Land, Labour, and Politics: Parliament and Allotment Provision, 1830–1870

Abstract

Allotments were the subject of extensive and at times intense political interest in the mid-nineteenth century. Many landowners saw them as the best hope for improving the social and moral condition of the rural poor, and it was widely believed that they encouraged self-reliance, industriousness, sobriety and political docility. Numerous local associations to promote allotments were established across the country (especially south of the Trent), and the national allotments society, the Labourers’ Friend Society, was patronized by an array of bishops, noblemen and MPs. In both Houses of Parliament, Bills to facilitate allotment provision were brought forward repeatedly, and governments were put under sustained pressure to legislate on the subject. For much of the period between 1830 and 1870, any discussion of rural labourers, agricultural employment, emigration or enclosure in either House was likely to precipitate a speech advocating allotment provision, even if, at least in the 1840s, such a speech might well elicit a scathing response from one of the radical MPs. All the major parliamentary inquiries into social conditions in the countryside, from the 1831 House of Lords Select Committee on the State of the Poor Laws to the 1867–9 Royal Commission on the Employment of Children, Young Persons, and Women in Agriculture, paid respectful and extended attention to allotments, including not only the 1834 Poor Law Report, the three select committees on agriculture of the 1830s, and the 1843 inquiry into women and children’s employment in agriculture, but also the inquiries of 1840 into handloom-weaving and 1845 into framework-knitting. In short, the allotment movement was a staple element of the parliamentary politics of rural society in the middle years of the nineteenth century.