This is why Cobbett (and John Fielden, his friend and fellow Member for Oldham after 1832) came so close to being spokesmen of the working class. Once the real condition of the working people – for Cobbett, the labourer, for Fielden, the factory child – is made, not one, but the test of all other political expedients, then we are close to revolutionary conclusions. Concealed within the seemingly ‘nostalgic’ notion of the ‘historic rights of the poor’, which, in different ways, was voiced by Cobbett, Oastler and Carlile, there were also new claims maturing, for the community to succour the needy and the helpless, not out of charity, but as of right.2 Cobbett loathed the ‘comforting system’ of charity and moral rescue, and, in his History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’, he was chiefly intent upon giving historical backing to his notion of social rights. The lands of the medieval Church had been held in trust for the poor. Wrongfully misappropriated or dispersed, nevertheless the poor still had a claim upon them, which (in Cobbett’s eyes) was recognized through the mediation of the old Poor Laws. The repeal of those laws constituted the last act in a shameful series of robberies by which the poor had been cheated of their rights: