Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

13 Pre-Victorian Society; ‘Gentle And Simple’ and doubtless prized occasions. In 1846, the starting-point of the central component of this study, Charles Pearson, a journalist and commentator, asserted that the English were ‘chained to the spot’. Indeed they were for the most part chained to the spot legally as well as socially by the settlement laws. Vigorous attempts were made to restrict the ceaseless movement that so much alarmed the authorities. The settlement laws obliged all those in houses of less than £10 annual rental – often the yardstick for the ‘simple’ and ‘gentle’ division and also one of the devices used for electoral eligibility- to return to and/or remain in their parish. This was because one’s home parish had the responsibility, were one a vagrant or pauper, to provide poor law aid. No ratepayer wanted to be forking out money for other people’s misfits. It was today’s complaints about immigrants scrounging off national benefits writ small. In general, it was a not terribly efficient way of trying to prevent the lower classes roaming all over the place. For the period before about 1840 was a restless one, characterised by dislocation and stress. From the onset of the Industrial Revolution until today, with cricket frequently used as a picturesque illustration, many have mourned the loss of the rural idyll. There is more than a note of romantic fancy in this pastoral fallacy. Whatever the coming hardships of industrial experience, few migrants to the factory town regretted their move. For example, a study based on the memoirs and journals of 350 such industrial incomers found no longing for agrarian bliss. 6 Starvation wages, the problem of finding winter work, the oft forgotten nastiness of rural child labour and a general fear of exploitation had been the norm. What still existed of the common ownership of land was all but obliterated by the Agricultural Revolution, particularly in the later part of the 18 th century and in the decades up until the General Enclosure Act of 1845. It was tantamount to an industrial approach to farming, involving pastoral and arable agriculture alike over much more extensive areas. Commons and smallholdings were ‘inclosed’ by purchase or more substantially by parliamentary legislation. In the hundred years up to 1850 a third of the farmed land, some 14m acres, was thereby enclosed in a torrent of legislation, leaving 200 persons owning half the nation’s land. One incidental side-effect was the takeover of land used for common-or- garden recreation. But the human consequences were much more severe than merely lost ‘play’ opportunities. A landless host was created. Thousands, losing their own land tenures and the rights to common land, either became agricultural labourers or migrated to the towns. It is sometimes said, perhaps at some risk of simplification, that the enclosure movement recruited the industrial proletariat. This massive destabilisation of the rural economy and the beginnings of modern urban growth coupled to produce a restlessness of very unsettling proportions. It contributed to the very high level of disorder, what has been called a ‘flourishing economy of crime’, that disrupted society. 7