THE VILLAGE LABOURER
1760-1832
THE VILLAGE LABOURER
1760-1832
A Study in the Government of England
before the Reform Bill
BY
J. L. HAMMOND AND BARBARA HAMMOND
... The men who pay wages ought not to be the political masters of
those who earn them (because laws should be adapted to those who have
the heaviest stake in the country, for whom misgovernment means not
mortified pride or stinted luxury, but want and pain, and degradation
and risk to their own lives and to their children’s souls)....
LORD ACTON.
SECOND IMPRESSION
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON
NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA
1912
TO
GILBERT AND MARY MURRAY
PREFACE
Many histories have been written of the governing class that ruled
England with such absolute power during the last century of the old
régime. Those histories have shown how that class conducted war, how
it governed its colonies, how it behaved to the continental Powers,
how it managed the first critical chapters of our relations with
India, how it treated Ireland, how it developed the Parliamentary
system, how it saved Europe from Napoleon. One history has only been
sketched in outline: it is the history of the way in which this class
governed England. The writers of this book have here attempted to
describe the life of the poor during this period. It is their object
to show what was in fact happening to the working classes under a
government in which they had no share. They found, on searching through
the material for such a study, that the subject was too large for a
single book; they have accordingly confined themselves in this volume
to the treatment of the village poor, leaving the town worker for
separate treatment. It is necessary to mention this, for it helps to
explain certain omissions that may strike the reader. The growth and
direction of economic opinion, for example, are an important part of
any examination of this question, but the writers have been obliged
to reserve the consideration of that subject for their later volume,
to which it seems more appropriate. The writers have also found it
necessary to leave entirely on one side for the present the movement
for Parliamentary Reform which was alive throughout this period, and
very active, of course, during its later stages.
Two subjects are discussed fully in this volume, they believe, for the
first time. One is the actual method and procedure of Parliamentary
Enclosure; the other the labourers’ rising of 1830. More than one
important book has been written on enclosures during the last few
years, but nowhere can the student find a full analysis of the
procedure and stages by which the old village was destroyed. The rising
of 1830 has only been mentioned incidentally in general histories: it
has nowhere been treated as a definite demand for better conditions,
and its course, scope, significance, and punishment have received
little attention. The writers of this book have treated it fully, using
for that purpose the Home Office Papers lately made accessible to
students in the Record Office. They wish to express their gratitude to
Mr. Hubert Hall for his help and guidance in this part of their work.
The obligations of the writers to the important books published in
recent years on eighteenth-century local government are manifest, and
they are acknowledged in the text, but the writers desire to mention
specially their great debt to Mr. Hobson’s _Industrial System_, a work
that seems to them to throw a new and most illuminating light on the
economic significance of the history of the early years of the last
century.
Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Ponsonby and Miss M. K. Bradby have done the
writers the great service of reading the entire book and suggesting
many important improvements. Mr. and Mrs. C. R. Buxton, Mr. A. Clutton
Brock, Professor L. T. Hobhouse, and Mr. H. W. Massingham have given
them valuable help and advice on various parts of the work.
HAMPSTEAD, _August 1911_
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER, 1
Comparison between English and French Aristocracy--Control
of English Aristocracy over (1) Parliament; (2) Local
Government--The Justices--Family Settlements--Feudal Dues.
II. THE VILLAGE BEFORE ENCLOSURE, 26
The Common-field System--Classes in the Village--Motives
for Enclosure--Agricultural Considerations--Moral
Considerations--Extent of Parliamentary Enclosure.
III. ENCLOSURE (I), 43
Procedure in Parliament--Composition of Private Bill
Committees--Proportion of Consents required--Helplessness
of Small Men--Indifference of Parliament to Local
Opinion--Appointment and Powers of Enclosure
Commissioners--Story of Sedgmoor.
IV. ENCLOSURE (II), 71
Standing Orders--General Enclosure Bills--Consolidating Act of
1801--Popular Feeling against Enclosure--Proposals for Amending
Procedure--Arthur Young’s Protest--Story of Otmoor.
V. THE VILLAGE AFTER ENCLOSURE, 97
Effects of Enclosure on (1) Small Farmers; (2) Cottagers;
(3) Squatters--Expenses--Loss of Common Rights--Village
Officials--Changed Outlook of Labourer.
VI. THE LABOURER IN 1795, 106
Loss of Auxiliary Resources--Fuel--Gleaning--Rise in
Prices--Effect of Settlement Laws--Food Riots of 1795.
