I. CHAUCER’S ENGLAND: Field, village, and manor-house
In Chaucer’s England we see for the first time the modern mingling with the mediaeval, and England herself beginning to emerge as a distinct nation, no longer a mere oversea extension of Franco-Latin EEurope. Chaucer, who spent long hours of his busy day in court circles, had the culture of mediaeval France at his fingers’ ends : when therefore he set the pattern of modern English poetry for centuries to come, he set it in forms and meters derived from France and Italy, in both of which countries he had traveled several times on business of state. Other characteristics of the new-born nation were expressed in Langland’s religious allegory, Piers the Plowman.
For in the economic sphere also the mediaeval was beginning to yield to the modern, and England was beginning to develop social classes peculiar to herself. The institution of justices of the peace, local gentry appointed by the crown to govern the neighborhood in the king’s name, was a move away from inherited feudal jurisdictions. All these movements – economic, social, ecclesiastical, national – are reflected in the proceedings of parliament, a characteristically mediaeval institution in origin, but already on the way to be modernized. Thus the age of Chaucer speaks to us with many voices not unintelligible to the modern ear.
The most important of the changes proceeding during the lifetime of Chaucer (1340-1400) was the break-up of the feudal manor. In order to understand the meaning of this change, it is necessary to give a brief account of the older system that was gradually displaced. The most characteristic, though by no means the only, method of cultivation in mediaeval England was the open field.
The outline of many of these strips ploughed by the farmers of saxon, mediaeval, and tudor-Stuart times can still clearly be seen. The strips or lands were not severally enclosed. The meadowlands for hay were cultivated on a similar principle. This system of cultivation, originated by the first Anglo-saxon settlers, lasted down to the time of the modern enclosures.
On this democracy of peasant cultivators was heavily superimposed the feudal power and legal rights of the lord of the manor. This system of servile tenure with the fixed work days of service on the lord’s demesne held good all over England, not only in the regions of open field strip cultivation, but in the south east, the west and the north, lands of old enclosure where other systems of cultivation were practiced. But, for a true picture of mediaeval agriculture in England, we must never forget sheep farming and the shepherd’s life.
The lifetime of Chaucer roughly corresponds with the years when the disruption of the old manorial system was in most rapid and painful progress. The commutation of field services had thus made some headway before the twelfth century closed. One cause of this feudal reaction was the rapid increase of population and the consequent land hunger of the thirteenth century.
When therefore the fourteenth century began, the lords of the manors were in a strong position. When a third or possibly a half of the inhabitants of the kingdom died of plague in less than two years, obviously the survivors among the peasantry had the whip hand of the lord and his bailiff. But the lord’s difficulty was the peasant’s opportunity.
Some lords still relied on the compulsory labour of the serfs to cultivate the home farm, but the decreased numbers and the increasing recalcitrance of the villagers from whom such services were due clogged the wheels of the old system. More and more, therefore, as Chaucer was growing to manhood, the lords abandoned the attempt to cultivate their demesne lands by the old method, and consented to commute field services for cash. With the money received in lieu of field service, the lords could offer wages to free labourers.
In a number of different ways, therefore, new classes of substantial yeomen came into existence. The wide gap between lord and villain that had characterized the society of the feudal manor is being filled up. These parliamentary laws to keep down wages were passed at the petition of the commons, at the instance of the smaller gentry and tenant farmers – husbands and land tenants as the statutes called them.
These parliamentary laws in restraint of wages mark the gradual change from a society based on local customs of personal service to a money economy that is nation wide. So the battle of the landless labourers against the farmers backed by the parliamentary justices went on, from the time of the black death to the rising of 1381 and after. On some manors the change in the relation between landlord and tenant had taken place without a struggle, in accordance with the clearly perceived interest of both parties to replace villain services by money rents.
The battle for freedom, differing in its precise character from manor to manor and from farm to farm, led to sporadic acts of violence that prepared the way for the rising of 1381. if such had for years been the state of the countryside, we can better understand the astonishing events of 1381. the English rebels were not starving men driven to violence by despair. These various formidable elements of social revolt had been inflamed by a propaganda of Christian democracy, demanding in god’s name freedom and justice for the poor.
Then took place the most remarkable incident of our long social history – the capture of London. The cause of law and order had been lost by the poltroonery of the government, it was revindicated, partly by courage and partly by fraud. The rebellion had been a great incident, and its history throws a flood of light on the English folk of that day. Personal freedom became universal at an early date in our country, and this probably is one reason for the ideological attachment of Englishmen to the very name of freedom.
The military system by which England fought the hundred years war, strengthened the power not of the king himself but of more than one class of his subjects. In most of the counties of England the king’s writ ran, though it was often evaded or denied. But in the counties bordering on Scotland the king’s writ can scarcely be said to have run at all.
While the north was still armed and fortified for war, and while the marcher lords still relied on their castles to hold down the welsh, in the more civilized parts of England it was no longer usual for lords and gentlemen to build fortress homes meant to withstand the siege of a regular army. Modified precautions were therefore taken in the domestic architecture of the day. In hilly country a moat filled with water was less usual and the rise of ground took its place in the scheme of defence.
In the west, fine houses were sometimes built of wood and plaster instead of stone, with a lessening regard for considerations of defence. In Chaucer’s day, life was already somewhat safer and a good deal more comfortable than in the warlike era when the most wealthy families had been crowded into the darkness of grim, square Norman keeps. While the square keeps of the Norman warriors were being deserted as no longer habitable, some of the finer Plantagenet castles were being enlarged and adapted to the use of a new age.
The farms and cottages of the poor were built of logs or planks, or of uprights and beams supporting rubble and clay. Bacon was a more common dish on the cottage table, but the number of pigs in the village herd depended on the extent and character of the waste. But there is other meat besides beef and mutton, poultry and bacon.
In 1389 the commons complained in parliament that artificers and labourers, and servants and grooms keep greyhounds and other dogs, and on the holy days, when good Christian people be at church, hearing divine service, they go hunting in parks, warrens, and coneyries of lords and others, to the very great destruction of the same. Rabbits, then called coneys, were a plague in many parts of mediaeval England, and were snared and dug out by all classes, except in private warrens. The gentry spent much of their lives hunting the deer with horse and hound, or flying hawks at pheasant, partridge and heron, or lying out at night to net the fox and the badger.
In men’s dress, as well as in so much else, the beginning of the change from mediaeval to modern might be ascribed to the age of Chaucer. The long gown did not, however, go out of use among the more sober part of mankind till tudor times. With much absurd and ephemeral luxury came in much solid comfort and new habits of life, that have survived. Under such tutors luxury increased, and with it commerce grew and refinement spread by the very means which the moralists denounced.
II CHAUCER’S ENGLAND: town and church
In the fourteenth century the English town was still a rural and agricultural community, as well as a centre of industry and commerce. The town was more insanitary than the village and was often visited by plague. The life of the burgher combined the advantages of town and countryside.
But these little towns, half rural though they were, had burgher pride of the most exclusive kind. Yet, great as war the power of London and considerable as were the liberties of other towns, they were loyal members of state, whose parliament legislated, partly by their advice, on their economic concerns in so far as they were national, and in the fourteenth century trade was becoming more and more national without ceasing to be municipal. But even in England and even during the hundred years war, national sentiment and loyalty to the kingdom at large made no such daily and urgent claims as did the civic patriotism that a man felt for his own town.
Political strife ran strong and fierce in the streets of every town of England, not the strife of national parties, but the politics of the craft and of the town which touched the burgher in his daily life. In London, sea coal, so called because it was brought by ship from Tyneside, was being more and more used in place of wood and charcoal, causing clergy and nobility resorting to the city of London to complain of danger of contagion from the stench of burning sea coal. Two miles from London lay Westminster, clustering round its abbey, and its hall which rufus had built and which richard II was adorning with rafters of oak.
The richest citizens of London were now on a par with the great territorial nobles, not only because they had at their command the city militia and a large proportion of the shipping of England, but because they lent money to government. And so, in the absence of the jews, Edward III borrowed money for his wars from Florentine bankers, who also supplied the needs of his barons. But the king also borrowed from his own subjects, the great city men as we may already call them, and from the wealthy merchants of other towns, like sir William de la l’ole od hull, the first English business man to become the founder of a great noble house.
It was in these circumstances that the network of Edward III’s financial, home and foreign policy was elaborated. English national policy was continually changing under the pressure of the king’s necessities, and of rival interests among his own subjects and among his allies oversea. But the English marine was at last beginning to be formidable.
The staple, where English goods for export had to be collected, taxed and sold, was necessary for levying the customs duties on which the king’s finances depended, and it was thought also to be of service in protecting English merchants against the fraud and violence of international commerce in that age. Most of the English goods exported through the staple at Calais consisted of raw wool, but woollen cloth was constantly gaining ground, till in tudor times the export of cloth killed the export of raw wool. These London Calais merchants, with whom the king had to bargain for loans and levies as if with a fourth estate of the realm, had extensive business and personal connection with wool growing district like the costwolds, where they and their rivals the clothiers bought estates and founded many of the great county families of western England.
It is, in fact, to the age of Chaucer that professor postan points as the great breeding season of England capitalism. While raw wool was still the chief article of export, domestic needs were supplied for the most part by cloth made in England. In the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries the production of standardized cloth for the market began to deteriorate in english towns, where the number of weavers seriously declined.
Government action in the reigns of Edward II and III further stimulated our greatest industry. The growth of the cloth trade was destined to go on for generations to come, creating new classes in town and country, adding to the luxury of the manor house and relieving the poverty of the cottage, altering the methods and increasing the rewards of agriculture. Already in the fourteenth century it was evident that the rapid expansion of the cloth trade required a new economic organization.
Capitalism as the organizer of industry is first clearly visible in the cloth trade. But, for centuries to come, most industries were still conducted by the old fashioned master craftsman, with a few apprentices and journeymen sleeping and working under his roof, subject to the general supervision of the craft gild. But there was more in it than a struggle for wages.
In the earlier stages of the craft gild, masters, apprentices, and journeymen were more or less of one class. In the age of Chaucer these things were changing. And so we find in the towns of the fourteenth century not only occasional strikes for higher wages inside the gild, but in some cases the formation of permanent yeomen gilds, to champion the interest of the employees and perform the fighting functions of a modern trade union.
Great changes, therefore, were taking place in Chaucer’s day in the structure of society. Change indeed was long overdue. Manu of the clergy themselves were critics of the church as outspoken as the laity.
The church, unlike the manor and the gild, could not be transformed by the natural working of economic change or by the mere pressure of opinion. Yet even without the support of the pope, the English bishops might have done at least something. Though paid out of the revenues of the church, the bishops gave their lives to the service of the state.
In the days of the Norman kings, the close connection between the bench of bishops and the royal ministry had supplied a barbarous land with able and learned bureaucrats, who derived from their Episcopal authority a prestige which enabled them to cope as the king’s servants with an ignorant and brutal baronage. Occupied as they were by the cares of secular office, the bishops paid little attention to the deplorable state of their dioceses. One branch of their duties, the proper control of the spiritual courts, the bishops neglected with unfortunate results.
Many parishes, no doubt, were faithfully and sufficiently served by men like Chaucer’s poor parson, the only type of churchman for whom the poet seems to have felt affection and respect. It followed that teaching and preaching often amounted to very little in an English village, so far as the resident priest was concerned, though mass was regularly performed. But the parish priest reigned within the walls of his church and there he said the mass, attended on Sundays by the greater part oh the village.
The peasant as he stood or knelt on the floor of the church each Sunday, could not follow the latin words, but good thoughts found a way into his heart as he watched what he revered and heard the familiar yet still mysterious sounds. The peasant knew some of the sayings of Christ, and incidents from his life and from those of the saints, besides many bible stories such as adam and eve, noah’s flood, solomon’s wives and wisdom etc. confession was a compulsory duty, normally made to the parish priest, but very frequently to the intruding friar, who gave absolution more easily.
The friars still set the pace in the age of Chaucer. If the orthodox secular clergy denounced the friars for filling their sermons with idle and unedifying stories to attract the vulgar, it was partly because those sermons attacked the sloth of bishops, monks and clergy and the corruption of the archdeacon and his summoner. If we seek the origins of some of the distinctive traits of English Puritanism, of its asceticism, its war on sin, its sabbatarian rigour, its fear of hell, its attacks on the bishops and wealthy clergy, its crude denunciation of opponents, its vigorous and soul stirring sermons, its tendency to unctuous sentiment, its lapses into hypocrisy, its equalitarian appeal to the poor and lowly, they are all to be found in the mediaeval church and particularly in the work of the friars.
While the enemies of the friars complained that they did too much and intruded too busily where they had no rightful place, the monks of this age were accused of doing too little. The monks in Chaucer’s England were worldly and well to do, living lives of sauntering comfort in the monastery, or roaming the land dressed like laymen, to hunt game or look after their estates. The monasteries had by this time accumulated vast endowments in land, tithes, appropriated churches, treasures, and clerical patronage enough to cause them to be bitterly envied as idle drones, living at the expense of the impoverished kingdom.
There were occasional scandals in monasteries and the orthodox gower was as certain as Wycliffe that the monks were unchaste. Already it was to the kingly power that church reformers, baffled by pope and bishops, were beginning to turn their hopes. In one great branch of service to mankind the church in the age of Chaucer was neither decadent nor even stagnant.
The section of the mediaeval church that was under least discipline and had only too little corporate sense was the army of unbeneficed priests, deacons, and clerks in holy orders who were scattered about the country, in every variety of employment, often under no control beyond that of their lay employers. The clerks in business houses and legal or state offices were performing functions necessary for society, and were neither better nor worse men than their neighbours. There was already considerable provision for education of clerks in reading, writing and latin.
In 1382 William of wykeham, desiring better education for the secular clergy, founded at Winchester a grammar school on scale of unexampled magnificence, which become the model for later foundations of equal splendour, like eton. The two ancient universities of England already existed, but scarcely yet as rivals, for Cambridge only rose to national importance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Chaucer’s day, oxford was the intellectual centre of England, and Wycliffe’s influence was the chief fact in oxford, until he and his followers were driven out or silenced by the interference of bishops and king with the independent life of the university.
The regulars were the monks and friars who had several great convents of their orders attached to the university. The seculars who regarded themselves as the university proper, consisted of secular clergy, priests like Wycliffe, or deacons and clerks in lower orders. Town and gown used daggers, swords, and even bows and arrows in their pitched battles in high street.
The mediaeval student, before the development of the college system had done its work, was riotous, lawless, and licentious. But England found a remedy for these evils. The demand for colleges and the readiness of founders to supply the need were stimulated by religious controversy. And so, in the fifteenth century, while the forcible suppression of debate on religious and ecclesiastical questions crippled for a hundred years the intellectual vigour of the English universities, the rapid growth of the college system bought about an improvement in morals and discipline. One very important branch of learning had found for itself a home that was neither oxford nor Cambridge.
CHAPTER III:ENGLAND IN THE AGE OF CAXTON
Henry VI, 1422. Edward IV, 1461. Edward V, 1483. Richard III, 1483. Henry VII, 1485.
It is difficult for us today to imagine how slow was the pace of change before the era of inventions. If Chaucer in the ghost had haunted England during the lifetime of Caxton (1422-1491), he would have found little to astonish him, except perhaps that nothing had come of all the talk against the Church.Most of the towns, our ghostly visitor might notice, had not grown since his day and some had even shrunk. In the port towns, bearded mariners, much the same as a certain ‘Shipman’ whom Chaucer had described long ago, told rough tales of trade and tempest in the Channel and the Biscay Bay; of the luck of English pirates who preyed on the merchandise of Spanish galleys, Genoese carracks and Breton and Flemish ballingers, and of adventures with foreign pirates who tried to retaliate.
In the gentleman’s manor-house, the nobleman’s castle and the King’s Court, the poet’s ghost would find the culture he loved still alive in a faded kind of way. And if Chaucer’s spirit could have peeped over the shoulders of Edward IV at the machine which Master Caxton had brought from Flanders, as it stamped off in quick succession copies of the Canterbury Tales to look almost like real manuscripts, the flattered poet would have smiled at so pleasant a toy.After the second expulsion of the English armies from France came the Wars of the Roses at home (1455-1485). ‘The Wars of the Roses’ means a period of social disorder which gave rise at intervals to spurts of real warfare, it is clear that the whole social fabric was affected by the general state of misrule. In what did this social disorder consist?
Most men’s conduct is determined by the prevailing fashion of the society in which each lives. Under these conditions, any aspirant to importance in the county, any ambitious man covetous of his neighbour’s lands, or ay quiet man who whised to remain safe in possession of his own, had need to secure the patronage of come magnate of the realm to be ‘good lord’ to him, to overawe the judge and jury when his case came on, and to speak the word for him at the Privy Council that should invoke or prevent interference by the Crown in the course of local justice.
