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Towards the ‘Cottage Charter’: The Expressive Culture of Farm Workers in Nineteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Ian Dyck
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Extract

A frequent complaint among English historians is that the farm workers were a ‘secret people’ who seldom interacted with the written or recorded word. If vaguely discernible in this or that statistic, or anonymous act of physical protest, the labourer's cultural and political consciousness was entombed (it is sometimes inferred) in that drudging physical pantomime which many nineteenth-century commentators assumed to be the primary attribute of ‘Hodge’. Even the labourers' contemporary friends harboured a ‘Hodge’ stereotype in their assumption that the labourers' aspirations, or ‘cottage charter’, were best represented and publicised by ‘articulate’ outsiders. William Cobbett, who for three decades argued that farm workers were capable of profound thought and articulation, implied as much in his observation that ‘Nobody (excepting himself) tells the tale of the labourer.’ In 1848, as a better known Charter was re-stated to the nation from the mass radical platform of the metropolis, Sidney Godolphin Osborne lamented that the labourer ‘has few to speak for him, few who care to face the odium of exposing the conduct of those individuals, or classes, or laws, who or which oppress him’. Five years later, with reference to the ‘peasant’ worker, Karl Marx made a similar assumption: ‘they must be represented’, he argued, and their representative ‘must appear as their master, as an authority over them.’ Even as late as 1880, shortly after the formation of the National Agricultural Labourers' Union, Richard Jefferies confidently proclaimed that ‘the country labourer possessed no clearly defined ‘Cottage Charter’ and no genuine programme of the future; that which is put forward in his name is not for him’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1990 , pp. 95 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

Notes

1 Cobbett's Political Register, 22 February 1823, p. 482.

2 ‘To the editor of the Wiltshire Independent’, 10 June 1848, in The Letters of S.G.O., 2 volumes. (London, n.d., c. 1888), vol. I, p. 161.

3 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1850–2) in Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, Selected Works (London, 1968), p. 171.Google Scholar

4 Jefferies, Richard, Hodge and his Masters (1880; London, 1979), pp. 262–3.Google Scholar

5 Armstrong, Alan, Farmworkers: A Social and Economic History, 1770–1980 (London, 1988). The quoted part is from p. 15.Google Scholar

6 Obelkevich, James, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford, 1976)Google Scholar, especially chapters 2 and 6.

7 Howkins, Alun, Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk, 1870–1923 (London, 1985).Google Scholar

8 Snell, K.D.M., Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 For some interpretative essays on the songs of English farm workers, see Pickering's, MichaelVillage Song and Culture (London, 1982)Google Scholar and ‘The farmworker and “The Farmer's Boy”’, Lore and Language, III, 9 (July 1983), 44–64Google Scholar; Howkins, Alun, ‘The voice of the people: the social meaning and context of country song’, Oral History, III, 1 (Spring 1975), 50–75Google Scholar; Howkins, Alun and Dyck, Ian, ‘Popular ballads, rural radicalism and William Cobbett’, History Workshop 23 (Spring 1987), 20–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPalmer, Roy discusses and reprints a number of rural songs in The Painful Plough (Cambridge, 1972)Google Scholar and The Sound of History: Songs and Social Comment (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar, chapter 2.

10 For published collections of some traditional ballads see The Roxburghe Ballads 9 volumes (Hertford, 1873–99); Rollins, Hyder E. (ed.), The Pepys Ballads 8 volumes (Cambridge, Mass., 1929–1932)Google Scholar; Francis Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads 5 volumes (Boston, 1882–98); The Euing Collection of English Broadside Ballads (Glasgow, 1971).Google Scholar

In its printed form, the traditional ballad is usually associated with the gothic, black-letter type which gave way to white-letter type during the eighteenth century. On account that many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘black-letter’ broadsides were reprinted in ‘white-letter’ format during the nineteenth century, this typographical distinction has little bearing on the thematic definitions adopted in this essay. For the history of the broadside song see Shepard, Leslie, The Broadside Ballad: A Study in Origins and Meaning (London, 1962)Google Scholar; Neuburg, Victor E., Popular Literature: A History and Guide (Harrnondsworth, 1977)Google Scholar; Gerould, Gordon Hall, The Ballad of Tradition (Oxford, 1957)Google Scholar; Dugaw, Diane, ‘The popular marketing of “old ballads”: the ballad revival and eighteenth-century antiquarianism reconsidered’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 21, no. 1 (Fall 1987), pp. 71–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Lloyd, A.L., Folk Song in England (1967; London, 1975), pp. 218, 297–300, 315–17Google Scholar; The Singing Englishman (London, 1945), p. 41.Google Scholar

12 Douglas Jerrold, ‘The Ballad-Singer,’ in The Heads of the People; or, Portraits of the English (London, 1840), pp. 289–97; Place Papers (B.M. Add. Mss. 27,825) vol. XXXVII, 1 (2), ff. 144–5; Select Committee on Education in England and Wales (1835), p. 465.

