On one point both of the two last committees were agreed, that the condition of the labourer was improved, and they said he was better off than at any former period, for his wages remained the same, while prices of necessaries had fallen.  That his wages went further is true, but they were still miserably low, and he was often housed worse than the animals on the farm.  ‘Wattle and dab’ (or mud and straw) formed the walls of his cottage, the floors were often of 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 early as eleven or twelve, so much ale and cider had been drunk