mud, and all ages
and both sexes frequently slept in one room. A block of ten cottages
were put up in the parish of Holmer[603] at the commencement of the
nineteenth century, which were said to have combined 'comfort,
convenience, and economy;' they each contained one room 12 feet by 14
feet and 6 feet high with a bedroom over, and cost L32 10s. each. They
were evidently considered quite superior dwellings, far better than
the ordinary run of labourer's cottages. Cobbett gives us a picture of
some in Leicestershire in 1826; 'hovels made of mud and straw, bits of
glass, or of old cast-off windows, without frames or hinges
frequently, and merely stuck in the mud wall. Enter them and look at
the bits of chairs or stools, the wretched boards tacked together to
serve for a table, the floor of pebble, broken brick, or of the bare
ground; look at the thing called a bed, and survey the rags on the
backs of the wretched inhabitants.'[604] The chief exceptions to this
state of affairs were the estates of many of the great landlords. On
that of the Earl of Winchelsea in Rutland, the cottages he had built
contained a kitchen, parlour, dairy, two bedrooms, and a cow-house,
and several had small holdings attached of from 5 to 20 acres.[605]
Not long before, wages in Hampshire and Wiltshire were 5s. and 6s. a
week.[606]

In 1822 it was stated that 'beef and mutton are things the taste of
which was unknown to the mass of labourers. No one has lived more in
cottages than I, and I declare solemnly I never remember once to have
seen such a thing.'[607] A group of women labourers, whom Cobbett saw
by the roadside in Hampshire, presented 'such an assemblage of rags as
I never saw before even amongst the hoppers at Farnham.'[608]

The labourer's wages may have gone a little further, but he had lost
his by-industries, his bit of land and rights of common, and would
have had a very different tale to tell from that of the framers of the
reports above quoted.

In spite of the complaints made that the improvements of the coaches
and of the roads drew the countryman to the towns, many stirred hardly
at all from their native parish, and their lives were now infinitely
duller than in the Middle Ages. The great event of the year was the
harvest home, which was usually a scene of great merry-making. In
Devonshire, when a farmer's wheat was ripe he sent round notice to the
neighbourhood, and men and women from all sides came to reap the crop.
As ea