Widows Abound

In​ The Country and the City, Raymond Williams described the powerful attraction many people feel for the ‘knowable community’ of the rural past. We hope to find in such places, he wrote, a prelapsarian refuge from the world of today. One such refuge could be found in the novels of George Eliot, which are populated by cottagers, carpenters, farmers’ wives, lacklustre clergymen and Methodist preachers. Characters of all classes are given their own opinions and idiomatic speech. Common experiences, quarrels, love and loss trump structural factors. Human universality was more easily observed in the countryside; Williams and Eliot agreed about that. Eliot’s fiction borrows heavily from the area around her birthplace, Chilvers Coton in Warwickshire. Parts of her first work of fiction, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), are set in that village, disguised as Shepperton. In the first of its three tales, ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’, she made clear that she intended to focus on ordinary people, admonishing readers who wanted anything else. ‘These commonplace people … bear a conscience,’ she wrote, ‘and have felt the sublime prompting to do the painful right … Nay, is there not a pathos in their very insignificance – in our comparison of their dim and narrow existence with the glorious possibilities of that human nature which they share?’ Dickens praised the ‘exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos’ of the stories, particularly that of Reverend Barton, who struggles haplessly to impart divine wisdom to the inmates of the local workhouse. His wife, Milly, dies giving birth to their seventh child, diminished by the strain of looking after an unthinking wealthy guest as well as her clueless husband.

A certain ‘pathos’ does emerge from these stories, which suggests something amiss in parish life. The problem can be traced back to the decline of the role of the landed elite, which began as early as the 1500s. In The Agrarian Problem in the 16th Century (1912), R.H. Tawney argued that Tudor landowners changed the terms of paternalistic governance when they enriched themselves through buying land and becoming involved in the wool trade. Rather than acting as custodians of the land, the gentry came to see property as a means of advancement. Like Eliot, Tawney was interested in the part played in this by the clergy. In Religion and the Rise of Capitalism he pointed to the Restoration settlement, which embraced property rights. Tawney criticised the Church for accepting ‘the prevalent social philosophy’ and adapting its teaching. From now on, he wrote, ‘religious thought was no longer an imperious master, but a docile pupil.’

Bernard Mandeville’s commentary in The Fable of the Bees (1714) reveals the attitude that lurked behind the new economic relationships. The poor, he wrote, ‘have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure’. For society to be happy, ‘it is necessary that great numbers should be wretched as well as poor.’ Wages must be kept low to ward off what economic historians termed the ‘leisure preference’ and workers called Saint Monday (it extended, some claimed, to Saint Tuesday).

Early modern historians seldom pay homage to Tawney; his preoccupations seem out of step with the contemporary interest in colonial settings. Yet a later generation of scholars carried forward the spirit of his argument in their investigations into the effects of increasing wealth disparity in the early modern era, examining the way social cohesion was maintained through acts of hospitality, gift-giving and charity. Such activities continued into the late 17th century, but by the 18th century new limits had been set on community and parish responsibility. Legal action against gleaners, who were sued for trespass, indicated that biblical directives no longer held sway with some landlords, even if local justices tried to rein in their inflated notion of property rights. The enclosure of common land was made possible by arguments in favour of efficient cultivation and cheap grain. By the end of the 18th century, criticisms of rural labourers were accompanied by rising rural underemployment. Objections to spiralling poor rates – a property tax used to provide relief – exposed the unwillingness of the landed classes to share the spoils of modernised agriculture.

As Tawney argued, monetary relations permeated this society. Financial transactions didn’t always serve to undermine social cohesion; they could just as easily have the opposite effect, given the shortage of ready coin, and extensive networks of credit and debt were generated by everyday activities. Obligations such as paying wages or reimbursing the cost of raw materials relied on credit, or payment in kind. But such obligations didn’t always signal a concern for mutual wellbeing, as the increase in litigiousness in the 17th century suggests. Face-to-face relations could break as well as make alliances. Village holidays and male fellowship in the alehouse may have provided an opportunity to affirm ties despite differences in wealth. And as more formal associational life grew over the course of the 18th century, new affiliations, such as friendly societies, gradually created social bonds that enabled a different kind of material support.

