Hollow Places. Christopher Hadley
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radius; he had never even climbed to the top of yonder great round hill.’ And there were said to be rustics who lived within ten miles of the sea but had never seen it. They were ‘intellectual cataleptics’, interested only in food and shelter, according to one mid-century journalist.
In one of his characteristically oblique and brilliant studies, the historian Keith Snell set out to uncover whether this really was all that the labourer wanted by scouring letters home from emigrants. Several themes stood out. They valued their families, wanted to be free from the overseer of the poor, craved secure work and better treatment by those offering it, and they demonstrated a marked interest in their environment – in the land and the livestock.
This only tells us about those who could write, but it gets around the famous reticence of the labourer, the mysterious barrier of ‘Ay, ay’, ‘may be’, ‘likely enough’ that greeted any enquiry, and contemporary observers attributed to stupidity.
Labourers were not alone, their employers were not celebrated for their conversational skills: In his Professional Excursions around Hertfordshire published in 1843, the auctioneer Wolley Simpson gives a wonderful description of a farmer which reads like the children’s game where you have to avoid saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Q. The Land you hold of the Marquis, is very good is it not Mr. Thornton?
A. It ai’nt bad Sir.
Q. The Timber I understand in this neigh-bourhood is very thriving.
A. Why I’ve seen worse Sir.
Q. You have an abundance of chalk too which is an advantage?
A. We don’t object to it Sir.
Q. You are likewise conveniently situated for markets?
A. Why we don’t complain Sir.
Q. You are plentifully supplied with fruit if I may judge from your Orchards?
A. Pretty middling for that Sir.
Q. Corn is at a fair price now for you?
A. It be’nt a bit too high Sir.
Q. The Canals must facilitate the convey-ance of produce considerably?
A. They are better than bad roads to be sure Sir.
And so on in the same vein. Simpson concludes that ‘evasion had become habitual, and I believe it to be a principle in rural education’.
Did village schools teach anything else besides?
The traditional way to measure literacy is to count the number of people who could sign their name on marriage licences and other documents. Although the method has its detractors, it is still a useful ready reckoner. In 1834, two marriages in the Pelhams involved agricultural labourers. All made their mark, with the exception of one witness, sixty-five-year-old Mary Bayford. This is not surprising as not all their employers could write: in the previous year the farmer and Vestry (local council) member John Hardy made his mark in the Overseers accounts.
There had been a charity school in Furneux Pelham since 1756 thanks to a bequest by the widow of the Reverend Charles Wheatly to provide a proper master to teach eight poor boys and girls to read and write. In an 1816 report to the parliamentary Select Committee somebody observed of the Pelhams: ‘The poor have not sufficient means of education; but the minister concludes they must be desirous of possessing them.’ By 1833, there was a schoolmaster and mistress looking after twenty-one boys and girls, but even with the existence of a school and the growing attendance figures, there were no guarantees that children would turn up regularly. In January 1854, the Hertfordshire school inspector wrote: ‘In country parishes boys are employed from three to five months in the year after the age of seven, and they are withdrawn from school altogether between ten and eleven. I believe that at present there are scarcely any children of agricultural labourers above that age in regular attendance at schools in my district.’
While the gentry endowed and managed the schools, their tenant farmers were less than enthusiastic, insisting that workers brought their children to the fields with them. Many, if not most, parents could not afford to forfeit the extra pennies the children would bring home. A survey of over 500 labouring families in East Anglia in the 1830s found that only about half the income of an average family came from the husband’s day-work. Nearly 80,000 children were permanently employed as agricultural labourers in the middle of the century. At least 5,500 of these were between the ages of five and nine. At harvest time classrooms would be empty.
They could be kept off at short notice for reasons that would baffle us, writes Pamela Horn: ‘Sometimes a strong wind would loose branches and twigs, and children would be kept from school to collect this additional winter firing.’ In the winter months, hard-pressed parents needed their children to earn extra money picking stones, rat-catching or beating for the squire’s shooting parties. These jobs not only kept them from the classroom, they provided them with little alternative stimulation. Common occupations such as bird scaring were an isolating and literally mind-numbing activity. Children would be on their own from dawn to dusk, because it was thought they wouldn’t work as hard if they had someone to talk to; as one chronicler of rural life in Norfolk observed, farmers thought that ‘One boy is a boy, two boys is half a boy, and three boys is no boys at all.’
If children did get past the classroom door, what did the schools teach them? The gentry might have been eager to do their duty and help provide an education to the agricultural workers, but their idea of what constituted that education was not ours. Needlework, cleaning and the catechism were often the extent of it. In the 1840s, girls were taught such rigorous academic subjects as the ‘art of getting up linen’ – but only as a reward if they showed good conduct and industry.
At the first school inspection of Furneux Pelham, in February 1845, seventy-one children turned up for the examination. There were nearly three times as many girls as boys, and just over half were older than ten. Twenty-four were, ‘Able to read a Verse in the Gospels without blundering’, twenty-six girls were ‘Working sums in the Simple Rules’, but only two boys; not one child had advanced to ‘Sums in the Compound Rules’ or the even loftier ‘Working Sums in Proportion and the Higher Rules’.
One school inspector a few years later lamented that children’s copy books rendered a dull study duller: ‘For of what use can it be to copy ten and twelve times over such crackjaw words as these: “Zumiologist”, “Xenodochium” …? Or such pompous moral phrases as “Study universal rectitude”?’
Pamela Horn gives examples of long-winded sums from the period designed perhaps to keep children occupied: ‘What will the thatching of the following stacks cost at 10 d. per square foot, the first was 36 feet by 27, the second 42 by 34, the third 38 by 24, and the fourth 47 by 39?’ The Hertfordshire diarist John Carrington set his son similar problems that might have proved useful to old Master Lawrence: ‘I desire to know how much timber there is in 24-foot long and 24-inches girt.’ Beneath the sum Carrington observed that a six-hundred-year-old oak fell down in Oxford in June 1789, ‘the girt of the oak was 21 feet 9 inches, height 71 feet 8 inches. Cubic contents 754 feet … luckily did no damage.’ Perhaps a functional education at least.
This is a picture of sorts, of the men who went to fell that tree, of their education – or lack of – their cares and their material circumstances. It does not get us very much closer to understanding why they thought they had found a dragon’s lair. Perhaps I am going about this back to front because the best