13 On Dibdin's songs see Sabine Baring-Gould and H. Fleetwood Sheppard, Songs of the West (London, 1892), ‘Preface’; T. Dibdin (comp.), Songs of the Late Charles Dibdin, with a Memoir (London, 1841); The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin, Written by Himself. Together with the Words of Six Hundred Songs … (London, 1803) 4 volumes.

14 Dibdin's ‘Tom Bowling,’ for example, appears in some labourers' repertoires - see Colin, Andrews (ed.), Shepherd of the Downs: The Life and Songs of Michael Blann of Upper Beeding (Worthing, 1979), pp. 34–5.Google Scholar

15 Sharp, Cecil, English Folk-Song: Some Conclusions (1907; Belmont, Calif., 1965), pp. 5, 126,138–9.Google Scholar See Harker, Dave, Fakesong: The Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’, 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes, 1985)Google Scholar, chapter 9.

16 Harker, Fakesong, especially pp. 192–5; Thomson, Robert S., ‘The development of the broadside ballad trade and its influence upon the transmission of folk songs’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, Cambridge University, 1974), pp. 23, 230–1Google Scholar, appendices.

17 Broadside songs of the 1820s and 1830s, such as ‘The Labouring Man’ and ‘Van Diemen's Land’, were later gathered from the oral culture of village workers. See, for example, the songs collected by Broadwood, Lucy in Sussex and Surrey during the 1890s: Journal of the Folk Song Society, I, 4 (1902)Google Scholar; Hill, Geoffrey, Wiltshire Folk Songs and Carols (1904; Norwood edn, 1975).Google Scholar

18 Deacon, George, John Clare and the Folk Tradition (London, 1983), pp. 33, 43, 52–3; 68–9Google Scholar; , J.W. and Tibble, Anne, John Clare: His Life and Poetry (London, 1956), p. 130Google Scholar; Grainger, Margaret, John Clare: Collector of Ballads (Peterborough, 1964), p. 7Google Scholar, appendix.

19 See, for example, Stubbs, Ken, ‘The life and songs of George Maynard’, The Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, IX, 4 (December 1963), 180–96Google Scholar; Lilias, Rider Haggard (ed.), I Walked by Night, being the Life & History of the King of the Norfolk Poachers (1935; Oxford, 1982), pp. vii, 6.Google Scholar

20 Vincent, David, ‘The decline of the oral tradition in popular culture’, in Storch, Robert D. (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1982), pp. 31–3, 41.Google Scholar

21 See, for example, The Autobiography of John Britton, 2 volumes (London, 1850), I, 59n.

22 Williams, Alfred, Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames (London, 1923), p. 21.Google Scholar

23 ‘Autobiography of a Suffolk farm labourer, with recollections of incidents and events that have occurred in Suffolk during the sixty years from 1816 to 1876’, Suffolk Times and Mercury (2 November 1894–16 August 1895). The quoted part is from part II, chapter II (21 December 1894).

24 Cressy, David, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), p. 189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Country Parson (1652), in Hutchinson, F.E. (ed.), The Works of George Herbert (Oxford, 1941)Google Scholar, chapter 32; Edwards, Maldwyn, ‘John Wesley’, in Davis, R. and Rupp, G. (eds.), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain (London, 1965), p. 58Google Scholar; Wearmouth, Robert, Methodism and the Common People of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1945), p. 135.Google Scholar

26 Clare to Marianne Marsh (January 1832) in Mark, Storey (ed.), The Letters of John Clare (Oxford, 1985), p. 560.Google Scholar

27 Thompson, Flora, Lark Rise to Candleford (Oxford, 1945)Google Scholar, chapter 4. On the songs of Juniper Hill, see Pickering, Michael, ‘Popular song at Jumper Hill,’ Folk Music Journal, 4, 5 (1984), 481–503.Google Scholar

28 Deacon, John Clare, p. 37.

29 Jefferies, Hodge and his Masters, p. 262.

30 , J.W. and Tibble, Anne (eds.), The Prose of John Clare (1951; New York 1970), pp. 19, 221.Google Scholar

31 Ian, Bain (ed.), A Memoir of Thomas Bewick (Oxford, 1975), pp. 8, 16, 24, 32.Google Scholar

32 The collections of nineteenth-century broadside songs used here are the Sir Frederic Madden Collection (hereafter Madden) at Cambridge University Library; the collections of the British Library (hereafter B.L.); the various collections of the English Folk-Dance and Song Society (hereafter E.F.D.S.S.); the London University Collection of Broadsides (hereafter L.U.C.B.); the John Johnson Collection of Ephemeral Literature (hereafter J.J.) and the Firth Collection of Broadsides (hereafter Firth) at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

33 See The Works of Hannah More, 11 volumes (London, 1830), vol. 2.

34 ‘The Cottage Boy’ (London: Catnach, printer) B.L.: 11621 i 12, f. 77. The London press of James Catnach was active between 1813 and 1838.

