"Oats: A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people."
(Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755)
When Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, Britain was in the midst of one of the many transitional periods that were to take place during her reign. Working the land remained one of the most common ways for Britons to earn a living, yet with compulsory education still far off on the horizon, a quarter of the population was living in poverty, with 40 per cent of the country’s wealth owned by 5 per cent of the population. Britain was still feeling the effects of a war that had ended 20 years previously. The Napoleonic Wars had made it impossible to import corn from Europe, resulting in the expansion of British wheat farming and, for the landowner and farmer, an era of advancing progress and affluence.
Corn cultivation was on the increase. There had been huge improvements in machinery and farming implements: fields had been divided into a convenient workable size; drainage had been innovated; roads had been constructed and farm buildings erected. Investments were free-flowing and profits were rising, but for labourers and farm servants rents were rising and bread prices were soaring.
When the Napoleonic conflicts finally ended in 1815, it had been feared that foreign corn imports would lower grain prices, so British landowners appealed to the House of Commons to protect the profits of their farmers. The first of the Corn Laws was introduced stating that no foreign corn would be allowed into Britain until domestic corn reached a price of 80 shillings per quarter. Although landowners benefited from this decree, among the working classes this move was devastating. Artificially high corn prices meant that the bulk of their wages would be spent on bread. With little money left for workers to spend on other goods, manufacturing suffered, workers were laid off and slowly the economy began to decline.
Not to be beaten, the manufacturers and industrialists continued their campaign to extend the right to vote and be better represented in Parliament, gaining a say in the running of the country. A victory of sorts came with the Reform Act of 1832, which extended the right to vote to a large proportion of the industrial merchant classes. The legislation enabled their opinions and grievances to be officially recognised, yet little improvements were seen by the working classes until Prime Minister Robert Peel took up the challenge. Despite strong opposition, Peel considered the objections of the Anti-Corn Law League, the series of poor harvests and outbreaks of social unrest, as well as the Potato Famine then decimating the population of Ireland. Peel agreed that the restrictions on foreign corn imports were causing an unnecessary tax on food and a hindrance to British exports.
Eventually, in June 1846, the Corn Laws were abolished for good. There was initial uncertainty when landowners and agriculturalists believed they would no longer be able to command decent prices for their produce, yet their worries were short-lived and the farming economy continued to thrive. The repeal of the Corn Laws was a watershed moment in British history. After a long period of lucrative farming, the balance of power had gradually begun to shift from the landed gentry to the industrialists. The beginning of the nineteenth century was still dominated by agriculture and manpower, but within 40 years industry would begin to overshadow it.
By the 1870s, Britain was once more undergoing a period of agricultural adversity. There was very little expenditure on land improvement, as interest in farming ventures declined. Rapid growth of factories and industry in the preceding decades meant there were fewer areas available for arable cultivation. The Tithe Commutation Survey estimated that wheat made up 26.8 per cent of the crops grown in England and Wales in 1836. By 1871, the Annual Agricultural Returns saw this figure drop to 23 per cent, with a steady decline to 16 per cent by 1911.
Previously, Britain had depended upon home-grown produce but soon the country was no longer as reliant on its rural economy. The arrival of the railways brought faster transportation, while steam power and new innovations allowed larger scale production. Wheat prices fell rapidly from 55 shillings to 28 shillings a quarter between 1870 and 1890.
The effects of these mammoth changes were felt by everyone – from the lowest paid labourer in a two-room cottage to the wealthiest aristocrat in a stately mansion.
Living off the Land
During the nineteenth century, the Poor Law Commissioners divided parishes into two types. ‘Open’ parishes consisted of villages where houses were owned by small-scale landlords and occupied by many agricultural labourers, while within ‘Close’ parishes, villages were dominated by landlords and ratepayers and tended to exclude the poor, who were viewed as a drain on the local resources. A perfect example of this division is captured in Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, where the labourers living in the small hamlet of Lark Rise take the long daily walk to Candleford, the nearest town, to find work.
The second official census, taken in March 1851, provided a picture of the economic status of mid-Victorian England and Wales. It showed that over 1.4 million people – approximately 23 per cent of working men – were employed on the land as farmers, agricultural labourers, or farm servants. Alongside them were female relatives of the farmers and children under the age of 15, who also had their roles to play. Although their work was not always recorded on the census, they too laboured in the fields, helping with the harvest by following the reapers and binding the sheaves of corn.
The Hon Edward Stanhope investigated the employment of women and children in agriculture in the late 1860s. His observations, submitted to the Royal Commissioners, help us to understand the feelings of labouring country men, who found it difficult to tolerate their wives and daughters working the land, seeing it as a humiliation.
"The woman takes her part in the coarseness of the fields. Her presence is no restraint on language. She becomes in all but sex a man among the men. Those husbands and brothers who have the finest instincts among the labourers, feel it a deep degradation, even when they must submit to it, that their wives and sisters have to work in the fields."
