GREEN LAND FAR AWAY 43

disposed of them to their richer neighbours. In other ways the
enclosures had operated against the interests of the labourer who,
by legal processes little understood by him, had been deprived of
certain prescriptive rights which had never had the formal
recognition of law. As Arthur Young put it, "The poor in these
parishes may say, Parliament may be tender of property; all I know is
I had a cow9 and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me." More
often the cow* was only a mangy donkey or a few straggling
geese, but the right to keep them on the common and to gather
firewood there had been -an important item in a poor country-
man's budget.

Yet if partially deprived, particularly in the southern counties,
of his former and inadequately recognised stake in the land,
robbed of his share in the dwindling wild food supply of the open
countryside by cruel Game Laws and of a market for the products
of his domestic handicrafts by the new machines, the peasant
still clung to -his hereditary standards and virtues. An
intense confidence in his skill and capacity for work sustained
him through a life of hardship—that and love of the land he
tended. He was never so happy as when working regularly under
a good master. Such men were neither the fantastic and passion-
ate creatures of modern regional novelists nor the down-trodden
puppets of sentimental social historians. Their intellects were
naively elementary, their passions (as proper to those who worked
hard on the soil) unobtrusive, their instinctive feelings profound.
They conformed to the natural rhythm of life, and in this lay
their enduring strength. Love of the soil, love of food—"bee-aeon
wi' fat about three inches thick, tha's the tackul !"—pride in their
own strength and skill—"I 'eeant very big but.I can carry a sack
of whait ur wuts ur beeans wi' anybody"1—and unshakable
integrity, and conservatism were the attributes of the English
peasantry.

"Wurken an the land is lovely wurk," was the ungrudging
verdict of an old Buckinghamshire labourer after a life of cease-
less labour, "and in mi time I wurked furteen and fifteen hours a
day, but that was afuur the machines come about. We sowed by
hand, ripped by hand, and threshed wi' the thraiul. It was lovely
wurk, and that was how it done when I was a young man. We
used to dibble the sayd in,and Ia',dibbled many a aiacre of wheeat,
beeans, wuts and barley. Sometimes we used to sow bradcast.

*J5T. Harmon, Sketches of the Bucks Countryside.