SOURCE: "Cottage Economy," in William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 107-24.

[In the following chapter, Dyck discusses the background, intent, and critical reception of Cottage Economy.]

In 1823 The Edinburgh Review imposed a sudden if temporary ceasefire in its fifteen-year battle with Cobbett's politics and economics by declaring his new work Cottage Economy to be 'an excellent little book … abounding with kind and good feelings, as well as with most valuable information'. The Review (Henry Brougham was the author of the praise) recognized that Cobbett's work was addressed to 'them', or 'the labouring classes', but it encouraged the rich to enlist the text in Whig educational service as a 'really useful' publication. Tories, for their part, did not publicize their opinions on Cottage Economy, but much of Cobbett's enthusiasm for an independent cottage economy was echoed in Robert Southey's essays on the 'peasantry' for The Quarterly Review. Thus we might ask: was Cobbett absolving employers and the state of responsibility for rural poverty, or was Cottage Economy misinterpreted by the elite? Wholly the latter, [as I] will argue, for in its political suppositions, and above all in its revisionist model of agrarian capitalism, Cobbett's strictures on cottage technology parted company with Whig improvement theory and with Tory prescriptions on the means of creating independent cottagers out of proletarian economic conditions.

Programmes of self-help, such as that espoused in Cottage Economy, were not the preserve of Whigs and Tories. A central theme of popular rural song throughout the first half of the nineteenth century was the struggle between economic determinism and the people's own agency in the attainment of domestic happiness. When traditional ballads treating of the chivalry of the nobility fell out of favour after 1815, the labourers turned not only to overt protest verse but to a genre of cottage songs whose heroes and heroines were humble country men and women who lived by the sweat of their brows, and who strove to maintain hospitality and happiness in the face of material hardship. At first glance the cottage songs appear to conform to the values promoted by the dominant culture's intrusions into the rural song market, but where the latter decree that the poor are too often idle and dissolute, the cottage songs suggest that these vices afflict the rich more than the poor. The songs acknowledge that honesty is an important virtue, but they proceed to remark that grinding poverty and unjust laws frequently oblige the poor to supplement their household economy by poaching and other extra-legal endeavours. Happiness, the songs observe, cannot be found in the face of poverty and exhaustion, but they encourage the poor to maintain their spirits, to seek out political solutions to their problems and to do whatever they must to make cottage life bearable and efficient. Thus, contrary to the elitist caricature of the farm workers as violent and misanthropic boors, the cottage songs reveal a class of people who strove to solve their social and cultural problems according to their own values and moral priorities. Indeed, the songs underwrite Cobbett's dictum that 'though we are oppressed, there is always something that we can do ourselves'.

During his twenty-two years as a practising farmer Cobbett delighted in growing two blades of grass where only one grew before; he experimented with tree culture, Tullian drill husbandry, Indian corn, cottage manufacturing and the importation of merino sheep. Not all of these projects were successful (the sheep, for example, developed an incurable foot-rot on the wetter English pastures), but it is simply wrong to suggest that his agricultural projects were ill-conceived or demonstrative of his inability 'to innovate'. He was indeed 'bereft of allies' in his husbandry, but only because of his opposition to the capital-intensive and market-oriented agriculture conducted at Holkham, Woburn and Petworth. As he explained to Thomas Coke, he was an improver with a difference:

[Improvement] is a mark of good taste, and it is a pursuit attended with more pleasure, perhaps, than any other. But, if the thing cannot be accomplished without producing the fall, the degradation and misery of millions, it is not improvement… The gay farmhouses with pianos within were not improvements. The pulling down of 200,000 small houses and making the inhabitants paupers was not an improvement. The gutting of the cottages of their clocks and brass-kettles and brewing-tackle was no improvement.

In Cobbett's 'radical' husbandry, as he called it, improvement was a technological innovation which added to the food, dress and happiness of those who worked the land. While the agricultural societies of the farmers and landlords ('nests of conspirators against the labourer', in Cobbett's view) awarded premiums to employers who cultivated the most land with the fewest hands, Cobbett's experiments were manpower intensive, even to the point where he once worked 100 men upon 4 acres at Kensington. The great object of Cobbett's agricultural experiments was to elevate labourers into self-sufficient smallholders, and in the process to undermine the high capitalism of large farmers and shopkeepers. Not in so many words did he encourage labourers to cease waged employment, but nor did he disguise the fact that the introduction of more non-wage forms of survival would reverse proletarianization and reduce the pool of reserve labour upon which large-scale capitalist agriculture depended.

