KENTISH JOURNAL: FROM KENSINGTON TO DARTFORD, ROCHESTER, CHATHAM, AND FAVERSHAM.
Tuesday, December 4, 1821, Elverton Farm, near Faversham, Kent.
This is the first time, since I went to France, in 1792, that I have been on this side of Shooters' Hill. The land, generally speaking, from Deptford to Dartford is poor, and the surface ugly by nature, to which ugliness there has been made, just before we came to the latter place, a considerable addition by the enclosure of a common, and by the sticking up of some shabby-genteel houses, surrounded with dead fences and things called gardens, in all manner of ridiculous forms, making, all together, the bricks, hurdle-rods and earth say, as plainly as they can speak, "Here dwell vanity and poverty." This is a little excrescence that has grown out of the immense sums which have been drawn from other parts of the kingdom to be expended on Barracks, Magazines, Martello-Towers, Catamarans, and all the excuses for lavish expenditure which the war for the Bourbons gave rise to. All things will return; these rubbishy flimsy things, on this common, will first be deserted, then crumble down, then be swept away, and the cattle, sheep, pigs and geese will once more graze upon the common, which will again furnish heath, furze and turf for the labourers on the neighbouring lands.--After you leave Dartford the land becomes excellent. You come to a bottom of chalk, many feet from the surface, and when that is the case the land is sure to be good; no wet at bottom, no deep ditches, no water furrows necessary; sufficiently moist in dry weather, and no water lying about upon it in wet weather for any length of time. The chalk acts as a filtering-stone, not as a sieve, like gravel, and not as a dish, like clay. The chalk acts as the soft stone in Herefordshire does; but it is not so congenial to trees that have tap-roots.--Along through Gravesend towards Rochester the country presents a sort of gardening scene. Rochester (the Bishop of which is, or lately was, tax Collector for London and Middlesex) is a small but crowded place, lying on the south bank of the beautiful Medway, with a rising ground on the other side of the city. Stroud, which you pass through before you come to the bridge, over which you go to enter Rochester; Rochester itself, and Chatham, form, in fact, one main street of about two miles and a half in length.--Here I was got into the scenes of my cap-and-feather days! Here, at between sixteen and seventeen, I enlisted for a soldier. Upon looking up towards the fortifications and the barracks, how many recollections crowded into my mind! The girls in these towns do not seem to be so pretty as they were thirty-eight years ago; or, am I not so quick in discovering beauties as I was then? Have thirty-eight years corrected my taste, or made me a hypercritic in these matters? Is it that I now look at them with the solemnness of a "professional man," and not with the enthusiasm and eagerness of an "amateur?" I leave these questions for philosophers to solve. One thing I will say for the young women of these towns, and that is, that I always found those of them that I had the great happiness to be acquainted with, evince a sincere desire to do their best to smooth the inequalities of life, and to give us, "brave fellows," as often as they could, strong beer, when their churlish masters of fathers or husbands would have drenched us to death with small. This, at the out-set of life, gave me a high opinion of the judgment and justice of the female sex; an opinion which has been confirmed by the observations of my whole life.--This Chatham has had some monstrous wens stuck on to it by the lavish expenditure of the war. These will moulder away. It is curious enough that I should meet with a gentleman in an inn at Chatham to give me a picture of the house-distress in that enormous wen, which, during the war, was stuck on to Portsmouth. Not less than fifty thousand people had been drawn together there! These are now dispersing. The coagulated blood is diluting and flowing back through the veins. Whole streets are deserted, and the eyes of the houses knocked out by the boys that remain. The jackdaws, as much as to say, "Our turn to be inspired and to teach is come," are beginning to take possession of the Methodist chapels. The gentleman told me that he had been down to Portsea to sell half a street of houses, left him by a relation; and that nobody would give him anything for them further than as very cheap fuel and rubbish! Good God! And is this "prosperity?" Is this the "prosperity of the war?" Have I not, for twenty long years, been regretting the existence of these unnatural embossments; these white-swellings, these odious wens, produced by Corruption and engendering crime and misery and slavery? We shall see the whole of these wens abandoned by the inhabitants, and, at last, the cannons on the fortifications may be of some use in battering down the buildings.--But what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, "the metropolis of the empire"? What is to become of that multitude of towns that has been stuck up around it? The village of Kingston was smothered in the town of Portsea; and why? Because taxes, drained from other parts of the kingdom, were brought thither.
The dispersion of the wen is the only real difficulty that I see in settling the affairs of the nation and restoring it to a happy state. But dispersed it must be; and if there be half a million, or more, of people to suffer, the consolation is, that the suffering will be divided into half a million of parts. As if the swelling out of London, naturally produced by the Funding System, were not sufficient; as if the evil were not sufficiently great from the inevitable tendency of the system of loans and funds, our pretty gentlemen must resort to positive institutions to augment the population of the Wen. They found that the increase of the Wen produced an increase of thieves and prostitutes, an increase of all sorts of diseases, an increase of miseries of all sorts; they saw that taxes drawn up to one point produced these effects; they must have a "penitentiary," for instance, to check the evil, and that they must needs have in the Wen! So that here were a million of pounds, drawn up in taxes, employed not only to keep the thieves and prostitutes still in the Wen, but to bring up to the Wen workmen to build the penitentiary, who and whose families, amounting, perhaps, to thousands, make an addition to the cause of that crime and misery, to check which is the object of the Penitentiary! People would follow, they must follow, the million of money. However, this is of a piece with all the rest of their goings on. They and their predecessors, Ministers and House, have been collecting together all the materials for a dreadful explosion; and if the explosion be not dreadful, other heads must point out the means of prevention.
Wednesday, 5 Dec.
The land on quitting Chatham is chalk at bottom; but before you reach Sittingbourne there is a vein of gravel and sand under, but a great depth of loam above. About Sittingbourne the chalk bottom comes again, and continues on to this place, where the land appears to me to be as good as it can possibly be. Mr. WILLIAM WALLER, at whose house I am, has grown, this year, Mangel-Wurzel, the roots of which weigh, I think, on an average, twelve pounds, and in rows, too, at only about thirty inches distant from each other. In short, as far as soil goes, it is impossible to see a finer country than this. You frequently see a field of fifty acres, level as a die, clean as a garden and as rich. Mr. Birkbeck need not have crossed the Atlantic, and Alleghany into the bargain, to look for land too rich to bear wheat; for here is a plenty of it. In short, this is a country of hop-gardens, cherry, apple, pear and filbert orchards, and quick-set hedges. But, alas! what, in point of beauty, is a country without woods and lofty trees! And here there are very few indeed. I am now sitting in a room, from the window of which I look, first, over a large and level field of rich land, in which the drilled wheat is finely come up, and which is surrounded by clipped quickset hedges with a row of apple trees running by the sides of them; next, over a long succession of rich meadows, which are here called marshes, the shortest grass upon which will fatten sheep or oxen; next, over a little branch of the salt water which runs up to Faversham; beyond that, on the Isle of Shepry (or Shepway), which rises a little into a sort of ridge that runs along it; rich fields, pastures and orchards lie all around me; and yet, I declare, that I a million times to one prefer, as a spot to live on, the heaths, the miry coppices, the wild woods and the forests of Sussex and Hampshire.
Thursday, 6 Dec.
"Agricultural distress" is the great topic of general conversation. The Webb Hallites seem to prevail here. The fact is, farmers in general read nothing but the newspapers; these, in the Wen, are under the control of the Corruption of one or the other of the factions; and in the country, nine times out of ten, under the control of the parsons and landlords, who are the magistrates, as they are pompously called, that is to say, Justices of the Peace. From such vehicles what are farmers to learn? They are, in general, thoughtful and sensible men; but their natural good sense is perverted by these publications, had it not been for which we never should have seen "a sudden transition from war to peace" lasting seven years, and more sudden in its destructive effects at last than at first. Sir Edward Knatchbull and Mr. Honeywood are the members of the "Collective Wisdom" for this county. The former was, till of late, a Tax-Collector. I hear that he is a great advocate for corn-bills! I suppose he does not wish to let people who have leases see the bottom of the evil. He may get his rents for this year; but it will be his last year, if the interest of the Debt be not very greatly reduced. Some people here think that corn is smuggled in even now! Perhaps it is, upon the whole, best that the delusion should continue for a year longer; as that would tend to make the destruction of the system more sure, or, at least, make the cure more radical.
Friday, 7 Dec.
I went through Faversham. A very pretty little town, and just ten minutes' walk from the market-place up to the Dover turnpike-road. Here are the powder-affairs that Mr. HUME so well exposed. An immensity of buildings and expensive things. Why are not these premises let or sold? However, this will never be done until there be a reformed Parliament. Pretty little VAN, that beauty of all beauties; that orator of all orators; that saint of all saints; that financier of all financiers, said that if Mr. HUME were to pare down the expenses of government to his wish, there would be others "the Hunts, Cobbetts, and Carliles, who would still want the expense to be less." I do not know how low Mr. Hume would wish to go; but for myself I say that if I ever have the power to do it, I will reduce the expenditure, and that in quick time too, down to what it was in the reign of Queen Anne; that is to say, to less than is now paid to tax-gatherers for their labour in collecting the taxes; and, monstrous as VAN may think the idea, I do not regard it as impossible that I may have such power; which I would certainly not employ to do an act of injustice to any human being, and would, at the same time, maintain the throne in more real splendour than that in which it is now maintained. But I would have nothing to do with any VANS, except as door-keepers or porters.
Saturday, 8 Dec.
Came home very much pleased with my visit to Mr. WALKER, in whose house I saw no drinking of wine, spirits, or even beer; where all, even to the little children, were up by candle-light in the morning, and where the most perfect sobriety was accompanied by constant cheerfulness. Kent is in a deplorable way. The farmers are skilful and intelligent, generally speaking. But there is infinite corruption in Kent, owing partly to the swarms of West Indians, Nabobs, Commissioners, and others of nearly the same description, that have selected it for the place of their residence; but owing still more to the immense sums of public money that have, during the last thirty years, been expended in it. And when one thinks of these, the conduct of the people of Dover, Canterbury, and other places, in the case of the ever-lamented Queen, does them everlasting honour. The fruit in Kent is more select than in Herefordshire, where it is raised for cyder, while, in Kent, it is raised for sale in its fruit state, a great deal being sent to the Wen, and a great deal sent to the North of England and to Scotland. The orchards are beautiful indeed. Kept in the neatest order, and, indeed, all belonging to them excels anything of the kind to be seen in Normandy; and as to apples, I never saw any so good in France as those of Kent. This county, so blessed by Providence, has been cursed by the System in a peculiar degree. It has been the receiver of immense sums, raised on the other counties. This has puffed its rents to an unnatural height; and now that the drain of other counties is stopped, it feels like a pampered pony turned out in winter to live upon a common. It is in an extremely "unsatisfactory state," and has certainly a greater mass of suffering to endure than any other part of the kingdom, the Wens only excepted. Sir EDWARD KNATCHBULL, who is a child of the System, does appear to see no more of the cause of these sufferings than if he were a baby. How should he? Not very bright by nature; never listening but to one side of the question; being a man who wants high rents to be paid him; not gifted with much light, and that little having to strive against prejudice, false shame, and self interest, what wonder is there that he should not see things in their true light?
NORFOLK AND SUFFOLK JOURNAL.
Bergh-Apton, near Norwich, Monday, 10 Dec. 1821.
From the Wen to Norwich, from which I am now distant seven miles, there is nothing in Essex, Suffolk, or this county, that can be called a hill. Essex, when you get beyond the immediate influence of the gorgings and disgorgings of the Wen; that is to say, beyond the demand for crude vegetables and repayment in manure, is by no means a fertile county. There appears generally to be a bottom of clay; not soft chalk, which they persist in calling clay in Norfolk. I wish I had one of these Norfolk men in a coppice in Hampshire or Sussex, and I would show him what clay is. Clay is what pots and pans and jugs and tiles are made of; and not soft, whitish stuff that crumbles to pieces in the sun, instead of baking as hard as a stone, and which, in dry weather, is to be broken to pieces by nothing short of a sledge-hammer. The narrow ridges on which the wheat is sown; the water furrows; the water standing in the dips of the pastures; the rusty iron-like colour of the water coming out of some of the banks; the deep ditches; the rusty look of the pastures--all show, that here is a bottom of clay. Yet there is gravel too; for the oaks do not grow well. It was not till I got nearly to SUDBURY that I saw much change for the better. Here the bottom of chalk, the soft dirty-looking chalk that the Norfolk people call clay, begins to be the bottom, and this, with very little exception (as far as I have been) is the bottom of all the lands of these two fine counties of Suffolk and Norfolk.--SUDBURY has some fine meadows near it on the sides of the river Stour. The land all along to Bury Saint Edmund's is very fine; but no trees worth looking at. Bury, formerly the seat of an Abbot, the last of whom was, I think, hanged, or somehow put to death, by that matchless tyrant, Henry VIII., is a very pretty place; extremely clean and neat; no ragged or dirty people to be seen, and women (young ones I mean) very pretty and very neatly dressed.--On this side of Bury, a considerable distance lower, I saw a field of Rape, transplanted very thick, for, I suppose, sheep feed in the spring. The farming all along to Norwich is very good. The land clean, and everything done in a masterly manner.
Tuesday, 11 Dec.
Mr. SAMUEL CLARKE, my host, has about 30 acres of Swedes in rows. Some at 4 feet distances, some at 30 inches; and about 4 acres of the 4-feet Swedes were transplanted. I have seen thousands of acres of Swedes in these counties, and here are the largest crops that I have seen. The widest rows are decidedly the largest crops here; and, the transplanted, though under disadvantageous circumstances, amongst the best of the best. The wide rows amount to at least 20 tons to the acre, exclusive of the greens taken off two months ago, which weighed 5 tons to the acre. Then, there is the inter tillage, so beneficial to the land, and the small quantity of manure required in the broad rows, compared to what is required when the seed is drilled or sown upon the level. Mr. NICHOLLS, a neighbour of Mr. CLARKE, has a part of a field transplanted on seven turn ridges, put in when in the other part of the field, drilled, the plants were a fortnight old. He has a much larger crop in the transplanted than in the drilled part. But, if it had been a fly-year, he might have had none in the drilled part, while, in all probability, the crop in the transplanted part would have been better than it now is, seeing that a wet summer, though favourable to the hitting of the Swedes, is by no means favourable to their attaining a great size of bulb. This is the case this year with all turnips. A great deal of leaf and neck, but not bulbs in proportion. The advantages of transplanting are, first, you make sure of a crop in spite of fly; and, second, you have six weeks or two months longer to prepare your ground. And the advantages of wide rows are, first, that you want only about half the quantity of manure; and, second, that you plough the ground two or three times during the summer.
Grove, near Holt, Thursday, 13th Dec.
Came to the Grove (Mr. Withers's), near Holt, along with Mr. Clarke. Through Norwich to Aylsham and then to Holt. On our road we passed the house of the late Lord Suffield, who married Castlereagh's wife's sister, who is a daughter of the late Earl of Buckinghamshire, who had for so many years that thumping sinecure of eleven thousand a year in Ireland, and who was the son of a man that, under the name of Mr. Hobart, cut such a figure in supporting Lord North and afterwards Pitt, and was made a peer under the auspices of the latter of these two heaven-born Ministers. This house, which is a very ancient one, was, they say, the birth-place of Ann de Boleyne, the mother of Queen Elizabeth. Not much matter; for she married the king while his real wife was alive. I could have excused her, if there had been no marrying in the case; but hypocrisy, always bad, becomes detestable when it resorts to religious ceremony as its mask. She, no more than Cranmer, seems, to her last moments, to have remembered her sins against her lawful queen. Fox's "Book of Martyrs," that ought to be called "the Book of Liars," says that Cranmer, the recanter and re-recanter, held out his offending hand in the flames, and cried out "that hand, that hand!" If he had cried out Catherine! Catherine! I should have thought better of him; but it is clear that the whole story is a lie, invented by the protestants, and particularly by the sectarians, to white-wash the character of this perfidious hypocrite and double apostate, who, if bigotry had something to do in bringing him to the stake, certainly deserved his fate, if any offences committed by man can deserve so horrible a punishment.--The present LORD SUFFIELD is that Mr. EDWARD HARBORD, whose father-in-law left him 500l. to buy a seat in Parliament, and who refused to carry an address to the late beloved and lamented Queen, because Major Cartwright and myself were chosen to accompany him! Never mind, my Lord; you will grow less fastidious! They say, however, that he is really good to his tenants, and has told them, that he will take anything that they can give. There is some sense in this! He is a great Bible Man; and it is strange that he cannot see, that things are out of order, when his interference in this way can be at all necessary, while there is a Church that receives a tenth part of the produce of the earth.--There are some oak woods here, but very poor. Not like those, not near like the worst of those, in Hampshire and Herefordshire. All this eastern coast seems very unpropitious to trees of all sorts.--We passed through the estate of a Mr. Marsin, whose house is near the road, a very poor spot, and the first really poor ground I have seen in Norfolk. A nasty spewy black gravel on the top of a sour clay. It is worse than the heaths between Godalming and Liphook; for, while it is too poor to grow anything but heath, it is too cold to give you the chirping of the grasshopper in summer. However, Mr. Marsin has been too wise to enclose this wretched land, which is just like that which Lord Caernarvon has enclosed in the parishes of Highclere, and Burghclere, and which, for tillage, really is not worth a single farthing an acre.--Holt is a little, old-fashioned, substantially-built market-town. The land just about it, or, at least, towards the east, is poor, and has been lately enclosed.
Friday, 14th Dec.
