Page:The English Peasant.djvu/240

 As illustrations of the sort of places the Oxfordshire labourer inhabits, I will describe two cottage interiors I sketched. The first, at Long Handborough, was clean and tidy enough for the most scrupulous persons, but there was no floor but rough stone flags. The draught was kept out by a thin screen of calico, but it must be very cold in winter. The fire-place was a most primitive arrangement; a couple of bricks, with a rest placed transversely to support the saucepan, a few sticks and a little coal.

The other was at Wootten, and was a cottage in which the good dame had dwelt since her birth. She allowed me to go up into the sleeping-room to sketch. As far as I can remember, it would have accorded with the average size of rooms in Wootten, and would probably be nine or ten feet square. The great four-post bedstead, finding as it does its last refuge with the rural poor, after it has been discarded everywhere else, touched the unceiled roof. Many gaudy little pictures adorned the walls, and a quantity of crockery from the pedlar's basket loaded the narrow shelves. Flower-pots filled up the long window-sill; the window itself only opening in one compartment. Nevertheless it afforded a pleasant view of the mediaeval-looking village of Wootten, with its precipitous winding streets, crowned by the old church, and the river Glyme running at its base, spanned by a many-arched bridge.

She seemed much depressed at the struggle going on in Wootten between the farmers and the labourers, as in no place have the former shown themselves more determined to crush the attempt on the part of the men to form a Union.

It appears that the labourers at Wootten, on the 29th of May last, formed themselves into a Union. They began with only sixteen members, and their first requests coming when the excitement about the Warwickshire strike was at its height met with success Their employers agreed to advance them first to eleven shillings and then to twelve shillings. After a time, the labourers, finding their numbers increase, and the principles of the Union more thoroughly understood and accepted, thought themselves justified in asking still better terms: sixteen shillings a week, nine hours work per day, and fourpence an hour overtime. This request the farmers determined to resist. They accordingly commenced a lock-