The following extract is taken from "The Victorian Peasant" and is

by Richard Heath, who wrote essays on the agricultural labourer, after a series of

pedestrian tours between 1870 and 1874.

(When) the War closed (in 1815), the glory of Trafalgar and of Waterloo 
was soon forgotten in the collapse which followed the inflation of trade,
 caused by the extravagance which had spent £625,000,000 in order to 
overthrow the French Revolution. And not only were the people of this 
country saddled for ever with this overwhelming debt, but the Nemesis 
also came in an ever-widening estrangement of classes.
The war found the farmer and his men living and working together in a 
somewhat patriarchal fashion; it left the master a gentleman, the labourer 
a pauper. The latter, no longer an inmate at the farm, lodged in some hovel 
and took his meals at the ale-house. But the widespread ruin the collapse 
produced led to the consolidation of farms in fewer hands. The separation 
between master and man became more complete; financial success the one end 
aimed at ---- 'buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest' ---- the 
one principle that prevailed. But such was the state of things that the 
masters were able not only to take full advantage of this law, but to go 
beyond it. For not only did one large farm require less labourers than the 
same area divided into several smaller ones, not only was the labour market 
abnormally increased by the stimulus given to human production by the Poor 
Law System, but that same system rendered the men careless of the amount of 
wages they received, since they knew the deficiency would be made up by the 
parish. Wages were accordingly given which, without this parochial dole, could 
not have kept the labourer alive.
  Seven, eight, or at the highest nine or ten shillings a week, when the 
quartern loaf averaged eighteenpence, simply meant wholesale murder. But the 
screw was put on gradually, and in a few years, when bread had fallen to 11 
1/2d the quartern loaf, there were places, Northamptonshire for example, where 
the magistrate fixed the parish allowance at 5s a single man, 6s a man and wife, 
and 2s each child, whatever the family earned to be deducted from the allowance.
As 14s or 15s was the least a single man could live upon when bread was still 
cheaper, it is manifest that the wages which have been given to the Agricultural 
Labourer during the greater part of this century - 7s, 8s or the utmost 9s or 
l0s have meant starvation during the lifetime of at least one generation and a 
portion of two others. For be it remembered that on these miserable sums not one 
person, but very frequently four or five have had to live. It was only done by 
reducing the quantity of bread, bacon and beer, and taking in their place gruel, 
potatoes, suet and rice puddings, with decoctions of washed-out tea leaves. But 
even such fare was hardly possible under the varying prices which obtained during 
the Protective system. An old man told me that he remembered the time when the 