Went to see the estate of Mr. Hardy at Leveringsett, a hamlet about two miles from Holt. This is the first time that I have seen a valley in this part of England. From Holt you look, to the distance of seven or eight miles, over a very fine valley, leaving a great deal of inferior hill and dell within its boundaries. At the bottom of this general valley, Mr. Hardy has a very beautiful estate of about four hundred acres. His house is at one end of it near the high road, where he has a malt-house and a brewery, the neat and ingenious manner of managing which I would detail if my total unacquaintance with machinery did not disqualify me for the task. His estate forms a valley of itself, somewhat longer than broad. The tops, and the sides of the tops of the hills round it, and also several little hillocks in the valley itself, are judiciously planted with trees of various sorts, leaving good wide roads, so that it is easy to ride round them in a carriage. The fields, the fences, the yards and stacks, the buildings, the cattle, all showed the greatest judgment and industry. There was really nothing that the most critical observer could say was out of order. However, the forest trees do not grow well here. The oaks are mere scrubs, as they are about Brentwood in Essex, and in some parts of Cornwall; and, for some unaccountable reason, people seldom plant the ash, which no wind will shave, as it does the oak.
Saturday, 15 Dec.
Spent the evening amongst the Farmers, at their Market Room at Holt; and very much pleased at them I was. We talked over the cause of the low prices, and I, as I have done everywhere, endeavoured to convince them, that prices must fall a great deal lower yet; and that no man, who wishes not to be ruined, ought to keep or take a farm, unless on a calculation of best wheat at 4s. a bushel and a best Southdown ewe at 15s. or even 12s. They heard me patiently, and, I believe, were well convinced of the truth of what I said. I told them of the correctness of the predictions of their great countryman, Mr. PAINE, and observed, how much better it would have been, to take his advice, than to burn him in effigy. I endeavoured (but in such a case all human powers must fail!) to describe to them the sort and size of the talents of the Stern-path-of-duty man, of the great hole-digger, of the jester, of the Oxford scholar, of the loan-jobber (who had just made an enormous grasp), of the Oracle, and so on. Here, as everywhere else, I hear every creature speak loudly in praise of Mr. Coke. It is well known to my readers, that I think nothing of him as a public man; that I think even his good qualities an injury to his country, because they serve the knaves whom he is duped by to dupe the people more effectually; but, it would be base in me not to say, that I hear, from men of all parties, and sensible men too, expressions made use of towards him that affectionate children use towards the best of parents. I have not met with a single exception.
Bergh Apton, Sunday, 16 Dec.
Came from Holt through Saxthorpe and Cawston. At the former village were on one end of a decent white house, these words, "Queen Caroline; for her Britons mourn," and a crown over all in black. I need not have looked to see: I might have been sure that the owner of the house was a shoe-maker, a trade which numbers more men of sense and of public spirit than any other in the kingdom.--At Cawston we stopped at a public house, the keeper of which had taken and read the Register for years. I shall not attempt to describe the pleasure I felt at the hearty welcome given us by Mr. Pern and his wife and by a young miller of the village, who, having learnt at Holt that we were to return that way, had come to meet us, the house being on the side of the great road, from which the village is at some distance. This is the birth-place of the famous Botley Parson, all the history of whom we now learned, and, if we could have gone to the village, they were prepared to ring the bells, and show us the old woman who nursed the Botley Parson! These Norfolk baws never do things by halves. We came away, very much pleased with our reception at Cawston, and with a promise, on my part, that, if I visited the county again, I would write a Register there; a promise which I shall certainly keep.
Great Yarmouth, Friday (morning), 21st Dec.
The day before yesterday I set out for Bergh Apton with Mr. CLARKE, to come hither by the way of Beccles in Suffolk. We stopped at Mr. Charles Clarke's at Beccles, where we saw some good and sensible men, who see clearly into all the parts of the works of the "Thunderers," and whose anticipations, as to the "general working of events," are such as they ought to be. They gave us a humorous account of the "rabble" having recently crowned a Jackass, and of a struggle between them and the "Yeomanry Cavaltry." This was a place of most ardent and blazing loyalty, as the pretenders to it call it; but, it seems it now blazes less furiously; it is milder, more measured in its effusions; and, with the help of low prices, will become bearable in time. This Beccles is a very pretty place, has watered meadows near it, and is situated amidst fine lands. What a system it must be to make people wretched in a country like this! Could he be heaven-born that invented such a system? GAFFER GOOCH'S father, a very old man, lives not far from here. We had a good deal of fun about the Gaffer, who will certainly never lose the name, unless he should be made a Lord.--We slept at the house of a friend of Mr. Clarke on our way, and got to this very fine town of Great Yarmouth yesterday about noon. A party of friends met us and conducted us about the town, which is a very beautiful one indeed. What I liked best, however, was the hearty welcome that I met with, because it showed, that the reign of calumny and delusion was passed. A company of gentlemen gave me a dinner in the evening, and, in all my life I never saw a set of men more worthy of my respect and gratitude. Sensible, modest, understanding the whole of our case, and clearly foreseeing what is about to happen. One gentleman proposed, that, as it would be impossible for all to go to London, there should be a Provincial Feast of the Gridiron, a plan, which, I hope, will be adopted--I leave Great Yarmouth with sentiments of the sincerest regard for all those whom I there saw and conversed with, and with my best wishes for the happiness of all its inhabitants; nay, even the parsons not excepted; for, if they did not come to welcome me, they collected in a group to see me, and that was one step towards doing justice to him whom their order have so much, so foully, and, if they knew their own interest, so foolishly slandered.
Bergh Apton, 22nd Dec. (night).
After returning from Yarmouth yesterday, went to dine at Stoke-Holy-Cross, about six miles off; got home at mid-night, and came to Norwich this morning, this being market-day, and also the day fixed on for a Radical Reform Dinner at the Swan Inn, to which I was invited. Norwich is a very fine city, and the Castle, which stands in the middle of it, on a hill, is truly majestic. The meat and poultry and vegetable market is beautiful. It is kept in a large open square in the middle, or nearly so, of the City. The ground is a pretty sharp slope, so that you see all at once. It resembles one of the French markets, only there the vendors are all standing and gabbling like parrots, and the meat is lean and bloody and nasty, and the people snuffy and grimy in hands and face, the contrary, precisely the contrary of all which is the case in this beautiful market at Norwich, where the women have a sort of uniform brown great coats, with white aprons and bibs (I think they call them) going from the apron up to the bosom. They equal in neatness (for nothing can surpass) the market women in Philadelphia.--The cattle-market is held on the hill by the castle, and many fairs are smaller in bulk of stock. The corn-market is held in a very magnificent place, called Saint Andrew's Hall, which will contain two or three thousand persons. They tell me, that this used to be a most delightful scene; a most joyous one; and, I think, it was this scene that Mr. CURWEN described in such glowing colours when he was talking of the Norfolk farmers, each worth so many thousands of pounds. Bear me witness, reader, that I never was dazzled by such sights; that the false glare never put my eyes out; and that, even then, twelve years ago, I warned Mr. CURWEN of the result! Bear witness to this, my Disciples, and justify the doctrines of him for whose sakes you have endured persecution. How different would Mr. CURWEN find the scene now! What took place at the dinner has been already recorded in the Register; and I have only to add with regard to it, that my reception at Norfolk was such, that I have only to regret the total want of power to make those hearty Norfolk and Norwich friends any suitable return, whether by act or word.
Kensington, Monday, 24 Dec.
Went from Bergh Apton to Norwich in the morning, and from Norwich to London during the day, carrying with me great admiration of and respect for this county of excellent farmers, and hearty, open and spirited men. The Norfolk people are quick and smart in their motions and in their speaking. Very neat and trim in all their farming concerns, and very skilful. Their land is good, their roads are level, and the bottom of their soil is dry, to be sure; and these are great advantages; but they are diligent, and make the most of everything. Their management of all sorts of stock is most judicious; they are careful about manure; their teams move quickly; and, in short, it is a county of most excellent cultivators.--The churches in Norfolk are generally large and the towers lofty. They have all been well built at first. Many of them are of the Saxon architecture. They are, almost all (I do not remember an exception), placed on the highest spots to be found near where they stand; and, it is curious enough, that the contrary practice should have prevailed in hilly countries, where they are generally found in valleys and in low, sheltered dells, even in those valleys! These churches prove that the people of Norfolk and Suffolk were always a superior people in point of wealth, while the size of them proves that the country parts were, at one time, a great deal more populous than they now are. The great drawbacks on the beauty of these counties are, their flatness and their want of fine woods; but, to those who can dispense with these, Norfolk, under a wise and just government, can have nothing to ask more than Providence and the industry of man have given.
LANDLORD DISTRESS MEETINGS.
For, in fact, it is not the farmer, but the Landlord and Parson, who wants relief from the "Collective." The tenant's remedy is, quitting his farm or bringing down his rent to what he can afford to give, wheat being 3 or 4 shillings a bushel. This is his remedy. What should he want high prices for? They can do him no good; and this I proved to the farmers last year. The fact is, the Landlords and Parsons are urging the farmers on to get something done to give them high rents and high tithes.
At Hertford there has been a meeting at which some sense was discovered, at any rate. The parties talked about the fund-holder, the Debt, the taxes, and so on, and seemed to be in a very warm temper. Pray, keep yourselves cool, gentlemen; for you have a great deal to endure yet. I deeply regret that I have not room to insert the resolutions of this meeting.
There is to be a meeting at Battle (East Sussex) on the 3rd instant, at which I mean to be. I want to see my friends on the South Downs. To see how they look now.
[At a public dinner given to Mr. Cobbett at Norwich, on the market-day above mentioned, the company drank the toast of Mr. Cobbett and his "Trash," the name "two-penny trash," having being at one time applied by Lord Castlereagh to the Register. In acknowledging this toast Mr. Cobbett addressed the company in a speech, of which the following is a passage:]
"My thanks to you for having drunk my health, are great and sincere; but much greater pleasure do I feel at the approbation bestowed on that Trash, which has, for so many years been a mark for the finger of scorn to be pointed at by ignorant selfishness and arrogant and insolent power. To enumerate, barely to name, all, or a hundredth part of, the endeavours that have been made to stifle this Trash would require a much longer space of time than that which we have now before us. But, gentlemen, those endeavours must have cost money; money must have been expended in the circulation of Anti-Cobbett, and the endless bale of papers and pamphlets put forth to check the progress of the Trash: and, when we take into view the immense sums expended in keeping down the spirit excited by the Trash, who of us is to tell, whether these endeavours, taken altogether, may not have added many millions to that debt, of which (without any hint at a concomitant measure) some men have now the audacity, the unprincipled, the profligate assurance to talk of reducing the interest. The Trash, Gentlemen, is now triumphant; its triumph we are now met to celebrate; proofs of its triumph I myself witnessed not many hours ago, in that scene where the best possible evidence was to be found. In walking through St. Andrew's Hall, my mind was not so much engaged on the grandeur of the place, or on the gratifying reception I met with; those hearty shakes by the hand which I so much like, those smiles of approbation, which not to see with pride would argue an insensibility to honest fame: even these, I do sincerely assure you, engaged my mind much less than the melancholy reflection, that, of the two thousand or fifteen hundred farmers then in my view, there were probably three-fourths who came to the Hall with aching hearts, and who would leave it in a state of mental agony. What a thing to contemplate, Gentlemen! What a scene is here! A set of men, occupiers of the land; producers of all that we eat, drink, wear, and of all that forms the buildings that shelter us; a set of men industrious and careful by habit; cool, thoughtful, and sensible from the instructions of nature; a set of men provident above all others, and engaged in pursuits in their nature stable as the very earth they till: to see a set of men like this plunged into anxiety, embarrassment, jeopardy, not to be described; and when the particular individuals before me were famed for their superior skill in this great and solid pursuit, and were blessed with soil and other circumstances to make them prosperous and happy: to behold this sight would have been more than sufficient to sink my heart within me, had I not been upheld by the reflection, that I had done all in my power to prevent these calamities, and that I still had in reserve that which, with the assistance of the sufferers themselves, would restore them and the nation to happiness."
SUSSEX JOURNAL: TO BATTLE, THROUGH BROMLEY, SEVEN-OAKS, AND TUNBRIDGE.
Battle, Wednesday, 2 Jan. 1822.
Came here to-day from Kensington, in order to see what goes on at the Meeting to be held here to-morrow, of the "Gentry, Clergy, Freeholders, and Occupiers of Land in the Rape of Hastings, to take into consideration the distressed state of the Agricultural interest." I shall, of course, give an account of this meeting after it has taken place.--You come through part of Kent to get to Battle from the Great Wen on the Surrey side of the Thames. The first town is Bromley, the next Seven-Oaks, the next Tunbridge, and between Tunbridge and this place you cross the boundaries of the two counties.--From the Surrey Wen to Bromley the land is generally a deep loam on a gravel, and you see few trees except elm. A very ugly country. On quitting Bromley the land gets poorer; clay at bottom; the wheat sown on five, or seven, turn lands; the furrows shining with wet; rushes on the wastes on the sides of the road. Here there is a common, part of which has been enclosed and thrown out again, or, rather, the fences carried away.--There is a frost this morning, some ice, and the women look rosy-cheeked.--There is a very great variety of soil along this road; bottom of yellow clay; then of sand; then of sand-stone; then of solider stone; then (for about five miles) of chalk; then of red clay; then chalk again; here (before you come to Seven-Oaks) is a most beautiful and rich valley, extending from east to west, with rich corn-fields and fine trees; then comes sand-stone again; and the hop-gardens near Seven-Oaks, which is a pretty little town with beautiful environs, part of which consists of the park of Knowle, the seat of the Duchess of Dorset. It is a very fine place. And there is another park, on the other side of the town. So that this is a delightful place, and the land appears to be very good. The gardens and houses all look neat and nice. On quitting Seven-Oaks you come to a bottom of gravel for a short distance, and to a clay for many miles. When I say that I saw teams carting gravel from this spot to a distance of nearly ten miles along the road, the reader will be at no loss to know what sort of bottom the land has all along here. The bottom then becomes sand-stone again. This vein of land runs all along through the county of Sussex, and the clay runs into Hampshire, across the forests of Bere and Waltham, then across the parishes of Ouslebury, Stoke, and passing between the sand hills of Southampton and chalk hills of Winchester, goes westward till stopped by the chalky downs between Romsey and Salisbury.--Tunbridge is a small but very nice town, and has some fine meadows and a navigable river.--The rest of the way to Battle presents, alternately, clay and sand-stone. Of course the coppices and oak woods are very frequent. There is now and then a hop-garden spot, and now and then an orchard of apples or cherries; but these are poor indeed compared with what you see about Canterbury and Maidstone. The agricultural state of the country or, rather, the quality of the land, from Bromley to Battle, may be judged of from the fact, that I did not see, as I came along, more than thirty acres of Swedes during the fifty-six miles! In Norfolk I should, in the same distance, have seen five hundred acres! However, man was not the maker of the land; and, as to human happiness, I am of opinion, that as much, and even more, falls to the lot of the leather-legged chaps that live in and rove about amongst those clays and woods as to the more regularly disciplined labourers of the rich and prime parts of England. As "God has made the back to the burthen," so the clay and coppice people make the dress to the stubs and bushes. Under the sole of the shoe is iron; from the sole six inches upwards is a high-low; then comes a leather bam to the knee; then comes a pair of leather breeches; then comes a stout doublet; over this comes a smock-frock; and the wearer sets brush and stubs and thorns and mire at defiance. I have always observed, that woodland and forest labourers are best off in the main. The coppices give them pleasant and profitable work in winter. If they have not so great a corn-harvest, they have a three weeks' harvest in April or May; that is to say, in the season of barking, which in Hampshire is called stripping, and in Sussex flaying, which employs women and children as well as men. And then in the great article of fuel! They buy none. It is miserable work, where this is to be bought, and where, as at Salisbury, the poor take by turns the making of fires at their houses to boil four or five tea-kettles. What a winter-life must those lead, whose turn it is not to make the fire! At Launceston in Cornwall a man, a tradesman too, told me, that the people in general could not afford to have fire in ordinary, and that he himself paid 3d. for boiling a leg of mutton at another man's fire! The leather-legged-race know none of these miseries, at any rate. They literally get their fuel "by hook or by crook," whence, doubtless, comes that old and very expressive saying, which is applied to those cases where people will have a thing by one means or another.
Battle, Thursday (night), 3 Jan. 1822.
To-day there has been a Meeting here of the landlords and farmers in this part of Sussex, which is called the Rape of Hastings. The object was to agree on a petition to Parliament praying for relief! Good God! Where is this to end? We now see the effects of those rags which I have been railing against for the last twenty years. Here were collected together not less than 300 persons, principally landlords and farmers, brought from their homes by their distresses and by their alarms for the future! Never were such things heard in any country before; and, it is useless to hope, for terrific must be the consequences, if an effectual remedy be not speedily applied. The town, which is small, was in a great bustle before noon; and the Meeting (in a large room in the principal inn) took place about one o'clock. Lord Ashburnham was called to the chair, and there were present Mr. Curteis, one of the county members, Mr. Fuller, who formerly used to cut such a figure in the House of Commons, Mr. Lambe, and many other gentlemen of landed property within the Rape, or district, for which the Meeting was held. Mr. Curteis, after Lord Ashburnham had opened the business, addressed the Meeting.
Mr. Fuller then tendered some Resolutions, describing the fallen state of the landed interest, and proposing to pray, generally, for relief. Mr. Britton complained, that it was not proposed to pray for some specific measure, and insisted, that the cause of the evil was the rise in the value of money without a corresponding reduction in the taxes.--A Committee was appointed to draw up a petition, which was next produced. It merely described the distress, and prayed generally for relief. Mr. Holloway proposed an addition, containing an imputation of the distress to restricted currency and unabated taxation, and praying for a reduction of taxes. A discussion now arose upon two points: first, whether the addition were admissible at all! and, second, whether Mr. Holloway was qualified to offer it to the Meeting. Both the points having been, at last, decided in the affirmative, the addition, or amendment, was put, and lost; and then the original petition was adopted.
