gigantic consumption of beer, to which I have already referred, makes it almost certain that this was the common beverage of all classes. The same writer makes a curious attempt to estimate the average incomes of families in the different classes of society in 1688. That of the temporal lords he places at 2,800l. That of baronets, at 880l.; that of esquires and of other gentlemen respectively at 450l. and 280l.; that of shopkeepers and tradesmen at 45l.; that of artisans and handicrafts at 40l.; that of labouring people and out-servants at 15l.; that of common soldiers at 147.; that of cottagers and paupers at 6l. 108. The average annual incomes of all classes he reckoned at 32l. a family, or 71. 188. a head. In France he calculated that the average annual income was 6l. a head, and in Holland 8l. 18.4d. From a careful comparison of the food of the different nations he calculated that the English annually spent on food, on an average, 31. 168. 5d. a head; the French, 2l. 16s. 2d.; the Dutch, 2l. 168. 5d.1 Such estimates can, of course, only be accepted with much reservation; but they are the judgments of a very acute contemporary observer, and they are, no doubt, sufficiently accu misery in the community. The relief was out-door relief; there appears to have been no general feeling of shame about accepting it, and it was distributed with a most mischievous profusion. Richard Dunning, in a tract published in 1698, asserts that the parish pay was in fact three times as much as a common labourer, having to maintain a wife and three children, can afford to expend upon himself, and that 'persons once receiving parish pay presently become idle, alleging that the parish is bound to maintain them, and that in case they should work, it would only favour a parish from whom, they say, they shall have no thanks.' He assures us that 'such as are maintained by the parish pay, seldom drink any other than the strongest ale-house beer, which, at the rate they buy it, costs 50s. or 31. a hogshead; that they seldom eat any bread save what is made of the finest wheat flour.' At this time there is reason to believe that wheat bread was almost unused among the labouring poor. The formation of workVOL. I. houses in 1723 was of some advantage, but the diet of their inmates was most imprudently and indeed absurdly liberal. See Thornton's OverPopulation, pp. 205–207. Knight's Pictorial History, iv. p. 844. Macaulay's picture of the condition of the poor should be compared with the admirable chapter on the same subject in Mr. Thornton's Over-Population. See, too, his Labour, pp. 11-12. The annual expenditure in poor rates is said to have trebled between the close of the reign of Anne and the year 1750 (Macpherson, Hist. of Commerce, iii. p. 560); yet nearly all the evidence we possess seems to show that the prosperity of the country had during that period been steadily increasing. 0 0 This curious work is printed in full at the end of the later editions of Chalmers's Estimate. Macaulay, as will be seen, has much overcharged his picture of the wretchedness of the poor when he states, on the authority of King, that 'hundreds of thousands of families scarcely knew the taste of meat.' 6 rate to enable us to form a fair general conception of the relative proportions. In 1704 an abortive attempt which was made to extend the system of poor-law relief produced the Giving Alms no Charity,' one of the most admirable of the many excellent tracts of Defoe. No man then living was a shrewder or more practical observer, and he has collected many facts which throw a vivid light on the condition of the labouring poor. He states that although in Yorkshire, and generally in the bishopric of Durham, a labourer's weekly wages might be only 48., yet in Kent and in several of the southern and western counties agricultural weekly wages were 78., 98., and even 10s. He mentions the case of a tilemaker, to whom he had for several years paid from 168. to 208. a week, and states that journeymen weavers could earn from 158. to 20s. a week. The pauperism of the country he ascribes not to any want of employment, but almost wholly to habits of vagrancy, drunkenness, and extravagance. I affirm,' he says, 'of my own knowledge, that when I wanted a man for labouring work, and offered 98. per week to strolling fellows at my door, they have frequently told me to my face that they could get more a-begging. Good husbandry,' he adds, is no English virtue ... it neither loves, nor is beloved by, an Englishman. The English get estates and the Dutch save them; and this observation I have made between foreigners and Englishmen-that where an Englishman earns his 208. a week, and but just lives, as we call it, a Dutchman grows rich, and leaves his children in very good condition. Where an English labouring man, with his 98. a week, lives wretchedly and poor, a Dutchman, with that wages, will live tolerably well. . . . We are the most lazy, diligent nation in the world. There is nothing more frequent than for an Englishman to work till he has got his pockets full of money, and then go and be idle, or perhaps drunk, till it is all gone, and perhaps himself in debt; and ask him, in his cups, what he intends, he'll tell you honestly he will drink as long as it lasts, and then go to work for more. I make no difficulty to promise, on a short summons, to produce above a thousand families in England, within my particular knowledge, who go in rags, and their children wanting bread, whose fathers can earn their 15s. to 258. a week, but will not work. . . . The reason why so many pretend to want work is that, as they can ... live so well on the pretence of wanting work, they would be mad to have it and work in earnest.' He maintains that wages in England were higher than in any other country in Europe, that hands and not employment were wanting, and that the condition of the labour market was clearly shown by the impossibility of obtaining a sufficient number of recruits for the army, without resorting to the press-gang. When, a few years later, the commercial treaty between France and England was discussed, one of the strongest arguments of its opponents was the danger of French competition, on account of the much greater cheapness of French labour. The French,' said one of the writers in the British Merchant,' did always outdo us in the price of labour; their common people live upon roots, cabbage, and other herbage; four of their large provinces subsist entirely upon chestnuts, and the best of them eat bread made of barley, millet, Turkey and black corn ... they generally drink nothing but water, and at best a sort of liquor they call beuverage (which is water passed through the husks of grapes after the wine is drawn off); they save a great deal upon that account, for it is well known that our people spend half of their money in drink.'' 