bread they had to eat was almost black, and so hard that they had to chop it. At 
such times, and perhaps many others, parents were glad on dark winter afternoons 
to fill their children's stomachs with fluid made of hot water and coarse brown 
sugar, flavoured with a modicum of milk, and putting them to bed, get rid of 
their cries for food until the next morning. 'No wonder,' as Cobbett said to one 
of his labourers, 'no wonder that you are all as thin as owlets, and that that 
son of yours there, who is nineteen years old, and is five feet nine inches high, 
is as you told me last summer, too weakly to do a man's work. No wonder that his 
knees bend under him, and that he has a voice like that of a girl, instead of being 
able to carry a sack of wheat and jump a five-barred gate.'
In Warwickshire I met two infirm men crawling like beetles along the road. After 
some conversation the elder of the two told me that he had brought eight children 
into the world and had buried five. What they died of he could hardly tell. 
Decline, one died of that,he knew - they called it 'consumpted decline'. Phthisis 
and scrofula, as every country practitioner has known, found its most frequent 
victims among this famine-struck race.
The degradation of pauperism is far worse than that of slavery, and of all 
pauperism none surely exceeded in cruelty this which fell to the lot of the
English Labourer. Pampered at first, led even into a coarse luxury, he was 
rapidly let down until he was treated to such degradations as being put up to 
auction, and his labour sold to the highest bidder, or to being made to drag 
gravel carts like a beast of burden.
Left in ignorance so dense that probably not one in five could read or write, 
was it surprising that agricultural labourers should view the introduction of 
threshing machines as calculated to put the finishing stroke to their ruin? When 
a prairie has been dried up by a long drought the merest spark will produce a 
conflagration, carrying destruction over hundreds of miles; so it is with a popular
movement, no one knows how it began or where it will end. Thus in the autumn of 1830, 
Agricultural England was panic-stricken by the news that the labourers were rising 
everywhere, destroying machines and setting fire to ricks. The movement spread through 
the southern, eastern and midland counties, and even showed itself in Cumberland. 
Sometimes it was a mere riot with an onslaught on some poor-house, parsonage, or 
manor-house, sometimes it was content with merely destroying machinery, but the 
most usual form was rick-burning. Night after night in many parts of England the 
blazing sky told that Captain Swing had been at his work.
In the roughly printed booklet from whence this mythic personage sprang, he is 
made to say:
I am not the author of these burnings. What can have caused them? Those fires, 
said I, are caused by farmers having been turned out of their lands to make room 
for foxes, peasants confined two years in prison for picking up a dead partridge, 
and parsons taking a poor man 's only cow for the tithe of his
  Another extract
In the close parishes of Northamptonshire the cottage supply is insufficient for 
the amount of labour; in the open ones the accommodation is rarely, if ever, 
adequate to provide for the health, comfort, and morals of the inhabitants. As an 
instance of the sort of building supposed to be good enough for a labouring family:
'Four cottages stand together in a village near a malt-kiln. They had gardens. A 
speculator bought them. He turned the kiln into six cottages, and built five others 
on the ground which had been used for gardens.'  In almost all the villages of 
Northamptonshire instances are to be met with of overcrowding. 'A cot, measuring 
16 feet by 18 feet,' the report states, 'was inhabited by a grandfather, aged 
eighty-four, father, mother, and eleven children - fourteen in all; and at the 
time the place was visited the mother of the family was engaged in washing out 
clothes in the only living-room.' This is spoken of as the worst case, but others
very bad are mentioned.
Education is very defective in Northamptonshire, not for want of schools, but owing 
to the. indifference and want of affection on the part of the parents. This is 
attributed to the demoralisation resulting from bad cottages, and to the poverty of 
the people and consequent want of hope.
Bedfordshire is very inadequately supplied with cottages. They are few and small, 
and their condition is often a mere precarious holding together of rotten materials; 
the stitch in time has not been applied, and there are hundreds on which no repairs 
can now be bestowed with advantage.
This was the state of things in 1864. In 1867 Mr Culley reports that in about half 
of fifty-five parishes of which he received descriptions,
the cottage accommodation was either mixed, bad and good, or generally bad - so we 
take the above as descriptive of the cots in such parishes. Of one district it is 
said:
Most of the men are intemperate. The causes are the aggre-gation of cottages in 
the villages, the wretched condition of the cottages, the entire absence of a 
proprietary considering them-selves in any way responsible for the moral and 
physical well-being of their tenants, and, lastly, the very defective legislation 
about public-houses.
In Buckinghamshire the labourer's home is no better than elsewhere. Here is an 
interior drawn by a landowner at Coleshill:
Look into a cottage in Bucks. You see a want of furniture, scanty bedding, perhaps 
the remains of a quartern loaf, and a mug smelling of beer. The family, not having 
a good meal of victuals once in twelve months, do their work (except piecework) 
accordingly without a will. As a rule, they are honest and well-conducted, but their 
enemies are want of economy, ignorance, and the beer-shop.
In the autumn of 1863 the Morning Star published a series of articles, entitled 
'Rural Life in Buckinghamshire'. Mr Culley mentions that in seven of the worst 
parishes exposed in these articles there has only been improvement in two. Of 
cottages in other parts he speaks in such language as 'very wretched dens', 
'wretched hovels', 'very bad cottages, quite unfit for human beings to live in.'
In the 'Burnham Magazine' of May 1868 were some strong remarks about the cottages 
in that town, ending thus: 'Human nature caged up in them must become degraded, and 
when these homes are emptied from the sheer impossibility of living in them, the 
beer-shops of course are filled.'
Oxfordshire is a thoroughly agricultural county, and in its farming arrangements 
still maintains some old-fashioned ideas
  and practices. Boys are still lodged at the farmers' houses, and instead of 
looking to factories and mines for an improvement in their position, they aspire 
to be grooms, and girls to go out to service. The boys are employed on the land, 
as they are in most other parts of the country, too early, and, trudging about in 
their heavy boots on the sticky soil, contract a weakness in the legs, which leaves 
its indelible mark in an awkward gait.
Oxfordshire cottages are not so bad as those of Beds or Bucks; but in treating of 
Oxon and Berks Mr Culley attributes the loose morals of the female population to 
the overcrowding of cottages.
From Berkshire come a series of denunciations. The Rev. W. J. Butler, Wantage, 
says: 'Wretched pigsties of hovels destroy decency, self-respect, and the love of 
home. I could mention frightful results from the present system of dwelling-houses.
Speaking of the Union of Newent, in Gloucestershire, a union comprising eighteen 
parishes with a population of 12,500, Dr Fraser says:
The physical, social and educational condition of the labouring classes appeared 
to me to be low. Many cottages which I saw in the parishes of Newent, Linton, and 
Taynton, are simply unfit for human habitation. . . In Linton I was informed very few 
of the cottages have a staircase; the bedrooms are reached by a ladder or steps. 
The casesin which the roof- particularly when it is old thatch - is so utterly unsound 
as to be unable to resist anything like a downpour, and where people's bedding, in 
consequence, constantly gets deluged, are too numerous to mention.