Chambers's Journal - Fifth Series, No. 9

Meanwhile the harvest-work on the lands of Ringsford Manor was progressing rapidly—to the surprise of the neighbours, who had heard that Mr Hadleigh could not obtain hands, owing to his craze about the beer question. He did not obtain much sympathy in the district in this attempted social revolution.

It was known that he was not a teetotaler himself; and most of the proprietors and farmers and all the labourers took Caleb Kersey’s view, that apart from the question whether beer was good or bad for them, this autocratic refusal of it to those who preferred to have it was an interference with the liberty of the subject. As he passed through the market-place, a band of labourers had shouted in chorus the old rhyme: ‘Darn his eyes, whoever tries, to rob a poor man of his beer.’