After the business of the day was ended, there was a dinner in the inn, in the same room where the Meeting had been held. I was at this dinner; and Mr. Britton having proposed my health, and Mr. Curteis, who was in the Chair, having given it, I thought it would have looked like mock-modesty, which is, in fact, only another term for hypocrisy, to refrain from expressing my opinions upon a point or two connected with the business of the day. I shall now insert a substantially correct sketch of what the company was indulgent enough to hear from me at the dinner; which I take from the report contained in the Morning Chronicle of Saturday last. The report in the Chronicle has all the pith of what I advanced relative to the inutility of Corn Bills, and relative to the cause of further declining prices; two points of the greatest importance in themselves, and which I was, and am, uncommonly anxious to press upon the attention of the public.
The following is a part of the speech so reported:--
"I am decidedly of opinion, Gentlemen, that a Corn Bill of no description, no matter what its principles or provisions, can do either tenant or landlord any good; and I am not less decidedly of opinion, that though prices are now low, they must, all the present train of public measures continuing, be yet lower, and continue lower upon an average of years and of seasons.--As to a Corn Bill; a law to prohibit or check the importation of human food is a perfect novelty in our history, and ought, therefore, independent of the reason, and the recent experience of the case, to be received and entertained with great suspicion. Heretofore, premiums have been given for the exportation, and at other times, for the importation, of corn; but of laws to prevent the importation of human food our ancestors knew nothing. And what says recent experience? When the present Corn Bill was passed, I, then a farmer, unable to get my brother farmers to join me, petitioned singly against this Bill; and I stated to my brother farmers, that such a Bill could do us no good, while it would not fail to excite against us the ill-will of the other classes of the community; a thought by no means pleasant. Thus has it been. The distress of agriculture was considerable in magnitude then; but what is it now? And yet the Bill was passed; that Bill which was to remunerate and protect is still in force; the farmers got what they prayed to have granted them; and their distress, with a short interval of tardy pace, has proceeded rapidly increasing from that day to this. What, in the way of Corn Bill, can you have, Gentlemen, beyond absolute prohibition? And, have you not, since about April, 1819, had absolute prohibition? Since that time no corn has been imported, and then only thirty millions of bushels, which, supposing it all to have been wheat, was a quantity much too insignificant to produce any sensible depression in the price of the immense quantity of corn raised in this kingdom since the last bushel was imported. If your produce had fallen in this manner, if your prices had come down very low, immediately after the importation had taken place, there might have been some colour of reason to impute the fall to the importation; but it so happens, and as if for the express purpose of contradicting the crude notions of Mr. Webb Hall, that your produce has fallen in price at a greater rate, in proportion as time has removed you from the point of importation; and, as to the circumstance, so ostentatiously put forward by Mr. Hall and others, that there is still some of the imported corn unsold, what does it prove but the converse of what those Gentlemen aim at, that is to say, that the holders cannot afford to sell it at present prices; for, if they could gain but ever so little by the sale, would they keep it wasting and costing money in warehouse? There appears with some persons to be a notion, that the importation of corn is a new thing. They seem to forget, that, during the last war, when agriculture was so prosperous, the ports were always open; that prodigious quantities of corn were imported during the war; that, so far from importation being prohibited, high premiums were given, paid out of the taxes, partly raised upon English farmers, to induce men to import corn. All this seems to be forgotten as much as if it had never taken place; and now the distress of the English farmer is imputed to a cause which was never before an object of his attention, and a desire is expressed to put an end to a branch of commerce which the nation has always freely carried on. I think, Gentlemen, that here are reasons quite sufficient to make any man but Mr. Webb Hall slow to impute the present distress to the importation of corn; but, at any rate, what can you have beyond absolute efficient prohibition? No law, no duty, however high; nothing that the Parliament can do can go beyond this; and this you now have, in effect, as completely as if this were the only country beneath the sky. For these reasons, Gentlemen, (and to state more would be a waste of your time and an affront to your understandings,) I am convinced, that, in the way of Corn Bill, it is impossible for the Parliament to afford you any, even the smallest, portion of relief. As to the other point, Gentlemen, the tendency which the present measures and course of things have to carry prices lower, and considerably lower than they now are, and to keep them for a permanency at that low rate, this is a matter worthy of the serious attention of all connected with the land, and particularly of that of the renting farmer. During the war no importations distressed the farmer. It was not till peace came that the cry of distress was heard. But, during the war, there was a boundless issue of paper money. Those issues were instantly narrowed by the peace, the law being, that the Bank should pay in cash six months after the peace should take place. This was the cause of that distress which led to the present Corn Bill. The disease occasioned by the preparations for cash-payments, has been brought to a crisis by Mr. Peel's Bill, which has, in effect, doubled, if not tripled, the real amount of the taxes, and violated all contracts for time; given triple gains to every lender, and placed every borrower in jeopardy.
Kensington, Friday, 4 Jan. 1822.
Got home from Battle. I had no time to see the town, having entered the Inn on Wednesday in the dusk of the evening, having been engaged all day yesterday in the Inn, and having come out of it only to get into the coach this morning. I had not time to go even to see Battle Abbey, the seat of the Webster family, now occupied by a man of the name of Alexander! Thus they replace them! It will take a much shorter time than most people imagine to put out all the ancient families. I should think, that six years will turn out all those who receive nothing out of taxes. The greatness of the estate is no protection to the owner; for, great or little, it will soon yield him no rents; and, when the produce is nothing in either case, the small estate is as good as the large one. Mr. Curteis said, that the land was immovable; yes; but the rents are not. And, if freeholds cannot be seized for common contract debts, the carcass of the owner may. But, in fact, there will be no rents; and, without these, the ownership is an empty sound. Thus, at last, the burthen will, as I always said it would, fall upon the land-owner; and, as the fault of supporting the system has been wholly his, the burthen will fall upon the right back. Whether he will now call in the people to help him to shake it off is more than I can say; but, if he do not, I am sure that he must sink under it. And then, will revolution No. I. have been accomplished; but far, and very far indeed, will that be from being the close of the drama!--I cannot quit Battle without observing, that the country is very pretty all about it. All hill, or valley. A great deal of wood-land, in which the underwood is generally very fine, though the oaks are not very fine, and a good deal covered with moss. This shows, that the clay ends before the tap-root of the oak gets as deep as it would go; for, when the clay goes the full depth, the oaks are always fine.--The woods are too large and too near each other for hare-hunting; and, as to coursing it is out of the question here. But it is a fine country for shooting and for harbouring game of all sorts.--It was rainy as I came home; but the woodmen were at work. A great many hop-poles are cut here, which makes the coppices more valuable than in many other parts. The women work in the coppices, shaving the bark of the hop-poles, and, indeed, at various other parts of the business. These poles are shaved to prevent maggots from breeding in the bark and accelerating the destruction of the pole. It is curious that the bark of trees should generate maggots; but it has, as well as the wood, a sugary matter in it. The hickory wood in America sends out from the ends of the logs when these are burning, great quantities of the finest syrup that can be imagined. Accordingly, that wood breeds maggots, or worms as they are usually called, surprisingly. Our ash breeds worms very much. When the tree or pole is cut, the moist matter between the outer bark and the wood putrifies. Thence come the maggots, which soon begin to eat their way into the wood. For this reason the bark is shaved off the hop-poles, as it ought to be off all our timber trees, as soon as cut, especially the ash.--Little boys and girls shave hop-poles and assist in other coppice work very nicely. And it is pleasant work when the weather is dry overhead. The woods, bedded with leaves as they are, are clean and dry underfoot. They are warm too, even in the coldest weather. When the ground is frozen several inches deep in the open fields, it is scarcely frozen at all in a coppice where the underwood is a good plant, and where it is nearly high enough to cut. So that the woodman's is really a pleasant life. We are apt to think that the birds have a hard time of it in winter. But we forget the warmth of the woods, which far exceeds anything to be found in farm yards. When Sidmouth started me from my farm, in 1817, I had just planted my farm yard round with a pretty coppice. But, never mind, Sidmouth and I shall, I dare say, have plenty of time and occasion to talk about that coppice, and many other things, before we die. And, can I, when I think of these things, now, pity those to whom Sidmouth owed his power of starting me!--But let me forget the subject for this time at any rate.--Woodland countries are interesting on many accounts. Not so much on account of their masses of green leaves, as on account of the variety of sights and sounds and incidents that they afford. Even in winter the coppices are beautiful to the eye, while they comfort the mind with the idea of shelter and warmth. In spring they change their hue from day to day during two whole months, which is about the time from the first appearance of the delicate leaves of the birch to the full expansion of those of the ash; and, even before the leaves come at all to intercept the view, what in the vegetable creation is so delightful to behold as the bed of a coppice bespangled with primroses and blue-bells? The opening of the birch leaves is the signal for the pheasant to begin to crow, for the blackbird to whistle, and the thrush to sing; and, just when the oak-buds begin to look reddish, and not a day before, the whole tribe of finches burst forth in songs from every bough, while the lark, imitating them all, carries the joyous sounds to the sky. These are amongst the means which Providence has benignantly appointed to sweeten the toils by which food and raiment are produced; these the English Ploughman could once hear without the sorrowful reflection that he himself was a pauper, and that the bounties of nature had, for him, been scattered in vain! And shall he never see an end to this state of things? Shall he never have the due reward of his labour? Shall unsparing taxation never cease to make him a miserable dejected being, a creature famishing in the midst of abundance, fainting, expiring with hunger's feeble moans, surrounded by a carolling creation? O! accursed paper-money! Has hell a torment surpassing the wickedness of thy inventor?
SUSSEX JOURNAL: THROUGH CROYDON, GODSTONE, EAST-GRINSTEAD, AND UCKFIELD, TO LEWES, AND BRIGHTON; RETURNING BY CUCKFIELD, WORTH, AND RED-HILL.
Lewes, Tuesday, 8 Jan., 1822.
Came here to-day, from home, to see what passes to-morrow at a Meeting to be held here of the Owners and Occupiers of Land in the Rapes of Lewes and Pevensey.--In quitting the great Wen we go through Surrey more than half the way to Lewes. From Saint George's Fields, which now are covered with houses, we go, towards Croydon, between rows of houses, nearly half the way, and the whole way is nine miles. There are, erected within these four years, two entire miles of stock-jobbers' houses on this one road, and the work goes on with accelerated force! To be sure; for, the taxes being, in fact, tripled by Peel's Bill, the fundlords increase in riches; and their accommodations increase of course. What an at once horrible and ridiculous thing this country would become, if this thing could go on only for a few years! And these rows of new houses, added to the Wen, are proofs of growing prosperity, are they? These make part of the increased capital of the country, do they? But how is this Wen to be dispersed? I know not whether it be to be done by knife or by caustic; but, dispersed it must be! And this is the only difficulty, which I do not see the easy means of getting over.--Aye! these are dreadful thoughts! I know they are: but, they ought not to be banished from the mind; for they will return, and, at every return, they will be more frightful. The man who cannot coolly look at this matter is unfit for the times that are approaching. Let the interest of the Debt be once well reduced (and that must be sooner or later) and then what is to become of half a million at least of the people congregated in this Wen? Oh! precious "Great Man now no more!" Oh! "Pilot that weathered the Storm!" Oh! "Heaven-born" pupil of Prettyman! Who, but him who can number the sands of the sea, shall number the execrations with which thy memory will be loaded!--From London to Croydon is as ugly a bit of country as any in England. A poor spewy gravel with some clay. Few trees but elms, and those generally stripped up and villanously ugly.--Croydon is a good market-town; but is, by the funds, swelled out into a Wen.--Upon quitting Croydon for Godstone, you come to the chalk hills, the juniper shrubs and the yew trees. This is an extension westward of the vein of chalk which I have before noticed (see page 54) between Bromley and Seven-Oaks. To the westward here lie Epsom Downs, which lead on to Merrow Downs and St. Margaret's Hill, then, skipping over Guildford, you come to the Hog's Back, which is still of chalk, and at the west end of which lies Farnham. With the Hog's Back this vein of chalk seems to end; for then the valleys become rich loam, and the hills sand and gravel till you approach the Winchester Downs by the way of Alresford.--Godstone, which is in Surrey also, is a beautiful village, chiefly of one street with a fine large green before it and with a pond in the green. A little way to the right (going from London) lies the vile rotten Borough of Blechingley; but, happily for Godstone, out of sight. At and near Godstone the gardens are all very neat, and at the Inn there is a nice garden well stocked with beautiful flowers in the season. I here saw, last summer, some double violets as large as small pinks, and the lady of the house was kind enough to give me some of the roots.--From Godstone you go up a long hill of clay and sand, and then descend into a level country of stiff loam at top, clay at bottom, corn-fields, pastures, broad hedgerows, coppices, and oak woods, which country continues till you quit Surrey about two miles before you reach East-Grinstead. The woods and coppices are very fine here. It is the genuine oak-soil; a bottom of yellow clay to any depth, I dare say, that man can go. No moss on the oaks. No dead tops. Straight as larches. The bark of the young trees with dark spots in it; sure sign of free growth and great depth of clay beneath. The wheat is here sown on five-turn ridges, and the ploughing is amongst the best that I ever saw.--At East-Grinstead, which is a rotten Borough and a very shabby place, you come to stiff loam at top with sand stone beneath. To the south of the place the land is fine, and the vale on both sides a very beautiful intermixture of woodland and corn-fields and pastures.--At about three miles from Grinstead you come to a pretty village, called Forest-Row, and then, on the road to Uckfield, you cross Ashurst Forest, which is a heath, with here and there a few birch scrubs upon it, verily the most villanously ugly spot I ever saw in England. This lasts you for five miles, getting, if possible, uglier and uglier all the way, till, at last, as if barren soil, nasty spewy gravel, heath and even that stunted, were not enough, you see some rising spots, which instead of trees, presents you with black, ragged, hideous rocks. There may be Englishmen who wish to see the coast of Nova Scotia. They need not go to sea; for here it is to the life. If I had been in a long trance (as our nobility seem to have been), and had been waked up here, I should have begun to look about for the Indians and the Squaws, and to have heaved a sigh at the thought of being so far from England.--From the end of this forest without trees you come into a country of but poorish wettish land. Passing through the village of Uckfield, you find an enclosed country, with a soil of a clay cast all the way to within about three miles of Lewes, when you get to a chalk bottom, and rich land. I was at Lewes at the beginning of last harvest, and saw the fine farms of the Ellmans, very justly renowned for their improvement of the breed of South-Down sheep, and the younger Mr. John Ellman not less justly blamed for the part he had taken in propagating the errors of Webb Hall, and thereby, however unintentionally, assisting to lead thousands to cherish those false hopes that have been the cause of their ruin. Mr. Ellman may say that he thought he was right; but if he had read my New Year's Gift to the Farmers, published in the preceding January, he could not think that he was right. If he had not read it, he ought to have read it, before he appeared in print. At any rate, if no other person had a right to censure his publications, I had that right. I will here notice a calumny, to which the above visit to Lewes gave rise; namely, that I went into the neighbourhood of the Ellmans, to find out whether they ill-treated their labourers! No man that knows me will believe this. The facts are these: the Ellmans, celebrated farmers, had made a great figure in the evidence taken before the Committee. I was at WORTH, about twenty miles from Lewes. The harvest was begun. Worth is a woodland country. I wished to know the state of the crops; for I was, at that very time, as will be seen by referring to the date, beginning to write my First Letter to the Landlords. Without knowing anything of the matter myself, I asked my host, Mr. Brazier, what good corn country was nearest to us. He said Lewes. Off I went, and he with me, in a post-chaise. We had 20 miles to go and 20 back in the same chaise. A bad road, and rain all the day. We put up at the White Hart, took another chaise, went round, and saw the farms, through the window of the chaise, having stopped at a little public-house to ask which were they, and having stopped now and then to get a sample out of the sheaves of wheat, came back to the White Hart, after being absent only about an hour and a half, got our dinner, and got back to Worth before it was dark; and never asked, and never intended to ask, one single question of any human being as to the conduct or character of the Ellmans. Indeed the evidence of the elder Mr. Ellman was so fair, so honest, and so useful, particularly as relating to the labourers, that I could not possibly suspect him of being a cruel or hard master. He told the Committee, that when he began business, forty-five years ago, every man in the parish brewed his own beer, and that now, not one man did it, unless he gave him the malt! Why, here was by far the most valuable part of the whole volume of evidence. Then, Mr. Ellman did not present a parcel of estimates and God knows what; but a plain and honest statement of facts, the rate of day wages, of job wages, for a long series of years, by which it clearly appeared how the labourer had been robbed and reduced to misery, and how the poor-rates had been increased. He did not, like Mr. George and other Bull-frogs, sink these interesting facts; but honestly told the truth. Therefore, whatever I might think of his endeavours to uphold the mischievous errors of Webb Hall, I could have no suspicion that he was a hard master.
Lewes, Wednesday, 9 Jan. 1822.
