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  RURAL RIDES

  WILLIAM COBBETT, journalist, farmer and politician, was born in 1763 at Farnham, Surrey. He spent his boyhood and adolescent years as a farm worker and gardener, graduating with other country lads from bird-scaring and hoeing to ‘the honour of joining the reapers in harvest, driving team and holding plough’. In 1784 he sought to enlist in the Royal Navy, but found himself in a marching regiment, the West Norfolk 54th. After a year of training at Chatham he moved with his regiment to New Brunswick, where for six years he assisted in protecting the Canadian border from American incursion, while devoting his spare time to the study of English literature and grammar. In 1791 his regiment returned to England where, having requested and received his discharge, he sought to bring embezzlement charges against his former officers. When this threatened to backfire, he made for revolutionary France and ultimately Philadelphia, where, under the pen-name Peter Porcupine, he rose to fame as a pro-British, anti-Jacobin journalist. In 1800 a steady flow of libel suits prompted Cobbett to return to England, where, after meeting with William Pitt and other Tory ministers, he resumed his career as an anti-Jacobin writer. Over the next few years, however, Cobbett’s support for Church and King began to wane. In his weekly Political Register (1802–35), as well as in his many books, lectures and election speeches, he evolved into a potent and prolific Radical. At the same time he re-connected with rural England by leasing farms, writing agricultural manuals and developing a profound sympathy for the plight of England’s farm workers. During the 1820s he undertook his celebrated rural rides and in his book of that title promoted the cause of radical politics and ‘radical husbandry’. The rural rising of 1830 – which Cobbett predicted and encouraged – inspired him to work hard in support of the Great Reform Bill, and ultimately to stand for Parliament himself after the passage of the Reform Act in 1832. Elected MP for the borough of Oldham in the following year, he aimed to represent the interests of industrial as well as agricultural workers, but as a self-confessed ‘South of England’ person who disliked towns, manufacturing and commerce, Cobbett maintained his preoccupation with the rural south and its village workers. He died on his Surrey farm in 1835 and lies buried at his native Farnham.

  IAN DYCK is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. He is the author of William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (1992) and of articles in History Workshop, Social History and Rural History. He is editor of Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine (1988) and co-editor (with Malcolm Chase) of Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (1996).

  WILLIAM COBBETT

  Rural Rides

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  IAN DYCK

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1830

  Published in Penguin Classics 2001

  7

  Editorial matter copyright © Ian Dyck, 2001

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editor has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

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  ISBN: 978-0-14-192184-6

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Further Reading

  A Note on the Text

  Map

  Rural Rides

  Notes

  Indexes:

  Persons

  Places

  INTRODUCTION

  William Cobbett composed for publication a remarkable thirty million words – a total doubtless unmatched in the history of English letters. He was also wide-ranging in his interests and themes, treating of subjects as diverse as English and French grammar, beer-making, the Protestant Reformation, the English and the American garden, the virtues of gold currency and the evils of potatoes and tea. For some readers Cobbett’s principal achievements lie in his literary and editorial career, such as his early use of the lead article, his collection and printing of parliamentary debates (‘Hansard’ should rightfully be called ‘Cobbett’) or his enormous contribution to English periodical journalism, most notably the eighty-nine volumes of the Political Register (1802–35). Others have focused upon his political platform, which in turn can be subdivided into his anti-Jacobin days in the United States (this alone yielded the twelve volumes of Porcupine’s Works), his Tory career in England and his subsequent stations in Whig and finally in Radical politics. Some scholars have emphasized Cobbett’s fierce disdain for commerce, manufacturing, ‘Scotch feelosofy’ and the so-called ‘learned languages’, while others have plumbed for his gentler side, such as his thoughts on child-rearing, the courting of the sexes and the qualities of Englishness. There is, in short, something of interest for everyone in Cobbett’s legion of writing – a fact reflected by the diversity of his admirers past and present, who include Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Michael Foot, A. J. P. Taylor, E. P. Thompson and Richard Ingrams.1