In the following century the Tudors freed the Privy Council and the courts of law from the dictation of the nobility, put down retainers and enforced order in the land.In the Fifteenth Century perpetual law-suits about title to land, often dragging on for years without settlement, were a serious matter for the farmer of the land in question, especially when both claimants for a manor sent in armed men and extorted the rents by force.The relation of the landlord to the tenant—whether of open-field strips or of an enclosed farm—was assimilating itself year by year to modern practice.Disputes between landlord and tenant as to the obligation to do repairs, and as to the amount and regularity of rent payments, characterized this period of transition from the old feudal ways to a new leasehold money-system, of which the rules had not yet been regularized by tradition.
The function of land-agent were often performed by a gentleman’s private chaplain,e ven by the parish priest who ‘visited’ his flock in this secular capacity. Sometimes the parish priest spent most of his time as a farmer, cultivating his own glebe farm like the peasant born that he was, and even, hiring other lands.Very occasionally the open field was enclosed and divided up into consolidated farms by agreement among the peasant cultivators themselves. Taken as a whole, the Fifteenth Century was a good time for the peasant and labourer and a bad time for the landlord. England during the Wars of the Roses was poorer than she had been owing to the unsuccessful French war, followed by civil strife at home, and owing also to the fall in population.
This period of rural society is best known to us from the letters of the Paston family and other smaller collections, like the Stonor and Cely Papers. In the age of Caxton, letters were not written for pastime or gossip, but had some practical purpose in view, usually of law, business or local politics. The extreme and formal deference that children were made to show to their parents, the hardness of home and school discipline, the constant ‘belashing’ of boys and girls and servants will perhaps cause no surprise. These old-established mediaeval customs, still vigorous in the Fifteenth Century, may at first seem inconsistent with the tone of mediaeval literature; for three centuries past, poetry had been the analysis of love-longing, the service and devotion of the knight to his lady, sung in strains of rapture and in forms of mystic allegory.
To the educated mediaeval man and woman, marriage was one relation of life, love another. A nobler view of what marriage might and should mean had not yet been envisaged by general opinion. Since, therefore, love was not the normal basis of marriage, the Troubadours of Languedoc at the end of the Eleventh Century, and the French and English poets who succeeded them in chanting the service of a pagan ‘God of Love’, regarded the passion of love as being under no obligation to respect so irrelevant a thing as the marriage bond. The great gift of mediaeval poets to the Western world was this new conception of the love of man and woman as a spiritual thing—the best of all spiritual things, raising men and women above their normal selves in all gentleness and virtue.
This victory of freedom and love has behind it a long roll of unknown warriors and martyrs. Even in the society of the prosaic Pastons has epistolary record of at least two love marriages. The other Paston love story had a longer and rougher course but reached an equally happy heaven. Already in the popular ballad literature of the later Fifteenth Century the motif of the love marriage was more and more making itself heard, as in the Nut Brown Maid, ancestress of the Bailiff’s Daughter of Islington and a hundred other romantically married heroines of ballad.
And so the slow and long contested evolution towards the English love match goes on throughout our social history, until in the age of Jane Austen and the Victorians free choice in love is accepted as the basis of marriage, even in the best society, and any more mercenary arrangement is regarded as exceptional and suspect. Among the poor, it is probable that marriage choice had always been less clogged by mercenary motives.
When once a lady is married, she entered on a sphere of activity, influence and even authority. To organize the feeding and clothing of the inhabitants of one or more manor-house was in itself a task for a life, requiring the same sort of administrative ability as ladies in our day so often devote to public work or professional employment. Chimneys in the wail were more and more replacing the open hearth in the middle of the room, whence the smoke had escaped as best it could through open windows. In the somewhat hard conception of family life that prevailed in manor-house and castle, there was little welcome extended to a superfluity of maiden aunts or elderly spinsters.
The rules for dress and conduct drawn up long ago by founders with ascetic ideas were very generally neglected. The nunneries, though numerous, were very small. In the Fifteenth Century these establishments were going downhill financially and otherwise. Between the time of Wycliffe’s criticism on the great endowments of the church, and the onslaught of Henry VIII, gifts of land and money were still commonly made, but they now went less often to house of monks, nuns and friars than to chantries and schools.
The Fifteenth Century, for all its troubles, was a great time to increased educational facilities and endowments. England, in fact, acquired a fine system of secondary education. Before the Greek and Ciceronian Renaissance reached England at the end of the Fifteenth Century, secondary education, from aristocratic Winchester and Eton, downwards, was based on the teaching of Latin—Vergil, Ovid, and some Christian authors. The sons of the nobility and gentry were educated in various ways, differing according to the rank or the personal views of their parents.
William of Wykeham’s Winchester, and Eton College founded by Henry VI in 1440, were gradually approximating to the character of ‘Public Schools’ in the English sense of the word—schools where the sons of gentry were educated. In a previous generation, the first John Paston had gone to the neighbouring University of Cambridge, to learn law at Trinity Hall, prior to going on to the Inner Temple.
Throughout the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge was gaining ground as a serious rival to Oxford. But during this conservative age the College system took firm root, and thereby an end was put in England to the uncared for and undisciplined life of the medieval student.
With the increase in the numbers of readers taught in the schools and Universities of England, what were the books they read? Apart from books of piety, Latin classics taught at school, and heavy tomes of learning for real scholars, the commonest types of reading among gentry and burghers were chronicles of England and of France in verse and in prose, endless romances in prose and in ‘rhyme doggrel’ about Troy, King Arthur, and a hundred other traditional tales. Besides private libraries, public libraries were being formed.
William Caxton (1422-1491) was a product of the new middle class and its improved education. Then in 1477 he brought over his press to England, set it up at Westminster, under the shadow of the Abbey, and there, during the remaining fourteen years of his life, under royal and noble patronage, he poured out nearly a hundred books, many of them in folio, and most in the English tongue.
His own use of the machine which he establish as part of our island life was at once ideal and practical, but it was not controversial. On the other hand, Caxton was well aware of the importance of his work in fixing the form of the English language for educated people, and he therefore gave much thought and asked much advice as to the dialect into which he had best translate the books he printed.
Throughout the troubled reigns of the Lancastrian and Yorkist Kings, London remained peaceful and her wealth constantly increased. The Government of London during this period was conducted, not by the democracy of manufacturing crafts but by members of the great merchant Companies.
The merchant aristocracy that rule the capital, wisely resisted the temptation to take an active part in the struggle of the rival families for the Crown. Not only London but the other towns enjoyed peace during the Wars of the Roses by the practice of virtual neutrality, and by paying small sums for presents to the King and other political personages, national and local, as also to the Judges for their favour in court.
From the middle of the Fourteenth Century onwards, the manufacture and export of cloth were growing at the expense of the export of raw wool. The migration of the cloth trade to the country was bound to be unpopular with the clothing gilds in the towns, who attempted to prevent the competition of rival manufacture by prohibiting the merchants of their towns from dealing with country cloth makers.
In Coggeshall lived the famous cloth merchant, Thomas Paycocke, and there he built his fine house with carved timbers, now belonging to the National Trust. And it was the in the West; after two more centuries had passed, Defoe observed that ‘many of the great families who now pass for gentry in the Western counties have been originally raised from and built up by this truly noble manufacture’ of cloth. The character of an English merchant of this period is made very real to us by the life and letters of Thomas Betson.
The hours of labour in field and workshop were very long by the standards of today. It was during this period that playing-cards came in, very much in the form in which we have them today : the dress of our court cards is still based on late Fifteenth Century costume. Shooting at the butts was encouraged by Proclamation and Statute at the expense of rival forms of amusement, in order to preserve England’s military monopoly of archery with the long bow.
In towns and wealthier villages, many gilds—not merely the craft gilds—helped to organize pageantry and merriment. Beside the maintenance of a chantry, a school, an almshouse or a bridge, one of the chief activities of Gilds was the staging of Miracle Plays ‘in a scaffold hye’. More directly under the patronage of the clergy were the ‘Church ales’, forerunners of the religious tea and philanthropic bazaar. The ceremony of the Boy Bishop, very strange to modern ideas, was patronized equally by the high-and-dry orthodox clergy and by the reforming Dean Colet.
CHAPTER IV:TODOR ENGLAND—INTRODUCTION
‘The End of the Middle Ages ?’
Henry VII, 1485. Henry VIII, 1509. Dissolution of Monasteries, 1536-1539. Edward VI, 1547. Mary, 1553. Elizabeth, 1558-1603.
Dates and periods are necessary to the study and discussion of history, for all historical phenomena are conditioned by time are produced by the sequence of events. But, unlike date, ‘periods’ are not facts. The habit of thinking about the past as divided into watertight ‘periods’ is most dangerous of all in economic and social history.
And it is all the more difficult to think about economic and social history in ‘periods’, because there is always an overlap of the old and the new continuing side by side in the same country for generations and even for centuries.
If, then, we are asked to name a date, or even a period, when ‘the Middle Ages came to an end’, what can we safely say ? In the year 1485 when Henry Tudor and his Welshmen had overthrown Richard III at Bosworth, they had no thought that a new era was beginning.
The victory of Henry the Welshman made no change distantly comparable in importance to the victory of William the Norman at Hastings. Another aspects of that half century of calm before the storm, was the Renaissance of classical scholarship and biblical exegesis under Grocyn and Linacre, Colet and More, the English friends of Erasmus.
In the secular sphere, Henry VII restored order to the countryside, and put down retainers. In the early Sixteenth Century, English trade, though again on the increase after a period of relative stagnation, still ran in its old mediaeval channels along the coasts of northern EEurope, with a new thrust into the Mediterranean, for vent of cloth.
It is indeed useless to look for any date, or even for any period, when the Middle Ages ‘ended’ in England. As to the economic side of things in town and country, Mr. Tawney, the social historian of the Sixteenth Century, regards the Tudor epoch as a ‘watershed’ whence things moved downward with ever increasing momentum towards the big estates and farms of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and the industrial capitalism of modern times.
Where then shall we place the end of the mediaeval society and economics—in the Fourteenth, the Sixteenth or the Eighteenth Centuries ? It is of course the Renaissance and the Reformation of which people are chiefly thinking when they ascribed the end of the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century.
The Elizabethan system, the grand finale of Tudor triumph, was as much a triumph of the Renaissance as of the Reformation. All this found its perfect expression before it passed away—in Shakespeare’s plays. If all aspects of life are taken into consideration, we may perhaps agree with the Historian of the reign of Henry VIII, that ‘of all the schisms which rend the woven garment of historical understanding, the worst is that which fixes a deep gulf between mediaeval and modern history’.
But before this brief golden age corresponding to the lifetime of Shakespeare (1564-1616), Tudor England had known a long period of malaise. Of these things, among much else, it will be my business to deal in the chapters that follow.
CHAPTER V
ENGLAND DURING THE ANTI-CLERICAL REVOLUTION
The advent of the first english antiquary, john leland, may be taken for a sign that the middle ages were indeed passing away and becoming matter for retrospect. Many castles, indeed, leland saw that had been adapted to the domestic uses of a later age, and had long years of splendour still before them. In the middle ages, the glory and safety of every town had been its encircling walls, but military, political, and economic reasons had combined to bring about their decay.
During the decade in which leland was travelling and making notes, henry viii, through the instrumentality of parliament, effected the anti-clerical revolution which more than any other single event may be held to mark the end of mediaeval society in England. The reformation in England was at once a political, a religious adn a sicoal event. Henry viii had himself been educated in the scholarly anti-clericalism of erasmus and his oxford friends - men sincerely religious and in the main orthodox, but inflamed with indignation at the tricks by which the baser sort of clergy conjured money from the ignorant and superstitious.
Such crude appeals to lay cupidity, and such veritable coarse anger at real abuses uncorrected down the centuries, had been genrally prevalent in london under wolsey's regime, and at his fall such talk become talk became equally fashionable at court. Their submission or their resistance would be an event of the utmost importance to the whole future development of english society. The bishops, for example, were first and foremost royal nominees and civil servants.
It was not therefore natural to the clergy to draw together to defend themselves against lay attack. Moreover, the reforming doctrines, whether of erasmus or of luther, had many secret sympathizers and open missionaries among the clergy. Many different currents of thought were moving in the english clerical mind.
English opinion, lay and clerical, was a shifting kaleidoscope. The dissolution of the orders of monks and friars was a natural outcome of the attitude towards religion, life and society that erasmus and his english friends had done so much to propagate.
An obstinate refusal to pay taxes was a characteristic of the english at this period. For a short while the sale of the monastic lands replenished the king's treasury. Henry did not, as it is sometimes stated, distribute any large proportion of the monastic lands and tithes gratis among his courtiers.
A good deal of monastic, chantry, and other ecclesiastical land and tithe remained in the hands of the crown for several generations. The coal-fields, particularly in durham and northumberland, had been, to a predominant extent, ecclesiastical property. Besides the gentry, another class that benefited by the dissolution of the monasteries were the citizens of towns like st albans and bury st edmunds, now released from the stranglehold of monastic lordship, against which they had been in fierce rebellion for centuries past.
The monks suffered personally much less than used to be supposed until recent research has revealed the facts. With the monks dissappeared also the preaching friars, so long the auxilliaries and rivals of the parish clergy. In all, about 5000 monks, 1600 friars, and 2000 nuns were pensioned off and sent out into the world.
As regards estate management there is less than no reason to suppose that either the secular or regular clergy were easier landlords than laymen before the dissolution. In fact the monks had to a large extent handed over the control of their estates to laymen. Apart from the tenants of the monastic lands, who can not be positively said to have either gained or lost by the dissolution, there was also a great army of servants, more numerous than the monks themselves, who were employed in the domestic service of the abbeys. Many of the abbey servants had been young gentlemen of the squire class attached to the monastery, wearing its livery, administering its astates, presiding over its manorial courts, acting as stewards, bailiffs, gentlemen farmers. But there were always the poor at the gate. It is impossible to say probably some gave more and other less.
The bands of sturdy beggars who alarmed society in the early tudor reigns were recruited from many sources - the ordinary unemployed, the unemployable, soldiers discharged after french wars and the wars of the roses, retainers disbanded at henry viii's command, serving men set adrift by impecunious lords and gentry, robin hood bands driven from their woodland lairs by deforestation and by the better enforcement of the king's peace, ploughmen put out of work by enclosures for pastures, and tramps who prudently pretended to belong to that much commiserated class. After the monasteries, the chantries. The chantries were not purely ecclesiastical establishments. For three hundred years after his death, edward vi enjoyed an undeserved reputation as a very good boy who had founded schools.
Another great chance had been missed. Such appeals had little effect on the policy of the councillors and courtiers who were greedily exploiting the minority of edward vi. A typical new man of the tudor age was nicholas bacon, father of francis, and son of the sheepreeve to the abbey of bury st edmunds.
At the same time the educational methods and ideals of the men of the new learning, eager to study the classics and the bible in the original tongues, gave an increased value to school and university teaching. If under henry viii and edward vi the catholic families had refused to purchase confiscated church property, it is probable that their children and grandchildren would less often have become protestants.
Throughout tudor times, as for centuries before, enclosure of land with permanent hedges was going on in various forms, the enclosure of waste and forest for agricultural purposes, the enclosure of open field strips into a smaller number of hedged fields to promote better individual tillage, the enclosure of village commons, and the enclosure of arable land for pasture. In the reign of henry vii a cry arose against the throwing together of small peasant holdings into pasture farms, as being injurious to population and leading to the pulling down of towns. The amount of noise made over economic and social change is determined, not by the extent and importance of the changes that actually occur, but by the reaction of contemporary opinion to the problem.
Agrarian trouble had not been to any large extent aggravated by the dissolution of the monasteries. Sixteenth - century England was ahead of germany and france in having got rid of the servile status of the peasant, of which little was left in the reign of henry vii and practically nothing in the reign of Elizabeth. Long ago, in the thirteenth century, there had been land hunger - too many men and not enough land in cultivation - greatly to the advantage of the landlords.
While the land hunger enabled the landlord to effect changes in rent and in agricultural method, the rise in prices compelled him to do so or be ruined. But this excuse was scarcely considered at all by popular anger and religious sentiment. It is not then surprising that preachers, pamphleteers and poets denounced enclosures as immoral and higher rents as extortionate.
A chief cause of social malaise was the causal and irregular incidence of the price rise on various classes of men. Thus, while some men flourished exceedingly, others, including many lords and squires, were in real distress during the reigns of edward vi and mary, largely as a result of their royal father's unscrupulous juggle with the coinage. Before the end of the century equilibrium had been reached for a time.
as a result of these conditions, the class denominated yeomen was more numerous, more wealthy and more important than in any former age. The yeomen were held to be the real strength and defence of the nation. A strong feeling already existed among the english against professional soldiers, largely derived from memories of what had been endured by quiet folk at the hands of the lords retainers.
