When he returned to England in 1800 the state of things was much worse than when he had left, so that the contrast was brought home to him in the most vivid manner. Corn he found at 134s. the quarter: in the spring of 1801 it rose to 156s. On the 5th of March in that year the quartern loaf was 1s. 10½d. As to the poor labourers, the men who had toiled all the year round beneath the sun and the rain to raise this bread for others, they had to put up with what no one else would touch. They ate, as an old man in Northamptonshire once told me, what we now give to the pigs. Their barley bread was such poor stuff that it fell out of the crust directly it was cut. The English rural poor would have died off every winter by thousands had not the local authorities throughout the country kept them alive by charity. The custom was that when the gallon loaf of 8 lbs. 11 oz. rose to 1s., every man was to be allowed 3s. weekly, and to have is. 6d. in addition for each member of his family. In this way the whole agricultural population became pauperized. Cobbett found that one person in every seven throughout the country received parochial relief!
A Royal proclamation was put forth exhorting the people to eat brown bread, and bounties were offered on the introduction of maize and rice. Riots were general. The people, blinded by ignorance and hunger, supposed it was the fault of the millers and bakers, and tried to burn the mills and break open the bakers' shops.
The war was, of course, the immediate cause of this extreme misery, but for its ultimate cause we must look much further back. Not only in France, but also in England, had the poorer classes been degrading for generations. The cry of the labourer had long gone up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and did much, we may be sure, to bring about that Revolution in whose surges we still are.
A poet, remarkable for the extreme fidelity of his painting rather than for the high flight of his sentiment Or language, has given us graphic pictures of the woeful misery in which the poor of England were existing years before the war. Crabbe had the very best opportunities of knowing the truth as a country clergyman, and had no reason for exaggerating.
