Mysterious Wisdom (25 page)

‘The jocose talk of hay-makers is best at a distance,' George Eliot wrote in
Adam Bede
, a novel which explores village life at precisely Palmer's period. ‘Like those clumsy bells round the cows' necks, it has rather a coarse sound when it comes close, and may even grate on your ears painfully; but heard from far off, it mingles very prettily with the other joyous sounds of nature.'
6
Palmer, indulging his dreams of a pastoral idyll, did not see the realities of rural life. He did not consider the rheumatic damp that would have seeped into the watching shepherd's bones; the backbreaking ache of the bent reaper's pose; the terrible weariness of the labourer at the end of a day which, beginning even before the first scrawny cockerel had scrambled onto its dung heap, closed in an often fireless darkness with shivering families huddled on beds of flea-ridden straw. Palmer painted cottage windows glowing with a welcoming light. His more socially attuned contemporary, Eliot, spoke instead of ‘little dingy windows telling, like thick filmed eyes, of nothing but the darkness within'.
7

The inhabitants of Palmer's paintings are not real people. They are characters from a pastoral fantasy: denizens of flowered dells and fruitful landscapes fed by burgeoning nature with berries and nuts, dozing to the piping melodies of flutes while the mellow sun warms their plump cheeks. This is the world that he described in
The Shepherd's Home
, one of only a few of his poems to survive, in which he wrote of ‘a little village, safe, and still,/ Where pain and vice, full seldom come'; where ‘Clear, shallow, pebbled streams are found,/ Where many a fish doth skim and bound'; where ‘trim cottage gardens' are ‘intricate with fruit-bent boughs' and ‘sweet young maidens . . . fairer than the milky lilies do appear'.
8
Palmer wanted to believe in a nurturing land which would provide for its people as the mother ewe in one of his images lets down her milk to a nuzzling lamb. He loved ‘the jovial time of hop picking' when the whole village made ‘sunshine holiday', when ‘age and youth and childhood, merrily singing as they worked, garnered in the fragrant crop without the help of strangers'.
9
He relished the ‘pretty picture' of harvest home when, the very last wagon loaded up, the children would ride home atop ‘singing and shouting for joy' before retiring to the old farmhouse where, as Palmer looking back wistfully described it, ‘all the poor people who have been reaping for so many days in the hot sun till they are as brown as hazel nuts – all these merry reapers have a good supper together with music and song and dances'. ‘They worked hard for their master, and now he makes them happy,'
10
Palmer concluded, equating the feudal relationship of landowner and peasant with that of Christ and his Christian flock.

The reality was rather different from this rose-tinted idyll. The bucolic character, wrote the clear-sighted Eliot, was not always ‘of that entirely genial, merry, broad-grinning sort, apparently observed in most districts visited by artists'.
11
An observer, ‘under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes hardships picturesque', she wrote in
Middlemarch
, would find a village homestead delightful with its ivy-choked chimneys, its large porch ‘blocked up with bundles of sticks and half the windows closed with grey worm-eaten shutters about which the jasmine boughs grew in wild luxuriance'. The mouldering garden wall with hollyhocks peeping over it, the mossy thatch of the cowshed, the broken barn doors: ‘all these objects', when painted ‘under the quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds would have made a sort of picture which we have all paused over as a “charming bit”'.
12
As this fiercely moral and profoundly compassionate woman well knew, a grim reality blighted the pastoral whimsy and this was a particularly brutal period in the rural history of Britain.

Many of the poorest field workers were only able to survive because they could graze a cow, raise a flock of geese, collect firewood or grow a few vegetables on the common, a shared piece of land to which they had a traditional right by virtue of renting a cottage within a village. When this common land was enclosed they were deprived of their independence. Forced to sell the livestock which had helped to ward off penury, they had only their wages to rely on. Gradually, an underclass of agricultural labourers emerged. Many would not have been the sort of ‘civil cleanly moral peaceable and industrious'
13
folk whom Palmer met in the farmsteads of Shoreham for, by the end of the 1820s, more than a third of the population of the Kentish weald was unemployed.

The Corn Laws, which had filled the coffers of Nathanial Palmer on whose annual allowance Palmer's father now lived, had spread hunger and distress through the very communities within which he preached. Many could no longer afford to pay for the grain from which they ground their bread. This state of affairs was exacerbated by the prolonged agricultural recession which followed the end of the Napoleonic wars. The poor rates – a tax on property levied by the parish to provide relief for those in need – should have helped but instead they further added to the problem as farmers, hoping that they could leave it up to the parish to make good any deficiencies, offered only the barest subsistence wage to their labourers; a sum which did not increase upon marriage or the birth of children. A family man could no longer take pride in being a hard-working provider; he was forced to depend on the handouts of charitable relief. And even when a farmer did pay a decent living wage, he still had to contribute to the poor rate and so ended up subsidising his less humanitarian neighbour.

After the war, when returning soldiers flooded the labour markets, the cost of parish relief soared. Farmers cut back even further on wages, often by laying off workers. This decision was made easier by the arrival of threshing machines, one of which it was reckoned in 1830 could replace ten labourers.
14
This deprived men of the threshing work that they had come to rely on to tide them over the bleak winter months. Life grew ever harder, as a wry Kentish rhyme records.

 
       

Pork and cabbage all the year;

Mouldy bread and sourish beer,

Rusty bacon, skim milk cheese;

Beds of chaff and full of fleas,

Who would like the living here?

