milk or eggs were consumed, and butter, lard or cheese were almost luxuries.³⁶

The best of the eastern counties was, it seeme, Lincolnshire. One witness said that ‘labourers here are generally better fixed than in any county in England’, which was almost certainly untrue, but at least there was more meat and more milk in the diet than in Norfolk and Suffolk. Bread and potatoes were still the great staples, but some labourers managed to get bacon every day, and vegetables, butter, cheese, and dumplings appear in the diet, as well as sugar and treacle. No doubt the lion’s share of the meat went to the husband, and, as a butcher from Brigg testified, The women say they live on tea: they have tea three times a day, sop, bread, and treacle’, yet there does seem to be less of the deadly monotony here than elsewhere. Probably this was because in some Lincolnshire parishes at least the labourer had a cottage and garden rent-free, a rood of land (a quarter acre) for potatoes, and the keep of a pig: some were even able to pasture a cow in return for some deduction in their wage. Such perquisites made a huge difference to the labourer’s diet and general standard of life.³⁷

In the last area to be investigated, the northern counties of Yorkshire and Northumberland, diet was still more varied and nutritious. In addition to the now universal bread, potatoes, and tea, there was milk and broth, oatmeal porridge and hasty pudding, pies and bacon much more frequently than in the south. The labourer was able to make significant contributions to his larder from the produce of his own garden or allotment, and the frequent mention of milk in the diet suggests that many had the use of a cow-pasture as well as a potato patch. In the East Riding a particularly high standard was ensured by the practice of feeding the labourer in the farmhouse and deducting Is a day from his wage. Farmers apparently believed that they got more work out of their men by feeding them well: some labourers no doubt liked the system, but there must have been others who resented a 6s a week deduction from a wage of 13s, and were ashamed to take home to their families scarcely more than they had consumed in dinners.³⁸ From Bolton Percy, near York, came a budget which must have represented almost the pinnacle of a labourer’s expectations. J. Allen earned the unusually high wage of 14s a week, while occasional earnings by his wife and one boy added another £14 7s 5d during the year 1841–2, bringing the total to £50 lis 9d. In this comfortable family of two adults and five children flour (this was home-baking territory) took £19 0s 5d — only two-fifths of the budget; £4 17s 1 d went on butcher’s meat, £3 10s Od on sugar, tea, and coffee and £1 6s 4d on milk. Items such as treacle, rice, eggs, and apples appeared in this diet, while there was even 6s a year for the children’s schooling and 17s 4d for contri-butions to a clothing club.³⁹

In Northumberland, diet approached closely to the Scottish pattern with oatmeal porridge, bread made from barley and pea-meal mixed, milk, potatoes, and bacon. Eggs, butter, sugar, fruit pies, and treacle are also frequently mentioned, tea and coffee not so commonly as in the south. The improved standard of diet here was related to the system of employment by which the hind instead of receiving a weekly wage was hired for the year and received most of his wage in kind. In addition to a given number of bushels of wheat, oats, barley, rye, and peas, the labourer had a cottage and garden free, cow-pasture, and a potato-ground, coals, wood, and a few pounds in cash.⁴⁰ This, the so-called ‘yearly bondage’ system, although it was resented by some, probably produced a higher standard of living for the labourer than was found anywhere else in the country.

These, then, were the real conditions of rural life in the ‘hungry forties’. To try to estimate whether they had deteriorated or not seems a somewhat unprofitable exercise when, by present-day standards, the whole of the first half of the nineteenth century was miserably hungry for many labourers. Several contributors to T. Fisher Unwin’s volume said that in their young days they could scarcely ever remember not feeling hungry, and this must have been the experience of all but a fortunate minority. This was a population existing on the edge of starvation. Many died in the first few weeks and months of life, fundamentally of under-nourishment, and those who survived to go out to long hours of field-work at nine or ten years old had inherited their strength from sturdier ancestors. Moreover, it was a stock continually degenerating as thousands of the most ambitious and enterprising left the country which could not offer them a tolerable maintenance for America and the colonies. Ironically, it was the abundant produce of the new lands overseas which ultimately rescued the English labourer from his wretchedness.

But in the first half of the century, before education, trade unions, and the franchise had begun to bring power and articulation to the labourer, his resentment at the conditions of his life could often be expressed only in outbreaks of violence. Although the numerous labourers’ riots of the period included a variety of grievances and demands — a minimum wage of 2s a day, improved poor relief, and the withdrawal of the threshing machines which were taking away winter employment — food was often at the basis of the discontent, as it had been in the bread riots of the eighteenth century. In 1816, when much of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridge-shire was in turmoil, the cry was for ‘Bread or Blood‘.⁴¹ The Swing Riots which spread over much of southern and eastern England in 1830–1 concerned low wages, seasonal unemployment, and the high cost of food. In 1836 and 1837 Norfolk labourers plundered flour from the carts of Poor Law Relieving Officers, while in Kent in 1838 ‘Sir’ William Courtenay led his band of followers under the emblem of a loaf of bread on a pole.⁴² Hunger and anger were fused in these risings, and in the rick-burnings that lit the night skies in many counties during the 1830s and 1840s. One terse comment in the sober Report on the Agricultural State of the Kingdom in 1816 sums up the plight of the labourers throughout almost all this period: They suffer.’⁴³

Notes

1 Prothero, Rowl and E. (1888) The Pioneers and Progress of English Farming, 224–5.

2 Easton, Josiah, Reports Respecting Grain and the Corn Laws, 1814–1815 V, 12. The author calculates from farm records that comparing the ten-yearly period 1773–82 with 1803–12, the bushel of wheat increased from 5s 1 Id to 12s 6d, meat from 2 3/4 to 8 3/4 per lb, butter from 6 1/4d to Is 4d per lb, wages from Is 2d to 2s 4d a day.