Cobbett deplored the word 'peasantry' on account of its implication of a 'degraded caste of persons', but he was strongly supportive of many of the occupational characteristics that rural historians have assigned to an objective or idealized peasantry. Indeed, Cobbett's assumption in Cottage Economy that many village workers extracted part of their subsistence from self-employments, cottage gardens and other diverse ingenuities goes some way towards reinforcing the suggestions by Mick Reed and Dennis Mills that peasants or household producers were more common in nineteenth-century rural England than we have been in the habit of thinking. Cobbett certainly remarked upon a trend in his day towards a threefold tiering of rural society—namely landlords, tenant farmers and hired labourers—but he also observed that many agricultural workers in the rural South derived a portion of their livelihood by productive modes that were distinct from market-oriented capital on one hand, and from proletarian labour on the other.

For Cobbett, the most important means of self-sufficiency was access to the soil, whether in the form of common land, cottage gardens or small farms. Even at Botley, where he cobbled together farms to a total of some 600 acres (mostly during his anti-Jacobin years, but still an embarrassment to a future critic of engrossment), he stood opposed to enclosure schemes which would have contributed more acres to his personal holdings. These stands against enclosure were hardly acts of great charity, but he also pursued more direct initiatives in support of landholding among the rural poor. During the scarcity of 1816, according to the vestry minutes of Bishop's Waltham, he used his influence as one of the larger landholders in the parish to call a special vestry meeting to obtain leave from the Lord of the Manor and the copyhold tenants

to enclose small parcels of Waste-Land in order to assist them in the support of their families. Second, to consult on the propriety of making application to the Lord of the Manor and the tenants to grant Copies for the said enclosures, and also for all enclosures already made in the manor by Encroachers, if the said Encroachers be poor men or women belonging to this Parish.

The proposal, according to the minutes, 'was rejected, their [sic] being only Mr. Cobbett to vote for the Propositions'. Among those who voted against the initiatives were two leasers of pauper labour and three large farmers: the first claimed that the parcels of land would make the labourers more 'saucy', the second argued that it would cause them to breed more rapidly and the third suggested that it would lead them to demand higher wages. Not only was the plan lost but within two years the vestry voted to throw open the existing encroachments which Cobbett had sought to have certified in deed.

Although not resident at Botley after his bankruptcy of 1820, Cobbett maintained a close interest in the welfare of the labourers and cottagers in his former parishes. In 1826 he opposed a petition by local farmers and landlords to enclose the 1,300 acres of Waltham Chase, on which lived a thousand cottagers who drew a large portion of their living from the cows, pigs and forest horses that they grazed on the common. The petitioners' claim that the land was 'unproductive in its present state' was sufficient word for the House of Commons, which drafted and passed a bill allowing the enclosure to proceed. Much to Cobbett's gratification, however, the Lords, to whom he had submitted evidence on both the productive use of the Chase and the hardship that its enclosure would cause, inspected the bill in committee and refused to proceed with it. 'Judge you of [the farmers'] mortification', said Cobbett to the cottagers:

You have seen an egg-sucking cur, when an egg-shell fitted with hot coals has been crammed into his mouth; and you have seen him twist his jaws about, and stare like mad. Like these curs were the graspers, when the House of Lords refused to give them the power of robbing the poor of Waltham Chase of the last blade of grass.

It was Cobbett's experience that commons and small farms bred a spirit of independence and self-confidence among the rural poor. His favourite agricultural scientist, Jethro Tull, had complained bitterly during the early eighteenth century of 'saucy' labourers who defied their masters and insisted that they be addressed 'in a very humble persuasive manner'. This was all to the good in Cobbett's view. While admitting that there might be some 'inconvenience' in brashness, he much preferred 'the saucy daring fellow' over the 'poor, crawling, feeble wretch, who is not saucy, only, perhaps, because he feels that he has not the power to maintain himself.

Cobbett also knew that labourers and cottagers were efficient and productive cultivators in their own right. Turning to Coke of Norfolk as an apologist for large farms and capital-intensive agriculture, he asserted that ten farms of 100 acres would yield more than one farm of 1,000 acres, for much agricultural produce, especially poultry, milk and honey, was more the result of time and care than of capital. The large farm, he claimed, only appeared more productive, with its large wagons rumbling to market along impressive new turnpikes. Large farmers knew as much, hence their bitter and irrational denunciations of cottagers as a 'new class of producer' who had the arrogance (in the words of one employer) to 'show us how to farm'. As one steward learned, 'it is by no means uncommon for a farmer who holds three or four hundred acres of land to complain, when his landlord interferes to take from him three or four acres for a cottager, that his farm is essentially injured by it'. In Wiltshire in 1806, recalled the rector of Broad Somerford, some parcels of land that farmers proved unable to reclaim were allotted to labourers, and soon 'cultivated in such perfection that … it is a disgrace to the farmer's cultivation'.

