There is something to
be said for old fashioned historical prose, the sort which was written before
the university institutionalisation of History. This powerfully written book
dates from 1911 and has been more or less continuously in print ever since. It’s
very readable and, indeed, moving.
One of the small
ironies of such old works is that even when Radical and of great potential interest
to a self-educating reader, they nonetheless assume a knowledge of French and
Latin (though never German) of which the reader may be ignorant. The very first
four lines of this book are in French - a quotation from de Tocqueville. The great
radical R H Tawney had the same habit as the Hammonds. They did not quite
escape from the assumptions of their class.
The Hammonds have a
very clear story line and argument, supported by extensive quotations from
their primary sources among which they (interestingly) include novels of the
period. The old English aristocratic ruling class comes out of it very badly,
the Church of England very very badly: in 1810 a Bill to remove the death
penalty for shoplifting items below the value of five shillings passed in the
Commons but was rejected by the Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury and six
other Lords Spiritual - six bishops of the Church of England - lending their support
to the rejection (page 204) - and that’s just for starters.
At various points I was
struck by similarities to the way we provide today for the poor. Though we do
now have a minimum wage - an idea familiar and sometimes acted upon as far back
as the sixteenth century - we also have all those kinds of income support which
in the 18th and 19th
centuries helped keep down wages and made swathes of the population dependent
on public relief to the advantage of employers and rent-receivers. The
Speenhamland system may have gone but we still have its legacy, for example, in
the willingness of governments to pay private rents for poor tenants, thus
keeping up the level of rent in a way deemed very acceptable to landlords. That
a better idea might be to build more homes is not one that we have often acted
upon, though Harold Macmillan in the 1950s famously did.
Like many English
people, I can trace lines of descent through the agricultural labourers of
southern England who are centre stage in this book. Those labourers did leave a
record in their certificates of birth, marriage, and death but in very little
else apart from the names they passed on. I read this book to fill out the
picture and found much more of interest than I had expected.
