" nobody was prepared to pay for idle hands,"
Yet workers were forced to endure conditions of near slavery to stay alive
It depends of which side you choose to support, I suppose
Rural life was brutal and those having to endure it were treated worse than valueed animals because they were replaceable
Your support for rural workers being forced to go to sea - underlines which side you have chosen
We left off being an itinerant people a thousand or so years ago - it's taken recent administrations to create a return to the good-old-days of life on the move
One of the least talked about aspects of life in 'the good old days' of rose covered cottages was the permanent rural unrest - with those seeking to better their lot being shipped off to Australia along with the poachers
As the land-grabbing enclosures began to bite, tied cottages became the order of the day which meant that the very roof over your head depended on total cap-doffing obedience.
In some parts of these islands the medieval practice of droit de seigneur put in a re-appearance, giving the owner of the land the right to 'first bite of the cherry' when one of his labourers married - Robert Clements, Lord Leitrim, leaned the dangers of that one when one of his victims drowned him in a roadside puddle for exercising his right to screw his wife on their wedding night.
"The landed gentry were not the ones to take over "common land" a"
What!!!!!
The landed gentry used their position as magistrates and their influences in Westminster to do exactly that - common land shrank to the few parks still in existence precisely because of that
Wealthy farmers cerainly were part of the land grabbing using the pretence of "improving rural economy", but the process was begun and carried in in the 12th century by the landed gentry - their role continued right into Industrial Revolution when the new Capitalist class - rural and urban, continued the practice with the active support of Parliament the particularly the House of Lords
It was the wealthy land owner, not the dependent tenant farmer who stole the land from under the people's feery and in doing so, also stole the food out of their mouths
You are not really attempting to blame the farmers for this centuries-old rape of Britain
In Scotland, land seizures, first to shoot game, later to graze sheep, led to enforced mass migrations of the rural working class to Canada - no unsimilar to what happened to famine-hit Ireland
Jim Carroll