Apart from the absolute increase in their wealth, they had acquired a new relative importance by the dissappearance of their former superiors, the feudal nobles, and the abbots and priors. The families whom the tudor raised up in their stead, the Russells, cavendishes, seymours, bacons, dudleys, cecils, and herberts rose to influence, not because they were feudal magnates, but because they were useful servants of the crown. Not only political but economic causes were depressing the old nobility.
The younger son of the tudor gentlemen was not permitted to hang idle about the manor house, a drain on the family income like the impoverished nobles of the continent who were too proud to work. Foreigners were astonished at the love of the english gentry for rural life. Owing to the habit among the gentry of apprenticing their younger sons to trade, our country avoided the sharp division between a rigid caste of nobles and an unprivileged bourgeoisie, which brought the french ancient regime to its catastrophe in 1789.
The tendency of protestant doctrine was to exalt the married state, and to dedicate the business life, in reaction against the mediaeval doctrine that the true life of religion was celibacy and monastic separation from the world. The new type of english religion idealized work, dedicating business and farming to god. The send time of these practices and ideas, which in the following century became so general, was the reign of edward vi and his elder sister, while cranmer was producing the prayer book to stand beside the bible, and queen mary was providing english protestantism with a martyrology.
The instituions of a country are always reflected in its military system. English archery was still so good that firearms had not yet displaced it. While the royal army did not exist, the royal navy was growing strong. The formation of a professional navy for war purposes only, was the more important because naval tactics were, after 2000 years, entering a new era.
In spite of much economic trouble, the standard of life was slowly going up in the early and middle tudor period. Harrison also notes that chimneys have become general even in cottages. Common houses and cottages were still of timber, or of half timber with clay and rubble between the wooden up rights and cross beams.
Harrison also records a change during his own lifetime of treen (wooden) platters into pewter, and of wooden spoons into silver or tin. So primitive, in the early tudor period, had been household conditions. In the reign of henry viii, the long predominance of gothic architecture may be said to have come to an end, after brusting out into the final magnificent flourishes of wolsey's hall at christ church, oxford, and the fan vaulted roof of the chapel of king's college, cambridge, completed by his royal master.
Every manor house of any pretensions had a deer park dotted with clumps of fine trees at various stages of growth, the whole enclosed by a high wooden pale. Hunting did not usually mean fox hunting, farmers for the most part were free to kill the red thief as best they could. The english were already notorious in eEurope for their devotion to horses and dogs, of which they bred and kept many varieties in great numbers.
The gay court owed its character to the young, athletic henry, one of the best archers in his own kingdom, not yet grown an obese and angry tyrant, but himslef the glass of fashion and the mould of form. At court, holbein and his studio were turning out apace portraits of henry and of his chief nobles. The music in the chapel royal was perhaps the best in eEurope.
When the tudor age began, venice still held the east in fee. After this discovery, prophetic of an end of things for venice and a beginning of things for England, nothing much came of it for two generations, except indeed cod fishing by english, french and portuguese fishermen off the new foundland coast. Meanwhile the portuguese were rounding the cape of good hope and opening the oceanic route to the eastern trade, a fatal blow to venice.
Although the vent of cloth was still conducted mainly on the old lines and in the old eEuropean markets it was constantly on the increase, supplied by the ever growing cloth manufacture in the towns and still more in the villages of England. The manufacture of wool into finished cloth involved a number of processes, not all carried on by the same folk or in the same place. Most of the weaving was done on the domestic system, the loom, owned and plied by the goodman of the house, was set up in garret or kitchen.
The volume of internal trade was far greater than the external. The rivers were a great means of transport especially for the heaviest goods, like the railways today. But the roads were used, then as now, for all local distribution and for much traffic in bulk. Even for long distance traffic of heavy goods the supremacy of water over road was not complete.
Chapter VI - VII
England in the Age of Shakespeare (1564-1616)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born into an age of experiment, invention, discovery, and revolution. It was an age in which scientists overthrew long-held axioms, philosophers promoted universal education, and seafarers expanded the boundaries of the known world.
A major catalyst of advancements was the invention of movable type (individual letters that could be arranged by hand to form words) by German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1468) in the mid-15th Century. The relative simplicity of EEuropean alphabets, generally consisting of fewer than 30 letters based on ancient Greek, made Gutenberg’s invention feasible. China had developed printing by the Second Century A.D., but the tens of thousands of symbols required by Chinese dialects hampered the development of movable type.
Thanks to Gutenberg’s invention, the common folk of England had access for the first time to books and the power of the printed word. They could learn scripture from the printed word instead of the painted picture or the sculpted statue. Or they could study history, peruse classic literature, explore the sciences, or read controversial foreign-language books such as Il Principe (The Prince), by Italian political theorist and statesman Nicolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), published in 1532. The book tells how a leader–a prince, for example–has the right to win and keep political power through intrigue, intimidation, and trickery.
During this time, Desiderius Erasmus (1469-1536), a Dutch Roman Catholic priest, popularized humanism in EEurope–and taught it in England–promoting education for everyone, not just the elite, to open narrow minds. Erasmus favored a secular education built on ideals of classical Greek and Latin writers (writers Shakespeare later studied in Stratford) and emphasized respect for students and a tolerance of competing ideas. Such an education, Erasmus believed, would counteract superstition and help remedy social and religious abuses. Ironically, the ideas of Erasmus, a Roman Catholic throughout his life, helped inspire the Protestant Revolt of Martin Luther (1483-1546), a dissident Augustinian priest. .
.In the new atmosphere fostered by Erasmus and other Renaissance thinkers, controversial ideas and propositions received due attention on the printed page. EEuropeans could even read accounts of one of the most astounding developments of the day: that the sun did not orbit earth–as astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus (127-145 A.D.), known today as Ptolemy–had declared in his famous treatise Almagest. Rather, earth and its sister planets orbited the sun. It was Polish scientist Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) who promulgated this theory and Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), inventor of the astronomical telescope, who confirmed it. The Copernican theory was revolutionary–affecting not only science but also theology and philosophy–for it impeached the egocentric view that the earth and its people were the center of the universe. Earth, in fact, was just another planet orbiting the sun. In 1609, German mathematician Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) published another revolutionary finding: that the path of the orbiting planets was elliptical, not circular.
The unsettling findings of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler appeared within little more than a century after Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) accidentally discovered the Americas (1492), an event that expanded the known world, encouraged further exploration, and increased the importation to England of ideas, peoples, and cultures. Africa, that far-off Dark Continent, was opening up after Portuguese sailors established trading posts in its coastal regions.
By 1569, when Shakespeare was five, seafaring became less of a guessing game, thanks to a map published by Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594), of Flanders. Mercator's map was the first to project the curvature of the earth onto a flat printing surface, enabling sailors to better plan voyages using the longitude and latitude lines printed on the map.
By 1600, science had its first microscope, a crude device invented by Hans and Zaccharias Jansen, Dutch lensmakers, and by 1609, its first astronomical telescope, invented by Galileo. The world could now view for the first time the cross section of a hair or the summit of a lunar mountain. These inventions prepared the way for the discovery centuries later of germs and packets of energy called quanta.
No microscope or telescope was needed, of course, to view wonders of another kind produced in Renaissance EEurope: the masterly paintings of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520), Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475-1564), Titian (1490-1576), and El Greco (1541-1614). Music flourished, too, with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594) composing magnificent church music and Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) composing the first great operas. His opera Orfeo (1607-1609) introduced the concept of an overture.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the Protestant Revolt in EEurope, Shakespeare's England smoldered with Protestant-Catholic conflict. Adherents of both religions resorted to spying, torture, political upheaval, and violence to gain sway. The unrest continued through the reign of Elizabeth I (1533-1603), a Protestant queen who ruled from 1558 to 1603. Elizabeth was preceded on the throne by Protestant Lady Jane Grey (1537-1554), who ruled for nine days in 1553, and Mary I (1516-1558), who ruled from 1553 to 1558. These three were the first women to rule England. Their ascendancy allowed wives and daughters to dream of someday escaping domestic servitude. For support, they could look to Shakespeare, who populated his plays with strong women. Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King John, Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Titus Andronicus all present women who rule, challenge, or stand up to men in one way or another.
Partly because Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII (1491-1547), had prodded Parliament to declare her the illegitimate daughter of Ann Boleyn (1507-1536) and, therefore, unqualified to become queen, Catholics viewed her as a usurper. Nevertheless, England prospered under the economic policies of Elizabeth, enabling Shakespeare and other playwrights to jingle their pockets.
Elizabethan England also became a leading sea power after explorer and adventurer Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596) defeated arch rival Spain and its armada of ships in 1588. This triumph boosted the British ego and British prosperity to new heights at the threshold of a new century. The time was right for Shakespeare, a writer of unparalleled genius, to celebrate England’s glory in his history plays and, in his great tragedies and comedies, to expose the soul and the mind of his age–and all ages to come. In Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Shakespeare aptly sums up England’s reaction to–indeed, the world’s reaction to–the achievements of his age and to the mysteries that still awaited solutions: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Chapter viii
The England of Charles and cromwell
In the realm of social and economic history, the period of the Stuart kingship in England up to the outbreak of the great rebellion may be regarded as an uneventful prolongation of the Elizabethan era, under conditions of peace and safety instead of domestic danger and foreign war. The slow pace of change in the economic and social life of England in the first forty years of the new century was but little accelerated by the union of the neglish and scottish monarchies in the person of Elizabeth's successor. Nor, under the Stuart kings, did english thought and practice greatly affect the scots, whose pride took quick alarm at influences emanating from their too powerful neighbour. In overseas trade the merchants of the two countries were still rivals, the purse proud english everywhere bearing the upper hand, and shutting out the scots from foreign and colonial markets to the best of their power.
Slight and gradual as were the changes in England herself during the first forty years of the seventeenth century, little as the dynastic union with scotland affected the social life of the time, these quiet years witnessed the greatest change of all, the beginning of the permanent expansion of the english race overseas. The english race began once more to move outside its island borders, this time in the right direction. This time the good yeomen whose limbs were made in England went forth again, but not with chivalry and not under the king, not with the long bow to sack and conquer an ancient civilization, but with axe and plough to found a new civilization in the wilderness.
For this enterprise the first requisite was peace. London companies like the virginia company and the massachusetts bay company financed and organized the emigration, which could never have taken place without such backing. The very efficient promoters of the movement included some of the noblest born and many of the wealthiest of the king's subjects: but the colonists themselves were of the middling and lower orders of town and village.
Those who crossed the atlantic for religious reasons desired, in the words of andrew marvell, to escape from prelate's rage. The settlers in virginia, the west Indian islands and to a large extent even in new England, had not emigrated for religious motives ar all. All these classes of emigrants went freely, at the instigation of private enterprise and persuasion.
During the civil wars of Charles and cromwell the flow of voluntary emigration diminished. England at that period and for two hundred years to come was peculiarly fitted to provide colonists of the right sort. The markers of the early American settlements must have been men and women of most admirable versatility, endurance, dan courage.
The newly founded colonies, whether on the mainland or on the islands, whether under the control of london companies or more directly under the crown, at once assumed a large degree of independence. The instinct of the first english settlers to manage their own affairs cannot be attributed solely to the great distance from eEurope. Moreover, there were habits of self government in old english society that were easily transplanted oversea.
In new England a puritan democracy of farmers and tradesmen arose, which also had its roots in habits brought from the old country. The emigrants also carried with them the jury system and the english common law, a law of liberty. The spirit of independence was further stimulated by the bible religion which the colonists brought with them from home. In this way the American colonies were founded, by private enterprise - financial, commercial, agricultural, and politico - religious.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, the ships of another london trading company were beginning another chapter of England's destiny. The first great anglo Indian statesman, sir thomas roe, James i's ambassador and the company's agent at the court of the mogul emperor, laid down the policy which guided the action of his countrymen in the east for more than a century to come. Under the early Stuarts the company established small trading stations at madras, at surat north of bombay, and by 1640 in bengal.
The east India trade, implying voyages a year long of ten thousand miles without braking bulk, did more even than the American trade to develop the art of navigation and the character of ship building. The long Indian voyages would not have been possible as a means of regular trade if the crews had been much exposed to the ravages of scurvy. In Stuart times the east India company owned some thirty great vessels for the voyage round the cape, besides numerous smaller craft that never left the eastern seas.
Here was a private navy, heavily armed, added to the strength of England. The Indian trade increased not only the shipping, but the wealth of England. Before the civil war, the chief articles conveyed to the thames in the company's great ships were saltpetre (for warlike eEurope's gunpowder), raw silk, and above all spices, particularly pepper.
These long distance trading companies, with their great losses and greater profits, became an important part of social and political life under the Stuarts. But the merchants of the east India house felt even more aggrieved because the king, while granting such unneeded monopolies in the home market, infringed their own much needed monopoly of trade in the far east, though the whole cost of political and military action on that side of the globe fell on the company and not on the crown. The early Stuart kings had done nothing effective either in eEurope or in asia to restrain the dutch from destroying the company's ships and factories in the east.
The struggle between josiah child and the interlopers in the reigns of Charles and James ii and william, was only a repetition on a larger scale of the struggle between the company and its rivals under James and Charles i dan cromwell. Four fifths of the population was tilling the land, but a gradually increasing proportion were enganged in trade or industry, more often in the country than in the town. The number of such small employers and tradesmen was on the increase, and they, like the east India company, often wanted to borrow money for their business.
Society had at last, very gradually, in the course of the tudor reigns, abandoned the mediaeval doctrine that it was wrong to lend money on interest. As yet indeed there were no banks in England. During the commonwealth and after the restoration the holding and lending of money passed more and more into the hands of the goldsmiths of london. The goldsmiths' business as proto - bankers was by no means confined to dealings with city merchants.
The earl's principal steward lived in Bedford house, kept the key of the all important trunk, and was, in fact, the family treasurer or receiver general, permanently residing in London. But the earls of Bedford, though certainly spacious in the possession of dirt, were by no means mere passive receivers of rent. To these two men, more than to any others, was due the successful initiation of the drainage of fenland.
On the advice of vermuyden, another Dutch engineer, it was decided that it would not suffice to deepen the old winding river courses, a straight canal, seventy feet wide and twenty one miles long, was cut from earith to Denver sluice. During the civil war the work of drainage was at a standstill, or rather went back, for the destruction of the dykes by their enemies went on apace in the disordered time. At the restoration, the draining of the fens, so far as it had yet gone, seemed to be an engineering and an economic success.
After the great venture of the fen draining had turned out so well under the commonwealth, the family (house of Russell) fortunes had been laid long ago in trade with gascony from weymouth quay in the days of Chaucer. By the child marriage, which in the course of years proved happy enough, the Russells got in on the ground floor of the east India company. If the great families had an overlarge share in governing England in the eighteenth century, they had done something to earn it.
In the generation that followed the death of queen Elizabeth, the gradual but constant rise of prices, largely due to the flow of silver from the Spanish American mines into eEurope, made it impossible for James and Charles i to live on their own revenues, and their parliaments were unwilling to make good the deficiency except on religious and political conditions which the Stuart kings were unwilling to accept. The financial embarrassments of the crown had an unfortunate effect on the economic policy of the state. But in one aspect of economic and social policy - the poor law - the continuance and enlargement of the system laid down under queen Elizabeth was a credit to the crown, and to the system of privy council government with which the names of stafford and laud are associated.
We shall have occasion in later chapters to consider the serious faults of poor law administration in the eighteenth century. The worst horrors of failure, of unemployment and of unprovided old age were not suffered by the poor in England to the same extent as in the continental countries of the ancient regime. There was no effective system of police until that begun by sir robert peel in 1830.
The personal liberty of the poor was not a thing of which much account was taken. The clear modern dictinction between offences punishable by the state on the one hand, and sins not cognizable by a court of law upon the other, was not yet so rigid in men's minds as it afterwards became. Under english puritan rule, it was not the church courts but the ordinary lay courts of the land that were charged with the suppression of sin. The horrible mania for persecuting witches, common to catholic and protestant lands during the period of the religious wars, was less bad in England than in some countries, but touched its highest point in the first half of the seventeenth century. In England before the restoration it would have been difficult to find more than a handful of men who openly avowed a disbelief in the miraculous sanctions of the christian faith, in one or other of its forms. After the triumph of the parliamnetary armies came the rule of the saints, with their canting piety used as a shibboleth to obtain the favour of the dominant party, their interference with the lives of ordinary people, their closing of the theatres and suppressing of customary sports.
The cromwellian revolution was not social and economic in its causes and motives, it was the result of political and religious thought and aspiration among men who had no desire to recast society or redistribute wealth. The stage of economic and social development which had been reached in the England of 1640 was not the cause, but it was a necessary condition, of the political and religious movements that burst forth into sudden blaze. Indeed, the puritan revolution was itself, in its basic impulse, a pilgrim's progress.