Cobbett knew many instances of cottagers succeeding at labour-intensive husbandry. Known to him since his youth were the Surrey 'Bourners' who put their spades to the tiny green patches between the heath-covered hills to the south of Farnham. 'The land being generally too poor to attract the rich,' Cobbett observed, 'this common has escaped enclosure bills; and every little green dip is now become a cottager's garden or field … till they have formed a grand community of cottages, each with its own plot of ground and its pigsty. Similar to the 'Bourners' were the cottagers of the New Forest who managed a prosperous and efficient agriculture which included a pig, sometimes a cow and pony, customary access to peat, wood and turf, as well as rights of grazing and mast. The pig was the certain thing: on one visit Cobbett counted some 140 within 60 yards of his horse. New Forest pigs, according to the topographers Brayley and Britton, produced the best bacon in the country, and reached weights of between 300 and 800 pounds apiece. Yet this dynamic economy of the foresters invited charges that they were so many thieves, prostitutes, smugglers and poachers. The agricultural improver Charles Vancouver pleaded on 'moral' grounds for the removal of the encroachers on the Forest's edge, while William Gilpin represented the entire population as 'an indolent race; poor and wretched in the extreme'. All their manifold advantages in way of fuel and livestock, he claimed, 'procure them not half the enjoyments of common day-labourers'. Cobbett, on the other hand, found them 'happy and well' with neat cottages, abundant fuel, a pig or two and sometimes a cow.

The pattern to emerge from Cobbett's detailed studies of forests and commons was that the poorer the soil the better off the labourers. At Swing-torn Micheldever in Hampshire he found newly enclosed commons, large farms and hungry labourers, whereas south of Winchester on the Mildmay estates, amid poorer soil, smaller farms and abundant woods and commons, the labourers had gardens, pigs and 'none of that haggard look which is so painful to my eyes in the north of Hampshire'. At Hurstbourne Tarrant the soil was rich and the agriculture advanced, but the labourers among the poorest in the county. To the south and east on the difficult soil of the Sussex woodlands, the labourers and cottagers were better off than their fellows in the corn-growing regions, for 'all is not appropriated where there are coppices and woods, where the cultivation is not so easy and the produce so very large'. In the forests near Tunbridge Wells, for example, he found that the labouring people looked 'pretty well' and had pigs in their sties; while in more arable areas, such as the Isle of Thanet, they 'suffer from the want of fuel, and they have nothing but their bare pay'. Scenes of poverty amid plenty were observed by Cobbett in the valley of the Avon, East Anglia and most often in north Hampshire and Wiltshire, where he found the labourers at the 'inferno potato level' with 'worse gardens than anywhere else'.

Of all country workers it was the 'clay and coppice' people of the southern weald that Cobbett most admired, and it was among them that he researched and compiled the recipes and instructions of Cottage Economy. These workers were unlettered and superstitious, but from the awkward wealden soils they extracted a hearty living 'by hook or by crook'. They had pigs, cows in some cases, winter employment in the coppices and a ready supply of wood for fuel, pig-sties, cow-sheds and hop-poles. These people were not confronted by enclosure schemes or by engrossing farmers; they secured their subsistence independently of the rich, who despised them for it. These 'leather-legged chaps', as Cobbett called them, were neither capitalist nor proletarian; they produced for their own consumption, exchanged produce with their friends and neighbours and had only occasional recourse to the commercial market. It was Cobbett's observation that they were able to maintain their independent economy, not so much because of any uniquely 'entrepreneurial' disposition, but because their property was 'deemed worth nothing' by the large landholders.

Much in contrast with the clay and coppice people were the labourers of arable districts who were often obliged to pay £4 or £5 a year, or a quarter of the man's earnings, for wood, peat or coal. Some Wiltshire labourers, Cobbett observed, scrambled for fuel merely to boil water for tea.

These 'local disadvantages', as Frederick Eden glibly called them, were not sympathetically treated by the labourers' critics: a Surrey farmer, for example, seemed to have the right idea when he urged his workers to diversify their diet by boiling rather than broiling their meat, but after a fair trial his workers complained that they could not afford the additional fuel involved. Cobbett understood the problem: at Botley he included a constant supply of fuel in his workers' wages; he also ensured that his cottages were fitted with large ovens. But these were extraordinary practices; the first cottage of Joseph and Hannah Ashby, for example, had no range for cooking, 'only an open fire with a shallow oven of seventeenthcentury pattern under it'. Such an obvious disadvantage, however, did not prevent a visitor to Tysoe from publicly condemning the 'improvidence and cooking of the cottage women', which charge would have gone unchallenged had not Joseph, like Cobbett, possessed the exceptional ability to launch a written defence of the skills and efficiency of his class.

