Rural Rides Page 59
Before we got to Thursley, I saw three poor fellows getting in turf for their winter fuel, and I gave them a shilling apiece. To a boy at the bottom of Hindhead, I gave the other sixpence, towards buying him a pair of gloves; and thus I disposed of the money which was, at one time, actually out of my purse, and going into the hand of the loyal Spitalfields weaver.
We got to this place (Mr Knowles’s of Thursley) about 5 o’clock in the evening, very much delighted with our ride.
Kensington, Thursday, 26th Oct.
We left Mr Knowles’s on Thursday morning, came through Godalming, stopped at Mr Rowland’s at Chilworth, and then came on through Dorking to Colley Farm, near Reigate, where we slept. I have so often described the country from Hindhead to the foot of Reigate Hill, and from the top of Reigate Hill to the Thames, that I shall not attempt to do it again here. When we got to the river Wey, we crossed it from Godalming Pismarsh to come up to Chilworth. I desired George to look round the country, and asked him if he did not think, it was very pretty. I put the same question to him when we got into the beautiful neighbourhood of Dorking, and when we got to Reigate, and especially when we got to the tiptop of Reigate Hill, from which there is one of the finest views in the whole world, but ever after our quitting Mr Knowles’s, George insisted that that was the prettiest country that we had seen in the course of our whole ride, and that he liked Mr Knowles’s place better than any other place that he had seen. I reminded him of Western Grove; and I reminded him of the beautiful ponds and grass and plantations at Mr Leach’s; but he still persisted in his judgment in favour of Mr Knowles’s place, in which decision, however, the grey hounds and the beagles had manifestly a great deal to do.
From Thursley to Reigate inclusive, on the chalk-side as well as on the sand-side, the crops of turnips, of both kinds, were pretty nearly as good as I ever saw them in my life. On a farm of Mr Drummond’s at Aldbury, rented by a farmer Peto, I saw a piece of cabbages, of the large kind, which will produce, I should think, not much short of five and twenty tons to the acre; and here I must mention (I do not know why I must, by the bye) an instance of my own skill in measuring land by the eye. The cabbages stand upon half a field and on the part of it furthest from the road where we were. We took the liberty to open the gate and ride in to the field, in order to get closer to the cabbages to look at them. I intended to notice this piece of cabbages, and I asked George how much ground he thought there was in the piece. He said, two acres; and asked me how much I thought. I said that there were above four acres, and that I should not wonder if there were four acres and a half. Thus divided in judgment, we turned away from the cabbages to go out of the field at another gate, which pointed towards our road. Near this gate we found a man turning a heap of manure. This man, as it happened, had hoed the cabbages by the acre, or had had a hand in it. We asked him how much ground there was in that piece of cabbages, and he told us, four acres and a half! I suppose it will not be difficult to convince the reader that George looked upon me as a sort of conjuror. At Mr Pym’s, at Colleyfarm, we found one of the very finest pieces of mangel wurzel that I had ever seen in my life. We calculated that there would be little short of forty tons to the acres and, there being three acres to the piece, Mr Pym calculates that this mangel wurzel, the produce of these three acres of land, will carry his ten or twelve milch-cows nearly, if not wholly, through the winter. There did not appear to be a spurious plant, and there was not one plant that had gone to seed, in the whole piece. I have never seen a more beautiful mass of vegetation, and I had the satisfaction to learn, after having admired the crop, that the seed came from my own shop, and that it had been saved by myself.
