to age – were seldom paid more frequently than two or three times a year. Upon marriage the farm servants moved out of the farm house, and set up home for themselves.
These two groups, the farm servants and regular outdoor agricultural labourers, formed the bulk of the farm labour force. Casual labour was also used: Irishmen, women and children, and textile workers (like the woolcombers mentioned earlier) would be brought in for the harvest. Among the regular labourers there was sometimes a degree of specialisation; shepherds, ploughmen, waggoners. But for the most part the agricultural labourer was expected to turn his hand to whatever the season of the year required. Wage rates were higher in the northern counties of England than in the South, varying from as much as 14s in the West Riding to 7s in Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Suffolk. Unlike his urban counterpart, the agricultural labourer sometimes had additional benefits in kind. A tied cottage was often only a damp hovel; the proverbial pig and patch of garden might be but a poor relic of the once ‘bold peasantry of England’; and it is impossible to know how many labourers enjoyed even these modest ‘extras’ and how many not. Where they did exist they perhaps helped to mitigate slightly the rigours of family life on 10s a week. Where they did not, recourse to poor relief was inevitable, as the swollen poor rates of the early 1830s attest.
For twenty years previously Cobbett had thundered against the degradation of the agricultural labourers to a race of potato-eating, tea-drinking serfs. His description of their condition was borne out by others. William Howitt, a popular author and journalist, who was anxious to take a favourable, even sentimental view of rural England, had to admit that the upbringing of the ordinary farm labourer made him little better than an animal. After describing how the labourer’s children are set to perform small tasks from the earliest possible age, he continued:
‘They are mighty useful animals in their day and generation, and as they get bigger, they successively learn to drive plough, and then to hold it; to drive the team, and finally to do all the labours of a man. This is the growing up of a farm servant. All this time he is learning his business, but he is learning nothing else, – he is growing up into a tall, long, smock-frocked, straw-hatted, ankle-booted fellow, with a gait as graceful as one of his own plough-bullocks. He has grown up, and gone to service; and there he is, as simple, as ignorant, and as laborious a creature as one of the wagon-horses that he drives. The mechanic sees his weekly newspaper over his pipe and pot; but the clod-hopper, the chopstick, the hawbuck, the hind, the Johnny-raw, or by whatever name, in whatever district he may be called, is everywhere the same, – he sees no newspaper, and if he did, he could not read it; and if he hears his master reading it, ten to one but he drops asleep over it. In fact, he has no interest in it…. He is as much of an animal as air and exercise, strong living and sound sleeping can make him, and he is nothing more.’13
Allowing for Howitt’s middle class, townsman’s prejudices, this unflattering passage is a fair example of the educated early Victorian’s view of the agricultural labourer. It was an attitude of pity and contempt, mixed sometimes with compassion and occasionally with fear.
Probably the most upsetting thing that could happen in an agricultural village in the 1830s and 1840s was the arrival of the railway. The decision to bring the line through a particular district had far-reaching economic and social consequences for that area. But the immediate impact was the arrival of a small army of construction workers to build the track. These were the navvies, a body of men who in the space of a few decades accomplished feats of construction which dwarfed the building of the pyramids in the ancient world (as the Victorians noted) or (moderns might add) the motorways of the present day. Strictly, the navvies were not common labourers. Originally they had worked on the canals (hence the name navigators, shortened to navvies), and they stayed together as a body, moving from one line to the next as it was completed. They were prepared to go anywhere that the railway contractors wanted them, later to France, South America, Canada, Australia and the Crimea. Not all of the 200,000 men working on new lines in 1845 were true navvies: some were agricultural labourers who were recruited locally, but it is probable that some of these remained to become regular navvies. The main attraction of the job was its relatively high pay. In a bad year such as 1843, weekly wages were 15s or 16s 6d; in 1846 (a good year) they were 22s 6d and 24s. These rates were for pickmen and shovellers. Skilled men such as masons and bricklayers could earn up to 21s in 1843 and 33s in 1846.
The work was extremely hard and often dangerous. A navvy was expected to shovel about twenty tons of earth and rock a day on the basic jobs of cutting, banking and tunnelling. Excavating was done with pick and shovel, the navvies working in rows. The men worked in gangs under the direction of a ganger who could be either a foreman paid by the sub-contractor or an independent agent who contracted the work from the sub-contractor. In either case the ganger recruited the navies. Wet weather frequently created slippery, and therefore dangerous, conditions. The earth from the bottom of a cutting, for instance, had to be taken out in barrows hauled up the steep sides of the cutting, and it was easy to slip and fall beneath the overturned barrow-load of ‘muck’. Tunnels were nearly always deep in mud, and in addition there was the danger hazard of the crude methods of blasting. The casualties on the notorious Woodhead tunnel between Sheffield and Manchester (1839–45) read like battle figures: 32 killed, 140 seriously wounded, 400 lesser accidents. Edwin Chadwick, the Poor Law and sanitary reformer, calculated later that this was 3 per cent of the labour force killed and 14 per cent wounded. Compensation for injuries and death was seldom paid by the contractors or railway companies: a small payment from the navvies’ own contributory sick club was all that was available. Because navvies were constantly moving on as the line advanced no settled mode of life was possible. They lived in rough shanty towns, hastily thrown together, miles from any village. Their huts were made of mud or wood, with tarpaulins for the roof. They slept in tiers of bunks, twenty or thirty to a room. No family or home life was possible; they might as well have been in Van Diemen’s Land.
The reputation of the navvies was fearsome, and not without good cause. Superior physical strength, combined with barbarian bravado and high spirits marked them off from other labourers. They ate and drank more than any other men: two pounds of meat, two pounds of bread and five quarts of ale a day was normal navvy fare. Most of their earnings went in drink. After a payday (which the companies preferred to keep as infrequent as possible in order to strengthen their truck system) navvies would be drunk for days together, and there were plenty of stories of navvies (always known by their nicknames – Rainbow Peg, Gipsy Joe, Streaky Dick) who worked in a perpetual state of inebriation. Above all there were the fights and riots. Once the navvies had got the drink in them they were a terror to the surrounding countryside. Their drunken revelry (called a ‘randy’) ended in personal fighting and violence, and sometimes in riots between Irishmen and the rest. Few women lived in the camps; only old women to cook and wash, and some girls who were concubines. The popular image of the navvy as a violent, godless, drunken fellow, far removed from the ‘refining’ influences of home and family, contained much truth. At the same time it also had to be admitted that the navvy was ‘the king of labourers’.14
Another worker who performed the same type of sheer, hard muscular toil as the navvy was the coalminer. Traditionally he too was regarded as an uncouth savage, whose job and living habits segregated him from other sections of the labouring poor. Like the navvy he earned rather more than most labourers, but again his job was specialised and some aspects of it required skill. Wages varied between districts and between good and bad years, but a range of 15s to 25s was usual in the period 1830–50. For this the miner worked an 11- to 12-hour day for 4½ days a week. The work was hard and dangerous. At the coal face the hewers, naked and on their knees, hacked away at the coal with their picks. In narrow seams, which could be as low as 2ft 3ins in parts of the Yorkshire coalfields, the face worker had to lie on his side, use his elbow as a lever, and pick away at the coal. Behind him the ‘hurriers’ dragged away the cut coal in wheelless tubs or small trucks to the pit bottom, where it was hoisted to the surface or, in more primitive pits, carried up ladders in corves on the backs of women and boys. The transport of the coal underground, heavy and laborious