VII. THE REMEDIES OF 1795, 123
The Remedies proposed but not adopted: (1) _Change of
Diet_--Cheap Cereals--Soup; (2) _Minimum Wage_--Demand from
Norfolk Labourers--Whitbread’s Bills, 1795 and 1800; (3) _Poor
Law Reform_--Pitt’s Poor Law Bill---Amendments of Settlement
Laws; (4) _Allotments_--Success of Experiments--Hostility
of Farmers--The Remedy adopted: Speenhamland System of
supplementing Wages from Rates--Account of Speenhamland
Meeting--Scale of Relief drawn up.
VIII. AFTER SPEENHAMLAND, 166
Prosperity of Agriculture during French War--Labourers
not benefited--Heavy Taxation--Agricultural Depression at
Peace--Labourers’ Rising in 1816--Poor Law Legislation of
1818, 1819 to relieve Ratepayers, compared with Whitbread’s
Scheme in 1807--Salaried Overseers--Parish Carts--Drop in
Scale of Relief for Labourers after Waterloo--New Auxiliary
Resources--Poaching--Game Laws--Distress and Crime--Criminal
Justice--Transportation.
IX. THE ISOLATION OF THE POOR, 207
Attitude of Governing Class towards the Poor--An Ideal Poor
Woman--Gulf between Farmers and Labourers due to Large
Farms--Bailiffs--Lawyers and the Poor--The Church and the
Poor--Gloom of the Village.
X. THE VILLAGE IN 1830, 225
Poor Law Commission Report of 1834--Effects of Speenhamland
System: Degradation of Labourer; Demoralisation of Middle
Classes--Possible Success of Alternative Policies--Minimum
Wage--Cobbett’s Position.
XI. THE LAST LABOURERS’ REVOLT (I), 240
Rising in Kent--Threshing Machines--Sussex Rising: Brede--Spread
of Rising Westwards--Description of Outbreak in Hampshire,
Wiltshire, Berkshire--Alarm of Upper Classes--Melbourne’s
Circular--Repressive Measures--Archbishop’s Prayer.
XII. THE LAST LABOURERS’ REVOLT (II), 272
Special Commissions--Temper of Judges--Treatment of
Prisoners--Trials at Winchester, Salisbury, Dorchester,
Reading, Abingdon, Aylesbury--Cases of Arson--Position of Whig
Government--Trials of Carlile and Cobbett--Proposals for helping
Labourers--Lord King--Lord Suffield--Collapse of Proposals.
XIII. CONCLUSION, 325
INDEX, 405
CHAPTER I
THE CONCENTRATION OF POWER
‘Là l’aristocratie a pris pour elle les charges publiques les plus
lourdes afin qu’on lui permît de gouverner; ici elle a retenu
jusqu’à la fin l’immunité d’impôt pour se consoler d’avoir perdu le
gouvernement.’
De Tocqueville has set out in this antithesis the main argument that
runs through his analysis of the institutions of ancient France. In
England the aristocracy had power and no privileges: in France the
aristocracy had privileges and no power. The one condition produced,
as he read history, the blending of classes, a strong and vigorous
public spirit, the calm of liberty and order: the other a society
lacking vitality and leadership, classes estranged and isolated, a
concentration of power and responsibility that impoverished private
effort and initiative without creating public energy or public wealth.
De Tocqueville’s description of the actual state of France during
the eighteenth century has, of course, been disputed by later French
writers, and notably by Babeau. Their differences are important, but
for the moment we are concerned to note that in one particular they
are in complete agreement. Neither Babeau, nor any other historian,
has questioned the accuracy of De Tocqueville’s description of the
position of the French nobles, from the day when the great cardinals
crushed their conspiracies to the day when the Revolution destroyed
the monarchy, whose heart and pulse had almost ceased to beat. The
great scheme of unity and discipline in which Richelieu had stitched
together the discords of France left no place for aristocracy. From
that danger, at any rate, the French monarchy was safe. Other dangers
were to overwhelm it, for Richelieu, in giving to it its final form,
had secured it from the aggressions of nobles but not from the follies
of kings. _Tout marche, et le hasard corrige le hasard._ The soliloquy
of Don Carlos in _Hernani_ contains an element of truth and hope for
democracy which is wanting in all systems of personal government, where
the chances of recovery all depend on a single caprice. It was the
single caprice that Versailles represented. It was the single caprice
that destroyed Richelieu’s great creation. When Louis XIV. took to
piety and to Madame de Maintenon, he rescinded in one hour of fatal
zeal the religious settlement that had given her prosperity to France.
