The Decline of the English Cottage, 1893
From The English Peasant by Richard Heath, 1893.
From: 1870 C.E. To: 1870 C.E.
Location: England
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From The English Peasant by Richard Heath, 1893.
The Cottage Homes of England.
(Leisure Hour, 1870.)
With their gable roofs of cosy thatch or of red tiles bright with moss and lichen, with their ornamented chimneys and walls of plaster laced and interlaced with heavy beams, the Cottage Homes of England, peeping out from the green lanes of Kent, or fringing the Surrey commons, or nestling in the wooded vales of Sussex, are always picturesque. They are, moreover, the one form of human habitation always in harmony with the scenery around them.
In Yorkshire and in Wales their aspect is bleak as the moor or the mountain side; in Cumberland and in Devonshire they are alike built of stone; but in the north their architecture is in keeping with the stern form Nature presents among the Cumbrian hills; while in the south, covered with ivy and hidden amongst gardens and orchards, each little cot appears a poem in itself. This harmony is partly due to the fact that the same soil which produces the natural scenery produces the material of which the cottages are built.
In the north wood is scarce, stone plentiful: hence the stone villages of Lancashire and Yorkshire. In the pottery districts and the midland counties clay is abundant; here, therefore, brick cottages are the rule. In Westmoreland the red sandstone is used; in Kent the ragstone, in Lincolnshire the Ancaster stone, in Cornwall granite, in Essex and Herts flints from the chalk hills, in Hampshire mud mixed with pebbles, in Norfolk and Suffolk lumps of clay mixed with straw.
Picturesque and harmonious from the artist's point of view, these cottages are in most other respects a scandal to England, and to write as Mrs Hemans did concerning them an unconscious satire.
Crabbe, who saw things as they really were, disposed long ago of the sentimental view of the Cottage Homes of England—
“Ye gentle souls who dream of rural ease,
Whom the smooth stream and smoother sonnet please,
Go ! if the peaceful cot your praises share,
Go look within, and ask if peace be there;
If peace be his—that drooping, weary sire.
Or theirs, that offspring round their feeble fire;
Or hers, that matron pale, whose trembling hand
Turns on the wretched hearth th' expiring brand!"
Even Crabbe's photographic painting gives but an inadequate idea of the moral misery of these pretty cots,—"smiling o'er the silvery brooks, and round the hamlet-fanes."
The Rev. James Eraser, afterwards Bishop of Manchester, one of the Assistant Commissioners in the inquiry made in 1867-68 into the conditions of agricultural labour (an inquiry nominally confined to the employment of women and children, but really extending to the whole subject), reports that "the majority of" cottages that exist in rural parishes are deficient in almost every requisite that should constitute a home for a Christian family in a civilised community.
They are deficient in bedroom accommodation, very few having three chambers, and in some chambers the larger proportion only one. They are deficient in drainage and sanitary arrangements; they are imperfectly supplied with water; such conveniences as they have are often so situated as to become nuisances; they are full enough of draughts to generate any amount of rheumatism; and in many instances are lamentably dilapidated and out of repair.
"It is impossible to exaggerate the ill effects of such a state of things in every aspect, physical, social, economical, moral, intellectual. Physically, a ruinous, ill-drained cottage, cribbed, cabin'd, confined, and overcrowded, generates any amount of disease, fevers of every type, catarrh, rheumatism, as well as intensifies to the utmost that tendency to scrofula and phthisis which, from their frequent intermarriages and their low diet, abound so largely among the poor.
"The moral consequences are fearful to contemplate... Modesty must be an unknown virtue, decency an unimaginable thing, where in one small chamber... two and sometimes three generations are herded promiscuously,... where the whole atmosphere is sensual, and human nature is degraded into something below the level of the swine. It is a hideous picture, and the picture is drawn from life."
In the summer 1864 a careful and elaborate inquiry was made by Dr H. J. Hunter into the house accommodation of rural labourers, and embodied in the seventh report of the medical officer of the Privy Council for presentation to Parliament. Every page testifies to its insufficient quantity and miserable quality.