The Meeting and the Dinner are now over. Mr. Davies Giddy was in the Chair: the place the County Hall. A Mr. Partington, a pretty little oldish smart truss nice cockney-looking gentleman, with a yellow and red handkerchief round his neck, moved the petition, which was seconded by Lord Chichester, who lives in the neighbourhood. Much as I had read of that great Doctor of virtual representation and Royal Commissioner of Inimitable Bank Notes, Mr. Davies Giddy, I had never seen him before. He called to my mind one of those venerable persons, who administer spiritual comfort to the sinners of the "sister-kingdom;" and, whether I looked at the dress or the person, I could almost have sworn that it was the identical Father Luke, that I saw about twenty-three years ago, at Philadelphia, in the farce of the Poor Soldier. Mr. Blackman (of Lewes I believe) disapproved of the petition, and, in a speech of considerable length, and also of considerable ability, stated to the meeting that the evils complained of arose from the currency, and not from the importation of foreign corn. A Mr. DONAVON, an Irish gentleman, who, it seems, is a magistrate in this "disturbed county," disapproved of discussing anything at such a meeting, and thought that the meeting should merely state its distresses, and leave it to the wisdom of Parliament to discover the remedy. Upon which Mr. Chatfield observed: "So, Sir, we are in a trap. We cannot get ourselves out though we know the way. There are others, who have got us in, and are able to get us out, but they do not know how. And we are to tell them, it seems, that we are in the trap; but are not to tell them the way to get us out. I don't like long speeches, Sir; but I like common sense." This was neat and pithy. Fifty professed orators could not, in a whole day, have thrown so much ridicule on the speech of Mr. Donavon.--A Mr. Mabbott proposed an amendment to include all classes of the community, and took a hit at Mr. Curteis for his speech at Battle. Mr. Curteis defended himself, and I thought very fairly. A Mr. Woodward, who said he was a farmer, carried us back to the necessity of the war against France; and told us of the horrors of plunder and murder and rape that the war had prevented. This gentleman put an end to my patience, which Mr. Donavon had put to an extremely severe test; and so I withdrew.--After I went away Mr. Blackman proposed some resolutions, which were carried by a great majority by show of hands. But, pieces of paper were then handed about, for the voters to write their names on for and against the petition. The greater part of the people were gone away by this time; but, at any rate, there were more signatures for the petition than for the resolutions. A farmer in Pennsylvania having a visitor, to whom he was willing to show how well he treated his negroes as to food, bid the fellows (who were at dinner) to ask for a second or third cut of pork if they had not enough. Quite surprised at the novelty, but emboldened by a repetition of the injunction, one of them did say, "Massa, I wants another cut." He had it; but as soon as the visitor was gone away, "D--n you," says the master, while he belaboured him with the "cowskin," "I'll make you know how to understand me another time!" The signers of this petition were in the dark while the show of hands was going on; but when it came to signing they knew well what Massa meant! This is a petition to be sure; but it is no more the petition of the farmers in the Rapes of Lewes and Pevensey than it is the petition of the Mermaids of Lapland.--There was a dinner after the meeting at the Star-Inn, at which there occurred something rather curious regarding myself. When at Battle, I had no intention of going to Lewes, till on the evening of my arrival at Battle, a gentleman, who had heard of the before-mentioned calumny, observed to me that I would do well not to go to Lewes. That very observation, made me resolve to go. I went, as a spectator, to the meeting; and I left no one ignorant of the place where I was to be found. I did not covet the noise of a dinner of from 200 to 300 persons, and I did not intend to go to it; but, being pressed to go, I finally went. After some previous common-place occurrences, Mr. Kemp, formerly a member for Lewes, was called to the chair; and he having given as a toast, "the speedy discovery of a remedy for our distresses," Mr. Ebenezer Johnstone, a gentleman of Lewes, whom I had never seen or heard of until that day, but who, I understand, is a very opulent and most respectable man, proposed my health, as that of a person likely to be able to point out the wished-for remedy.--This was the signal for the onset. Immediately upon the toast being given, a Mr. Hitchins, a farmer of Seaford, duly prepared for the purpose, got upon the table, and, with candle in one hand and Register in the other, read the following garbled passage from my Letter to Lord Egremont.--"But, let us hear what the younger Ellman said: 'He had seen them employed in drawing beach gravel, as had been already described. One of them, the leader, worked with a bell about his neck.' Oh! the envy of surrounding nations and admiration of the world! Oh! what a 'glorious Constitution!' 'Oh! what a happy country! Impudent Radicals, to want to reform a Parliament, under which men enjoy such blessings! On such a subject it is impossible (under Six-Acts) to trust one's pen! However, this I will say; that here is much more than enough to make me rejoice in the ruin of the farmers; and I do, with all my heart, thank God for it; seeing, that it appears absolutely necessary, that the present race of them should be totally broken up, in Sussex at any rate, in order to put an end to this cruelty and insolence towards the labourers, who are by far the greater number and who are men, and a little better men too, than such employers as these, who are, in fact, monsters in human shape!'"
I had not the Register by me, and could not detect the garbling. All the words that I have put in Italics, this HITCHINS left out in the reading. What sort of man he must be the public will easily judge.--No sooner had Hitchins done, than up started Mr. Ingram, a farmer of Rottendean, who was the second person in the drama (for all had been duly prepared), and moved that I should be put out of the room! Some few of the Webb Hallites, joined by about six or eight of the dark, dirty-faced, half-whiskered, tax-eaters from Brighton (which is only eight miles off) joined in this cry. I rose, that they might see the man that they had to put out. Fortunately for themselves, not one of them attempted to approach me. They were like the mice that resolved that a bell should be put round the cat's neck!--However, a considerable hubbub took place. At last, however, the Chairman, Mr. Kemp, whose conduct was fair and manly, having given my health, I proceeded to address the company in substance as stated here below; and, it is curious enough, that even those who, upon my health being given, had taken their hats and gone out of the room (and amongst whom Mr. Ellman the younger was one) came back, formed a crowd, and were just as silent and attentive as the rest of the company!
[NOTE, written at Kensington, 13 Jan.--I must here, before I insert the speech, which has appeared in the Morning Chronicle, the Brighton papers, and in most of the London papers, except the base sinking Old Times and the brimstone-smelling Tramper, or Traveller, which is, I well know, a mere tool in the hands of two snap-dragon Whig-Lawyers, whose greediness and folly I have so often had to expose, and which paper is maintained by a contrivance which I will amply expose in my next; I must, before I insert this speech, remark, that Mr. Ellman the younger has, to a gentleman whom I know to be incapable of falsehood, disavowed the proceeding of Hitchins; on which I have to observe, that the disavowal, to have any weight, must be public, or be made to me.
As to the provocation that I have given the Ellmans, I am, upon reflection, ready to confess that I may have laid on the lash without a due regard to mercy. The fact is, that I have so long had the misfortune to be compelled to keep a parcel of badger-hided fellows, like SCARLETT, in order, that I am, like a drummer that has been used to flog old offenders, become heavy handed. I ought to have considered the Ellmans as recruits and to have suited my tickler to the tenderness of their backs.--I hear that Mr. Ingram of Rottendean, who moved for my being turned out of the room, and who looked so foolish when he had to turn himself out, is an Officer of Yeomanry "Gavaltry." A ploughman spoiled! This man would, I dare say, have been a very good husbandman; but the unnatural working of the paper-system has sublimated him out of his senses. That greater Doctor, Mr. Peel, will bring him down again.--Mr. Hitchins, I am told, after going away, came back, stood on the landing-place (the door being open), and, while I was speaking, exclaimed, "Oh! the fools! How they open their mouths! How they suck it all in."--Suck what in, Mr. Hitchins? Was it honey that dropped from my lips? Was it flattery? Amongst other things, I said that I liked the plain names of farmer and husbandman better than that of agriculturist; and, the prospect I held out to them, was that of a description to catch their applause?--But this Hitchins seems to be a very silly person indeed.]
The following is a portion of the speech:--
"The toast having been opposed, and that, too, in the extraordinary manner we have witnessed, I will, at any rate, with your permission, make a remark or two on that manner. If the person who has made the opposition had been actuated by a spirit of fairness and justice, he would not have confined himself to a detached sentence of the paper from which he has read; but, would have taken the whole together; for, by taking a particular sentence, and leaving out all the rest, what writing is there that will not admit of a wicked interpretation? As to the particular part which has been read, I should not, perhaps, if I had seen it in print, and had had time to cool a little [it was in a Register sent from Norfolk], have sent it forth in terms so very general as to embrace all the farmers of this county; but, as to those of them who put the bell round the labourer's neck, I beg leave to be now repeating, in its severest sense, every word of the passage that has been read.--Born in a farm-house, bred up at the plough-tail, with a smock-frock on my back, taking great delight in all the pursuits of farmers, liking their society, and having amongst them my most esteemed friends, it is natural, that I should feel, and I do feel, uncommonly anxious to prevent, as far as I am able, that total ruin which now menaces them. But the labourer, was I to have no feeling for him? Was not he my countryman too? And was I not to feel indignation against those farmers, who had had the hard-heartedness to put the bell round his neck, and thus wantonly insult and degrade the class to whose toils they owed their own ease? The statement of the fact was not mine; I read it in the newspaper as having come from Mr. Ellman the younger; he, in a very laudable manner, expressed his horror at it; and was not I to express indignation at what Mr. Ellman felt horror? That Gentleman and Mr. Webb Hall may monopolize all the wisdom in matters of political economy; but are they, or rather is Mr. Ellman alone, to engross all the feeling too? [It was here denied that Mr. Ellman had said the bell had been put on by farmers.] Very well, then, the complained of passage has been productive of benefit to the farmers of this county; for, as the thing stood in the newspapers, the natural and unavoidable inference was, that that atrocious, that inhuman act, was an act of Sussex farmers."
Brighton, Thursday, 10 Jan., 1822.
Lewes is in a valley of the South Downs, this town is at eight miles' distance, to the south south-west or thereabouts. There is a great extent of rich meadows above and below Lewes. The town itself is a model of solidity and neatness. The buildings all substantial to the very out-skirts; the pavements good and complete; the shops nice and clean; the people well-dressed; and, though last not least, the girls remarkably pretty, as, indeed, they are in most parts of Sussex; round faces, features small, little hands and wrists, plump arms, and bright eyes. The Sussex men, too, are remarkable for their good looks. A Mr. Baxter, a stationer at Lewes, showed me a farmer's account book which is a very complete thing of the kind. The Inns are good at Lewes, the people civil and not servile, and the charges really (considering the taxes) far below what one could reasonably expect.--From Lewes to Brighton the road winds along between the hills of the South Downs, which, in this mild weather, are mostly beautifully green even at this season, with flocks of sheep feeding on them.--Brighton itself lies in a valley cut across at one end by the sea, and its extension, or Wen, has swelled up the sides of the hills and has run some distance up the valley.--The first thing you see in approaching Brighton from Lewes is a splendid horse-barrack on one side of the road, and a heap of low, shabby, nasty houses, irregularly built, on the other side. This is always the case where there is a barrack. How soon a Reformed Parliament would make both disappear! Brighton is a very pleasant place. For a wen remarkably so. The Kremlin, the very name of which has so long been a subject of laughter all over the country, lies in the gorge of the valley, and amongst the old houses of the town. The grounds, which cannot, I think, exceed a couple or three acres, are surrounded by a wall neither lofty nor good-looking. Above this rise some trees, bad in sorts, stunted in growth, and dirty with smoke. As to the "palace" as the Brighton newspapers call it, the apartments appear to be all upon the ground floor; and, when you see the thing from a distance, you think you see a parcel of cradle-spits, of various dimensions, sticking up out of the mouths of so many enormous squat decanters. Take a square box, the sides of which are three feet and a half, and the height a foot and a half. Take a large Norfolk-turnip, cut off the green of the leaves, leave the stalks 9 inches long, tie these round with a string three inches from the top, and put the turnip on the middle of the top of the box. Then take four turnips of half the size, treat them in the same way, and put them on the corners of the box. Then take a considerable number of bulbs of the crown-imperial, the narcissus, the hyacinth, the tulip, the crocus, and others; let the leaves of each have sprouted to about an inch, more or less according to the size of the bulb; put all these, pretty promiscuously, but pretty thickly, on the top of the box. Then stand off and look at your architecture. There! That's "a Kremlin"! Only you must cut some church-looking windows in the sides of the box. As to what you ought to put into the box, that is a subject far above my cut.--Brighton is naturally a place of resort for expectants, and a shifty ugly-looking swarm is, of course, assembled here. Some of the fellows, who had endeavoured to disturb our harmony at the dinner at Lewes, were parading, amongst this swarm, on the cliff. You may always know them by their lank jaws, the stiffeners round their necks, their hidden or no shirts, their stays, their false shoulders, hips, and haunches, their half-whiskers, and by their skins, colour of veal kidney-suet, warmed a little, and then powdered with dirty dust.--These vermin excepted, the people at Brighton make a very fine figure. The trades-people are very nice in all their concerns. The houses are excellent, built chiefly with a blue or purple brick; and bow-windows appear to be the general taste. I can easily believe this to be a very healthy place: the open downs on the one side and the open sea on the other. No inlet, cove, or river; and, of course, no swamps.--I have spent this evening very pleasantly in a company of reformers, who, though plain tradesmen and mechanics, know I am quite satisfied, more about the questions that agitate the country, than any equal number of Lords.
Kensington, Friday, 11 January, 1822.
Came home by the way of Cuckfield, Worth, and Red-Hill, instead of by Uckfield, Grinstead and Godstone, and got into the same road again at Croydon. The roads being nearly parallel lines and at no great distance from each other, the soil is nearly the same, with the exception of the fine oak country between Godstone and Grinstead, which does not go so far westward as my homeward bound road, where the land, opposite the spot just spoken of, becomes more of a moor than a clay, and though there are oaks, they are not nearly so fine as those on the other road. The tops are flatter; the side shoots are sometimes higher than the middle shoot; a certain proof that the tap-root has met with something that it does not like.--I see (Jan. 15) that Mr. Curteis has thought it necessary to state in the public papers, that he had nothing to do with my being at the dinner at Battle! Who the Devil thought he had? Why, was it not an ordinary; and had I not as much right there as he? He has said, too, that he did not know that I was to be at the dinner. How should he? Why was it necessary to apprise him of it any more than the porter of the inn? He has said, that he did not hear of any deputation to invite me to the dinner, and, "upon inquiry," cannot find that there was any. Have I said that there was any invitation at all? There was; but I have not said so. I went to the dinner for my half-crown like another man, without knowing, or caring, who would be at it. But, if Mr. Curteis thought it necessary to say so much, he might have said a little more. He might have said, that he twice addressed himself to me in a very peculiar manner, and that I never addressed myself to him except in answer; and, if he had thought "inquiry" necessary upon this subject also, he might have found that, though always the first to speak or hold out the hand to a hard-fisted artisan or labourer, I never did the same to a man of rank or riches in the whole course of my life. Mr. Curteis might have said, too, that unless I had gone to the dinner, the party would, according to appearances, have been very select; that I found him at the head of one of the tables, with less than thirty persons in the room; that the number swelled up to about one hundred and thirty; that no person was at the other table; that I took my seat at it; and that that table became almost immediately crowded from one end to the other. To these Mr. Curteis, when his hand was in, might have added, that he turned himself in his chair and listened to my speech with the greatest attention; that he bade me, by name, good night, when he retired; that he took not a man away with him; and that the gentleman who was called on to replace him in the chair (whose name I have forgotten) had got from his seat during the evening to come and shake me by the hand. All these things Mr. Curteis might have said; but the fact is, he has been bullied by the base newspapers, and he has not been able to muster up courage to act the manly part, and which, too, he would have found to be the wise part in the end. When he gave the toast "more money and less taxes," he turned himself towards me, and said, "That is a toast that I am sure you approve of, Mr. Cobbett." To which I answered, "It would be made good, Sir, if members of Parliament would do their duty."--I appeal to all the gentlemen present for the truth of what I say. Perhaps Mr. Curteis, in his heart, did not like to give my health. If that was the case, he ought to have left the chair, and retired. Straight forward is the best course; and, see what difficulties Mr. Curteis has involved himself in by not pursuing it! I have no doubt that he was agreeably surprised when he saw and heard me. Why not say then: "After all that has been said about Cobbett, he is a devilish pleasant, frank, and clever fellow, at any rate."--How much better this would have been, than to act the part that Mr. Curteis has acted.----The Editors of the Brighton Chronicle and Lewes Express have, out of mere modesty, I dare say, fallen a little into Mr. Curteis's strain. In closing their account (in their paper of the 15th) of the Lewes Meeting, they say that I addressed the company at some length, as reported in their Supplement published on Thursday the 10th. And then they think it necessary to add: "For OURSELVES, we can say, that we never saw Mr. Cobbett until the meeting at Battle." Now, had it not been for pure maiden-like bashfulness, they would, doubtless, have added, that when they did see me, they were profuse in expressions of their gratitude to me for having merely named their paper in my Register a thing, which, as I told them, I myself had forgotten. When, too, they were speaking, in reference to a speech made in the Hall, of "one of the finest specimens of oratory that has ever been given in any assembly," it was, without doubt, out of pure compassion for the perverted taste of their Lewes readers, that they suppressed the fact, that the agent of the paper at Lewes sent them word, that it was useless for them to send any account of the meeting, unless that account contained Mr. Cobbett's speech; that he, the agent, could have sold a hundred papers that morning, if they had contained Mr. Cobbett's speech; but could not sell one without it. I myself, by mere accident, heard this message delivered to a third person by their agent at Lewes. And, as I said before, it must have been pure tenderness towards their readers that made the editors suppress a fact so injurious to the reputation of those readers in point of taste! However, at last, these editors seem to have triumphed over all feelings of this sort; for, having printed off a placard, advertising their Supplement, in which placard no mention was made of me, they, grown bold all of a sudden, took a painting brush, and in large letters put into their placard, "Mr. Cobbett's Speech at Lewes;" so that, at a little distance, the placard seemed to relate to nothing else; and there was "the finest specimen of oratory" left to find its way into the world under the auspices of my rustic harangue. Good God! What will this world come to! We shall, by-and-bye, have to laugh at the workings of envy in the very worms that we breed in our bodies!--The fast-sinking Old Times news-paper, its cat-and-dog opponent the New Times, the Courier, and the Whig-Lawyer Tramper, called the "Traveller;" the fellows who conduct these vehicles; these wretched fellows, their very livers burning with envy, have hasted to inform their readers, that "they have authority to state that Lord Ashburnham and Mr. Fuller were not present at the dinner at Battle where Cobbett's health was drunk." These fellows have now "authority" to state, that there were no two men who dined at Battle, that I should not prefer as companions to Lord Ashburnham and Mr. Fuller, commonly called "Jack Fuller," seeing that I am no admirer of lofty reserve, and that, of all things on earth, I abhor a head like a drum, all noise and emptiness. These scribes have also "authority" to state, that they amuse me and the public too by declining rapidly in their sale from their exclusion of my country lectures, which have only begun. In addition to this The Tramper editor has "authority" to state, that one of his papers of 5th Jan. has been sent to the Register-office by post, with these words written on it: "This scoundrel paper has taken no notice of Mr. Cobbett's speech." All these papers have "authority" to state beforehand, that they will insert no account of what shall take place, within these three or four weeks, at Huntingdon, at Lynn, at Chichester, and other places where I intend to be. And, lastly, the editors have full "authority" to state, that they may employ, without let or molestation of any sort, either private or public, the price of the last number that they shall sell in the purchase of hemp or ratsbane, as the sure means of a happy deliverance from their present state of torment.
HUNTINGDON JOURNAL: THROUGH WARE AND ROYSTON, TO HUNTINGDON.
Royston, Monday morning, 21st Jan., 1822.
Came from London, yesterday noon, to this town on my way to Huntingdon. My road was through Ware. Royston is just within the line (on the Cambridgeshire side), which divides Hertfordshire from Cambridgeshire. On this road, as on almost all the others going from it, the enormous Wen has swelled out to the distance of about six or seven miles.--The land till you come nearly to Ware which is in Hertfordshire, and which is twenty-three miles from the Wen, is chiefly a strong and deep loam, with the gravel a good distance from the surface. The land is good wheat-land; but I observed only three fields of Swedish turnips in the 23 miles, and no wheat drilled. The wheat is sown on ridges of great width here-and-there; sometimes on ridges of ten, at others on ridges of seven, on those of five, four, three, and even two, feet wide. Yet the bottom is manifestly not very wet generally; and that there is not a bottom of clay is clear from the poor growth of the oak trees. All the trees are shabby in this country; and the eye is incessantly offended by the sight of pollards, which are seldom suffered to disgrace even the meanest lands in Hampshire or Sussex. As you approach Ware the bottom becomes chalk of a dirtyish colour, and, in some parts, far below the surface. After you quit Ware, which is a mere market town, the land grows by degrees poorer; the chalk lies nearer and nearer to the surface, till you come to the open common-fields within a few miles of Royston. Along here the land is poor enough. It is not the stiff red loam mixed with large blue-grey flints, lying upon the chalk, such as you see in the north of Hampshire; but a whitish sort of clay, with little yellow flattish stones amongst it; sure signs of a hungry soil. Yet this land bears wheat sometimes.--Royston is at the foot of this high poor land; or, rather in a dell, the open side of which looks towards the North. It is a common market town. Not mean, but having nothing of beauty about it; and having on it, on three of the sides out of the four, those very ugly things, common-fields, which have all the nakedness, without any of the smoothness, of Downs.
Huntingdon, Tuesday morning, 22nd Jan., 1822.
Immediately upon quitting Royston, you come along, for a considerable distance, with enclosed fields on the left and open common-fields on the right. Here the land is excellent. A dark, rich loam, free from stones, on chalk beneath at a great distance. The land appears, for a mile or two, to resemble that at and near Faversham in Kent, which I have before noticed. The fields on the left seem to have been enclosed by Act of Parliament; and they certainly are the most beautiful tract of fields that I ever saw. Their extent may be from ten to thirty acres each. Divided by quick-set hedges, exceedingly well planted and raised. The whole tract is nearly a perfect level. The cultivation neat, and the stubble heaps, such as remain out, giving a proof of great crops of straw, while, on land with a chalk bottom, there is seldom any want of a proportionate quantity of grain. Even here, however, I saw but few Swedish turnips, and those not good. Nor did I see any wheat drilled; and observed that, in many parts, the broad-cast sowing had been performed in a most careless manner, especially at about three miles from Royston, where some parts of the broad lands seemed to have had the seed flung along them with a shovel, while other parts contained only here and there a blade; or, at least, were so thinly supplied as to make it almost doubtful whether they had not been wholly missed. In some parts the middles only of the ridges were sown thickly. This is shocking husbandry. A Norfolk or a Kentish farmer would have sowed a bushel and a half of seed to the acre here, and would have had a far better plant of wheat.--About four miles, I think it is, from Royston you come to the estate of Lord Hardwicke. You see the house at the end of an avenue about two miles long, which, however, wants the main thing, namely, fine and lofty trees. The soil here begins to be a very stiff loam at top; clay beneath for a considerable distance; and, in some places, beds of yellow gravel with very large stones mixed in it. The land is generally cold; a great deal of draining is wanted; and yet the bottom is such as not to be favourable to the growth of the oak, of which sort I have not seen one handsome tree since I left London. A grove, such as I saw at Weston in Herefordshire, would, here, be a thing to attract the attention of all ranks and all ages. What, then, would they say, on beholding a wood of Oaks, Hickories, Chestnuts, Walnuts, Locusts, Gum-trees, and Maples in America!--Lord Hardwicke's avenue appears to be lined with Elms chiefly. They are shabby. He might have had ash; for the ash will grow anywhere; on sand, on gravel, on clay, on chalk, or in swamps. It is surprising that those who planted these rows of trees did not observe how well the ash grows here! In the hedge-rows, in the plantations, everywhere the ash is fine. The ash is the hardiest of all our large trees. Look at trees on any part of the sea coast. You will see them all, even the firs, lean from the sea breeze, except the ash. You will see the oak shaved up on the side of the breeze. But the ash stands upright, as if in a warm woody dell. We have no tree that attains a greater height than the ash; and certainly none that equals it in beauty of leaf. It bears pruning better than any other tree. Its timber is one of the most useful; and as underwood and fire-wood it far exceeds all others of English growth. From the trees of an avenue like that of Lord Hardwicke a hundred pounds worth of fuel might, if the trees were ash, be cut every year in prunings necessary to preserve the health and beauty of the trees. Yet, on this same land, has his lordship planted many acres of larches and firs. These appear to have been planted about twelve years. If instead of these he had planted ash, four years from the seed bed and once removed; had cut them down within an inch of the ground the second year after planting; and had planted them at four feet apart, he would now have had about six thousand ash-poles, on an average twelve feet long, on each acre of land in his plantation; which, at three-halfpence each, would have been worth somewhere nearly forty pounds an acre. He might now have cut the poles, leaving about 600 to stand upon an acre to come to trees; and while these were growing to timber, the underwood would, for poles, hoops, broom-sticks, spars, rods, and faggots, have been worth twenty-five or thirty pounds an acre every ten years. Can beggarly stuff, like larches and firs, ever be profitable to this extent? Ash is timber, fit for the wheelwright, at the age of twenty years, or less. What can you do with a rotten fir thing at that age?----This estate of Lord Hardwicke appears to be very large. There is a part which is, apparently, in his own hands, as, indeed, the whole must soon be, unless he give up all idea of rent, or, unless he can choack off the fundholder or get again afloat on the sea of paper-money. In this part of his land there is a fine piece of Lucerne in rows at about eighteen inches distant from each other. They are now manuring it with burnt-earth mixed with some dung; and I see several heaps of burnt-earth hereabouts. The directions for doing this are contained in my Year's Residence, as taught me by Mr. William Gauntlet, of Winchester.--The land is, all along here, laid up in those wide and high ridges, which I saw in Gloucestershire, going from Gloucester to Oxford, as I have already mentioned. These ridges are ploughed back or down; but they are ploughed up again for every sowing.--At an Inn near Lord Hardwicke's I saw the finest parcel of dove-house pigeons I ever saw in my life.--Between this place and Huntingdon is the village of Caxton, which very much resembles almost a village of the same size in Picardy, where I saw the women dragging harrows to harrow in the corn. Certainly this village resembles nothing English, except some of the rascally rotten boroughs in Cornwall and Devonshire, on which a just Providence seems to have entailed its curse. The land just about here does seem to be really bad. The face of the country is naked. The few scrubbed trees that now-and-then meet the eye, and even the quick-sets, are covered with a yellow moss. All is bleak and comfortless; and, just on the most dreary part of this most dreary scene, stands almost opportunely, "Caxton Gibbet," tendering its friendly one arm to the passers-by. It has recently been fresh-painted, and written on in conspicuous characters, for the benefit, I suppose, of those who cannot exist under the thought of wheat at four shillings a bushel.--Not far from this is a new house, which, the coachman says, belongs to a Mr. Cheer, who, if report speaks truly, is not, however, notwithstanding his name, guilty of the sin of making people either drunkards or gluttons. Certainly the spot, on which he has built his house, is one of the most ugly that I ever saw. Few spots have everything that you could wish to find; but this, according to my judgment, has everything that every man of ordinary taste would wish to avoid.--The country changes but little till you get quite to Huntingdon. The land is generally quite open, or in large fields. Strong, wheat-land, that wants a good deal of draining. Very few turnips of any sort are raised; and, of course, few sheep and cattle kept. Few trees, and those scrubbed. Few woods, and those small. Few hills, and those hardly worthy of the name. All which, when we see them, make us cease to wonder, that this country is so famous for fox-hunting. Such it has doubtless been in all times, and to this circumstance Huntingdon, that is to say, Huntingdun, or Huntingdown, unquestionably owes its name; because down does not mean unploughed land, but open and unsheltered land, and the Saxon word is dun.--When you come down near to the town itself, the scene suddenly, totally, and most agreeably, changes. The River Ouse separates Godmanchester from Huntingdon, and there is, I think, no very great difference in the population of the two. Both together do not make up a population of more than about five thousand souls. Huntingdon is a slightly built town, compared with Lewes, for instance. The houses are not in general so high, nor made of such solid and costly materials. The shops are not so large and their contents not so costly. There is not a show of so much business and so much opulence. But Huntingdon is a very clean and nice place, contains many elegant houses, and the environs are beautiful. Above and below the bridge, under which the Ouse passes, are the most beautiful, and by far the most beautiful, meadows that I ever saw in my life. The meadows at Lewes, at Guildford, at Farnham, at Winchester, at Salisbury, at Exeter, at Gloucester, at Hereford, and even at Canterbury, are nothing, compared with those of Huntingdon in point of beauty. Here are no reeds, here is no sedge, no unevennesses of any sort. Here are bowling-greens of hundreds of acres in extent, with a river winding through them, full to the brink. One of these meadows is the race-course; and so pretty a spot, so level, so smooth, so green, and of such an extent I never saw, and never expected to see. From the bridge you look across the valleys, first to the West and then to the East; the valleys terminate at the foot of rising ground, well set with trees, from amongst which church spires raise their heads here-and-there. I think it would be very difficult to find a more delightful spot than this in the world. To my fancy (and every one to his taste) the prospect from this bridge far surpasses that from Richmond Hill.--All that I have yet seen of Huntingdon I like exceedingly. It is one of those pretty, clean, unstenched, unconfined places that tend to lengthen life and make it happy.
JOURNAL: HERTFORDSHIRE, AND BUCKINGHAMSHIRE: TO ST. ALBANS, THROUGH EDGWARE, STANMORE, AND WATFORD, RETURNING BY REDBOURN, HEMPSTEAD, AND CHESHAM.
Saint Albans, June 19, 1822.
From Kensington to this place, through Edgware, Stanmore, and Watford, the crop is almost entirely hay, from fields of permanent grass, manured by dung and other matter brought from the Wen. Near the Wen, where they have had the first haul of the Irish and other perambulating labourers, the hay is all in rick. Some miles further down it is nearly all in. Towards Stanmore and Watford, a third, perhaps, of the grass remains to be cut. It is curious to see how the thing regulates itself. We saw, all the way down, squads of labourers, of different departments, migrating from tract to tract; leaving the cleared fields behind them and proceeding on towards the work to be yet performed; and then, as to the classes of labourers, the mowers, with their scythes on their shoulders, were in front, going on towards the standing crops, while the haymakers were coming on behind towards the grass already cut or cutting. The weather is fair and warm; so that the public-houses on the road are pouring out their beer pretty fast, and are getting a good share of the wages of these thirsty souls. It is an exchange of beer for sweat; but the tax-eaters get, after all, the far greater part of the sweat; for, if it were not for the tax, the beer would sell for three-halfpence a pot instead of fivepence. Of this threepence-halfpenny the Jews and Jobbers get about twopence-halfpenny. It is curious to observe how the different labours are divided as to the nations. The mowers are all English; the haymakers all Irish. Scotchmen toil hard enough in Scotland; but when they go from home it is not to work, if you please. They are found in gardens, and especially in gentlemen's gardens. Tying up flowers, picking dead leaves off exotics, peeping into melon-frames, publishing the banns of marriage between the "male" and "female" blossoms, tap-tap-tapping against a wall with a hammer that weighs half an ounce. They have backs as straight and shoulders as square as heroes of Waterloo; and who can blame them? The digging, the mowing, the carrying of loads, all the break-back and sweat-extracting work, they leave to be performed by those who have less prudence than they have. The great purpose of human art, the great end of human study, is to obtain ease, to throw the burden of labour from our own shoulders, and fix it on those of others. The crop of hay is very large, and that part which is in, is in very good order. We shall have hardly any hay that is not fine and sweet; and we shall have it, carried to London, at less, I dare say, than 3l. a load, that is 18 cwt. So that here the evil of "over-production" will be great indeed! Whether we shall have any projects for taking hay into pawn is more than any of us can say; for, after what we have seen, need we be surprised if we were to hear it proposed to take butter and even milk into pawn. In after times, the mad projects of these days will become proverbial. The Oracle and the over-production men will totally supplant the March-hare.--This is, all along here, and especially as far as Stanmore, a very dull and ugly country: flat, and all grass-fields and elms. Few birds of any kind, and few constant labourers being wanted; scarcely any cottages and gardens, which form one of the great beauties of a country. Stanmore is on a hill; but it looks over a country of little variety, though rich. What a difference between the view here and those which carry the eye over the coppices, the corn-fields, the hop-gardens and the orchards of Kent! It is miserable land from Stanmore to Watford, where we get into Hertfordshire. Hence to Saint Albans there is generally chalk at bottom with a red tenacious loam at top, with flints, grey on the outside and dark blue within. Wherever this is the soil, the wheat grows well. The crops, and especially that of the barley, are very fine and very forward. The wheat, in general, does not appear to be a heavy crop; but the ears seem as if they would be full from bottom to top; and we have had so much heat, that the grain is pretty sure to be plump, let the weather, for the rest of the summer, be what it may. The produce depends more on the weather, previous to the coming out of the ear, than on the subsequent weather. In the Northern parts of America, where they have, some years, not heat enough to bring the Indian Corn to perfection, I have observed that, if they have about fifteen days with the thermometer at ninety, before the ear makes its appearance, the crop never fails, though the weather may be ever so unfavourable afterwards. This allies with the old remark of the country people in England, that "May makes or mars the wheat;" for it is in May that the ear and the grains are formed.
Kensington, June 24, 1822.
Set out at four this morning for Redbourn, and then turned off to the Westward to go to High Wycombe, through Hempstead and Chesham. The wheat is good all the way. The barley and oats good enough till I came to Hempstead. But the land along here is very fine: a red tenacious flinty loam upon a bed of chalk at a yard or two beneath, which, in my opinion, is the very best corn land that we have in England. The fields here, like those in the rich parts of Devonshire, will bear perpetual grass. Any of them will become upland meadows. The land is, in short, excellent, and it is a real corn-country. The trees, from Redbourn to Hempstead are very fine; oaks, ashes, and beeches. Some of the finest of each sort, and the very finest ashes I ever saw in my life. They are in great numbers, and make the fields look most beautiful. No villanous things of the fir-tribe offend the eye here. The custom is in this part of Hertfordshire (and I am told it continues into Bedfordshire) to leave a border round the ploughed part of the fields to bear grass and to make hay from, so that, the grass being now made into hay, every corn field has a closely mowed grass walk about ten feet wide all round it, between the corn and the hedge. This is most beautiful! The hedges are now full of the shepherd's rose, honeysuckles, and all sorts of wild flowers; so that you are upon a grass walk, with this most beautiful of all flower gardens and shrubberies on your one hand, and with the corn on the other. And thus you go from field to field (on foot or on horseback), the sort of corn, the sort of underwood and timber, the shape and size of the fields, the height of the hedge-rows, the height of the trees, all continually varying. Talk of pleasure-grounds indeed! What, that man ever invented, under the name of pleasure-grounds, can equal these fields in Hertfordshire?--This is a profitable system too; for the ground under hedges bears little corn, and it bears very good grass. Something, however, depends on the nature of the soil: for it is not all land that will bear grass, fit for hay, perpetually; and, when the land will not do that, these headlands would only be a harbour for weeds and couch-grass, the seeds of which would fill the fields with their mischievous race.--Mr. TULL has observed upon the great use of headlands.--It is curious enough, that these headlands cease soon after you get into Buckinghamshire. At first you see now-and-then a field without a grass headland; then it comes to now-and-then a field with one; and, at the end of five or six miles, they wholly cease. Hempstead is a very pretty town, with beautiful environs, and there is a canal that comes near it, and that goes on to London. It lies at the foot of a hill. It is clean, substantially built, and a very pretty place altogether. Between Hempstead and Chesham the land is not so good. I came into Buckinghamshire before I got into the latter place. Passed over two commons. But, still, the land is not bad. It is drier; nearer the chalk, and not so red. The wheat continues good, though not heavy; but the barley, on the land that is not very good, is light, begins to look blue, and the backward oats are very short. On the still thinner lands the barley and oats must be a very short crop.--People do not sow turnips, the ground is so dry, and, I should think, that the Swede-crop will be very short; for Swedes ought to be up at least by this time. If I had Swedes to sow, I would sow them now, and upon ground very deeply and finely broken. I would sow directly after the plough, not being half an hour behind it, and would roll the ground as hard as possible. I am sure the plants would come up, even without rain. And, the moment the rain came, they would grow famously.--Chesham is a nice little town, lying in a deep and narrow valley, with a stream of water running through it. All along the country that I have come the labourers' dwellings are good. They are made of what they call brick-nog; that is to say, a frame of wood, and a single brick thick, filling up the vacancies between the timber. They are generally covered with tile. Not pretty by any means; but they are good; and you see here, as in Kent, Susses, Surrey, and Hampshire, and, indeed, in almost every part of England, that most interesting of all objects, that which is such an honour to England, and that which distinguishes it from all the rest of the world, namely, those neatly kept and productive little gardens round the labourers' houses, which are seldom unornamented with more or less of flowers. We have only to look at these to know what sort of people English labourers are: these gardens are the answer to the Malthuses and the Scarletts. Shut your mouths, you Scotch Economists; cease bawling, Mr. Brougham, and you Edinburgh Reviewers, till you can show us something, not like, but approaching towards a likeness of this!
