Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [568]
Ralph was not so sure. He felt uncomfortable with Adam Smith’s doctrines which seemed to him to describe too harsh and cruel a world, however free.
“But the Corn Law,” he agreed heartily, “ought to go.”
It stayed. The agricultural poor were starving. Craftsmen, especially weavers, were being thrown out of work by the new machines. A terrible and cruel peace seemed to be taking over from the long years of war. And reactionary ministers, in reality as confused by the dawning industrial age as the unhappy people, clamped down on all reform. When the unemployed rioted, when the so-called Luddites tried to break up the machines they thought were destroying their livelihood, they were crushed.
True, as the 1820s wore on, there were hints of reform. A rising figure in Parliament, Robert Peel, though certainly a Tory, began a modest reform which included founding the first London police force and removing some hundred offences from the list that carried the death penalty. Trade improved too, and some of the duties that Mason hated were removed.
But in Sarum, it seemed to Ralph Shockley, nothing ever changed.
Of all the many voices in England demanding reform at this time – voices, Ralph knew, far more powerful than his – none was more powerful than that of the great journalist and describer of poverty, William Cobbett. His weekly, The Political Register, was Ralph’s bible, and though he never allowed Porteus to know it, he would buy up extra copies of it and surreptitiously leave them sometimes where he knew some of the poorer farm workers or labourers might find them. It was an easy way for the schoolmaster in his fifties to make himself believe he was agitating for change. But sometimes his outrage at the poverty he saw overcame him and once, to Porteus himself in his own house, he cried:
“Why, Canon, beasts of burden are better treated than our farm labourers.”
To which, for once, Porteus made no reply – Ralph was never sure whether he was silent from contempt or from shame.
In all these years, it was the memory of a single day and of two encounters which always remained in his mind.
It was an overcast morning in late spring and he went walking on the high ground. There were sheep everywhere: not the old long-horned sheep – they had all gone now – but the new, more economical breed from the south downs. Hornless, except for the rams, with their true fleeces – three of them could feed, it was said, where only two of the ancient stock could had fed before. Wherever there were no sheep, there were fields of recently sown corn.
He liked the sweeping, desolate landscape: he had walked for an hour without seeing a single human being.
Then he saw the boy.
He was, at first, hardly more than a speck, a tiny figure standing all alone in the middle of a huge, furrowed field.
Ralph came slowly towards him. The boy stayed where he was. Ralph noticed the birds sweeping over the surface of the furrows cautiously, wheeling and dipping around its edges.
Only when he came to the edge of the field and stopped there did the boy move towards him. He was a handsome young fellow with a mass of unruly brown hair and a long, thin, slightly hooked nose. He could not have been more than ten; his jaunty bearing reminded Ralph of his own son at that age, although as he drew close, he saw the young fellow was pitifully thin.
“All alone?” he enquired pleasantly.
The boy nodded. “You’re the first person I seen all day, sir.”
“What are you doing here?”
The boy waved his arm at the huge field.
“Frightening birds off.”
“What time did you come here?”
“Dawn, just after.”
“When do you go home?”
“Dusk, just afore.”
“Have you eaten today?”
“No, sir.”
“And who sent you here?”
“My father, sir.”
“What does he do?”
“Works on farm.”
“His farm?”
“No. Mr Jones.”
“Where’s that?”
“Avonsford.”
Ralph nodded. Obviously this was an outlying field.
“So,” he said with a smile, “you’re a human scarecrow?”
“’Sright.”
“What’s your name, scarecrow?”
“Godfrey, sir. Daniel Godfrey.”
“Daniel