Page:The English Peasant.djvu/89

 Oxfordshire is a thoroughly agricultural county, and in its farming arrangements still maintains some old-fashioned ideas and practices. Boys are still lodged at the farmers' houses, and instead of looking to factories and mines for an improvement in their position, they aspire to be grooms, and the girls to go out to service. The boys are employed on the land, as they are in most other parts of the country, too early, and, trudging about in their heavy boots on the sticky soil, contract a weakness in the legs, which leaves its indelible mark in an awkward gait.

Oxfordshire cottages are not so bad as those of Beds or Bucks; but in treating of Oxon and Berks Mr Culley attributes the loose morals of the female population to the overcrowding of cottages.

From Berkshire come a series of denunciations. The Rev. W. J. Butler, Wantage, says: "Wretched pigsties of hovels destroy decency, self-respect, and the love of home. I could mention frightful results from the present system of dwelling-houses."

Speaking of the Union of Newent, in Gloucestershire, a union comprising eighteen parishes with a population of 12,500, Dr Fraser says: "The physical, social, and educational condition of the labouring classes appeared to me to be low. Many cottages which I saw in the parishes of Newent, Linton, and Taynton, are simply unfit for human habitation." In a note he says, "In Linton I was informed very few of the cottages have a staircase; the bedrooms are reached by a ladder or steps. The cases in which the roof—particularly when it is old thatch—is so utterly unsound as to be unable to resist anything like a downpour, and where people's bedding, in consequence, constantly gets deluged, are too numerous to mention."

Mr Cattle, a surgeon practising at Newent, took Dr Fraser a drive one afternoon through his district, and showed him some of the worst of these dens; and he says that, "speaking generally, anything more deplorable than the way large masses of the population in the neighbourhood of Newent, in Kilcote, Gorsley, Linton, and on Glass House Hill, are housed cannot be conceived. The state of their homes tells on the physical condition of the people. Many of them never wash; the flannel undervest