My grandfather had most of Cobbett’s agricultural books, and read them with respect, as Cobbett never recommended anything without trying it himself or having seen it tried. These books of his are shrewd and sensible, and may be right in what they say of that “degrading curse,” the “pernicious practice of drinking tea,” _Cottage Economy_, sections 23 to 33. “But is it in the power of any man, any good labourer who has attained the age of fifty, to look back upon the last thirty years of his life without cursing the day in which tea was introduced into England?” Parson Davy was preaching against tea-drinking here in 1803, and as early as 1748 Wesley was exhorting his followers to abhor tea as a deadly poison. (A prophet is without honour in his own chapels.) Cobbett likewise talks of “the corrosive, gnawing, and poisonous powers” of tea. “Tea has no useful strength in it: it contains nothing nutritious.... It is, in fact, a weaker kind of laudanum, which enlivens for the moment and deadens afterwards.”
The fault may not be in the tea itself, but in the way of making it and leaving it to ‘stand’ or ‘draw.’ A cynic said that tea was the salvation of the people here; it so damaged their digestions that they could not assimilate the food they ate; and this really was a mercy, as they over-ate themselves so much. Even in this house, I fear, tea was allowed to stand too long. I remember my grandmother being chaffed about a letter she had written, “Jane has drunk tea here. Poor soul, she has drained the cup of bitterness to the very dregs.”
In my early days here the cottagers all kept pigs; and the sties abutted on the cottages and drained into the lanes. There were sties on each side of the lane between Bowhouse and the Tallet; and as the lane is steep, the drainage made a stream downhill and joined the drainage from a sty at Souther Wreyland just outside the kitchen door. Then came a time when pig-sties were prohibited within a certain distance of a house; and the old granite pig-sties were utilized in other ways--that Souther Wreyland sty became a coal-cellar, and a double sty at Lower Wreyland has now become a sitting-room. But in War-time all restrictions were removed; and pig-sties could be set up close to dwellings, as before. Restrictions on building also were removed. Some years before the War I wanted to turn a barn into a house; but this was not allowed, although the barn had well-built granite walls--few houses have as good. And now a barn near here, not built so well as that, has just been turned into a house. If restrictions were necessary, they should not have been removed: if they were capricious, they should never have been made.