Bondagers
Available price £11.95 from T W Brand in Wooler, Geo C Grieve in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Appleby’s Bookshop in Morpeth, Crossing the Bar in Eyemouth, Kesley’s Bookshop in Haddington, Tourist Information Centres throughout Northumberland, or by post for £14.95 to include postage and packing from: Glendale Local History Society, The Cheviot Centre, 12 Padgepool Place, Wooler, Northumberland NE71 6BL (cheques payable to “Glendale Local History Society”).
Bondagers, by Dinah Iredale from Doddington near Wooler, has been many years in the making, and is the most comprehensive and accessible work on the Bondage system for farm workers that existed in Northumberland and South-East Scotland throughout the Nineteenth and in the early part of the Twentieth Century.
Bondagers tells the story of a forgotten way of life in the days when farming relied on hard manual labour and the countryside was much more densely populated than it is today. Farm labourers were hired on an annual basis and many moved from farm to farm throughout their working lives, uprooting their families and possessions from one poor cottage to another often not many miles away. What made Northumberland and South-East Scotland unusual was that the agricultural improvements of the early 19th century led to large labour-hungry farms in an area whose population had been previously relatively small, resulting in the practice of requiring hinds – the male labourers – to provide a woman to work with them. These Bondagers, as they were called, often had the worst of all worlds – the hardest work for the least return – and were poorly regarded by the hinds who saw them as an encumbrance which had, moreover, to be paid out of their own small wages.
It is small wonder that the Bondage system soon came to be seen as iniquitous: protests were loud and largely carried out through the medium of the local press. Described in detail in the book, the press coverage of Bondagers displays many facets of 19th Century life and attitudes, making it a fascinating social history source. Despite the generally-agreed iniquity of the system, like many others it was slow to end, surviving in modified form almost up to the Second World War. And, as always when people are faced by hard conditions, a camaraderie grew among the Bondagers which expressed itself in their own special customs and lifestyle.
Bondagers is published by the Glendale Local History Society, in part thanks to a grant from the North Northumberland Leader Gold Small Grants Scheme administered by Community Action Northumberland. Chairman, Roy Humphrey, said: “The Society is delighted to have been able to help Dinah see her excellent book into print. The Bondage system was unique to Northumberland and South-East Scotland and it is particularly appropriate that the fullest account of this most fascinating subject has been written by a local author, printed to a high standard in Berwick, the archetypal Border town, and published by a local publisher, our Society. I believe it has every chance of becoming the standard work on the subject and that it will generate interest far beyond the immediate locality it deals with".
Bondagers (ISBN 978-0-9559132-0-4 published in May 2008) is a large (A4) size paperback volume of 208 pages, with a colour cover, illustrated throughout (including numerous facsimiles of original press cuttings), and with a comprehensive bibliography, map and index to enable students such as family historians to trace many of the individuals, places and references contained in the book.
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