DAVE MANSE,LL the income of this class. Potato cultivations was rapidly expanding and all these factors seem to have ecouraged earlier marriages and large families. Population increase outdistanced the food supply and a classical Malthusian situation was set up which was to contribute greatly to the catastrophe of the 1840s. This lowest class did not share in the agricultural prosperity of the Napoleonic war period, and the newly mechanised factories, such as large flour mills, employed little labour. It was the textile industries alone that held out the prospect of widespread supplementary employment. One of the allurements of Pitt's programme for the Union had been an influx of British capital to the island as a whole, but this did not happen in a way that produced much employment. The rapidly enlarging class of labourers and cottiers (probably due as much to a falling death rate as to a rising birth rate) came to depend on a diet centred on the potato, supplemented with what they could earn from domestic textile production, and they were severely affected by a series of poor harvests in grain and potatoes in 1799-1800, 1816, 1817, 1822 and 1836 which led to partial famines among them, but which led to increased prices for the larger farmers. Their poverty was greatly added to by the severe depression in the linen industry after the British slump of 1819/20. As we have seen above, textile manufacture as a whole began to be centralised more and more in the North-East at the expense of the rest of the country which became relatively more ruralised. The visible effect of this ruralisation on the labourers and cottiers made the smallholders that much more tenacious in clinging on to the little land that they had, which at least guaranteed them a more varied diet and protected them from total famine. In the poorest ragions, subdivision of land provided access to a minute holding for every man. In other regions there was a pronounced sense of property rights. Conflict was apt to arise between tenants and landlord if a tenant's jealously guarded right to his holding appeared to be in question. By now the right of a tenant to the renewal of his lease so long as he paid the rent demanded, or to the continuation of whatever agreement he held the land by, was all but universal. Trouble was only likely to occur if the lease came up for renewal in a time of falling prices when landlord and tenant might not agree on terms for renewal and, failing agreement, the farm might be offered to someone else willing to pay a higher rent. At this point the occupying tenant might come 74
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTExMDY2NQ==