there are three churches of this denomination, with 600 communicants, another with 300, and at the third, which is called English Presbyterian, there are about 200. Most of their children are sent in due course to be catechized by their ministers. Mr Grey, in his article on Northumbrian Farming in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society, particularly notes the clean and respectable attire of the field-working women and girls in attending their places of worship on Sundays, and says it would fill with astonishment, and perhaps envy, the female peasantry of Kent or Surrey.
Before I left Wooler I paid a visit to one of the Presbyterian ministers. He endorsed all I had seen of the domestic life of these noble people. The bondage system, he said, was not so strict as it used to be. He spoke of the blot on the fair fame of Northumbria. Illegitimacy, was not uncommon, but he did not think it much due to field labour the cottages, no doubt, were a source of evil.
The prevalence of this particular vice is attributed by others to the laxity of opinion with reference to the marriage bond, arising from the frequency of border marriages in former times; but it does not seem necessary to go far for a cause in the presence of the bondage system, carried on in connection with one-roomed cottages.
At Eslington, close to Lord Ravensworth's mansion, I went into a cottage where seven persons—a father, mother, grandmother, two grown-up sons, and two other children—all slept in one room, and that room was not weather-tight, since daylight could be seen through the boards which formed the ceiling. They had given up the box-beds because of the "varmint," and had two four-posters, and a fold-up bedstead for the sons.
In this case the mother acted as the bondager, and the grandmother did the housework. Surely such a domestic arrangement is bad enough in itself; how much worse, if in addition they had been obliged to receive a stranger into the family, and that a young female. To a stranger it must be a matter of astonishment how such enlightened people as Northumbrian employers can allow such a system to continue a single day, did we not remember that there is not an evil which has afflicted and oppressed mankind but
