The poor burn no coals: the struggle to stay warm in  nineteenth century rural England

 

This article investigates how the rural labouring classes in England kept warm during the nineteenth century. It examines three primary concerns of keeping warm: fuel, shelter, and the money that keeps the roofs over their heads and their fires burning. The primary focus of this article is Dorset, although other areas will be included for contextual purposes  

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Keeping warm was primarily a financial concern for the rural labouring classes in the nineteenth century.  The availability of employment, wages, and supplementary income from local trade determined their living standards. With money, rural labourers could buy warm clothes or rent land for fuel collection.

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One of the main factors that affected the income of rural labourers was enclosure. In short, enclosure was the revocation of common rights that the peasantry historically held to the lands of the parish. These common lands were allocated to private individuals, who would cordon it off with fences or bushes. The government implemented enclosure to make land more productive. However, it restricted the rural poor’s access to grazing pasture and fuel. Until the nineteenth century, enclosure had been an ongoing, and slow process over the centuries. However, the government increased the rate of enclosure with the Enclosure Acts of 1805.[1]

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So, how did enclosure affect the income of the rural labouring classes? In the case of our primary focus, Dorset, enclosure saw farmland converted into pasture. This had the effect of reducing employment opportunities in the region as it lowered the need for farm labourers. Not only did this put labourers out of work, but it increased competition for jobs, which depressed wages.  [2]

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Enclosure also reduced the means that the rural poor had to supplement their income. In pre-enclosure Dorset, rural labourers might have owned cows, pigs, or some poultry. They would take their animals to graze on common land. Occasionally, these animals could be sold to supplement income during the winter or periods of illness, to raise funds to maintain cottages or to buy winter clothes. After enclosure, most rural labourers had to sell their animals as they no longer had adequate grazing land. [3]

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This effect of enclosure has been recorded in ‘The Common A-Took in, Thomas and John,’ written in 1834, by William Barnes, a Dorset poet who wrote in the local dialect. In this poem, John expresses his worries about enclosure to Thomas. “Why, I'm a-getten rid ov ev'ry goose, An' goslen I've a-got: an' what is woose, I fear that I must zell my little cow.” To this Thomas explains that John could rent an allotment if the landlords decide to lease the land. To which John replies. “I do hope that they will do it here, Or I must goo to workhouse, I do fear.” [4]

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While fictional, this passage aims to reflect the realities of the rural labouring class life. In this, Barnes describes how enclosure removed a source of income that rural labourers relied on to the extent that, without it, they would be forced into the workhouse – a place of punitive labour for the poor that provides a meagre income. Ultimately, enclosure destabilised employment by removing jobs from the region. This impacted incomes which made it harder to access the resources needed to stay warm.

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Another factor that impacted the living standards of the rural poor was their ability to supplement their income through factory work. Here we see a distinct difference in northern and southern rural communities. In the south, we find families such as Joseph Houghton’s, a 45-year-old casual labourer in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. In 1867, his wife and four young children were described as sat around a meagre fire in an ill-maintained, sparsely furnished, single-room cottage, “nearly naked...with very little poor clothing.” [5] This is a description of absolute poverty.

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In the north, as the nineteenth century wore on, rural labourers resided closer to industrial areas and could supplement their wages with factory labour. This earning opportunity didn’t exist in the South. Moreover, Dorset had become synonymous with ‘hodges,’ a derogatory term for impoverished agricultural labourer. Thomas Hardy observed this in 1883 when he wrote that Dorset was “where the Hodge in his most unmitigated form is supposed to reside.” [6] This account is just an observation of the perceived condition of agricultural labourers in Dorset, so its use is limited. However, as the historian Mark Freeman has pointed out, the west country had the lowest agricultural wages and the living standards for rural labourers. Therefore, it is likely that the living conditions of rural labourers in Dorset were more likely to be like those of Joseph Houghton’s family.