Many families in all ranks of life who fought and suffered for the church and the prayer book, by those sufferings learnt a love of the church of England which had not been so consistently felt and expressed before the civil war as it was after the restoration. But there are other things in pilgrim's progress besides most perfect representation of evangelical religion. The country through which the pilgrims travel and the ways along which they have to pass, are the countryside, the roads and the lanes of the english east midlands with which bunyan in his youth was familiar.
The great generation of men who between them produced the high english tragedy of roundhead and cavalier, were not brought up on the bible and on the influences of the country life alone - though such a limitation would almost be true of bunyan. Political and religious controversy was conducted in books and pamphlets forbiddingly learned to the modern eye, yet in spite of their heavy display of erudition, they caught the eager audience to which they made appeal. There were in fact a great many students among the upper and middle classes both of town and country.
The civil wars of Charles and cromwell were not, like the wars of the roses, a struggle for power between two groups of aristocratic families, watched with disgusted indifference by the majority of the population, particularly by the townsfolk. Men chose their sides largely from disinterested motives and under no compulsion. In the towns also it was an age of independence and individualism.
To speak in general terms, royalism was strongest where the economic and social changes of the previous hundred years had been least left. Cromwell himself was a man of good family, related to several of the most important people in the house of commons. The civil war was not therefore a social war, but a struggle in which parties divided on political and religious issues, along a line of cleavage that answered, roughly and with many personal exceptions to certain divisions of social type.
Even the idea of political democracy was almost confined to the radicals of the triumphant army. But although there was no breaking up of estates into smaller units of land on a demodratic basis, a certain amount of land passed for a short time from cavalier to roundhead ownership. Otherwise the amount of land that changed hands was remarkably small.
In any case it does not appear to be true that, as has sometimes been conjectured, the whigs of Charles ii's reign were a new type of landowner who had risen ib the county during the commonwealth period. The nobility were even more in eclipse than the squirearchy, for hardly any of the house of peers followed the fortunes of the roundhead party in the regicide period. On the other hand, many important results of the victory of the parliamentary armies survived the restoration.
In tudor times, to strengthen the rotal prerogative and meet the real needs of that age, there had been a great increase in the number vand the power of independent courts each administering its own legal system with little regard to the procedure and principles of the common law. Thus the english judicial system escaped the fate of being broken into fragments. The victory of the common law involved the abolition of torture in England long before other countries, and paved the way for a fairer treatment of political enemies of government when brought to trial.
Under the commonwealth and protectorate, constitutional law was trodden underfoot in the exigencies of revolution, but even during that period the common law and the lawyers were very strong, strong enough unfortunately to prevent the fulfilment of a loud popular demand for law reform, a crying social need which cromwell vainly endeavoured to supply.
It may well be imagined that there was scant building of manor houses between 1640 and 1660. Certain changes were taking place in the structure of the houses newly built. Cornices and pilasters decorated the exterior in classical style.
The plaster work of the ceilings was elaborately decorative. Out of doors, it was a great age for gardens in England, as indeed it has been ever since. Many trees, plants, and flowers were introduced into England at this period, among many others the crown imperial, the tulip, the laburnum, the nasturtium, the everlasting, love in a mist, honesty, the tulip tree, the red maple. Besides the flowers of this period that are still with us, our ancestors had then a passion for herbs, which has not survived to the same extent.
Bab iX
Restoration England
A. ENGLISH RESTORATION
King Charles II, the first monarch to rule after the English Restoration.
The English Restoration, or simply The Restoration, was an episode in the history of Britain beginning in 1660 when the English monarchy, Scottish monarchy and Irish monarchy were restored under King Charles II after the Interregnum that followed the English Civil War. The term Restoration may apply both to the actual event by which the monarchy was restored, and to the period immediately following the accession of Charles II.
B. END OF THE PROTECTORATE
The Protectorate, which had preceded the Restoration and followed the Commonwealth, might have continued if Oliver Cromwell's son Richard, who was made Lord Protector on his father's death, had been capable of carrying on his father's policies. Richard Cromwell's main weakness was that he did not have the confidence of the army. After seven months the army removed him and on 6 May 1659 it reinstalled the Rump Parliament. Charles Fleetwood was appointed a member of the Committee of Safety and of the Council of State, and one of the seven commissioners for the army. On 9 June 1659 he was nominated lord-general (commander-in-chief) of the army. However, his power was undermined in parliament, which chose to disregard the army's authority in a similar fashion to the post-First Civil War parliament. The Commons on 12 October 1659, cashiered General John Lambert and other officers, and installed Fleetwood as chief of a military council under the authority of the speaker. The next day Lambert ordered that the doors of the House be shut and the members kept out. On 26 October a "Committee of Safety" was appointed, of which Fleetwood and Lambert were members. Lambert was appointed major-general of all the forces in England and Scotland, Fleetwood being general. Lambert was now sent, by the Committee of Safety, with a large force to meet George Monck, who was in command of the English forces in Scotland, and either negotiate with him or force him to come to terms.
It was into this atmosphere that Monck, the governor of Scotland under the Cromwells, marched south with his army from Scotland. Lambert's army began to desert him, and he returned to London almost alone. Monck marched to London unopposed. The Presbyterian members, excluded in Pride's Purge of 1648, were recalled and on 24 December the army restored the Long Parliament. Fleetwood was deprived of his command and ordered to appear before parliament to answer for his conduct. Lambert was sent to the Tower of London on 3 March 1660, from which he escaped a month later. Lambert tried to rekindle the civil war in favour of the Commonwealth by issuing a proclamation calling on all supporters of the "Good Old Cause" to rally on the battlefield of Edgehill. But he was recaptured by Colonel Richard Ingoldsby, a regicide who hoped to win a pardon by handing Lambert over to the new regime. Lambert was incarcerated and died in custody on Drake's Island in 1684; Ingoldsby was pardoned.
C. RESTORATION OF CHARLES II
On April 4, 1660, Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda, which made known the conditions of his acceptance of the crown of England. Monck organised the Convention Parliament, which met for the first time on April 25. On May 8 it proclaimed that King Charles II had been the lawful monarch since the execution of Charles I in January 1649. Charles returned from exile, leaving The Hague on May 23 and landing at Dover on May 25. He entered London on May 29, his birthday. To celebrate "his Majesty's Return to his Parliament" May 29 was made a public holiday, popularly known as Oak Apple Day. He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 23 April 1661.
The Cavalier Parliament convened for the first time on May 8, 1661, and it would endure for over 17 years until its dissolution on January 24, 1679. Like its predecessor, it was overwhelmingly Royalist and is also known as the Pensionary Parliament for the many pensions it granted to adherents of the King.
D. REGICIDES AND REBELS
The Indemnity and Oblivion Act, which became law on 29 August 1660, pardoned all past treason against the crown, but specifically excluded those involved in the trial and execution of Charles I. Thirty-one of the fifty-nine Commissioners who had signed the death warrant were living. In the ensuing trials twelve of those found guilty were hanged, drawn and quartered, the full penalty for treason. The leading prosecutor at the trial of King Charles I, John Cooke, died in a similar manner. The bodies of the regicides Cromwell, Bradshaw and Ireton, which had been buried in Westminster Abbey, were exhumed and hanged.
On October 14, 1660 Major-General Thomas Harrison, a leader of the Fifth Monarchists, was the first person found guilty of the regicide of Charles I as the seventeenth of fifty-nine commissioners (Judges) to sign the death warrant in 1649. He was the first regicide to be hanged, drawn and quartered because he was considered by the new government to still represent a real threat to the re-established order. This threat was realised when on January 6, 1661, 50 Fifth Monarchists, headed by a wine-cooper named Thomas Venner, made an effort to attain possession of London in the name of "King Jesus." Most of the fifty were either killed or taken prisoner, and on January 19 and 21, Venner and ten others were hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason.
E. RESTORATION BRITAIN
Theatres reopened after having been closed during the protectorship of Oliver Cromwell, Puritanism lost its momentum, and the bawdy 'Restoration comedy' became a recognizable genre. In addition, women were allowed to perform on stage for the first time.
F. THE REPUBLICAN NEW NOBILITY
The Commonwealth's written constitutions gave to the Lord Protector the King's power to grant titles of honour. Cromwell created over thirty new knights. These were all declared invalid upon the Restoration of Charles II. Many were regranted by the restored King, but being non-hereditary, these titles have long since become extinct.
Of the twelve Cromwellian baronetcies, Charles II regranted half of them. Only two now continue: Sir George Howland Francis Beaumont, 12th baronet, and Sir Richard Thomas Williams-Bulkeley, 14th baronet, are the direct successors of Sir Thomas Beaumont and Sir Griffith Williams.
Edmund Dunch was created Baron Burnell of East Wittenham in April 1658, but it was not regranted. The male line failed in 1719 with the death of his grandson, also Edmund Dunch, so no one can lay claim to the title.
The one hereditary viscountcy Cromwell created (making Charles Howard Viscount Howard of Morpeth and Baron Gilsland) continues to this day. In April 1661 Howard was created Earl of Carlisle, Viscount Howard of Morpeth, and Baron Dacre of Gillesland. The present Earl is a direct descendant of this Cromwellian creation and Restoration recreation.
Bab X
Defoe’s England
A. THE GOLDEN AGE
Defoe was one of the first who saw thee old world through a pair of sharp modeern eeyes. He drew the picture of England in much wealth of prosaic detail, leaves the impression of a healthy national life, in wich town and country, agricul;ture, industry and commerce weree harmonious part of a single economic system.
The England so ordered was so prosperous and ini the main contented enen in time of war, partly owing to good harveests and cheap food in the first half of Anne’s reign. Only during the last three years of a decade of hostilities with Francee (1702-12) were there signs of distress and discontent due to war conditions. Otherwise, industry, agriculture and commerce all continued to expand; society moved to the Industrial Revolution. The interplay of the activity of town and country, not yet subversive of the old social order, gave to Queen Anne’s England a fundamental harmony and strength, below the surface of the fierce distracting antagonisms of sect and faction.
B. LAND AND WATER TRAFFIC
While religion divided, trade united the nation, and trade was gaining in relative importance. The bible had now a rival in the ladger. The puritan, sixty years back, had been Cromwell, sword in hand; thirty years back, Bunyan, singing hymns in gaol; but now the puritan was to be found in the tradesman-journalist Defoe.
In the reign of Anne a great interchange of agriculture products was going on between one district to another, aspecially where river traffic was afailable. Laergely for this reason, the deepening of rivers and the making of locks was a movement spacially characteristic of the period, two generation before the era ofthe Duke of Bridgewater’s artivisial canals.
England and Wales already formed the most considerable area in Europh for internal free trade, to which Scotland was added half way though the reign of Anne.
C. FREEHOLDERS AND TENANTS
The age of Defoe was still a period of prosperity for Anglish freehold yeomen, and it was no ill time for the still rising fortunes of the tenant farmers. A hundred yeears later thee opposite was probably the case, in so far as the freehold yeoman any longer existed. For in Georgian era of agricultural improvements, the tenant farmer had the benefit of his landlord’s capital poured into his land, while the small freeholder had no financial resources save his own with which to keep abreast of the times. But Anne’s reign was perhaps a moment of no very marked economic difference between thee two classes.
The difference was political and social. The freeholder had a vote for parliament and was often in a position to use it as he liked. The tenant farmer had no vote, and if he had, he would have been obliged to cast it as his landlord wished. But the distiction between the class of freeholders and the class of tenants was never absolute, because a man often farmed one piece of land as a tenant and another piece as its owner.
D. THE NORTHERN COUNTRIES
In neoghbouring country of Northumberland, recently so warlike and babarous, the travelers along the coast and in the valley of the South Tyne, found ‘plenty of good bread and beer’ as well as hens and gees, and famous stocks of claret. Pieece with Scotland, the wealth of the Tyneside mines, and the trade of Newcastle were factors already raising the standard of life along the Border. But the more outlying rural districts of Northumberland, Cumberland ad Durham were still very poor, though more thickly inhabited than they afterward became.
E. THE NEW ARISTOCRACY
Thge country gentlemen were of many diferent grades of wealth and culture. At the of the social hierarchy stood the Dukes, who in any other land have been stiled Princes, and whose maner of life outdid in magnificences the court of te allied monarch drawing England’s pay. At the lower end of the scale was the squire reckonded to be worth two or three hundred a year, farming a part of his own land, but distinguished from the yeomen, among whom he mingled almost an equal terms, by a small sporting establishment, by a coast of arm, and by the respect which all paid to him as a ‘gentleman’.
But this type of old-fashioned small squire was beginning to feel the prsessure of the times. The heavy land tax of four shillings in the pound to pay for Whig Wars, hit him hard and added to the zeal of his toryism. The style of living even in rural parts was becoming expensive.
The country hoese life \of the time could be brawed with of the grandees, filling rural places with pictures from Italy, furniture from France, and editions of Italian, French and Latin authors. There were philosophers Lords like the Third Earl of Shaftesbury; scholar statesmen like Somers and Montagu and so on.
F. UPPER-CLASS EDUCATION
The expenditure required of a country gentleman, rich or poor, was in one respect very small. Is was not then considered obligatory that his sons should be sent at great cost to axclusively patrician schools. At the nearest local grammar school, the squire’s children sat beside those sons of yeomen and shopkeepers who had been selected for a clerical career; itherwise the young gentlemen were taught at home by a neighbouring person, or in wealthier families by the private chaplain. I just tell you, that you were not my type, but you just insisted.
The common schooling of the upper and middle class was already being criticied for its rigidly classical curriculum. It was even declared by some that ‘a girl which is educated at home with her mother is wiser at twelve than a boy at sixteen who knows only Latin. Yet the second classical language was so ill taught at school and college that the excellent Latinists of Christ Church had not enaugh Greek to be aware that Bentley had proved them dunces over the Letters of Phalaris. It was only in the Nineteenth Century that he typical English scholar was equally at home with Aristophanes and with Horace.
Among the critics of the educational methods were the wise Locke and the good-natured Steele, who both urged that perpetual flogging was not the best method of imparting knowledge and maintaining dicipline. Upper-class education was admitted on all hands to need reform, yet nothing was done to reform it.
G. MARRIAGE BARGAINS
Since almost everyone regarded it as a grave misfortune to remain single, women did not account it a universal grievance that their hands should often be disposed of by others. Divorce was almost unknown. It was obtainable only through Church Court, and they only if followed by a Special act of Parliament. Not more than six divorces were thus legalized during the twelve years of Queen Anne.
H. THE CHARITY SCHOOLS
The ablemen at the head of the Charity School mevement introduced the principle of democratic co-operation into the field of educational endowment. Another characteristics organization of this period was ‘The Society for the Reformation of Manners.’
Chapter XI
DR. Johnson’s England (circa 1740-1780)
A “classical age”, that is to say an age of unchallenged assumptions, when the philosophers of the street, such as Dr. Johnson, have ample leisure to moralize on the human scene, in the happy belief that the state of society and the modes of thought to which they are accustomed not mere passing aspects of an ever-shifting kaleidoscope, but permanent habitations, the final outcome of reason and experience. The men of this “classical” age looked back with a sense of kinship to the far-off Ancient World. The upper class regarded the Greeks and Romans as honorary Englishmen. The mediaeval period, with its ‘gothic’ aspiration and barbarism, sank for a while below the horizon of study and sympathy.
In the course of the Eighteenth Century the population pf England and Wales rose from about five and a half millions when Queen Anne came to throne to nine millions in 1801. this unprecedented increase, the herald of great changes in the life of our island, was not cause by immigration: the entry of Irish cheap labor which now first become an important feature of our social and economic life, was counterbalanced numerically by English emigration overseas. In the first decades of the century the death-rate had risen sharply and passed the birth-rate. But the dangerous tendency was reversed between 1730 and 1760, and after 1780 the death-rate went down by leaps and bounds.
Both the death-rate and the subsequent fall have been attributed in part of two growth and decline of the habit of drinking cheap gin instead of beer. The consequences of that change in the habits of poor have been immortalized in Hogarth’s famous delineation of the horrors of ‘Gin Lane’ contrasted with prosperous ‘Beer Street’. In the third decade of the century: the epoch of the Beggar’s Opera, statesmen and legislators had deliberately encouraged the consumption of gin by throwing open the distilling trade and by placing on spirits far too light a tax. After the middle years of the century tea became a formidable rival to alcohol with all classes, both in the capital and in the country at large. At the height of the gin era, between 1740 and 1742, the burials in London region had been twice as many as the baptism.
While the period of cheap gin lasted (1720-1750) it had done much to reduce the population of the capital. Social historians have indeed sometimes exaggerated the effect of gin-drinking on vital statistics outside the London area. For example, gin cannot account for the rapid increase in the death-rate between 1700 and 1720, for in those years the great consumption of cheap spirits had scarcely begun. Besides the decline of the consumption of spirits, to account for the remarkable fall in the death-rate that marked the middle period of the century, and still more its last twenty years. The reasons why death began to take a smaller toll of English infants, children and adults, were improved conditions of life and improved medical treatment. The great advance in agriculture during the Eighteenth Century gave more abundant food to many. The advance in locomotion and changes in industrial method gave more employment and higher wages and brought more numerous and more varied articles of purchase within the cottager’s reach.