The orchards all along this country are by no means bad. Not like those of Herefordshire and the north of Kent; but a great deal better than in many other parts of the kingdom. The cherry-trees are pretty abundant and particularly good. There are not many of the merries, as they call them in Kent and Hampshire; that is to say, the little black cherry, the name of which is a corruption from the French, merise, in the singular, and merises in the plural. I saw the little boys, in many places, set to keep the birds off the cherries, which reminded me of the time when I followed the same occupation, and also of the toll that I used to take in payment. The children are all along here, I mean the little children, locked out of the doors, while the fathers and mothers are at work in the fields. I saw many little groups of this sort; and this is one advantage of having plenty of room on the outside of a house. I never saw the country children better clad, or look cleaner and fatter than they look here, and I have the very great pleasure to add, that I do not think I saw three acres of potatoes in this whole tract of fine country, from St. Albans to Redbourn, from Redbourn to Hempstead, and from Hempstead to Chesham. In all the houses where I have been, they use the roasted rye instead of coffee or tea, and I saw one gentleman who had sown a piece of rye (a grain not common in this part of the country) for the express purpose. It costs about three farthings a pound, roasted and ground into powder.--The pay of the labourers varies from eight to twelve shillings a-week. Grass mowers get two shillings a-day, two quarts of what they call strong beer, and as much small beer as they can drink. After quitting Chesham, I passed through a wood, resembling, as nearly as possible, the woods in the more cultivated parts of Long Island, with these exceptions, that there the woods consist of a great variety of trees, and of more beautiful foliage. Here there are only two sorts of trees, beech and oak: but the wood at bottom was precisely like an American wood: none of that stuff which we generally call underwood: the trees standing very thick in some places: the shade so complete as never to permit herbage below: no bushes of any sort; and nothing to impede your steps but little spindling trees here and there grown up from the seed. The trees here are as lofty, too, as they generally are in the Long Island woods, and as straight, except in cases where you find clumps of the tulip-tree, which sometimes go much above a hundred feet high as straight as a line. The oaks seem here to vie with the beeches, in size as well as in loftiness and straightness. I saw several oaks which I think were more than eighty feet high, and several with a clear stem of more than forty feet, being pretty nearly as far through at that distance from the ground as at bottom; and I think I saw more than one, with a clear stem of fifty feet, a foot and a half through at that distance from the ground. This is by far the finest plank oak that I ever saw in England. The road through the wood is winding and brings you out at the corner of a field, lying sloping to the south, three sides of it bordered by wood and the field planted as an orchard. This is precisely what you see in so many thousands of places in America. I had passed through Hempstead a little while before, which certainly gave its name to the Township in which I lived in Long Island, and which I used to write Hampstead, contrary to the orthography of the place, never having heard of such a place as Hempstead in England. Passing through Hempstead I gave my mind a toss back to Long Island, and this beautiful wood and orchard really made me almost conceit that I was there, and gave rise to a thousand interesting and pleasant reflections. On quitting the wood I crossed the great road from London to Wendover, went across the park of Mr. Drake, and up a steep hill towards the great road leading to Wycombe. Mr. Drake's is a very beautiful place, and has a great deal of very fine timber upon it. I think I counted pretty nearly 200 oak trees, worth, on an average, five pounds a-piece, growing within twenty yards of the road that I was going along. Mr. Drake has some thousands of these, I dare say, besides his beech; and, therefore, he will be able to stand a tug with the fundholders for some time. When I got to High Wycombe, I found everything a week earlier than in the rich part of Hertfordshire. High Wycombe, as if the name was ironical, lies along the bottom of a narrow and deep valley, the hills on each side being very steep indeed. The valley runs somewhere about from east to west, and the wheat on the hills facing the south will, if this weather continue, be fit to reap in ten days. I saw one field of oats that a bold farmer would cut next Monday. Wycombe is a very fine and very clean market town; the people all looking extremely well; the girls somewhat larger featured and larger boned than those in Sussex, and not so fresh-coloured and bright-eyed. More like the girls of America, and that is saying quite as much as any reasonable woman can expect or wish for. The Hills on the south side of Wycombe form a park and estate now the property of Smith, who was a banker or stocking-maker at Nottingham, who was made a Lord in the time of Pitt, and who purchased this estate of the late Marquis of Landsdowne, one of whose titles is Baron Wycombe. Wycombe is one of those famous things called Boroughs, and 34 votes in this Borough send Sir John Dashwood and Sir Thomas Baring to the "collective wisdom." The landlord where I put up "remembered" the name of Dashwood, but had "forgotten" who the "other" was! There would be no forgettings of this sort, if these thirty-four, together with their representatives, were called upon to pay the share of the National Debt due from High Wycombe. Between High Wycombe and Beaconsfield, where the soil is much about that last described, the wheat continued to be equally early with that about Wycombe. As I approached Uxbridge I got off the chalk upon a gravelly bottom, and then from Uxbridge to Shepherd's Bush on a bottom of clay. Grass-fields and elm-trees, with here and there a wheat or a bean-field, form the features of this most ugly country, which would have been perfectly unbearable after quitting the neighbourhoods of Hempstead, Chesham and High Wycombe, had it not been for the diversion I derived from meeting, in all the various modes of conveyance, the cockneys going to Ealing Fair, which is one of those things which nature herself would almost seem to have provided for drawing off the matter and giving occasional relief to the overcharged Wen. I have traversed to-day what I think may be called an average of England as to corn-crops. Some of the best, certainly; and pretty nearly some of the worst. My observation as to the wheat is, that it will be a fair and average crop, and extremely early; because, though it is not a heavy crop, though the ears are not long they will be full; and the earliness seems to preclude the possibility of blight, and to ensure plump grain. The barley and oats must, upon an average, be a light crop. The peas a light crop; and as to beans, unless there have been rains where beans are mostly grown, they cannot be half a crop; for they will not endure heat. I tried masagan beans in Long Island, and could not get them to bear more than a pod or two upon a stem. Beans love cold land and shade. The earliness of the harvest (for early it must be) is always a clear advantage. This fine summer, though it may not lead to a good crop of turnips, has already put safe into store such a crop of hay as I believe England never saw before. Looking out of the window, I see the harness of the Wiltshire wagon-horses (at this moment going by) covered with the chalk-dust of that county; so that the fine weather continues in the West. The saint-foin hay has all been got in, in the chalk countries, without a drop of wet; and when that is the case, the farmers stand in no need of oats. The grass crops have been large everywhere, as well as got in in good order. The fallows must be in excellent order. It must be a sloven indeed that will sow his wheat in foul ground next autumn; and the sun, where the fallows have been well stirred, will have done more to enrich the land than all the dung-carts and all the other means employed by the hand of man. Such a summer is a great blessing; and the only draw-back is, the dismal apprehension of not seeing such another for many years to come. It is favourable for poultry, for colts, for calves, for lambs, for young animals of all descriptions, not excepting the game. The partridges will be very early. They are now getting into the roads with their young ones, to roll in the dust. The first broods of partridges in England are very frequently killed by the wet and cold; and this is one reason why the game is not so plenty here as it is in countries more blest with sun. This will not be the case this year; and, in short, this is one of the finest years that I ever knew.
WM. COBBETT.
RURAL RIDE, OF 104 MILES, FROM KENSINGTON TO UPHUSBAND; INCLUDING A RUSTIC HARANGUE AT WINCHESTER, AT A DINNER WITH THE FARMERS, ON THE 28TH SEPTEMBER.
Chilworth, near Guildford, Surrey, Wednesday, 25th Sept., 1822.
This morning I set off, in rather a drizzling rain, from Kensington, on horseback, accompanied by my son, with an intention of going to Uphusband, near Andover, which is situated in the North West corner of Hampshire. It is very true that I could have gone to Uphusband by travelling only about 66 miles, and in the space of about eight hours. But my object was not to see inns and turnpike-roads, but to see the country; to see the farmers at home, and to see the labourers in the fields; and to do this you must go either on foot or on horse-back. With a gig you cannot get about amongst bye-lanes and across fields, through bridle-ways and hunting-gates; and to tramp it is too slow, leaving the labour out of the question, and that is not a trifle.
We went through the turnpike-gate at Kensington, and immediately turned down the lane to our left, proceeded on to Fulham, crossed Putney bridge into Surrey, went over Barnes Common, and then, going on the upper side of Richmond, got again into Middlesex by crossing Richmond bridge. All Middlesex is ugly, notwithstanding the millions upon millions which it is continually sucking up from the rest of the kingdom; and, though the Thames and its meadows now-and-then are seen from the road, the country is not less ugly from Richmond to Chertsey bridge, through Twickenham, Hampton, Sunbury, and Sheperton, than it is elsewhere. The soil is a gravel at bottom with a black loam at top near the Thames; further back it is a sort of spewy gravel; and the buildings consist generally of tax-eaters' showy, tea-garden-like boxes, and of shabby dwellings of labouring people who, in this part of the country, look to be about half Saint Giles's: dirty, and have every appearance of drinking gin.
At Chertsey, where we came into Surrey again, there was a Fair for horses, cattle, and pigs. I did not see any sheep. Everything was exceedingly dull. Cart colts, two and three years old, were selling for less than a third of what they sold for in 1813. The cattle were of an inferior description to be sure; but the price was low almost beyond belief. Cows, which would have sold for 15l. in 1813, did not get buyers at 3l. I had no time to inquire much about the pigs, but a man told me that they were dirt-cheap. Near Chertsey is Saint Anne's Hill and some other pretty spots. Upon being shown this hill I was put in mind of Mr. Fox; and that brought into my head a grant that he obtained of Crown lands in this neighbourhood, in, I think, 1806. The Duke of York obtained, by Act of Parliament, a much larger grant of these lands, at Oatlands, in 1804, I think it was. But this was natural enough; this is what would surprise nobody. Mr. Fox's was another affair; and especially when taken into view with what I am now going to relate. In 1804 or 1805, Fordyce, the late Duchess of Gordon's brother, was Collector General (or had been) of taxes in Scotland, and owed a large arrear to the public. He was also Surveyor of Crown lands. The then Opposition were for hauling him up. Pitt was again in power. Mr. Creevey was to bring forward the motion in the House of Commons, and Mr. Fox was to support it, and had actually spoken once or twice, in a preliminary way on the subject. Notice of the motion was regularly given; it was put off from time to time, and, at last, dropped, Mr. Fox declining to support it. I have no books at hand; but the affair will be found recorded in the Register. It was not owing to Mr. Creevey that the thing did not come on. I remember well that it was owing to Mr. Fox. Other motives were stated; and those others might be the real motives; but, at any rate, the next year, or the year after, Mr. Fox got transferred to him a part of that estate, which belongs to the public, and which was once so great, called the Crown lands; and of these lands Fordyce long had been, and then was, the Surveyor. Such are the facts: let the reader reason upon them and draw the conclusion.
This county of Surrey presents to the eye of the traveller a greater contrast than any other county in England. It has some of the very best and some of the worst lands, not only in England, but in the world. We were here upon those of the latter description. For five miles on the road towards Guildford the land is a rascally common covered with poor heath, except where the gravel is so near the top as not to suffer even the heath to grow. Here we entered the enclosed lands, which have the gravel at bottom, but a nice light, black mould at top; in which the trees grow very well. Through bye-lanes and bridle-ways we came out into the London road, between Ripley and Guildford, and immediately crossing that road, came on towards a village called Merrow. We came out into the road just mentioned, at the lodge-gates of a Mr. Weston, whose mansion and estate have just passed (as to occupancy) into the hands of some new man. At Merrow, where we came into the Epsom road, we found that Mr. Webb Weston, whose mansion and park are a little further on towards London, had just walked out, and left it in possession of another new man. This gentleman told us, last year, at the Epsom Meeting, that he was losing his income; and I told him how it was that he was losing it! He is said to be a very worthy man; very much respected; a very good landlord; but, I dare say, he is one of those who approved of yeomanry cavalry to keep down the "Jacobins and Levellers;" but who, in fact, as I always told men of this description, have put down themselves and their landlords; for without them this thing never could have been done. To ascribe the whole to contrivance would be to give to Pitt and his followers too much credit for profundity; but if the knaves who assembled at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, in 1793, to put down, by the means of prosecutions and spies, those whom they called "Republicans and Levellers;" if these knaves had said, "Let us go to work to induce the owners and occupiers of the land to convey their estates and their capital into our hands," and if the Government had corresponded with them in views, the effect could not have been more complete than it has, thus far, been. The yeomanry actually, as to the effect, drew their swords to keep the reformers at bay, while the tax-eaters were taking away the estates and the capital. It was the sheep surrendering up the dogs into the hands of the wolves.
Lord Onslow lives near Merrow. This is the man that was, for many years, so famous as a driver of four-in-hand. He used to be called Tommy Onslow. He has the character of being a very good landlord. I know he called me "a d----d Jacobin" several years ago, only, I presume, because I was labouring to preserve to him the means of still driving four-in-hand, while he, and others like him, and their yeomanry cavalry, were working as hard to defeat my wishes and endeavours. They say here, that, some little time back, his Lordship, who has, at any rate, had the courage to retrench in all sorts of ways, was at Guildford in a gig with one horse, at the very moment, when Spicer, the Stock-broker, who was a Chairman of the Committee for prosecuting Lord Cochrane, and who lives at Esher, came rattling in with four horses and a couple of out-riders! They relate an observation made by his Lordship, which may, or may not, be true, and which therefore, I shall not repeat. But, my Lord, there is another sort of courage; courage other than that of retrenching, that would become you in the present emergency: I mean political courage, and especially the courage of acknowledging your errors; confessing that you were wrong when you called the reformers Jacobins and levellers; the courage of now joining them in their efforts to save their country, to regain their freedom, and to preserve to you your estate, which is to be preserved, you will observe, by no other means than that of a Reform of the Parliament. It is now manifest, even to fools, that it has been by the instrumentality of a base and fraudulent paper-money that loan-jobbers, stock-jobbers and Jews have got the estates into their hands. With what eagerness, in 1797, did the nobility, gentry, and clergy rush forward to give their sanction and their support to the system which then began, and which has finally produced, what we now behold! They assembled in all the counties, and put forth declarations that they would take the paper of the Bank, and that they would support the system. Upon this occasion the county of Surrey was the very first county; and on the list of signatures the very first name was Onslow! There may be sales and conveyances; there may be recoveries, deeds, and other parchments; but this was the real transfer; this was the real signing away of the estates.
To come to Chilworth, which lies on the south side of St. Martha's Hill, most people would have gone along the level road to Guildford and come round through Shawford under the hills; but we, having seen enough of streets and turnpikes, took across over Merrow Down, where the Guildford race-course is, and then mounted the "Surrey Hills," so famous for the prospects they afford. Here we looked back over Middlesex, and into Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, away towards the North-West, into Essex and Kent towards the East, over part of Sussex to the South, and over part of Hampshire to the West and South-West. We are here upon a bed of chalk, where the downs always afford good sheep food. We steered for St. Martha's Chapel, and went round at the foot of the lofty hill on which it stands. This brought us down the side of a steep hill, and along a bridle-way, into the narrow and exquisitely beautiful vale of Chilworth, where we were to stop for the night. This vale is skirted partly by woodlands and partly by sides of hills tilled as corn fields. The land is excellent, particularly towards the bottom. Even the arable fields are in some places, towards their tops, nearly as steep as the roof of a tiled house; and where the ground is covered with woods the ground is still more steep. Down the middle of the vale there is a series of ponds, or small lakes, which meet your eye, here and there, through the trees. Here are some very fine farms, a little strip of meadows, some hop-gardens, and the lakes have given rise to the establishment of powder-mills and paper-mills. The trees of all sorts grow well here; and coppices yield poles for the hop-gardens and wood to make charcoal for the powder-mills.
They are sowing wheat here, and the land, owing to the fine summer that we have had, is in a very fine state. The rain, too, which, yesterday, fell here in great abundance, has been just in time to make a really good wheat-sowing season. The turnips, all the way that we have come, are good. Rather backward in some places; but in sufficient quantity upon the ground, and there is yet a good while for them to grow. All the fall fruit is excellent, and in great abundance. The grapes are as good as those raised under glass. The apples are much richer than in ordinary years. The crop of hops has been very fine here, as well as everywhere else. The crop not only large, but good in quality. They expect to get six pounds a hundred for them at Weyhill fair. That is one more than I think they will get. The best Sussex hops were selling in the Borough of Southwark at three pounds a hundred a few days before I left London. The Farnham hops may bring double that price; but that, I think, is as much as they will; and this is ruin to the hop-planter. The tax, with its attendant inconveniences, amounts to a pound a hundred; the picking, drying, and bagging, to 50s. The carrying to market not less than 5s. Here is the sum of 3l. 10s. of the money. Supposing the crop to be half a ton to the acre, the bare tillage will be 10s. The poles for an acre cannot cost less than 2l. a-year; that is another 4s. to each hundred of hops. This brings the outgoings to 82s. Then comes the manure, then come the poor-rates, and road-rates, and county rates; and if these leave one single farthing for rent I think it is strange.