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We can now turn our attention to fuel. What did the rural labouring classes of the nineteenth century burn in their fireplaces? Coal might be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of fuel in this period. However, in the countryside, coal was a luxury, and not widely used due to cost. Despite this, it was used on occasion. For example, after land was enclosed in North Elmham in 1833, £40 from the sale of land was used to buy coals for the poor. In 1801, similar charitable efforts were undertaken in Hickling, Norfolk, where eighty acres of land were rented to raise funds to buy coal for the poor. [7]

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In Dorset, there is no equivalent of the Norfolk coal charities. This is most likely due to cost of coal. In 1869, The Poole Pilot attributed the “comparatively high price of coal” to a lack of exports from Poole to coal-producing cities, such as Newcastle. On these ships, coal could have been brought back to Poole affordably.[8] With no coal charities and higher than-usual coal prices, the average rural labourer was dependent on fuel sources that could be scavenged or extracted locally.

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If labourers were dependent on scavenging, then it is reasonable to assume that they would have burnt wood from forests. However, in 1805, J. M. Ducumb noted that in the neighbouring county of Devon “the poor burn no coals, and very little wood, on account of the expense.”[9] The situation in Dorset would have been similar due to the enclosure of forests. Writing in Gillingham 1774, John Hutchins described that in order to access forested land, cottagers needed to pay a yearly sum.[10] The expense of renting a forest allotment from a local lord would likely be unaffordable for rural labourers due to declining incomes.

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If coal and wood were unaffordable or inaccessible for most, what else was there to burn? In late eighteenth-century Suffolk, the poet George Crabbe referred to the heaths as the origin of “the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor.” Likewise, J.M. Ducumb stated that in Devon “most of their fuel is peat or turf.”[11] From this, derive that the rural poor also made use of the Purbeck heaths in Dorset for fuel. There is evidence of this written in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. In this book, which is set in the Dorset heaths later on in the nineteenth century, Hardy describes a woman raking over a turf fire and stacking blocks of “fresh turf” over its smouldering embers.[12] Moreover, Hardy also writes about the use of furze, also known as gorse, in fires. Furze is a thorny, dry, and highly flammable shrub that grows in the Dorset heathlands. This fuel would be cut, bundled, and sold by Furze-cutters. Hardy, through the dialogue of his characters, describes how furze is a low-quality fuel that burns quickly and brightly.[13]

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Now that we have determined that the rural labouring classes primarily burned turf or peat, especially after enclosure. We can now ask: how did they light it? In The Return of the Native, Hardy describes a woman striking a light on kindled furze.[14] In this description, Hardy is referring to a Fire-striker or a Flint and steel. Fire-strikers were made from a thin steel plate, about an eighth of an inch thick and two inches long. They were commonly an inverted U-shape so they could be secured over the fingers and struck upon a piece of flint. Most English labourers used a Fire-striker to light a fire, and they remained in common use after the invention of matches. This was because they were durable and affordable, costing around fourpence each.[15] Those without a fire-striker would ask their neighbours for some burning embers to start a fire.[16]

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The Fire-striker would be kept in a tinder box, another essential component of lighting a fire. This box would be divided into two or three sections, the first, smaller section, would contain a piece of flint and a Fire-striker, and the second section would contain tinder. These boxes were wooden and fairly large, around 10 inches long, and sometimes had a handle. They had a simple and functional appearance. The tinder section could contain various combustible materials: the down of reed mace, dried leaves, dried horse dung, or thistles. However, the commonest type of kindling was Amadou, from the French amadouer, which means to allure, as it enticed the spark into a fire. Amadou could be made from any type of puffball fungus, which grows in between the layers of fallen, decaying oak or willow trees. The fungus would be gathered in the autumn, beaten with a mallet till soft and stored in the tinder box next to the fireplace or hearth. [17]

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Keeping a fire alight is also about shelter. Labourers often built cottages on waste or common land. These were simple buildings, constructed from a timber frame; with wattle and daub walls and space for window shutters; the floors were made from wooden planks, and the roofs were thatched. Some were built with stone chimneys, however, many were built with large holes in the roof instead, particularly early on in the century. Once constructed, manorial lords would usually incorporate the cottages into their lands to legitimise the property and extract rents.[18]