Ill-informed criticism of the labourers' 'improvidence' was commonplace in nineteenth-century cottage manuals. But while Cobbett's treatise was a rare exception, it did not pretend to approve of all of the labourers' domestic habits. Not intending that the book be read by employers or Whig educators, he dealt frankly with domestic inefficiencies, calling upon rural workers to make the best use of their raw materials. There 'are very few gardens of the labourers in the country', he observed, 'unless where they have been totally stripped by the bull-frog system of enclosure, which do not contain twenty or thirty rods each'. He instructed his readers in how to turn these few rods to full advantage, and at the same time to cease all unnecessary indulgences which imbalanced the cottage budget. His most controversial advice pertained to bread—the 'staff of life' which he insisted upon for every farm worker. A man earning 10s. a week, with four children, an industrious wife and a quarter acre garden, he calculated, should not have his children crying for bread, even with flour at 6d. a bushel. The woman's duty was to bake the bread; that of the man was not to complain that a coarser loaf was not good enough—'it was good enough for his forefathers who were too proud to be paupers'. These heady words were more pleasing to the readers of The Edinburgh Review than to the southern rural workers, who associated the coarse and heavy flour of Cobbett's recommendation with extraordinary scarcity, the olden times and the fare of the Midlands and North. But unlike other commentators who criticized the labourers' insistence upon the wheaten loaf, Cobbett ensured that he also offered advice on the means of securing the other two-thirds of the three Bs: bacon and beer.

In a small way Cottage Economy indulged the southern farm worker by refusing to recommend the more flexible diet of the labourer of the North and Scotland. It was Cobbett's boast that a Sussex labourer would not adopt a northern diet unless the rich 'broke every limb in his body', destroyed the coppices and woods and force-fed him 'oat-cakes, pea-bunnochs, and burgoo'. Thus no sooner was he across the Tweed in 1832 than he began composing broadsides for the southern chopsticks about the scarcity of villages, churches, alehouses, flower-gardens, and pigs and geese, while ridiculing the bothies where the Scottish labourers kept residence and prepared their meals from their allowances of potatoes, oats, barley and milk. 'If this be the effect of [Scottish] light,' he declared, 'give me the darkness o' tha' Sooth', and on he went to urge the southern labourers to go to any length to preserve their gardens, Poor Laws and what remained of their bread, bacon and beer. This was indulgence of a sort, but it was also the commission of the southern labourers' own songs, which refused to relinquish a claim to the three Bs, even if it meant foregoing the more varied fare of their Scottish brothers and sisters.

The Edinburgh Review was able to embrace Cottage Economy on account that its editors did not detect Cobbett's unofficial sub-text which invited the labourers to steal fuel and fodder, to poach as required and to evade the exciseman whenever possible. Such practices were condoned by Cobbett on account of his belief that the labourers already performed adequate services for their rulers and employers, who in turn bore much of the responsibility for the erosion of organic relationships within the cottage. The state taxed leather, salt, candles, soap, malt and hops, while employers often refused to break bulk or to retail small portions of food to their workers. The result was a dependence upon shopkeepers which crippled the cottage budget by appending to food costs the profits of farmer, miller, mealman and retailer, which in many cases amounted to the difference between indebtedness and solvency within the cottage. A cycle was thereby set in motion that saw the labourers mortgage their harvest earnings by July, fall into debt by early winter, and have their credit vanish by the start of the new year. Among Cobbett's official remedies were his campaigns against excise duties, his lectures to farmers on the virtues of the farm-gate sale and his support for the cottage cow-keeping programmes of Lords Brownlow, Carrington, Stanhope and Winchelsea, but he did not hold his breath for these reforms, advising the labourers in the meantime to do what they had to do—legal or otherwise—to avoid the shopkeeper and the purchase of taxable commodities.