Her finance and her resources foundered in his hurricanes of temper and
of arrogance. Louis XV. was known in boyhood as ‘the beloved.’ When
he fell ill in the campaign of 1744 in Flanders, all France wept and
prayed for him. It would have been not less happy for him than it would
have been for Pompey if the intercessions of the world had died on
the breeze and never ascended to the ear of Heaven. When thirty years
later his scarred body passed to the royal peace of St. Denis, amid the
brutal jeers and jests of Paris, the history of the French monarchy
was the richer for a career as sensual and selfish and gross as that
of a Commodus, and the throne which Richelieu had placed absolute and
omnipotent above the tempests of faction and civil war had begun to
rock in the tempests of two sovereigns’ passions.
One half-hearted attempt had indeed been made to change the form and
character of the monarchy. When he became regent in 1715, Orleans
played with the ideas of St. Simon and substituted for the government
of secretaries a series of councils, on which the great nobles sat,
with a supreme Council of Regency. As a departure from the Versailles
system, the experiment at first excited enthusiasm, but it soon
perished of indifference. The bureaucrats, whom Orleans could not
afford to put on one side, quarrelled with the nobles: the nobles
found the business tedious and uninteresting: the public soon tired of
a scheme that left all the abuses untouched: and the regent, at the
best a lukewarm friend to his own innovation, had his mind poisoned
against it by the artful imagination of Dubois. One by one the councils
flickered out; the Council of the Regency itself disappeared in 1728,
and the monarchy fell back into its old ways and habits.
As at Versailles, so in France. If the noble had been reduced to a
trifling but expensive cypher at the Court, the position of seigneur
in the village was not very different. In the sixteenth century he
had been a little king. His relations with the peasants, with whom
his boyhood was often spent in the village school, were close and
not seldom affectionate. But though he was in many cases a gentle
ruler, a ruler he undoubtedly was, and royal ordinances had been found
necessary to curb his power. By the eighteenth century his situation
had been changed. There were survivals of feudal justice and feudal
administration that had escaped the searching eye of Richelieu, but
the seigneur had been pushed from the helm, and the government of the
village had passed into other hands. It was the middle-class intendant
and not the seigneur who was the master. The seigneur who still
resided was become a mere rent receiver, and the people called him the
‘_Hobereau_.’ But the seigneur rarely lived in the village, for the
Court, which had destroyed his local power, had drawn him to Paris to
keep him out of mischief, and when later the Court wished to change its
policy, the seigneur refused to change his habits. The new character of
the French nobility found its expression in its new homes. Just as the
tedious splendour of Versailles, built out of the lives and substance
of an exhausted nation, recorded the decadence and the isolation of the
French monarchy, so in the countryside the new palaces of the nobles
revealed the tastes and the life of a class that was allowed no duties
and forbidden no pleasures. The class that had once found its warlike
energy reflected in the castles of Chinon and Loches was now only at
home in the agreeable indolence of Azay le Rideau or the delicious
extravagance of Chenonceaux. The nobles, unable to feed their pride on
an authority no longer theirs, refused no stimulant to their vanity
and no sop to their avarice. Their powers had passed to the intendant;
their land was passing to the bourgeois or the peasant; but their
privileges increased. Distinctions of rank were sharper edged. It was
harder for a plebeian to become an officer under Louis XVI. than it
had been under Louis XIV., and the exemptions from taxation became a
more considerable and invidious privilege as the general burdens grew
steadily more oppressive. Nature had made the French nobleman less, but
circumstances made him more haughty than the English. Arthur Young,
accustomed to the bearing of English landlords, was struck by the
very distant condescension with which the French seigneur treated the
farmer. The seigneur was thus on the eve of the Revolution a privileged
member of the community, very jealous of his precedence, quarrelsome
about trifles, with none of the responsibilities of a ruler, and with
few of the obligations of a citizen. It was an unenviable and an
uninspiring position. It is not surprising that Fénelon, living in
the frivolous prison of Versailles, should have inspired the young
Duke of Burgundy with his dream of a governing aristocracy, or that
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse should have described the public-spirited
members of this class as caged lions, or that a nobleman of the fierce
energy of the Marquis de Mirabeau should have been driven to divide
his time between the public prosecution of his noisy and interminable
quarrels with his wife and his sons, and the composition of his feeling
treatise on _L’Ami des Hommes_.
For in the France whose king had no thought save for hunting, women
and morbid disease, there was endless energy and intellectual life.
