ABSTRACT
As with the elite, the effects of the depression upon the labourer were complex, both direct and indirect. In the great corn areas of the south and east in particular the reports of the Royal Commission on Labour in 1894 and the more general reports on the farm labourer in 1900 and 1905 return time and again to this reduction in the casual workforce, whether men, women or children. A main factor which affected the labourers was mechanization. At the most basic level English agriculture was essentially non-mechanical before the 1870s. Only the threshing machine, and then only regionally, was widely used. Education was simply one of a number of changes in the consciousness of the rural poor. These manifested themselves in the decades after 1870 in a whole range of labourers’ movements, the most obvious of which were trades unions. The unions were not, however, the only such movements.
