Early Victorian Britain: 1832–51

Most Victorian writers, when describing their society, divided it into the upper, middle and lower (or working) classes. They realised the rough and ready nature of this categorisation, and usually referred to the working classes or lower orders in the plural. Unfortunately the convenient threefold division stereotyped a view of British society which has persisted down to the present day, but which is more a statement of ideology than a useful description of social stratification. The three class model is inadequate for comprehending early Victorian society because, among other things, it does not permit sufficient account to be taken of the very important group of ‘middling’ people who were distinct from both the more affluent middle class and the bulk of the working class; and because it obscures the great diversity within the working class. When Henry Mayhew carried out his great investigation of labouring people in London in 1849–51 (subsequently republished in 1861–2 and 1864 as London Labour and the London Poor) he had to employ quite other categories in order ‘to enunciate for the first time the natural history, as it were, of the industry and idleness of Great Britain’. He found it ‘no easy matter … to classify the different kinds of labour scientifically’, and his four volumes document the detailed and complex arrangements which he discovered among different sections of the working classes. Seeking, as a pioneer social scientist, for a general categorisation of what he called the social fabric he devised a fourfold classification: those who will work, those who cannot work, those who will not work, and those who need not work. The first three comprised the labouring poor. Mayhew’s material was limited to the metropolis, and it has therefore to be supplemented by surveys and observations from the provinces, rural and industrial. From these various sources we can construct a typology of the labouring classes.

At the top of the hierarchy was the labour aristocracy. This was a small group of highly skilled artisans, earning 30s to 40s a week, with fair regularity of employment and superior working conditions. Many of them were handicraftsmen in traditional industries and had served a long apprenticeship. They inherited the pride and prestige of being masters of their craft or ‘mystery’. In many trades there was a distinction between the ‘society’ and ‘non-society’ men, or between the ‘honourable’ and the ‘dishonourable’ sections. Among cabinet makers in London, for instance, a small group of six or seven hundred produced high quality work while the majority of four or five thousand supplied the mass market with cheaper goods. The former were all members of a trade society (or union) and their wages, work-methods and marketing arrangements were regulated by custom; the latter were less skilled, unorganised and forced by competition to accept lower earnings. It was estimated that the ‘society men’ of every trade comprised about one-tenth of the whole. They were printing compositors, breeches-makers, jewellers, watchmakers, scientific instrument makers, some cutlery workers, hatters, ironmoulders, shipwrights and carpenters. The new industries also contributed their quota of highly paid artisans: locomotive engineers, first class fine cotton spinners, calico printers and dyers. No hard and fast line can be drawn between the labour aristocracy and the lower middle class. The economic and social position of a small shopkeeper or independent master was very close to that of a skilled and experienced artisan – as witness the career of Francis Place, the radical tailor of Charing Cross who began his career as a leather-breeches maker, and whose shop became a meeting place for artisan and middle class reformers. In the metal working trades of Birmingham and the Black Country, and in the cutlery trades of Sheffield, little masters and skilled journeymen intermingled in a complex series of economic and social relationships, varying from craft to craft and between one subdivision of the trade and the next. Similarly at the lower level the labour aristocracy shaded off into ordinary skilled workers, whose wages would be in the range of 20s to 30s per week. Many building trades craftsmen, tailors, shoemakers, skilled engineers and lower grade spinners fell into this category. They were artisans and had the habits and attitudes of handicraftsmen, yet without the superior pay and security of the very first class men.

Below them came the great divide in working class life: the complete separation of the artisans from the labourers, of the skilled from the unskilled and semi-skilled:

‘The transition from the artisan to the labourer [commented Mayhew] is curious in many respects. In passing from the skilled operative of the west-end to the unskilled workman of the eastern quarter of London, the moral and intellectual change is so great, that it seems as if we were in a new land, and among another race.’

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Mayhew saw the difference mainly in terms of education and higher intelligence. He defined an artisan as an educated handicraftsman, in contrast to a labourer whose occupation needed no educational apprenticeship. And he noted great differences in the interests and life styles of the two groups. The trade unions (which, until much later in the century, were virtually confined to skilled workers) fiercely maintained the privileged status of their members. It was quite unthinkable that a labourer should ever be allowed to do a craftsman’s job, or that the ‘mate’ or ‘helper’ should earn more than a half or a third as much as the skilled man by whose side he worked. In Bradford the skilled woolcombers did not drink in the same pubs with more lowly members of the textile fraternity.