Summing up the results of the inquiry, the report says: "Even the general badness of the dwellings is an evil infinitely less urgent than their numerical insufficiency," a statement proved by the fact that in 821 separate parishes or townships in England a destruction of houses had been going on during the previous ten years notwithstanding increased local demand for them.
"People," the report says, "do not desert villages, villages nowadays desert people."
Certain provisions of the Poor Law relating to chargeability and settlement rendered it the pecuniary interest of every parish to lessen the number of the poor residing within its boundaries. When, therefore, a parish was the sole property of two or three great landlords, "they had only to resolve that there should be no labourers' dwellings on their estates, and their estates were thenceforth free from half their responsibility for the poor." The Union Chargeability Act has changed all this, but the evil done remains.
Other causes have doubtless been at work, but this has been the principal one. When we come to understand the wretched pauperism into which the agricultural labourers have drifted, we can see how powerful the temptation to shift the burden of the poor-rates must have been to large proprietors. "Agricultural labour," says this report, " instead of implying a safe and permanent independence for the hard-worked labourer and his family, implies for the most part only a longer or shorter circuit to eventual pauperism."
What are the causes which have brought agricultural labour into this wretched condition?
In feudal times land was held in great masses from the Crown, and as the importance of every lord depended upon the number of retainers he could bring into the field, it was his interest to divide his estate into as many farms as he could find tenants to cultivate them, and to grant rights of common to each one over the remaining portions.
Thorold Rogers, in his "History of Agriculture and Prices in England," says: "In the 14th century the land was greatly subdivided, and most of the inhabitants of villages or manors held plots of land which were sufficient in many cases for maintenance, and, in nearly all cases, for independence in treating with their employers. Most of the regular farm servants—the carter, the ploughman, the shepherd, the cowherd, and the hog-keeper—were owners of land, and there is a high degree of probability that the occasional labourer was also among the occupiers of the manor. The mediaeval peasant had his cottage and curtilage at a very low rent and in secure possession, even when, unlike the general mass of his fellows, he was not possessed of land in his own right held at a labour or a money rent, and he had rights of pasturage over the common lands of the manor for the sheep, pigs, or perhaps cow, which he owned."
This prosperity continued to the close of the 15th century, when the Wars of the Roses broke out, ending in the destruction of the feudal system. Manufactures rose on its ruin, the woollen trade increased greatly, and large tracts of land were required for sheep-walks. This caused at the time a wholesale destruction of villages, so that, in a petition presented to Parliament in 1450, it is stated that sixty-five towns (villages) and hamlets within twelve miles of Warwick had been destroyed.
Many efforts were made to restore the former widely-spread prosperity of the English peasantry. An Act passed in 1487 forbade any one to take more than one farm, and the value of that farm was not to exceed ten marks yearly. Five or six times in the 16th century Acts were passed imposing penalties for not keeping up "houses of husbandry," and for not laying convenient land for their maintenance. An Act of 1549 secured to small cottiers land for gardens or orchards. Another, passed in the year 1589, is peculiarly noteworthy as forbidding the erection of cottages unless four acres were attached; the object being, as Lord Bacon said of the Act of 1487, "to breed a subject to live in convenient plenty and no servile condition, and to keep the plough in the hands of the owners, and not mere hirelings."
And the result sought was obtained, for, towards the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries, contemporary authorities declare that the condition of the labourers and small tenants in husbandry "had grown to be more powerful, skilful, and careful, through recompense of gain, than heretofore they had been."
This prosperity, dimmed for a time by the Civil War, was not seriously affected by it, for in the reign of Charles II. there were, according to the best statistical writers of the time, not less than 160,000 proprietors, who, with their families, must have made up a seventh part of the whole population who derived their subsistence from little freehold estates. This second era of agricultural well-being continued until the middle of the 18th century, when, from all accounts, it culminated. Prior to the American War, the English peasantry were, generally speaking, in a comparatively prosperous condition. They were reaping the advantage of the expanding commerce of the country without any corresponding diminution in their resources.
But with the improvement and extension of modern husbandry commenced the depression and decay of the husbandmen. It was found that large farms could be managed more profitably than small ones. Thus the poor and the weak began to fall into the ranks of the hired labourer, while their richer neighbour rose in the social scale.
