The Story of England, page 40
The most significant changes in the village in the eighteenth century came in its agricultural life, for these profoundly altered the social order. Ever since the village had been founded in the Dark Ages the life of its people had centred on the cultivation of the fields. But from the Tudor period onwards there was a movement across the country on the part of well-off landowners to enclose the common fields and move from arable to pasture. In Kibworth the old communally organized open fields still survived, as they did in most places in the English Midlands, but there were wealthy graziers among the local farmers ‘whose lands and tenements were so dispersed in the fields that in their present situation they were incapable of any considerable improvement’, as a Kibworth man was later to remark. On all fronts though this was an age of improvement. And wherever they could, such men were already trying to buy up parcels in the common fields, meadows and pastures with a view to gathering their scattered holdings together, usually through private agreements with other landowners, and enclosing them with hedges. From the seventeenth century, and particularly during the eighteenth, Parliament became involved in the process, enabling a majority of proprietors who were keen on the development to override the objections of a minority. In such economic rationalization lay the path to the future. Though some small yeoman farmers were still to be found in the area before the Second World War living in the old style, from now on the writing was largely on the wall for the old ways. The process came to a head with the enclosure of the common fields of the whole of the parish in 1779.
The enclosure of the common fields
On the evening of Wednesday, 21 April 1779, William Peters, the innkeeper of the Crown Inn on the main road in Kibworth Harcourt (now an Indian restaurant), had a big crowd in for a midweek night and did a roaring trade catering for a noisy meeting of local landholders. The assembled group were there to discuss the issue which had dominated talk in the parish for months: the enclosure of the open fields in the lordships of Kibworth Beauchamp, Kibworth Harcourt and Smeeton Westerby. Needless to say, no more than at any other time were these developments conditioned only by local concerns: just as in the Middle Ages, the reorganization of the countryside came at a time when society as a whole was undergoing rapid change. The population of England rose from five and a half million in 1688 to more than eight million in 1801. Huge urban centres were now growing up, especially London, of which an increasingly educated farming community was well aware through travel, business and the beginning of regional and local newspapers. Change was in the air.
Among local landholders, including ordinary small yeoman farmers like Will Perkins on Main Street, who still held land in virgates and yardlands, the issue of enclosure had already rumbled on contentiously for some years. The process of obtaining a Parliamentary Enclosure Act required the prior support of at least three quarters of the local proprietors, as well as agreement about who would act as commissioners to oversee the process and the compensation to be paid for tithe and manorial rights. In most places this was a drawn-out process, descending to light bickering at the very least. By 1779 it was achieved in Kibworth, and the necessary Act of Parliament was passed that year. If there was ongoing tension at the Crown that evening it may have stemmed from the owners of the eight out of the 148 ‘yardlands’ in Beauchamp who had declared their opposition to the process. Typically it was in Beauchamp, the proletarian half of the parish, that resistance was most felt.
The purpose of the meeting was for the appointed commissioners to debate the many practicalities arising from the Act’s execution, such as the definition of public roads and paths across the village land. Some of these had been customary ways for centuries: the Slang, from the horse mill out into the North Field; Mill Lane, westwards out of Beauchamp from which one could reach the west fields of both Smeeton and Beauchamp; the old ox tracks out into Ridge Field and Nether Field in Smeeton and on to the even more ancient furlong of the Gric. The new Act meant that the old pattern of the countryside was to be swept away.
The landscape they were measuring and valuing was owned by many landowners, the most important of which was Merton College, which leased lands in the open fields of Harcourt to farmers both big and small, some of which had been passed by father to son over many generations. As we have seen, the open-field landscape of Kibworth was the product of centuries of development and change since the fields were first laid out, probably in the tenth century, and then expanded up to 1300. Rights to use the land were shared between the landowners – Merton in Harcourt and various manorial lords in Smeeton and Beauchamp. The commoners had the right to graze their livestock when crops were not being grown. Some of these rights had eroded over the previous couple of centuries, and some areas of the parish had already been enclosed by well-off landowners working together. But still in the 1770s most of the land consisted of the remains of the three big fields, the common haymeadows and a series of closes, paddocks, orchards and gardens dotted around the village which had come down over time for common use; and also the common waste, the pasture and rough lands on the very edge of the parish. In 1779 this patchwork system, with its scores of field names going back to their medieval and Viking ancestors, was still part of the common mental world picture of the villagers. But with the sanction of the state, by parliamentary Act, these common lands were now to be fenced off and divided, with deeds and titles awarded to private owners, ending the centuries-old traditional common rights.
Throughout the summer that year the Enclosure Commissioners worked in the open fields of the ancient parish of Kibworth, walking with local jurymen, ‘dividing, allotting, and inclosing the Open and Common Pastures’ and measuring and staking out all public roads and tracks which traversed the open land. On 28 August a formal notice was printed in the local press, and pasted prominently around the village, detailing the various ‘Carriage and Drift Roads and Bridle Roads’ to be retained. Thus, for instance, ‘the present Turnpike Road [now the A6] leading from Market Harborough to Leicester, in the same track it now goes over the Fields, is marked and staked out of the breadth of sixty feet.’ (Other carriage roads in the parish were forty feet wide; bridle roads twenty.) The commissioners’ clerk, William Wartnaby, announced a subsequent meeting at the Crown, scheduled for 9 September, which would give villagers a chance to voice objections to the proposed routes.