Steve Hindle has spent his career examining the social ties that sustained parish life. The Social Topography of a Rural Community is an impressive work of historical archaeology. Hindle describes the lives of 780 inhabitants of 176 households in the parish of Chilvers Coton in 1684. Tawney isn’t mentioned, but his measuring stick for the new style of affluence, an absence of charity to the lower rungs of the labouring poor, makes an appearance. The disparities of wealth within the community were growing, but many of the old charitable traditions still held. Hindle acknowledges Eliot’s title in his own and praises ‘her sympathy for the poetry and pathos lying in the experience of otherwise unremarkable people’. He also employs her idioms: some of his individuals sound remarkably similar to her characters. But Hindle’s study allows us to access people of this parish in ways that novels and histories from above can’t emulate.

The book draws primarily on a trove of data assembled by a ‘control-freak’ landlord (Hindle’s phrase), Sir Richard Newdigate, 2nd baronet, an ancestor of the landowner for whom Eliot’s father acted as agent. Provoked by a sense of rivalry with neighbouring landowners, Newdigate sent elected officials (called ‘jurors’) knocking on every door in the parish to record the names of those who lived there and their occupations. It took the jurors three full days in December 1684 to cover Chilvers Coton, logging the location of all the dwellings, which were later marked on a map.

The jurors described and itemised the landscape: angled red roofs, gables and windows, the location of chimneys and doorways facing the street. A church steeple and its vicarage sit on a large parcel of land. (As Tawney might have predicted, the vicar, John Perkins, a bookish man who kept a lock on his study door, is far from being a spiritual leader.) Poorer dwellings are shown by dense clusters of tiny red dots, often in more remote areas. ‘A house with a lean-to’ yields a cache of information about a labourer’s family, and a nail-smith’s two-room, one-hearth cottage, located in the optimistically named Paradise End, a description of the nail-making process in detail that Adam Smith would have appreciated. The jurors carefully counted livestock, by far the most valuable category of goods in probate records and owned at every rung on the social ladder, except the very bottom. Any animals drawn on the map indicate a record of illegal grazing; such knowledge was a problem for landless labourers, who depended on landlords turning a blind eye. By the time Hindle arrives at a ‘mean tenement’ belonging to a collier, we’ve been sensitised to deprivation, which was especially pronounced in mining families. Colliers, according to the commentary, squander their high wages on drink.

Unlike Eliot, who chooses the church, the centre of Chilvers Coton village life in these records is the alehouse run by Frances Rason, one of 26 widows in the parish. She described herself as a victualler, translated by Hindle as a supplier of fast food for the working people of the village. Some of those meals would have included cheese made in her household: she dedicated a large amount of space and equipment to the dairy. While other alehouses received admonitions against rowdy behaviour, Rason’s never did. As an owner-occupier, she would have been allotted an important pew in church and it seems she had friendly relations with the local miller and maltster. Life didn’t get much better than this for an alewife in a 17th-century village.

Rason must have been a trusted as well as a prominent member of the community: the records show that packets of silk were left in her alehouse by middlemen to be collected by weavers; nailmakers also went there to collect iron bars, the raw material of their trade. Rason rented out rooms, too; activity in this establishment must have been constant. A teenage granddaughter called Mary, listed as a servant, helped out. After Rason’s death, Mary became the owner of the family Bible, along with a large share of her grandmother’s movable goods. We’re left to wonder about her fate, however, because she disappears from local records in 1685, when Rason died. Perhaps she used family networks to find a new home. Working in the alehouse would have made her a good judge of character.

Certain features​ of communal charity proved that even humble status could confer serious responsibility, such as that given to two churchwardens – a labourer and a tanner – who had the job of handing out money on the occasion of an annual sermon for the poor. Those who showed up to church were given two-thirds of the cash; the unpopular vicar, Perkins, kept the remaining 6s. 8d. Villagers were enlisted to oversee probate proceedings, which required careful inventories of household belongings. The local miller and a farmer were asked to draw up an inventory for Perkins himself, when he died suddenly, intestate, in 1691. His considerable estate, valued at £106, was probably an underestimate because the two men wouldn’t have known the value of his substantial collection of books. He had never been present at a sickbed or witnessed a single will in his own parish, yet his relative affluence was apparent to all at the time of his death.