Throughout the Eighteenth century the medical profession was moving out of the dark ages of socialism and tradition superstition into the light of science. Science and philanthropy were the best part of the spirit of the ‘age of enlightenment’ and this spirit inspired the better medical training and practice of individuals. At the beginning of the century, small pox had been the scourge most dreaded, as destructive of beauty and still more destructive of life. Jenner discovered vaccination for small pox it carried of a thirteenth of each generation at the close of the century.
Scotland was beginning to make her great intellectual contribution to life south of the Border. It was the age of Hume, Smollet, Adam Smith and Boswell. The great improvement in professional skill was supported by the foundation of Hospitals, in which the age of philanthropy gave sober expression to its feelings, just as the age of Faith had sung its soul in the stories of cloisters and cathedral aisles. In the capital, between 1720 and 1745, Guy’s, Westminster, St. George’s, London and Middlesex Hospitals were all founded; the mediaeval St. Thomas’s had been rebuilt in the reign of Anne and at Bart’s teaching and practice were improving apace. In the course of 125 years after 1700, no less than 154 new hospitals and dispensaries were established in Britain.
At the same time the growing benevolence of the age was moved to cope with the appalling infant mortality among the poor and especially among deserted bastard children. Jonas Hanway, who did much to reduce these evils, had declared that ‘few parish children live to be apprenticed’. And thousands of infants did not even live to be parish children, but died abandoned in empty rooms or exposed in streets by mothers to whom they would only mean expense and shame. Captain Coram, with his kind sailor’s heart, could not endure to sight of babes lying deserted by the roadside, while respectable citizens passed by with the shrug of the Pharisee. For years Coram agitated the project of a Foundling Hospital; at length he obtained a charter from George II. Many infant lives were saved, and many deserted children were brought up and apprenticed to trades. A few years after the good captain had died, a bad moment occurred in the history of the institution he had founded. In 1756 Parliament made a grant to its funds, on condition that all children brought to the hospital should be admitted.
Early in the reign of George III, Hanway’s persistent efforts were crowned by an Act of Parliament which compelled the perishes of the London area to keep their ‘parish infants’ no longer in the workhouses where they died apace but in country cottages where they lived and throve. In the same spirit, General Oglethrope had drawn attention to the scandals of debtor’s prison. English prisons remained for the rest of the century a national disgrace, being still farmed out to wretched of this kind by the local authorities who would not be at the trouble and expense to maintain them properly paid public officials.
‘Strong benevolence of soul’ was characteristic of many in that age. It dictated the extraordinary domestic arrangements of Oglethrope’s formidable friend Dr. Johnson. From beginning to end of the century, the new Puritanism of the ardently religious, such as Robert Nelson, lady Elizabeth Hastings, the Wesleys, Cowper and finally Wilberforce, strove to practice the charity of the New Testament in place of the harsher precepts of the old with which Cromwell’s trooper had marched to battle. While the new humanitarian spirit inspired private initiative, it had yet little effect on executive, municipal or legislative action. Private employers treated their servants better that the Government treated its soldiers and sailors. The private of the army was no better treated. They were the more unpopular because they acted as the only efficient police force against rioting and smuggling.
Throughout the century, Parliament went on adding statute after statute to the ‘bloody code’ of English Law, enlarging perpetually the long list of offenses punishable by death. Yet, until the Code Napoleon was received on the continent, it is possible that English justice, bad as it was, may have been the best in the world, as Blackstone boasted. It gave the prisoner in political cases a real chance to defend himself against the government, an improvement made by the Treason Law of 1695, and by the general tendency of political and judicial practice since the Revolution English justice was on the whole less bad than the continental practice of the day, the philosophers of EEurope and England now began their famous attack on the existing systems of law and punishment.
The excellent idea of the rule of law, is something superior to the will of the rulers, was strong among the Eighteenth century English. The high conception of the supremacy of law was popularized by Blackstone’s Commentaries of the Laws of England (1765), a book widely read by educated people in England and America, for it was a legally-minded age. Therefore Jeremy Bentham, the father of English law reform, regarded Blackstone as the arch-enemy, who stood in the way of change by teaching people to make a fetish of the laws of England in the form which they actually bore at the moment. The first blast against Blackstone was blown by young Bentham in his Fragment in Government in 1776, the seminal year which saw the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, the first part Gibbon’s History, and the American Declaration of Independence. Onwards from that time our laws were rapidly changed in accordance with the commonsense, utilitarian principles that Bentham had laid down.
The specific work of the earlier Hanoverian epoch was the establishment of the rule of law; and that law, with all its grave faults, was at least a law of freedom. In the Nineteenth century in England would have proceeded by Revolutionary violence, instead of by parliamentary modification of the law. The abuses of the poor-law, of which so much was heard in Eighteenth century England, were due to want of modern organs of government, and above all to an entire lack of central organization and control. Rural England was governed by the patriarchal sway of the justices of the Peace. The Justices, nominally appointed by Crown, were really appointed by the Lord Lieutenant influenced by the opinion of the gentry of the shire. Nominally States Officials, the J.P.s really represented local territorial power. The Privy Council no longer, as in Tudor and early Stuartdays, kept them an awe and guided their action on national principles. The Privy Council by aiming at absolute power in all things had lost powers which it had formerly exercised for general good. The power and functions of J.P.s covered all sides of country life. They administered justice in Quarter or Petty Sessions, or in the private house of a single magistrate. They were supposed to keep up the roads and bridges, the prisons and workhouses.
In the middle years of the century, Fielding, Smollet and other observers of the injustices of life, bitterly satirized the irresponsible power of the J.P.s and its frequent misuse in acts of tyranny and favoritism. It is a common error to regard the Eighteenth century in England irreligious. An ethical code based on Christian doctrine was a rule of life to a much larger proportion of the community than it had been in the late mediaeval and Tudor periods. Human experience had so long associated religion with intolerance that when intolerance cooled, people thought that religion had decayed. The harmony of science and religion was nobly symbolized by the crection in 1755 of Roubillac’s statue of Newton in the ante-chapel at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In the early years of George III’s reign, there were Britons of the intellectual caliber of Hume and Gibbon who were avowed skeptics. In any case, the scholarly skepticism of the English Eighteenth century was addressed only to a highly educated audience. Its optimistic philosophy was the outcome of upper-class condition of life. In the period of the French Revolution, Tom Paine appealed to multitude on behalf of Deism as the proper creed of democracy, a new age had arrived. English eighteenth century religion both within the establishment and among the Dissenting bodies, was of two schools, which we may call for brevity the Latitudinarian and the Methodist. The Latitudinarian stood for the spirit of tolerance, for lack of which Christianity had for centuries past wrought cruel havoc in the world it set out to save; the Latitudinarian stood also for Reasonableness in the interpretation of religious doctrines.
Since the revolution, political circumstances had favored Latitudinarians. By the time that George III ascended the throne, the Church was fully reconciled to the house of Hanover, and the political motive for Latitudinarianism ceased to operate. The increasingly scientific spirit of the age demanded that ‘the reasonableness of Christianity’ should be proved and emphasized.
In the early years of George III, the parson was raising in the social and cultural scale, living on equal terms with the gentry as never before. In the new industrial and mining districts the neglected inhabitants altogether escaped the ministrations of the Establishment. It was natural that an aristocratic, unreforming, individualistic ‘classical’ age should be saved by a Church with the same qualities and defects as the other chartered institution of the country.
The way of life which came to be called ‘Methodism’ was older than its name and older than the mission of the Wesley brothers. As ‘boys’, they had been brought up in its atmosphere in the Epworth rectory of their High Church father. It was a way of life devoted not only to religious observance but to self-discipline and work for others. This ‘method’ of religious life was widely spread among the trading and professional classes, whether Church or Dissent. It was at once Puritaniand Middle Class in character; it was even stronger among the laity than the clergy; its devotees were not withdrawn from the business of live but strove to dedicate it to God. The greatest and most justly famous of the manifestations of ‘Methodism’ was the revivalist preaching of the Wesleys and Whitefield, which deeply moved a vast mass of human being hitherto neglected by Church and State.
The humanitarian spirit of the Eighteenth century with the care it bestowed on the bodies and minds of the poor and the unfortunate, made a real advance towards better things. The foundation of hospitals and the improvement of medical service and infant welfare were pure gain. But the education work done, valuable as it was, is more open to retrospective criticism. The charity schools, followed by the Sunday School movement that took on such large proportion after 1780, were indeed the first systematic attempt to give any education to the bulk of the working people, as distinct from selected clever boys to whom the old Grammar Schools had given opportunity to rise out of their class. Modern educations in our time have gone too far in an opposite direction.
While the Eighteenth century made a beginning of mass instruction by starting the charity and Sunday Schools, it last ground in Secondary Education by permitting many of the Old Grammar and endowed schools to decay. It was a general feature of the age that, while private enterprise and philanthropic zeal opened new paths, chartered institutions grew lazy and corrupt. The loss incurred by secondary education was made good by private schools, financed by fees only, which made much progress in the Eighteenth century. Indeed, the spirit of chartered monopoly was seen at its worst on the banks of Isis and Cam. The College Don could hold his fellowship for life, unless he took a Church benefice. Gibbon, who as a gentlemen commoner was admitted to the Fellows’ table at Magdalen, Oxford.
At both Universities the undergraduates were entirely neglected by the great majority of the Fellows, though here and there a College Tutors zealously performed duties that ought to have been shared by the whole society. At Oxford, by 1770, no serious examination at all was held far a degree. At Cambridge the Mathematical Tripos offered a real test for the rival merits of the more ambitious candidates for honors. The movement of internal reform, by which the two universities put themselves upon the road of self-improvement, only began in the very last years of the century.
The notorious Jacobitism of Oxford under the first two Georges had been highly significant of the limitation of the power of government, and the immunity secured to the subject by charter and the rule of law. Church patronage was in the hands of the Whig Ministers, who would sooner have made a Mohammedan than a Jacobite Bishop. But the Oxford and Cambridge colleges were outside their jurisdiction, and the failure of James II’s attack on the universities was a red-light warning which preserved academic liberty in England from interference by future government. Yet in spite of the decadence of the only two universities that then existed in England, in spite of intellectual of the country was never more brilliant, and the proportion of men of genius per head of population in the irregularly educated England of George III was immensely greater than in our own day.
In Elizabeth’s reign the Church, by translating the Bible and Prayer Book into Welsh, began unconsciously to counteract the Anglicizing policy of the state. English Puritanism of the Cromwellian type did not attract the Welsh, who remained cavalier so far as they took any side at all. When the Eighteenth century opened, the smaller Welsh squires, like their counterparts in England, were being bought out by the larger landlords. Wales was becoming, legally, a land of great estates; but in its fundamental social structure it was a land of small peasant farms.
Wales was a land of old enclosure, like other western and Celtic parts of the island. The ordinary Welsh farms were fenced with stone walls or sod banks. The traditional ways of these remote and rustic folk were not in Stuart time disturbed by the impact of any emotional movement-social, national, political or religious. Economically, and intellectually, Wales was shut off from English penetration by the geographic difficulties of approach. If, then, the Welsh were to have a religious and educational revival of any sort they must make it for themselves; and they did.
To teach the peasant to read, and to put the Welsh Bible into his hands were the motives of those who established popular education throughout the length and breadth themselves, and ‘middle-class’ ideas of utility were unknown; who was founded the schools desired only to save the souls of men and women, to bring them up as Bible-reading, evangelical Christians. This object was achieved, and at the same time the Welsh people, by becoming literate, had new vistas of intellectual and national culture opened to them, colored always by religion but spreading out onto spheres.
CHAPTER XII
(DR. JOHNSON’S ENGLAND)
( The agricultural and Industrial Revolutions begin- improved
communications- Overseas Trade- The city)
Capitalism,coal,transoceanic commerce, factories,machinery, and trade unions had had their port in English life long before the Hnoverian epoch.The Industrial Revoution is the most important movement in social history eventhough it is difficult to say when it began. Industrial change which is stimulated by scientific nvention and a rising population the last half of the Eighteenth century.
The agricultural Revolution began to the Eighteenth Century. At this century landlords as a class were willing to devote their wealth and attention to the improvements of the land and the methods of cultivation. The capital was conducted with the money derived from cloth, cotton, coal, and commerce. But the capital could also be from land into industry; many of the new industrialist who set up factories, mills, and business got money. From their fathers’ success as cultivators of the land. Thus the county banks grew up in great numbers and assisted this capital from industry into agriculture and from agriculture into industry.
The agricultural and Industrial Revolution helped each other. And they are a single effort to feed and employ population that was rising rapidly because of medical conditions. The changes effected for a hundred years could be seen by contrasting the situation in the reigns of George IV.
When George II ( 1727-1760) begin to reign, manufacturers inhabited ordinary villages. They supplied its own clothes, implements, bread, meat, and beer. Only furniture ,books , china in an age of the taste and expense. Moreover, many rustic villages manufactured both cheap goods for their own use and luxury goods for the market. The woolen clothes are processed in the countryside and the rapidly growing cotton industry was conducted in the cottage.
When George IV reigned (1820-1830), The manufacture of specialized goods had left the country cottage for the factory regions. There was the improvement of the roads. And the modern farmers produced corn and meats primarily for home consumption. The changes so effected related to ‘ agricultural revolution’ because they worked not by the expansion of an old economic and social system but by the creation of a new one. Great estates cultivated in large forms by leasehold tenants covered more and more of acreage of England. The open fields of the great Midland corn area were enclosed into the pattern of fenced fields. The larger owners were consolidating their estates by purchase, farmers and squires were busy with new methods. Better roads, canals, and machine were diverting industry from cottage and village to factory and town.
These changes were still going forward in the era of Trafalgar and Waterloo. They had set on a great scale between 1740 and 1789. After the third decade of the Eighteenth Century, the work began to new procedure : private acts of parliament which overrode the resistance of individual proprietors to enclosure; Each had to be content with the land or the money compensation awarded by Parliamentary Comissioners whose decisions had the force of law.
The enclosure of land grew more rapid every decade from 1740 onwards, and was the fastest of all. It occurred when revolutionary acts were hurried through every Parliament of George III (1760-1820). For the age of enclosure was also the age of new methods of draining, drilling, sowing manufacturing, breeding and feeding cattle, making roads, rebuilding of farm premises and hundred other changes, all of them requiring capital. The landlord class had more capital and more credit to devote to the cause of agricultural improvement.
For the first time since mankind took to farming, the slaughter of stock ceased. Salted meat was replaced by fresh beef and mutton. The immediate result was that the skin disease grew rare even among the poor. The new facilities for feeding animals all the year round encouraged landlords and farmers to purchase stocks and to study scientific breeding. It doubled between 1710-1795 in selling. Owing to the occurrence above, the price of any diminution of arable existed. On the contrary the output of wheat and barley was able to supply bread and beer for home population rose more rapidly, the imports of grain from abroad gradually equaled and passed the quantity exported.
Englishmen of all classes became so dainty as to insist on wheat bread that had previously been regarded as a luxury of the rich. This new demand spread from the town to the country. The abandonment of the breadstuffs was bad for the purity of the loaves provided by dishonest bakers bad for the health and bad for the teeth of the English race. But it was a proof of the efficacy of capitalist high farming. The social price for economic gain was a decline among independent cultivators and a rice in the number of landless laborers. While the landlords rented their lands, the profit of farmers and middl;eman rose.
The rapid rise in the numbers of the population kept down the market price of labour because they were losing their independent sources of the livelihood. Moreover, the poor were now unarmed and untrained to war. The hard case of the peasant didn’t win such hearing from statesman and publicist as during Tudor times. Enclosure had been regarded as a public crime while now as public duty. Without sympathy from the classes, the peasants were unable to state his own case with effect. He could only sell his land awarded by Parliamentary Comissioner to the big men.
In future, to farm the land of England, one must have capital of one’s own or have behind one the capital of others. The English banking system grew with the enclosure of land and other improvements on borrowed money. Under such system, the poorest class had little chance of farming with success. However, under the system, the rural poor were worse off materially than they had been in the past. But when in the following era, democracy armed with new strength in the cities, turned a hard eye on the cultural interest, it felt an instinctive dislike for an aristocratic preserve.
In the Eighteenth Century, many of those who were divorced from the land by the change of the system went off unwillingly. Industrial and professional families wee descended from small squires and peasants who had migrated to the towns with the price of their land in their pockets. The Englishmen’s instinct to ‘better himself’ gave the impulse to the rapid growth of wealth ,power and intelligence in the country, the towns and overseas.
