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Cottages for farm labouring families: plans, exhortations and realities (1825–50)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
Abstract
Loudon’s 1825 Encyclopedia of Agriculture set out why and how ‘comfortable’ family cottages should be built for the farm labouring workforce. Over the next quarter-century, published ‘prize essays’ on cottage-design appeared alongside articles advocating ‘high farming’. Low labourer wages and insecure farm tenancies handicapped investment in both, though a parliamentary inquiry showed improvement projects could enhance labourer employment. The 1834 ‘new’ Poor Law – an ‘administrative’ law – restricted ‘poor relief’, but left many ‘settlement’ issues to continue as perceived obstacles to building cottages (the occupants might become a burden on the poor rates). This paper illustrates ideal contemporary cottage designs – relative to contrasting exposures of poor people’s home lives. Landowners, patchily, promoted some cottage-building, but labouring families mostly remained poorly housed. Along with recent scholarship on families’ work, income, possessions (often very few) and survival strategies, this work augments ideas of real housing conditions in rural areas.
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References
Notes
1 Thomas Davis, ‘Address to the landholders of this kingdom; with plans of cottages for the habitation of labourers’, Letters and Papers addressed to the Bath and West of England Society, 7 (1795), 294–310.
2 John Claudius Loudon, An Encyclopædia of Agriculture (London, 1825), p. 419.
3 Loudon, ‘Review of Slaney’s “Essay on the Beneficial Direction of Rural Expenditure”’, Gardener’s Magazine and Register of Rural & Domestic Improvement, vol. 1, 1826, pp. 175–86.
4 Loudon, Encyclopædia, p. 419.
5 John Wood, A Series of Plans, for Cottages or Habitations of the Labourer, either in Husbandry, or the Mechanic Arts, Adapted as Well to Towns, as to the Country (Bath, UK, 1788).
6 Loudon, Encyclopædia, p. 420.
7 George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, in instalments, 1871–2 (Oxford, UK, 1947), p. 28.
8 David Paterson, Fair Seed-time (Kibworth Beauchamp, UK, 2019).
9 Eliot, Middlemarch, p. 10.
10 Nathaniel Kent, Hints to Gentlemen of landed Property (London, 1775), pp. 228–9.
11 Adrian Green, ‘Heartless and Unhomely? Dwellings of the Poor in East Anglia and North-East England’, in Joanne McEwan and Pamela Sharpe, eds, Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850 (Basingstoke, UK, 2011), pp. 69–101.
12 Sarah Lloyd, ‘Joys of the Cottage: Labourers’ Houses, Hovels and Huts in Britain and the British Colonies, 1770–1830’, in McEwan and Sharpe, eds, Accommodating Poverty, pp. 102–21.
13 The ‘new standards’ judgement is from: Nicholas Goddard, ‘Agricultural Literature and Societies’, in G. E. Mingay, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. VI (Cambridge, UK, 1989), pp. 361–83 (p. 365). Loudon’s Encyclopædia went into many editions.
14 Forty rural Letters came out in 1849 and 1850; a further ten in 1851; not all concerned ‘agriculture’; mining and fishing were discussed when in rural, rather than urban, locations.
15 The ‘Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population’ (1842) and ‘Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture’ (1843); ‘prize essays’ are discussed later in this article.
16 K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, UK, 1985), pp. 114–37.
17 Ibid., pp. 136–7.
18 John Broad, ‘The Parish Poor House in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in McEwan and Sharpe, eds, Accommodating Poverty, pp. 246–62 (p. 260).
19 John Broad, ‘Housing the rural poor in southern England 1650–1850’, Agricultural History Review, 48 (2000), 151–70; Roger Wells, ‘The Poor Law Commission and publicly-owned housing in the English countryside, 1834–47’, Agricultural History Review, 55 (2007), 181–204.
20 Samantha A. Shave, Pauper Policies: Poor Law Practice in England, 1780–1850 (Manchester, UK, 2017), pp. 197–247.
21 Report from the Poor Law Commissioners on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (London, 1842), presented to both Houses of Parliament, July 1842.
22 Dorset Country Chronicle, 14th December 1843, p. 4; newspaper references in the present article are (except for The Times) from the British Newspaper Archive <britishnewspaperarchive.cc.uk>.
23 Joseph Childers, ‘Observation and representation: Mr. Chadwick writes the poor’, Victorian Studies, 37 (1994), 405–32.