After the quarter-acre garden or its pilfered equivalent the cornerstone of Cobbett's writing on cottage economics was the pig. It was the national animal, according to Cobbett and the labourers—unmatched in taste and culinary versatility. Cobbett was even moved to suggest that a flitch in the larder was more important and meaningful than a complete set of the Political Register; it prompted peace, goodwill and happiness in a way that nothing else could. As Walter Rose later observed, the flitch 'formed the purtiest picture in the house', and 'to understand why, you must know not only the labourers' habit of mind but the poverty from which his stock had sprung'. Cobbett well understood this state of mind, but first he got down to advising the labourers on the means of fattening hogs upon a wide variety of fodders amenable to spade husbandry, including potatoes, pease, beans, cabbages, turnips and Indian corn, together with the familiar roadside acquisitions that inclined some Dorset farmers to declare that 'no labourer can be honest and feed a pig'. It was in pig-keeping that labourers and cottagers most ably demonstrated the 'hook or crook' ingenuity that Cobbett wished to see extended to all aspects of the rural domestic experience, for despite a decline in the number of cottage pigs in some regions, Cobbett found many sties still occupied, especially in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Kent, the Isle of Wight and the fens of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire. Exact figures are hard to come by, but there seems to have been a pig in about 40 per cent of cottage gardens.

Like Flora Thompson, Cobbett revelled in the lore of the pig. He spoke in metaphysical tone about the sagacity and discriminating palate of the hog, and happily conformed with the countryman's penchant for scratching a pig's back with a walking stick while entertaining passers-by with tall stories about the hog's wisdom. One of his yarns, though 'true beyond all doubt', pertained to a gamekeeper who had taught a pig to point to partridges and other fallen game in the manner of a pointer dog. Accordingly, Cobbett insisted upon first-class accommodation for his swine: 'When I make up my hogs' lodging place for winter, I look well at it, and consider, whether, upon a pinch, I could, for once and away, make shift to lodge in it myself. If I shiver at the thought, the place is not good enough for my hogs.' During his stay in America in 1817-18, he went as far as to accommodate a large sow inside his Long Island farmhouse, much to the irritation of his son John who was kept awake at night by the incessant grunts of the boarder. If in some ways Cobbett lived an absurd and obsessive life, this was not one of them: the pig is a tidy and intelligent animal maligned only by urban prejudice. Its well-being was the most important concern of a pig-keeping household; when the bacon chest ran low, Cobbett observed, the pig-keeper's discourse evolved from 'd—d hog' to 'pretty piggy'; and as slaughter-day approached, the atmosphere in the cottage became one of nervous anticipation. Along with the labourers, Cobbett remembered the procedures of the butchering with proverbs and rituals, knowing that the job had to be done methodically and with a mystical reverence, not in the haphazard and secular manner of Hardy's Jude. For a small minority of countrymen, such as Joseph Ashby, the mentality associated with pig-keeping was intellectually debilitating; Cobbett preferred to see it as an example of the importance of tradition, neighbourliness and good living in the village community.

Cobbett's greatest contribution to pig-keeping was his introduction to England of 'Cobbett's Corn': a dwarf variety of Continental maize which he proved would ripen in England and provide an excellent source of both animal fodder and of human food. As small a crop as 10 rods, he claimed, could fatten a pig to 1,000 pounds; or if the labourer preferred, five pigs to 200 pounds. The crop had much to commend it in Cobbett's agrarian economics: it required no capital and no barn, it could be worked by women and children, with the entire family spending the winter months shelling ears at the fireside. Cobbett further predicted that cottagers with 20 rods of his corn would aspire to 10 acres, and subsequently to a small farm. In this way the corn would produce 'real emancipation: it is the poor man's plant: it is the plant of liberty; the plant of independence, and of insurance: 'It will prevent the labourers from ever being slaves again; it will inevitably re-produce small farms; it will make labourers more independent of their employers; it will bring back, it will hasten back, the country towards its former happy state.' Cobbett's expectations were not met, but in the face of derision from The Times and the Farmer's Journal, the crop met with substantial, if temporary, success. From his experimental farm in Surrey (the cost of the experiments ran into the 'thousands' according to his daughter Susan), 'Cobbett's Corn' spread in patch-work from Scotland to the Channel Islands, enabling a number of labourers to keep a pig for the first time. Early in 1831, on account of the excellent public response to the corn, Cobbett arranged to distribute free packages of seed to the Swing counties, each of which was to receive 200 ears for its labourers, with the exception of Kent, which was to receive 500 in unsubtle commemoration of the starting point of the rising. It was Cobbett's intention to distribute the corn in person, 'but I do not want to be hanged; and, I know, that no place is safe for me; which is not at a good distance from the ricks and barns, and furnishes me with an alibi'. When the torches were laid to rest, Cobbett hurried to the Swing-tom parishes of Sussex and north Hampshire, where he organized the planting of the corn in the face of derision from large farmers, the London press and an estranged Henry Hunt. All that mattered to Cobbett was the response of the labourers, who seem to have appreciated the gesture. One elderly labourer refused to accept payment from Cobbett for two exemplary ears: 'I planted 24 corns, and I have these bunches of fine ears, I have put some short ones by for seed and Mr. Cobbett, God bless him, he is welcome to the whole of them if he wishes it.' The local scribe who passed on the message might have coloured its contents to curry favour with Cobbett; nevertheless the corn was not the hoax that many alleged, even some of Cobbett's political adversaries admitted as much. Still, not even Cobbett himself boasted complete success, for the new crop failed to bring an end to the human consumption of potatoes.