There was a strict hierarchy between the farmer and his workforce, although the distinction between labourer and farm servant was not always well defined. Farm servants were often young boys in their mid-teens or unmarried men, hired at a local fair on a yearly basis, or employed privately through word-of-mouth recommendations. Agricultural labourers and skilled workers, such as shepherds, ploughmen, herdsmen and hedge cutters, were usually married and employed either on a casual basis or as regular workers. When hired, their abilities, previous employment and family circumstances would be taken into account before a wage was offered.
Landowning farmers often found it beneficial to provide rented cottages for their workers. Known as ‘tied housing’, the accommodation was tied to the job and when an employee left, or was no longer required, he and his family had to move out. For the labourer this could be quite a precarious position. Having a roof over their heads deterred them from complaining about poor conditions, ill-treatment or low wages, in case their objections led to their eviction. It was essential for the worker to prove themselves hard-working and indispensable, as there was no guarantee of employment and little security as labourers grew old and infirm. The worker was at the mercy of the good nature and charity of their employer.
Labourers who remained on the same farm or estate for a long period, raised their families and, in turn, a new generation of farm workers, with the tied cottage often passing down to the eldest son upon the death of the labourer. Imbued with the knowledge of farming life from an early age, they became highly-skilled workers who knew the lay of the land and the challenges of nature. Daughters started on the employment ladder as bird scarers and ‘gleaners’, collecting leftover corn and vegetables in the fields after a harvest, before taking on a labouring role or a more skilled position in the dairy as a milkmaid or domestic servant in their employer’s house.
The milk maid would usually milk the cows twice a day. In the morning she would sieve and cool the milk ready to sell, whilst the milk collected during the evening would be used to make butter and cheese. Specific days would be set aside for the long, laborious processes involved in butter and cheese-making, but throughout her working week she would be expected to monitor the welfare of the animals, keep the dairy clean and the milking pails scrubbed and scalded with boiling water ready for the next milking.
A busy farm would often require a domestic known as a ‘maid of all work’. Her day would start at dawn when she prepared the range for cooking. Any other fires within the home were lit, water heated and taken upstairs to enable the family to wash – all before she began the task of organising breakfast. In the morning, soups and stews were prepared for later in the day, whilst her additional list of chores might include scrubbing the kitchen floor, washing the laundry, making beds and mending garments. These women worked as hard as their male counterparts on the farm; their days were long with a constant stream of tasks to be completed before they could contemplate going to bed.
Case Study: The Life of a Victorian Farm Labourer
Warwickshire-born Joseph Arch was the son of a farm labourer. At the age of nine he started work as a bird-scarer on a local smallholding, the first step towards developing his agricultural skills. When he later became a Methodist lay preacher, Joseph acquired a reputation for championing the concerns of the farm labourer. Joseph’s biography vividly recalls how his family was affected by the Corn Laws and the difficulties they faced just to get a simple meal on the table:
It was 1835, the winter of the Repeal of the Corn Laws. I was about nine years old. I well remember eating barley bread, and seeing the tears in my poor mother’s eyes as she cut slices off a loaf … It was a terrible winter ...
There was corn enough for everybody, that was the hard, cruel part of it but those who owned it would not sell it out when it was sorely needed. They kept it back, they locked it up; and all the time the folk were crying out in their extremity for bread … To make as much money as they could, by letting corn rise to famine prices, was all the owners of it cared about. “Make money at any price” was their motto.
Meat was rarely, if ever, to be seen on the labourer’s table; the price was too high for his pocket … In many a household even a morsel of bacon was considered a luxury. Flour was so dear that the cottage loaf was mostly of barley."
The Victorian Vegetable Patch
The nineteenth century domestic cook was constrained by the seasons and the availability of produce grown locally. As a rule, approximately one eighth of an acre (or 20 rods, as the measurement was then known) was expected to feed a family of five. This would provide enough space to grow vegetables – potatoes, cabbages, onions, leeks, carrots, beans and parsnips – with an area set aside to keep a pig, chickens or ducks. Some householders had the luxury of keeping a cow, providing them with milk to make their own butter and cheese.
The extra food grown in the vegetable garden often ensured a family’s survival, so every last inch of space was utilised, with fruit trees trained against the walls of the cottage and small bushes planted on spare patches of land to provide berries.
In the countryside, many families had access to a patch of land surrounding their cottage upon which they could grow food, but plenty of others who lacked this facility, were known as ‘landless labourers’. Parliament was keen to promote allotments among the working classes to solve this problem and the creation of an Allotment Movement was outlined in parliamentary papers and the reports of the Board of Agriculture. The Society for Bettering the Conditions and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor was founded in the late eighteenth century, but the project was slow to gain support. However, after a series of harvest failures and the growth in the number of landless labourers, the early plots provided a model for a larger venture and between 1829 and 1873 England saw one allotment created for every three male agricultural labourers. At the end of this period, over 240,000 allotments had been established, giving these workers the opportunity to feed their families without having to rely on poor relief.
Labourers worked their allotments in the same way any cottager planted his kitchen garden. The principles were also the same used by any farmer, but applied on a much smaller scale, with allotments ranging in size from half a rod to a quarter of an acre. A great deal of thought was given to the type of produce grown, whether planting mainstay vegetables such as potatoes, onions, carrots, cabbages and kale or training climbers like broad beans up against a wall or bordering hedgerow.
