The Eighteenth Century in England
The 18th century was an exciting time historically. Mercantile adventure was in full swing and the Industrial Revolution was hot on the heels of the commercial successes of merchants. One of the side effects of increasing commercialism in the early 18th century was a mass migration from the rural interior to the urban city ports. This unfortunately left the countryside with a reduced population whilst the cities grew exponentially; this shifting population included a ever growing merchant middle class, which added to the increased stratification of society in the cities. The Industrial Revolution altered the English landscape forever as she pioneered the way the most significant social change since the introduction of the printing press.
The commercial boom in England had a largely negative effect on rural regions, affecting small towns and villages in two significant ways.
First, the Enclosure Acts, imposed by Government, encouraged the migration from the villages to the cities. Innumerable redundancies were caused by Enclosure, as the fallow land, formerly used collectively by the village for grazing livestock, came under cultivation. Unobtrusive, non-parliamentary enclosures had been going on for decades however the Parliamentary Acts of Enclosure occurred mainly in the latter half of the century as acquisitive farmers, often tenants of wealthy landlords and not landowners themselves, began to predominate. "a world where all below them...were reduced to landless labourers"
Second cause of migration was the attraction of higher wages offered by urban centres. In addition that persuasion were the commercial goods, of increasing variety and quality, which were flooding in to the cities which drew the attention of those in pursuit of what they perceived as a better life. �They (village youth) quit their clean healthy fields for a region of dirt, stink, and noise.� Arthur Young 1771. Since life in the rural areas had become pretty dire it was hardly surprising.
London was seen as a place of infinite opportunities but the migration caused by that attraction produced a colossal burden on the London economy. Mechanisation of traditional occupations brought radical changes to working on the land an those brought redundancies to many. In addition the building of an increasing number of roads, governed by the turnpike system made for easier travel for both freight and passengers.Technological advancements of the 18th century produced improved manufacturing but all at the cost to the rural cottage industry and this in turn resulted in the shift to a more urban way of life.
The allure of London had the most profound effect on the social and economic developments of the eighteenth-century. The city contained huge contrasts between material wealth and wretched poverty, urban improvement and deteriorating quality of life. Between 1760-66 the last gates to the City and surrounding walls were demolished. By this time the City, under the Lord Mayor and his aldermen, was a small part of an ever-increasing area which formed the Capital, with suburbs stretching in every direction as the country people moved to the outskirts of the city.
Background
At the beginning of 18th century nearly every cottager had at least one strip of land to cultivate in the communal fields and enjoyed customary rights to graze cows, pigs, horses, goats and geese on common lands. The farmed lands were open, unhedged and divided into narrow strips, each villager usually having several pieces, not necessarily adjacent to each other. Beyond the cultivated manor lands were wastes, the common land.
England was however not a hedgeless place, however the post-enclosure countryside had a quite different character. The pre- enclosure fields with their medieval boundaries were irregular, having rounded corners, reflecting the use of horse drawn ploughs. After enclosure the hedges were straighter and more regular the shape, until they gradually were more orientated to the mechanisation of ploughing. A hedge might contain a variety of trees and shrubs, maple, elder, holly, whitethorn, sloe, hazel and in some places crab apple, all due mainly to natural rather than deliberate planting.
Medieval fields might be a mile long and half as wide, with the many strips worked by the wholecommunity as they had been for centuries. The ridges created by the strip f arming system became a part of the English country scene and can still be seen underlying some modern fields. The open system was largely profitless however everyone was obliged to conform. Around the cultivated areas lay the common lands. Uncultivated wastelands, which were free for everyone to use and were largely scrub and �waste�
Because there were no restrictions or controls the condition and quality of these lands was frequently very poor and the state of the beasts that grazed them just as wretched. It was, it seems, quite rare for a collective effort to be made to improve the common lands.
The system, unchanged for centuries, had exhausted the fertility in most of the land, with no limit to the number of beasts grazing on the common lands were rampant, winter crops were not grown because of rights to graze. Change was desperately needed but it was only when the pressing need to feed an ever-growing population, at the end of the century, that an efforts were made to improve things generally. Enclosure was the solution offered. An Act of Parliament was passed a private Act of Parliament initially, which abolished the right to common tillage and began the slow and costly process that became known as Enclosure.