France sparkled with ideas. The enthusiasms of the economists and
philosophers filled the minds of nobles who in England would have been
immersed in the practical duties of administration. The atmosphere of
social sensibility melted the dry language of official reports, and
the intendants themselves dropped a graceful tear over the miseries of
the peasants. Amid the decadence of the monarchy and the uncivilised
and untamed license of Louis XV., there flourished the emancipating
minds of Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot and Quesnai, as well as
Rousseau, the passion and the spirit of the Revolution. On the one
side is Versailles, abandoned to gross and shameless pleasures, on
the other a society pursuing here a warm light of reason and science
with a noble rage for progress and improvement, bewitched there by the
Nouvelle Héloïse and Clarissa, delighting in those storms of the senses
that were sweeping over France. The memoirs, the art, the literature
of the time are full of these worlds, ruled, one by philosophy and
illumination, the other by the gospel of sensibility and tender
feeling, the two mingling in a single atmosphere in such a salon as
that of Julie de Lespinasse, or in such a mind as that of Diderot.
A kind of public life tries, too, to break out of its prison in the
zealous, if somewhat mistaken exertions of agricultural societies and
benevolent landowners. But amid all this vitality and inspiration and
energy of mind and taste, the government and the fortunes of the race
depend ultimately on Versailles, who lives apart, her voluptuous sleep
undisturbed by the play of thought and hope and eager curiosity, wrapt
and isolated in her scarlet sins.
When Louis XVI. called to office Turgot, fresh from his reforms at
Limoges, it looked as if the intellect of France might be harnessed to
the monarchy. The philosophers believed that their radiant dreams were
about to come gloriously true. Richelieu had planned his system for an
energetic minister and a docile king; Turgot had not less energy than
Richelieu, and Turgot’s master was not more ambitious than Louis XIII.
But the new régime lasted less than two years, for Louis XVI., cowed by
courtiers and ruled by a queen who could not sacrifice her pleasures to
the peace of France, dismissed his minister, the hopes of the reformers
were destroyed, and France settled down to the unrolling of events.
The monarchy was almost dead. It went out in a splendid catastrophe,
but it was already spent and exhausted before the States-General were
summoned. This vast, centralised scheme was run down, exhausted by the
extravagance of the Court, unable to discharge its functions, causing
widespread misery by its portentous failure. The monarchy that the
Revolution destroyed was anarchy. Spenser talks in the _Faerie Queene_
of a little sucking-fish called the remora, which collects on the
bottom of a ship and slowly and invisibly, but surely, arrests its
progress. The last kings were like the remora, fastening themselves on
Richelieu’s creation and steadily and gradually depriving it of power
and life.
It was natural that De Tocqueville, surveying these two centuries of
national life, so full of mischief, misdirection and waste, seeing,
too, in the new régime the survival of many features that he condemned
in the old, should have traced all the calamities of France to the
absence of a ruling aristocracy. It was natural that in such a temper
and with such preoccupations he should have turned wistfully and not
critically to England, for if France was the State in which the nobles
had least power, England was the State in which they had most. The
Revolution of 1688 established Parliamentary Government. The manners
and the blunders of James II. had stripped the Crown of the power that
his predecessor had gained by his seductive and unscrupulous politics,
and when the great families settled with the sovereign of their
choice, their memories of James were too recent and vivid to allow
them to concede more than they could help to William. The Revolution
put the law of the land over the will of the sovereign: it abolished
his suspending and dispensing powers, and it obliged him to summon
Parliament every year. It set up a limited monarchy with Parliament
controlling the Crown. But though the Revolution gave England a
constitutional Parliamentary government, that government had no
homogeneous leadership, and it looked as if its effective force might
be dissipated in the chaos and confusion of ministries. In such a
situation one observer at least turned his eyes to France. There exists
in the British Museum a paper by Daniel Defoe, written apparently for
the guidance of Harley, who was Secretary of State in 1704. In this
paper Defoe dwelt on the evils of divided and dilatory government, and
sketched a scheme by which his patron might contrive to build up for
himself a position like that once enjoyed by Richelieu and Mazarin.
Defoe saw that the experiment meant a breach with English tradition,
but he does not seem to have seen, what was equally true, that success
was forbidden by the conditions of Parliamentary government and the
strength of the aristocracy. The scheme demanded among other things the
destruction of the new Cabinet system. As it happened, this mischievous
condition of heterogeneous administration, in which one minister
counterworked and counteracted another, came to an end in Defoe’s
lifetime, and it came to an end by the consolidation of the system
which he wished to see destroyed.
