ABSTRACT
In their classic study of the village labourer in the early nineteenth century J. L. and Barbara Hammond wrote that ‘This world has no Member of Parliament, no press, it does not make literature, or write history; no diary or memoirs have kept alive for us the thoughts and cares of the passing day’. 1 More recent research suggests that it is possible to penetrate this ‘underground world’, at least to some extent, from the writings of labourers themselves, a surprising number of whom recorded their experiences of rural life from the late eighteenth century onwards. One of these was Joseph Mayett of Quainton, Buckinghamshire, (1783–1839), who wrote his autobiography between 1828 and 1831, in itself a remarkable achievement for someone whose only formal education was at Sunday school. He was the fourth of ten children of an agricultural labourer who worked for many years for the same farmer at 9s. a week in summer and 6s. in winter, but managed without recourse to poor relief, preferring his respectable poverty. Joseph’s own life spanned a very different economic climate – the long succession of French Wars between 1793 and 1815, rapid inflation and famine years of bad harvests, then the post-war depression and widespread unemployment: his history was therefore one of downward social mobility from what was already a miserably low base. His autobiography is the antithesis of a success story: it falls into two distinct periods – youth and early manhood during the war, and adult life from 1815 until his early death in 1839.
I was deprived of a liberal Education for instead of being Sent to School I was Set to Lace making to provide something toward a livelihood through the narrowness of our Circumstances. However, notwithstanding this my mother being able to read and write a little though in some instances hardly legible yet She taught me to read at a very early age.