I hear that Mr. Birkbeck is expected home from America! It is said that he is coming to receive a large legacy; a thing not to be overlooked by a person who lives in a country where he can have land for nothing! The truth is, I believe, that there has lately died a gentleman, who has bequeathed a part of his property to pay the creditors of a relation of his who some years ago became a bankrupt, and one of whose creditors Mr. Birkbeck was. What the amount may be I know not; but I have heard, that the bankrupt had a partner at the time of the bankruptcy; so that there must be a good deal of difficulty in settling the matter in an equitable manner. The Chancery would drawl it out (supposing the present system to continue) till, in all human probability, there would not be as much left for Mr. Birkbeck as would be required to pay his way back again to the Land of Promise. I hope he is coming here to remain here. He is a very clever man, though he has been very abusive and very unjust with regard to me.
Lea, near Godalming, Surrey, Thursday, 26 Sept.
We started from Chilworth this morning, came down the vale, left the village of Shawford to our right, and that of Wonersh to our left, and crossing the river Wey, got into the turnpike-road between Guildford and Godalming, went on through Godalming, and got to Lea, which lies to the north-east snugly under Hindhead, about 11 o'clock. This was coming only about eight miles, a sort of rest after the 32 miles of the day before. Coming along the road, a farmer overtook us, and as he had known me from seeing me at the Meeting at Epsom last year, I had a part of my main business to perform, namely, to talk politics. He was going to Haslemere fair. Upon the mention of that sink-hole of a Borough, which sends, "as clearly as the sun at noonday," the celebrated Charles Long, and the scarcely less celebrated Robert Ward, to the celebrated House of Commons, we began to talk, as it were, spontaneously, about Lord Lonsdale and the Lowthers. The farmer wondered why the Lowthers, that were the owners of so many farms, should be for a system which was so manifestly taking away the estates of the landlords and the capital of the farmers, and giving them to Jews, loan-jobbers, stock-jobbers, placemen, pensioners, sinecure people, and people of the "dead weight." But his wonder ceased; his eyes were opened; and "his heart seemed to burn within him as I talked to him on the way," when I explained to him the nature of Crown lands and "Crown tenants," and when I described to him certain districts of property in Westmoreland and other parts. I had not the book in my pocket, but my memory furnished me with quite a sufficiency of matter to make him perceive that, in supporting the present system, the Lowthers were by no means so foolish as he appeared to think them. From the Lowthers I turned to Mr. Poyntz, who lives at Midhurst in Sussex, and whose name as a "Crown tenant" I find in a Report lately laid before the House of Commons, and the particulars of which I will state another time for the information of the people of Sussex. I used to wonder myself what made Mr. Poyntz call me a Jacobin. I used to think that Mr. Poyntz must be a fool to support the present system. What I have seen in that Report convinces me that Mr. Poyntz is no fool, as far as relates to his own interest, at any rate. There is a mine of wealth in these "Crown lands." Here are farms, and manors, and mines, and woods, and forests, and houses, and streets, incalculable in value. What can be so proper as to apply this public property towards the discharge of a part, at least, of that public debt, which is hanging round the neck of this nation like a mill-stone? Mr. Ricardo proposes to seize upon a part of the private property of every man, to be given to the stock-jobbing race. At an act of injustice like this the mind revolts. The foolishness of it, besides, is calculated to shock one. But in the public property we see the suitable thing. And who can possibly object to this, except those, who, amongst them, now divide the possession or benefit of this property? I have once before mentioned, but I will repeat it, that Marlborough House in Pall Mall, for which the Prince of Saxe Coburg pays a rent to the Duke of Marlborough of three thousand pounds a-year, is rented of this generous public by that most Noble Duke at the rate of less than forty pounds a-year. There are three houses in Pall Mall, the whole of which pay a rent to the public of about fifteen pounds a-year, I think it is. I myself, twenty-two years ago, paid three hundred pounds a-year for one of them, to a man that I thought was the owner of them; but I now find that these houses belong to the public. The Duke of Buckingham's house in Pall Mall, which is one of the grandest in all London, and which is not worth less than seven or eight hundred pounds a-year, belongs to the public. The Duke is the tenant; and I think he pays for it much less than twenty pounds a-year. I speak from memory here all the way along; and therefore not positively; I will, another time, state the particulars from the books. The book that I am now referring to is also of a date of some years back; but I will mention all the particulars another time. Talk of reducing rents, indeed! Talk of generous landlords! It is the public that is the generous landlord. It is the public that lets its houses and manors and mines and farms at a cheap rate. It certainly would not be so good a landlord if it had a Reformed Parliament to manage its affairs, nor would it suffer so many snug Corporations to carry on their snugglings in the manner that they do, and therefore it is obviously the interest of the rich tenants of this poor public, as well as the interest of the snugglers in Corporations, to prevent the poor public from having such a Parliament.
We got into free-quarter again at Lea; and there is nothing like free-quarter, as soldiers well know. Lea is situated on the edge of that immense heath which sweeps down from the summit of Hindhead across to the north over innumerable hills of minor altitude and of an infinite variety of shapes towards Farnham, to the north-east, towards the Hog's Back, leading from Farnham to Guildford, and to the east, or nearly so, towards Godalming. Nevertheless, the enclosed lands at Lea are very good and singularly beautiful. The timber of all sorts grows well; the land is light, and being free from stones, very pleasant to work. If you go southward from Lea about a mile you get down into what is called, in the old Acts of Parliament, the Weald of Surrey. Here the land is a stiff tenacious loam at top with blue and yellow clay beneath. This Weald continues on eastward, and gets into Sussex near East Grinstead: thence it winds about under the hills, into Kent. Here the oak grows finer than in any part of England. The trees are more spiral in their form. They grow much faster than upon any other land. Yet the timber must be better; for, in some of the Acts of Queen Elizabeth's reign, it is provided, that the oak for the Royal Navy shall come out of the Wealds of Surrey, Sussex, or Kent.
Odiham, Hampshire, Friday, 27 Sept.
From Lea we set off this morning about six o'clock to get free-quarter again at a worthy old friend's at this nice little plain market-town. Our direct road was right over the heath through Tilford to Farnham; but we veered a little to the left after we came to Tilford, at which place on the Green we stopped to look at an oak tree, which, when I was a little boy, was but a very little tree, comparatively, and which is now, take it altogether, by far the finest tree that I ever saw in my life. The stem or shaft is short; that is to say, it is short before you come to the first limbs; but it is full thirty feet round, at about eight or ten feet from the ground. Out of the stem there come not less than fifteen or sixteen limbs, many of which are from five to ten feet round, and each of which would, in fact, be considered a decent stick of timber. I am not judge enough of timber to say anything about the quantity in the whole tree, but my son stepped the ground, and as nearly as we could judge, the diameter of the extent of the branches was upwards of ninety feet, which would make a circumference of about three hundred feet. The tree is in full growth at this moment. There is a little hole in one of the limbs; but with that exception, there appears not the smallest sign of decay. The tree has made great shoots in all parts of it this last summer and spring; and there are no appearances of white upon the trunk, such as are regarded as the symptoms of full growth. There are many sorts of oak in England; two very distinct; one with a pale leaf, and one with a dark leaf: this is of the pale leaf. The tree stands upon Tilford-green, the soil of which is a light loam with a hard sand stone a good way beneath, and, probably, clay beneath that. The spot where the tree stands is about a hundred and twenty feet from the edge of a little river, and the ground on which it stands may be about ten feet higher than the bed of that river.
In quitting Tilford we came on to the land belonging to Waverly Abbey, and then, instead of going on to the town of Farnham, veered away to the left towards Wrecklesham, in order to cross the Farnham and Alton turnpike-road, and to come on by the side of Crondall to Odiham. We went a little out of the way to go to a place called the Bourn, which lies in the heath at about a mile from Farnham. It is a winding narrow valley, down which, during the wet season of the year, there runs a stream beginning at the Holt Forest, and emptying itself into the Wey just below Moor-Park, which was the seat of Sir William Temple when Swift was residing with him. We went to this Bourn in order that I might show my son the spot where I received the rudiments of my education. There is a little hop-garden in which I used to work when from eight to ten years old; from which I have scores of times run to follow the hounds, leaving the hoe to do the best that it could to destroy the weeds; but the most interesting thing was a sand-hill, which goes from a part of the heath down to the rivulet. As a due mixture of pleasure with toil, I, with two brothers, used occasionally to desport ourselves, as the lawyers call it, at this sand-hill. Our diversion was this: we used to go to the top of the hill, which was steeper than the roof of a house; one used to draw his arms out of the sleeves of his smock-frock, and lay himself down with his arms by his sides; and then the others, one at head and the other at feet, sent him rolling down the hill like a barrel or a log of wood. By the time he got to the bottom, his hair, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, were all full of this loose sand; then the others took their turn, and at every roll there was a monstrous spell of laughter. I had often told my sons of this while they were very little, and I now took one of them to see the spot. But that was not all. This was the spot where I was receiving my education; and this was the sort of education; and I am perfectly satisfied that if I had not received such an education, or something very much like it; that, if I had been brought up a milksop, with a nursery-maid everlastingly at my heels, I should have been at this day as great a fool, as inefficient a mortal, as any of those frivolous idiots that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster Schools, or from any of those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities. It is impossible to say how much I owe to that sand-hill; and I went to return it my thanks for the ability which it probably gave me to be one of the greatest terrors, to one of the greatest and most powerful bodies of knaves and fools, that ever were permitted to afflict this or any other country.
From the Bourn we proceeded on to Wrecklesham, at the end of which we crossed what is called the river Wey. Here we found a parcel of labourers at parish-work. Amongst them was an old playmate of mine. The account they gave of their situation was very dismal. The harvest was over early. The hop-picking is now over; and now they are employed by the Parish; that is to say, not absolutely digging holes one day and filling them up the next; but at the expense of half-ruined farmers and tradesmen and landlords, to break stones into very small pieces to make nice smooth roads lest the jolting, in going along them, should create bile in the stomachs of the overfed tax-eaters. I call upon mankind to witness this scene; and to say, whether ever the like of this was heard of before. It is a state of things, where all is out of order; where self-preservation, that great law of nature, seems to be set at defiance; for here are farmers unable to pay men for working for them, and yet compelled to pay them for working in doing that which is really of no use to any human being. There lie the hop-poles unstripped. You see a hundred things in the neighbouring fields that want doing. The fences are not nearly what they ought to be. The very meadows, to our right and our left in crossing this little valley, would occupy these men advantageously until the setting in of the frost; and here are they, not, as I said before, actually digging holes one day and filling them up the next; but, to all intents and purposes, as uselessly employed. Is this Mr. Canning's "Sun of Prosperity?" Is this the way to increase or preserve a nation's wealth? Is this a sign of wise legislation and of good government? Does this thing "work well," Mr. Canning? Does it prove that we want no change? True, you were born under a Kingly Government; and so was I as well as you; but I was not born under Six-Acts; nor was I born under a state of things like this. I was not born under it, and I do not wish to live under it; and, with God's help, I will change it if I can.
We left these poor fellows, after having given them, not "religious Tracts," which would, if they could, make the labourer content with half starvation, but something to get them some bread and cheese and beer, being firmly convinced that it is the body that wants filling and not the mind. However, in speaking of their low wages, I told them that the farmers and hop-planters were as much objects of compassion as themselves, which they acknowledged.
We immediately, alter this, crossed the road, and went on towards Crondall upon a soil that soon became stiff loam and flint at top with a bed of chalk beneath. We did not go to Crondall; but kept along over Slade Heath, and through a very pretty place called Well. We arrived at Odiham about half after eleven, at the end of a beautiful ride of about seventeen miles, in a very fine and pleasant day.
Winchester, Saturday, 28th September.
Just after daylight we started for this place. By the turnpike we could have come through Basingstoke by turning off to the right, or through Alton and Alresford by turning off to the left. Being naturally disposed towards a middle course, we chose to wind down through Upton-Gray, Preston-Candover, Chilton-Candover, Brown-Candover, then down to Ovington, and into Winchester by the north entrance. From Wrecklesham to Winchester we have come over roads and lanes of flint and chalk. The weather being dry again, the ground under you, as solid as iron, makes a great rattling with the horses' feet. The country where the soil is stiff loam upon chalk is never bad for corn. Not rich, but never poor. There is at no time anything deserving to be called dirt in the roads. The buildings last a long time, from the absence of fogs and also the absence of humidity in the ground. The absence of dirt makes the people habitually cleanly; and all along through this country the people appear in general to be very neat. It is a country for sheep, which are always sound and good upon this iron soil. The trees grow well, where there are trees. The woods and coppices are not numerous; but they are good, particularly the ash, which always grows well upon the chalk. The oaks, though they do not grow in the spiral form, as upon the clays, are by no means stunted; and some of them very fine trees; I take it that they require a much greater number of years to bring them to perfection than in the Wealds. The wood, perhaps, may be harder; but I have heard that the oak, which grows upon these hard bottoms, is very frequently what the carpenters call shaky. The underwoods here consist, almost entirely, of hazle, which is very fine, and much tougher and more durable than that which grows on soils with a moist bottom. This hazle is a thing of great utility here. It furnishes rods wherewith to make fences; but its principal use is, to make wattles for the folding of sheep in the fields. These things are made much more neatly here than in the south of Hampshire and in Sussex, or in any other part that I have seen. Chalk is the favourite soil of the yew-tree; and at Preston-Candover there is an avenue of yew-trees, probably a mile long, each tree containing, as nearly as I can guess, from twelve to twenty feet of timber, which, as the reader knows, implies a tree of considerable size. They have probably been a century or two in growing; but, in any way that timber can be used, the timber of the yew will last, perhaps, ten times as long as the timber of any other tree that we grow in England.
Quitting the Candovers, we came along between the two estates of the two Barings. Sir Thomas, who has supplanted the Duke of Bedford, was to our right, while Alexander, who has supplanted Lord Northington, was on our left. The latter has enclosed, as a sort of outwork to his park, a pretty little down called Northington Down, in which he has planted, here and there, a clump of trees. But Mr. Baring, not reflecting that woods are not like funds, to be made at a heat, has planted his trees too large; so that they are covered with moss, are dying at the top, and are literally growing downward instead of upward. In short, this enclosure and plantation have totally destroyed the beauty of this part of the estate. The down, which was before very beautiful, and formed a sort of glacis up to the park pales, is now a marred, ragged, ugly-looking thing. The dying trees, which have been planted long enough for you not to perceive that they have been planted, excite the idea of sterility in the soil. They do injustice to it; for, as a down, it was excellent. Everything that has been done here is to the injury of the estate, and discovers a most shocking want of taste in the projector. Sir Thomas's plantations, or, rather, those of his father, have been managed more judiciously.
I do not like to be a sort of spy in a man's neighbourhood; but I will tell Sir Thomas Baring what I have heard; and if he be a man of sense I shall have his thanks, rather than his reproaches, for so doing. I may have been misinformed; but this is what I have heard, that he, and also Lady Baring, are very charitable; that they are very kind and compassionate to their poor neighbours; but that they tack a sort of condition to this charity; that they insist upon the objects of it adopting their notions with regard to religion; or, at least, that where the people are not what they deem pious, they are not objects of their benevolence. I do not say, that they are not perfectly sincere themselves, and that their wishes are not the best that can possibly be; but of this I am very certain, that, by pursuing this principle of action, where they make one good man or woman, they will make one hundred hypocrites. It is not little books that can make a people good; that can make them moral; that can restrain them from committing crimes. I believe that books of any sort never yet had that tendency. Sir Thomas does, I dare say, think me a very wicked man, since I aim at the destruction of the funding system, and what he would call a robbery of what he calls the public creditor; and yet, God help me, I have read books enough, and amongst the rest, a great part of the religious tracts. Amongst the labouring people, the first thing you have to look after is, common honesty, speaking the truth, and refraining from thieving; and to secure these, the labourer must have his belly-full and be free from fear; and this belly-full must come to him from out of his wages, and not from benevolence of any description. Such being my opinion, I think Sir Thomas Baring would do better, that he would discover more real benevolence, by using the influence which he must naturally have in his neighbourhood, to prevent a diminution in the wages of labour.
Winchester, Sunday Morning, 29 Sept.
Yesterday was market-day here. Everything cheap and falling instead of rising. If it were over-production last year that produced the distress, when are our miseries to have an end! They will end when these men cease to have sway, and not before.
I had not been in Winchester long before I heard something very interesting about the manifesto, concerning the poor, which was lately issued here, and upon which I remarked in my last Register but one, in my Letter to Sir Thomas Baring. Proceeding upon the true military principle, I looked out for free-quarter, which the reader will naturally think difficult for me to find in a town containing a Cathedral. Having done this, I went to the Swan Inn to dine with the farmers. This is the manner that I like best of doing the thing. Six-Acts do not, to be sure, prevent us from dining together. They do not authorize Justices of the Peace to kill us, because we meet to dine without their permission. But I do not like Dinner-Meetings on my account. I like much better to go and fall in with the lads of the land, or with anybody else, at their own places of resort; and I am going to place myself down at Uphusband, in excellent free-quarter, in the midst of all the great fairs of the West, in order, before the winter campaign begins, that I may see as many farmers as possible, and that they may hear my opinions, and I theirs. I shall be at Weyhill fair on the 10th of October, and, perhaps, on some of the succeeding days; and, on one or more of those days, I intend to dine at the White Hart, at Andover. What other fairs or places I shall go to I shall notify hereafter. And this I think the frankest and fairest way. I wish to see many people, and to talk to them: and there are a great many people who wish to see and to talk to me. What better reason can be given for a man's going about the country and dining at fairs and markets?
