John Lawrence Hammond and Barbara Bradby Hammond
The Village Labourer
1760-1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill
Originally published 1911
New Edition, 1920.
PREFACE
This edition differs from previous editions of The Village Labourer in two
respects. The original Chapter One has been omitted: this chapter described the
concentration of power in the hands of a small class, which was the leading
feature of our political development in the eighteenth century. Secondly, the
Appendices have been reduced, but the student who wishes to pursue the subject
of enclosure further will find, at the end of this volume, full details of four
important and representative enclosures.
In their preface to the edition published in 1913 the authors discussed some of
the controversies that had arisen on the topic of the enclosures. It seems worth
while to reproduce here the substance of that preface. Two main criticisms have
been passed on the treatment of enclosures in these pages: the first, that the
writers have drawn an unjust picture, because they deliberately excluded the
importance of enclosure in increasing the food supplies of the nation; the
second, that the hardships of the poor have been exaggerated, and that, though
the system of enclosure lent itself to abuses, there was no evidence that wrong
was done in the mass of enclosures.
The writers submit the following considerations: (1) It has been the accepted
view of all modern critics, with the single exception of dr Hasbach, that the
enclosures of this period, or at any rate the enclosures that took place after
1795, made the soil of England immediately more productive. That this is the
usual view was stated in the text; its correctness was not discussed or
questioned. The subject of this volume is the fate of the Village Labourer, and
so far as he is concerned, the facts which they are accused of neglecting
suggest two reflections: (a) the feeding of Manchester and Leeds did not make
life cheaper to him; and (b) if agriculture suddenly became a great industry,
multiplying as some say England's resources twenty-fold, an equitable
readjustment must have increased the prosperity of all classes engaged in that
industry. The greater the stress laid on the progress of agriculture, the
greater appear the perversity and injustice of the arrangements of a society
under which the labourer became impoverished. If it is argued that the misery of
the labourer was the price the nation had to pay for that advance, it is worth
while to point out that that was not the view of Young, or Davies, or Eden, or
Sinclair, or Cobbett, and that the actual revolution that was accomplished was
not the only alternative to the old unreformed common field system. (2) The
authors desire to point out how little they have relied on solitary instances
for their general statements. Complaint has been made of the publishing of the
story of the attempted enclosure of Sedgmoor, but those who read that account
carefully will see that the passage from Selwyn's letters are important as
disclosing the state of mind of a chairman of an Enclosure Committee; they will
note also that his letters show that it was a common practice for Members of
Parliament to arrange meetings in order to manipulate Committees in the interest
of private persons. Selwyn's view of the responsibilities of a chairman of one
of these Committees has therefore a special significance. The main question for
the historian is this: Were the poor sacrificed or not in the enclosures as they
were carried out? The writers have given their reasons for thinking that they
were sacrificed, and needlessly sacrificed, and no evidence has come under their
notice in the criticisms published to shake that view. They have set out the
actual methods of procedure that were adopted for converting England from the
old to the new system, and they think it is clear that those methods were such
that the poor were bound to suffer unless Parliament expressly intervened for
their protection. This was apparent, or became apparent, to observers at the
time, and proposals that would have helped the poor were made by Arthur Young,
by Eden, by Davies, by Suffield, and by the Board of Agriculture. Those
proposals were disregarded, not necessarily from wickedness or rapacity, but
because the atmosphere of the ruling class was unfavourable. Young referred to
his own proposal six years later in a passage which is worth quoting:
'I have been reading over my Inquiry into the Propriety of applying Wastes to
the better Maintenance of the Poor. I had almost forgotten it, but of all the
essays and papers I have produced, none I think so pardonable as this, so
convincing by facts, and so satisfactory to any candid reader. Thank God I wrote
it, for though it never had the smallest effect except in exciting opposition
and ridicule, it will, I trust, remain a proof of what ought to have been done;
and had it been executed, would have diffused more comfort among the poor than
any proposition that ever was made' (Autobiography, July 14, 1806).
One further fact of interest and importance in this connection may be mentioned.
Michael Sadler, the Factory Reformer, was, unhappily for England, thrown out of
Parliament after the passing of the Reform Bill. He was in the House of Commons
for only three years. One of the most important speeches that he made in his
brief career there, was a long speech reviewing the disastrous change that had
come over the agricultural labourers in recent times. The chief cause he found
in the disappearance of the small farmer, the pulling down of cottages, and the
enclosures. He said that the enclosures had inflicted on the poor as a class
'the most irreparable injuries.' Like Thelwall, with whom he would have been
slow to recognise any affinity, he argued that enclosure might have benefited
the poor, but that in practice it had ruined them. 'Inclosures might indeed have
been so conducted as to have benefited all parties; but now, coupled with other
features of the system, they form a part of what Blackstone denominates a "fatal
rural policy"; one which has completed the degradation and ruin of your
agricultural poor.'
Two subjects are discussed fully in this volume for the first time. One is the
actual method and procedure of Parliamentary Enclosure; the other the labourers'
rising of 1830. More than one important book has been written on enclosures
during the last few years, but nowhere can the student find a full analysis of
the procedure and stages by which the old village was destroyed. The rising of
1830 has only been mentioned incidentally in general histories: it has nowhere
been treated as a definite demand for better conditions, and its course, scope,
significance and punishment have received little attention. The writers of this
book have treated it fully, using for that purpose the Home Office Papers
accessible to students in the Record Office. They wish to express their
gratitude to Mr Hubert Hall for his help and guidance in this part of their
work.
The obligations of the writers to the important books published in recent years
on eighteenth-century local government in the text, but the are manifest, and
they are acknowledged writers desire to mention specially their great debt to Mr
Hobson's Industrial System, a work that seems to them to throw a new and most
illuminating light on the economic significance of the history of the early
years of the last century.
Mr and Mrs Arthur Ponsonby and Miss M. K. Bradby have done the writers the great
service of reading the entire book and suggesting many important improvements.
Mr and Mrs C. R. Buxton, Mr A. Clutton Brock, Professor L. T. Hobhouse, and Mr
H. W. Massingham have given them valuable help and advice on various parts of
the work.
HEMEL HEMPSTED, April 1920.
CHAPTER ONE
The Village Before Enclosure
To elucidate these chapters, and to supply further information for those who are
interested in the subject, we publish an Appendix containing the history, and
tolerably full particulars, of four separate enclosures at Croydon, Haute
Huntre, Stanwell and Wakefield.
At the time of the great Whig Revolution, England was in the main a country of
commons and of common fields;(1*) at the time of the Reform Bill, England was in
the main a country of individualist agriculture and of large enclosed farms.
There has probably been no change in Europe in the last two centuries comparable
to this in importance of which so little is known to-day, or of which so little
is to be learnt from the general histories of the time. The accepted view is
that this change marks a great national advance, and that the hardships which
incidentally followed could not have been avoided: that it meant a vast increase
in the food resources of England in comparison with which the ...
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