Combe and its landless cottagers

You are in [Places] [Combe] [Combe and its labourers, 1840-43 and beyond]

This updated article was written by Dr Donald Peck and presented to the Virtual Museum January 2025.

Commons, woodlands and farmland in Hampshire in the mid-19th century.

The dispute over Wadsmere Common in 1840-43 and the subsequent Enclosure of Combe in 1851-53.

This is the story of a dispute for which Combe became briefly famous in 1841, when the Times shone a spotlight on the owner of the Manor of Combe, King’s College, Cambridge. Combe was a remote downland parish in North Hampshire, a closed parish which had only very recently stopped having a demesne farm with a highly beneficial ‘ecclesiastical’ lease. The dispute was about rights to access to firewood, in the shape of small logs and also gorse, which was contested between villagers, who believed they had commons rights to free fuel, and farmers and landlords who were curtailing such customary rights. The dispute was also about common land and the enclosure of waste land and common land, where property rights were then finally becoming exclusive.

Rural Southern England in the 1830s and 1840s

The context around the Wadsmere dispute was the great social changes across Britain of the 1830s and 1840s. The Captain Swing disturbances of 1830 mobilised rural discontent across most of southern England, including many places near Combe, such as Kintbury and Hungerford (*1) . This coincided with the political mobilisation which occurred around the conflictive passage of the 1832 Great Reform Bill. There was little serious violence involved and the result was that labourer’s wages temporarily improved a little, and the introduction of machinery, particularly threshing machines was delayed for a time. In national terms rural unrest turned into urban agitation around the Great Reform Bill, which turned at once into Chartism and increasing industrial unrest with the potential for violence.

(*1) The Swing disturbances caused no deaths, but led to 19 executions and over 450 transportations to Australia. 

Although the sudden threat of Chartism in 1838-1840 did not spread far into rural areas in the south, the threat of violence remained and revenge-inspired arson attacks on farm property and sometimes crops became quite common. Many farmers struggled to keep afloat, while farm labourers’ wages stagnated or fell. Farmers not far from Combe, in Hurstbourne Tarrant and Faccombe, continued to go bankrupt and/or sell up at frequent intervals during the 1830s and 1840s; and three farmers at Faccombe had their barns or ricks burnt, in silent protest, between 1846 and 1849.

The vast majority of the rural population consisted of farm labourers on the breadline (see below for quantification of that). In the 1840s English agricultural labourers’ situation was always held to be pretty wretched; in the days before regular grain imports stabilised prices, labourers and the poor were particularly vulnerable to sharp swings in basic food prices. Emigration from the villages in the south of England to the cities or elsewhere in England or abroad was still not commonplace. Farm profitability seems to have begun to decline – at least in places where High Farming (with increased fertiliser and other new inputs) could from the 1840s be practised, ie only on the best types of agricultural land. Farming of this type was not possible on much of the land in Combe, such as the more marginal parts of the parish’s chalk-with-flints downland.

There were also families that could not make do as farm labourers and fell into real poverty. The New Poor Law, designed in 1834 by liberal Whig economists (we would today call them ‘neo-liberals’), sharply reduced welfare benefits (or ‘relief’) to the very poor and needy from the levels they had reached during the Napoleonic wars and in the decade or so after the end of the war. This new welfare system meant that there were, officially at least, no resources available to subsidise wages for the really poor, who were no longer getting parish benefits and were at the same time trying desperately to avoid the harsh disciplinary environment enforced in the new workhouses.

Across Britain as a whole, a new level of awareness of both rural and urban poverty was growing; it was epitomised by Lord Shaftesbury, who worked hard to get legislation on industrial labour conditions and also on allotments for the poor. The press, in particular The Times, in addition to focussing on factory conditions and child labour, now conducted a prolonged campaign against the dreadful conditions of the really poor rural poor. The press identified the New Poor Law’s key aspects as the workhouse system and the ending of ‘outdoor relief’, which had taken the form of paid farm jobs or what we would in the twenty-first century probably call work creation schemes. This media pressure to better the lot of the poor also helped a political sea-change which led to the repeal of the Corn Laws. The Conservative governments of the 1820s had introduced this protective tariff system to keep farm prices up and prevent farmer (and, indirectly, farm labourer) destitution (but of course making bread more expensive for the poor), but their repeal was forced upon a reluctant Conservative government by Robert Peel in 1845-46.

