6 - Access to Land

Summary

The question of labourers’ access to land in the nineteenth century was fraught with controversy and myth. It is not now generally thought that the process of land enclosure robbed the self sufficient peasantry of their land and reduced them to a landless class of employees. During the main period of parliamentary enclosure in Bedfordshire - from 1750 to 1830 — most Bedfordshire countrymen had little or no access to any land of their own. Nevertheless the applications for poor law relief even in the 1840’s indicate the presence of a small minority of land holders among this depressed section of the community. Some allotments were made available to the poor at the time of Swing riots of 1830. Parishes were able to provide land for the poor under the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1819 (59 Geo. Ill cap. 12).

Some Bedfordshire landowners and administrators such as the Russells of Woburn and Henry Trethewy, the Cornish-born steward of the de Grey estate at Wrest Park, Silsoe, took the lead in providing the labourer with allotments, which, orginally an adjunct to the Poor Law, became a fringe benefit to encourage farm workers to remain within the village community.

The agricultural depression of the 1870’s called into question the whole basis of what had been assumed was a prosperous and successful rural social system. Perhaps the concentration on the middle-acreage, tenant farmer had after all been ill advised. Land reform, i.e. the re-creation of a self-supporting peasantry with its own small holdings, and recruited from the ranks of the hitherto landless rural workers, was, after all, the route to rural prosperity. In some other countries in northern Europe, in Scandinavia and even in backward Ireland, the way forward was increasingly seen as involving a revived peasantry rather than an extinct peasantry. In England the advanced radicals like Joseph Chamberlain and Jesse Collings took up the call for land-reform in the ‘unauthorised programme’ of the Liberals in 1885.

In the event, it was the Conservatives who won the 1886 election, not least because they had the support of the land-reforming element among the liberals, who had deserted Gladstone over the issue of Irish Home Rule.