Rural Rides Read online

  Cobbett’s work in the countryside has been seen by some historians as constituting a desertion or even a betrayal of the Radical reform movement.18 It is true that his interest in metropolitan politics was on the wane after 1815, but this does not constitute a desertion; rather he was seeking to enlarge the reform platform by calling attention to the issues and concerns of village workers. It is to expect too much of Cobbett to seek from him information about industrial conditions or urban life, for by his own admission he knew very little about these matters, having visited only two factories in his entire life (and even these being the unrepresentative mills of Robert Owen and John Fielden) while making only one substantial tour of the Midlands and one of northern England, Scotland and Ireland.19 When in 1821 Thomas Attwood accused him of forgetting about the town worker, Cobbett defended himself without refuting the charge: ‘Born amongst husbandmen, bred to husbandry… it is natural that I should have a strong partiality for country life, and that I should enter more in detail into die feelings of labourers of husbandry man into those of other labourers.’20

  Cobbett proudly described himself as a ‘South-of-England’ person whose first loyalty was to the ‘chopsticks’ of that region.21 No other part or people of England elicited his sympathy to die same extent, and he delighted in telling northerners and Scots that a Sussex labourer would not adopt a diet of ‘oat-cakes, pea-bunnochs, and burgoo’ unless ‘every limb in his body’ be broken.22 There was a ‘South-of-England’ peasant identity in Cobbett himself: after a long rural ride or a day in die fields he would note that ‘I am as red as a rose’ or ‘my face is as hard as a farmer’s heart’.23 As a result he was sometimes taken for an ordinary ‘Hodge’.24 In 1813, at a county meeting in Hampshire, a Tory adversary nearly mistook Cobbett for ‘one of the innocent bacon-eaters of the New forest’, though wisely, upon realizing his error, he ‘did not allow [Cobbett’s] placid easy eye and smile to take me in’.25 Similarly, two decades later, another witness — the journalist James Grant — discerned in Cobbett the image of a humble peasant:

  Never were the looks of any man more completely at variance with his character. There was something so dull and heavy about his whole appearance, that any one who did not know him, would at once have set him down for some country clodpole… who not only had never read a book, or had a single idea in his head…26

  The compelling thing about this latter portrait is that it was drawn as William Cobbett, MP, sat on the benches of the House of Commons, author to this point of twenty books, upwards of twenty-five million words, and editor of and chief contributor to a weekly journal of thirty-years standing. Yet for all this there were rural features to Cobbett always — indeed the last words in his diary, entered at Normandy farm a week before his death in 1835, are simply ‘Ploughing Home Field’.27

  Cobbett’s rural interests were not cosmetic, part time or recreational. They were integral to his career in general and to Rural Rides in particular. Cobbett described his representations of field workers as his ‘sacred duty’ and as ‘a rational ground for action’; he assured his readers that ‘I know more of their toils and sufferings than any other man’, and he let farmers and his family know that since he had once been a country labourer, he would ‘think it no disgrace to be a labourer again’. ‘I say WE,’ he once informed Coke of Norfolk, ‘because I never can separate myself from die Labouring Classes’, and in particular from the ‘chopsticks’, whom he saw as ‘the very best and most virtuous of all mankind’.28

  Rural Rides should be seen within the context of Cobbett’s rural upbringing, his long farming career and the serialized Political Register, where the text itself initially appeared. Literary scholars have sometimes incorporated passages from the Rides into anthologies of romantic prose (understandable in light of Cobbett’s mastery of the language and his sensitivity to landscape) but it is important that we bear in mind that Cobbett mastered grammar, not at Christ’s Hospital like Coleridge, or Westminster School like Robert Southey, but in an army barrack in die company of other ex-ploughboys, and that when the time came to compose his own grammar of the English language (it sold 100,000 copies in its first fifteen years), he subtitled it ‘especially for the Use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-Boys’.29

