ical inquiry into the condition of the poorer classes. He found that in this locality, where much labour is employed, various cots had been destroyed and no new ones built. In one district stood four houses, named birdcages; each had 4 rooms of the following dimensions in feet and inches:
- Kitchen: 9 ft. 5 by 8 ft. 11 by 6 ft. 6.
- Scullery: 8 ft. 6 by 4 ft. 6 by 6 ft. 6.
- Bedroom: 8 ft. 5 by 5 ft. 10 by 6 ft 3.
- Bedroom: 8 ft. 3 by 8 ft. 4 by 6 ft. 3.
(10.) Northamptonshire.
Brinworth, Pickford and Floore: in these villages in the winter 20—30 men were lounging about the streets from want of work. The farmers do not always till sufficiently the corn and turnip lands, and the landlord has found it best to throw all his farms together into 2 or 3. Hence want of employment. Whilst on one side of the wall, the land calls for labour, on the other side the defrauded labourers are casting at it longing glances. Feverishly overworked in summer, and half-starved in winter, it is no wonder if they say in their peculiar dialect, “the parson and gentlefolk seem frit to death at them.”
At Floore, instances, in one bedroom of the smallest size, of couples with 4, 5, 6 children; 3 adults with 5 children; a couple with grandfather and 6 children down with scarlet fever, &c.; in two houses with two bedrooms, two families of 8 and 9 adults respectively.
(11.) Wiltshire.
Stratton. 31 houses visited, 8 with only one bedroom. Pentill, in the same parish: a cot let at 1s. 3d. weekly with 4 adults and 4 children, had nothing good about it, except the walls, from the floor of rough-hewn pieces of stones to the roof of worn-out thatch.
