Introduction: The Bedfordshire Farm Worker In The Nineteenth Century

Summary

Although nineteenth century England was the world’s first industrial society, agriculture remained the largest single male occupation at mid century and farm workers formed the largest occupational group. As long as industry was powered by steam, it was confined largely to the midlands and north. The population of an inland, rural county like Bedfordshire remained almost entirely dependent on agriculture and the most typical Bedfordshire man was one who earned his living on the land.

It is not always realised that societies where most of the working population are engaged in cultivating the land in return for wages, are, historically speaking, rather rare. Most agrarian societies in the past have either been based on some form of serfdom or slavery or have been peasant societies where the typical countryman cultivated the land on his own account with the help of his family. Even within the British Isles during the nineteenth century, peasant communities were the rule in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and some remote parts of England. Only in the progressive, prosperous south and east of England was most of the land cultivated by farmers who employed labour on a considerable scale.

In lowland England, the peasantry had long disappeared by the nineteenth century. In an arable county like Bedfordshire, rural society had become divided into three classes – landowners great and not so great who drew a rent; farmers (some owners,others tenants) who managed the land in return for profits from the sale of produce; and a much more numerous class of wage-dependent labourers. It is with this last class that this book is concerned.

Bedfordshire is an appropriate county in which to make a study of the Victorian farm worker. Being one of the corn-growing counties of the eastern half of England, the classic pattern of landlord, farmer and labourer was highly developed and accepted with little interchange or social mobility between classes. The farm-labouring way of life in Bedfordshire was relatively undistorted by outside influence. North of the Trent, farm-workers’ wages were influenced favourably by the presence of industry and coalfields; in the pastoral counties of Wales and the west there was less rigid distinction between master and man on the land; while further south the influence of London made itself felt in terms of higher wages and greater opportunities.