When we turn to the non-artisan section of ‘those who will work’, we are met with a bewildering range of jobs and conditions that cannot be defined entirely by stratification. Relative degrees of skill are hard to estimate and do not necessarily correspond with earnings: thus more skill is required for handloom weaving than for navvying, yet the poor handloom weaver earned much less than a railway navvy. Regional, occupational, even ethical, variations were vertical factors modifying the general pattern of stratification. Factory hands, for example, were really characteristic only of the northern industrial counties; most of Mayhew’s street traders were not found outside the metropolis; and Irish immigrants were concentrated in a relatively few occupations and centres. We have therefore to bear in mind that the following picture of the less fortunate sections of the labouring poor is impressionistic, a series of more or less localised types, rather than an overall description which is universally applicable.

Among semi- and unskilled workers the factory operatives attracted a good deal of attention from contemporaries. They represented for most observers the heart of the new industrial civilisation, about whose benefits or iniquities there was so much argument. As always, investigators tended to find what they were looking for: the lot of the factory operative was presented both as a state of continual misery and as a life of modest comfort and respectability. Here are two contrasting examples. The first is a rosy description of the homes of the operatives near Messrs Ashworth’s model cotton mill at Turton, near Bolton, Lancashire. It was written by William Cooke Taylor in 1842:

‘The situation [of Banktop, the operatives’ village], though open and airy, is not unsheltered; the cottages are built of stone, and contain from four to six rooms each; back-premises with suitable conveniences are attached to them all…. I visited the interior of nearly every cottage; I found all well, and very many respectably, furnished: there were generally a mahogany table and chest of drawers. Daughters from most of the houses, but wives, as far as I could learn, from none, worked in the factory. Many of the women were not a little proud of their housewifery, and exhibited the Sunday wardrobes of their husbands, the stock of neatly folded shirts, etc.: … I found that there were some processes connected with the cotton manufacture which the women were permitted to execute in their own houses. “The pay,” said one of the women, “is not much, but it helps to boil the pot.” … I was informed by the operatives that permission to rent one of the cottages was regarded as a privilege and favour, that it was in fact a reward reserved for honesty, industry and sobriety…. All were not merely contented with their situation, but proud of it … It is not easy to fix upon a statistical test for measuring the intelligence of the adult operatives. I found clocks and small collections of books in all their dwellings; several had wheel-barometers…. I have more than once gone down in the evening to Turton Mills, to see the operatives coming from work … The boys were as merry as crickets: there was not one of the girls who looked as if she would refuse an invitation to a dance.’

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A very different impression is left by William Dodd’s account of a young girl factory worker in Manchester in 1841. After the watchman has knocked on the window at 4.30 in the morning, the girl’s mother:

‘rouses the unwilling girl to another day of toil. At length you hear her on the floor; the clock is striking five. Then, for the first time, the girl becomes conscious of the necessity for haste; and having slipped on her clothes, and (if she thinks there is time) washed herself, she takes a drink of cold coffee, which has been left standing in the fireplace, a mouthful of bread (if she can eat it), and having packed up her breakfast in her handkerchief, hastens to the factory. The bell rings as she leaves the threshold of her home. Five minutes more, and she is in the factory, stripped and ready for work. The clock strikes half-past five; the engine starts, and her day’s work commences.

‘At half-past seven … the engine slacks its pace (seldom stopping) for a short time till the hands have cleaned the machinery and swallowed a little food. It then goes on again and continues at full speed till twelve o’clock, when it stops for dinner. Previously to leaving the factory, and in her dinner-hour, she has her machines to clean. The distance of the factory is about five minutes’ walk from her home. I noticed every day that she came in at half-past twelve, or within a minute or two, and once she was over the half hour; the first thing she did was to wash herself, then get her dinner (which she was seldom able to eat), and pack up her drinking for the afternoon. This done, it was time to be on her way to work again, where she remains, without one minute’s relaxation, till seven o’clock; she then comes home, and throws herself into a chair exhausted. This [is] repeated six days in the week (save that on Saturdays she may get back a little earlier, say, an hour or two)…. This young woman looks very pale and delicate, and has every appearance of an approaching decline. I was asked to guess her age; I said, perhaps fifteen…. Her mother…. told me she was going nineteen … She is a fair specimen of a great proportion of factory girls in Manchester.’

