full of zeal for the Church and of hatred of Dissenters and foreigners, the Jacobitism of the country gentry had subsided during the reign of George II., and they gave the Pretender no assistance in 1745. Their chief vice was hard-drinking.' Their favourite occupations were field sports. These amusements, though they somewhat changed their character, do not appear to have at all diminished during the first half of the eighteenth century, and it was in this period that Gay, and especially Somerville, published the most considerable sporting poems in the language. Hawking, which had been extremely popular in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and which was a favourite sport of Charles II., almost disappeared in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Stag-hunting declined with the spread of agriculture, but hare-hunting held its ground, and fox-hunting greatly increased. Cricket, which would occupy a distinguished place in any modern picture of English manners, had apparently but just arisen. The earliest notice of it, discovered by an antiquary who has devoted much research to the history of amusements, is in one of D'Urfey's songs, written in the beginning of the century. It was mentioned as one of the amusements of Londoners by Strype in his edition of Stow's 'Survey' published in 1720, and towards the close of the century it greatly increased. There had been loud complaints ever since the Revolution, reckon themselves so much on a par, that a small estate is but another word for starving; of course, few are to be found, but they are bought up by greater neighbours or become mere farmers.' Letters on England, p. 229. In Grose's Olio, published in 1792, there is a very graphic description of the mode of living of the little independent country gentleman of 3007. per annum,' 'a character,' the author says, 'now worn out and gone.' Mrs. Montagu, in one of her letters from Yorkshire to a friend in London, writes: "We have not been troubled with any visitors since Mr. Montagu went away; and could you see how awkward, how absurd, how uncouth are the generality of people in this country, you would look upon this as no small piece of good fortune. For the most part they are drunken and vicious, and worse than hypocrites-profligates. I am very happy that drinking is not within our walls. We have not had one person disordered with liquor since we came down, though most of the poor ladies in the neighbourhood have had more hogs in their drawingroom than ever they had in their hog sty.'-Doran's Life of Mrs. Montagu, p. 36. 106. 2 Strutt's Sports and Pastimes, p. both in the country and in the towns, of the rapid rise of the poor-rates, but it seems to have been due, much less to any growth of real poverty than to improvident administration and to the dissipated habits that were generated by the poor-laws. Although the controversy on the subject of these laws did not come to a climax till long after the period we are now considering, the great moral and economical evils resulting from them were clearly seen by the most acute thinkers. Among others, Locke, in a report which he drew up in 1697, anticipating something of the later reasoning of Malthus, pointed out forcibly the danger to the country from the great increase of able-bodied pauperism, and attributed it mainly, if not exclusively, to the relaxation of discipline and the corruption of manners.' The annual rates in the last thirty years of the seventeenth century were variously estimated at from 600,000l. to 840,000l. They rose before the end of the reign of Anne to at least a million. They again sank for a time after an Act, which was carried in 1723, for founding workhouses and imposing a more severe discipline on paupers, but they soon regained their ascending movement and continued steadily to increase during the remainder of the century. Popular education and the rapid growth of manufacturing wages had not yet produced that high type of capacity and knowledge which is now found among the skilled artisans of the great towns, but the broad lines of the English industrial character were clearly discernible. Probably no workman in Europe could equal the Englishman in physical strength, in sustained power and energy of work, and few, if any, could surpass him in thoroughness and fidelity in the performance of his task and in general rectitude and honesty of character. On the other hand, he was far inferior to most Continental workmen in those branches of labour which depended on taste and on delicacy of touch, and most industries of this kind passed into the hands of refugees. His requirements were much greater than those of the Continental workman. In habits of providence and of economy he ranked extremely low in the industrial scale; his relaxations usually took the form of drunkenness or brutal 2 sports, and he was rather peculiarly addicted to riot and violence. a An attempt to estimate with any precision the position of the different classes engaged in agriculture or manufacturing indus- th try is very difficult, not only on account of the paucity of evidence we possess, but also on account of the many different The th and fluctuating elements that have to be considered. prosperity of a class is a relative term, and we must judge it not only by comparing the condition of the same class in different th countries and in different times, but also by comparing it with that of the other sections of society. The value of money has n greatly changed,' but the change has not been uniform; it has been counteracted by other influences; it applies much more to some articles of consumption than to others, and therefore affects very unequally the different classes in the community. Thus the price of wheat in the seventy years that followed the Revolution was not very materially different from what it now is, and during the first half of the eighteenth century it, on the whole, slightly declined. At the time of the Revolution it a was a little under 418. a quarter. During the ten years ending i in 1705 it was about 438., in the ten ending in 1715 it was about 448.; in the twenty ending in 1735 about 358.; in the ten ending in 1745 about 328.; and in the ten ending in 1755 about 338. The price of meat, on the other hand, was far less than at present. The average price of mutton throughout England from 1706 to 1730 is stated to have been 24d. a pound. From 1730 to 1760 it had risen to 3d. a pound. The price of beef, from 1740 to 1760, is said to have been 21d. a pound. Pork, veal, and lamb, as well as beer, were proportion ately cheap. We must remember, too, in estimating the condition of British labourers, that besides their wages they had the advantage of an immense extent of common land. Nearly every village had still around it a large space of unenclosed and uncultivated ground on which the cows, sheep, and geese of the poor found an ample pasture. The different parts of England differed widely in prosperity, the counties surrounding London, and generally the southern half of the island, being by far the most flourishing, while the northern parts, and especially the counties bordering on Scotland, were the most poor. There can be no doubt that in the former, at least, the condition of the English labourer was much more prosperous than that which was general in the same class on the Continent. Gregory King, in his very valuable estimate of the state and condition of England 'in 1696, has calculated that, out of a population of about 5,500,000, about 2,700,000 ate meat daily, and that, of the remaining 2,800,000, 1,540,000 ate meat at least twice a week, while 240,000 were either sick persons or infants under thirteen months old. There remained 1,020,000 persons who receive alms, and consequently eat not flesh above once a week.' It would appear from this estimate that the whole population eat meat at least once a week and all healthy adults, who were not paupers, more than once; 2 while the These and many other statistics on the subject, are collected in Knight's Pictorial Hist. of England, iv. p. 700. Eden's Hist. of the Working Classes, iii. append. i. Thornton's Over-Population, p. 202. 2 The immense proportion the paupers bore to the rest of the popu lation will strike the reader, but Macaulay, in his famous third chapter, greatly exaggerated its significance as indicating the amount of real 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 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 321. a family, or 7. 188. a head. In France he calculated that the average annual income was 67. 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. 168. 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 accurate 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 was almost unused among the labour- the reign of Anne and the year 1750 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.' I |