Talking of the shop, I came to it in a very few hours after looking at this mangel wurzel; and I soon found that it was high time for me to get home again; for here had been pretty devils’ works going on. Here I found the ‘Greek cause’, and all its appendages, figuring away in grand style. But, I must make this matter of separate observation. I have put an end to my Ride of August, September, and October, 1826, during which I have travelled five hundred and sixty-eight miles, and have slept in thirty different beds, having written three monthly pamphlets, called the ‘Poor Man’s Friend’, and have also written (including the present one) eleven Registers. I have been in three cities, in about twenty market towns, in perhaps five hundred villages; and I have seen the people no where so well off as in the neighbourhood of Weston Grove, and no where so badly off as in the dominions of the Select Vestry of Hurstbourne Tarrant, commonly called Uphusband. During the whole of this ride, I have very rarely been a-bed after day-light; I have drunk neither wine nor spirits. I have eaten no vegetables, and only a very moderate quantity of meat; and, it may be useful to my readers to know, that the riding of twenty miles was not so fatiguing to me at the end of my tour as the riding of ten miles was at the beginning of it. Some ill-natured fools will call this ‘egotism’. Why is it egotism? Getting upon a good strong horse, and riding about the country has no merit in it; there is no conjuration in it; it requires neither talents nor virtues of any sort; but health is a very valuable thing; and when a man has had the experience which I have had in this instance, it is his duty to state to the world and to his own countrymen and neighbours in particular, the happy effects of early rising, sobriety, abstinence and a resolution to be active. It is his duty to do this; and it becomes imperatively his duty, when he has seen, in the course of his life, so many men; so many men of excellent hearts and of good talents, rendered prematurely old, cut off ten or twenty years before their time, by a want of that early rising, sobriety, abstinence and activity from which he himself has derived so much benefit and such inexpressible pleasure. During this ride I have been several times wet to the skin. At some times of my life, after having indulged for a long while in codling myself up in the house, these soakings would have frightened me half out of my senses; but I care very little about them: I avoid getting wet if I can; but, it is very seldom that rain, come when it would, has prevented me from performing the day’s journey that I had laid out beforehand. And, this is a very good rule: to stick to your intention whether it be attended with inconveniences or not; to look upon yourself as bound to do it. In the whole of this ride, I have met with no one untoward circumstance, properly so called, except the wounding of the back of my horse, which grieved me much more on his account than on my own. I have a friend, who, when he is disappointed in accomplishing any thing that he has laid out, says that he has been beaten, which is a very good expression for the thing. I was beaten in my intention to go through Sussex and Kent; but I will retrieve the affair in a very few months’ time, or, perhaps, few weeks. The COLLECTIVE will be here now in a few days; and, as soon as I have got the Preston Petition6 fairly before them, and find (as I dare say I shall) that the petition will not be tried until February, I shall take my horse and set off again to that very spot, in the London turnpike-road, at the foot of Butser-hill, whence I turned off to go to Petersfield, instead of turning the other way to go to Up Park; I shall take my horse and go to this spot, and, with a resolution not to be beaten next time, go along through the whole length of Sussex, and sweep round through Kent and Surrey till I come to Reigate again, and then home to Kensington; for, I do not like to be beaten by horse’s sore back, or by any thing else; and, besides that, there are several things in Sussex and Kent that I want to see and to give an account of. For the present, however, farewell to the country, and now for the Wen and its villanous corruptions.
NOTES
For full bibliographical citations, see Further Reading.
FROM KENSINGTON TO UPHUSBAND
1. my son James: Cobbett was married to Nancy Anne Reid (1774–1848) in 1792, and they had three daughters (Anne, Eleanor and Susan) and four sons (William, John Morgan, James and Richard). The latter two sons joined him on some rides. See also index of Persons.
2. Republicans and Levellers: The allusion is to the Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property again
st Republicans and Levellers, founded in 1793 by John Reeves, who was later appointed King’s printer. Such was Cobbett’s earlier commitment to anti-Jacobinism that he dedicated Porcupine’s Works to Reeves (Spater, William Cobbett, vol. I, pp. 116, 129). During his stay in the United States (1792–1800), Cobbett was a strident and vociferous critic of the republican and Jacobin faction in France, but by 1805 he began to mock alarmism about the French Revolution and its ‘levelling’ and ‘republican’ influences. Cobbett also became a defender of the English radical tradition of the seventeenth century, and despite not embracing republicanism (save for a few months after encountering part I of Paine’s Rights of Man in 1791) he developed disdain for politicians and journalists who used the words ‘republican’ and ‘leveller’ pejoratively and indiscriminately, or who refused to recognize the constitutionalist and ‘non-levelling’ element in much of the reform platform of his day.