3 From 1805–13 wheat averaged 100s 4d per quarter, compared with 49s between 1774 and 1790: W. Hasbach (1920) A History of the English Agricultural Labourer, 176.

4 Fussell, G.E. and Fussell, K.R. (1981) The English Countryman, His Life and Work from Tudor Times to the Victorian Age, 128.

5 Richardson, T.L. (1976) The agricultural labourer’s standard of living in Kent, 1790–1840’, in Derek J. Oddy and Derek S. Miller, The Making of the Modern British Diet, 105 (Tables I and II).

6 Davies, David (1795) The Case of Labourers in Husbandry, Stated and Considered, 8–24.

7 Driver, A. and Driver, W. (1794) Agriculture of Hampshire-, Marshall, William (1817) ,A Review of the Reports to the Board of Agriculture from the Southern and Peninsular Departments of England, 293.

8 Middleton, John (1795) Agriculture of Middlesex; Marshall, op. cit., 131.

9 Oddy, D.J. (1981) ‘Diet in Britain during industrialization’, paper at Leyden Colloquium, The Standard of Living in Western Europe (September), 15.

10 Board of Agriculture (1816) The Agricultural State of the Kingdom, in February, March and April, 1816. Republished, with an Introduction by Gordon E. Mingay (1970), 7 passim.

11 The ‘Bread Scale’, or Speenhamland System, was graduated to cover changes in the price of the gallon loaf from Is to 2s and the variations in the size of the family up to seven children. It was headed ‘This shows at one view what should be the weekly income of the industrious poor’. Some representative figures only are given below:

12 For detailed and vivid descriptions of the ‘last labourers’ revolt’ see J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond (1911) The Village Labourer, 1760–1832; E.J. Hobsbawn and G. Rude (1973) Captain Swing (2nd edn).

13 Labourers’ Wages: Report from the Select Committee on the Rate of Agricultural Wages, and on the Condition and Morals of Labourers in that Employment, SP (1824) (392).

14 ibid., 47.

15 Cobbett, William (1830) Rural Rides, 390.

16 ibid., 372.

17 ibid., 75.

18 Cobbett, William (1830) Cottage Economy, paras 78 and 99.

19 The Family Economist: a Penny Monthly Magazine directed to the Moral, Physical and Domestic Improvement of the Industrious Classes (1848), 66.

20 Copley, Esther (1849) Cottage Cookery, 92.

21 Reports from the Select Committee on the State of Agriculture, First Report, SP (1836) (79), Q. 8.198.

22 Poor Law Amendment Act: Minutes of Evidence taken before the Select Committee of the House of Lords, Parts I and II, SP (1837–8) (719), 270.

23 Journal of the Statistical Society XXIV (1861).

24 ibid., 1(1838), 181.

25 Springall, L. Marion (1936) Labouring Life in Norfolk Villages, 1834–1914, 23.

26 Quarterly Journal of Agriculture (1836), 19.

27 Gamier, Russell M. (1895) Annals of the British Peasantry 306 et seq.

28 For a full discussion of the derivation of the phrase, see W.H. Chaloner (1957) The Hungry Forties: a Re-Examination (The Historical Association Aids for Teachers Series), no. 1.

29 Unwin, T. Fisher (ed.) (1904) The Hungry Forties: Life under the Bread Tax. Descriptive letters and other testimonies from contemporary witnesses, 22.

30 ibid., 28–9.

31 Reports of Special Assistant Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture (1843) (510), XII.

32 ibid., 18–19.

33 ibid., 58–9.

34 ibid., 69–70.

35 Reports, 1843, op. cit., 233.

36 Digby, Anne (1978) Pauper Palaces, 23.

37 Reports, 1843, op. cit., 254–5.

38 ibid., 295.

39 ibid., 302–6. Calculated by Pamela Horn (1980) The Rural World, 1780–1850. Social Change in the English Countryside, 266–7 (Appendix 4).

40 ibid., 297.

41 Peacock, A.J. (1965) Bread or Blood. The Agrarian Riots in East Anglia, 1816.

42 Rogers, P.G. (1961) The Battle in Bossenden Wood. The Strange Story of Sir William Courtenay. (This was probably the assumed name of J.N. Tom, who was killed in the battle with eleven or twelve of his followers.)

43 The Agricultural State of the Kingdom, 1816, op. cit., 33. The comment was specifically applied to the parish of Chatteris, Cambridgeshire.