With the main part of an allotment devoted to a system of regularly rotated kitchen crops, much emphasis was put upon the preparation and the type of manure used to ensure a successful harvest. The Victorians were keen recyclers. An article in Mrs Beeton’s All About Gardening (1871) advised: ‘The droppings of cattle, sheep, pigs, and all house sewage, should be collected and saved, and mixed with rather more than the same quantity of garden soil: the application of a little quicklime will remove any offensive smell’.
Many local varieties of vegetables were grown in allotments and cottage gardens. Types of peas, for instance, included Emperor, Bishop’s Long Pod and Blue Imperials – although not everyone chose to grow peas, as the harvest was small for the amount of room required to grow them. Silver Globe onions, Kirk’s Kidney potatoes, early Dutch turnips, Ragged Jack Kale and Colewort cabbages were also highly rated. Herbs – considered essential to add to stocks, stews and soups as well as providing medicinal relief – could be grown in any small corner. Rhubarb was easy to cultivate and provided a plentiful harvest, whilst those with sufficient room might decide to plant fruit trees or bushes. The choice of apples at this time was endless, from the Blenheim Orange to the Kerry Pippin. Greengage and Victoria plums were popular along with Kentish cherries, Lancashire Hero gooseberries and Falstaff raspberries.
Where possible, crops were rotated on a yearly cycle to ensure high yields, and planning was needed to decide where specific varieties would flourish; some crops required shelter from frost, whilst others benefited from being planted in a sunny position. Just like the farmer, the country cottager and allotment-holder was at the mercy of the seasons and needed to ensure that the best use was made of their land to enable a wide selection of produce to be harvested throughout the year.
Whilst crops such as radishes and lettuce could be grown in a matter of weeks, others took months to reach maturity. No sooner had the onions been grown, dried, and taken into the kitchen ready to be used, than the patch of land in which they had been raised would be dug over and replaced with a different crop. Certain flowers, such as marigolds and lavender, were planted in-between each variety, not only to look pretty, but also to act as natural pesticides and deter the bugs from eating the crops.
Weather conditions, planting times, harvesting and the benefits of eating certain produce were often dictated by folklore and traditional rhymes passed down within families. Some warned to, ‘Eat leeks in March and wild garlic in May, and all year after physicians may play’, while others forecast, ‘Mist in May, heat in June, makes a harvest come right soon’, or ‘A cold May is kindly, and fills the barn finely’.
In a classic prophesy for the end of the year, all apparently depended upon the direction of the wind:
"If on New Year’s Eve night the wind blow south,
It betokeneth warmth and growth;
If west, much milk, and fishes in the sea;
If north, much cold and storms there will be;
If east, the trees will bear much fruit;
If north-east, flee it, man and brute!"
When harvests were good, the Victorian cottager had an extremely healthy diet, but poor seasons and lack of money could change their fortunes virtually overnight. Even within working class communities there were varying states of existence, and bad harvests could have a devastating effect on individual families. At such times, the humble potato provided a reliable source of sustenance. It was relatively easy to grow, bulked out a meal when there was little or no meat available, and was perfect for baking in the grate, ready to carry out to workers in the fields at lunch time.
The importance of the potato in the diet of working people can be seen in the example of the Irish Potato famine during the 1840s. It is said that Sir Walter Raleigh planted the first potatoes in Ireland on his 40,000 acre estate near Cork, attempting to debunk the myth that they were poisonous. Whatever the truth of this, during the seventeenth century Irish peasants realised the numerous benefits of cultivating the vegetable, from its ability to grow in poor soil to the ease with which it could be stored. It was wholesome and sustaining and soon became an essential part of the Irish diet. Poor families enhanced meals consisting of this staple crop with cabbage, salt or fish.
As growing potato crops in poor soil freed space for more profitable wheat, landowners encouraged their tenants to produce the crop. Potato planting would begin in the spring, usually around St Patrick’s Day, and harvests were reaped in September. July and August were often the lean months when the previous year’s harvest was beginning to run out and workers had to turn to highly priced oats and barley to form the basis of their meals.
Sadly, the Irish dependency on the potato had disastrous results. In September 1845, a major outbreak of potato blight swept through Europe. The plants turned black and curly and soon began to rot. It was later discovered that an airborne fungus, transported from the hulks of ships travelling from North America to England, had swept across the fields of Ireland causing devastation. The fungal spores thrived in the moist conditions, settling on the plants and multiplying to infect thousands of others within days. With their food source literally eliminated overnight, people quickly began to starve.
The famine led to over one million deaths, causing those who could afford to pay for their passage to flee the country in search of a better life in England, Australia, New Zealand, Canada or America. Known as the Irish Diaspora, this mass movement of people meant that the population of Ireland decreased by two million between 1847 and 1851. Today, it is hard to believe that the potato completely changed the face of a nation, but this vegetable once caused a disaster that touched all Victorian Britons.
By Karen Foy in "Life in the Victorian Kitchen", Pen & Sword History, Barnsley, South Yorkshire, UK, 2014, excerpts chapter one. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.