The pressure on land for food, and also for resources such as wood, was immense. Farming was still labour intensive, as mechanisation on the farm was only just beginning to have a minor effect on farm labour. The farm sector’s demand for more land to grow cereals was behind the General Inclosure Acts (*2), which enabled farmers to get together and enclose the waste land parts of their parish for sowing, or for coppicing or other farm purposes. The underwood (as coppice-wood was then called) from several species of coppiced trees (*3) was now seen as a particularly valuable asset. The College became increasingly interested in wood not just because of the market for it, but also because its form of landownership (as with other similar institutional landowners) gave it a much greater ability to make money out of wood than out of Manor Farm land rental, because the land rent was fixed at traditional amounts of wheat and barley and numbers of fat wether sheep, ie paid in kind (*4).

(*2) These Acts dispensed with the need for separate enclosure acts of Parliament to be passed on a village-by-village basis (as had taken place over the previous 150 years), and the transaction cost of enclosing a parish was drastically reduced.
(*3) Mainly hazel, ash and oak, plus, in some places (but not in Combe), hornbeam, yielding hurdles for penning sheep, stakes for hedges, staves and hoops for barrels, spars for thatching and poles of different kinds, etc.
(*4) The College disputed the underwood with the tenant of the Manor (the Rawlinson family) increasingly actively throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, increasing the Rawlinsons’ lease cost and restricting their ability to harvest the wood profitably.

The first General Inclosure Act of 1845 provided (as then did other similar acts) for some land to be set aside, at the time of enclosure, for the poor of the parish. The land allotted to the poor was intended either to be cultivated in the normal way with the resulting income providing funds for the relief of the poor (now usually coal), or to be let as allotments to be cultivate with the spade by the deserving poor so that they could grow their own vegetables or grain, or if the land was more akin to waste land, to substitute for the customary rights for fuel collected by the poor. The poor had always collected furze (ie gorse) and, more significantly firewood or, to give it its manorial term, firebote (dry sticks of wood and kindling, or fallen wood or snapwood – ie dead branches snapped off from a tree). Allotments of this sort had first been rented to the poor in Wiltshire in 1795 and, by the 1840s, had spread to around 2,000 parishes across England, mainly in the south. The size of such allotments would generally be something less than a quarter of an acre, just about enough for the owner to keep a pig, but not a cow unless he/she also had access to common pasture.

As we will see, it would only take a few more years, until 1851, for the owner of Combe Manor (still King’s College, Cambridge) to get together with Combe’s last remaining farmers to carry out their own cosy little enclosure of the wate land of Combe. But, as we shall also see, in Combe (across all of England until the 1860s), allotments were small and few and far between.

Conditions in Combe when the Wadsmere dispute started

The population of Combe, like most other similar villages had started growing after 1770 and kept steadily increasing in the nineteenth century. At the 1841 census, the village’s population had grown to 223 people, up over 30% since a parish census in 1782 but way below the 100% growth of the whole country in that period. Combe was almost at its all-time peak of 228 inhabitants in 1851. Some of its inhabitants doubtless considered emigrating, though we can only trace two Combe natives of this time who got married and then left for Australia – during the gold rush (*5). Farm labourers were the vast majority: there were 55 in the parish (19 of them 15 years old or less) and farm labourers headed 32 out of 43 households (with four farmers among the heads of the other households).

(*5) Two sons of William Batt, one of the oldest villagers Zebulon and Jeremiah, at this point aged respectively 27 and 19, left for South Australia later in the 1840s, presumably to farm there.

The landowner at Combe, King’s College, Cambridge, then leased cottages to most of the village’s labourers, who would remember that their rent had been doubled in around 1820 to (in most cases) £2 a year. These rents were not always collected, but they provided the College with clear titles and a basis to evict less desirable inhabitants, which it would increasingly make use of. By making formal lease agreements with the cottagers, the College could, over time, reduce the number of cottagers who could be described in squatters - living in cottages they (or their ancestors) had erected for themselves on waste land in the remoter parts of the parish. The College would go on doing this methodically for the next 40 years or so, either by turning squatters into tenants at low rents or by taking opportunities to remove cottages as progressively more and more of them became uninhabited. Thus the College made sure that one aspect of encroachment on common land linked to commons rights on such land was controlled and eradicated. After 1870 the Agricultural Depression removed any ability to make money from arable farming and the numbers of cottagers declined very fast.