This was the work of Walpole, whose career, so uninviting to those who
ask for the sublime or the heroic in politics, for it is as unromantic
a story as can be desired of perseverance, and coarse method, and art
without grace, and fruits without flowers, is one of the capital facts
of English history. Walpole took advantage of the fortunate accident
that had placed on the throne a foreigner, who took no interest in
England and did not speak her language, and laid the foundations of
Cabinet government. Walpole saw that if Parliamentary supremacy was to
be a reality, it was essential that ministers should be collectively
responsible, and that they should severally recognise a common aim and
interest; otherwise, by choosing incompatible ministers, the king could
make himself stronger than the Cabinet and stronger than Parliament. It
is true that George III., disdaining the docility of his predecessors,
disputed later the Parliamentary supremacy which Walpole had thus
established, and disputed it by Walpole’s own methods of corruption
and intrigue. But George III., though he assailed the liberal ideas of
his time, and assailed them with an unhappy success, did not threaten
the power of the aristocracy. He wanted ministers to be eclectic and
incoherent, because he wanted them to obey him rather than Parliament,
but his impulse was mere love of authority and not any sense or feeling
for a State released from this monopoly of class. Self-willed without
originality, ambitious without imagination, he wanted to cut the knot
that tethered the Crown to the Cabinet, but he had neither the will
nor the power to put a knife in the system of aristocracy itself. He
wished to set back the clock, but only by half a century, to the days
when kings could play minister against minister, and party against
party, and not to the days of the more resolute and daring dreams of
the Stuart fancy. The large ideas of a sovereign like Henry of Navarre
were still further from his petty and dusty vision. He was so far
successful in his intrigues as to check and defeat the better mind of
his generation, but if he had won outright, England would have been
ruled less wisely indeed, but not less deliberately in the interests of
the governing families. Thus it comes that though his interventions are
an important and demoralising chapter in the history of the century,
they do not disturb or qualify the general progress of aristocratic
power.
In France there was no institution, central or local, in which the
aristocracy held power: in England there was no institution, central
or local, which the aristocracy did not control. This is clear from a
slight survey of Parliament and of local administration.
The extent to which this is true had probably not been generally
grasped before the publication of the studies of Messrs. Redlich and
Hirst, and Mr. and Mrs. Webb, on the history of local government or
the recent works of Dr. Slater and Professor Hasbach on the great
enclosures. Most persons were aware of the enormous power of the
aristocracy, but many did not know that that power was greater at the
end than at the beginning of the century. England was, in fact, less
like a democracy, and more remote from the promise of democracy when
the French Revolution broke out, than it had been when the governing
families and the governing Church, whose cautions and compromises and
restraint Burke solemnly commended to the impatient idealists of 1789,
settled their account with the Crown in the Revolution of 1688.
The corruptions that turned Parliamentary representation into the
web of picturesque paradoxes that fascinated Burke, were not new in
the eighteenth century. As soon as a seat in the House of Commons
came to be considered a prize, which was at least as early as the
beginning of the sixteenth century, the avarice and ambition of
powerful interests began to eat away the democratic simplicity of the
old English franchise. Thus, by the time of James I., England had
travelled far from the days when there was a uniform franchise, when
every householder who did watch and ward could vote at a Parliamentary
election, and when the practice of throwing the provision of the
Members’ wages upon the electorate discouraged the attempt to restrict
the franchise, and thereby increase the burden of the voters. Indeed,
when the Whig families took over the government of England, the case
for Parliamentary Reform was already pressing. It had been admitted by
sovereigns like Elizabeth and James I., and it had been temporarily
and partially achieved by Cromwell. But the monopolies which had been
created and the abuses which had been introduced had nothing to fear
from the great governing families, and the first acts of the Revolution
Parliament, so far from threatening them, tended to give them sanction
and permanence. Down to this time there had been a constant conflict
within the boroughs between those who had been excluded from the
franchise and the minorities, consisting of burgage-holders or corrupt
corporations or freemen, who had appropriated it. These conflicts,
which were carried to Parliament, were extinguished by two Acts, one
of 1696, the other of 1729, which declared that the last determination
in each case was final and irrevocable. No borough whose fate had been
so decided by a Parliamentary committee could ever hope to recover its
stolen franchise, and all these local reform movements settled down to
their undisturbed euthanasia. These Acts were modified by a later Act
of 1784, which allowed a determination to be disputed within twelve
months, but by that time 127 boroughs had already received their final
verdict: in the others, where the franchise was determined after 1784,
there was some revival of local agitation.
The boroughs that were represented in Parliament in the eighteenth
century have been classified by Mr. Porritt, in his learned work, in
four categories. They were (1) Scot and lot and potwalloper boroughs,
(2) Burgage boroughs, (3) Corporation boroughs, and (4) Freemen
boroughs.