24 Children’s Employment Commission, First Report of the Commissioners: Mines (London, 1842); Leeds Mercury, 14th May 1842, p. 7: ‘a more revolting exposition of the state and condition of a portion of the labouring classes can hardly be imagined.’
25 Barbara Leckie, Open Houses (Philadelphia, PA, 2018), p. 28; Leckie also describes Edwin Chadwick’s assembling of the Sanitary Report material and provides closely argued reviews of the ‘Sanitary Idea’, and the ‘Architectural Idea’.
26 Sanitary Report, p. 369. The claim about ‘annual loss of life’ comes in ‘Recapitulation of Conclusions’.
27 Ibid., p. 9.
28 Ibid., pp. 8–9.
29 Reports of Special Assistant Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture (London, 1843).
30 Karen Sayer, Country Cottages: A Cultural History (Manchester, UK, 2000): the chapter on The Imperfect Home (pp. 49–78) give a detailed account of Assistant Commissioner Austin’s attitudes and work, including a major passage about the crowded Stourpain cottage with a single ‘ten feet square’ bedroom for eleven occupants.
31 Women and Children in Agriculture, p. 21.
32 ‘The Hon.’ because from an aristocratic family – an extra irritant to the Dorset gentry?
33 Godolphin Osborne responded to a toast to ‘the Bishop and clergy of the diocese’.
34 Sherborne Mercury, 30th December 1843, p. 4.
35 Godolphin Osborne served only briefly as Blandford Union chair, taking over when the elected chair stood down due to ill health; he was not re-elected the following year (Hampshire Advertiser, 20th April 1844, p. 8).
36 Sherborne Mercury, 30th December 1843, p. 4.
37 Morning Chronicle (hereafter MC), 30th December 1843, p. 2.
38 S. Godolphin Osborne, A Letter to the Right Hon. Ashley, M. P. on the Condition of The Agriculture Labourer (London, 1844), the letter is ‘signed’ from Durweston, 29th January 1844 – roughly a month after the Blandford meeting: it was advertised (‘Just published’) the next month (Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 17th February 1844, p. 1); Ashley had also spoken at the 1843 Dinner.
39 The Times, 8th March 1844, p. 7 (Times Digital archive, accessed 14th May 2021): the article commenced, ‘We have had much pleasure in perusing’ the letter, even though welcoming its author as somewhat of a ‘convert’ recanting principles he had formerly accepted as ‘just and enlightened’.
40 Standard, 13th May 1844, p. 4.
41 John Claudius Loudon, Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (London, 1833). Several writers have suggested this – despite a little anachronism – might have been the ‘Loudon’s book’ Dorothea consults; but the 1825 publication would readily have given her the plan drawing stimulus she wanted.
42 Architectural Magazine, vol. 1, 1834, p. 1 (the Magazine ran from 1834 to 1838).
43 George Smith, ‘Essay on the construction of cottages’, Prize-Essays and Transactions, Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland, 10 (1835), 205–16. Scottish practices influenced nineteenth-century English agriculture; Loudon, brought up in Scotland, had published an account of Designs for Laying out Farms and Farm-Buildings in the Scotch Style; Adapted to England (London, 1811).
44 Sanitary Report, pp. 395–9.
45 Ibid., p. 397.
46 The Rev. Copinger Hill, ‘On the construction of cottages’, Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England (hereafter JRAS), 4 (1843), 356–69.
47 George Nicholls, ‘On the condition of the agricultural labourer; with suggestions for its improvement’, JRAS, 7 (1847), 1–30.
48 Morning Post, 30th May 1848, p. 6.
49 Thomas Hine, Prize Model Cottage (London, 1848).
50 Henry Goddard, ‘On the construction of a pair of cottages for agricultural labourers’, JRAS, 10 (1849), 230–46. Having only one ground floor room was to avoid either cottage ‘becoming a residence for two families’.
51 J. Young Macvicar, ‘Labourers’ cottages’, JRAS, 10 (1849), 400–20.
52 Duke of Bedford, ‘On labourers’ cottages’, JRAS, 10 (1849), 185–7.
53 Examples include publications from Somerset architect Henry Weaver (MC, 19th March 1849, p. 7) and Essex architect George Dean (Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 19th March 1849, p. 7).
