Rural Rides Read online

  This was town-based rather than class-based robbery. All countrymen, whether labourers, farmers or landlords, were legitimate and valuable producers, simply because, in Cobbett’s physiocratic view, agriculture is ‘the main pillar of every great state’.43

  As Rural Rides makes clear, Cobbett did not wish class-based antagonisms on rural England. He was himself a proud alumnus of old England who remembered ‘the cask in the cellar and the flitch in the pantry’; and as a practising farmer he knew that this good life was still attainable because he lived it himself and still had the means of ensuring that his own workers – who numbered as many as twenty at any one time – were well-paid and well-fed, and that they either shared his board or had access to the three Bs: bread, bacon and beer. Cobbett and the labourers had no problem with a hierarchical society or the idea of a ‘natural magistracy’ providing that farmers and landlords sponsored a harvest home for their workers, took them to fairs and patronized ‘manly’ sports (such as Cobbett’s favourite martial game of single-stick) in order to ensure that the Methodists and Evangelicals did not turn Englishmen into effeminate tea-drinkers.44 But landholders withdrew from these duties and opted for a class-based understanding of rural society: the first to surrender were the landed merchants and bankers ‘who had risen recently from the dung-hill’, then the ‘new-fashioned’ or ‘bull-frog’ farmers, and finally the older gentry (‘these mean, these cruel, these cowardly, these carrion, these dastardly reptiles’).45 In turn, it was this class consciousness of the landholders that moved Cobbett and the labourers to participate in the Captain Swing revolt of 1830–31, and which later roused Cobbett into declaring that the revised Poor Law of 1834 – which effectively abolished the labourers’ claim to relief – entitled them to rise up and declare absolute ownership of the land.46

  This comes later, after the rides. The Rural Rides before us is a Radical but not revolutionary text. Its method – ‘hearing what gentlemen, farmers, tradesmen, journeymen, labourers, women, girls, boys, and all have to say; reasoning with some, laughing with others, and observing all that passes’47 – is more populist than class based, for it does not offer a clear, class-oriented definition of the ‘people’. Cobbett’s politics, too, qualify as ‘populist’, especially his animosity towards stock-jobbers, public credit, placemen, sinecurists and the all-devouring ‘wen’. For many scholars, Cobbett is a near perfect model of ‘populism’, for he was anti-elitist, anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-intellectual, racist, self-righteous as well as a staunch believer in golden ages, ‘romantic primitivism’ and physiocratic economics. According to this key, only Cobbett’s opposition to paper money is out of step with the plenary symptoms of ‘populism’, yet despite this near perfect fit (the late Isaiah Berlin once remarked that ‘there exists a shoe – the word ‘populism’ – for which somewhere there exists a foot’48), it is worth remembering that Cobbett was also a class commentator who argued against exploitation and in support of a labour theory of value and the rights of workers to take collective action in support of their living standards.49 These latter positions and theories are more characteristic of a class-based platform, which is to say that Cobbett, especially during the 1820s, was a hybrid, part populist and part class-based commentator. Thus one minute we find him celebrating traditional Englishness against the imported culture of the stock-jobbers, while in the next issuing a class-conscious broadside against ‘bull-frog’ farmers:

  your labourers hate you as they hate toads and adders. They regard you as their deadly enemies; as those who robbed them of their food and raiment, and who trample on them and insult them in their state of weakness; and they detest you accordingly… You know that you merit their deadly hatred; and then, proceeding upon a principle of the most abominable injustice, you hate them, and you destroy them, if possible, because you know that they hate you.50

  Cobbett articulated the class consciousness of rural workers, but he seldom promoted alliances between country and town workers. During the outpouring of urban working-class support for the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834, he lent his support for a vaguely denned alliance of urban and rural workers, but this was a short-lived campaign at the end of Cobbett’s life. As a rule he thought in terms of rural England, even after being elected MP for the industrial borough of Oldham in 1833 (Cobbett wished dearly for a seat in the rural South, but a consequence of his compromise with the Great Reform Bill of 1832 was that his beloved agricultural workers were left without the vote, which caused him to look north for a constituency with broad suffrage).51 The ‘ploughboy that continues to warm my veins’ flowed in Cobbett always, and until the last he could not understand why industrial workers – including the Luddites – refused to go along with his advice to return to agriculture.52 Thus for urban – or industrial-minded readers of then or now, his rural interests and enthusiasms might seem narrow and reductionist. But this was far from the case for agricultural workers, who at the time of Cobbett’s death still constituted (we too often forget) the single largest occupational group in England, and who were otherwise without representation in Westminster or the public press.