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In other situations, rural labourers would live in converted farmhouses. In 1867, a commissioner described a converted farmhouse in Southwater, Sussex, that was nearly unliveable. According to the commissioner, the house had such a large chimney that a fire couldn’t be kept alight on wet days. On these days, the commissioner added, the families are forced to keep warm by going into their beds. However, even when they did escape to their beds, the houses were in such a state that the roofs would be unable to weather any sort of downpour, which would result in their bedding being drenched in rain. [19]

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Cottages may have had some of the same problems. In William Barnes's poem The Settle an the Girt Wood Vire, he remembers sitting in his Dorset cottage around a fire. He states “I cou’d zee al up into the sky, An’ watch the smoke goo vrom the vire, al up an’ out o’ tun an higher.”[20] Due to this chimney, or ‘tun’, being large enough to see the stars out of, it would have let rain in too. Overall, rural housing during the nineteenth century can be summed up in the words of Rev. A. H. S. Barwell, “very cold, badly closed, and badly drained.”[21]

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The question of how the rural labouring classes kept warm during the nineteenth century has many answers. The poor were dependent on a myriad of factors to stay warm: the availability of employment, the cost and availability of fuel and the condition of their housing. There are still more variables that I have not covered,such as their clothes, hot meals, and social spaces with open fires such as pubs and clubs. The rural poor felt the impact of these factors depending on their region. In the north, the rural poor often had a greater quality of life. This was due to their ability to supplement their wages with factory work. In the south, the living standards were considerably worse. Dorset labourers were the most poorly paid in southern England, and as a result, they struggled the most. Here, in Dorset, keeping warm was hard. Housing conditions were bad, the availability of work was low, and the cost of fuel was high. Ultimately, much of the rural poor went cold.

 

[1]G. E. Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to its Causes Incidence and Impact, 1750 – 1850 (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1997), 143; History of the Heaths, Dorset council, accessed on 8th September 2024, https://www.dorsetcouncil.gov.uk/w/history-of-the-heaths#:~:text=The%20Enclosures%20Act%20of%201805%20determined%20much%20of,the%20heath%20with%20pine%20to%20%27improve%27%20the%20area.

 

[2] Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England,143.

3 Ibid., 131-132.

[4] William Barnes, “The Common A-Took In, Thomas and John,” in The Poems of William Barnes Vol One, edited by Bernard Jones (London: Centaur Press, 1962), 13.

[5] Barnes, “The Common A-took in,”121.

[6] Mark Freeman, “The Agricultural Labourer and the Hodge stereotype C. 1850-1914,” The Agricultural History Review 49, no. 2 (2001), 174.

[7] Sara Birtles, “Common Land, Poor Relief and Enclosure: The Use of Manorial Resources in Fulfilling Parish Obligations, 1601-1834.” Past and Present no.165 (Nov. 1999), 91-93.

[8] “Cost of Coals,” Poole Pilot, (February 1869), 3.

[9] J. M. Ducumb, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Hereford (1805), 14.

[10] John Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the Country of Dorset (London: W. Bowyer and J. Nichols, 1774), 240.

[11] J. M. Ducumb, General view of the agriculture of the county of Hereford (1805), 14.

[12] Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Belgravia, 1878; Auckland: The Floating press, 2010), 610.

[13] Ibid., 51-52.

[14] Ibid., 601.

[15] Miller Christy, “Concerning Tinder-Boxes. Article I.-Domestic Tinder Boxes,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol.1, no.1 (March 1903), 56-59.

[16] A. Roger Ekrich, At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (New York: W. W. Norton Company, Inc., 2005), 102.

[17] Christy, “Concerning Tinder-Boxes,” 60.

[18] John Broad, “Housing the Rural Poor in Southern England, 1650 – 1850,” The Agricultural History Review 48, no.2 (2000): 154.

[19] Tremenheere, Commission on Employment of Children, 98.

[20] William Barnes, T. L. Burton, The Sound of William Barnes Dialect Poems: Vol. 1, Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, First Collection (1844) (Adelaide: University of Adelaide press, 203), 345.

[21] Tremenheere, Commission on Employment of Children, 160.