Part 21 (1/2)
”Order'd that Mr. Simons apply to the justices and inquire of them whether they can compel labourers who have decent earnings to pay their rent”!
The following incidents are mentioned from Over in Cambridges.h.i.+re:--
”A widow with two children had been in receipt of 3s. a week from the parish, and was able to live upon this. She afterwards married a butcher, and still the allowance of 3s. for the children was continued.
But the butcher and his bride came to the Overseer and said 'they were not going to keep _those children_ for 3s. a week, and if a further allowance was not made _they should turn them out of doors_ and throw them on the parish altogether.' The Overseers resisted; the butcher appealed to the Magistrates, who recommended him to make the best arrangement he could as the parish was obliged to support the children”!
The law and its administration, on behalf of the parish, actually put a valuable premium on b.a.s.t.a.r.dy.
The Parish Beadle was tempted to bribe the young woman to lay an information against someone in another parish, ”a compulsory marriage”
was brought about and the woman and b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and all future liability, were sometimes got rid of at one stroke! A Parish Beadle, in addition to looking after little Oliver Twists, often had these delicate negotiations to manage, and whether Mr. b.u.mble was able to ingratiate himself with 'Mrs. Corney' or not, he often did a good stroke of business for his parish in the matrimonial market, when, as I have mentioned in an earlier chapter, a labourer could not even go into another parish to work without a certificate from the parish he belonged to. In the report of the Commission, to which I have referred, occurs this significant little item:--
”A Beadle in a small district a.s.sured me he had alone effected fifty marriages of this description in the course of a few years.”
The labour market was the parish, and this was completely disorganised and demoralised. The old law of settlement made it practically impossible for labour to find the best market. Even if a young man had an offer of a situation in another part of the country at double wages he would often refuse to go lest he should ”lose his parish,” or it might be that the parish where he was asked to go was considered a ”bad” parish compared with his own. Each parish {164} was thus considered as a sort of freehold, with a family cupboard bound to provide for nil its children.
It was almost impossible for any individual farmer to stand out and follow an independent course, for if he paid his men full wages he would also, as a ratepayer, be paying part of the wages for the other farmers in the parish. In some cases the masters combined with the men and gave false certificates as to the amount of their wages in order to get more ”make up” from their parish.
The farmer preferred to employ men with large families to keep them off the parish, but single young men, finding they were not wanted, contracted early and improvident marriages, to make sure of being ”provided for by the parish.” Population increased to beyond the requirements for local industry; the law of settlement was squeezed to the utmost against removals, and thus the farmer was creating the Nemesis he was seeking to flee from.
In many cases wages were as low as 8s. per week, the difference being made up according to the labourer's increasing family, and ”if he makes more, still he receives his allowance in order that industry may not be discouraged.”
At Over on one occasion, Mr. Robinson, the overseer, refused payment to men who would not keep their proper hours at work upon the road. ”They complained to the Bench at Cambridge, and beat him as usual,” so says the report, and not only that, but they returned home wearing favours in their hats and b.u.t.ton-holes, and in the evening collected in a body before Mr. Robinson's house and shouted in triumph!
The report for the parish of Bottisham showed that the effect of the scale for single young men when not working, or receiving less wage than the scale, was that one family, consisting of man, wife, and seven children, were ent.i.tled to and were at that time receiving 19s. 6d. a week (over and above their earnings) from the parish, several of the sons being grown up!
”At Little Shelford,” says the Commissioner, ”a worse case than this was given me by the Acting Overseer, of one family, a man, wife, and four sons, living together, receiving 24s. weekly from the parish”!
The effect of this pauperising system could not fail to be very disastrous--it placed a direct premium upon idleness, as a man was sure of a living from the rates even if he did not work, and also a bounty upon wages, or an inducement for the farmer to pay a much lower wage than he could afford. The ultimate effect of both these circ.u.mstances was that there was such a large amount of pauper labour that it became necessary, in order to relieve the rates, to take care that such labour should be employed before any other. In some cases the unemployed men were actually put up to auction, or rather {165} their labour, and an instance is mentioned in the Commissioners' report of ten men in one parish being knocked down to one farmer for five s.h.i.+llings, and that out of a body of 170 men, 70 were let in this manner! The parish also meddled and muddled in the labour market by making a contract with some individual to have certain work performed by the paupers at a given price, the parish paying the paupers. The making of the Newmarket Road Cutting, near Royston, was an instance of this.