35 Lloyd, Folk Song in England, p. 172.

36 Hannah More, ‘The Riot’ (1795), in Works of Hannah More, vol. 2, pp. 86–9. A broadside version appears in Madden 15.

37 ‘The Ploughboy's Dream’ (no imprint) B.L.: L.R. 271a. 2, vol. 8, f. 92.

38 ‘A New Song on the Hard Times’ (London: J. Pitts, printer) Madden VIII (2); B.L.: 11602 gg. 30, f. 22. John Pitts was active as a London printer between 1797 and 1844.

39 See, for example ‘Struggle for the Breeches’ (London: E. Hodges, printer, c. 1840s) Madden 11 (V).

40 ‘A Woman Never Knows When her Day's Work's Done’ (London: Ryle & Co., printer, c. 1840s) Madden 5; ‘What Man Would be Without a Woman’ (Manchester: J. Swindells, printer, c. 1850s) Madden 18 (III).

41 ‘[Women] never perform in public, and only very rarely when men are present. If you would prevail upon a married woman to sing to you, you must call upon her when her man is away at work … She will never sing to you in his presence until you have come to know both her and her husband very intimately’ (, Sharp, English Folk Song (London, 1907 edn), p. 106.Google Scholar) Sharp did not consider the possibility that the repertoires of labouring women might contain gender-based protests objectionable to men, hence their ‘silence’.

42 Scores of copies of ‘The Labouring Woman’ have survived: see, for example, the version of W. Dever, printer, London: Madden 14 (VIII). The same is true of ‘The Labouring Man’. For a broadside copy (Birmingham: William Pratt, printer) see Madden 21 (VI). Regarding its oral performance see Broadwood's, Lucy notes on song collecting in Sussex and Surrey during the 1890s: Journal of the Folk Song Society, I, 4 (1902), 198–9.Google Scholar

43 ‘The Wives’ Lamentation' (London: E. Hodges, printer, c. 1850) Madden 22 (VII); ‘New Way to Make a Good Husband’ (Preston: J. Harkness, printer, c. 1850s) Madden 18 (III).

44 Roxburghe Ballads, vol. VI, pp. 521–5; Euing Collection, p. 195. For a nineteenth-century version see the Catnach broadside in Madden 5 (II). There is an excellent discussion of the ballad by Michael Pickering; ‘The past as a source of inspiration: popular song and social change’ in Michael, Pickering and Tony, Green, (eds.) Everyday Culture and the Vernacular Milieu (Milton Keynes, 1987)Google Scholar, chapter 2.

45 ‘The Ploughman's Praise’ in Roxburghe Ballads, vol. VIII (1895), pp. 682–3.

46 ‘The Honest Ploughman; or, 90 Years Ago’ (London: W.S. Fortey, printer, c. 1860–80) Madden 11 (V). Other copies appear in B.L.: 1876 e. 1 (4); Madden 22 (VII); Madden 10 (IV); J.J.: Street Ballads, 28. Fragments of what appear to be the same song were collected during the early twentieth century from oral culture: see W.A. Barrett, English Folk Songs (London, n.d., c. 1891), pp. 32–3; Williams, Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames, p. 294.

47 ‘The Poor Labourers’ (London: Ryle & Co., printer, c. 1840s) B.L.: L.R. 271a. 2, vol. I (2), f. 120. Printings by Henson of Northampton appear in Madden 19 (IV) and Firth b. 25 (399).

48 Cobbett's Political Register, 5 October 1833, pp. 39–40.

49 ‘The New-Fashioned Farmer’ (London: J. Pitts, printer, c. 1820s). The song is listed for sale in a Catnach catalogue of 1832. A broadside copy of the song was recovered from the countryside by Cecil Sharp (E.F.D.S.S.: MP 40 1261, f. 22).

50 Ibid.

51 ‘Country Hiring’ (Preston: J. Harkness, printer, c. 1850) Madden 18 (III); Bodleian 2806 c. 14 (14); B.L.: 1876 d. 41.

52 ‘A New Song on the Hard Times’ (London: J. Pitts, printer, c.1830) Madden 8 (II); B.L.: 11602 gg. 30, f. 22. For an eighteenth-century version of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’, see Madden 15.

53 ‘The Truth, the Whole Truth, and, Nothing but the Truth; or, A touch on the Times’ (Portsea: J. Williams, printer, c. 1830s) Madden 22 (VII).

