Early Victorian Britain: 1832–51. Литагент HarperCollins USD

rates than the average, attracted fresh workers, who remained to swell the numbers in the industry long after the temporary boom had gone. Entry into the trade was easy. Apprenticeship had decayed or become meaningless by the 1840s, and in any case the work was normally only semi-skilled. Youths and girls in their teens could easily manage an ordinary frame. The concentration of the industrial life of the area upon hosiery restricted alternative job opportunities, and it was customary for children to follow their fathers at the frame.

      The two previous examples, stockingers and weavers, were of workers whose status and earnings had been drastically reduced. In part this had been possible because of the existence of more lowly members of the labouring poor, who in effect functioned as a reserve army of labour to depress wages. Beyond the ranks of artisans and operatives was an army of manual labourers, men whose bodily toil supplied the motive power for innumerable operations which today are done by machines. We are so accustomed to hearing about the great changes wrought by power driven machinery in certain industries that it is easy to forget how little mechanisation there was in great areas of early Victorian life. A vast amount of wheeling, dragging, hoisting, carrying, lifting, digging, tunnelling, draining, trenching, hedging, embanking, blasting, breaking, scouring, sawing, felling, reaping, mowing, picking, sifting, and threshing was done by sheer muscular effort, day in, day out. Much of this labour was arduous and uninteresting, and some of it was dangerous. It had to be performed out-of-doors with inadequate protection from the constant rain and raw cold of the British climate, or in the stifling heat and dust-laden atmosphere of the mines. It was not highly regarded: on the contrary, such labour was looked down on by all who could find alternative employment. No amount of moralising by middle class authors about the glory of work or the nobility of labour could disguise the reality. Rather was it the curse of Adam for a majority of the labouring poor. By modern Western standards labour was cheap, and it was used prodigally. Manual labouring jobs were so numerous and various that they defy any easy general description. We shall therefore, as in the case of the other sections of the labouring poor, have to confine ourselves to a few selected groups of workers.

      The largest single category in any industry was the agricultural labourers. In 1851 they numbered over one million. There were also 364,000 indoor farm servants (of both sexes), making a total of nearly one and a half million wage workers in agriculture. They were employed by slightly more than half the total number of farmers, the remainder of the farms being too small to need hired labour. The number of labourers per farm and the type of job they performed varied between counties. In areas where there were many small holdings, as in south-eastern England, or in hilly areas like Wales and the Pennine counties, there were relatively fewer wage labourers than on the large farms of eastern England and south-eastern Scotland. Within the large county of Yorkshire several types of agricultural organisation existed, resulting in a difference in the proportion of labourers between one district and the next. The West Riding, although the home of the new manufactures, still contained some purely agricultural districts, and many more in which industrial and agricultural pursuits were combined. There was not only the seasonal migration of the woolcombers, for example, from Craven to work in the corn harvest in the plain of York, but also some continuation of the weaver-farmer tradition which Defoe had noted a hundred years earlier. James Caird, the agriculturist, described the small clothiers of the West Riding in 1851:

      ‘Besides those employed in the large mills, there is a class called “clothiers”, who hold a considerable portion of the land within several miles of the manufacturing towns; they have looms in their houses, and unite the business of weavers and farmers. When trade is good the farm is neglected; when trade is dull the weaver becomes a more attentive farmer. His holding is generally under twenty acres, and his chief stock consists of dairy cows, with a horse to convey his manufactured goods and his milk to market. This union of trades has been long in existence in this part of the country, but it seldom leads to much success on the part of the weaver-farmer himself, and the land he occupies is believed to be the worst managed in the district.’¹⁰

      Such men were of more substance and independence than agricultural wage labourers, as also were the small farmers of the Dales. But they did not hire help. On the southern and eastern sides of the West Riding were larger arable farms, on which wage labourers were employed, and on a model farm in this area Caird instances wages of 14s, 13s, and 12s a week for ploughmen, according to ability.

      Something of the tradition of an independent peasantry probably survived into the mid-decades of the nineteenth century in parts of the North Riding. But the custom of annual hirings in Stokesley, Thirsk, Pickering, York and the larger villages of the North Riding is alone sufficient evidence of the extent to which a large class of landless agricultural labourers existed in the district. In the East Riding this was even more so. There, in an area of rolling chalk wolds, the farms were large, anything from 300 to 1,300 acres, with large corn fields of 30 to 70 acres each; and ‘the farmers are probably the wealthiest men of their class in the county’.¹¹ Mary Simpson, the daughter of the Vicar of Boynton and Carnaby with Fraisthorpe (an extensive parish on the eastern side of the Wolds), described such an agricultural district in a letter of July 1856:

      ‘This is a very scattered parish, entirely agricultural. I do not know if in any other part of England the population and customs are quite similar. Every farm (there are twelve in this parish) comprises in its household from six or seven to twenty plough lads, according to the size of the farms; their ages varying from about fourteen to twenty-four, but the greater part in their teens. These are all changed every year at Martinmas [i.e. the last week in November].’¹²

      In this, the most purely agricultural area of Yorkshire, a landless agricultural working class formed the bulk of the population. Living in the farm houses were the ‘farm servants’, usually lads and lasses in their teens. They were hired annually at the Martinmas hirings, and usually changed farms each year. During working hours they were supervised by a foreman and (the girls) by the mistress of the house. Board and lodging were provided, and wages – varying according to age – were seldom paid more frequently than two or three times a year. Upon marriage the farm servants moved out of the farm house, and set up home for themselves.

      These two groups, the farm servants and regular outdoor agricultural labourers, formed the bulk of the farm labour force. Casual labour was also used: Irishmen, women and children, and textile workers (like the woolcombers mentioned earlier) would be brought in for the harvest. Among the regular labourers there was sometimes a degree of specialisation; shepherds, ploughmen, waggoners. But for the most part the agricultural labourer was expected to turn his hand to whatever the season of the year required. Wage rates were higher in the northern counties of England than in the South, varying from as much as 14s in the West Riding to 7s in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Suffolk. Unlike his urban counterpart, the agricultural labourer sometimes had additional benefits in kind. A tied cottage was often only a damp hovel; the proverbial pig and patch of garden might be but a poor relic of the once ‘bold peasantry of England’; and it is impossible to know how many labourers enjoyed even these modest ‘extras’ and how many not. Where they did exist they perhaps helped to mitigate slightly the rigours of family life on 10s a week. Where they did not, recourse to poor relief was inevitable, as the swollen poor rates of the early 1830s attest.

      For twenty years previously Cobbett had thundered against the degradation of the agricultural labourers to a race of potato-eating, tea-drinking serfs. His description of their condition was borne out by others. William Howitt, a popular author and journalist, who was anxious to take a favourable, even sentimental view of rural England, had to admit that the upbringing of the ordinary farm labourer made him little better than an animal. After describing how the labourer’s children are set to perform small tasks from the earliest possible age, he continued:

      ‘They are mighty useful animals in their day and generation, and as they get bigger, they successively learn to drive plough, and then to hold it; to drive the team, and finally to do all the labours of a man. This is the growing up of a farm servant. All this time he is learning his business, but he is learning nothing else, – he is growing up into a tall, long, smock-frocked, straw-hatted, ankle-booted fellow, with a gait as graceful