The Scot and lot boroughs, of which there were 59, ranged from Gatton,
with 135 inhabitants, to Westminster and Northampton. On paper they
approached most nearly to the old conditions as to the franchise. A
uniform qualification of six months residence was established in 1786.
In other respects the qualifications in these boroughs varied. In some
the franchise depended on the payment of poor rate or church rate: in
others the only condition was that the voter had not been a charge on
the poor rate. The boroughs of the second of these classes were called
potwalloper, because the voter had to prove that he was an inhabitant
in the borough, had a family, and boiled a pot there. This potwalloper
franchise was a survival from the days when freemen took their meals
in public to prove that they did not depend on the table of a lord.
In the eighteenth century the potwalloper sometimes put his table in
the street to show that he had a vote. But these boroughs, in spite of
their wide franchise, fell under the control of the aristocracy almost
as completely as the others, for the reason that when the borough
itself developed, the Parliamentary borough stood still, and in many
cases the inhabitant householders who had the right to vote were the
inhabitants of a small and ancient area of the town. All that was
necessary in such circumstances in order to acquire the representation
of the borough, was to buy the larger part of the property within this
area. This was done, for example, at Aldborough and at Steyning.
The Burgage boroughs were 39. They were Parliamentary boroughs in which
the right to vote attached exclusively to the possession of burgage
properties. The burgage tenants were the owners of land, houses, shops
or gardens in certain ancient boroughs. The holders of these sites
were originally tenants who discharged their feudal obligations by a
money payment, corresponding to the freeholder in the country, who held
by soccage. They thus became the men of the township who met in the
churchyard or town hall. In many cases residence was unnecessary to the
enjoyment of the franchise. The only qualification was the possession
of title-deeds to particular parcels of land, or registration in the
records of a manor. These title-deeds were called ‘snatch papers,’ from
the celerity with which they were transferred at times of election.
The burgage property that enfranchised the elector of Old Sarum was
a ploughed field. Lord Radnor explained that at Downton he held 99
out of the 100 burgage tenures, and that one of the properties was in
the middle of a watercourse. At Richmond, pigeon-lofts and pig-styes
conferred the franchise. In some cases, on the other hand, residence
was required; at Haslemere, for example, Lord Lonsdale settled a colony
of Cumberland miners in order to satisfy this condition. Sometimes the
owner of a burgage property had to show that the house was occupied,
and one proof of this was the existence of a chimney. In all of these
boroughs the aristocracy and other controllers of boroughs worked
hard, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to restrict
the number of properties that carried the right to vote. The holder
of burgage property and the borough patron had a common interest in
these restrictions. The burgage boroughs provided a great many cases
for the decision of Parliamentary committees, and the borough owners
mortgaged their estates under the strain of litigation of this kind.
Parliamentary committees had to determine for example whether the
Widows’ Row at Petersfield really stood on the foundation of the house
which conferred the franchise in the reign of William III. The most
successful borough-monger was the patron who had contrived to exclude
first the non-burgage owners, and then the majority of the burgage
owners, thus reducing his expenses within the narrowest compass.
The Corporation boroughs, or boroughs in which the corporation had
acquired by custom the right to elect, independently of the burgesses,
were 43. In days when Parliamentary elections were frequent, the
inhabitants of many boroughs waived their right of election and
delegated it to the corporations. When seats in the House of Commons
became more valuable, the corporations were tenacious of this customary
monopoly, and frequently sought to have it established by charter.
These claims were contested in the seventeenth century, but without
much success, and the charters bestowed at this time restricted the
franchise to the corporations in order to prevent ‘popular tumult,
and to render the elections and other things and the public business
of the said borough into certainty and constant order.’ It is easy to
trace in these transactions, besides the rapacity of the corporations
themselves, the influence of the landed aristocracy who were already
beginning to finger these boroughs. There was, indeed, an interval
during which the popular attacks met with some success. When Eliot and
Hampden were on the Committee of Privileges, some towns, including
Warwick, Colchester, and Boston, regained their rights. But the
Restoration was fatal to the movement for open boroughs, and though it
was hoped that the Revolution, which had been in part provoked by the
tricks the Stuarts had played with the boroughs, would bring a more
favourable atmosphere, this expectation was defeated. All of these
boroughs fell under the rule of a patron, who bribed the members of
the corporation with money, with livings or clerkships in the state
departments, cadetships in the navy and in India. Croker complained
that he had further to dance with the wives and daughters of the
corporation at ‘tiresome and foolish’ balls. There was no disguise or
mistake about the position. The patron spoke not of ‘my constituents’
but of ‘my corporation.’ The inhabitants outside this little group
had no share at all in Parliamentary representation, and neither the
patron nor his nominee gave them a single thought. The members of the
corporation themselves were often non-resident, and the mayor sometimes
never went near the borough from the first day of his magistracy to the
last. His office was important, not because it made him responsible for
municipal government, but because it made him returning officer. He had
to manage the formalities of an election for his patron.