54 See ‘A New Song on the Hard Times’ (London: J. Pitts, printer) Madden 8 (II) and B.L.: 11602 gg. 30, f. 22; ‘The Labouring Man’ (London: W. Dever, printer) Madden 14 (VIII) and Firth c. 16 (238); ‘The Farmer's Lamentation’ (London: J. Pitts, printer) Madden VIII (2); ‘The Farmer's Downfall’ (York: C. Croshaw, printer, c. 1820s) Firth c. 16 (278).

55 ‘The Farmer's Son’ (London: J. Pitts, printer, c. 1830s) Madden VIII (2).

56 ‘Bad Times among the Farmers’ (Sheffield?: Crome, printer, 1815) Goldsmith's Library 21148.

57 ‘Advice to Farmers’ (London: Catnach) J.J.: Street Ballads, 2. A copy was listed for sale in a Catnach catalogue of 1832.

58 See, for example, ‘Farmers Don't You Cry’ (no imprint, c. 1850) Madden 19 (IV); ‘The Present Times; or, Eight Shillings a week’ (Birmingham: W. Pratt, printer, c. 1860s) Madden 21 (VI).

59 ‘A Ploughboy's Trip to the Hiring Fair’ (Liverpool: John White, printer, c. 1850).

60 On harvest-home songs see Williams, Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames, pp. 20, 55–6, 230; Lucy Broadwood and J.A. Fuller Maitland, English County Songs (London, 1893), pp. 81, 143, 148, 151; Kitchen, Fred, Brother to the Ox (London, 1951), p. 65Google Scholar; Buckmaster, John, A Village Politician (1897; Horsham, 1982), p. 20Google Scholar; ‘Autobiography of a Suffolk farm labourer’, part 2, chapter 2; Deacon, John Clare, pp. 56, 181, 230–3.

61 For a text of ‘Jolly Fellows’ (there were many versions) see Madden 18 (III) or 11 (IV). I am grateful to Michael Yates for the information on the two Sussex singers: Harry Upton of Balcombe and Harry Holman of Copthorne. See Yates, Michael, ‘Harry Upton: a singer and his repertoire’, Traditional Music, 10(1978), 14–20Google Scholar; ‘“Stand up ye men of labour”: the socio-political songs of Walter Pardon’, Musical Traditions, 1 (mid 1983), 22–7.Google Scholar

62 Edwards, George, From Crow Scaring to Westminster (London, 1922), p. 59.Google Scholar

63 George Loveless, The Victims of Whiggery (London, 1837), pp. 6–7.

64 Arch, Joseph, From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography (1898; London, 1986), pp. 98–9.Google Scholar‘The Fine Old English Labourer’ was authored by Howard Evans – see Songs for Singing at Agricultural Labourers' Meetings (London, n.d., c. 1874), pp. 1–3; Arthur Clayden, The Revolt of the Field (London, 1874), p. 103. Regarding the tune of ‘The Fine Old English Gentleman’, see Palmer, Sound of History, pp. 62, 272. A broadside song by that title, lamenting the disappearance of the generous squires of ‘olden time’ appears in B.L.: L.R. 271a. 2, vol. 5, f. 127.

65 See, for example, ‘The Labourer is Worthy of his Hire’ (London: H. Disley, printer, c. 1860) Firth c. 22 (109); ‘Revolt of the Workhouse’ (Portsea: J. Williams, printer, c. 1840); ‘Poor Law Bill’ (Cambridge: H. Talbot, printer, c. 1840) L.U.C.B., vol. 6, no. 579 (1); ‘Poor Law Starvation Bill’ (Norwich: Walker, printer, c. 1845) Goldsmith's Library 29187.

66 ‘The Times in Hertfordshire’ (London: W. Taylor, printer, c. 1880s) Madden 13 (VII); ‘The Poor Labourers’ (London: Ryle & Co., c. 1850) B.L.: L.R. 271a. 2, vol. 2 (2), f. 120.

67 ‘A Voice from St. Stephen's (London: J. Catnach, printer, c. 1830) Madden 10 (IV); ‘The Sporting Farmer’ (London: E. Hodges, printer, c. 1850s); J.J.: Street Ballads 4, f. 17; ‘A True Picture of the Times, or, The Poor Man's Consolation from Reform’ (Norwich: Smith, printer, c. 1830) Madden 19 (IV); ‘Van Dieman's Land’ (Birmingham: W. Wright, printer, c. 1830s).

68 See, for example, ‘Three Acres and a Cow’ (London: H.P. Such, printer, c. 1880s) Firth c. 16 (305) - another copy, without imprint, is in J.J.: Smallholdings and Allotments 1; ‘Wake Up Hodge’ (no imprint, c. 1875) Firth c. 26 (52); ‘My Master and I’ (London: H.P. Such, printer, c. 1875) Firth c. 16 (304); ‘A New Song on the Ploughmen's Association’ (no imprint) Firth c. 16 (306).

69 Williams, Folk-Songs of the Upper Thames, p. 105.