Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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from which the ivy was regularly stripped’. Did local men carve their names into the trunk of the yew as plainly as they did into the stone window jambs and leadwork of the Pelham churches? Even if they did, the tree is long gone, the tools are lost, and the field names are slipping from memory. Where now can we find Master Lawrence the carpenter and the labourers who believed in dragons?
In October 1904 the Hertfordshire historian Robert Andrews went to Anstey, a village next to Brent Pelham, chasing the legend of a secret tunnel, a blind fiddler and the devil. ‘The tenant of the little house at Cave Gate near Anstey was digging upon the premises held by him and found that the tool he was using suddenly sunk into the ground almost throwing him down,’ wrote Andrews. This tenant was old Thomas Skinner and he had found the entrance to a tunnel in the chalk. Skinner was a carpenter who had ‘passed his early years in the near neighbourhood’ and had recently retired to Cave Gate, ‘where he can, if he chooses, smoke his pipe under one of the most magnificent trees in Hertfordshire’. Perhaps it was while sitting under this tree talking to his guest about local folklore that he mentioned that in his boyhood his family had taken loppings from an ancient yew tree felled on the boundary of Great Pepsells field.
This was a tantalising reference. Not only did it place the felling of the tree in Thomas Skinner’s boyhood in the 1830s – tallying with the map and other evidence – but the Skinner family were agricultural labourers who just happened to share a house in Brent Pelham with another labourer, Thomas Lawrence, the cousin of the carpenter William Lawrence whose sons would one day become Wigram’s parish clerks. I would never know for sure, and it did not really matter, but I was unlikely to do better than to send these men to fell the tree one winter’s day in 1834.
Like many agricultural labourers in the early nineteenth century, the Skinners awoke in a single room in a house shared with another family. There was scant light on a winter’s morning and a ceiling open to the rough rafters did little to keep the place warm. If a labourer’s wife were house-proud, he would take his breakfast sitting on a chair varnished with homemade beer, and there might be bread with dripping washed down with ‘tea’ (made from burned toast), or perhaps ‘coffee’ (made from burned toast). Many labourers spent half their week’s wages on bread, but could not settle the baker’s bill until they had killed their pig at the end of the year. These are the generalisations of the historian, but the 1830s were not a happy time for agricultural labourers, especially in the winter months when trees were traditionally felled. Winter was also the time for job creation schemes (or as the historians of the rural poor, the Hammonds, put it in their inimical and depressing way, ‘Degrading and repulsive work was invented for those whom the farmer would not or could not employ’). One economic historian has estimated that 17 per cent of agricultural labourers were out of work in winter in the early 1830s. They would get poor relief, but it also meant that labourers could find themselves shared out between farmers who would find them things to do. The winter of 1834 was particularly bad, because the harvest had failed. ‘I am fearful we shall experience much difficulty this Winter in finding employment for the Poor,’ wrote a prominent Essex land agent, in a letter to his client, insisting they must reduce the burden of tithe payments that year.
Across the country, and especially in the south, large numbers of agricultural labourers had been turned into paupers by a system that saw the rate-payers, who were also their employers, agree to pay or subsidise their wages through the poor rate. The money they took home each week was linked to the size of their family and the price of a loaf of bread. There were many variations to this system. In some villages, labourers were auctioned weekly to the highest bidders. One Nathan Driver explained to the Select Committee on the Poor Laws how things worked in Furneux Pelham. There were some ninety agricultural labourers in a parish of 2,500 acres, which according to Mr Driver meant there were eighteen labourers too many. The solution was to put the names of all ninety labourers in a hat and share them out between the farms in Furneux Pelham – according to their size – on a daily basis. The farmers would then have to find something for them to do – chopping down a tree, for example.
Twenty-five children were born in the Pelhams in 1834, to a thatcher, a shoemaker, two yeoman farmers and twenty-one agricultural labourers. At the beginning of the 1830s, 62 per cent of men over twenty in the three Pelhams were agricultural labourers, a little higher than the Hertfordshire average and nearly three times the national one. By then considerably more families earned their living in England from trade, manufacturing or handicrafts, than worked on the land, but still agricultural labourers made up the single largest occupation group – some 745,000 of them. Most of us have more agricultural labourers in our family tree than any other ancestors. ‘Agricultural labourer’ does not necessarily tell the whole story. In the column marked ‘Occupation’ on the 1841 Census, the enumerators would have written the diminutive ‘Ag Lab’ ad nauseam, so it is disappointing that they didn’t relieve the boredom by being more precise. Where were the ploughmen, the carters, the hedgers, the headmen, the woodcutters and the common taskers? It has been said that there were hierarchies among farm workers as intricate as that among the gentility.
It is impossible to consider this period without turning to the campaigning journalist and chronicler of the pains and pleasures of rural life William Cobbett. On one of his ‘rural rides’ around England in the 1820s he encountered a group of women labourers in ‘such an assemblage of rags as I never before saw’. And of labourers near Cricklade: ‘Their dwellings are little better than pig-beds and their looks indicate that their food is not nearly equal to that of a pig. Their wretched hovels are stuck upon little bits of ground on the road side … It seems as if they had been swept off the fields by a hurricane, and had dropped and found shelter under the banks on the road side! Yesterday morning was a sharp frost; and this had set the poor creatures to digging up their little plats of potatoes. In my whole life I never saw human wretchedness equal to this; no, not even amongst the free negroes in America.’
Accommodation for these people was notoriously bad: ‘The majority of the cottages that exist in rural parishes,’ wrote the Reverend James Fraser in the late 1860s, ‘are deficient in almost every requisite that should constitute a home for a Christian family in a civilized community.’
Labourers in the Pelhams were probably not living on roots and sorrel, nor had they – in the words of Lord Carnarvon – been reduced to a plight more abject than that of any race in Europe. Housing may also have been better than mud and straw hovels found elsewhere. Over forty new houses were built in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, which might suggest a benevolent land-owning class, but the population of the villages increased as well, so the ratio of families to houses barely changed. In the early 1830s, some 228 families shared 177 homes.
The Reverend Fraser disapproved of such cramped conditions, adding that, ‘it is impossible to exaggerate the ill effects of such a state of things in every aspect – physical, social, economical, moral, intellectual’. What did such an existence do to their minds? Did it make them more or less likely to see holes and think of dragons?
Reading contemporary accounts of agricultural labourers, we are told that they are not just ill-paid and ill-fed and ill-clothed but also unimaginative, ill-educated, ignorant, illogical and brutish. ‘They seem scarcely to know any other enjoyments than such as is common to them, and to the brute beasts which have no understanding … So very far are they below their fellow men in mental culture,’ wrote John Eddowes in his 1854 The Agricultural Labourer as He Really Is. This is the cruel stereotype that christened every Ag Lab ‘Hodge’ and gave him an awkward gait, ungainly manners, a slow wit and an indecipherable patois. Another