  Cobbett might indeed qualify as a ‘romantic’, but for inspiration he was too wary of abstract ideals and metaphysics to ponder the heavens of Blake and Shelley, the urns and nightingales of Keats or die daffodils and tranquil reflections of Wordsworth. Some of Cobbett’s social commentary might have been sparked by poetic imagination but his stories and commentaries were uniformly grounded in workers’ experience of dispossession and hunger, such as when he encountered a disused farm table at a country auction:

  This ‘Squire Charington’s father used, I dare say, to sit at die head of die oak-table along with his men, say grace to them, and cut up die meat and the pudding. He might take a cup of strong beer to himself, when they had none; but, that was pretty nearly all die difference in their manner of living. So that all lived well. But, the ’Squire had many wine-decanters and wine-glasses and ‘a dinner set’, and a ‘breakfast set’, and ‘desert knives’; and these evidently imply carryings on and a consumption that must of necessity have greatly robbed the long oak table if it had remained fully tenanted… Therefore, it became almost untenanted; the labourers retreated to hovels, called cottages; and, instead of board and lodging, they got money…30

  The proletarianization of farm workers — die great cause and inspiration of Cobbett’s Radicalism — receives frequent mention throughout Rural Rides, and in a more direct manner than by any other early nineteenth-century romantic writer. It was one of Cobbett’s gifts, and sometimes one of his limitations, to require direct, empirical experience of his subjects, and while he might employ symbol or allegory, his ends were almost always political, such as when he encountered a worker near a beautiful hill in die rotten borough of Old Sarum:

  I asked how he got on. He said, very badly. I asked him what was die cause of it. He said die hard times. ‘What times,’ said I; ‘was there ever a finer summer, a finer harvest, and is there not an old wheat-rick in every farm-yard?’ ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘they make it bad for poor people, for all that.’ They?’ said I, ‘who is they?’ He was silent. ‘Oh no no! my friend,’ said I, ‘it is not they; it is that ACCURSED HILL that has robbed you of the supper that you ought to find smoking on the table when you get home.’ I gave him the price of a pot of beer, and on I went…31

  For all Cobbett’s zeal to show off figures of speech or his genius as a writer, his primary purpose here was to offer political advice to a farm worker about the causes of rural poverty. Indeed, the very definition of ‘Radicalism’ inheres in this dialogue at the precise point where Cobbett directs the labourer beyond an ill-defined ‘them’ (a populist sensibility) to a clearly-defined ‘Accursed Hill’, or the unreformed parliament at Westminster.

  Cobbett also sought to win urban readers’ respect for farm workers and for rural popular culture. Thus while he might praise a worker for reading the Political Register or embracing a radical reform of parliament, he was also the first to say that this did not ensure intelligence or happiness.

  I got, at one time, a little out of my road, in, or near, a place called TANGLEY. I rode up to the garden-wicket of a cottage, and asked the woman, who had two children, and who seemed to be about thirty years old, which was the way to LUDGARSHALL, which I knew could not be more than about your miles off. She did not know.!… ‘Well, my dear good woman,’ said I, ‘but you have been at LUDGARSHALL?’ – ‘No.’ – ‘Nor at ANDOVER?’ (six miles another way) – ‘No.’ – ‘Nor at MARLBOROUGH?’ (nine miles another way) – ‘No.’ – ‘Pray, were you born in this house?’ – ‘Yes.’ – ‘And, how far have you ever been from this house?’ – ‘Oh! I have been up in the parish, and over to Chute.’ That is to say, the utmost extent of her voyages had been about two and a half miles! Let no one laugh at her… It is a great error
to suppose, that people are rendered stupid by remaining always in the same place. This was a very acute woman, and as well behaved as need to be.32

  Despite his notorious egotism, Cobbett did not degrade this woman or advise her to procure copies of Cobbett’s Grammar, his geography titles or his Year’s Residence in the United States of America — all of which would have broadened her horizons beyond two and a half miles of her birthplace. He was a defender of traditional rural culture, especially its songs, proverbs and folk tales. He believed that oral culture and daily experience could themselves generate a Radical political consciousness, and that literacy or the written word was no guarantee of a ‘correct’ political position or even necessary for happiness and competence in life, especially in agriculture. This is to say that Cobbett was sincere in his remark that ‘a carter or a hedger is a more edifying companion than a politician’.”33