The movement from country to town was conditioned by the improvement of roads and of water carriage. Without improving communications neither the industrial nor the agricultural revolution could have taken place. There was no effective highway authority ,either local or central. The parish was charged. The parish naturally scamped the work or left it undone. The turnpike companies were granted parliamentary powers to erect gates and toll bars. There were many stages in the improvement of roads as many in the corresponding improvement of vehicles.
Private carriages gradually became more light and elegant as the roads improved. The roads were thronged as they had never been in any past age, for the number of vehicles increased the number of riders had not yet diminished.
Indeed, a rage for the travel seized on Englishmen of all classes. The wealthiest made the grand tour of France and Italy. The English ‘ milords’ had the monopoly of the tourist travel in EEurope.
At home, the improved roads carried visitors so far owing to better roads and vehicles, Both in the days of Beau Nash was so crowded with visitors that it was thought worth while to rebuild its streets in a style befitting the solid splendour and comfort of that age. By constant experiment in new engineering methods and new road surfaces, Turnpike trustees reached the perfection of Macadam’s road with relays of horses at the coaching inns, in the brief interval of highway glory between Waterloo and the Railways. As the highways improved, the transport of the goods progress at the same as the traffics of the passengers. The wagon first supplemented and superseded the packhorse. The improvement of ‘ inland navigation’ was less important than the improvement of roads in opening the way to industrial change. The Duke of Bridgewater is known as ‘father of inland navigation’ but he could be more accurately described as the father of English canals.
The canal movement began in the rapidly developing industrial region of Ssouth Lancashire and the Westmidlands and soon spread over the whole country. In the canal system and the Turnpike roads did more than stimulate the exchange of goods inside the islands. They hastened the growth of overseas trade. Goods from EEurope, America, Asia and Africa could now distributed in much greater quantity throughout the length and breadth of England.
The American trade was shared by London with Bristol and Liverpool. The branch of American trade belonging to Liverpool was the slave trade which was connected with the cotton manufacture of Lancashire. More than half the slaves carried across the Atlantic made the ‘middle passage’ in the holds of English ships. They transported 50.000 slaves in 1771. One of the first to object to the slaves trade on moral grounds was Dr. Johnson and another was Horace Walpole.
The Liverpool slavers carried cargoes of finished Lancashire cotton goods to Africa, exchanged them for negroes, took the slaves across the Atlantic and ret7urned with cargoes of raw cotton, besides tobacco and sugar. Cotton goods were also used by all classes in England and were already a rival to ‘good English cloth’. In the middle of the century, the great increase of the raw materials of cotton gave employment to many thousands of men, women and children in their own homes. The women and the children were engaged in picking the cotton, while the men in weaving it. This domestic system was a source of independence and livelihood to many families. But it was not an ideal mode of life since when the home was a workshop for cotton, it could be neither clean nor comfortable.
Cotton was already great but woolens were still the greatest. The weaving of woolen cloth was still a source of additional wealth to hundreds of agricultural villages all over England. For several generations of gradual change the domestic and the factory systems existed side by side in the textile industries.
The British West Indian Islands and The Southern Colonies of the mainland sent to the mother country not only cotton but sugar and tobacco. The national consumption of tobacco, wearing of cotton and the use of sugar increased as the reign of George III reigned. The West Indian Islands were regarded as the Richest jewels of the English Crown.
The northern colonies of the American mainland took English cloth and other manufactured goods, and sent back timber and pig iron. Timber, iron, and naval stores had to be sought in Scandinavia and the Baltic. Coal made good the fuel deficiency for the domestic purposes but it was now beginning of to be applied on a large scale to the smelting of iron. The manufacturing progress of the Eighteenth Century, England did the little to harm the amenities of the island in that era.
Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) is a characteristic figure of this time when industry move towards mass production was not divorced from taste and art. He is typical of fine bourgeois life of the Eighteenth Century England. The important of English and Dutch East India Companies had inspired EEurope to rival Asia in the beautiful art of porcelain.
The most potent and characteristic phase of the whole industrial revolution was only now beginning; The connection of iron with coal. The great development of the iron trade that followed took place chiefly in South Wales, South Yorkshire, and Tyneside. In 1769 Arkwright patented the water frame and James Watt his steam engine. 1769 was the birth year of mechanical power in cotton and engineering.
The constant growth of England’s home industries and overseas trade throughout the eighteenth century depended on the finding money for those purposes. And it was not available as in later times. Government was a strong competitor in borrowing. But the technique of the money market was being perfected in London.
Joint-stock methods had suffered a set back with the bursting of the South sea Bubble in 1720. Joint-Stock company was suited to the social structure of that aristocratic but commercially minded Century. But even more than the Joint-Stock company, the growth of provincial Banks all over the island financed both the industrial and the agricultural revolutions. These banks were family or one man concerns, therefore not always secure.
Then, there were the Jew and the Quaker, both rising into the front rank in the City and the Banking World of England, each bringing certain qualities of value. The Jew helped the development of the city. He ran after custosmers without regard to his dignity and made a profit out o articles and transactions which other people rejected.
The Quakers were becoming a power in finance. They took to banking and had much to do with the establishment of the best English tradition there in; honest, quiet, liberal and peace loving, they had an effect on the excitable violance and Jingoisms of the financial world.
BAB XIII DR JOHNSON’S ENGLAND
If the England of the eighteenth century, under aristocratic leadership, was a land of art and elegance, its social and economic structure was assistant thereto. Under these happy conditions, the skilled hands produced, for the ordinary market, goods of such beautiful design and execution that they are valued by connoisseurs and collectors today. Architecture was safe in the plain English style now known as Georgian.
In the eighteenth century, art was a part of ordinary life and trade. The spirit bloweth where is listeth: the social historian cannot pretend to explain why art or literature flourished at a particular period of followed a particular course. Wealth and leisure were on the increase, widely diffused among large classes, civil peace and personal liberty were more secure than in any previous age, the limited liability of the wars we waged oversea with small professional armies gave very little disturbance to the peaceful avocations of the inhabitants of the fortunate islands.
Another circumstances favorable to the arts in the Hanoverian epoch was the aristocratic influence which coloured many aspects of life besides politics. Indeed, aristocracy functioned better as a patron of art and letters than even the old fashioned form of kingship. Eighteenth century taste was not perfect.
The romantic circumstances of the discovery of the buried cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii excited an immense curiosity, which had better consequences, perhaps, for archaeology than for art. But in spite of the vagaries of fashion in art and much variety in the powers of its leading practitioners, the tone of the eighteenth century was favorable to high quality in the arts and crafts. Indoors and out it was a lovely land.
In the last decade of the century arose the great school of landscape printers, chiefly in water colour, girtin and the youthful turner, soon to be followed by many more, including crome and cotman of the Norwich school, and constable himself. The taste for mountains which began in the later part of the eighteenth century, was accompanied by a corresponding love for the seaside, hitherto neglected. But those who went for the medicine of the body, found also a medicine of the soul.
In the eighteenth century, for the first time, the sites of new country houses were chosen for aesthetic, not merely for practical reasons. Fashion has many odd vagaries. In these country houses, great and small, was lived at its fullest.
In many respects it was a free and easy society. Perhaps no set of men and women since the world began enjoyed so many different sides of life, with so much zest, as the english upper class at this period. In versatility of action and enjoyment fox represented the society in which he was so long the leading figure.
This classical age, when dr johnson’s dictionary (1755) did much to fix the words recognized as good English, saw also the settlement of spelling by rules now insisted on among all educated people. Older forms of the chase were yielding to the pursuit of the fox. Hare hunting, beloved of Shakespeare and of sir roger de coverley, went out more slowly.
In the reign of george III fox hunting had become in its essential features what it has been ever since. Shooting in the eighteenth century was rapidly taking the place of the hawking, netting, and liming of wild fowl. The muzzle loading flint and steel gun of slow ignition was very different from the modern ejector, its action being slower.
In Stuart times cricket had grown up obscurely and locally, in Hampshire and kent, as a game of the common people. Until the later years of the century the two wickets each consisted of two stumps, only one foot high, about twenty four inches apart, with a third stump or bail laid across them.
Eighteenth century Englishmen were much addicted to the pleasures of the table, and our island cooking had already taken on certain characteristic merits and defects. The theatre had a vigorous popular life in eighteenth century England. On the other hand, as we should expect in the country that so effectually patronized Handel’s Oratorius, the musical side of the theatre was excellent.
The dramatic genius of Garrick in the middle of the century, and of Mrs Siddons after him, made the London theatre famous. The printed newspaper had y the middle of the century quite displaced the written news letter.
Just as the theatre and the newspaper had, since the reign of Charles II, spread from the capital to the provinces, so had the printing and publishing of books. The vigorous literary and scientific life of many provincial towns in Dr Johnson’s day was stimulated by the local newspaper and the local publishing firms, which often attained to a high standard. Poetry, travels, history and novels all had a place in popular reading.
BAB XIV SCOTLAND AT THE BEGINNING AND AT THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Since the scope of this work is confined to the social history of England, nothing has yet been said about the neighboring kingdom of Scotland. By the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne (1603) his two kingdoms were linked by the uneasy bond of a dual monarchy. Under these political conditions, social life in the countries continued to flow in separate channels.
Indeed, so repugnant to one another were the two neighbor nations over which king William uneasily reigned, that before his death in 1702 it had become clear to the wiser heads in both his kingdoms that either there must be a closer political and commercial unions, or else the crowns would again become separate and war would almost certainly ensue. The right choice was made, though with deep misgivings on the part of the scots. For a generation or more the benefits of the union seemed to hang fire.
1. Scotland At The Time Of The Union Of 1707
Ever since the days of Burns and Sir Walter Scott the English have delighted in Scottish tradition and story, highland and lowland alike, sometimes to the point of sentimentality. Perhaps not more than a dozen people in the year visited Scotland for pleasure. Nor was there in Scotland anything specially to attract the seeker after the beautiful as it was understood in those days.
The scot was either a jacobite or a Presbyterian, and in either capacity he alienated four-fifths of English sympathy. The Scots, indeed, regarded the English with sour aversion, as purse-proud and overbearing neighbors. The Edinburgh parliament, though it had become somewhat more important after the revolution, had never stood for much in the social life and imagination of the people.
The barons, or county members, unlike the corresponding class in the English house of commons, were not elected on a popular franchise of forty-shilling freeholders, but were each chosen by a few score gentlemen who happened to be, in the eye of the old Scottish law, tenants in chief of the crown. The predominance of the aristocracy was not confined to parliament. After the nobles came the lairds or country gentlemen. The interior was equally devoid of luxuries common in the south of the island. Near Edinburgh and other towns golf was a time honored institution.
The gentry of the lowlands were divided not unevenly into Presbyterian and Episcopalian, a division scarcely distinguishable from the political division of whig and jacobite. Family and religious discipline tended to be more strict in Presbyterian than in Episcopalian families. The divison therefore was deep only on its political side.
Nearly all Scottish families, especially those of the gentry, regularly attended either the parish church or the Episcopal meeting house, where they received much the same spiritual medicine, diluted with different quantities of water. The intellectual unity of the nation and the good understanding of its component classes were all the greater because Scottish lairds in those days sent their own bairns to the village school. But in the age of anne no literary or intellectual palms were won by Scotland in the world’s arena.
Scottish school education would, however, by modern standards, be judged miserably inadequate. On the other hand, though there were not enough schools, in those that there were latin was very often taught, and it was usually well taught in the burgh schools maintained by the towns. The universities, of Scotland were in a dull condition at sunrise of that century which was to set in the golden glow of principal Robertson, adam smith and the Edinburgh philosophers.
The students were all of classes, sons of nobles, lairds, ministers, farmers, and mechanics. The peasants on a estate lived on terms of traditional familiar intercourse with the laird, who on his daily ride across his lands had to listen to the sharp tongues of an outspoken race. The peasantry held their farms on annually terminable leases which left them at the mercy of the laird or his factor, and fatally discouraged any attempt on their part at improving the land they tilled.
Under these conditions it is no wonder that in queen anne’s reign nine-tenths of the fileds of Scotland were unenclosed by wall or hedge. The houses of the peasantry were in keeping with the starved aspect of the landscape and the want of any proper system of agricultural improvement. Men and women wore clothes made up in the immediate neighborhood by local weavers and tailors, often spun and dyed in the wearer’s own cottage.
In Scotland yet, as in the England of pre saxon times, much of the land that was potentially the best for agriculture was still uncultivated marsh cumbering the valley bottoms, while the peasants painfully drove their teams on the barren hillsides above. A group of farmers usually tilled their lands together, and shared the profit on the run-rig system, each farmer claiming the produce of a rig or ridge – a different rig being assigned to him each harvest. The farm was further divided into an infield and an outfield.
Scottish crops consisted of oats for the staple food, and barley to make scones, or the scots ale which was still the wholesome national drink of the lowlander before the ill omened invasion of whisky from the highlands. The tyranny of these primitive customs of cultivations, approved by the people themselves, kept them always near the verge of famine. The last half dozen years of William’s reign had been the dear years of Scottish memory, six consecutive seasons of disastrous weather when the harvests would not ripen.
In these circumstances, the principal source of agricultural wealth, as distinct from mere subsistence, was sheep and cattle. The standard of life in Scotland was very low in almost every material respect, but hardships had not crushed the spirit of the people, not even after the dear years of William. Licenses to beg from door to door in a given area were also issued by the kirk session to privileged gaberlunzies, or blue gowns.
But unhappily there was a much larger number of unlicensed and less desirable vagabonds. Fletcher of saltoun, the grim republican patriot who lent a flavor of his own to the Scottish politics of the age, proposed as a remedy that the sorners should be put into compulsory servitude, his idea was only the extension of existing practice in Scotland. If Scotland at the time of the union lagged behind England in agricultural methods, her industry and commerce were in no better way.
Though Scottish officers and regiments were winning honor for the land of their birth – the scots greys were as famous in the armies of Marlborough as in those of Wellington – the war with France meant little to the scots at home. Since the restoration, Glasgow had been reckoned as the second city in the kingdom, and the first for trade and manufacture. The fourth university town was Edinburgh herself – the headquarters of scotland’s law and law courts, the meeting place of the parliament of the three estates, and of that other parliament which proved more enduring – the general assembly of the church.
Although the antique city guard of Edinburgh, with their lochaber axes, were the laughing stock of Scotland, yet housebreaking and robbery were almost unknown in the chief city of the kingdom, where men left their house doors unlocked all night. But not even the church attempted on weekdays to stop horseracing on leith sands, golf, cockfighting or heavy drinking. This famous sanitary system of Edinburgh aroused much comment among English travelers and made the scots traduced and taxed of other nations as being in defoe’s words unwilling to live sweet and clean.
The Scottish peasant, cramped in feudal bonds and mediaeval poverty, had one method of escape from his material lot – religion. The parish church, with its roof of turf or thatch, was a small and tumbledown building, it had no mediaeval splendors or amenities, and would in England have been deemed more fitted for a barn. The most solemn and impressive of popular religious rites were the communions, held out of doors at long tables, gathering under the eye of summer heaven that reminded everyone present of more dangerous meeting held on the moorside in the killing times.
The belief in witchcraft had already so far declined in the upper strata of English society that the persecution of witches in accordance with the law and with the dictates of popular superstitions was ceasing to be permitted, in a country that was then ruled according to the ideas of its educated class. The Presbyterian church was not the fount and origin of popular superstitions. In the absence of proper doctors for the countryside, popular medicine was traditional, and it was sometimes hard to distinguish it from a popular form of witchcraft.
If even in the lowlands primitive and natural conditions bred primitive belief and natural fancies, it was even more so in the highlands, the very home of the fairies and spirits of the mountain, of the formless monster that brooded unseen in the deep water beneath the boat, of second sight, of omens and prophecy with which the little life of man was girt ground. Far less accurate knowledge was available in London or even in Edinburgh about the state of the highlands than can now be bought across the counter of a bookshop concerning the remotest parts of Africa. The chief had the power of life and death, and exercised it to the full, keeping his clan in awe, that was always strengthened by traditional loyalty and often by affection.
2. Scotland At The End Of The Eighteenth Century
Progress as we of the twentieth century are better aware than our Victorian ancestors, is not always change from bad to good or from good to better, and the sum total of progress associated with the industrial revolution has not been wholly for the good of man. Release from the conditions of misery described before came mainly through a revolution in agricultural methods. As in England, the first movers in the change were individual landlords with a little capital, enterprise and outside knowledge.
There was indeed an obvious danger, as in the analogous case of the English enclosures, that some of the old tenants would be turned off the land altogether, as victims of reform. Both the old lands and the new were now enclosed with stone walls or hedges, the high rigs were leveled, the fields were drained, limed, manured, one or two good horses took the place of the long train of starveling oxen at the plough, men could now afford leather harness instead of horses’ hair or rushes, iron ploughs instead of wooden, carts instead of sledges. After the turnpike act of 1751, the roads were so generally improved as to increase the marketing opportunities of farmers and industrialists alike.