54 Labourer’s Friend (the Society’s journal), vol. 56, January 1849, pp. 2–3.
55 Ibid., vol. 63, August 1849, p. 128.
56 MC, 18th October 1849, p. 5. The complete Rural Letters have been republished in volumes VI and VII of Alexander Mackay and Shirley Brooks, The Morning Chronicle’s Labour and the Poor, ed. Rebecca Watts and Kevin Booth (Ditto Books, 2020): letters cited in the present article are in ‘Volume VI’.
57 Farmer’s Magazine (hereafter FM), vol. 20, 1849, p. 494. The ‘task’ covered ‘Metropolitan’, ‘Manufacturing’, and ‘Rural’ districts; the FM reprinting of the rural Letters continued into 1851.
58 FM, vol. 22, 1850, p. 412 – reprinted from its sister weekly publication the Mark Lane Express.
59 MC, 24th October 1849, p. 5; FM, vol. 20, 1849, p. 499, Letter 2.
60 MC, 3rd November 1849, p. 5; FM, vol. 21, 1850, p. 243, Letter 5.
61 MC, 28th November 1849, p. 6; FM, vol. 22, 1850, p. 237, Letter 12.
62 MC, 28th November 1849, p. 6; FM, vol. 22, 1850, pp. 237–8, Letter 12.
63 MC, 28th November 1849, p. 6; FM, vol. 22, 1850, p. 239, Letter 12.
64 MC, 5th December 1849, pp. 5–6; FM, vol. 22, 1850, pp. 418–27, Letter 14.
65 MC, 31st October 1849, p. 4; FM, vol. 21, 1850, p. 34, Letter 4.
66 MC, 8th December 1849, p. 5; FM, vol. 23, 1851, p. 137, Letter 15.
67 MC, 3rd November 1849, p. 5; FM, vol. 21, 1850, pp. 241–5, Letter 5.
68 MC, 7th November 1849, 5.
69 MC, 26th December 1849, 5; FM, vol. 24, 1851, p. 53, Letter 20; Drayton and Horsted are near Norwich.
70 MC, 26th December 1849, p. 5; FM, vol. 24, 1851, p. 54, Letter 20.
71 Sayer, Country Cottages, p. 2.
72 Daniel Maudlin, The Idea of the Cottage in English Architecture, 1760–1860 (Abingdon, UK, 2015), p. 3.
73 MC, 3rd November 1841, p. 5; FM, vol. 21, 1850, p. 243, Letter 5.
74 Leckie, Open Houses.
75 John B. Lamb, ‘Turning the inside out: morals, modes of living, and the condition of the working class’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 25:1 (1997), 39–52.
76 ‘Tenant right; Mr Pusey’s committee’, Law Review, 9 (1849), 133–48 (p. 135).
77 Ibid., ‘subsoiling, boning, guanoing, marling, claying, &c.’ are cited as soil-improving measures.
78 G. M. Williams, ‘On the tenant’s right to unexhausted improvements, according to the custom of North Lincolnshire’, JRAS, 6 (1846), 44–6; Barugh Almack, ‘A form of memorandum on tenant-right to be added to existing agreements or lease’, JRAS, 7 (1847), 234–7.
79 Over an extended period, the Farmer’s Magazine published, in detail, the evidence given.
80 FM, vol. 18, 1848, pp. 520–6. This witness, a self-proclaimed ‘improver’, ran farms across four parishes.
81 Boats transported the chalk for forty to fifty miles, an operation involving three riverside wharves for a nine-hundred-acre farm – a ‘quasi-industrial’ approach to land improvement!
82 An all too obvious reference to poor relief dependence in hard times.
83 Express, 14th August 1848, p. 3; Morning Post, 29th August 1848, p. 4; FM, vol. 18, 1848, p. 337.
84 ‘M. B.’, ‘Shaw’s and Corbett’s Digest of Agricultural Customs’, Journal of Agriculture, [no volume number] (July 1850), 384–91: the commentary sits alongside a county-by-county tabulation of farm-holding arrangements – with or without leases, yearly or longer tenancies, etc., and compensation (if any) for ‘unexhausted improvements’; see also North British Agriculturist, 15th August 1850, p. 2.
85 J. R. Fisher, ‘Landowners and English tenant right, 1845–1852’, Agricultural History Review, 31 (1983), 15–25 – summarises earlier historian comments and background to the parliamentary inquiry.