King’s College was mostly passive as lord of the manor. The manorial courts which it had been holding, with village elders’ participation, for four centuries, to run the village’s customary tenancies and bye-laws of the villages had ceased to function. Instead, King’s, like other institutional/religious landowners, was now just beginning to tighten up the management of its whole portfolio of landed property across England, after the decline and disappearance of the paternalistic ‘manorial system’, but, as we shall see, a systematic approach was not easy for the College’s managers. Until 1858 they were also restrained by unamended legislation dating back to 1571-76 from taking fully commercial decisions in relation to their landed or urban estates.

In the 1840s two Combe copyholder farmers with small amounts of land gave up their farms after several generations and one other copyholder farmer (in Eastwick, the remotest farmed area at the eastern end of the parish of Combe) sunk deep into debt and was turned by the landowner from a copyholder into a (struggling) tenant. That left only three farmers in Combe and one in Eastwick; one of the former was John Newton, aged 60 in 1841, who had been renting the Manor Farm for 25 years, but gave up his lease in 1846.

We do not have wage data for Combe for this period, but we do have them for several nearby villages. We know from local newspaper reports that a male labourer’s wages in the Combe area were still averaging less than 8 shillings a week (*6), and they were never in work for a full 52 weeks a year. That means about 14 pence per day for a fit male labourer, assuming that he worked 42 weeks a year. 14 pence was twice as much per day as for a woman labourer. A woman would work perhaps one quarter of the year on average (and women’s work in the fields was fast declining, only being used for some of the haymaking and occasional crop-weeding). A male labourer’s wage was at least three times as much per day as would be earned by an adolescent boy, who would work perhaps nearly two-thirds of the year. A family with three workers – male, female and boy - would therefore earn in wages only £24 per year. If they could get free firewood, that would save tenants perhaps £4 per year (ie 18 pence per week, but estimates vary significantly) (*7) – and they might conceivably be able to sell firewood as well, though there is little evidence of public sales of such wood from distant woods going on.

(*6) Farm labourers’ wages did not rise above this level for about another 50 years except very briefly when (and where) there was an active union in the 1870s. Berkshire Record Office documents show that Combe farm labourers were still in 1910 normally only getting 12-13 shillings a week.
(*7) A price of 6d per faggot and 1/3 of a faggot per day over a year would mean £3 per year.

Stage 1 - poor villagers need to cut and/or take wood at Wadsmere – why and where?

To understand the dispute, a map of the south-western part of Combe parish will help – see here:-

Wadsmere (Down) Common was nearly 20 acres, with Wadsmere Coppice, just below it at 20 acres. Lower (Cow) Common was slightly more, about 35 acres. Both are shown on an estate map of 1815 as partly covered in scrub, which would have meant, as nowadays, varying amounts of gorse; on that map Wadsmere Common also shows a few larger trees. Wadsmere is almost next door to the villagers’ other cow down, Mill Down, which they had to give up to the manor farmer in winter. Lower Common and Mill Down were the only pastures where villagers could pasture cattle. We can imagine people quietly snapping off wood as they trudged up and down.

Wadsmere was particularly good for wood because it was next to Wadsmere Coppice, part of the coppicewood section of Combe Wood (and the Wood’s north-west portion was shown on this map with thicker trees than the other portion). Wadsmere was also strategic for copyholders because it was on the normal route to Rockmoor, the outlying area newly allotted as arable land to copyholders in the seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century to an increasing extent, coppices would have been used to produce coppicewood and, on coppiced oak, oak bark, a labour-intensive tanning product obtained by stripping oak coppice poles.

We also need to understand the historical background in the manorial system. Miraculously, King’s College has kept a pretty good series of manorial court rolls back to around 1600 for the main manor court, though, as we will see, it did not make good use of those records in the Wadsmere dispute! This court (the ‘courts baron’) dealt with land and farming issues in the village’s fields and its coppice woods – which were historically the responsibility of, respectively, the hayward (the warden of the hedges, literally) and the wood-warden. The village officers (the tithingmen) had the role, indeed the duty, of upholding the ‘custom of the Manor’ on certain issues, particularly wood.

These court records show that there were constant disputes about wood, for a period in the eighteenth century (ending around 1715) between the College, the village and its farmers, who then included about 20 copyholders with holdings of roughly equal size (30-50 acres). The situation in principle was pretty clear: the College wanted to be able to sell as much underwood as a crop from its woodland it could on a regular basis .

