wance; he refused them, showing them that they had the full
allowance sanctioned by the magistrates' scale; they swore, and
threatened he should repent of it; and such was their violence, that
she called them back, and prevailed on her husband to make them further
allowance. Mr. Faircloth, by a stricter system, reduced the rates at
Croydon; he became unpopular among the labourers, and after {167}
harvest they gathered in a riotous body about his threshing machine and
broke it to pieces. At Guilden Morden, in the same neighbourhood, a
burning took place of Mr. Butterfield's stacks to the amount of L1,500
damage. Mr. Butterfield was Overseer, and the Magistrates have
committed, on strong circumstantial evidence, a man to whom he had
denied relief, because he had refused to work for it. I have found
that the apprehension of this dreadful and easily perpetrated mischief
has greatly affected the minds of the rural parish officers, making the
power of the paupers over the funds provided for their relief almost
absolute as regards any discretion of the Overseers."

Report of Mr. Power, Assistant Commissioner for Cambs.:--

"If an Overseer refuses relief, or gives less than the pauper thinks
himself entitled to, he (the Overseer) was liable to be summoned before
Justices to defend himself against the charge of inhumanity and
oppression, and unhappily the applicant, who has been refused relief,
has frequently recourse to a much more summary remedy than the
interference of the Magistrates. The tribunal which enforces it sits,
not at the Petty Sessions, but at the beershop--it compels obedience,
not by summons and distress, but by violence and conflagration. The
most painful and the most formidable portion of our evidence, consists
of the proof that in many districts the principal obstacle to
improvement is the well-founded dread of these atrocities."

But worse than mere insolence of words were the acts of lawlessness and
crime which prevailed. These items occur in a number of typical
questions and answers in the report of the Commissioners, extracts from
which I give below, with the name of the Overseers or other
informants:--

BOURN (Mr. Whittet.)

The poverty which compelled the farmer to use the threshing machine,
bore down the labourer to unprecedented distress, and drove him to
desperation.

FOWLMERE.

The lawlessness, &c., here was "Chiefly attributable to a long course
of bad execution of the Poor-laws. T