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Within the textile industry, where most of the factory operatives were to be found, wages and working conditions were affected by a number of factors. The particular branch of the industry (cotton, wool, worsted, flax, silk), the constant replacement of one machine or process by another, the relative use of women and children instead of men, and the vagaries of unemployment, all helped to determine the fortunes of any one group of operatives. In general, however, a male factory hand in Yorkshire or Lancashire (employed, say, as a third grade spinner) could hope to earn between 14s and 22s a week. If to this could be added the earnings of his wife and children the weekly family income would be raised to 30s or more, depending on the age and number of the children. The women were employed as throstle spinners (in cotton) and as power loom weavers, and their wages were 5s to 10s a week. Children were frequently used as piecers and paid 2s 6d to 5s weekly. In Leeds in 1839 male cloth pressers averaged 20s a week, cloth drawers 24s 6d, slubbers 24s and wool sorters 21s – which compared favourably with 16s for tailors and 14s for shoemakers.

(#litres_trial_promo) The situation in one Leeds spinning mill in the 1830s was summarised thus:

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It was a characteristic of the factory operatives, as of some other sections of the labouring poor, that the unit of earning was the family, not a single breadwinner. No aspect of the factory system aroused more controversy than this, and the employment of women and children became a focus for agitation and legislation in the 1830s and 1840s. Some of the wider implications of this will be examined later. In relation to social stratification it provided another distinction between the élite of skilled workers and the majority of working people.

As the textile mill operative was felt to be the representative type of worker in the machine age, so the handloom weaver was the representative figure from the past. The golden age of handloom weaving (still within the memory of the old weavers) had come to an end before the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, but the craft remained attractive despite a fall in earnings. It was an occupation which was pursued in the worker’s own home surrounded (and also assisted) by his wife and family. He could, and did, work at his own pace and to suit his own convenience. If he wished to work hard for four days and loaf for three, he was at liberty to do so. He was free from the irksome discipline of the factory, and if most yardage weaving was monotonous he could always break off for a smoke or a drink when he felt inclined. Traditionally many of the weavers of the West Riding had also been farmers, and the substantial stone houses with their third storey loom shops stood as reminders of a prosperous past. Handloom weaving was popular because of its freedom and because it satisfied the old artisan craving for independence. Unfortunately it was also, at least in its plain and coarser departments, a skill which was easily acquired. Little capital was necessary: a loom and lodgings could be hired in Burnley and Colne for a shilling a week. There were no restrictive apprenticeship regulations, and much of the work could be done by women and children. An assistant commissioner who enquired into the state of the industry in 1838–9, reported that in Barnsley thirty Irishmen entered the town one morning and set up as handloom weavers, though they had never done any weaving before. From 1815 to the 1830s the hand weaver’s earnings were reduced drastically, and he was forced to work longer and longer hours and accept more onerous conditions for the privilege of getting work. By 1838–9 in Manchester the total family earnings of weavers of coarse fabrics averaged only 8s a week, and similar figures were reported from Glasgow and Barnsley. Although there were important differences between cotton weavers in Lancashire, woollen and worsted weavers in Yorkshire, and silk weavers in London and Coventry, the trend was everywhere the same. Selected groups of weavers who did extra fine or specialised work were able to make up to 16s a week. But such earnings were a sad reward for a once-proud craft.