The copyholders had rights to some wood and other villagers had right to less wood. Copyholders always had the right to lop and pollard trees (but not the timber), but only on their own land. All villagers (*9) had rights to limited amounts of firewood (or underwood) from the commons, ie from common land. But the amounts of their entitlements to wood varied and were not defined precisely and therefore caused disputes. Occasionally the manor in those days gave tenants the right to cut down a tree on the fields where the copyholders farmed in order to make or repair a building, but insisted on the replanting of the same kind of tree, with the court ensuring that the person who felled the tree should ‘cherish’ the new sapling. The custom of the manor also dictated that only one of the two main areas of coppices on the manor – meaning (presumably) Combe Wood’s coppices – should be closed off at any one time, with the other part left open to the villagers’ cattle; this was another clear source of conflict. In brief, the manor court and the village community maintained all these customary rights and practices, some of which very clearly were needed to conserve and manage the woodland.

(*9) By 1840, that meant, in practice, all residents of the village.

However hard it evidently tried to clarify its position, consistently the College had just not been able to get the tithingmen in the manorial court to accept limitations on these rights held by villagers. So in 1700-1715, the College tried instead to maintain its position on paper by repeatedly making notes on the Manor roll denying, in particular, firewood rights, at one time as often as once a year, usually citing civil court precedents from the civil courts about other manors, as by now litigation on these matters in the normal courts and there was lots of it.

All of this would have remained in villagers’ minds for long periods, because the tithingmen were expected to know and decide on customary law disputes, but in 1840 that was long in the past in 1840; since around 1715 the manorial court had not dealt with woodcutting or conservation matters at all, only with land ownership and tenancy matters, with the need to keep farm buildings in order, and occasionally with the hedges (or the lack of them) between or around fields. By this time, the College was exploiting coppicewood systematically, with four men now working for the College’s head woodman in 1851. They held regular auctions at least once a year for the sale of areas of underwood by rotation, which were cleared by contractors.

On the other hand, what the villagers of Combe did know was that they had rights on the common lands; that was why in the hard winter of 1839-40 they were repeatedly found taking wood from Wadsmere Common. The person who reported on them was Combe’s aging head woodman Robert Bulpitt, a partly educated member of one of the oldest families in Combe (*10).

(*10) A Bulpit features (as Bulkeputt) as a farmer in a 13th document about Combe. In the eighteenth century had been farmers (ie copyholders) in neighbouring Faccombe, but never in Combe itself. Robert Bulpitt’s three sons worked as woodmen, possibly, for a time, all three of them at the same time.

Stage 2 - the 1840 hearings at the Winchester Assizes – Robert Hooper loses his claim

The case that came to trial was a case for damages filed by Combe’s leading copyholder, Robert Hooper (whose father had earlier leased the Manor farm from John Rawlinson) against George and/or his brother John Cummins (*11) , for taking underwood as fuelwood from Wadsmere Common from January 31st onwards. There must have been proceedings of some sort in the case before a magistrate, but the first newspaper reference we have to the case is of the hearing at the summer Assizes in Winchester in July 1840 in front of Justice Sir John Coleridge (the nephew of the poet). The remarkable thing was that by then the Cumminses had obtained a solicitor, Mr Carrow, who was to prove effective, and a number of arguments with which to defend their own rights to wood.

(*11) George was then 28 and John, a poor crippled shoemaker, was 30. Their family was not in Combe in the 1782 census but their father Thomas raised his entire family in Combe. Thomas had died when John and George were respectively 8 and 6, and their elder brothers had died 13 and 14 years later. John had no children and George’s left the village in their teens (after 1851).

The Hampshire Chronicle provided a good account, particularly of the witness statements rather than of the law (*12). It is worth proceeding to quote evidence witness by witness verbatim as their evidence was often contradictory.

(*12) Hampshire Chronicle, 20/7/1840.

Hooper’s case was put forward in court first by Henry Earle, the King’s College solicitor in Andover (*13) , who then called witnesses. Earle’s role and his approach made it clear that King’s was using Hooper as a proxy, of course. The first witness was a King’s College steward from Cambridge who produced the manor court roll and stated that it was customary for “tenants to cut underwood”.

(*13) In 1845 Earle would earn some notoriety as the solicitor for the Andover Workhouse’s much-maligned managers, but would remain as the College’s solicitor throughout the vagaries of the Wadsmere case and also the Andover Workhouse case and long after. 

Robert Bulpitt, the King’s woodman-bailiff, testified next. He started by stoutly claiming “He had never seen anyone but copyholders cut the wood”. He continued more straightforwardly, “[He] had sold wood to persons, cottagers within the manor, for fencing and fuel. The taking of wood by the cottagers began on 31st of last Jan. The defendant is a shoemaker lodging with his brother at Combe and he had several times carried away a nitch (*14) of wood from the Common”. Bulpitt the woodman’s younger son (another Robert), who assisted him in his work, then said: “The copyholders had been in the habit of taking wood at Wadsmoor Common. He had not seen any of the cottagers taking wood from the Common before last January”.