The Freemen boroughs, of which there were 62, represent in Mr.
Porritt’s opinion the extreme divergence from the old franchise.
In these boroughs restrictions of different kinds had crept in, a
common restriction being that in force at Carlisle, which limited
the franchise to the inhabitants who belonged to the trade guild.
For some time these restrictions, though they destroyed the ancient
significance of ‘freeman’ as a person to be distinguished from the
‘villein,’ did not really destroy the representative character of the
electorate. But these boroughs suffered like the others, and even more
than the others, from the demoralising effects of the appreciation
of the value of seats in Parliament, and as soon as votes commanded
money, the corporations had every inducement to keep down the number of
voters. In many boroughs there set in a further development that was
fatal to the elementary principles of representation: the practice of
selling the freedom of the borough to non-residents. There were three
classes of buyers: men who wanted to become patrons, men who wanted
to become members, and men who wanted to become voters. The making of
honorary freemen became a favourite process for securing the control
of a borough to the corporation or to a patron. Dunwich, which was a
wealthy and famous seaport in the time of Henry II., gradually crumbled
into the German Ocean, and in 1816 it was described by Oldfield
as consisting of forty-two houses and half a church. This little
borough contained in 1670 forty resident freemen, and in that year it
largessed its freedom on four hundred non-residents. The same methods
were applied at Carlisle, King’s Lynn, East Grinstead, Nottingham,
Liverpool, and in many other places. A particularly flagrant case
at Durham in 1762, when 215 freemen were made in order to turn an
election, after the issue of the writ, led to a petition which resulted
in the unseating of the member and the passing of an Act of Parliament
in the following year. This Act excluded from the franchise honorary
freemen who had been admitted within twelve months of the first day
of an election, but it did not touch the rights of ordinary freemen
admitted by the corporation. Consequently, when a Parliamentary
election was impending or proceeding, new freemen used to swarm into
the electorate whenever the corporation or the patron had need of
them. At Bristol in 1812 seventeen hundred and twenty freemen, and at
Maldon in 1826 a thousand freemen, were so admitted and enfranchised.
Generally speaking, corporations seem to have preferred the method of
exclusion to that of flooding the electorate with outside creations.
On the eve of the Reform Bill, there were six electors at Rye and
fourteen at Dunwich. At Launceston, early in the eighteenth century,
the members of the corporation systematically refused freedom to all
but members of their own party, and the same practices were adopted
at East Retford, Ludlow, Plympton, Hastings, and other places. Legal
remedies were generally out of reach of the excluded freemen. There
were some exceptions to the abuses which prevailed in most of these
boroughs, notably the case of the City of London. A special Act of
Parliament (1774) made it a condition of the enjoyment of the freemen’s
franchise there, that the freeman had not received alms, and that he
had been a freeman for twelve calendar months. But in most of these
boroughs, by the end of the eighteenth century, the electorate was
entirely under the influence of the corporations. Nor was the device of
withholding freedom from those qualified by custom, and of bestowing
it on those who were only qualified by subservience, the only resource
at the command of the borough-mongers. Charities were administered
in an electioneering spirit, and recalcitrant voters were sometimes
threatened with impressment.
Of the 513 members representing England and Wales in 1832, 415 sat for
cities and boroughs. Fifty members were returned by 24 cities, 332 by
166 English boroughs, 5 by single-member boroughs, 16 by the Cinque
Ports, and 12 by as many Welsh boroughs. The twelve Welsh counties
returned 12 members, and the forty English counties 82, the remaining 4
members being representatives of the Universities.