3. people of the ‘deadweight’: Usually meant military personnel, especially retired officers who drew (in Cobbett’s view) some £5 million annually in pay and benefits.
4. oak tree… river. Cobbett was an authority on trees, and had his own plantations and seed farms – see his The Woodlands and A Year’s Residence in the United States of America.
5. education… Universities: For Cobbett’s early education, see his Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine; for his opinions about universities and the ‘learned languages’, see Spater, William Cobbett, vol. II, pp. 538–9.
6. Six-Acts if I can:… The Six Acts – sponsored by the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth, and passed late in 1819 – were directed against the radical reform movement. They enhanced the power of magistrates in areas of search, arrest and the general control of public meetings, as well as placed new restrictions on training in arms and on so-called ‘seditious’ publications. A tax of fourpence was now applied to cheap, news-oriented periodicals which appeared more frequently than every twenty-six days. A cheap unstamped Political Register was not possible under the Six Acts, but Cobbett still found ways of getting inexpensive publications to workers, such as by going monthly or by entitling his periodicals ‘sermons’.
7. ‘religious Tracts’… half starvation: Cobbett despised the tracts of Hannah More and the Cheap Repository Tract Society. In his view, their advice to workers was to stay out of politics, to be content with poverty and to endure their suffering. See Dyck, Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, chapter 4. Cobbett conveyed a different message in his own serialized ‘religious’ tracts, which he collected and published as Cobbett’s Sermons.
8. whether Peel’s Bill will be repealed: Peel’s Act of 1819 provided for the Bank of England to restore payment in specie by 1 May 1823 (paper money had been issued by the Bank since 1797, when the gold standard was suspended). Cobbett believed that the government would not be able to pay the interest on the national debt when gold again became legal tender, and he offered to submit himself to a broiling on a gridiron if cash payments could be resumed without forcing the government to default on the debt. (Accordingly, a picture of a gridiron is frequently to be found on the masthead of the Political Register from 1821.) The economy was more resilient than Cobbett anticipated, and the return to gold payments came about according to the schedule of Peel’s Act, though Cobbett argued that the government cheated by reducing the full force of the Act with the Small Note Act of 1822 (see Spater, William Cobbett, vol. II, pp. 411–13, 420–24). It was Cobbert’s view that the government should persevere with its plans to return to hard currency, but that it should accompany this with a legal and ‘equitable adjustment’ (see ‘From Burghclere to Petersfield’, note 2 below) which, in George Spater’s words, would reconfigure ‘all obligations (the national debt, leases, mortgages and other contracts) so that the burden on the one side and the benefits on the other would be approximately the same as they had been before the government began its deflationary policy – in other words, to reduce the obligations to match the new price level’ (William Cobbett, vol. II, p. 413).
Cobbett was of the view that farmers and landlords were seeking the wrong solution by petitioning Parliament for a higher duty on imported corn. They should instead campaign for the government to reduce mortgages, leases and taxes in order to match the deflation brought about by the calling-in of paper currency and the return to gold payments.
9. Agricultural Report of 1821: Cobbett did not much like this report, but he approved of its opposition to higher duties on imported corn (see ‘From Winchester to Burghclere’, note 11).
10. my Book on Gardening… making shoots: Cobbett had worked as a gardener’s boy during his youth, and retained a life-long interest in small-scale, intensive gardening and farming. He is referring to his book The English Gardener (1828), which is a revised version of his American Gardener (1821).
THROUGH HAMPSHIRE, SURREY AND SUSSEX
1. my brothers: Cobbett was the third of four children – all boys – of George Cobbett, a publican and small farmer at Farnham in Surrey. Many of the dates that Cobbett gives for the events of his youth are skewed by the fact that he thought that he was born in 1766: his correct date of birth is 9 March 1763.
2. hanging… for resisting one of this Smith’s game-keepers: In the index of Persons, see Robert Baker and James Turner, and also Robert Snelgrove and Charles Smith.