The ‘distress’ of the handloom weavers in the 1830s and 1840s received a good deal of publicity, though little constructive help. They were, after the agricultural workers and domestic servants, the largest occupational group in the country, numbering with their families over 800,000 persons. Their reduction in status from respectable artisans to workers on the edge of starvation represented an important cultural shift within a significantly large section of the labouring population. It is easy to write them off simply as unfortunate casualties of the Industrial Revolution, outmoded handworkers who were unable to compete with the machine. But this is by no means the whole story, and obscures the essential nature of the impact of industrialism on the labouring poor. Only in the 1830s in the cotton, and in the 1840s in the woollen, industries did power looms in the factories compete fully and directly with handlooms. Until that time the two existed side by side, with the handloom weaver reduced to being an auxiliary of the factory, but not yet driven out of existence by competition. His role was to take up the slack in busy times, and to bear the first brunt of a recession. He also acted as a check on the wages of power loom operators, most of whom were women. The plight of the weavers was a vivid illustration of how helpless a section of labouring men could be when caught between the relics of the domestic system and the full force of competitive industrial capitalism. In classical economic theory the handloom weaver should no doubt, under the stress of severe competition, have transferred his labour to some other sector of the economy. But in fact this did not happen. Weavers for the most part would not, and could not, find other employment. ‘Too great attachment to the occupation is the bane of the trade,’ commented Dr Mitchell, one of the Assistant Handloom Weavers’ Commissioners, in the 1841 Report. Quite apart from their strong desire to cling to an occupation which enabled them to preserve something of their traditional way of life, their opportunities of alternative jobs were strictly limited. They were barred from entering, or apprenticing their children to, skilled handicrafts by the trade societies; they were not required in the mills, where power loom weavers were usually women and girls; and they seldom had the physique or strength for an outdoor labouring job. Their occupation, protected neither by unions nor trade customs, was wide open to anyone who wished to take it up; and the supply of weavers was always in excess of the demand for their labour. At the same time, as earnings and conditions of work deteriorated, more people became weavers; for poor as the remuneration was, it was better than starvation and for some sections of the labouring poor this was the choice in the 1830s.

Thus was the handloom weaver degraded. The story was told many times over by contemporary observers and fully documented in government enquiries. Engels’ vignette, written in 1844, may well stand for many others:

‘Of all the workers who compete against machinery the most oppressed are the handloom weavers in the cotton industry. These workers receive the lowest wages and even when in full employment cannot earn more than 10s a week. One branch of hand weaving after another is challenged by the power-loom. Moreover handloom weaving is the refuge of workers who have lost their livelihood in other sections. The result is that there is always a surplus of handloom weavers, and they consider themselves fortunate if on the average they can earn between 6s and 7s a week for fourteen to eighteen hours a day spent behind the loom…. I have visited many of these weavers’ workshops, which are usually in cellars, situated down obscure, foul courts and alleys. Frequently half a dozen of these handloom weavers – some of them married people – live together in a cottage which has one or two workrooms and one large common bedroom. They live almost entirely upon potatoes, supplemented perhaps with a little porridge. They seldom drink milk and they hardly ever eat meat. A large number of them are Irish or of Irish descent. These poor wretches are the first to be thrown out of work when there is a commercial crisis and last to be taken on again when trade improves.’

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Other outworkers, such as the framework knitters in the hosiery industry, suffered similar though not identical experiences. In order to sharpen our focus and thereby penetrate a little deeper than is possible in generalised statements, it will be helpful to look in some detail at the nature of this one selected industry. Hosiery manufacture was localised almost entirely in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and south Derbyshire, and this Midlands trade provides a case history in which the condition of a section of the labouring poor, the outworkers, can be studied. By the 1830s the industry had developed various branches in addition to the old staple product, stockings. Shirts, cravats, braces, socks and gloves were all manufactured. Most of the worsted hosiery was made in Leicester, the cotton and silk in Nottingham and Derby. In Leicester, there had also developed a cheap line of stocking manufacture, the cut-ups, or straight down hose. The traditional wrought (i.e. fully fashioned) hose was made mainly in the county. The basis of all this manufacture was the hand knitting frame, which was worked either in the stockinger’s own home or in the small ‘shop’ belonging to a master stockinger. Steam power was not introduced into the industry until 1845, and the domestic basis of framework knitting remained until well into the 1850s. Like the handloom weavers, the knitters had suffered a steady fall in their earnings since 1815, until by 1838 they averaged only 7s for a full week’s work.

From the early nineteenth century two factors had combined to undermine the independence of the stockinger – the system of frame letting and the growth of middlemen. Although in the eighteenth century some stockingers had owned their own frames, by the 1830s this independence had disappeared, and virtually all frames were hired. The owners of the frames were of three different types – hosiers (or manufacturers), middlemen (bagmen), and persons not connected with the trade who let the frames solely for the profits of their rents. Among the varieties of middlemen it was not always possible to categorise exactly. But in addition to the ‘putter out’ who simply gave out the yarn for the hosier and collected the hose when it had been made, there were two types of genuine contractor. The undertaker, or master stockinger, contracted with the larger hosiers to supply hose, and then put out the work to a number of framework knitters. Similar to, and often indistinguishable from, this type was the bagman or bag hosier. He flourished particularly in certain country districts, and manufactured on his own account. It was from the twin institutions of frame letting and middlemen that most of the grievances of the framework knitters stemmed.