Kibworth Harcourt in 1781 after enclosure, from a map in Merton College, Oxford: the three great open fields and the old customary holdings have now gone
Kibworth’s enclosure took place during the most important period of enclosure in Leicestershire: during the 1760s and 1770s two thirds of all the enclosure acts for the county were passed, at an average of five or six per year. In the parish of Kibworth some 3,900 acres of open farmland, unsegregated by hedge or fence, were awarded to twenty-seven proprietors in Beauchamp, twenty-three in Harcourt and thirty-five in Smeeton Westerby, according to the number of ‘yardlands’ they had previously claimed in the parish. The subsequent erection of fences and cultivation of hedges to demarcate individual plots would change the appearance of the surrounding country for ever, shaping today’s patchwork field system which we now think of as archetypal English countryside.
The most powerful local owners, Lebbeus Humphrey (a relative newcomer) and Robert Haymes (from a village family which rose in Tudor times), did best out of this process. The popular mythology of enclosure quickly became that of a ‘Great National Robbery’: a land grab by the powerful at the expense of the impoverished tenantry, whose access to any remaining common land was much reduced if it was not removed entirely. Dr John Aikin, a descendant of the Reverend John Jennings and born and raised in Kibworth himself, expressed the view of many radicals when he wrote: ‘[the poor man] has resigned to the landlord all his share of the ground, which his own hands cultivated, not reserving to himself as much as will bury him …’ A child in the 1860s, F. P. Woodford remembered the bitter opinion of many working men in the village:
the surrounding landowners said that it would be very advantageous if the fields, meadow and pastures were enclosed (for ever). Amazing candour! Agreeable and acceptable to all concerned no doubt, totally ignoring the poor man, whose rightful heritage they were, and whose need was more pressing than theirs (rank robbery, and discreditable to all concerned).
Historians have been more divided. Large-scale enclosure was both symptom and catalyst of broader economic change. As population growth increased the demand for food, and improvements in transport facilitated the movement of produce, so the incentive grew for landowners to pay the costs of enclosure in return for gains in productivity. In Leicestershire, at least, there do not seem to have been widespread outbreaks of violence as a result of parliamentary enclosures during the eighteenth century (the only instance concerning the South Field of Leicester in 1753) – though the much earlier Midlands Revolt of 1607 which affected the region to the south of Kibworth was sparked by the enclosure of common land. That said, there is certainly some evidence that the dramatic changes prompted by enclosure in Kibworth were the cause, directly or indirectly, of increased suffering among the growing numbers of rural poor.
The creation of a landless proletariat
In 1797, less than a decade after the parish of Kibworth was enclosed, Sir Frederick Eden published his remarkable and pioneering three-volume survey The State of the Poor, the predecessor of great works on the English working class from Engels to E. P. Thompson. Prompted by the hardship he observed among the labouring classes in 1794 and 1795, when harvests failed and prices rose steeply during the war with France, Eden set out to survey conditions among the poor all over England. Doing some of the fieldwork himself, he gathered information from the clergy, as well as designing a questionnaire which he sent out with ‘a remarkably faithful and intelligent person’, John Housman. Housman gave brief accounts of his tours in the Monthly Magazine and observed the rapid decline of arable now in the Leicestershire area where ‘the farmers graze most part of their grounds.’ A major change in English economy and society was under way before his eyes.
In Eden’s book Kibworth features strongly. The detailed picture Eden provided for the village in the 1790s noted that some nine tenths of the land had become pasture, while no common or waste land (such as described in 1086 in Domesday) now survived in the parish. Before the fields were enclosed, people in Kibworth told Eden, they were ‘solely applied’ to the production of corn; the poor then ‘had plenty of employment, in weeding, reaping, threshing, &c and could also collect a great deal of corn by gleaning’. ‘There is,’ Eden concluded, ‘some truth in these observations: one third or perhaps one fourth of the number of hands which were required twenty years ago, would now be sufficient, according to the present system of agriculture, to perform all the farming work in the parish.’
He may have exaggerated the extent to which the open fields in Kibworth had been exclusively arable – a portion at least of the open fields had been set aside for ‘ley’ (that is, grass for grazing) and the 1779 enclosure survey of the fields shows many already as ‘Old Inclosure’. But there is no doubt that pasture significantly increased as a result of enclosure and that this drastically reduced the available farm work for landless labourers. The 1801 crop returns gave the relatively low figure of 348 acres of surviving arable land for Kibworth Beauchamp, of which the largest constituents were beans, wheat and barley in that order. It cannot have been coincidental that annual expenditure on poor relief in Kibworth Beauchamp soared during this period: from £72 in the year ending Easter 1776, to £147 in 1785 to £423 in 1803 (getting on for £350,000 today in terms of the average earnings index).