It is understandable that late twentieth-century Britons—the world's foremost consumers of potatoes—should find novelty and amusement in Cobbett's diatribes against 'the root of extreme unction', but dietary dignity is relative. If today's North Americans feel no cultural imposition in gnawing 'Cobbett's Corn' directly off the cob, the same cannot be said for many aghast British observers, who sometimes marvel at the culinary simplicity and apparent indignity of the spectacle. Cobbett ate his sweet corn directly off the cob, yet he deplored the sight of labourers unearthing potatoes, tossing them unwashed into a pot, and carrying them cold to the fields in their satchels. It was not so much the taste or the foreign origins of the potato that most unnerved him (nor its status as an innovative crop: his own sweet corn was an even newer arrival), but rather the 'slovenly and beastly habits' which he associated with its production and consumption. The vigour of Cobbett's opposition to the 'villainous root' had much to do with with his recollection of a potato-free Farnham:

I can remember when the first acre of potatoes was planted in a field, in the neighbourhood of the place where I was born; and I very well remember, that even the poorest of the people would not eat them. They called them hog-potatoes; but now, they are become a considerable portion of the diet of those who raise the bread for others to eat.

Although carrying his opposition to the ridiculous heights of threatening to inflict penalties upon anyone who transported potatoes onto his own farms, he had important scientific and economic objections to the root. First, it contributed little to the organic relationships in the cottage garden, yielding no straw for pig-bedding and returning few nutrients to the soil. Second, he joined the labourers in objecting to potatoes, not as a dietary supplement, but as the 'sole food of man'. Finally, he strongly rejected the uncharitable idea (often expressed in Cobbett's own day, and later by J. H. Clapham) that potatoes were adequate compensation for the labourers' losses in other vegetable fare. The labourers of 1830 were 'almost wholly supplied with potatoes', according to one observer: 'breakfast and dinner brought to them in the fields, and nothing but potatoes'. In 1826, not a particularly hungry year, Alexander Somerville was obliged to do with his crop of potatoes 'what I intended a pig to do—eat them'. Most emphatically of all, Cobbett opposed the potato because it allowed rural employers to add to the exploitation of their workers. Farmers represented the potato plot as 'a blessing to all the lower classes of the community', for it meant that their labourers might survive on 7s. or 8s. a week. In the words of one agricultural reporter, the new crop kept the labourers 'more under subjection' by discouraging them from 'leaving their master during the summer; as in that case the crop would be forfeited'.

Potato-eating, according to Cobbett, was not an isolated practice but 'a component part of the tea-drinking system' which cumulatively robbed the labourers of time, money and good health. In advising English workers to refrain from tea, he joined the company of John Wesley, Arthur Young, Frederick Eden, William Howitt and Sir John Sinclair—Tories in the main. These men looked back to an older, more virile and 'manly' England; they parted company with Cobbett on political matters but believed in fair play and hard work, which according to most genuine countrymen, required an ample supply of beer. For William Marshall, the speed at which harvest work was performed stood in inverse relationship with the amount of beer consumed. The same observation was made all over the Kingdom, including by a Shropshire farmer who after complaining of the 'excessive quantity of beverage' allowed to the farm workers of his county, proceeded to observe (without relating cause and effect) that 'there are few parts of England, where the harvest is got in with such spirit and expedition'. Cobbett was in no doubt that beer was a necessity of life for those who lived by their labour. As an employer he discovered that one labourer 'well lined with meat and beer is worth two or three creatures swelled out with warm water, under the name of tea'. In terms of the labourers' overall diet, he rated beer next in importance to bread and meat, and as far more important than cheese or butter.

Opposition to beer came from the advocates (mainly Whigs and Peelites) of an urban-based English culture. The younger Peel, whom Cobbett later confronted in Parliament for a repeal of the malt duty, defended tea as a moral refreshment and as 'our national beverage'. Cobbett and his men could only laugh at these suggestions; they saw the advertisers of tea in the same light as they saw temperance reformers: as 'despicable drivelling quacks'. This is not to say that Cobbett approved of immoderate consumption or drunkenness. He carefully calculated his workers' allowances at two quarts per day in winter, three in spring and five in summer; this much the labourers must have, he argued, otherwise they would turn to the alehouse with ruinous frequency.