Surprisingly, Newdigate was not the wealthiest man in the area, though few would have realised it. Daniel Hinckley, a local man who became silkmaster in the nearby village of Astley, was deeply involved in the economic life of Warwickshire. A number of people who worked for him organised their households around the making of ‘narrow-ware’, silk ribbons used as ornaments in women’s hair and dresses. His wealth is evident from the inventory of raw materials in his possession at the time of his death in 1678, when he was probably in his late fifties. Silk weavers took in apprentices and servants, cramming them into unheated rooms attached to their cottages. Spread around the countryside near Coventry, this cottage industry provided ribbons for mourning dress and feminine attire as far away as the American colonies. Hinckley’s household had another significant source of income: his livestock – 36 cattle, 26 sheep, seven horses and three pigs – represented the capital of a prosperous farm. His foray into the silk business may have started as a sideline. Other local industries were less bucolic. Smoke hung over Windmill Field Lane, and its blacksmith and metalworkers would have made a good deal of noise. In the southern part of the parish, coalworks left exposed trenches and slagheaps.

The ‘middling sort’, small husbandmen, yeomen and craftsmen with more than sufficient land, formed a sizeable cohort of respectable parish leadership. Their existence is reassuring, but it is important to look below them, to those who lived in cottages with gardens and orchards; in one of Hindle’s charts, their plots ranged from a fifth to as much as three and a half acres. These people might have kept livestock and grown vegetables to augment the food they bought with their wages. Agricultural labour would have constituted part of their income for only some of the year. According to Hindle’s calculations, the wages paid by Newdigate were less than half the market rate and far short of what was needed to support a family of five. To make things worse, only 24 of the 90 cottages in Chilvers Coton had the right to use the common grazing. The vast majority of labouring families came up short each year.

Such households subsisted only through the efforts of all members. The work of women, in particular, is largely lost to the historical record. The construct of the male breadwinner belongs to a later period: women’s economic activities mattered a great deal in the late 17th century. In Chilvers Coton women spun and wove, managed small farms, milked cows, produced cheese and butter for market and shared responsibility for their husbands’ artisan labour. For families without much land or access to commons, these activities made the difference between destitution and survival. Historians tend to call the act of bringing family income up to the point of debt-free sufficiency ‘makeshift’ work, a word as gender-biased as the era it represents. ‘The woman who manages a dairy has a large share in making the rent,’ Eliot wrote of the Poysers, a successful farming family, in Adam Bede.

Considering how badly women were paid, it’s not surprising that they often had to resort to parish relief after losing a husband. Their work in the fields was poorly remunerated and is difficult to trace in the financial records of estates because of its seasonal and ad hoc nature. The wife of an agricultural labourer might earn £1.15 for working a full haying season. Compared to the income from dairy cows grazed on the commons, which could reach as much as £14 and even £20, such wages were meagre indeed. In Alternative Agriculture (1997), the historian Joan Thirsk wrote about the ‘small things’ women did to earn money on the side. Precarity required being alert to opportunities such as gathering and selling mushrooms or herbs. Still, many 17th-century villagers couldn’t survive without financial aid. The death of an adult could spell disaster in families with too many dependants or too few helpful relations. Hindle writes about one of the two overseers of the poor, the prosperous miller Henry Clay, who in the year 1684 disbursed more than £44 to those in need, some of them regular recipients and others with temporary problems. Widows abound in the archive: one widowed mother lived with a widowed daughter and her two children; another, widowed at 45, lived with her six children. The records remind us how much misfortune occurred in winter, when the need for clothing and fuel was high.

Hindle laments the number of dead children and spouses, a clear indicator of poor nutrition and harsh physical demands. Some cottagers paid very little rent, in a few cases less than a pound a year. This wasn’t generosity on the part of landlords, however: their poverty was sustained by an unwritten contract that allowed employers to call on their labour at a moment’s notice. Tenants and craftsmen waited every morning at a designated spot in order to learn what work was needed that day. To say that people lived from day to day, or hand to mouth, erases the role of the propertied classes in this state of affairs. A hundred years later, Malthus would voice the scorn of a particular section of the landed classes for the degradation of labourers without considering its structural causes.