A donkey and cart.
A lady driving a donkey-drawn cart, by American artist George Bellows (1882-1925). William Pitt’s tax on horses (except as farming animals) was introduced in 1784, and immediately provoked ridicule; a famous cartoon appeared soon after showing a Cheshire farmer riding a cow complete with saddle and halter: see ‘Pitt Outwitted’ at Wikimedia Commons. A similar tax was introduced in the US in 1794, the Carriage Tax, in which George Washington did not make the mistake of specifying horse-drawn vehicles. Today, through VAT governments tax far more things than hats, clocks and hair products, but because the duty is unspecific it does not invite ridicule or ingenious evasions as Pitt’s taxes did. See Sydney Smith on War is Such a Taxing Business.
AT about an equal distance from Hereford and from Ross, we met with something, the sight of which pleased me exceedingly: it was that of a very pretty pleasant-looking lady (and young too)* with two beautiful children, riding in a little sort of chaise-cart, drawn by an ass, which she was driving in reins.
She appeared to be well known to my friends, who drew up and spoke to her, calling her Mrs Lock, or Locky (I hope it was not Lockart),* or some such name. Her husband, who is, I suppose, some young farmer of the neighbourhood, may well call himself Mr Lucky; for to have such a wife, and for such a wife to have the good sense to put up with an ass-cart, in order to avoid, as much as possible, feeding those cormorants who gorge on the taxes, is a blessing that falls, I am afraid, to the lot of very few rich farmers.
Mrs Lock (if that be her name) is a real practical radical. Others of us resort to radical coffee and radical tea;* and she has a radical carriage.
* There was an opinion among the fashionable that working class people should not marry young and have lots of children, and even that legislation should be introduced to discourage them. Cobbett objected to this opinion very strongly. See ‘God Never Sends Mouths Without Sending Meat’.
* A reference to journalist John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854), who was editor of the Tory Quarterly Review from 1826 to 1853 and married Sophia Scott, daughter of Sir Walter Scott, in 1820. In March 1817, Lockhart accused Cobbett of fomenting sedition at a meeting in Winchester, to which charge Cobbett replied that Lockhart was twisting his words. Lockhart chose to be outraged at this, and demanded ‘satisfaction’. Cobbett (who objected to duels) replied that he was too busy, and there the matter ended. Lockhart initiated another unseemly duel in 1821.
* Wines and spirits were another item taxed by the indefatigable Mr Pitt. Cobbett went on to say that hoped Mr Lock was not so ‘unmanly’ as to let his pretty wife, who deserved the best her husband could give her, defy the Treasury by driving about in a donkey-and-trap while he sat at home swelling the Treasury’s coffers with the help of a bottle.
Précis
In Rural Rides, William Cobbett recalled seeing a young farmer’s wife driving a trap along a Herefordshire lane, drawn by a donkey and accompanied by two children. Cobbett, a severe critic of frivolous taxation, guessed it was a swipe at the tax on keeping a horse-drawn vehicle, and congratulated her husband on having such a pretty and spirited wife. (59 / 60 words)
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