Cobbett was far from alone in condemning the decline in cottage brewing precipitated by the leap in the malt tax from 10s. 6d. per quarter in 1791 to 38s. 8d. in 1804. Farmer John Ellman of Glynde in Sussex informed the 1821 Select Committee on Agriculture that when he began farming in the 1770s, every family in his parish brewed their own beer—'there are few of them now that do, unless I give them the malt'. Ellman was no Radical, and partly for this reason Cobbett extracted abundant mileage from the testimony, referring to it not fewer than twenty times. Many other commentators supplied similar evidence. At Chailey in Sussex during the 1790s it was observed that 'since the advance in the price of malt, both the brewing and consumption of beer have been much discontinued; and tea and spirits have been very greatly substituted'. In nearby Offlham there was said to be tea but no beer in the cottages. In Berkshire, according to David Davies, home-brewing fell off markedly during the early 1790s on account of a doubling of the taxes on malt and hops. During the 1780s, remembered an Isle of Thanet farmer, every labourer 'had a barrel of beer in his cellar', but such was not the case by the 1830s. Home-brewing, said Frederick Eden in 1797, 'even amongst small farmers is at an end. The Poor drink tea at all their meals.' The labourers were 'worse workmen' as a result, added a Gloucestershire farmer, 'for they have not now strength sufficient to perform their work properly, from the want of a nutritive and invigorating beverage, which the removal of the Tax upon Malt would supply'.

Some of Cobbett's archest political foes, including the Hampshire MP Willis Fleming and Thomas Coke of Holkham, lamented the passing of cottage brewing. Many farmers, to be sure, were less interested in cheap beer than in markets for their barley, but some were genuinely distressed at the sight of their workers attempting to quench their thirst at the water-pump. In some cases these farmers continued to brew, despite the high costs. A large Kentish farmer claimed that his brewing expenses amounted to £2,000 between 1831 and 1834; another announced that he tolerated a high malt bill because 'a man cannot work without beer'. Still, such sensitivity was the exception. The Essex farmer and political reformer Montagu Burgoyne, for example, was party to a local decision to pay weekly wages of 8s. with beer, or 9s. without. 'I am laughed at by all gentlemen farmers for preferring the former', he remarked, 'I know that it is attended with inconvenience; but it is no small comfort to the poor man; and trouble, in such a case, is a duty.'

Thus, while the commercial production of beer continued to rise after 1790, the decline of home-brewing meant a decrease in the rates of per capita consumption, which is to say that English rural workers doubtless consumed more beer in the 1720s than in the 1820s, despite a modest reduction in the malt duty in 1822. Moreover, the beer consumed in Regency times was largely purchased from the public house, where until 1830 it was taxed at the rate of 200 per cent. The bottle-crook that Cobbett had carried to the field in his youth became a rare sight. 'While this tax lasts', he argued,

working men have no home; no fireside, no family; they are driven to prowl about for drink like cattle in a dry summer. In short, this tax must be repealed, or we must prepare ourselves for everlasting strife, and everlasting confusion. Tax the wine, tax the spirits, tax the sugar, tax the tea, tax anything but the malt.

The malt duty was worse than plague, famine or civil war, he claimed, it was 'the main instrument in the ruin of England'. Given cheap malt, the labourers would brew again; their beer would cost them a penny a quart and they could dispense with the tea-kettle 'that boileth without ceasing, like the bowels of Mount-Edna'. In the meantime he urged his own workers to make their own malt behind the back of the exciseman, 'and good jovial lives they led'.

Along with the Poor Law Bill, the malt duty was Cobbett's first priority as a member of Parliament, and he died fighting for its repeal against the Whigs and Tories who cared little about the labourers and their mascot John Barleycorn. Home-brewing would ultimately return to the cottage, but not until later in the century, in the communities of Richard Jefferies and Flora Thompson, by which time tea was commonplace and the standing of beer reduced in rural culture. Even a countryman of the calibre of W. H. Hudson would assume that neatness and civic pride in Wiltshire villages implied temperance among the inhabitants. He was surprised to learn that the villagers brewed their own beer and drank of it daily. Doubtless the village was sober not despite its home-brewing but because of it, just as Cobbett would have anticipated.

