In the middle of the West Oxfordshire countryside, on the outskirts of the village of Minster Lovell, there are a series of bungalows on regular plots of land. The Ordnance Survey map refers to these dwellings as the Charterville Allotments. The name alludes to a surprising past, a connection to one of the largest but ultimately unsuccessful campaigns for parliamentary reform of the nineteenth century: Chartism.
On 14th June 1839 a great petition was presented to Parliament by Thomas Attwood on behalf of the Chartist movement. The Chartists were calling for reforms that would have made Parliament more democratic. Their People’s Charter, drawn up the year before, set out their demands:
- All men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage)
- Voting should take place by secret ballot
- Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years
- Constituencies should be of equal size
- Members of Parliament should be paid
- The property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament should be abolished
The petition was almost three miles long and contained over 1.2 million signatures. Parliament voted against even considering the petition by a vote of 235 to 46, a decision that resulted in rioting across the country.
The failure of the petition of 1839 prompted Feargus O’Conner, one of the Chartist leaders, to form the Chartist Co-operative Land Company (later the National Co-operative Land Company), which was approved by the Chartist Conference of 1845. His aim was a grand social and political experiment. If Parliament would only hear the voices of men who held a certain amount of property, the Chartists would create a new body of such men from among their own supporters.
How were the Charterville bungalows and the small plots of land on which they stood supposed to lead to the reform of Parliament? O’Conner’s plan, set out in his book ‘A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms’, was to resettle surplus labourers from the growing cities on small-holdings of one to four acres. An acre is approximately the same size as a football pitch. This would enable the farmer to meet the property qualification required to have a vote in Parliamentary elections, enabling Chartists to have their say and their voice represented.
The Land Company sold shares to raise the money needed to buy land across the Midlands and the West, which would then be allocated to prospective tenants via a ballot. In June 1847 O’Conner bought 300 acres in Minster Lovell for £10,378. This is a sum equivalent to the combined annual wages of over 140 craftsman in the building trade in the 1850s or over £600,000 today. Despite legal challenges to the nature of the Land Company, with a Select Committee of the House of Commons ruling that it was an illegal lottery, O’Conner pressed ahead and between June 1847 and February 1848 78 single-storey cottages and a school house were constructed in Minster Lovell. This almost doubled the number of households in the village.
There was a problem with this scheme though. Despite O’Conner’s pamphlet ‘What can be done with Three Acres of Land’ optimistically suggesting that 14lbs of bacon, 1.5 stones of flour, 4.5 stones of potatoes, 20 duck eggs and more could be produced “after consumption and the best of good living” these new settlers were not experienced farmers. A visitor in March 1848 reported seeing only seven or eight men working on the allotments, all of whom were hired day labourers, not the occupiers. The land, overlooking the valley, was stony, the soil was poor and water had to be collected via a system of cottage gutters and stored in indoor tanks. Nor was the settlement well connected to Oxford or Cheltenham, were it was expected the famers could sell their produce. While some of the settlers had clearly expected to start a new life in a rural idyll, the hard reality soon sunk in and hopes were dashed.
Rent arrears grew and freehold payments lapsed and so by 1850 the experiment at Charterville had failed in the eyes of most commentators and the mortgage lenders who had put up half of the purchase price won a court battle forcing the sale of the allotments. The census returns of 1851 show the disintegration of the Charterville Allotments. Of the 73 plot-holders of 1848, only 33 survived to late 1850. The two-acre plot-holders seem to have been most vulnerable. By 1852 the 1848 survivors were down to four. Local farmers bought or rented the plots, often cultivating them in addition to other land, and in more experienced hands Charterville gradually became more prosperous towards the end of the 19th century. Other Chartist Land Plan experiments met a similar fate.
What then is the significance of the Chartist Land Plan and the failure of the Charterville Allotments? The Plan, which failed for various financial, legal and practical reasons, marks a high point of a nostalgic yearning for a lost rural existence, before the advent of industrialisation and increasing urbanisation. The Plan was also a serious effort to improve the living conditions of the struggling surplus labourers in the growing cities and to, by helping them achieve the property qualification set by Parliament for the vote, to give them a voice and the chance at political representation. Even today the poorest in our society are typically less engaged with politics and as a result less represented by Parliament.
What of Chartism? What happened to this movement after the Land Plan failed? The Chartists continued to campaign for the People’s Charter and submitted another petition to Parliament in 1848. Again, the petition was ignored and with little appetite to attempt the violent overthrow of the established order seen in other European capitals that year the movement became a spent political force. Nevertheless, the ideas and arguments of the Chartist movement continued, inspiring a new generation of reformers, a growing sense of class solidarity and grassroots and municipal efforts to improve the lot of the labouring poor. Chartism may have failed in the 1840s and 1850s but the fundamental justice and fairness of its argument won out in the end.
By Tony Twigger (Thameside, Wallingford U3A).
To read the full, unabridged version of Tony Twigger’s article click here.
Sources:
C. Paine et al, ‘Working Class Housing in Oxfordshire’, Oxoniensa Vol XLIII (1978), pp. 209-212.
Tiller, ‘Charterville and the Chartist Land Company’, Oxoniensa Vol L (1985)
R. Tombs, The English and their History (2014), pp. 482-485 (describing the social and economic changes of the second half of the nineteenth century).
Victoria County History Oxfordshire Vol XV p. 177.