3. hares… greyhound: Cobbett kept greyhounds at Botley and frequently took his sons and guests on coursing expeditions.
4. hearts be too much set upon the treasures of this world: Matthew 6:19–21: ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal. But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’
5. ‘greatest Captain of the Age’: Francis Burden coined this saying about the Duke of Wellington (in index of Persons, see Arthur Wellesley).
6. those arguments have never been answered: One of Cobbett’s least credible beliefs was that the population of rural England was in decline during his lifetime.
7. Monsieur de Snip: In index of Persons, see John Maberley.
8. Gatten and Old Sarum: These are two notorious boroughs because Old Sarum had seven electors, Gatton all of two (J. A. Phillips, Electorial Behaviour in Unreformed England (Princeton, 1982), p. 60). See also ‘Down the Valley of the Avon’, note 2, below.
9. A greater than Solomon is here: Matthew 12:42: ‘[The queen of the south] came from the uppermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here.’
10. Edinburgh Reviewers: The Whig publication gave Cobbett a scolding in 1807, and he never forgave the editors, whom he subsequently mocked as ‘feelosofers’.
11. spiritual songs: Cobbett would later become deeply involved with these ‘hard parishes’, as he called them, during the rising of agricultural workers in 1830–31 – see Dyck, Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, chapter 7 and Appendix II; in index of Persons, see Barings.
12. Pitt-system: The ‘system’ of Prime Minister Pitt, according to Cobbett, was government by and for placemen, pensioners, sinecurists, fund-holders, stock-jobbers and paper-money holders.
13. Old Doctor, i.e. Lord Sidmouth (see index of Persons).
14. Banishment Act: This refers to the Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Bill, which was one of the Six Acts of 1819 – see note 6 (p. 454) above.
15. When the pure Whigs were in power. Cobbett is referring to the so-called Ministry of All the Talents (1806–7), headed by Lord William Grenville. The cabinet had Charles James Fox at foreign affairs and William Windham (Cobbett’s friend and patron during his anti-Jacobin days) as secretary of state for war. Cobbett soon gave up on the capacity of the ‘Talents’ to uproot the ‘Pitt-system’.
16. ‘the admiration of the world’: Cobbett often quoted these words without identifying the speaker. It is possible that he had in mind the younger Pitt, who during a speech on parliamentary reform alluded to the ‘beautiful
frame of government which had made us the envy and admiration of the world’ (The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London, 1814), vol. XXII, p. 1417).
17. Marriage Act: Act of 1822 that sought to make secret marriages more difficult.
18. Mr Charles B——’s farms: In index of Persons, see Sir Charles Burrell.
THROUGH SURREY, SUSSEX AND HAMPSHIRE
1. musket too, when necessary: Cobbett was shamefully bigoted towards Jews and Quakers, especially the former (he sometimes confessed to having met a ‘good’ or ‘decent’ Quaker from time to time, but not so with Jews). See Schweizer and Osborne, Cobbett in his Times, chapter 7; and W. D. Rubinstein, ‘British Radicalism and the “Dark Side” of Populism’, in Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British Society (Brighton, 1987), pp. 339–73.
2. performed at Manchester: This refers to the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ of 16 August 1819 at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester. A crowd of 60,000 reformers was set upon by the yeomanry cavalry and a troop of hussars. Eleven people were killed and several hundred injured.
3. into the American fields: Cobbett had a small farm on Long Island during his second sojourn in the United States (1817–19). See his A Year’s Residence.
4. ‘puff-out’ Registers: The Political Register of these years forecast that the Bank of England would ‘puff-out’ upon the circulation of forged bank notes, which Cobbett always thought was desirable and imminent.
5. straw affair: Regarding Cobbett’s promotion of the straw-plait industry and his experiments with suitable straws, see his Cottage Economy, chapter 8; and Dyck, Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, pp. 123–4. The straw was grown by farmers Mr and Mrs Brazier at Worth in Sussex, where Cobbett often stayed during his rides and did some of the research for Cottage Economy.