86 M. E. Turner, J. V. Beckett, B. Afton, Farm Production in England, 1700–1914 (Oxford, UK, 2001), pp. 81–3.
87 British Husbandry, vol. 1 (London, 1834) – anonymously published under auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
88 Percentages recalculated from Table 7.1 (pp. 218–19) in Turner, Beckett, Afton, Farm Production – itself utilising earlier published sources.
89 William E. van Vugt, ‘Running from ruin?: the emigration of British farmers to the U.S.A. in the wake of the repeal of the Corn Laws’, Economic History Review, 41 (1988), 411–28.
90 B. A. Holderness, ‘The Origins of High Farming’, in B. A. Holderness and Michael Turner, eds, Land, Labour and Agriculture (London, 1991), pp. 149–64.
91 Philip Pusey, ‘On the progress of agricultural knowledge during the last eight years’, JRAS, 11 (1850), 381–438.
92 Oliver MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government, 1830–1870 (London, 1977); Anthony Brundage, England’s ‘Prussian Minister’: Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1852–1854 (Pennsylvania, PA, 1988); Shave, Pauper Policies.
93 Lorie Charlesworth, Welfare’s Forgotten Past: A Socio-Legal History of the Poor Law (Abingdon, UK, 2011). Aspects of this book’s arguments and evidence have been disputed – see for instance, praise and criticism in Steven King’s courteous review (Rural History, 22 (2011), 271–3).
94 New Poor Law (4&5 Will IV col. 76), 110 clauses, 24 pages in Statutes of the United Kingdom, vol. 13 (London, 1835 – edition with notes and references by N. Simons, Barrister at Law); Factory Act (3&4 Will IV col. 103), 50 clauses, 7 pages in same publication.
95 H. W. Arthurs, ‘Without the Law’: Administrative Justice and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto, Can., 1985), p. 132 – from an award-winning academic lawyer.
96 Godolphin Osborne, Letter to Lord Ashley, pp. 10–11; the abbreviated lines quoted come within a substantial attack on Chadwick as working in an ‘atmosphere of theory’; ‘friendship’ here may be dubious; their interactions seem only to date from a later date (see Brundage, England’s ‘Prussian Minister’, p. 114.)
97 Shave, Pauper Policies.
98 Hansard, HC, cols 874–988 (col. 875) (17th April 1834).
99 Ibid., col. 876.
100 House of Commons Journal, vol. 89, 292–421– a series of ‘House-in-Committee’ meetings (and deferrals).
101 MC, 19th June 1834, p. 2.
102 MC, 13th August 1834, p. 2.
103 ‘The New Poor Law’, Quarterly Review, 52 (1834), 233–61 (p. 234).
104 Standard, 14th August 1834, p. 1; Melbourne was then newly into his first term as Prime Minister.
105 Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Law and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, UK, 1998), p. 151.
106 Ibid.: the ‘myth of the workhouse’ and lurid rumours over happenings in those ‘Bastilles’.
107 Samantha Williams, ‘Earnings, poor relief and the economy of makeshifts: Bedfordshire in the early years of the New Poor Law’, Rural History, 16 (2005), 21–52.
108 Godolphin Osborne, Letter to Lord Ashley, p. 9.
109 Arthurs, Without the Law, p. 136.
110 See Shave, Pauper Policies, pp. 31–2, 261–2 and general discussion of the ‘policy process’.
111 Alannah Tomkins, ‘Poor Law institutions through working-class eyes: autobiography, emotion, and family context, 1834–1914’, Journal of British Studies, 60 (2021), 285–309 (p. 309).
112 ‘Vexatious Legislation on Parish Settlements’, Law Magazine, vol. 5, 1846, pp. 160–4.
113 ‘The Unsettled Settlements’, Law Magazine, vol. 6, 1847, pp. 91–8.
114 Ibid., p. 93; the 1846 legislation is 9&10 Vict, col. 66.
115 ‘Poor Law Legislation of the Session’, Law Magazine, vol. 7, 1847, pp. 81–4.
116 Emma Griffin, ‘Diets, hunger and living standards during the British industrial revolution’, Past & Present, 239 (2018), 71–111; Carl Griffin, ‘Enclosures from below? The politics of squatting and encroachment in the post-Restoration New Forest’, Historical Research, 91 (2018), 274–95; Nicola Verdon, ‘Skill, status and the agricultural workforce in Victorian England’, History, 104 (2019), 820–51; Natalie Carter and Steven King, ‘“I think we ought not to acknowledge them [paupers] as that encourages them to write”: the administrative state, power and the Victorian pauper’, Social History, 46 (2021), 117–44; Joseph Harley, ‘Domestic production and consumption in English pauper households, 1670–1840’, Agricultural History Review, 69 (2021), 25–49; Tomkins, ‘Poor Law institutions’.
