house, a family estate, a second country home, a shooting box in a northern county, another in Scotland, possibly a castle in Ireland were not out of the ordinary. Besides Hatfield and his London house on Arlington Street, Lord Salisbury owned Walmer Castle in Deal, the Manor House at Cranborne in Dorsetshire, his villa in France, and if he had been a sporting man, would have had a place in Scotland or a racing stud near Epsom or Newmarket. There were 115 persons in Great Britain who owned over 50,000 acres each, and forty-five of these owned over 100,000 acres each, although much of this was uncultivatable land in Scotland whose income yield was low. There were some sixty to sixty-five persons, all peers, who possessed both land over 50,000 acres and income over £50,000, and fifteen of these—seven dukes, three marquesses, three earls, one baron and one baronet—had landed incomes of over £100,000. In all of Great Britain, out of a population of 44,500,000, there were 2,500 landowners who owned more than 3,000 acres apiece and had landed incomes of over £3,000.
Income taxes were not payable on incomes under £160 and in this category there were approximately eighteen to twenty million people. Of these, about three million were in white-collar or service trades—clerks, shopmen, tradesmen, innkeepers, farmers, teachers—who earned an average of £75 a year. Fifteen and a half million were manual workers, including soldiers, sailors, postmen and policemen and those in agricultural and domestic service who earned less than £50 a year. The “poverty line” had been worked out at £55 a year, or 21 s . 8 d . a week, for a family of five. Indoor servants slept in attics or windowless basements. Agricultural laborers lived in houses for which they paid a shilling a week, and worked with scythe, plow and sickle in the fields from the time when the great horn boomed at five o’clock in the morning until nightfall. When their houses leaked or rotted they were dependent on the landlord for repairs, and unless the landlord took care of them when their earning power came to an end, they went to the workhouse to finish out their days. Estate servants—grooms, gardeners, carpenters, blacksmiths, dairymen and field hands—whose families had lived on the land as long as its owners, gave service that was “wholehearted and passionate.… Their pride was bound up in it.”
With the opening of the grouse season in August, and until the reopening of Parliament in January, the great landowners engaged in continuous entertainment of each other in week-long house parties of twenty to fifty guests. With each guest bringing his own servant, the host fed as many as a hundred, and on one occasion at Chatsworth, four hundred extra mouths while his house party lasted. Shooting was the favored pastime and consisted in displaying sufficient stamina and marksmanship, assisted by a loader and three or four guns, to bring down an unlimited bag of small game flushed out of its coverts by an army of beaters. From county to county and back and forth into Scotland, their trail marked by thousands upon thousands of dead birds and hares, the gentry were constantly on the move: for shooting with the Prince at Sandringham, for hunting (in blue and buff instead of scarlet coats) with the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds in Wiltshire, for deer stalking amid Scottish lochs and crags and trackless forests (“Keep doon, Squire, keep doon”—his ghillie whispered to Mr. Chaplin, forced to crawl into the open to come within shooting distance of his stag—“ye’re so splendidly built about the haunches I’m afeert the deer will be seeing ye”), for Christmas parties and coming-of-age parties and occasional time out at Homburg and Marienbad to purge satiated stomachs and allow the round to begin again.
Morning was the gentlemen’s time on the moors; ladies came down to breakfast in hats and at afternoon tea reigned in elaborate and languorous tea gowns of,
Income taxes were not payable on incomes under £160 and in this category there were approximately eighteen to twenty million people. Of these, about three million were in white-collar or service trades—clerks, shopmen, tradesmen, innkeepers, farmers, teachers—who earned an average of £75 a year. Fifteen and a half million were manual workers, including soldiers, sailors, postmen and policemen and those in agricultural and domestic service who earned less than £50 a year. The “poverty line” had been worked out at £55 a year, or 21 s . 8 d . a week, for a family of five. Indoor servants slept in attics or windowless basements. Agricultural laborers lived in houses for which they paid a shilling a week, and worked with scythe, plow and sickle in the fields from the time when the great horn boomed at five o’clock in the morning until nightfall. When their houses leaked or rotted they were dependent on the landlord for repairs, and unless the landlord took care of them when their earning power came to an end, they went to the workhouse to finish out their days. Estate servants—grooms, gardeners, carpenters, blacksmiths, dairymen and field hands—whose families had lived on the land as long as its owners, gave service that was “wholehearted and passionate.… Their pride was bound up in it.”
With the opening of the grouse season in August, and until the reopening of Parliament in January, the great landowners engaged in continuous entertainment of each other in week-long house parties of twenty to fifty guests. With each guest bringing his own servant, the host fed as many as a hundred, and on one occasion at Chatsworth, four hundred extra mouths while his house party lasted. Shooting was the favored pastime and consisted in displaying sufficient stamina and marksmanship, assisted by a loader and three or four guns, to bring down an unlimited bag of small game flushed out of its coverts by an army of beaters. From county to county and back and forth into Scotland, their trail marked by thousands upon thousands of dead birds and hares, the gentry were constantly on the move: for shooting with the Prince at Sandringham, for hunting (in blue and buff instead of scarlet coats) with the Duke of Beaufort’s hounds in Wiltshire, for deer stalking amid Scottish lochs and crags and trackless forests (“Keep doon, Squire, keep doon”—his ghillie whispered to Mr. Chaplin, forced to crawl into the open to come within shooting distance of his stag—“ye’re so splendidly built about the haunches I’m afeert the deer will be seeing ye”), for Christmas parties and coming-of-age parties and occasional time out at Homburg and Marienbad to purge satiated stomachs and allow the round to begin again.
Morning was the gentlemen’s time on the moors; ladies came down to breakfast in hats and at afternoon tea reigned in elaborate and languorous tea gowns of,
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