to poverty by having
spent all their legacies!"

It was not, however, so much in favour of the farmer as the system
might seem, for they got the worst of the labour--of the two whom Mr.
Nash was obliged to take in the above instance, one killed a valuable
mare, and the other he was obliged to prosecute for stealing corn--for
the farmer was obliged to take his share of the unemployed labour, and
often had a dozen idle worthless men on his hands at times when five or
six would have done the work.

Those of us to whom the memory of the bent-backed figure of the
"wheat-barn tasker" in every village, is now but a dim vision of the
past, can hardly realize how bitter must have been the feeling when the
threshing machine came to do away with the flail. A simple matter it
may seem, yet the peasant revolt which it brought about was for the
time more universal, and more effective, than Wat Tyler's rebellion,
because, without Wat Tyler's organization, it found a means of working
in every village. To the mind of the labourer this uprooting of the
habitual daily work of a thousand years, taken in connection with the
coming movement against allowing the labourer to go to the overseer to
make up his wages out of the rates--these things together presented to
his mind an outlook which was bad enough to arouse the sluggish mind of
the peasant in every village. So he set about upon a course of
retaliation and unreasoning revenge. The threshing machine was
threatening their work, and so upon the threshing machine wherever they
found it the labourers set with a vengeance. The effects of that
vengeance are traceable in the criminal returns for the period. Thus
the number of criminals for trial for malicious offences against
property, which for the previous five or six years had scarcely
averaged fifty a year, in the year 1831 went up at a hound to a total
of 1,245, of which no less than 921 were for "destroying threshing
machines." Riots, incendiarism, and sending letters threatening to
burn houses, &c., also went up almost to a corresponding extent.

One or two local examples of pauper insolence and tyranny may be given
from the Commissioners' report:--

"The tone assumed by the paupers towards those who dispense relief is
generally very insolent and often assumes a more fearful character. At
Great Gransden, the Overseer's wife told me that two days before my
visit, two paupers came to her husband demanding an increase of
allo