  Karl Marx once observed that Cobbett was ‘a plebeian by instinct and sympathy’.53 This is true, but his instinctive plebeianism was decidedly rural; indeed one of his great legacies is to expose the error in Marx’s assumption that country workers are politically ignorant. It was indeed this rural orientation of Cobbett – his resolve to represent the ‘cottage charter’ – that sets his programme apart from that of other Regency reformers. It was the eighteenth-century Country Party platform that led Cobbett to seek political guidance from the independent country gentlemen; it was Major Cartwright who convinced him to embrace parliamentary reform; it was Henry Hunt who convinced him to campaign against the economic interests of the landlords; it was a speech by Samuel Bamford in 1817 that moved him from householder to adult male suffrage; and it was Thomas Paine who raised his suspicions about the funding system and paper money.54 Cobbett’s uniqueness as a Radical lies not so much in the details of his programme as in his efforts to create a political platform that belonged as much to the countryside as to London and the industrial towns. In Rural Rides, as elsewhere, Cobbett had more to say about villagers than about townspeople, but this was in a heroic attempt to correct an imbalance that throve in his time as well as in our own.

  Notes

  1. For annotated bibliographies of Cobbett’s writings see Gaines, William Cobbett and the United States and Pearl, William Cobbett: A Bibliographical Account (see Further Reading for full citations). The most comprehensive studies of Cobbett are Spater, William Cobbett, Cole, The Life of William Cobbett and Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture. For a compact survey of Cobbett’s life and career see the entry on him by I. Dyck in The New Dictionary of National Biography. Regarding Cobbett and Hansard, see Spater, Cobbett, vol. I, pp. 170–71, 251–4.

  2. Political Register (hereafter PR), 5 December 1807, p. 872; PR, 28 November 1807, p. 842; PR, 23 November 1811, pp. 652–3; PR, 30 November 1816, pp. 675–9; PR, 14 April 1821, pp. 77–8, 85–92, 113; PR, 5 May 1821, p. 249.

  3. Regarding Cobbett’s relationship with his Oldham constituents, see PR, 10 January 1835, pp. 68–70; Cobbett to John Fielden, 28 September 1833, and John Knight to William Cobbett, 10 September 1833 (Rutgers University).

  4. PR, 30 August 1834, pp. 529–30; Cobbett, The Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine, pp. 20–22, 93; ‘A Memoir of William Cobbett by James Paul Cobbett’, c. 1864 (Nuffield College, University of Oxford); PR, 28 September 1833, p. 826.

  5. See, for example, Osborne, William Cobbett, p. 18.

  6. Cobbett, Life and Adventures, p. 27.

  7. Cobbett, The Soldier’s Friend.

  8. PR, 5 October 1805, pp. 523–4; PR, 12 October 1805, pp. 548–9; PR, 17 June 1809, pp. 899–915; PR, 6 December 1817, pp. 1094–5; PR, 26 March 1831, p. 819; Cobbett, Porcupine’s Gazette, 12 August 1799; Cobbett, Life and Adventures, pp. 30–40; Cobbett to Rachel Smither
, 6 July 1794 (Nuffield College); Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works; Spater, William Cobbett, vol. I, chapters 1–6.

  9. Cobbett to Edward Thornton, 18 July 1800, in Cole (ed.), Letters from William Cobbett to Edward Thornton, p.111; PR, 16 December 1815, pp. 329–31.

  10. PR, 4 January 1817, p. 17; PR, 20 May 1809, p. 777; PR, 22 February 1823, p. 455; PR, 3 June 1826, p. 586. See Cobbett’s short-lived anti-Jacobin daily newspaper The Porcupine.

  11. PR, 7 September 1816, p. 308; PR, 19 May 1821, pp. 479–80. The experiences to which Cobbett alludes were in 1804 when he visited a common at Horton Heath in Hampshire, where he discovered impoverished labourers who in his view could make more productive use of common land than either farmers or landlords. See Dyck, Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, pp. 30–32, 37.

  12. Regarding Cobbett’s land plans for labourers, see Bishop’s Waltham Vestry Book, 6 October 1816, 18 October 1816, 19 June 1818 (Hampshire County Record Office, 30 M77A/PC1); Cobbett, Two-Penny Trash, October 1830, pp. 88–9; PR, 20 December 1828, p. 780; PR, 20 March 1830, pp. 357–8; PR, 15 January 1831, pp. 159–61. For extended discussion of Cobbett’s shift to Radicalism, see Spater, William Cobbett, vol. I, chapters 8–15; Dyck, Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, chapter 2.