  One of Cobbett’s great purposes in his rural rides was to enlarge the radical platform of the countryside, and it was to this end that he visited many county agricultural meetings, where he frequently spoke under the rubric ‘Rustic Harangue’. The principal object of farmers and landlords at these meetings was to petition parliament against falling corn prices, especially by the early 1820s when the Corn Laws ceased to be in full effect. Cobbett was not well-disposed towards this lobby, for it was predicated upon an assumption that agriculturists (a word he deplored, preferring ‘agriculture-asses’, which he deemed more apt and more grammatical) were uniquely valuable and hard pressed. Landholders, he argued, were not any more valuable than their workers or any more entitled to legislative protection; they had enjoyed high corn prices during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, he argued, and it was simply immoral that they should seek ‘to perpetuate [their] extravagant gains’ through a revised Corn Law.34

  It was die farmers who collaborated with die government and die urban middle class, whether by investing in die funds or riding in the yeomanry cavalry, whom Cobbett wished to see ruined by die post-war fall in agricultural prices. Those who remained aloof from London and the middle class, and who recognized that the labourers were their ‘only rampart against their natural foes, die dealers in money and funds’,35 would never be brought down, Cobbett predicted. Such arguments were rejected by most large farmers, who earned his ire by claiming that all countrymen – landlords, farmers and labourers – were in favour of die high-priced bushel. Parliamentary committees assigned to investigate legislated protection, Cobbett advised, should not ask a farmer whether he would like higher prices for his produce (which Cobbett equated with ‘asking a drunkard if he be thirsty’) but about the date when farm servants were evicted from the farmhouse, when cottage brewing entered into decline and when tea and potatoes became the principal fare of country workers: ‘And, if you find that all these took place at the time when farmers began to wear shining boots, white cravats, and broad cloth coats, ought you not to recommend that which will bring prices still lower?’36 This was the labourers’ voice on the question of agricultural protection and the Corn Laws. Although a fanner himself who stood to gain from additional protection against imported wheat, Cobbett wanted no part of a measure that would harm the labourers and enable the government and middle classes to glean more taxes from the rural economy.

  The post-war county meetings were generally restricted to freeholders, which meant that to qualify for attendance at these gatherings, Cobbett had either to tell falsehoods about his county property holdings or else perform some swift transactions on the freehold market: he did both. Some of the meetings (Cobbett attended at least twenty in 1822 alone) were open to non-freeholders, and in which case Cobbett had support to the extent of their numbers. In Salisbury in 1815, as the Corn Bill passed through parliament, a crowd of many hundreds packed into a hall to hear his speech against ‘rapacious landlords’. At Norwich in 1821, despite opposition from Coke of Norfolk, the crowd carried Cobbett’s petition in full, including its call for the enfranchisement of rural workers. At a Surrey meeting in 1823, support for his petition came from the non-freeholder side of the hall, which votes were discounted by the presiding Lord Ellenborough. At most of the meetings Cobbett was obliged to speak for rather than with the labourers, whose presence was neither official nor welcome. On these occasions Cobbett reminded landholders that their profits were owing to their workers. He asked them to remember that the labourers paid proportionately more taxes than any other economic group — as much as one half of their net earnings. He urged employers to cease defining poor rates as a tax; they were wage-funds and as such they should be seen. He also advised employers not to reduce wages as a means of paying rents, taxes and tithes, for the labourers had first claim to the produce of the land. ‘Were I pushed to the very verge of ruin,’ he claimed, ‘my labourers would share with me to the last… I would pay my tradesmen in full; and as to die landlord and tithe-owner, they must… take die rest.’ He begged his audience to treat die labourers with ‘gendeness and justice’, and to make common cause with their workers against die government and die urban middle class.37

  Sometimes die farmers would hear Cobbett out; other times they gave him ‘sour looks’ or simply left die hall. Still, at die time of his rural rides (1821–6), he was familiar with some old-fashioned farmers who were willing to support radical measures that benefited their workers (often he billeted with such people during his rides). The number of these old-fashioned farmers, however, declined precipitously during die late 1820s, so that in die aftermath of his rides, Cobbett grew more and more doubtful that farmers would heed his advice to join their labourers in a campaign for a radical reform of parliament. Thus by 1828 he began to prophesy a major rural revolt that would pit labourers against farmers, and by die winter of that year he had fixed die date to die late autumn and early winter of 1830.