In the highlands, much disappeared besides the hereditable jurisdictions. A population that had always lived for and by war was at last effectively disarmed, but its fighting instincts were canalized into the highland regiments of the crown, that did good service abroad for the empire now common to Englishmen and scots, to gael and saxon. Meanwhile Presbyterian missionaries and schoolmasters had been at work in the highlands, and had from the first shown more tact and more sympathy with the gael than the emissaries of the civil power.
The rapid changes in Scottish mind and manners during the eighteenth century did not come into any serious collision with the influence of the church, such as marked contemporary movements of opinion in france. It is possible that some of the moderates went too far in the sweet reasonableness of their moderation, and the more zealous of their ever critical hearers had perhaps some reason in their complaints against sermons that were a cauld clatter of morality, lacking in orthodox doctrine and apostolic zeal. The eighteenth century also saw great changes in the fortunes and in the spirit of the Episcopalian minority.
In the course of the eighteenth century the inhabitants of Scotland rose in numbers from about a million to 1652000. rapid as was the rise of scotland’s population in the eighteenth century, it had not been as rapid as the increase of her wealth. But Scotland had still a bad hour to pass through.
CHAPTER XV:COBBETT’S ENGLAND
Between the classical world of the Eighteenth Century with its self-confidence and self-content, and the restless England of Peterioo and the rick-burnings, of Byron and Cobbett, were interposed twenty years of war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (1793-1815). Since municipal lethargy and corruption had long lost all touch with the civic traditions and public spirit of mediaeval corporate life, the sudden growth of the new factory quarters did not disturb the slumbers of the town oligarchies, who were so well accustomed to neglect their old duties that they were incapable of rising to a new call.
When Waterloo was fought, rural England was still in its unspoilt beauty, and most English towns were either handsome or picturesque. The course of the Napoleonic wars, with blockade and counter-blockade, made business a gamble. The war had also the effect of shutting out the supply of EEuropean corn, which had at last become necessary to steady food prices in cur thickly populated island. The observant eyes of Defoe, as he rode through Queen Anne’s England, had been pleased by the harmony of the economic and social fabric. The poor suffered by the war. But at no period had the landed gentry been wealthier or happier, or more engrossed in the life of their pleasant country houses. During half the years of the struggle with France, England sent no expeditionary force to EEurope, and even the seven campaigns of the Peninsular War cost less than 40,000 British dead : the blood tax was a light one for all classes. For all that, we must not exaggerate the actual amount of discontent, particularly in the first part of the war.
It is to be feared that the ‘ sentiment’ was unduly optimistic, but the fact that it could be applauded by the ‘ gallery ‘ is not without pleasant significance. Once the war and ifs reactions were well over, it appears from statistical calculation of real wages that the agricultural laborer was no worse off in 1824 than he had been thirty years before, taking the average of the country as a whole. It would, however, be a great mistake to regard the unhappy condition of the. labourers in the. Counties south of Thames as characteristic of" all rural England. As far back as 1771 Arthur Young had deplored the fact that, with better facilities of travel, the drift of country lads and lasses to London was on the increase.
The continual rise in the population made it indeed impossible to provide work for everyone in the English village. With the improvement of roads and communications first the lady of the manor, then the farmer’s wife and lastly the cottager learnt to buy in the town many articles that used to be made in the village or on the estate. But the English village during the first half of the Nineteenth Century was still able to provide an excellent type of colonist to new lands beyond the ocean. All the circumstances of postwar England helped the great movement of colonization. But while many English villagers were crossing the. ocean, many others were drifting into the industrial districts at home.
Immigrants to the mining and industrial districts were leaving an old rural world essentially conservative in its social structure and moral atmosphere, and were dumped down in neglected heaps that soon fermented as neglected heaps will do, becoming highly combustible matter. The worst slums in the new urban areas were those inhabited by the immigrant Irish. The factory hands, like the miners, were brought together as a mass of employees face to face with an employer, who lived apart from them in a house of his own in a separate social atmosphere. The mass of unregarded humanity in the factories and mines were as yet without any social services or amusements of a modern kind to compensate for the lost amenities and traditions of country life. But there is another reason, besides the restraints and consolations of a powerful popular religion, to account for the moderate character and the limited success of the Radical movement in me generation After Waterloo.
Another large class, equally far removed from factory or domestic employment, was the mobile army of unskilled labour known as ‘ navvies ‘ engaged in gangs that moved from place to place, digging canals, making reads and in the next generation constructing embankments and tunnels for railways. At the opposite end of the ranks or labour were the skilled engineers and mechanics. It is indeed easier to reconstruct the early history of the coal-miners and textile hands, than that of the mechanics and engineers, because the latter were scattered up and down the country. Adult Education received its first impetus from the Industrial Revolution in the desire of mechanics for general scientific knowledge, and the willingness of the more intelligent part of the middle class to help to supply their demand.
The success of these Mechanics’ Institutes, with an annual subscription of a guinea, showed that whatever was happening to other classes of workers, prosperity was coming to the engineers and mechanics from the Industrial Revolution which had called them into being. While adult education and self-education were on the move before a strong new breeze, the foundation of .London University (1827) was inspired by the same spirit. Primary education both, lost and gained by the religious and denominational squabbles, characteristic of an age when Dissenters had become numerically formidable, but Churchmen were still unwilling to abate a jot of their privileges.
In the middle of the Napoleonic wars, unemployment low wages and starvation were periodic among the industrialists of Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire, and Lancashire, partly owing to the first effects of new machinery. After 1822 the anti-Jacobin tide at last began to ebb. With Peel at the Home Office, repression ceased to be the sole method of government, and in 1824-1825 the House of Commons, in the spirit of a new and better age, was induced by the skilful lobbying of Joseph Hume and Francis Place to repeal Pitt’s Combination Act and make Trade Unions legal. It must not be supposed that the strife of classes was ever an absolute thing in England, or that all masters were harsh to their workpeople or indifferent to their hardships.
Unfortunately, in the earlier years of the Century, State control in the interest of the working classes was not an idea congenial to the rulers of Britain. At the end of the Nineteenth Century, partly by successive Factory Acts, partly by Trade Union action, factory life had proved a means of raising standards, while the ‘ sweated ‘ domestic trades, like dressmaking which could not be brought under factory control, were still for awhile longer the scene of the worst oppressions, especially of women.
CHAPTER XVI: COBBETT’S ENGLAND
The growth of the factory system and of capitalist agriculture involved a number of changes in the employment of women, which altered conditions of family life, and therefore in the long run affected the relation of the sexes. The move to the factories could not be effected at once and in many cases was not effected at all.
Under the old system of life, many village women took an active part in tilling the family patch of Ground, looking after the pig or cow, marketing the goods or helping to conduct some small local business. Moreover, the women who went to work in the factories, though they lost some of the best things in life, gained independence. In the early Nineteenth Century these domestic conditions had changed on the large enclosed farms of the new order, but this was only true to its full extent in the case of the wealthier fanners, some of whom were indeed gradually becoming gentlemen. An account of women’s life at this period ought to include a reference to the great army of prostitutes.
The new age was bringing into being a large leisured class which had no direct relation either to the land, to the professions, to industry or to trade. When Cobbett abused the ‘ fund-holders ‘ as bloodsuckers eating the taxes of the people, and demanded the repudiation of the National Debt, he hardly realized what an enormous number of inoffensive, humble folk he proposed to ruin, over and above the ‘ stock-jobbers ‘ who were perhaps fair game.
During the first thirty years of the Century many changes ‘n habits of life and thought were due to the steady infiltration of evangelical religion into all classes of society, finally not excepting the highest ; it was a movement, that spread from below upwards. In the lower ranks of society, horror of French Republican atheism helped the Wesleyan movement to spread more widely than ever after the death of its great founder 1791.While the war lasted, the influence of the new type of Nonconformity was anti-French and on the whole conservative; the governing classes therefore regarded its increasing influence and numbers with less alarm than might otherwise have been felt. The bridge between Establishment and Dissent, as also between anti-Jacobin and Liberal, was found in the small but influential Evangelical party which had now effected a lodgment inside the Church.
Humanitarian activity was the characteristic form in which their religious piety expressed itself. This cross-cut, traversing established party and denominational lines, indicated tint the public mind was becoming more active and independent. The British mercantile marine, which together with the Royal Navy thwarted the ambition of Bonaparte, was incomparably the greatest in the world. The Thames estuary still held unchallenged supremacy as the centre of Britain’s trade and the World’s. The relation of the Royal Navy to the merchant marine and to the rest of the seagoing population – including fishermen, whalers and smugglers, was of the first importance in time of war.
In the last few years of the struggle with Napoleon, the army became for a short time even more popular with the nation than the navy. The military officers came from more aristocratic circles than the ‘naval men. There was no very strong professional feeling among the army officers of our most unmilitary nation. During the long war two changes took place, indicating that at last the nation had accepted the standing army as a necessary national institution. The reformers now rising the influence disliked it as an aristocratic preserve.It became so ingrained during the hundred years of security that it proved very difficult to shake it off when danger returned in the Twentieth Century more formidably than ever before.
When the date and place of a prize-fight had been announced, hordes set out, driving, riding and walking to the spot from all parts of the island. Indeed with so much money wagered by the public, it was an uphill struggle for noble patrons to keep either the turf or the ring even comparatively honest. As the century went on. when growing humanitarianism, evangelicalism and respectability helped to put down ‘ the ring,’ they did the greater service of putting down the duel.
These early years of the Century saw the culmination of a delightful popular art, the ‘ coloured print’. But above all, the colored prints represented the outdoor world of sport, from big-game shooting in India and Africa to the field-sports and the life of the road at home. There was no luxury about the field-sports of those days. Hard exercise and Spartan habits were the condition of all pursuit of game. Indirectly, therefore, the passion for shooting game did much for what was best in our civilization
By a new law of 1816, the starving cottager who went out to taken a hare or rabbit for the family pot could be transported for seven years if caught with his nets upon him at night. Indeed, as the Nineteenth Century advanced and as the anti-Jacobin spirit receded, humanitarianism invaded one province of life after another, softening the rude and often brutal temper of the past, and fostering instead a cheerful benevolence "of heart sometimes running to sentimentality. These changes of feeling were a striking improvement upon all past ages. As the Nineteenth Century grew older, humanity pervade more and more all the dealings of life, particularly the treatment of children. The advance in humanity, far more than the boasted advance in machinery, was the thing of which the Nineteenth Century had best reason to be proud; for in the wrong hands machinery may destroy humanity.
CHAPTER XVII: BETWEEN THE TWO REFORM BILLS [1832-1867]
The interval between the Great Reform Bill of 1832 and the end of the Nineteenth Century may, be called the Victorian Age, but it was characterized by such constant and rapid change in economic circumstance, social custom and intellectual atmosphere, that we must not think of these seventy years as saving a fixed likeness one to another, merely because more than sixty of them were presided over by ‘the Queen’ (1837-1901). If any real unity is to be ascribed to the Victorian era in England, it must be found in two governing conditions: first, there was no great war and o fear catastrophe from without; and secondly, the whole period was marked by interest in religious questions and was deeply influenced by seriousness of thought and self-discipline of character, an outcome of the Puritan ethos.
Throughout the last seventy years of the Nineteenth Century the State was rapidly undertaking new social functions, rendered necessary by new industrial conditions in an overcrowded island; but the real strength and felicity of the Victorian age lay less in that circumstance, important as it was, than in the self-discipline and self-reliance of the individual Englishman, derived indeed from many sources, but to a large extent sprung from Puritan traditions to which the Wesloyan and Evangelical movements had given another lease of life.
With the growth of the power and wealth of England and the need for every kind of leadership at home and overseas that the new Century demanded, a great increase of secondary education was essential. And it was to some extent supplied, but in an expected way that had important social consequences. It might have been supposed that the age of Reform and the approach of democracy would lead to the improvement and multiplication of endowed Grammar Schools by State action; in that case a common education would have been shared by the clever children of very various classes, as had been done in the Grammar Schools of Tudor and Stuart times with such excellent results. But in the Victorian era the Grammar Schools as at Manchester. At the same time the Dissenting Academies, so useful in the previous century, petered out. The new fashion was all for the ‘Public School,’ modelled on the old ideals of Eton, Westminster, Winchester and Harrow, of which Rugby became the great exemplar.
The upper, the upper-middle and the professional classes were welded together in the Public Schools, and by the same process were further divided from the rest of the nation brought up under a different educational system. The tendency to social segregation, enhanced by the geographic division of the various class ‘quarters’ in the lay-out of great modern cities, was thus further accentuated by education. Moreover, the expenses of a Public School, so much higher than those of the Grammar School and Day School, became a terrible self-imposed burden on middle-class and professional families.
Already in the middle years of the Nineteenth Century industrial change was creating the mass-vulgarity which was destined ere long to swamp that high standard of literary culture with the advent of the new journalism, the decay of the countryside, and the mechanization of life. Scientific education, when at last it came, inevitably displaced humanism. But in the mid-Nineteenth Century, education was still humanistic not scientific, and though this had some serious practical disadvantages, it made for the time being a great literary civilization based on scholarship with an even wider following of intelligent readers than in the Nineteenth Century, and with a much more varied and catholic scope in style and matter than in the days when Boileau and Pope were the standards of taste. In literature and thought as well as in society and politics it was an age of transition from aristocracy to democracy, from authority to mass-judgment; and for literature and thought such conditions were propitious, so long as they lasted.
The atmosphere of free religious controversy, of moral reflection, of anxious and reverent doubts on orthodox creeds and the search for a substitute, gave body and interest to imaginative writers like Carlyle, Ruskin and the author on In Memoriam, and made Wordsworth in his old age more popular than Byron in his grave. At the same time the critical analysis of actual society, perceived to be very faulty and believed to be remediable, helped to inspire and to popularize Dickens, Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell and Trollope. And the rights of personality, even in the case of women, were represented in the writings of the Brontë sisters no less than in the life’s work of Florence Nightingale. John Stuart Mill on Liberty (1859) and on the Subjection of Women (1869) attacked the bondage of convention and proclaimed the rights of individual men and women to free life and thought, in a manner that may be taken as a turning-point between the early and the later Victorian age. In the middle years of the Century, Victoria’s subjects developed eyes for many kinds of natural beauty and historical interest. They enjoyed a great literary civilization, both in reading the classic of the past and producing classics of their own age.
In the ‘forties’, ‘fifties’ and ‘sixties’ painting was still a great trade, supplying a great demand. For the photographer had not yet sufficiently developed his science to take the place of the painter’s art in the production of family portraits, copies of famous pictures and representations of ancient buildings and favourite landscape. That the important measure meant much to the social life of cities, by the immediate transference of power to new classes; and it meant more than was then foreseen, as the basis on which was to arise, during the next hundred years, the great structure of municipal social service for the benefit of all classes of the community, particularly of the poor. No one in 1835 foresaw the day when the ‘new municipalities’ would not only light and pave the streets, but control the building of houses, and the sanitation and health of the borough; convey the workmen to and from their work; provide public libraries; carry on great municipal trades and industries; and finally educate the people.
The Reform Bill of 1832 and its sequel in the Municipal Reform Bill of 1835, taken together, emphasized and increased the differentiation between the social life of town and country which economic forces were everyday making more complete. Victoria’s England consisted of two strongly contrasted social system, the aristocratic England of the rural district and the democratic England the great cities.
In the matter of guardianship of public health, the rule of shopkeepers, builders and publicans, elected by the rate-payers under the Municipal Reform Act of 1835. Still throughout the ‘forties’ nothing was done to control the slum-landlords and jerry-builders who, according to the prevalent laissez-faire philosophy, were engaged from motives of self-interest in forwarding the general happiness. Not till the ‘seventies’ did the death-rate decisively fall as a result of building and sanitary reform, and not ill the end of the Century was sanitation in English cities at all what it should have been. In that year, when the Great Exhibition spread its hospitable glass roof high over the elms of Hyde Park, and all the world came to admire England’s wealth, progress and enlightenment, an ‘exhibition’ might profitably have been made of the way in which our poor were housed, to each the admiring foreign visitor some of the dangers that be set the path of the vaunted new era.
The period between the two first Reform Bill (1832-1867) was the ‘age of coal and iron’ now working at full blast, or in the other words it was ‘the Railway Age’. The railways were England’ gift to the world. They originated from experiments in the best method of moving coal from the pit-head in the vast quantities required for smelting and manufacture as well as for domestic use. In the ‘twenties’ there had been much controversy as to the rival merits of drawing coal along wooden or iron rails by horses, or by stationary engines, or by George Stephenson’s ‘locomotive’.