  It is often remarked that Cobbett was a venal writer whose work is awash in self-contradiction and paradox. This is unjust. He contradicted himself certainly, but no more than one would expect of someone who spent forty years at the forefront of the public press, and who was not afraid to venture opinions on a wide range of subjects, whether social, political, religious, cultural or economic. Cobbett’s politics changed dramatically (between 1791 and 1816 he shifted from democratic radicalism to anti-Jacobinism and back to democratic radicalism, where he finally settled) but these transitions are not as novel or as discrediting as is sometimes made out. The important thing about his political evolution lies less in the evolution itself than in the circumstances that led him to exchange his early Toryism for a left-leaning platform that included universal manhood suffrage. It is also worth remembering that Cobbett is one of the few public figures in modern England to evolve in middle age from right to left. The great majority (save for a few exceptions, such as Charles Dickens, William Gladstone or David Lloyd George) seem to travel in the opposite direction, and especially those who, like Cobbett, witnessed the French Revolution of 1789. Further-more, Cobbett was a journalist; he was drawn by nature and profession to the contemporary event, but this is not to say that he adopted positions with a view to the sale of papers – indeed he absorbed losses on some of his publications and adopted numerous positions from principle that clearly reduced his stock of readers, such as his animosity towards industrialization or his unrelenting denunciation of London as the wretched ‘Wen’. How, one wonders, did he think that he would acquire readers in the industrial North by advising manufacturing workers, including the Luddites, to return to the land and till the soil;2 or what was on his mind when as MP fo
r the industrial borough of Oldham he insisted upon interrogating the government about rural and agrarian issues, much to the frustration of some of his manufacturing constituents?3 This is all to say that Cobbett’s dedication to rural England was neither an appendix nor an aside to his ‘primary’ career as a political commentator. Indeed, rural England is the index and cipher to his life and thought.

  It is appropriate that we have in hand Rural Rides as it is Cobbett’s quintessential text on rural and agrarian England. Born and raised a farm worker, or ‘a sort of labourer’, at Famham in Surrey in 1763, Cobbett lived the life of most farm lads, receiving little formal schooling but graduating from bird-scaring and hoeing to ‘the honour of joining the reapers in harvest, driving team and holding plough’. According to one of his brothers the young William showed occasional signs of ‘uncommon intelligence’, but there was ‘nothing about him of the prodigy’. Perhaps only his interest in books (Cobbett could not remember seeing newspapers in his boyhood home) signalled anything exceptional for the young William’s future – otherwise he was a ‘real and good and true ploughboy’ whose adolescent years were spent in the fields with his blue smock-frock, woollen spatterdashes and bottle of small beer, and who until the age of nineteen had ‘never known any other ambition than surpassing my brothers in the different labours of the field’. Indeed, he later claimed that he held his very pen between fingers ‘somewhat bent, from having been… so often in close embrace with the eye of the spade and the handle of the hoe’.4

  Rural life also had its limitations for Cobbett, and in 1784 – at the age of twenty-one – he joined numerous other ‘lads from the plough tail’ in trading the plough for the musket. After a year at Chatham his regiment (the West Norfolk 54th foot) removed to New Brunswick, where for seven years he endured snow and heat while becoming regimental copymaster and rising to the rank of sergeant-major. Contrary to the claims of some of Cobbett’s detractors, his decision to flee rural England does not contradict his later enthusiasm for it,5 as his flight was motivated by a simple and natural longing for new horizons:

  I sighed for a sight of the world; the little island of Britain seemed too small a compass for me. The things in which I had taken the most delight were neglected; the singing of the birds grew insipid, and even the heart-cheering cry of the hounds… was heard with the most torpid indifference.6

  It was during this period of temporary ambivalence to rural life that Cobbett mastered English and French grammar, learned disrespect for authority (especially upon seeing his senior officers appropriate some of the pay of common soldiers) and ultimately ventured into print as author of an anonymous pamphlet regarding the plight of the common soldier.7 After returning to England in 1791 and receiving his discharge, Cobbett sought to expose the peculations of the officers in his former regiment, but when this threatened to rebound, he and his new wife Nancy Anne Reid (who eventually would bear him seven children) made haste for revolutionary France and ultimately the United States of America, where in 1792 Cobbett began a new life as a vituperative critic of all things republican, democratic and French. This was a swift and self-serving reversal, for only a year earlier Cobbett had fallen ‘headlong’ into republicanism and democracy upon encountering Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, but there was also an empirical and ideological element to his about-face, for the new Republic at close quarters did not seem to warrant the lavish praise that Paine had bestowed upon it. Indeed, America struck Cobbett (or ‘Peter Porcupine’ as he signed himself) as a ‘detestable’ place: hot, dry and peopled by a ‘cheating, sly, roguish gang’.8 The particular task that he set himself was to undermine the prospect of a Franco-American alliance against Britain, and it was his efforts in this cause that brought his writing to the attention of Tory leaders in Britain, including Prime Minister William Pitt. Upon returning to England in 1800 Cobbett volunteered for the anti-Jacobin circuit, even dining with Pitt and his leading ministers, but soon Cobbett began to sense that the rural England he remembered, and had fondly described from America, was no longer to be found. At his native Farnham he discovered that two of his brothers, both small farmers, were ‘obliged to work very hard’ and were ‘far from being in easy circumstances’. He also learned that two landed estates in the area had passed from the old aristocracy to upstart merchants. And as he approached the public house he heard ordinary farmers in convivial and bellicose celebration of the high price of wheat and livestock.9 For the time being Cobbett occupied himself with supporting Pitt and resisting Napoleon,10 but by 1805 – when moving to the countryside upon his purchase of a farm at Botley in Hampshire – he came face to face with die poverty of southern agricultural workers:

