The village labourer, 1760-1832 A study in the government of England before the Reform Bill

‘Là l’aristocratie a pris pour elle les charges publiques les plus lourdes afin qu’on lui permît de gouverner; ici elle a retenu jusqu’à la fin l’immunité d’impôt pour se consol...

To elucidate these chapters, and to supply further information for those who are interested in the subject, we publish an Appendix containing the history, and tolerably full par...

An enclosure, like most Parliamentary operations, began with a petition from a local person or persons, setting forth the inconveniencies of the present system and the advantage...

In the year 1774, Lord North’s Government, which had already received a bad bruise or two in the course of its quarrels with printers and authors, got very much the worst of it...

THE governing class continued its policy of extinguishing the old village life and all the relationships and interests attached to it, with unsparing and unhesitating hand; and...

of cutting peat or moor turf. The trustees (rector, churchwarden and overseers) were to distribute the turf to poor families, and were to pay any surplus from the rent of the he...

In an unenclosed village, as we have seen, the normal labourer did not depend on his wages alone. His livelihood was made up from various sources. His firing he took from the wa...

trades where they liked, and were not to be removable till they became actually chargeable; and in 1793 (33 George III. c. 54) this latter concession was extended to members of...

The collapse of the economic position of the labourer was the result of many causes, and in examining the various remedies that were proposed we shall see that they touch in tur...

The Speenhamland system is often spoken of as a piece of pardonable but disastrous sentimentalism on the part of the upper classes. This view overlooks the predicament in which...

The upper classes, to whom the fact that the labourers were more wretched in 1830 than they had been in 1795 was a reason for making punishment more severe, were not deliberatel...

We have described the growing misery of the labourer, the increasing rigours of the criminal law, and the insensibility of the upper classes, due to the isolation of the poor. W...

Where not otherwise stated the authorities for the two following chapters are the Home Office Papers for the time (Municipal and Provincial, Criminal, Disturbances, Domestic, et...

The bands of men and boys who had given their rulers one moment of excitement and lively interest in the condition of the poor had made themselves liable to ferocious penalties....

A row of eighteenth-century houses, or a room of normal eighteenth-century furniture, or a characteristic piece of eighteenth-century literature, conveys at once a sense of sati...