At the dinner at Winchester we had a good number of opulent yeomen, and many gentlemen joined us after the dinner. The state of the country was well talked over; and, during the session (much more sensible than some other sessions that I have had to remark on), I made the following
RUSTIC HARANGUE.
GENTLEMEN,--Though many here are, I am sure, glad to see me, I am not vain enough to suppose that anything other than that of wishing to hear my opinions on the prospects before us can have induced many to choose to be here to dine with me to-day. I shall, before I sit down, propose to you a toast, which you will drink, or not, as you choose: but I shall state one particular wish in that shape, that it may be the more distinctly understood, and the better remembered.
The wish to which I allude relates to the tithes. Under that word I mean to speak of all that mass of wealth which is vulgarly called Church property: but which is, in fact, public property, and may, of course, be disposed of as the Parliament shall please. There appears at this moment an uncommon degree of anxiety on the part of the parsons to see the farmers enabled to pay rents. The business of the parsons being only with tithes, one naturally, at first sight, wonders why they should care so much about rents. The fact is this: they see clearly enough, that the landlords will never long go without rents, and suffer them to enjoy the tithes. They see, too, that there must be a struggle between the land and the funds: they see that there is such a struggle. They see, that it is the taxes that are taking away the rent of the landlord and the capital of the farmer. Yet the parsons are afraid to see the taxes reduced. Why? Because, if the taxes be reduced in any great degree (and nothing short of a great degree will give relief), they see that the interest of the Debt cannot be paid; and they know well, that the interest of the Debt can never be reduced, until their tithes have been reduced. Thus, then, they find themselves in a great difficulty. They wish the taxes to be kept up and rents to be paid too. Both cannot be, unless some means or other be found out of putting into, or keeping in, the farmer's pocket, money that is not now there.
The scheme that appears to have been fallen upon for this purpose is the strangest in the world, and it must, if attempted to be put into execution, produce something little short of open and general commotion; namely, that of reducing the wages of labour to a mark so low as to make the labourer a walking skeleton. Before I proceed further, it is right that I communicate to you an explanation, which, not an hour ago, I received from Mr. Poulter, relative to the manifesto, lately issued in this town by a Bench of Magistrates of which that gentleman was Chairman. I have not the honour to be personally acquainted with Mr. Poulter, but certainly, if I had misunderstood the manifesto, it was right that I should be, if possible, made to understand it. Mr. Poulter, in company with another gentleman, came to me in this Inn, and said, that the bench did not mean that their resolutions should have the effect of lowering the wages: and that the sums, stated in the paper, were sums to be given in the way of relief. We had not the paper before us, and, as the paper contained a good deal about relief, I, in recollection, confounded the two, and said, that I had understood the paper agreeably to the explanation. But upon looking at the paper again, I see, that, as to the words, there was a clear recommendation to make the wages what is there stated. However, seeing that the Chairman himself disavows this, we must conclude that the bench put forth words not expressing their meaning. To this I must add, as connected with the manifesto, that it is stated in that document, that such and such justices were present, and a large and respectable number of yeomen who had been invited to attend. Now, Gentlemen, I was, I must confess, struck with this addition to the bench. These gentlemen have not been accustomed to treat farmers with so much attention. It seemed odd, that they should want a set of farmers to be present, to give a sort of sanction to their acts. Since my arrival in Winchester, I have found, however, that having them present was not all; for that the names of some of these yeomen were actually inserted in the manuscript of the manifesto, and that those names were expunged at the request of the parties named. This is a very singular proceeding, then, altogether. It presents to us a strong picture of the diffidence, or modesty (call it which you please) of the justices; and it shows us, that the yeomen present did not like to have their names standing as giving sanction to the resolutions contained in the manifesto. Indeed, they knew well, that those resolutions never could be acted upon. They knew that they could not live in safety even in the same village with labourers, paid at the rate of 3, 4, and 5 shillings a-week.
To return, now, Gentlemen, to the scheme for squeezing rents out of the bones of the labourer, is it not, upon the face of it, most monstrously absurd, that this scheme should be resorted to, when the plain and easy and just way of insuring rents must present itself to every eye, and can be pursued by the Parliament whenever it choose? We hear loud outcries against the poor-rates; the enormous poor-rates; the all-devouring poor-rates; but what are the facts? Why, that, in Great Britain, six millions are paid in poor-rates, seven millions (or thereabouts) in tithes, and sixty millions to the fund-people, the army, placemen, and the rest. And yet nothing of all this seems to be thought of but the six millions. Surely the other and so much larger sums might to be thought of. Even the six millions are, for the far greater part, wages and not poor-rates. And yet all this outcry is made about these six millions, while not a word is said about the other sixty-seven millions.
Gentlemen, to enumerate all the ways, in which the public money is spent, would take me a week. I will mention two classes of persons who are receivers of taxes: and you will then see with what reason it is, that this outcry is set up against the poor-rates and against the amount of wages. There is a thing called the Dead Weight. Incredible as it may seem, that such a vulgar appellation should be used in such a way and by such persons, it is a fact, that the Ministers have laid before the Parliament an account, called the account of the Dead Weight. This account tells how five millions three hundred thousand pounds are distributed annually amongst half-pay officers, pensioners, retired commissaries, clerks, and so forth, employed during the last war. If there were nothing more entailed upon us by that war, this is pretty smart-money. Now unjust, unnecessary as that war was, detestable as it was in all its principles and objects, still, to every man, who really did fight, or who performed a soldier's duty abroad, I would give something: he should not be left destitute. But, Gentlemen, is it right for the nation to keep on paying for life crowds of young fellows such as make up the greater part of this dead weight? This is not all, however, for, there are the widows and the children, who have, and are to have, pensions too. You seem surprised, and well you may; but this is the fact. A young fellow who has a pension for life, aye, or an old fellow either, will easily get a wife to enjoy it with him, and he will, I'll warrant him, take care that she shall not be old. So that here is absolutely a premium for entering into the holy state of matrimony. The husband, you will perceive, cannot prevent the wife from having the pension after his death. She is our widow, in this respect, not his. She marries, in fact, with a jointure settled on her. The more children the husband leaves the better for the widow; for each child has a pension for a certain number of years. The man, who, under such circumstances, does not marry, must be a woman-hater. An old man actually going into the grave, may, by the mere ceremony of marriage, give any woman a pension for life. Even the widows and children of insane officers are not excluded. If an officer, now insane, but at large, were to marry, there is nothing, as the thing now stands, to prevent his widow and children from having pensions. Were such things as these ever before heard of in the world? Were such premiums ever before given for breeding gentlemen and ladies, and that, too, while all sorts of projects are on foot to check the breeding of the labouring classes? Can such a thing go on? I say it cannot; and, if it could, it must inevitably render this country the most contemptible upon the face of the earth. And yet, not a word of complaint is heard about these five millions and a quarter, expended in this way, while the country rings, fairly resounds, with the outcry about the six millions that are given to the labourers in the shape of poor-rates, but which, in fact, go, for the greater part, to pay what ought to be called wages. Unless, then, we speak out here; unless we call for redress here; unless we here seek relief, we shall not only be totally ruined, but we shall deserve it.
The other class of persons, to whom I have alluded, as having taxes bestowed on them, are the poor clergy. Not of the church as by law established, to be sure, you will say! Yes, Gentlemen, even to the poor clergy of the established Church. We know well how rich that Church is; we know well how many millions it annually receives; we know how opulent are the bishops, how rich they die; how rich, in short, a body it is. And yet fifteen hundred thousand pounds have, within the same number of years, been given, out of the taxes, partly raised on the labourers, for the relief of the poor clergy of that Church, while it is notorious that the livings are given in numerous cases by twos and threes to the same person, and while a clamour, enough to make the sky ring, is made about what is given in the shape of relief to the labouring classes! Why, Gentlemen, what do we want more than this one fact? Does not this one fact sufficiently characterize the system under which we live? Does not this prove that a change, a great change, is wanted? Would it not be more natural to propose to get this money back from the Church, than to squeeze so much out of the bones of the labourers? This the Parliament can do if it pleases; and this it will do, if you do your duty.
Passing over several other topics, let me, Gentlemen, now come to what, at the present moment, most nearly affects you; namely, the prospect as to prices. In the first place, this depends upon whether Peel's Bill will be repealed. As this depends a good deal upon the Ministers, and as I am convinced, that they know no more what to do in the present emergency than the little boys and girls that are running up and down the street before this house, it is impossible for me, or for any one, to say what will be done in this respect. But my opinion is decided, that the Bill will not be repealed. The Ministers see, that, if they were now to go back to the paper, it would not be the paper of 1819; but a paper never to be redeemed by gold; that it would be assignats to all intents and purposes. That must of necessity cause the complete overthrow of the Government in a very short time. If, therefore, the Ministers see the thing in this light, it is impossible, that they should think of a repeal of Peel's Bill. There appeared, last winter, a strong disposition to repeal the Bill; and I verily believe, that a repeal in effect, though not in name, was actually in contemplation. A Bill was brought in, which was described beforehand as intended to prolong the issue of small notes, and also to prolong the time for making Bank of England notes a legal tender. This would have been a repealing of Peel's Bill in great part. The Bill, when brought in, and when passed, as it finally was, contained no clause relative to legal tender; and without that clause it was perfectly nugatory. Let me explain to you, Gentlemen, what this Bill really is. In the seventeenth year of the late King's reign, an act was passed for a time limited, to prevent the issue of notes payable to bearer on demand, for any sums less than five pounds. In the twenty-seventh year of the late King's reign, this Act was made perpetual; and the preamble of the Act sets forth, that it is made perpetual, because the preventing of small notes being made has been proved to be for the good of the nation. Nevertheless, in just ten years afterwards; that is to say, in the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven, when the Bank stopped payment, this salutary Act was suspended; indeed, it was absolutely necessary, for there was no gold to pay with. It continued suspended until 1819, when Mr. Peel's Bill was passed, when a Bill was passed to suspend it still further, until the year 1825. You will observe, then, that, last winter there were yet three years to come, during which the banks might make small notes if they would. Yet this new Bill was passed last winter to authorize them to make small notes until the year 1833. The measure was wholly uncalled for. It appeared to be altogether unnecessary; but, as I have just said, the intention was to introduce into this Bill a clause to continue the legal tender until 1833; and that would, indeed, have made a great alteration in the state of things; and, if extended to the Bank of England, would have been, in effect, a complete repeal of Peel's Bill.
It was fully expected by the country bankers, that the legal tender clause would have been inserted; but, before it came to the trial, the Ministers gave way, and the clause was not inserted. The reason for their giving way, I do verily believe, had its principal foundation in their perceiving, that the public would clearly see, that such a measure would make the paper-money merely assignats. The legal tender not having been enacted, the Small-note Bill can do nothing towards augmenting the quantity of circulating medium. As the law now stands, Bank of England notes are, in effect, a legal tender. If I owe a debt of twenty pounds, and tender Bank of England notes in payment, the law says that you shall not arrest me; that you may bring your action, if you like; that I may pay the notes into Court; that you may go on with your action; that you shall pay all the costs, and I none. At last you gain your action; you obtain judgment and execution, or whatever else the everlasting law allows of. And what have you got then? Why the notes; the same identical notes the Sheriff will bring you. You will not take them. Go to law with the Sheriff then. He pays the notes into Court. More costs for you to pay. And thus you go on; but without ever touching or seeing gold!
Now, Gentlemen, Peel's Bill puts an end to all this pretty work on the first day of next May. If you have a handful of a country banker's rags now, and go to him for payment, he will tender you Bank of England notes; and if you like the paying of costs you may go to law for gold. But when the first of next May comes, he must put gold into your hands in exchange for your notes, if you choose it; or you may clap a bailiff's hand upon his shoulder: and if he choose to pay into Court, he must pay in gold, and pay your costs also as far as you have gone.
This makes a strange alteration in the thing! And everybody must see, that the Bank of England, and the country bankers; that all, in short, are preparing for the first of May. It is clear that there must be a farther diminution of the paper-money. It is hard to say the precise degree of effect that this will have upon prices; but that it must bring them down is clear; and, for my own part, I am fully persuaded, that they will come down to the standard of prices in France, be those prices what they may. This, indeed, was acknowledged by Mr. Huskisson in the Agricultural Report of 1821. That two countries so near together, both having gold as a currency or standard, should differ very widely from each other, in the prices of farm-produce, is next to impossible; and therefore, when our legal tender shall be completely done away, to the prices of France you must come; and those prices cannot, I think, in the present state of Europe, much exceed three or four shillings a bushel for good wheat.
You know, as well as I do, that it is impossible, with the present taxes and rates and tithes, to pay any rent at all with prices upon that scale. Let loan-jobbers, stock-jobbers, Jews, and the whole tribe of tax-eaters say what they will, you know that it is impossible, as you also know it would be cruelly unjust to wring from the labourer the means of paying rent, while those taxes and tithes remain. Something must be taken off. The labourers' wages have already been reduced as low as possible. All public pay and salaries ought to be reduced; and the tithes also ought to be reduced, as they might be to a great amount without any injury to religion. The interest of the debt ought to be largely reduced; but, as none of the others can, with any show of justice, take place, without a reduction of the tithes, and as I am for confining myself to one object at present, I will give you as a Toast, leaving you to drink it or not, as you please, A large Reduction of Tithes.
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Somebody proposed to drink this Toast with three times three, which was accordingly done, and the sound might have been heard down to the close.--Upon some Gentleman giving my health, I took occasion to remind the company that the last time I was at Winchester we had the memorable fight with Lockhart "the Brave" and his sable friends. I reminded them that it was in that same room that I told them that it would not be long before Mr. Lockhart and those sable gentlemen would become enlightened; and I observed that, if we were to judge from a man's language, there was not a land-owner in England that more keenly felt than Mr. Lockhart the truth of those predictions which I had put forth at the Castle on the day alluded to. I reminded the company that I sailed for America in a few days after that meeting; that they must be well aware that, on the day of the meeting, I knew that I was taking leave of the country, but, I observed, that I had not been in the least depressed by that circumstance; because I relied, with perfect confidence, on being in this same place again, to enjoy, as I now did, a triumph over my adversaries.
After this, Mr. Hector gave a Constitutional Reform in the Commons' House of Parliament, which was drunk with great enthusiasm; and Mr. Hector's health having been given, he, in returning thanks, urged his brother yeomen and freeholders to do their duty by coming forward in county meeting and giving their support to those noblemen and gentlemen that were willing to stand forward for a reform and for a reduction of taxation. I held forth to them the example of the county of Kent, which had done itself so much honour by its conduct last spring. What these gentlemen in Hampshire will do it is not for me to say. If nothing be done by them, they will certainly be ruined, and that ruin they will certainly deserve. It was to the farmers that the Government owed its strength to carry on the war. Having them with it, in consequence of a false and bloated prosperity, it cared not a straw for anybody else. If they, therefore, now do their duty; if they all, like the yeomen and farmers of Kent, come boldly forward, everything will be done necessary to preserve themselves and their country; and if they do not come forward, they will, as men of property, be swept from the face of the earth. The noblemen and gentlemen who are in Parliament, and who are disposed to adopt measures of effectual relief, cannot move with any hope of success unless backed by the yeomen and farmers, and the middling classes throughout the country generally. I do not mean to confine myself to yeomen and farmers, but to take in all tradesmen and men of property. With these at their back, or rather, at the back of these, there are men enough in both Houses of Parliament to propose and to urge measures suitable to the exigency of the case. But without the middling classes to take the lead, those noblemen and gentlemen can do nothing. Even the Ministers themselves, if they were so disposed (and they must be so disposed at last) could make none of the reforms that are necessary, without being actually urged on by the middle classes of the community. This is a very important consideration. A new man, as Minister, might indeed propose the reforms himself; but these men, Opposition as well as Ministry, are so pledged to the things that have brought all this ruin upon the country, that they absolutely stand in need of an overpowering call from the people to justify them in doing that which they themselves may think just, and which they may know to be necessary for the salvation of the country. They dare not take the lead in the necessary reforms. It is too much to be expected of any men upon the face of the earth, pledged and situated as these Ministers are; and therefore, unless the people will do their duty, they will have themselves, and only themselves, to thank for their ruin, and for that load of disgrace, and for that insignificance worse than disgrace which seems, after so many years of renown, to be attaching themselves to the name of England.
Uphusband, Sunday Evening, 29 Sept. 1822.
We came along the turnpike-road, through Wherwell and Andover, and got to this place about 2 o'clock. This country, except at the village and town just mentioned, is very open, a thinnish soil upon a bed of chalk. Between Winchester and Wherwell we came by some hundreds of acres of ground that was formerly most beautiful down, which was broken up in dear-corn times, and which is now a district of thistles and other weeds. If I had such land as this I would soon make it down again. I would for once (that is to say if I had the money) get it quite clean, prepare it as for sowing turnips, get the turnips if possible, feed them off early, or plough the ground if I got no turnips; sow thick with Saint-foin and meadow-grass seeds of all sorts, early in September; let the crop stand till the next July; feed it then slenderly with sheep, and dig up all thistles and rank weeds that might appear; keep feeding it, but not too close, during the summer and the fall; and keep on feeding it for ever after as a down. The Saint-foin itself would last for many years; and as it disappeared, its place would be supplied by the grass; that sort which was most congenial to the soil, would at last stifle all other sorts, and the land would become a valuable down as formerly.
I see that some plantations of ash and of hazle have been made along here; but, with great submission to the planters, I think they have gone the wrong way to work, as to the mode of preparing the ground. They have planted small trees, and that is right; they have trenched the ground, and that is also right; but they have brought the bottom soil to the top; and that is wrong, always; and especially where the bottom soil is gravel or chalk, or clay. I know that some people will say that this is a puff; and let it pass for that; but if any gentleman that is going to plant trees will look into my Book on Gardening, and into the