Short local lines laid down in the coal districts were developed in the ‘thirties’ and ‘forties’ into a national system for the whole island, as a result of two distinct periods of railway investment and speculation, in 1836-1837 and in 1844-1848. But in the ‘forties’, under the less scrupulous leadership of George Hudson, the ‘Railway King,’ the general public plunged headlong into the speculation of the ‘railway mania,’ and lost much money in bogus or unsuccessful companies. Hudson was not a mere swindler; he had scored his mark across the face of England. In 1843 there had been about 2000 miles of railway in Great Britain; in 1848 there were 5000.
When Victoria came to the throne the ‘great taste’ system was already an accomplished fact. Ever since the days of the last Stuart Kings, more and more land had been passing from small squires and cultivating owners into the possession of the big landlords, into whose circle the men of the new town made wealth were constantly intruding themselves by marriage, by the purchase of large continuous estates, and by the building of new ‘country houses.’ But if estates were large, it did not follow that farms had proportionately increased in size. On the average they were bigger than before. But moderate-sized farms worked by a single family without hired labour were still very common. And indeed such farms are very numerous even today, especially in the pastoral counties of the North, the more so as machinery had reduced the number of hand required.
At Victoria’s accession, the enclosure of the ‘open fields’ and therewith the end of the ‘strip’ system of agriculture, was already an accomplished fact except for a few scattered survivals. But the enclosure of commons was not yet complete and still went on apace, stimulated by the General Enclosure Act of 1845.
The movement for the enclosure of common land-for so many centuries past a source of disputes and grievances, as well as a means of greatly increasing the productivity of the island-was halted at last in the decade between 1865 and 1875. The condition of the agricultural labourer, particularly in the South, was often very wretched in the ‘thirties and ‘hungry ‘forties,’ when even the farmer who employed him was suffering from the bad times. Dicken’s Oliver Twist was an attack on workhouse management, to which the greater sensibility of the Victorian public responded. The working class in town and country regarded the New Poor Law as an odious tyranny, as indeed in often was.
For the system erected for the new Poor Law was based not on laissez-faire but on its opposite. It was pure Benthamism, a combination of the elective with the bureaucratic principle, as advocated in Bentham’s ‘Constitutional Code’. But the new Poor Law of 1834was a very unfortunate beginning for reformed methods of governing the countryside. Its harshness, especially in the separation of families, gave the rural poor a distaste for Benthamite improvement, and reconciled them to the old paternal government of the Justices of Peace in all other matters, which went on for another fifty years. The New Poor Law might have served as a model for other changes in local government, but it was too unpopular.
With the increasing prosperity of industry and agriculture in the ‘fifties and sixties’, the lot of the wage-earn in town and country was greatly relieved. The labourer, driven off the enclosed common and open field, had sometimes found compensation in allotments and potato-patches provided for him by philanthropic squires, parsons, and farmers. In the ‘fifties and sixties,’ while agriculture still flourished, good brick cottages, with slate roofs and two or even three bedrooms apiece, were being built by landlords as ‘estate cottages,’ particularly on large estates like those of the Duke of Bedford. The bad cottages were the old ones, of which there were plenty, built of mud, lath and plaster, and roofed with ill-repaired thatch, with only two rooms to the whole cottage. ‘The worst’ were generally the small freeholds, inhabited by the person who owned them. The best had usually been erected recently by the landlord. Where a good farmhouse was two centuries old, it was nearly always a former manor house, once belonging to some family of small squires. The English landlord, if not a philanthropic, was not a mere ‘business man’ dealing with land to profit.
The passing of the Reform Bill of 1832 was at once followed in the industrial North by a fierce agitation of the factory hands against the hard condition of their lives, particularly in the matter of hours. At Westminster members of all parties took part in it, and in 1833 the Whig government gave it legislative form. Evangelical humanity was a strong motive in providing the educated leaders, while the popular drive behind the movement came from the factory population itself, who were mostly Radicals. The sentiment of humanity was now a great force in politics. In 1833 it abolished slavery I the Empire at a cost of twenty million pounds cheerfully paid by the British taxpayer. This second crisis of Factory legislation came to a head in 1844-1847, contemporaneously with the repeal of the Corn Laws, and was heated with the fires of that great dispute. The Ten Hours Bill limited the daily work of women and youths in textiles factories, and thereby compelled the stoppage of al work after ten hours, as the grown men could not carry on the processes alone.
What the Reform Bill of 1832 was to all later extensions of the Franchise, the Factory Acts of 1833-1847 are to the far-spreading code of statutory regulation which now governs the conditions and hours of almost all branches of industry. And decisive first steps were taken in 1833-1847, during the period which it is usual to condemn as obsessed by the doctrine of laissez-faire. The passing of the abortive chimney-sweeper’s Act of 1864 had been large measure due to the publications in the previous years of Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies. Children’s books of which the pleasure was intended to be shared with grown-ups was a characteristic invention of the time. In the previous century Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe had been written for men and women, though children and boys delighted in them and in the Arabian Nights. But in 1855 Thackeray published the Rose and The Ring, a Fireside Pantomime for great and small children, and ten years later Alice, written for the little daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, a published by ‘Lewis Carroll.’
Certainly the Industrial Revolution had in the Victorian era increased the disparity of wealth between the very rich and the very poor, and had segregated classes geographically by substituting great cities divided into various social quarters, in place of the life of villages and market towns with some features and interests common to all. The improvement of the lot of the wage-earners in the ‘fifties and sixties’, was partly due to the prosperity of trade those fortunate years when England was the workshop under world; partly to the social legislation of Parliament; were partly to Trade Union action raise wages, and stop payments and other abuses. Trade Unionism was particularly strong among the working-class aristocracy, the engineers and the men of other skilled trades. In the ‘seventies’ the Co-operative Societies added production on a considerable scale to their original activities. The Co-operative movement was of more than financial importance. It gave many working people a sense that they also had ‘a stake in the country.’
The of England’s happiness in the Nineteenth Century, and the cause of that peculiar belief in ‘progress’ as a law of history which cheered the Victorian mind, was the fact we were not engaged in any great war for a hundred years after Waterloo. The Crimean War (1854-1856) was no exception. It was merely a foolish expedition to the Black Sea, made for no sufficient reason, because the English people were bored by peace, in spite of the flood of pacifist talk in which they had been indulged three years before at the time of the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. One thing that the Crimean War did not produce was Army Reform. It was indeed recognized that though the veteran soldiers had fought well, maintaining the regimental traditions inherited from the Peninsula, they had been ill supplied with recruits, ill led, and ill recognized as an army.
Only in 1859 there was a panic over the supposed ill intentions of Napoleon III, though his real desire was to live on friendly terms with England. So the islanders had one of their periodic frights that punctuated their perpetual unpreparedness, and th result on this occasion was the starting of the Volunteer movement, the drilling of business men and their employees in off hours, consonant with the civilian and individualist spirit of the time. But the reform of the regular army remained unattempted, until the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 made the English public vaguely aware that something was going on among those uncountable foreigners.
CHAPTER XVIII: THE SECOND HALF OF THE VICTORIAN ERA [1865-1901]
Democracy, bureaucracy, collectivism are advancing like a silent tide making in by a hundred creeks and inlets. A short list of some of the changes which marked off the ‘seventies’ from the previous generation, may at least be suggestive. But the greatest single event of the ‘seventies,’ fraught with immeasurable consequences for the future, was the sudden collapse of English agriculture. The new agricultural machinery enabled the farmers of the Mile-West to skim the cream off virgin soils of unlimited expanse; the new railway system carried the produce to the ports; the new steamers bore it across the Atlantic.
Meanwhile the landlords and farmers, who had neither the wish nor the power to divorce themselves from the soil, suffered and complained in vain, for their day as the political rulers of England had gone by. Both the Liberal and the Conservative intelligentsia of the ‘seventies and eighties’ were saturated with the Free Trade Doctrine: they believed that if one industry, agriculture for instance, went under in free competition, other industries would gain proportionately and would take its place and so all would be well. For political economy does not cover the whole field of human welfare.
From 1891-1899 a second wave of agricultural depression followed, as severe as that of 1875-1884. By the end of the Century the corn area in England and Wales had shrunk from over eight million acres in 1871 to under six million. The later Victorians laid no far plans for the future. They were content to meet those demands and to solve those problems of which the pressure was already felt. To meet this new situation, Free Trade and individualist self-help might not alone be enough.
The Queen’s Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 were celebrated by all classes with real pride and thankfulness, due in part to sense of delivery from the conditions endured at the beginning of her reign, for the ‘hungry forties,’ were still remembered. Manners were gentler, streets were safer like was more humane, sanitation was improving fast, working-class housing, though still bad, was less bad than ever before. Conditions of labour had been improved real wages had risen, hours had shortened.
In 1885 a third of the world’s sea-going ships were on the British register, including four-fifths of the world’s steamships. The tonnage of the port of London was still sixty percent, greater than that of the Mersey, though Liverpool, dealing in Lancashire’s cotton, exported more British goods than the Capital. The great Thames and Mersey docks were both completed in the ‘eighties.’ The railway system had greatly increased the volume of overseas trade, but had further reduced the number of ports, a process begun in the Eighteenth Century.
In the ‘seventies and eighties,’ large families were still customary in the professional and business world, as well as in the working class, and the population rose apace since so many of the children born were now kept alive. The death-rate dropped with the improvement of town sanitation and the constant progress of medical knowledge and practice. The ‘seventies and eighties’ had been a period not only of large families but of Puritanism in ethical and sexual ideas, qualified by the too frequent weakness of human nature in practice. Queen Victoria had put the example of her court on the side of the stricter code. The genuine honesty of most British merchants as men of business had been one of the causes of our great commercial prosperity. The older and more definite religious beliefs that meant so much to these men were being successfully attacked by the ‘Agnostics’ of the same period. The fame and authority enjoyed by George Eliot’s novels were largely due to the fact that they were taken by many as ‘restating the moral law and process of soul-making, in terms acceptable to the rationalist agnostic conscience.’
The Puritan attitude to life and conduct was inculcated not only by the Bible religion of the mass of the Victorians, but by the Anglo-Catholic religion that had grown out of the Oxford Movement of the ‘thirties,’ and was now spreading wide, with such men as Gladstone and Salisbury among its lay representatives. The Anglo-Catholic influence made easier some concession to ordinary human nature, including a less strict observance of the ‘Sabbath’ than Evangelicals could approve.
Naturally the religious world took up arms to defend positions of dateless antiquity and prestige. Naturally the younger generation of scientific men rushed to defend their revered chief, and to establish their claim to come to any conclusion to which their researchers led, regardless of the cosmogony and chronology of Genesis, and regardless of the ancient traditions of the Church. The strife raged throughout the ‘sixties, ‘seventies and ‘eighties. During this period of change and strife, causing much personal and family unhappiness and many searching of heart, the world of educated men and women was rent by a real controversy, which even the English love of compromise could not deny to exist. The shaking of dogmatic assurance within the pale of the Anglican and Protestant Churches in the latter years f the Nineteenth Century helped the propaganda of the Roman Church, whole undeviating claim to full and certain knowledge appealed to persons who could not bear to be left in doubt.
In the last half of the Nineteenth Century, Archaeology and History were in rapid progress, and their discoveries strengthened the hands of science in the strife against orthodox beliefs. The two older Universities became so far assimilated to the new that before the end of the Queen’s reign Oxford and Cambridge were much more lay than clerical in the personnel of their ‘dons,’, who were, moreover, now allowed to marry while continuing to hold Fellowships. Academic study now embraced physical science and medieval and modern history as strongly as the older humanism and mathematics. The last half of Victoria’s reign was indeed the period when Oxford and Cambridge were most in the public eye. Their reform, particularly the abolition of religious tests for academic posts (1871) was one of the chief political questions of the day.
It was significant of the coming era that the Salvation Army was more sensational in its methods than the older Nonconformist bodies. It was no less significant that the Salvation Army regarded social work and care for the material conditions of the poor and outcast as being an essential part of the Christian mission to the souls of men and women.
In the Twentieth Century, drink has found fresh enemies in the cinema at the street corner, and the wireless at home, and the increase of skilled and mechanical employments, particularly the driving of motor-cars, has put a premium on sobriety. But when Queen Victoria died, drinking was still a great evil from the top to the bottom of society, more widely prevalent than in our day, but decidedly less than when she came to the thorne.
In the Victorian era photography made its effective impact on the world. Already in 1871 it was acclaimed by an observer ‘the greatest boon that has been conferred on the poorer classes in later years.’ Many thousands of painters had formerly lived on the demand for portraits of persons, for accurate delineations of events, scene and buildings and for copies of famous pictures. Photography henceforth supplied all these. By reducing the importance of picture-painting as a trade, and surpassing it in realistic representation of detail, it drove the painter to take refuge more and more in theory, and in a series of intellectualized experiments in Art for Art’s sake. For the three centuries between Elizabeth and Victoria had been a period of transactions by writing, governed by a literate upper class who defended the language against fundamental changes in grammar or in the structure of existing words.
All through the Nineteenth Century, America, Africa, India, Australasia, and parts of EEurope, were being developed largely by British capital, and British shareholders were thus being enriched by the world’s movement towards industrialization. On the other hand, ‘shareholding’ meant leisure and freedom which was used by many of the later Victorians for the highest purposes of a great civilization. Fortunately, however, the increasing power and organization of the Trade Unions, at least in all the skilled trades, enabled the workmen to meet on more equal terms the managers of the companies who employed them. By the end of the Century, Trade Unionism was in most trades and in most regions of England a very powerful weapon of defence for workmen’s wages, on the whole wisely used.
The country houses and the country estates were less than ever supported by agricultural rents, which American imports had lowered and brought into arrear. The pleasures of the country house and the business of the estate system were now financed by money which the owner drew from industry or other investments, or from his income as ground landlord of more distant urban areas.
Fifty years later, a bewildering chaos of overlapping authorities still carried on the affairs of the five million inhabitants of the Capital in haphazard fashion. The Local Government Act of 1888 applied a remedy long overdue. It established the London Country Council, which has since governed London, all except the area of the ancient City, reserved as an historical monument under the Lord Mayor and Aldermen. This forward move in local government by London, hitherto so backward, was conducted by the Progressive party that got majority on the Council at one election after another. It called itself so as not to be completely identified with either the Liberal or the Labour party, but it had close affinities to both.
The new cities were too big to have individual unity or character, or even to be seen by the eye as Athena, Rome, Perugia, Nuremberg, Tudor London and a thousand other older cities had been seen and loved. And to make matters worse there had been practically no town planning of the Victorian cities. The new education and the new journalism were both the outcome of these surroundings and partook of their nature. The race bred under such conditions might retain many sturdy qualities of character, might even with better food and clothing improve in physique, might develop sharp wits and a brave, cheery, humorous attitude to life, but its imaginative powers must necessarily decline, and the stage is set for the gradual standardization of human personality. This measure abolished School Boards and gave the power to provide for Education, both Primary and Secondary, to the elected County Councils, and to certain large Borough Councils Such is our system today.
The aspect of position was fully appreciated at the two Jubilees of Queen Victoria (1987, 1897) when the pageant of distant and diverse island, all come to pay homage to the little lady in grey, was first fully displayed, with startling effect, in London streets. The ways of thought and habits of life in English towns and villages had been strongly influenced by overseas connections. In the Eighteenth Century tea and tobacco had become as much the national food as beef and beer. And ever since the Seventeenth Century the adventurous and the discontented had been going across the ocean, first to American colonies, then to the United State, to Canada, to Australia, and to South Africa. It is true that until the Nineteenth Century the emigrant usually parted for ever from the folk he left behind and, however he fared, little more was heard of him.
Victorian prosperity and Victoria civilization, alike in their grosser and then higher aspects, were due to a century’s immunity from great wars and from any serious national danger. No great country except English-speaking America has ever been so utterly civilian in thought and practice as Victorian England. On the whole supremacy in the oceans and along the shores of the world was used in the Nineteenth Century on the side of peace, goodwill and freedom. The carefree Victorians knew little about the spirit and inner workings the militarized continent, off which this green and happy isle was anchored.
To the Englishman, foreign affairs were a branch of Liberal and Conservative politics, tinged with emotion, a matter of taste, not a question of existence. In the Victorian era this attitude could be indulged without disaster. But when the reign and the Century came to an end, a tremendous revolution in all human affairs was imminent. And England would be the country most concerned of all, because she would lose half the benefit other insular position. And even in peacetime the new age of motor traction on the roads made a more rapid social and economic revolution in the first forty years of the Twentieth Century than railways and machinery had made before. Political society could not at once adjust its habits of thought to new conditions coming on with unexampled speed.
There are good points in this latest age. The process actually made in the forty years of the new Century, particularly in education and in social services, has perhaps been as much as can be expected of limited human wisdom. The material conditions of the working class in 1939 were much better than in the year Queen Victoria died.