117 Xavier Bonnefoy, ‘Inadequate housing and health: an overview’, International Journal of Environment and Pollution, 30 (2007), 411–29; James Dunn, ‘Housing and healthy child development: known and potential impacts of interventions’, Annual Review of Public Health, 41 (2020), 381–96.
118 Leckie, Open Houses, pp. 27–58.
119 John E. Crowley, ‘The sensibility of comfort’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 749–82; the same author’s The Invention of Comfort (Baltimore, MD, 2001) discusses ‘comfort’ from medieval times onward.
120 A ‘machine for living’ comes from Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (Towards an Architecture), first published 1923.
121 ‘Real’ wage rates are complicated by benefits-in-kind, seasonal and regional variability.
122 Sherborne Mercury, 30th December 1843, p. 4.
123 Griffin, ‘Diets, hunger and living standards’, p. 72.
124 Samantha A. Shave, ‘The dependent poor? (Re)constructing the lives of individual “on the Parish” in rural Dorset, 1800–1832’, Rural History, 20 (2009), 67–97.
125 Graham Rawson, ‘Economies and strategies of the northern rural poor: the mitigation of poverty in a West Riding township in the nineteenth century’, Rural History, 28 (2017), 69–92.
126 Thomas Sokoll, ‘Old age in poverty: the record of Essex pauper letters, 1770–1834’, in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King, Pamela Sharpe, eds, Chronicling Poverty: The Voices of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke, UK, 1997), pp. 127–54.
127 Thomas Sokoll, ‘Negotiating a living: Essex pauper letter from London, 1800–1834’, International Journal of Social History, 45 (2000), 19–46; this article quotes (p. 26) an example of a relief recipient threatening to ‘come home’ with his family if his request for relief was not approved
128 Broad, ‘Housing the rural poor’; Wells, ‘Publicly-owned housing’.
129 Sanitary Report, p. 8.
130 MC, 7th November 1849, p. 5; 28th November 1849, p. 6; 5th December 1849, p. 5; FM, vol. 21, 1850, p. 248; FM, vol. 22, 1850, pp. 236, 422; Letters 6 (Devon), 12 (Dorset) and 14 (Suffolk).
131 Peter King, ‘Pauper Inventories and the Material Lives of the Poor in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Hitchcock, King, Sharpe, eds, Chronicling Poverty, pp. 155–91; Green, ‘Heartless and Unhomely’; Harley, ‘Domestic production and consumption’. Accessible pauper inventory information sheds light on pre-1834 conditions; Labour and the Poor captures 1849–50 conditions.
132 ‘On Labourers’ Cottages’, FM, vol. 15, 1859, pp. 222–6.
133 See, for instance, Green, ‘Heartless and Unhomely’; Lloyd, ‘Joys of the Cottage’.
134 Leckie, Open Houses, pp. 240–1.
135 Some illustrated in Figures 1–4.
136 Despite Copinger Hill’s attempt to persuade otherwise.
137 T. W. Fletcher, ‘The Great Depression of English agriculture 1873–1896’, Economic History Review, 13 (1961), 417–32; P. J. Perry, ‘Where was the “Great Agricultural Depression”? A geography of agricultural bankruptcy in late Victorian England and Wales’, Agricultural History Review, 20 (1972), 30–45.
138 ‘The Agricultural Labourer’, in Royal Commission on Labour, Fifth and Final Report presented to Parliament June 1894, pp. 199–253.
139 Verdon, ‘Skill, status and the agricultural workforce’.
140 Morning Post, 28th December 1855, p. 6.
141 Sun, 8th February 1855, pp. 3 or 7 (in different editions).
142 Louis Ruegg, ‘Farming of Dorsetshire’, JRAS, 15 (1855), 389–454.
143 The ‘animated debate’ was that at the 1843 Blandford meeting addressed by Godolphin Osborne.
144 Ruegg, ‘Farming of Dorsetshire’ – names eight proprietors who had acted over cottage building and villages with new-built cottages.