Frame rents were by no means the only grievance, but the struggle for their abolition became synonymous with, and symbolic of, the general struggle to improve the stockinger’s lot. Traditionally the rent for a frame was ninepence per week, but with the introduction of the new wider frames the rent went up. A constant complaint of the stockingers was the uncertainty and variability of frame rents. A full week’s rent was paid whether or not there was a full week’s work, and it was paid whether the frame was in the stockinger’s home or in the employer’s shop. In the latter case an additional charge for standing room was also made, together with charges for light, fuel and needles. Thus it was not uncommon in 1844 for 3s in charges to be deducted from weekly earnings of 10s; and there were cases where men who had had work for only two or three days in the week found that they had worked for nothing else than the frame rent.

But, as Thomas Cooper discovered:

‘… it was by a number of petty and vexatious grindings, in addition to the obnoxious “frame rent”, that the poor framework knitter was worn down, till you might have known him by his peculiar air of misery and dejection, if you had met him a hundred miles from Leicester. He had to pay, not only “frame rent”, but so much per week for the “standing” of the frame in the shop of the “master”, for the frames were grouped together in the shops, generally, though you would often find a single frame in a weaver’s cottage. The man had also to pay threepence per dozen to the “master” for “giving out” of the work. He had also to pay so much per dozen to the female “seamer” of the hose. And he had also oil to buy for his machine, and lights to pay for in the darker half of the year. All the deductions brought the average earnings of the stocking-weaver to four and sixpence per week. I found this to be a truth confirmed on every hand.

‘And when he was “in work”, the man was evermore experiencing some new attempt at grinding him down to a lower sum per dozen for the weaving, or at “docking” him so much per dozen for alleged faults in his work; while sometimes – and even for several weeks together – he experienced the most grievous wrong of all. The “master” not being able to obtain full employment for all the frames he rented of the manufacturer, but perhaps only half employ for them – distributed, or “spread” the work over all the frames … But the foul grievance was this: each man had to pay a whole week’s frame rent, though he had only half a week’s work! Thus while the poor miserable weaver knew that this half-week’s work, after all the deductions, would produce him such a mere pittance that he could only secure a scant share of the meanest food, he remembered that the owner of the frame had the full rent per week, and the middleman or “master” had also his weekly pickings secured to him.

‘Again; a kind of hose would be demanded for which the frame needed a deal of troublesome and tedious altering. But the poor weaver was expected to make all the alterations himself. And sometimes he could not begin his week’s weaving until a day, or a day and a half, had been spent in making the necessary alterations. Delay was also a custom on Monday mornings. The working man must call again. He was too early. And, finally, all the work was ended. The warehouses were glutted, and the hosiery firms had no orders. This came again and again, in Leicester and Loughborough and Hinckley, and the framework knitting villages of the county, until, when a little prosperity returned, no one expected it to continue.’

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Cooper’s final hint that the low condition of framework knitters was due to more than the specific grievances already listed sets the problem in a somewhat wider perspective. The distress of the stockingers, caused by their low earnings and long periods of complete or partial unemployment, was not the result of competition between the economically dying handworker and production by power machinery. The truth was that the trade of framework knitting, like that of handloom weaving, was overstocked with labour. Only in exceptionally prosperous times was there enough work to go round. The system of frame rents directly encouraged employers to spread the work over as many knitters as possible, even though this meant that each would have less than a full week’s work, since thereby the maximum number of rents would be obtained. The organisation of the industry was well calculated to encourage overcrowding; there was, in fact, a premium on idleness. The industry was very susceptible to changes in fashion; new lines or new markets, offering higher 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.’

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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’.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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].’

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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 as one of his own plough-bullocks. He has grown up, and gone to service; and there he is, as simple, as ignorant, and as laborious a creature as one of the wagon-horses that he drives. The mechanic sees his weekly newspaper over his pipe and pot; but the clod-hopper, the chopstick, the hawbuck, the hind, the Johnny-raw, or by whatever name, in whatever district he may be called, is everywhere the same, – he sees no newspaper, and if he did, he could not read it; and if he hears his master reading it, ten to one but he drops asleep over it. In fact, he has no interest in it…. He is as much of an animal as air and exercise, strong living and sound sleeping can make him, and he is nothing more.’

