THE CURRENT constitutional crisis over the bizarre expense claims by our Members of Parliament has been brought to our attention in an investigation of unprecedented scale by the Daily Telegraph.

As we all know it has led to the resignation of the Speaker and at least 10 other MPs. There will be more casualties, perhaps an earlier-than-anticipated General Election, a new Government and, if the BNP does well, more dire warnings from the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

As the Telegraph itself reported, it is a very British revolution.

There have been other occasions throughout history when our rulers have been humiliated. The decision by Charles 1 to dissolve Parliament in 1628 (which eventually led to the English Civil War) is one. The uprisings led by Jack Cade and Wat Tyler are others. In recent years the Poll Tax campaign comes to mind.

However, not much is written these days about William Cobbett, a political journalist who set out on a mission in 1821 to expose corruption and see for himself how the crippling national debt caused by the Napoleonic Wars had forced landowners to become oppressors.

Unlike the Daily Telegraph, Cobbett did not have a 45-strong team scrutinising and analysing the excesses of our MPs, he did not have access to archives, he did not have a mobile telephone, a computer and he did not even have a motor car. He inspected the whole of England on horseback!

Cobbett, a Tory pamphleteer, deplored the changes in the country way of life brought about by corrupt politicians. He started his own newspaper – The Weekly Register. His dislike of the arrogance of William Pitt led him towards radicalism and he wrote about the days when farmers and labourers drank beer and ate beef from the same table and there were no enclosures.

He was known as the "People's Friend". He became popular in England for his support of Queen Caroline against the extravagant, overweight, self indulgent, King George IV. Distrustful of our Members of Parliament and particularly the way they were ruining the countryside, he was offered £10,000 by the Cabinet to "retire" from politics. He refused.

Cobbett's Rural Rides took many years to complete. On Wednesday January 2, 1822, according to his diary, he attended a meeting of the "gentry, clergy, freeholders and occupiers to consider the distressed state of the agricultural interest". He then described his journey that day...

"You come through part of Kent to get to Battle from the Great Wen (his word for London) on the Surrey side of the Thames. The first town is Bromley, the next Seven-Oaks, the next Tunbridge, and between Tunbridge and this place you cross the boundaries of the two counties. From the Surrey Wen to Bromley the land is generally a deep loam on a gravel, and you see few trees except elm. A very ugly country.

"On quitting Bromley the land gets poorer; clay at bottom; the wheat sown on five, or seven, turn lands; the furrows shining with wet; rushes on the wastes on the sides of the road. Here there is a common, part of which has been enclosed and thrown out again, or, rather, the fences carried away. There is a frost this morning, some ice, and the women look rosy-cheeked.

"There is a very great variety of soil along this road; bottom of yellow clay; then of sand; then of sandstone; then of solider stone; then (for about five miles) of chalk; then of red clay; then chalk again; here (before you come to Seven-Oaks) is a most beautiful and rich valley, extending from east to west, with rich corn-fields and fine trees; then comes sand-stone again; and the hop-gardens near Seven-Oaks, which is a pretty little town with beautiful environs, part of which consists of the park of Knowle (sic), the seat of the Duchess of Dorset.

"It is a very fine place. And there is another park, on the other side of the town. So that this is a delightful place, and the land appears to be very good. The gardens and houses all look neat and nice. On quitting Seven-Oaks you come to a bottom of gravel for a short distance, and to a clay for many miles. When I say that I saw teams carting gravel from this spot to a distance of nearly 10 miles along the road, the reader will be at no loss to know what sort of bottom the land has all along here.

"The bottom then becomes sand-stone again. .....Tunbridge is a small but very nice town, and has some fine meadows and a navigable river. ...... There is now and then a hop-garden spot, and now and then an orchard of apples or cherries; but these are poor indeed compared with what you see about Canterbury and Maidstone.

"The agricultural state of the country or, rather, the quality of the land, from Bromley to Battle, may be judged of from the fact, that I did not see, as I came along, more than 30 acres of swedes during the 56 miles! In Norfolk I should, in the same distance, have seen 500 acres! However, man was not the maker of the land; and, as to human happiness, I am of opinion that as much, and even more, falls to the lot of the leather-legged chaps that live in and rove about amongst those clays and woods as to the more regularly disciplined labourers of the rich and prime parts of England.

"As 'God has made the back to the burthen,' so the clay and coppice people make the dress to the stubs and bushes. Under the sole of the shoe is iron; from sole six inches upwards is a high-low; then comes a leather bam to the knee; then comes a pair of leather breeches; then comes a stout doublet; over this comes a smock-frock; and the wearer sets brush and stubs and thorns and mire at defiance.

"I have always observed that woodland and forest labourers are best off in the main. The coppices give them pleasant and profitable work in winter. If they have not so great a corn-harvest, they have a three weeks' harvest in April or May; which employs women and children as well as men. And then in the great article of fuel!

"They buy none. It is miserable work where this is to be bought, and where.... the poor take by turns the making of fires at their houses to boil four or five tea-kettles. What a winter-life must those lead, whose turn it is not to make the fire! A man, a tradesman too, told me, that the people in general could not afford to have fire in ordinary, and that he himself paid threepence for boiling a leg of mutton at another man's fire!

"The leather-legged-race know none of these miseries, at any rate. They literally get their fuel "by hook or by crook," whence, doubtless, comes that old and very expressive saying, which is applied to those cases where people will have a thing by one means or another.

By August 1823 Cobbet found himself riding through the heart of Kent and what he described as some of the most delightful countryside in rural England. His mind, however, was still focussed on those who had brought "great debt" to England. More next week.