Few things had more helped the mass of English peasants than the freedom they had enjoyed to use the common lands. But from about the middle of the last century commenced that wholesale private appropriation of common property which has so largely helped to complete the ruin of the English peasant. Between 1710, the date of the first Inclosure Act, and 1760, only 334,974 statute acres were inclosed, while, in the century which followed, more than seven millions of statute acres have been added to the cultivated area of Great Britain.
In a speech made by Mr Cowper-Temple (Lord Mount-Temple), on the second reading of the general Inclosure Bill, March 13th, 1844, he said:—"In former times every cottage almost had some common rights, from which the poor occupants derived much benefit; the privilege of feeding a cow, a pig, or a goose on the common was a great benefit to them, and it was unfortunate, when a system of inclosing commons first commenced, that a portion of the land was not set apart for the benefit of every cottager who enjoyed common rights, and his successors; but the course adopted had been to compensate the owner of the cottage to which the common rights belonged, forgetting the claims of the occupier by whom they were enjoyed."
Had the loss of these common rights been balanced by a share in the material progress of the country, the agricultural labourer would not have been much worse treated by these Inclosure Acts than the bulk of the community, but since 1815 their wages have declined, while there has been an increase in the cost of living.
The fictitious prosperity that arose during the war only made the subsequent destitution harder to bear. From 1815 to 1846 was a period of continually recurring distress amongst the agriculturists, and the unhappy labourers sank almost universally into pauperism. Their wages fell to zero, if we may use that term to imply the lowest point to which they could fall compatible with continued existence. In different countries they varied from 7s. to 12s. a week. In Cambridgeshire the farmers paid 8s. and beer, which made it 9s. 6d., but they said it was only intimidation made them pay such prices. The labourers grew desperate, and in 1830 there were a series of incendiary fires, extending for more than eighteen months, in the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Berkshire, and Buckinghamshire.
But these efforts were like the struggles of a dying man, fitful, and each time perceptibly weaker During the winter of 1845-46 the agonised sufferer was dimly seen writhing in the dark. In the newspapers of the time there were accounts of gatherings of the labourers, with their wives and children, at night, on moors and commons, under circumstances that gave a weird-like character to the proceedings. At one held near Wootton-Basset, on a cold winter's night, the speakers, one after the other, gave accounts of their own sufferings and those of their families, quite inconceivably cruel. Nearly a thousand Wiltshire peasants were present, and it was a heart-rending sight, when the moon shone out from time to time behind the clouds, and revealed the upturned faces worn with anxiety, want, and hunger.
Nearly twenty years later, Elihu Burritt, in his walk to Land's End, relates the result of a conversation he had with a hedger in Wiltshire. After detailing his own hardships, the man told him "that his son-in-law had six children, all too young to earn anything in the field, and he had to feed, clothe, and house the whole family out of eight shillings a week. They were obliged to live entirely on bread, for they could not afford to have cheese with it. Take out one-and-sixpence for rent, and as much for fuel, candles, clothes, and a little tea, sugar, or treacle, and there was only five shillings left for food for eight mouths. They must eat three times a-day, which made twenty-four meals to be got out of eightpence, only a third of a penny for each."
Thus, in the progress of modern civilisation, the English agricultural labourer has been a constant loser. From a condition in which he might hope, by industry and thrift, to become a small farmer, he can now hope for nothing better than to perform like a hireling his day, and then to find a pauper's grave. One privilege after another has gone, until at last he is driven from the land which the toil of many generations of his ancestors has rendered fertile, to burrow with his children in the slums of some outlying village, and thence to trudge with gaunt face and discontented heart to and fro from the scene of labour, no longer sweetened by bygone memories or future hopes.
There are times when the yearnings of humanity claim to be heard, and when those who, from any motive, good or bad, have allowed themselves to be carried away by the tendencies of the day, will be forced to exclaim with the greatest of modern English agriculturists, "It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one's country. I look around, and not a house is to be seen but mine. I am the Giant of Giant Castle, and have eaten up all my neighbours."
Heath, Richard. The English Peasant. T. Fisher Unwin, 1893.
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