Eden discussed in detail the economic situation of one Kibworth labourer in particular. In August 1795 he was forty years old, and had a wife and five children from fourteen down to eighteen months to support; at fourteen the eldest girl earned two shillings a week spinning, but neither the labourer’s wife nor his other children earned; his second daughter, who was twelve years old, suffered from fits. He worked part of the year as a canal navvy, and at other times picked up casual labour. Lacking the regular seasonal agricultural work on which his ancestors had relied and which he might have expected to perform for much of the year, the family were often dependent on the extensive system of charity organized by the parish – one of the features of Kibworth life as far back as records go. ‘The parish pays this man’s house-rent, finds him coals, occasionally gives him articles of wearing-apparel, and, for the last two weeks past, has given him an allowance of 2s. a week.’ The labourer gave a detailed account of his family’s basic diet:
[He] says that they use little or no milk or potatoes; that they seldom get any butter; neither do they use any oatmeal; that they occasionally buy a little cheese, and sometimes have meat on a Sunday; that his wife and daughters consume a small quantity of tea; but that bread is the chief support of the family and that they have far from a sufficiency of that article at present; that they should use much more, if they could procure it; and that his children are almost naked, and half-starved. He adds, that he has lately worked many days with only bread diet, and that many weeks have elapsed since he has tasted any beer.
With its journalistic approach to factual detail Eden’s approach, which is typified by this 1795 interview with a poor Kibworth labourer, is the pioneer of the flood of great nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature on the condition of the English working class, from Marx and Engels to Priestley and Orwell. In his book the signs are unmistakably on the wall. Over the next century the population of England will quadruple; our nameless worker and his family, it might fairly be said, represent a new turn in English history.
Canals and industry
Fortunately for him, and many others like him in Kibworth, at this particular moment, when the enclosure of the village fields severely reduced the available agricultural work, an entirely new source of labour – albeit temporary – had appeared in the region. ‘Many labourers,’ Eden noted, ‘can, at present, get work at a canal cutting in the neighbourhood; otherwise, the [county poor] rates must have been much higher than they even now are.’ The labourer reported that he was working at the canal for about half the year, earning 2 shillings a day, when the weather allowed. Money was money, with a family to feed, but digging canal trenches by hand, with hand picks and shovels, and with overseers intolerant of slacking, was work which must have been painful and draining almost beyond endurance on a meagre diet of bread and gruel.
For the region, though, this was a momentous development. Economic growth in Leicestershire had always been constrained by the fact that this part of the Midlands was unserved by navigable waterways. By now coal was an important part of the local economy, for industry and for domestic heating, since there were few sources of wood close by. In fact the Merton court rolls show that coal was already used in Kibworth in the late thirteenth century, when the peasants’ dues included carting the lord’s coal across the county. But the poor quality of roads and tracks made Kibworth dependent on local supplies of coal, which were more costly and inferior in quality to that produced in neighbouring Derbyshire. The roads were so bad in places that even local coal was brought to Leicester on the back of horses and mules. Goods from London, astonishingly, were still conveyed to Leicester by sea, in coasting brigs which travelled down the Thames, north around the Suffolk and Norfolk coasts to the Lincolnshire mouth of the Trent, and then in ‘Trent boats’ as far as Loughborough, before they were finally carried overland by wagon.
Though strong vested interests opposed the building of canals – not least the Leicestershire coal merchants – sufficient weight in favour was eventually secured to overcome resistance. The success of river ‘navigation’ schemes in the north of the county was followed in the early 1790s by the canal mania which gripped England as a whole. An ambitious plan was drawn up to create a water link – later dubbed the ‘Grand Junction’ – from London to the Oxford Canal and ultimately to join the Trent and Mersey Canal to Liverpool. This led to a ‘Union Canal’ project which would link the Midland towns of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester to this wider network. In spite of tortuous negotiations, and a dip in canal fever as the French wars continued, the project went ahead on a route which ran north-west from Market Harborough, round the southern edge of Smeeton Westerby, towards Leicester. Less than a mile to the west of Smeeton a major tunnel, 880 yards long, was dug through rising ground at Saddington, whose huge spoil tips are still visible along the edge of Smeeton fields. As the English canal revolution was launched, villagers in Kibworth had a box seat.
For the locals, though, this had pros and cons. On the one hand, employment in the village, which had dried up with the enclosing of the fields, could find an outlet on major local engineering projects. On the other, works on this scale required more labour than they alone could provide. Much of this labour was provided by gangs of imported ‘navigators’ or ‘navvies’ who lodged in temporary encampments on the edge of the village or in local accommodation if it could be found cheaply. The unruliness of many of these newcomers, who were often Irish, made them highly unpopular with the communities on which they descended. The height of canal mania in the 1790s was also a time of war in Europe, and since the Irish had a history of alliance with the French, xenophobic passions made it a particularly combustible time in the village. One incident recorded in the Leicester Journal for April 1795 became long remembered as the ‘Kibworth Riot’.