(*14)  Nitch – probably the same as a notch of wood, so only one faggot, transferred from the notch cut to represent each faggot on a tally for a load of wood.

Robert Hooper’s brother Charles, who had the same size of landholding as his brother, said next, much more ambiguously, that “he rented part of Wadsmoor Common with his farm, and that he had always cut wood there, and no one but copyholders were in the habit of doing so. After giving up some copyhold tenements, he continued to cut wood on the Common”. Hooper was claiming thus that he had rights both as copyholder and through his lease.

The lessee of the Manor Farm, said that “he had never known the cottagers cut wood on the common; he himself was not a copyholder and had no right to do so”. Then came William Hall, a shepherd employed by Robert Hooper, said “he had known Wadsmoor Common, as long as he could remember, but he did not know who cut wood there”. He thus cannily confirmed implicitly, without lying and without incriminating anyone, that wood was regularly cut but that it was not only copyholders and other farmers who did so”.

It was then the Cumminses’ lawyer’s turn to make his case. The report of his five main points for the case for the poor people’s rights is not full enough to make them out. Carrow said that King’s was relying a lot on “the word copyholders’ (ie their rights) but that this was wrong. He pointed to the fact that one of the defendants was a cripple and to a notice to quit which had been served on the Cumminses (who lived together in the centre of Combe, as the 1851 census shows). Carrow then “maintained [this] was a recognition of them as tenants from year to year” and therefore they had tenants’ rights.

Two defence witnesses were crucial: Edward Joyce, a Combe shopkeeper, was a less inhibited witness, who provided the names of several people in addition to himself who had cut wood “scores of times” and “never asked leave of anybody”. Even under cross-examination by the College’s solicitor, Joyce repeated that he had seen “labourers and poor people cut wood there frequently”, and, he said, when cutting wood for copyholders such as the Hoopers, he “took three, four, five or ten bundles for himself and was never molested”. Finally Joseph Haynes, born in Combe but now living in Stockbridge, said “he had always cut wood with his brother and his mother, who was a labourer’s wife. He had seen others go and cut wood at Wadsmoor Common and they never were forbidden”.

Judge Coleridge’s summing-up then clarified both sides’ legal claims and summarised the strong qualitative evidence. Coleridge’s legal points, as reported, seemed quite favourable to Hooper’s position, except that in concluding he agreed with Carrow that “on looking over the copy of the court roll, his lordship remarked that it did not contain a single syllable about this right.” The judge then asked the jury to return a verdict apparently solely on this point of copyholder’s rights – and the jury returned a verdict in favour of the defendant, negating copyholders’ rights and thus by implication not denying the customary rights claimed by the Cummingses.

Stage 3 - the 1841 evictions and the press

We do not know what the College did about this judgment except retire hurt. But it had in fact already in March 1840, started proceedings to evict some of the wood-cutters from their cottages they let from the College in Combe regardless and at Michaelmas they became subject to eviction. The eviction process continued and, on 4th January 1841, the College evicted five families of wood-cutters from their cottages, leaving them out in the street in Combe until they were taken in by neighbours, leaving their furniture exposed to the elements. This was in the middle of an extremely cold spell, with snow up to five feet deep. (The press reported very serious flooding nearby in the Wallops, destroying several buildings and drowning two people, after this snow’s sudden melt.)

The eviction put Combe back in the national press at a sensitive moment. It was the last straw for The Times which, on January 20th, went to town with an article, ‘The Tender Mercies of King’s College, Cambridge’. The Times reminded its readers how the College was “defeated in an attempt to prevent the poor of the parish of Combe in Hants from cutting wood upon the common of the said parish, which they had been doing from time immemorial. The right having been tried, the College were fairly beaten. But how seldom is the right of the poor in England worth anything! … A single proprietor might have been actuated by feelings of humanity or fear, and have shrunk from driving five poor families to the street in the beginning of January during the severity of a snow storm. But a corporation knows neither mercy nor fear. The only security for the poor is that the rich are sometimes weary of oppressing them”.