  13. The best guides to these years are the PR, Cobbett’s ‘Farm Account Books’ and associated correspondence (Nuffield College) and his A Year’s Residence in the United States of America. Cobbett farmed at Botley (1805-17), at Barn-Elm farm in Surrey (1827–30) and at Normandy farm, near Ash in Surrey (1832–5). He had smaller ventures, too, such as his seed farm at Kensington during the 1820s. See n. 16 below.

  14. See Ian Dyck, ‘Debts and liabilities: William Cobbett and Thomas Paine’, in Ian Dyck (ed.), Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine (London, 1987), pp. 86–103. Regarding the Queen Caroline affair see PR, July–December 1820.

  15. PR, 22 January 1820, pp. 648–9; PR, 7 April 1821, p. 11; Cobbett, Cottage Economy, para. 134; Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, para. 327; [Henry Brougham], ‘Cottage economy’, Edinburgh Review, 38:75 (February 1823), 105.

  16. PR, 26 May 1821, p. 524; PR, 3 November 1821, p. 1036. For examples of Cobbett’s agricultural innovations, see his The Woodlands, Treatise on Cobbett’s Corn, The English Gardener and his edition of Jethro Tull’s Horse-Hoeing Husbandry.

  17. PR, 5 May 1821, p. 336; PR, 26 July 1823, p. 221; Susan Cobbett, ‘Additional notes’ (Nuffield College XVII/3/2–3). For premiums awarded by agricultural societies, see Arthur Young’s Annals of Agriculture for the 1790s and early 1800s.

  18. See, for example, John Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism (Oxford, 1985), pp. 133–4.

  19. Although interested in Cobbett’s rural associations, Cole began a tradition of thought about Cobbett that emphasized his commentary on industrialization and urbanization. Cole saw Cobbett as spokesperson for the first generation of factory workers who were ‘torn from the land and flung into the factory’: Cole, ‘Introduction’, in Cobbett’s Life and Adventures, p. 7; Cole, Life of William Cobbett, p. 4. For Cobbett’s tour of Scotland and the North see his Tour in Scotland. He also visited Ireland towards the end of his life – see Knight (ed.), Cobbett in Ireland.

  20. PR, 5 May 1821, p. 343.

  21. Cobbett, Year’s Residence, para. 16. ‘Chopsticks’ was Cobbett’s affectionate term for southern agricultural workers. According to Oxford Word and Language Service, his use of the word is one of the earliest on record. The word is also used in William Howitt, The Rural Life of England (1838; Shannon, 1971), pp. 601, 608. See also note 24.

  22. PR, 20 November 1830, pp. 239–42; PR, 20 October 1832, p. 155; PR, 27 October 1832, pp. 200–202.

  23. Cobbett to Nancy Cobbett, 6 August 1832, 14 September 1826 (Nuffield College).

  24. ‘Hodge’ has served as a pejorative nickname for farm workers since at least the fourteenth century.

  25. ‘Letter to Timothy Tickler, Esq.’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 14:78 (September 1823), 329.

  26. James Grant, Random Recollections of the House of Commons, from the Year 1830 to the Close of 1835 (London, 1836), p. 191.

  27. Cobbett’s Diary (Nuffield College).

  28. PR, 9 November 1822, pp. 329–30; PR, 16 February 1822, p. 445; PR, 5 November 1831, p. 342; PR, 23 June 1832, p. 743; PR, 16 June 1832, p. 652; PR, 11 February 1832, p. 404; Cobbett to J. P. Cobbett, in PR, 22 January 1820, p. 703; PR, 29 January 1831, p. 288.

  29. PR, 12 May 1821, pp. 388–90; Cobbett, Advice to Young Men, paras. 44, 311–13; Cobbett, Year’s Residence, paras. 354-5; Cobbett, Life and Adventures, pp. 32–3; PR, 17 June 1809, p. 913; Spater, William Cobbett, vol. I, pp. 17–18. (For the full title of the Grammar, see Pearl’s William Cobbett.)

  30. From Kensington, Across Surrey, 20th October, 1825.

  31. Down the Valley of the Avon, 30th August [1826].

  32. From Kensington to East Everley, 27th August [1826].

  33. Cobbett to Samuel Clarke, 30 April 1821 (Nuffield College).

  34. PR, 28 May 1814, pp. 684–90; PR, 18 June 1814, p. 780; PR, 28 May 1814, p. 687. See also Henry Hunt, Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq., 3 vols. (London, 1820), vol. III, pp. 217–18; Travis Crosby, English Farmers and the Politics of Protection 1815–1852 (Hassocks, 1977), chapters 1–3.

