Page:The English Peasant.djvu/86

 In some parts of Herefordshire, owing to failing population and former poverty, many of the small homesteads have become labourers' cottages. Although these places are always old, and generally dilapidated, they are large and airy. Surrounded by gardens and outhouses, they have room to breed pigs, and chickens, and ducks, making all the difference between independence and penury.

The great bulk of the cottages, however, in this county, have been built by the labourers themselves on pieces of ground cribbed from the waste. "They are generally constructed of wattle and dub, and thatched, and contain only bedroom and sitting-room. In one village many of the cottages were found in the last stage of decay, windows broken, doors far from wind-tight, roofs not water-tight, bedrooms unceiled."

From Upton-on-Severn, in Worcestershire, comes the statement, "Nine-tenths of the cottages are abominable; they are overcrowded, damp, and not air-tight." Elsewhere they are described as deplorably bad and overcrowded. Archdeacon Sandford says: "The housework often remains undone till evening, and the infants and babies are consigned to some busy neighbour, or small child, unfit for the care of other children, who ought herself to be at school."

The same practice prevails in Warwickshire, and there, strange to say, it would appear that field-working is confined to married women. It is said that the men expect the wife in this way to help towards the support of the family. A Medical Officer of the Warwick Union says: "I have known at least eight cases in which children left at home have been burned or scalded—three or four of these have resulted in death. I have occasionally known an opiate in the shape of Godfrey's Cordial, or Duffy's Elixir, given by the mother to the children to keep them quiet." Another surgeon, who has practised at Knowle for twenty-seven years, says: "Almost all the illegitimacy is due to crowded cottages. The drainage is abominable. We have outbreaks of fever which we can trace entirely to nuisances."

Leicestershire is a county suffering from the two opposite evils of congestion and depletion. The stocking villages are over-