The College’s solicitor, Henry Earle, hit back at once with a series of letters in the local press rebutting the attacks on the College’s policy, blaming the Cummingses’ solicitor and his associates. He also wrote to The Times on January 27th, giving a tendentious and defensive account of the conclusions of the court and justifying the eviction of the cottagers at some length, in terms of the sanctity of private property. The solicitor’s letter-writing strategy was successful, and with that the press lost interest in the case completely.

But in practice the College must have thought long and hard what to do next. It seems to have gone back on the evictions, for the Cummingses definitely returned to a cottage in Combe, and one of them, George, was to remain there for over 60 years more.

The court case, however, was not closed, and the College’s archives hold a London barrister’s opinion which the College obtained another 18 months later in July 1842; the barrister recommended further proceedings at that summer’s assizes with a view to evicting once more the trespassing wood-cutters, as follows: “a trial… is most calculated to recover the prejudicial effect of the former verdict… and [should be] by a special jury”. This shows that the court was undecided about the wood-cutters’ claims – such was the tenacious hold of the custom of the manor and commons rights in law.

Stage 4 - the award of rented allotments to the poor of Combe

In fact the College took no such action, and instead, later in 1842, changed course. The College clearly decided that it needed to keep the labourers of Combe living in the village, so it decided to shore up its position among what the College’s solicitor had just called in his letter to The Times the ‘baser inhabitants’ of Combe. Perhaps the Times article had more effect on the fellows of the College in Cambridge than its solicitor’s overdone corrections as printed by The Times. The farmers of Combe certainly needed the men to try to cultivate profitably the arable land they already had and the additional poor land they would soon be granted by the Enclosure of Combe: for example, in 1841 John Newton employed at least 14 labourers to farm the Manor Farm lands and Robert Hooper and his brother-in-law (who had succeeded his brother Charles when he died) each employed 10 men on their respective portions of the Hooper lands (*15).

(*15) See the 1841 Census.

What the College did was to order Robert Bulpitt to set up ‘allotment gardens’ which 23 labourers of Combe were allowed to rent for cultivation on Mill Down. The allotment process was quite slow but it concluded at the Manor Court in October 1843, at which it was agreed that each allotment garden would be 20 lugs in size, ie 1/8 of an acre, hardly bigger than an urban allotment today, and about half the average allotment measure described in some other villages. This was a total of only 3 acres on the College’s land at Mill Down, the downland where the villagers had the right to pasture cows during the summer (*16). These allotments do not seem very conveniently located for growing vegetables for the villagers, but they were right under the eyes of Bulpitt and his son George, who took over as woodman-bailiff when Robert died in 1844 (see the sketch-map above).

(*16) The College was prepared to give land to the highly deserving poor: for example, Mark Jones was given an extra allotment of 1 acre on Oat Hill because he was looking after his family and his land so well. This was right next to the 23 allotments and near the Jones cottage at the junction of the roads from Combe to Faccombe and to East Woodhay. Mark’s father John had earlier had his cottage rent reduced by the College from 12s to 10s a year. Jones built the cottage with money from Mr Cooke, but when he died around 1880 and his widow moved away, the College pulled down the cottage and paid her to extinguish any rights to the land. 

By the end of the process 23 labourers agreed to be allottees and to pay an almost token amount of 1s a year for this land (a low rent compared with many other allotments). A written agreement was signed by Bulpitt and all labourers concerned; all of the labourers save John Bulpitt (and including John’s older brother Robert) were illiterate and could only sign it with a cross. Robert and John were sons of Robert the woodman-bailiff himself; both of these families lived high on the downs near Mill Down, the two Roberts together near the top of Granny’s Lane, and John 100 yards away beyond that, probably in a cottage of which only a small pile of stones remains, close to the edge of the northernmost extension of Combe Wood right beside Wadsmere Common (*17).

(*17) This cottage is shown on the map above of south-western Combe.

The list of the 23 allottees is given as an appendix below. Comparing this list with the 1841 census, we find that allotments were made to 23 of the 27 labourers who were heads of household in the census. Two of the 4 labourers to whom allotments were not made lived in Eastwick, on the other side of the parish, well over a mile away from the Mill Down allotments (*18).

(*18) Unfortunately, we cannot relate this directly to the families who were temporarily evicted in 1841 because the census was taken in April 1841, 3 months after the evictions.

The most notable person on the list was George Cumming, who was a defendant in the woodcutting trial (whom the College had tried to evict in 1840), but was now given an allotment. As we have seen, he was the last to remain, as he was still there in 1901. Another allottee, William Annetts, was the only newcomer to the parish: he had moved into Combe from Vernham Dean between 1841 and 1843 (*19).