Enclosure meant the apportionment of fencing of common and waste lands as well as cultivated lands. Once a parish had been enclosed it was necessary for each new owner to protect his interest in his land by fencing it. This might be local stone, post and rail or the quickest cheapest and easiest means was to put a ditch round it and plant a hedge on the resulting spoil bank. It was costly but gradually better and more skilled means of hedging developed and the boundaries became straight with a pride being taken in the new trade of hedging and ditching. Landowners, with an eye to make money, planted woodlands on their land. Elm wood became the timber of choice for both local use and for profit. Elm was quicker to grow than oak and easier than ash, which draws water and nutrients from the soil to the point where crops will not grow within its reach and cattle will not lie where its leaves fall. Elm was the perfect tree It is durable underwater thus it could be sold to the Navy, for planking and ships keels; at home it made drainpipes and lock gates on canals. For many centuries the elm was the signature of the English landscape, until the 1960�s when a beetle cause Dutch Elm Disease and killed almost every elm in the land.
Landed lords began to attach importance to good hedging particularly when they realised that hedges provided protection for game. Soon tenants were forbidden to trim their hedgerows more than once in seven years. This not un-naturally caused uproar, with tenants unable to grow good crops whilst rabbits flourished and deer consumed their newly planted fields and whilst all the time they were paying rent, for what amounted to useless land.
The enclosure of the land brought an increase in production and progressive farming practices and the people who worked the land had a stake in the future for the land.The labourer was thus able to produce his own food, sometimes with sufficient surplus for him to send to the local market. If he was diligent he could save a little, allowing him the opportunity to invest in more stock and raise his standard of living.
A small farmer might have ten acres to work but Enclosure was so expensive that poor farmers were forced to sell out to a better off farmer. It would be quite beyond the poor farmer�s means to support the legal expenses of Enclosure and the cost of hedging and ditching. A very poor man might have an acre with a small cash payment compensating him for his loss of rights in the common lands. However this might well mean the loss of free grazing for his cow, which had supplied his children with milk. He might therefore have to sell both his land and his cow and become maybe a farm servant or an agricultural labourer.
The petty yeoman and the small cottagers lost most of their independence and by the 1840�s found themselves at the mercy of the landed employers, from whom they could not always gain a living wage. Having no work in bad weather and slack times, and thus not getting a wage, coupled with being landless, meant they could not save for times of sickness or for their old age.
Large landowners preferred to have a few tenants working larger units rather than a large number of smaller tenants in small acreages. It seemed like good management and common sense but for a huge number of farm workers it meant redundancy and his family suffered too, because the cottage they lived in was tied to the job. In the Midlands where it was more found to be more profitable to breed cattle than grow corn, a huge number of families were rendered jobless and homeless. In one parish alone some 60 families lost their living when vast acres of arable land was laid down to grass.
Many of the little farmers who did take up their allotment of land lived to repent the decision. Having all his land in a single piece rather than scattered across the parish, did not compensate for the loss of his free rights to common lands. Horses were still needed to work the land but he also had to feed them himself instead of turning them out onto the common land; he now had to tend his sheep where once one shepherd minded the common flock. If he chose to sell his livestock the whole edifice was doomed. The cattle, the sheep and horses provided manure for his field, and without the nourishment of his arable land, crops became increasingly poor until the entire arrangement failed.This dreadful plight occurred at almost exactly the same time as the introduction of new machinery into ages-old cottage industries. For centuries all over the country families in and around village and small towns had found a supplement to poor agricultural wages by working at home. Blankets making, cloth weaving, glove making and stocking making all provided that vital subsidy. However the increasing industrialisation and mechanisation of many of these traditions crafts meant that even that was lost to poor families.
This was not the final indignity heaped upon the country population. In 1795 the decision was made to provide for the poor from the parish. Originally introduced to avert famine by fixing a living wage for farm workers it was adapted to provide what is now called Dole. Based on the price of a loaf, the Dole made up the difference between what he earned and what it cost him to live, and was provided by the parish rate. However if he had a few pounds saved for his old age or if he still had a cow or a pig he was refused this dole. Farmers let the parish help to pay their wages bill and because of this preferred to employ paupers. A thrifty worker who lost his job could not get work whilst he retained his few pounds and a couple of cows. He had to reduce himself to a state of beggary to get employment. The result was that farm owners had no incentive to pay a living wage or keep men employed.
The evil of the consequences of the terrible mismanagement of Enclosure was felt throughout the farming population. Stripped of the ancient rights to common land, which in turn deprived them of their cow, the pig and their few sheep. With their self-respect destroyed and their independence taken from them, they became deprived, too, of any ambition to rise in life. With nothing left of savings many were forced into the degradation of parish relief.
The life they had known for so long was gone. A life which was essentially wholesome, despite financial poverty, it was rich in many ways, community, tradition, self sufficiency, a life that their fore fathers had lived for centuries. These proud, independent men and women, toilers of the soil, on whose backs the whole edifice of English society rested, were forced to become farm servants and labourers on other men�s lands, condemned to a life of servitude. With no means of surviving is the clean air and open spaces of the countryside the other alternative offered was to work in the city, a disease-ridden dirty noisy life and the lure of higher wages.
19th century agricultural life
Werrington
