The Cut Throat Killer

The people

Industry was sucking wealth into the towns and cities during the Victorian era. Though conditions in urban areas were far from pleasant for many people, there was at least money to be made. In rural areas, this was not always the case.

Almost continuous war between Britain and France between 1793 and 1815, battered the economies of the two countries and Britain’s rural areas bore particular hardship.

After centuries of enclosures, where common land was split into fields for private ownership, agricultural workers were denied any way of living that was not dependent on landowners. The practice accelerated and labourers in the countryside were often, in effect, tied to few or perhaps only one employer who owned all the land in their locality, and had no need to tempt workers by paying higher wages. War forced up prices as goods became scarce further disadvantaging unskilled workers, such as agricultural labourers.

Many jobs in rural areas were also gradually being taken over by power-driven mechanisation, for example spinning. The worsening conditions triggered social unrest, increasing political militancy and riots.

In an attempt to alleviate the poverty, the Speenhamland System was devised in Berkshire and spread throughout much of southern England. Establishing a fixed wage, which was then topped up out of parish rates, the intention was to widen help given under the Poor Law in 1782, which was targeted at the aged and infirm.

The result was almost the reverse of what seems to have been intended. Agricultural labourers became dependant on handouts and could not earn more than the fixed wage no matter how hard they worked.

As a protest against worsening conditions and poor wages, in 1811 Luddites began breaking machines in Nottingham and the movement spread. The government took tough action, making machine-breaking a capital offence.

In addition, the government introduced the Corn Law of 1815, mainly aimed at protecting the landowners’ income by stating that until homegrown corn reached 80 shillings per quarter no foreign corn could be imported into Britain. The chief effect was to make bread too expensive for the poor to buy.

In 1816 poaching laws were stiffened with the penalty as severe as transportation for seven years.

In 1830 riots spread throughout much of the country. In South Brewham, Somerset, for example, a riot was accompanied by threats to wreck a threshing machine. In Taunton, ‘inflammatory’ leaflets appeared and elsewhere a poorhouse saw its own paupers riot and attackers released prisoners from a lock up.

In Tolpuddle village in Dorset in 1834 six farm labourers who tried to form a trade union were charged with administering illegal oaths and sentenced to seven years’ transportation to Australia. After many protests they were pardoned and repatriated. They became known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

The great journalist William Cobbett (1762-1835) conducted a series of journeys highlighting the divisions in the countryside. He pointed to hard-working farmers paying tithes to idle parsons; land bought by rich Londoners just for shooting and protectionist landlords, whom he nicknamed ‘agriculturasses’.

The Chartist movement also pushed for social and electoral reform. All male householders got the vote in the Second Reform Bill in 1867. And the last public hanging came the following year. Women gained increasing rights.

Even though agricultural societies improved farming standards in the 1830s and 40s, life for the rural poor remained hard and countryside divisions between the rich man and pauper were still huge. In the 1870s conditions were to worsen again as increasing amounts of competitively-priced wheat were being imported from the new farmland of the US.

Industrialisation and over crowding in cities led to great crime problems as well as a health crisis. Widespread concern led Sir Robert Peel to set up London’s force at the end of the 1820s. By early in the next decade the force had swelled to 3,300 men and there were horse patrols.

An unfortunate result was that many criminals were pushed out to rural areas, which were not quick to take on the new police system. Even by 1853 only 22 counties had established police forces for their whole territory.

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