"People obviously were fed, or they would have died out en-masse. !
They died in their thousands - prematurely, their loives cut short by the appalling conditions that were forced on them
In 1835 the workhouse system was introduced where people were barely kept alive with what they wer fed and they had to work for that - they were paid with the meagre diets and a bed
Those workhouses remained into the twentieth century when Hammond and Gardinerand Frank Kidson visited them to collect folk songs
THis from J L and Barbara Hammonds @The village Labourer in the chapter, 'The last Labourers' Rvolt

The bands of men and boys who had given their rulers one moment of excitement and lively interest in the condition of the poor had made themselves liable to ferocious penalties. For the privileged classes had set up a code under which no labourer could take a single step for the improvement of the lot of his class without putting his life and liberties in a noose. It is true that the savage laws which had been passed against combination in 1799 and 1800 had been repealed in 1824, and that even under the less liberal Act of the following year, which rescinded the Act of 1824, it was no longer a penal offence to form a Trades Union. But it is easy to see that the labourers who tried to raise their wages were in fact on a shelving and most perilous slope. If they used threats or intimidation or molested or obstructed, either to get a labourer to join with them or to get an employer to make concessions, they were guilty of a misdemeanour punishable with three months' imprisonment. They were lucky if they ran no graver risk than this. Few of the prosecutions at the Special Commissions were under the Act of 1825. A body of men hold¬ing a meeting in a village where famine and unemployment were chronic, and where hardly any one had been taught to read or write, might very soon find themselves becoming what the Act of 1714 called a riotous assembly, and if a magis¬trate took alarm and read the Riot Act, and they did not disperse within one hour, every one of them might be punished as a felon. The hour's interval did not mean an hour's grace, for, as Mr. Justice Alderson told the court at Dorchester, within that hour ' all persons, even private individuals, may do anything, using force even to the last extremity to prevent the commission of a felony.'
There were at least three ways in which labourers meeting together to demonstrate for higher wages ran a risk of losing their lives, if any of their fellows got out of hand from of action which he had expected from it. The Governmes: are indisposed to take action, and Suffield, growing sicK arc impatient of their slow clocks, warns Melbourne in June tha; he cannot defend them. Melbourne replies that such a measure could not be maturely considered or passed during the agitation over the Reform Bill. Later in the monti there was a meeting between Suffield and Melbourne, of which unfortunately no record is preserved in the Memoir, with the result that Suffield declared in Parliament that the Government had a plan. In the autumn of 1831 an Act was placed ot the Statute Book which was the merest mockery of aE Suifield's hopes, empowering churchwardens or overseers to hire or lease, and under certain conditions to enclose, land up to a limit of fifty acres, for the employment of the poor. It is difficult to resist the belief that if the riots had lasted longer they might have forced the Government to accept the scheme, in the efficacy of which it had no faith, as the price of peace, and that the change in temperature recorded in Suffield's Diary after the middle of December marks the restoration of confidence at Whitehall…….

So perished the last hope of reform and reparation for the poor. The labourers' revolt was ended; and four hundred and fifty men had spent their freedom in vain. Of these exiles we have one final glimpse; it is in a letter from the Governor of Van Diemen's Land to Lord Goderich: ' If, my Lord, the evidence, or conduct, of particular individuals, can be relied on as proof of the efficiency or non-efficiency of transportation, I am sure that a strong case indeed could be made out in its favour. I might instance the rioters who arrived by the Eliza, several of whom died almost immediately from disease, induced apparently by despair. A great many of them went about dejected and stupefied with care and grief, and their situation after assignment was not for a long time much less unhappy.'

The situation of the Rural poor was made worse with the destruction of the cottage textile industries, when former home weavers were forced into dangerous factories and work in appalling conditions which cut their life expectancy by decades
For Burns - I suggest you read a decent biography and maybe listen to 'A Man's a Man For All that with an open mind
Jim Carroll