Parochial affairs presented this extraordinary condition of things that for the industrious, thrifty man who was desirous of laying up something for a rainy day, there was no hope! Take the following, which I copy verbatim from the Commissioners' report--
”We have already quoted from Mr. Cowell's report a letter from Mr.
Nash, of Royston, in which he states that he had been forced by the Overseer of Reed to dismiss two excellent labourers for the purpose of introducing two paupers into their place. Mr. Nash adds that of the men dismissed, one,
”Was John Walford, a paris.h.i.+oner of Barley, a steady, industrious, trustworthy, single man, who, by long and rigid economy, had saved about L100. On being dismissed, Walford applied in vain to the farmers at Barley for employment! _It was known that he had saved money, and could not come on the parish, although any of them would willingly have taken him had it been otherwise_! After living a few months without being able to get any work he bought a cart and two horses, and has ever since obtained a precarious subsistence by carrying corn to London for use of the Cambridge merchants; but just now the current of corn is northward and he has nothing to do; and at any time he would gladly have exchanged his employment for that of a day labourer, if he could have obtained work. No reflection is intended on the Overseers of Barley; they only do what all others are expected to do; though the young men point at Walford and call him a fool for not spending his money at a public-house as they do; adding that then he would get work”!
A somewhat similar instance is supplied to the Commissioners by Mr.
Wedd who is spoken of in the report as ”an eminent solicitor of Royston.”
Here is another case:--”A man without children in this neighbourhood emerged from poverty and bequeathed many pecuniary legacies, some L100 apiece, and others larger and smaller, to a number of agricultural labourers who were his distant relatives. As soon as the legacies are paid the legatees would not be able to obtain any employment in husbandry until the legacies are spent! The employment in this parish is all wanted for those who from deep poverty can claim it of the Overseers, and these legatees will have no {166} t.i.tle to claim employment till they have reduced themselves again to poverty by having spent all their legacies!”
It was not, however, so much in favour of the farmer as the system might seem, for they got the worst of the labour--of the two whom Mr.
Nash was obliged to take in the above instance, one killed a valuable mare, and the other he was obliged to prosecute for stealing corn--for the farmer was obliged to take his share of the unemployed labour, and often had a dozen idle worthless men on his hands at times when five or six would have done the work.
Those of us to whom the memory of the bent-backed figure of the ”wheat-barn tasker” in every village, is now but a dim vision of the past, can hardly realize how bitter must have been the feeling when the thres.h.i.+ng machine came to do away with the flail. A simple matter it may seem, yet the peasant revolt which it brought about was for the time more universal, and more effective, than Wat Tyler's rebellion, because, without Wat Tyler's organization, it found a means of working in every village. To the mind of the labourer this uprooting of the habitual daily work of a thousand years, taken in connection with the coming movement against allowing the labourer to go to the overseer to make up his wages out of the rates--these things together presented to his mind an outlook which was bad enough to arouse the sluggish mind of the peasant in every village. So he set about upon a course of retaliation and unreasoning revenge. The thres.h.i.+ng machine was threatening their work, and so upon the thres.h.i.+ng machine wherever they found it the labourers set with a vengeance. The effects of that vengeance are traceable in the criminal returns for the period. Thus the number of criminals for trial for malicious offences against property, which for the previous five or six years had scarcely averaged fifty a year, in the year 1831 went up at a hound to a total of 1,245, of which no less than 921 were for ”destroying thres.h.i.+ng machines.” Riots, incendiarism, and sending letters threatening to burn houses, &c., also went up almost to a corresponding extent.
One or two local examples of pauper insolence and tyranny may be given from the Commissioners' report:--