  35. PR, 12 October 1833, p. 96.

  36. PR, 7 April 1821, p. 16.

  37. PR, 10 June 1822, pp. 690–91; Hunt, Memoirs, vol. III, pp. 362–3; PR, 11 March 1815, pp. 289–93; PR, 29 December 1821, pp. 157–8; PR, 15 February 1823, pp. 428–30, 442-3; PR, 2 February 1822; p. 301; PR, 23 February 1822, p. 454; PR, 2 March 1822, pp. 548–9; PR, 6 April 1822, pp. 47–51; PR, 26 October 1822, pp. 218, 234-7; PR, 16 November 1822, pp. 422–3; PR, 21 December 1822, pp. 758–9; PR, 1 April 1826, p. 42; PR, 15 April 1826, pp. 149–59

  38. Dyck, Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, chapter 7. See Cobbett’s petitions ‘To the Rate-Payers of Kensington’ (1830) and ‘To the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in Parliament assembled’ (1830); both are at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

  39. PR, 3 April 1820, pp. 422–3; PR, 24 April 1830, p. 524; PR, 1 May 1830, p. 557; PR, 27 June 1829, pp. 813–14; Two-Penny Trash, December 1830, pp. 121–2, 125–30; Melville, Life and Letters, vol. II, p. 247; PR, 6 March 1830, p. 308; PR, 22 May 1830, p. 658.

  40. Dyck, Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, pp. 160–62; Wells, ‘Mr William Cobbett, Captain Swing, and King William IV’, pp. 34–48; PR, 23 October 1824, pp. 239–40; Ian Dyck, ‘ “Rural war” and the missing revolution in early nineteenth-century England’, in Michael Davis (ed.), Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 (London, 2000), chapter 12.

  41. John Clare, ‘The Village Minstrel’, in The Village Minstrel and Other Poems (London, 1821), stanza xlix.

  42. Down the Valley of the Avon in Wiltshire, 30 August [1826].

  43. Cobbett, History of the Regency, para. 211; PR, 5 December 1807, p. 870.

  44. See Cobbett’s ‘Farm Account Book’ and the letters between Cobbett and family members, 1806–12 (Nuffield College); Cobbett to Mrs Cobbett, 23 December 1829 (Nuffield); PR, 4 July 1835; pp. 15–16; PR, 4 October 1834, p. 4; Two-Penny Trash, October 1830, pp. 83–4; PR, 18 May 1816, p. 614.

  45. PR, 11 January 1817, pp. 40–41; PR, 20 December 1828, p. 777; PR, 16 December 1815, pp. 330–31.

  46. Dyck, Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, pp. 202–9.

  47. PR, 14 December 1822, p. 686.

  48. Quoted in J. B. Allcock, ‘ “Populism”: a brief biography’, Socialism 5:3 (September 1971), 385, n. 4.

  49. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and Industry: Essays on Political Thought and History (Cambridge, 1985), p. 297; Donald McRae, ‘Populism as an ideology’, in G. Ionescu and E. Gellner (eds.), Populism: Its Meaning and National Characteristics (London, 1969), p. 161; Peter Wiles, ‘A Syndrome, not a doctrine: some elementary theories on populism’, in ibid., p. 179 n. 4; Ernesto Laclau, Poli
tics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (London, 1977), chapter 4; Allcock, ‘Populism’, 371–87, 385 n. 34; Margaret Canovan, Populism (New York, 1981), pp. 4, 8–13; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1968 edn.), pp. 820–37; Craig Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1982), pp. 4,7–9, 76–7, 99, 103, 115, 171.

  50. PR, 11 September 1824, p. 671.

  51. PR, 29 March 1834, pp. 796–7; PR, 5 April 1834, pp. 47–52 PR, 12 April 1834, p. 81; PR, 19 April 1834, pp. 167–8; PR, 26 April 1834, pp. 198–9; PR, 10 May 1834, p. 341; PR, 17 January 1835, p. 133; Cobbett to John Halliwell, 19 April 1835 (John Rylands Library); Cobbett to James Gutsell, 17 May 1835 (Yale University).

  52. PR, 28 September 1833, p. 826.

  53. Karl Marx, letter to the New York Daily Tribune, 22 July 1853, p. 5.

  54. PR, 2 June 1832, p. 526; The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford: Passages in the Life of a Radical (1838–41), ed. W. H. Chalomer (London, 1967), book I, pp. 18–19; Hunt, Memoirs, vol. III, pp. 218–20, 356–7; Cobbett, Paper Against Gold; Dyck, ‘Debts and liabilities’, pp. 86–103.

  FURTHER READING

  The largest collections of Cobbett correspondence and manuscripts are at Nuffield College in Oxford and the British Library.