6 As far as we are able to judge from the few scattered facts that are preserved, the position of the poor seems on the whole to have steadily improved in the long pacific period during the reigns of George I. and George II. It was at this time that wheat bread began to supersede, among the labouring classes, bread made of rye, barley, or oats, and the rate of wages slightly advanced without any corresponding, or at least equivalent, rise in the price of the articles of first necessity. When Arthur Young investigated the agricultural condition of the southern counties in 1768, he found that the average weekly rate of agricultural wages for the whole year round, was 108. 9d. within 20 miles of London; 78. 8d. at a distance of from 20 to 60 miles from London; 6s. 4d. at from 60 to 110 miles 1 British Merchant, i. 6, 7. 'I think nothing so terrible,' wrote Lady M. Montagu, when travelling through France in 1718, as objects of misery, except one had the Godlike attribute of being capable to redress them; and all the country villages of France show nothing else. When the post-horses are changed, the whole town comes out to beg, with such miserable starved faces and thin tattered clothes, they need no other eloquence to persuade one of the wretchedness of their condition.' -Lady M. W. Montagu's Works (Lord Wharncliffe's edition), ii. p. 89. from London; 6s. 3d. at from 110 to 170 miles. The highest wages were in the eastern counties, the lowest in the western counties, and especially in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. In some parts of these he found that the agricultural wages were not higher than 4s. 6d. in winter and 68. in summer. In the north of England, which he described in 1770, he found that agricultural wages, for the whole year, ranged from 48. 11d. to 98. 9d., the average being 78. 1d. Within 300 miles to the north of London, the average rate in different districts varied only from 68. 9d. to 7s. 2d.; but beyond that distance it fell to 58. 8d. Twenty years later, the same admirable observer, after a detailed examination of the comparative condition of the labouring classes in England and France, pronounced agricultural wages in the latter country to be 76 per cent. lower than in England, and he has left a most emphatic testimony to the enormous superiority in well-being of the English labourer.1 One change, however, was taking place which was, on the whole, to his disadvantage. It was inevitable that with the progress of agriculture the vast tracts of common land scattered over England should be reclaimed and enclosed, and it was almost equally inevitable that the permanent advantage derived from them should be reaped by the surrounding landlords. Clauses were, it is true, inserted in most Enclosure Bills providing compensation for those who had common rights; and the mere increase of the net produce of the soil had some effect in raising the price of labour; but the main and enduring benefits of the enclosures necessarily remained with those in whose properties the common land was incorporated, and by whose capital it was fructified. After a few generations the right of free pasture, which the English peasant had formerly enjoyed, had passed away, while the compensation he had received was long since dissipated. The great movement for enclosing common land belongs chiefly to the reign of George III., but it had begun on a large scale under his predecessor. Only two Enclosure Acts had been passed under Anne, and only 1 Arthur Young's Southern Tour, pp. 321-324. Northern Tour, iv. pp. 293-297 Tour in France. See, too, Eden's Hist. of the Poor, Thornton's Over-Population and Labour, Knight's sixteen under George I. Under George II. there were no less than 226, and more than 318,000 acres were enclosed.1 Though the population of London was little more than a seventh of what it now is, the magnitude of the city relatively to the other towns of the kingdom was much greater than at present. Under the Tudors and the Stuarts many attempts had been made to check its growth by proclamations forbidding the erection of new houses, or the entertaining of additional inmates, and peremptorily enjoining the country gentry to return to their homes in order to perform the duties of their several charges. . . . to be a comfort unto their neighbours . . . . to renew and revive hospitality in their respective counties.' Many proclamations of this kind had been issued during the first half of the seventeenth century, but the last occasion in which the royal prerogative was exercised to prevent the extension of London beyond its ancient limits appears to have been in 1674.2 From that time its progress was unimpeded, and Davenant in 1685 combated the prevalent notion that it was an evil. The cities of London and Westminster, which had originally been far apart, were fully joined in the early years of the seventeenth century, partly, it is said, through the great number of Scotch who came to London on the accession of James I., and settled chiefly along the Strand. The quarter now occupied by St. James's Square, Pall Mall, St. James's Street, and Arlington Street, was pasture land till about 1680. Evelyn, writing in 1684, stated that London had nearly doubled in his own recollection; but in the beginning of the eighteenth century Hackney, Newington, Marylebone, Islington, Chelsea, and Kensington were still rural villages, far removed from the metropolis. Marylebone, which was probably the nearest, was separated from it by a full mile of fields. The growth of London in the first half of the eighteenth century appears to have been chiefly in the direction of Deptford, Hackney, and Bloomsbury. It spread also on the southern bank of the 1 McCulloch's Statistical Account of the British Empire, i. 550. 2 Eden's Hist. of the Poor, i. 136137. Craik's Hist. of Commerce, ii. 114. See, too, on the alarm felt at the increase of London. Parl. Hist. iv. 660, 676, 679, 742, 743. 346. Evelyn's Diary, June 12, 1684. |