The great explanation for Cobbett's long-standing opposition to Regency tax schedules lies not in the Political Register but in Cottage Economy. The approximately 40 percent of the labourers' earnings that went to the taxman were the ways in which the 'system' contributed to the corruption of the labourers' economy. Salt quarried in Hampshire cost 2s. 6d. in the state of New York, but 19s. at the quarry itself. Legislators seemed unaware that salt was required in the making of butter, cheese and, above all, bacon. The labourer Thomas Smart, in giving evidence to the 1824 parliamentary committee on agricultural wages, complained that the salt tax prevented him from keeping a pig, for the three pecks needed to salt a goodsized hog were elevated by the tax from 6d. to 10s. 6d. The pig might also have to go if the farmer refused to sell the odd bushel of wheat to the labourer, for that was the source of bran that best concluded the fattening process. The demise of home-brewing also had implications for pig-keeping inasmuch as used malt was often applied to the same purpose. Without a pig, in turn, there was neither bacon in the cottage nor natural fertilizer for the garden; nor was there lard for cooking or (to return to the decline of home-brewing) yeast for the baking of bread. Cottagers had either to buy these supplies at the inflated prices of the shopkeeper, publican and baker, or they went without their traditional fare.

The last great compromise of the organic potential of the cottage lay in the removal of manufacturing from the countryside. Cobbett is often criticized for his prosaic appeals for a return to 'the dark ages' when women spun wool and knitted stockings, but it is seldom observed that he tackled the problem directly by reviving the strawplait industry which had entered a depression during the 1820s on account of the importation of straw hats from Tuscany. His plan was to grow in England the same grasses that were used in the Italian and American manufacture, which in a limited way he succeeded in doing. Among those to prosper at his industry were two Botley girls who earned more at plaiting than did their father at agricultural labour. A crippled Kentish worker who was unable to perform field labour mastered the craft of plaiting from the book by 'Mr. Caubitt'. Even as far north as the Orkneys there was introduced the 'Cobbett-Bonnet' industry, which, according to one observer, added £20,000 a year to the regional economy. For his efforts Cobbett was awarded the silver medal of the Society of Arts (he thought that he deserved the gold), which he accepted in a frank speech condemning 'that despicable cant, which was constantly dinned into the ears of the labouring classes; who, if they complained of their situation, were immediately told, that they ought to be contented with the state of paupers'. Mixed with the applause of Society members, according to The Times correspondent, was 'some slight disapprobation'. A certain amount of disapprobation was inevitable for Cobbett was attracted to the industry because it engendered no urban masses, 'calico-lords' or Combination Acts. He also liked the fact that it required little capital, and that it was 'a great deal better employment than singing hymns, listening to the bawling of the Methodist parson, or in reading those lying blackguard things called religious tracts'.

Cottage Economy sought to rebuild the cottage as a viable economic organism at the same time as Cobbett campaigned against legislation prejudicial to the labourers' independence and happiness. At one level it is a practical text on cookery, but when set beside Cobbett's other ventures on behalf of the village economy, it becomes a highly political text in a way that The Edinburgh Review did not perceive. Even on points where Cobbett and the ruling class seemed to be in essential agreement, such as on the merits of the straw-plait industry, or on the virtues of home-brewed ale, they were at political and economic odds; for while most legislators and employers were not exactly opposed to improvements in the labourers' happiness and material circumstances, they were not prepared to run any risk of esteeming labour ahead of capital. Cobbett, on the other hand, perceived the cottage, and indeed the entire industry of agriculture, as a family unit of peasant production which would have all but destroyed capitalist agriculture. Cottage Economy worked in close collaboration with the labourers' own cultural priorities, while giving them hard advice on how to brew affordable beer (even with the malt tax in place), to build ice-houses and to keep bees. Although stopping short of the more collectivist agrarianism of the Owenites or Spenceans, Cobbett was adamant that his readers not be content as waged labourers or even as cottagers; he wanted a nation of peasants or 'household producers' who exchanged goods and services in kind, cultivated their own lands with family hands and avoided the capitalist market except to sell by barter some excess produce at traditional fairs:

I hold a return to small farms to be absolutely necessary to a restoration of any thing like an English community; and I am quite sure, that the ruin of the present race of farmers, generally, is a necessary preliminary to this … Men, not only without capital, but who have never so much as heard the coxcomical word, must be put to cultivate farms. Farms will be divided again.

And so sang the labourers, who called for ten farms to be made of one. But small farms did not return, and the primacy of capital was not reduced. Even the later allotment movement was viewed by many employers with grave suspicion: as a Suffolk labourer recalled, 'the landowners and gentry were as much against our desire for allotments as if we had claimed universal suffrage'.