 

 

A few local parishes started subsidising emigration so that they could be rid of the excessive burden of maintaining the unemployed. In 1827, some seventy families from the Weald left England. Not far away, in Petworth, West Sussex, the Earl of Egremont offered to pay the passage to Canada for workers from his estate. He was praised for his magnanimity though, in truth, he had merely discovered a convenient way to dispatch a considerable problem along with any of the residual qualms of conscience that it had caused.

The outspoken radical William Cobbett – who had himself been a farm boy before a spell in the Army had expanded his horizons – toured the southern English countryside by foot and on horseback between 1821 and 1826 reporting on what he saw in his classic
Rural Rides
. He was clear as to the cause of the problem. It lay in the demise of the old English farmhouse in which the small farmer had provided board and lodging for workers whom he cared for as part of his family. They had tilled his few acres together and, at the end of the day, shared the fruits of their labour and the comforts of his home. There would have been a quart of beer, a good barley loaf and a bowl of potatoes, turnips and carrots from the garden and maybe some butter from the dairy wrapped up in a dock leaf and a hunk of smoked bacon cut from the storeroom's side of pig. But the days of ‘the cask in the cellar and the flitch in the pantry were gone',
15
Cobbett wrote. Traditional steadings had been swallowed whole by ‘bullfrog farmers', agricultural capitalists intent only on making a return on their money. An old farm table, spotted for sale at a country auction, summed up the situation for this writer: ‘Squire Charington's father used, I dare say, to sit at the head of the oak table along with his men, say grace to them, and cut up the meat and the pudding,' he wrote. ‘He might take a cup of strong beer to himself, when they had none; but that was pretty much all the difference in their manner of living. So that
all
lived well.' But as his son rose in his manner of living and expectations, Cobbett said, his need of luxuries, of wine decanters, of dinner sets and dessert knives, ‘must of necessity have robbed the long oak table if it had remained fully tenanted . . . therefore, it became almost untenanted; the labourers retreated to hovels, called cottages; and instead of board and lodging, they got money'.
16

By the end of the eighteenth century, the majority of farmers had become tenants of such wealthy landowners as the Marquis of Camden who, farming just a few miles from Shoreham, had, by Palmer's day, spread ‘his length and breadth over more . . . than ten or twelve thousand acres'.
17
In 1830, out of all the agricultural land in England,
The Times
estimated that 90 per cent was farmed under lease.
18
Even worse, when the old beneficial leases expired they were replaced with vastly inflated rental values which reflected the sharp rise in farm prices during the war. ‘The farmers have become labourers and tenants of little cottages for which they pay £5 or £6 an annum, though they cover a few rods only of that land which they had earlier sold for £2 an acre,' the newspaper reported.
19
Meanwhile, ‘the farming servant is a miserable outcast . . . ill-paid, half-starved, heartless and exasperated'. He is reduced to ‘little more than a labouring animal on the estate'.
20

The Church did nothing to help. It still exacted its tithes. One priest, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, laying the problem at the door of a rising population, urged ‘moral restraint'. He proposed that married labourers should abstain from sex while those still unwed should defer plans for matrimony until such time as they could be sure they could maintain a family without parish help. William Cobbett countered him vigorously, arguing that nobody had ever suggested controlling the birth rate of clergy or any other non-productive classes that drained public finances. Cobbett published a weekly newspaper, the
Political Register
, which, launched in 1802, soon established itself as a powerful radical voice. Landowners, he declared in his paper, were not any more valuable than their workers or more entitled to governmental protection. It would be immoral for them to continue to ‘perpetuate their extravagant gains'.

Palmer and Cobbett both dreamt of a perfect rural community. But, in 1829, when the youthfully self-indulgent Palmer, mingling for the most part with gentlemanly farmers and so blind to the baser sufferings of the agricultural community, refused to see anything but his archaic ideal, Cobbett (who did not disapprove of the hierarchical society or wish for any class-based antagonism) was pleading with his countrymen to recreate a working alliance wherein landowners would recognise their duties towards their workers and represent their case to Parliament. He called for reductions in tithes, reform of the Corn Laws, a wider suffrage and an end to innovations in the Poor Law – not least those which allowed unemployed workers to be put up for auction, their labour sold to the highest bidder, or permitted paupers to be used quite literally as beasts of burden, set to dragging laden carts or shouldering towering stacks of wood. Time and again, even as late as the harvest of 1830, Cobbett was begging the farmers to share more of their wealth. Change your ways now ‘or we shall be wide awake about the middle of next winter. The “grand rousing” will come from the fellows with hobnails in their shoes,' he warned.
21
These were the very hobnails that Palmer picked out in a sketch in which he posed a shepherd boy like a slumbering Endymion. This was the very year he was painting his
Coming from Evening Church,
a symbolic expression of an outmoded order, which, far from preserving a traditional idyll, was grinding the rural worker down into the dust.

 

 

By the end of the 1820s, a dangerous impasse had been reached. The inimical Cobbett again put his finger on the point: ‘Your labourers hate you as they hate toads and adders,' he warned landowners. ‘They regard you as their deadly enemies; as those who robbed them of their food and raiment, and who trample on them and insult them in their state of weakness; and they detest you accordingly . . . You know that you merit their deadly hatred; and then, proceeding upon a principle of the most abominable injustice, you hate them, and you destroy them, if possible, because you know that they hate you.'
22