  Although a prophet and later a leader of die Captain Swing revolt, Cobbett sought to give farmers every chance to mend their ways and to make common cause with their workers. In November 1829 — exactly a year before die rising — he pleaded with farmers to re-create a working alliance of countrymen, wherein landholders would recognize that they had interests in common with their workers, and that it was their duty to represent these common interests in petitions to Westminster. Cobbett showed the way forward himself by composing petitions for his own workers (including some who were unable to read or write) that called for reductions in taxes and tidies, reform of die Corn Laws, a wider suffrage and an end to innovations in die Poor Law, especially die use of paupers or under-employed labourers as beasts of burden.38 Time and again, even as late as die harvest weeks of 1830, Cobbett pleaded with farmers to share more of their wealth with their workers, even calling attention to precise examples of poverty amidst plenty in die countryside, which put him in mind of rural France on the eve of the Great Fear of 1789. At St Ives in May he encountered a handbill advertising die sale of farm equipment, including ‘a fire-engine and several steel mantraps, all in excellent condition’. That evening – in a speech to East Anglian fanners — he made reference to the sale, suggesting that ‘dismal indeed were the times become when fire-engines and man-traps formed part of the implements of husbandry’. When things were in their ‘natural state’, he observed, rural peace was maintained by the ‘constable’s staff’ and the ‘sheriff’s wand’, but nothing could save the farmers’ stacks from the wrath of their labourers. And with this Cobbett bowed out of the negotiations, warning ‘better be a dog than a fanner next winter’. Change your ways now, he ordered farmers, ‘or we shall be wide awake about the middle of next winter. The “grand rousing” will come from the fellows with hobnails in their shoes.’ The labourers were ‘tender parents’ and ‘unassuming, modest, and content in their state of life’, but they will not, Cobbett assured his readers, ‘live on damned potatoes while the barns are full of corn, the downs covered with sheep, and the yards full of hogs created by their labours’.39

  As the first wave of fires illuminated the horiz
ons of Kent and Sussex, Cobbett took up his place among the village workers, visiting and advising them as the burnings and machine-breakings proceeded to Hampshire, Berkshire and the West. He had done everything in his power to advise the farmers to discard their class formations, but as he remarked as early as 1824, there must sometimes ‘be a cause more powerful than advice’.10 Rural Rides is this advice stage, for it is in this work where we see Cobbett calling for the restoration of the old countryman identity, for the days when, as John Clare put it:

  … masters [levelled] with their men,

  Who push’d the beer about, and smok’d and drank.41

  Class conflict and class consciousness were witnessed by Cobbett during the rides of the 1820s, but he then thought it conceivable that all countrymen could be united against their collective enemy: the ‘Wen’ of London and its fund-holders and stock-jobbers. For the Cobbett of the Rides, the essential conflict in English society was not along the horizontal borders of class but along the vertical seam dividing town and country. This conflict, according to him, was generated by urban appropriation of what might be called the ‘surplus value’ of the countryside; and during his rides he frequently calculated the extent of these appropriations, such as for the parish of Milton in the valley of the Avon:

  Here is, then, bread for 800 families, mutton for 500, and bacon and beer for 207. Let us take the average of the three, and then we have 502 families, for the keeping of whom… the parish of Milton yields a sufficiency… Now, then, according to the ‘POPULATION RETURN’, laid before Parliament, this parish contains 500 persons, or, according to my division, one hundred families. So that here are about one hundred families to raise food and drink enough, and to raise wool and other things to pay for all other necessaries, for five hundred and two families!… What injustice, what a hellish system it must be, to make those who raise it skin and bone and nakedness, while the food and drink and wool are almost all carried away to be heaped on the fund-holders, pensioners, soldiers, dead-weight, and other swarms of tax-eaters!42