ABSTRACT
The wage labourer’s status was low. Society put a premium on economic independence; he was an employee; in old age and when his children were young, he was frequently in receipt of charity or subsidised by rates paid by his better-off neighbours. His work was punishingly heavy, dirty and undignified, he was caricatured as a yokel, a bumpkin, a clodhopper. Church services ritualised the labourer’s subordination. Richard Gough (b.1634) held it ‘a thing unseemly and undecent’ that the labouring poor should occupy pews in front of their betters. As a small boy Joseph Arch (b.1826) watched the Sunday procession to the altar:
First up walked the squire to the communion rail, the farmers went up next, then up went the tradesmen and shopkeepers, the wheelwright, and the blacksmiths; and then, the very last of all, went the poor labourers in their smock frocks.
Cliff Hills (b.1904), from Great Bentley in Essex, ‘came to the conclusion that church-goers were something like railway carriages were at one time – first, second and third class’. The vicar ‘didn’t seem to have any time for the lower classes. Mother and her friends would pass out of the Church door, the vicar would . . . smile, perhaps not that even . . . I thought my mother was worth a handshake as well as the rich.’