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Allowing for Howitt’s middle class, townsman’s prejudices, this unflattering passage is a fair example of the educated early Victorian’s view of the agricultural labourer. It was an attitude of pity and contempt, mixed sometimes with compassion and occasionally with fear.

Probably the most upsetting thing that could happen in an agricultural village in the 1830s and 1840s was the arrival of the railway. The decision to bring the line through a particular district had far-reaching economic and social consequences for that area. But the immediate impact was the arrival of a small army of construction workers to build the track. These were the navvies, a body of men who in the space of a few decades accomplished feats of construction which dwarfed the building of the pyramids in the ancient world (as the Victorians noted) or (moderns might add) the motorways of the present day. Strictly, the navvies were not common labourers. Originally they had worked on the canals (hence the name navigators, shortened to navvies), and they stayed together as a body, moving from one line to the next as it was completed. They were prepared to go anywhere that the railway contractors wanted them, later to France, South America, Canada, Australia and the Crimea. Not all of the 200,000 men working on new lines in 1845 were true navvies: some were agricultural labourers who were recruited locally, but it is probable that some of these remained to become regular navvies. The main attraction of the job was its relatively high pay. In a bad year such as 1843, weekly wages were 15s or 16s 6d; in 1846 (a good year) they were 22s 6d and 24s. These rates were for pickmen and shovellers. Skilled men such as masons and bricklayers could earn up to 21s in 1843 and 33s in 1846.

The work was extremely hard and often dangerous. A navvy was expected to shovel about twenty tons of earth and rock a day on the basic jobs of cutting, banking and tunnelling. Excavating was done with pick and shovel, the navvies working in rows. The men worked in gangs under the direction of a ganger who could be either a foreman paid by the sub-contractor or an independent agent who contracted the work from the sub-contractor. In either case the ganger recruited the navies. Wet weather frequently created slippery, and therefore dangerous, conditions. The earth from the bottom of a cutting, for instance, had to be taken out in barrows hauled up the steep sides of the cutting, and it was easy to slip and fall beneath the overturned barrow-load of ‘muck’. Tunnels were nearly always deep in mud, and in addition there was the danger hazard of the crude methods of blasting. The casualties on the notorious Woodhead tunnel between Sheffield and Manchester (1839–45) read like battle figures: 32 killed, 140 seriously wounded, 400 lesser accidents. Edwin Chadwick, the Poor Law and sanitary reformer, calculated later that this was 3 per cent of the labour force killed and 14 per cent wounded. Compensation for injuries and death was seldom paid by the contractors or railway companies: a small payment from the navvies’ own contributory sick club was all that was available. Because navvies were constantly moving on as the line advanced no settled mode of life was possible. They lived in rough shanty towns, hastily thrown together, miles from any village. Their huts were made of mud or wood, with tarpaulins for the roof. They slept in tiers of bunks, twenty or thirty to a room. No family or home life was possible; they might as well have been in Van Diemen’s Land.

The reputation of the navvies was fearsome, and not without good cause. Superior physical strength, combined with barbarian bravado and high spirits marked them off from other labourers. They ate and drank more than any other men: two pounds of meat, two pounds of bread and five quarts of ale a day was normal navvy fare. Most of their earnings went in drink. After a payday (which the companies preferred to keep as infrequent as possible in order to strengthen their truck system) navvies would be drunk for days together, and there were plenty of stories of navvies (always known by their nicknames – Rainbow Peg, Gipsy Joe, Streaky Dick) who worked in a perpetual state of inebriation. Above all there were the fights and riots. Once the navvies had got the drink in them they were a terror to the surrounding countryside. Their drunken revelry (called a ‘randy’) ended in personal fighting and violence, and sometimes in riots between Irishmen and the rest. Few women lived in the camps; only old women to cook and wash, and some girls who were concubines. The popular image of the navvy as a violent, godless, drunken fellow, far removed from the ‘refining’ influences of home and family, contained much truth. At the same time it also had to be admitted that the navvy was ‘the king of labourers’.