(*19) Charlotte, the first of the Annettses to arrive in Combe, had moved in from nearby Vernham Dean in 1841 as a servant to Robert Bulpitt the woodman.

Being remote, Combe was a close-knit community; the 23 allottees came from a total of only 13 families (and those families were often, of course, closely interrelated). The College had got the result it wanted: a group of well-rooted poor cottagers as their tenants on a sustainable basis. The allotment remedy really worked: the allottees’ families would all to stay on for very long periods in Combe. 10 of the families given allotments had been in Combe at the time of the vicar’s census in the 1780s; all 10 of these families from 60 years before, and all but one of the 1842 allottee families, were still there nearly 30 years later at the 1871 census. The only family which did leave before the 1881 census was the family of James Criswick, the publican (*20).

(*20) Criswick’s pub was actually a small wayside alehouse in his cottage on the track at the eastern edge of Walbury Fort. James would probably still have made most of his money as a labourer. He was already over 60 in 1841. His son Thomas must have left Combe soon after that, after marrying the 16-year old Martha Ann Challis, his Eastwick neighbour’s illegitimate daughter by one of her Eastwick neighbours, the Kimbers.

But in 1870-72 disaster struck, in the shape of the Agricultural Depression with sheep plagues and a series of bad harvests, combined with more supplies of US, Canadian and Argentinian wheat and lower prices. The day of the agricultural labourer was soon over for ever and the great majority of Combe’s labouring families left the village. By 1891, apart from George Cummings, only three of the 12 other families remained in Combe. They were: the Matthewses (the allottee’s son, Herbert had moved up from postmaster in 1851 to being the parish clerk), the Annettses (who included Matthews’s successor as parish clerk) and the Bulpitts, the woodmen who were continuing their downwards slide, as the heyday of underwood and timber sales had also passed. Robert Bulpitt the woodman’s daughter-in-law Hannah Bulpitt, wife of George, was the last occupant of the woodman’s cottage near Mill Down; it is Hannah who gave her name to the track called Granny’s Lane, going steeply up from the church to her cottage just below Wadsmere Common. Hannah died in 1903 and the College bought the land back off her son for £10, leaving the cottage to turn into a pile of stones, just visible there still, among the yew trees in her garden, which are now huge.

Stage 5 - the College agrees enclosure of the rest of the waste in the parish and ends the villagers’ rights to take wood (or anything else) from the commons, except in a very small area

With the labourers’ unrest settled by the mid-1840s, the College soon turned back to the question of managing its landed estate, given that there was now came there way a means to put an end to any rights over the commons other than its own and those of its chosen farm tenants.

1845 saw the passing of the most effective General Inclosure Act; it was meant to encourage the enclosure and ploughing up of most types of unenclosed land in England, leaving a small amount aside for the benefit of cottagers, or non-landholding commoners.

It was not until 1851 that King’s set about enclosing the remainder of Combe and Combe’s farmers got what they must always have wanted: clear ownership of all (or, in fact. 99%) of the downland of Combe that they had still not enclosed and ploughed up. The College put forward the idea of an enclosure agreement between the College and all those with any copyhold rights. This was a cosy transaction because the copyholders were in effect now in fact consolidated into just the two farming families which remained occupying and farming land in Combe, the last Hooper, Robert, who lived in Wright’s Farm, and Richard Kimber, in Eastwick Farm. The agreement, drafted, inevitably, by Henry Earle the Andover solicitor, excluded the last small leaseholder farmer, Thomas Challis of Upper Eastwick (who was an ex-copyholder). But in line with the spirit of the 1845 Act, it made some provision, to a minimal extent, for what they termed ‘the poor’.

The Combe Enclosure covered about 256 acres; 71 of those went to Kimber, entirely in Eastwick, one-third of it on the downs above Eastwick, adjoining Combe’s own downland. 164 acres went to Hooper, all of it in Combe; this was mainly downland, but some of it was also the land for coppicing that we have already identified, on Wadsmere Down Common, Lower Cow Common and Rockmoor Down. In these areas, the College noted, the copyholders had already encroached from their land onto manor land. The College therefore was once again prepared to be flexible about the copyholders and their rights, so long as it maintained its own rights and extinguished the rights of anyone else, particularly villagers with customary commons rights.