  The clock was gone; the brass kettle was gone; the pewter dishes were gone; the warming pan was gone… the feather bed was gone; the Sunday-coat was gone! All was gone! How miserable, how deplorable, how changed that Labourer’s dwelling, which I, only twenty years before, had seen so neat and happy.11

  As he re-acquainted himself with the countryside, Cobbett learned that much common land in his neighbourhood had recently been enclosed, that poor rates were now used to subsidize the income of farm workers and that local ‘bull-frog’ farmers (so-called by Cobbett for their capacity to swallow up small farmers) were opposed to any attempt – including those initiated by Cobbett himself – to provide labourers with access to land. These experiences radicalized him – leading him to give up on Tory administrations by 1805, Whig ones by 1808 and even the moderate reform positions of Francis Burden and Francis Place by 1810.12

  During these years Cobbett was deeply involved with the daily routine of farming, the local politics of Hampshire and the radical platform of London. There were detours, such as his two years in Newgate Prison (1810–12) for criticizing the flogging of militiamen and two more of self-imposed exile in the United States (1817–19) when Lord Sidmouth increased persecution of leading Radicals, but still Cobbett maintained his interests in agriculture and in the well-being of country workers. Even incarceration in Newgate did not prevent him from issuing detailed directives about the farm, and in the United States he experimented with new crops and rotations, including a variety of maize that he christened ‘Cobbett’s Corn’, and which he later demonstrated could be grown successfully in England.13

  In the autumn of 1819, upon his return from the United States, Cobbett’s political stock was at a low ebb. The Peterloo Massacre of that year was a demoralizing affair for reformers, and Cobbett’s personal credibility was reduced by his decision to flee to the United States while other Radicals languished in British prisons. Finally, there was the unhappy business of Cobbett’s bankruptcy, which resulted in the loss of his beloved farm at Botley. Not even the talisman of Thomas Paine’s bones – exhumed by Cobbett in New York and transported by him to England – proved able to revive the fortunes of Radicalism. Thankfully, however, a godsend arrived in 1820 in the form of Queen Caroline, whose cause Cobbett championed (even writing some of her letters and public statements) and which ultimately enabled him to return to the forefront of the Radical reform movement.14

  As Cobbett returned to prominence in the Radical movement in 1820 and 1821, and as the Queen Caroline affair subsided, his politics began to revolve even more directly around the condition of country workers. The metropolitan platform – and London generally – did not vanish from his writings but they retreated proportionately. When not on his four-acre seed farm at Kensington, or at work in his fields at Barn-Elm farm, Cobbett was occupied with his rural research and writing, such as Cottage Economy, where he instructed farm workers on how to keep bees, fatten hogs and brew beer while abstaining from the un English commodities of tea and potatoes. He offered this advice in full knowledge of the fact that rural workers faced a crippling array of taxes on salt, hops and malt, but he was never so caught up in attacking Westminster as to forget that some country workers did not do as much as they could to help themselves – or as Cobbett put it, ‘though we are oppressed, there is always so
mething that we can do ourselves’. This message was greeted by some of his political adversaries, including Henry Brougham, who praised Cottage Economy and enrolled it in Whig educational service as a ‘really useful publication’. Yet Brougham and others could not endorse all of Cobbett’s prescriptions on cottage technology, for its great purpose was to create a class of self-supporting peasants who were independent of wage labour, consumerism and the capitalist market.15

  During his twenty-two years as a practising farmer Cobbett took great delight in growing two blades of grass where only one had grown before. He experimented with tree culture, Tullian drill husbandry, Indian corn, the breeding of merino sheep and the introduction to England of an Italian straw that would contribute to the revival of the English straw-plait industry. Not all of these projects were successful but they had the common object of liberating farm workers from the tyranny of wages. Improvement in agriculture is a very good thing, Cobbett explained to Thomas Coke of Norfolk, but only when the purpose is to enhance the comfort and happiness of those who toil on the land:

  Improvement is a mark of good taste, and it is a pursuit attended with more pleasure, perhaps, than any other. But, if the thing cannot be accomplished without producing the fall, die degradation and misery of millions, it is not improvement. The gay farmhouses with pianos within were not improvements. The pulling down of 200,000 small houses and making die inhabitants paupers was not an improvement. The gutting of the cottages of their clocks and brass-kettles and brewing-tackle was no improvement.16

  The great object of Cobbett’s ‘radical’ husbandry, as he called it, was to undermine the cash market, the tax collector and the accumulation of capital. While the agricultural societies of the farmers and landlords (‘nests of conspirators against the labourer’, in Cobbett’s view) awarded prizes to employers who cultivated die most land with the fewest hands, Cobbett’s enterprises were labour intensive, even to die point where he once worked a hundred people on his four acres at Kensington. More non-wage modes of survival, he believed, would reverse proletarianization and reduce the pool of reserve labour upon which large-scale, capitalist agriculture depended.17