Cutting of underwood on the commons and downs was now seen as an important right for the farmers to keep, not one for the College to worry about, as previously. The cottagers got no more such rights; all that was preserved for the poor of the village was some insignificant and uncultivable land on the top of the Downs [this plot was half a mile south-east of the car park on the Faccombe road], namely:-

4 acres given ‘to the inhabitants of Combe for the purposes of a sand pit and for the use of the Poor for the purposes of cutting furze’, to be used for firewood. The sand was vital for brick-making, so cottagers could repair or built extensions to their cottages (*21).

(*21)  Note that the King’s College archives also show that people from outside the village would sometimes come and help themselves to sand on the common as well.

The College itself kept just 32 acres on Mill Down, which did include the 3 acres covered by the 23 poor people’s allotments distributed in 1843, but not the poor people’s 4 new acres. All the rest of the parish’s 300-400 acres of downland had already been split up and, wherever possible, ploughed up. After this final enclosure, the poor’s rights to take wood or perform any other activities on the commons would have been very tenuous and very difficult to defend if they were ever challenged. Elsewhere the right to recreation on common land was fought for extensively, but the right to access the downs in Combe was not restored until the quite recent ‘Right to Roam’ provisions of the 2000 Countryside and Rights of Way Act, which operates in a rather half-hearted manner.

By comparison with its near neighbour, Faccombe, Combe had always been less enclosed, because of the wide extent of its downland. The Eastwick valley part of Combe parish, like neighbouring Faccombe, which had the lower part of the Eastwick valley, had more enclosed closes than Combe itself. Enclosure there much earlier had led to earlier population decline than in Combe: Faccombe had seen a rapid decline in population – from 305 in 1821 down to 190 in 1871, when it was almost 15% smaller than Combe – and accompanied, as we have seen, by arson attacks, a number of poaching cases and a number of farmers going out of business. The whole estate was also quickly sold in 1858, to be developed as a shooting estate by Mr William H Heath.

The College had clearly now realised that it needed to induce farmers to stay on the land, by ensuring that the tenants could afford to pay decent leasehold rent for their land, and even being ready to build a bit of new accommodation for labourers – eg in the centre of Combe the 2 new cottages built by Michael Cooke, who had become the new farmer of the Manor in 1851, and the four Slate Cottages, built probably in the 1860s.

But there is a footnote from the end of the nineteenth century. Things did not improve much for labourers even during the years of labour-intensive ‘High Farming’ from 1855-1870. Wages barely changed at all and, in 1872, just as things began to get markedly worse for farmers, Joseph Arch, from Warwickshire, introduced the idea of a national farm labourers’ union, which in practice helped raise labourers’ wages significantly for a time across much of the south midlands and the south of England.

There may or may not have been a rise in labourers’ wages then in Combe due to the union, and wages only rose later in a more lasting way to a fall in the supply of labour; as we have seen, the number of agricultural labourers fell drastically in Combe, as everywhere else in the south, in the long years of agricultural depression after 1871. These were the numbers: the census figure for Combe fell from 59 agricultural labourers in 1871 (plus 4 shepherds and 2 gamekeepers) in 1871 to only 12 labourers in 1901 (plus 2 shepherds and 2 gamekeepers).

When Rev George Pearson, looking back in 1901 on his 45 years as vicar of Combe, told a rambling visitor, the naturalist WH Hudson, about his memories of the beginning of the Agricultural Depression, his passion had to some extent diminished. This is how Hudson put it: Pearson ‘preached it [the labourers’ cause] in his own pulpit in a way that offended the landowners and alarmed the farmers in the district. The church-wardens, who were farmers, then locked him out of his church and for two or three weeks there was no public worship in the parish of Combe’. These passions subsided over time, but, as Mr Pearson, 30 years after the event, told Hudson, one of the men who locked him out had admitted to him 25 years later that he, the vicar, was right and he himself had been wrong.

Appendix - The 1843 Allotments on Mill Down

All the 23 allottees were described in the censuses as agricultural labourers except for Robert Bulpit the woodman’s sons, Robert and John, William Annetts, a carpenter, and James Criswick, who was added as an afterthought a few days later. The ages of the 23, calculated via the nearest census, are given below in brackets.

See also:

- Manors and Combe - A short background to manorial agriculture in southern England and why manorial farming characterized the whole period from before 1000 to after 1350 and continued to influence life and farming in the following centuries.

- Combe and the Abbey of Bec-Hellouin - Combe (c 2,200 acres including woodland) as it appears from the account rolls of the owner of the manor, the Abbey of Bec-Hellouin, in the Middle Ages:

- Combe as a manor of Bec in the Middle Ages - from the custumal records of Bec-Hellouin.

- Combe gibbet - myth and background.