The county franchise had a much less chequered history than the
various franchises in boroughs. Before the reign of Henry VI., every
free inhabitant householder, freeholder or non-freeholder, could vote
at elections of Knights of the Shire. The Act of 1430 limited the
franchise to forty-shilling freeholders. Many controversies raged
round this definition, and by the eighteenth century, men were voting
in respect of annuities, rent-charges, the dowries of their wives and
pews in church. Mr. Porritt traces the faggot voter to the early days
of Charles I. Two changes were made in the county franchise between
1430 and 1832. The residential qualification disappears by 1620: in
1702 a tax-paying qualification was introduced under which a property
did not carry a vote unless it had been taxed for a year. In 1781 the
year was cut down to six months. Great difficulties and irregularities
occurred with regard to registration, and a Bill was passed into law in
1784 to establish a public system of registration. The Act, however,
was repealed in the next year, in consequence of the agitation against
the expense. The county franchise had a democratic appearance but
the county constituencies were very largely under territorial sway,
and by the middle of the fifteenth century Jack Cade had complained
of the pressure of the great families on their tenants. Fox declared
that down to 1780 one of the members for Yorkshire had always been
elected in Lord Rockingham’s dining-room, and from that time onwards
the representation of that county seems to have been a battle of bribes
between the Rockinghams, the Fitzwilliams and the Harewoods.
It is easy to see from this sketch of the manner in which the
Parliamentary franchise had been drawn into the hands of patrons and
corporations, that the aristocracy had supreme command of Parliament.
Control by patrons was growing steadily throughout the eighteenth
century. The Society of Friends of the People presented a petition to
the House of Commons in 1793, in which it was stated that 157 members
were sent to Parliament by 84 individuals, and 150 other members
were returned by the recommendation of 70 powerful individuals. The
relations of such members to their patrons were described by Fox in
1797, ‘When Gentlemen represent populous towns and cities, then it is
a disputed point whether they ought to obey their voice or follow the
dictates of their own conscience. But if they represent a noble lord or
a noble duke then it becomes no longer a question of doubt, and he is
not considered a man of honour who does not implicitly obey the orders
of a single constituent.’[1] The petition of the Society of Friends
of the People contained some interesting information as to the number
of electors in certain constituencies: 90 members were returned by 46
places, in none of which the number of voters exceeded 50, 37 ‘by 19
places in none of which the number of voters exceeds 100, and 52 by
26 in none of which the number of voters exceeded 200. Seventy-five
members were returned for 35 places in which it would be to trifle with
the patience of your Honourable House to mention any number of voters
at all,’ the elections at the places alluded to being notoriously a
matter of form.
If the qualifications of voters had changed, so had the qualifications
of members. A power that reposed on this basis would have seemed
reasonably complete, but the aristocracy took further measures to
consolidate its monopoly. In 1710 Parliament passed an Act, to which
it gave the prepossessing title ‘An Act for securing the freedom of
Parliament, by further qualifying the Members to sit in the House of
Commons,’ to exclude all persons who had not a certain estate of land,
worth in the case of knights of the shire, £500, and in the case of
burgesses, £300. This Act was often evaded by various devices, and
the most famous of the statesmen of the eighteenth century sat in
Parliament by means of fictitious qualifications, among others Pitt,
Burke, Fox and Sheridan. But the Act gave a tone to Parliament, and
it was not a dead letter.[2] It had, too, the effect of throwing the
ambitious merchant into the landlord class, and of enveloping him in
the landlord atmosphere. Selection and assimilation, as De Tocqueville
saw, and not exclusion, are the true means of preserving a class
monopoly of power. We might, indeed, sum up the contrast between the
English and French aristocracy by saying that the English aristocracy
understood the advantages of a scientific social frontier, whereas
the French were tenacious of a traditional frontier. More effectual
in practice than this imposition of a property qualification was the
growing practice of throwing on candidates the official expenses of
elections. During the eighteenth century these expenses grew rapidly,
and various Acts of Parliament, in particular that of 1745, fixed these
charges on candidates.
It followed naturally, from a system which made all municipal
government merely one aspect of Parliamentary electioneering, that the
English towns fell absolutely into the hands of corrupt oligarchies
and the patrons on whom they lived. The Tudor kings had conceived
the policy of extinguishing their independent life and energies by
committing their government to select bodies with power to perpetuate
themselves by co-opting new members. The English aristocracy found
in the boroughs--with the mass of inhabitants disinherited and all
government and power vested in a small body--a state of things not
less convenient and accommodating to the new masters of the machine
than it had been to the old. The English towns, which three centuries
earlier had enjoyed a brisk and vigorous public life, were now in a
state of stagnant misgovernment: as the century advanced, they only
sank deeper into the slough, and the Report of the Commission of 1835
showed that the number of inhabitants who were allowed any share in
public life or government was infinitesimal. In Plymouth, for example,
with a population of 75,000, the number of resident freemen was under
300: in Ipswich, with more than 20,000 inhabitants, there were 350
freemen of whom more than 100 were not rated, and some forty were
paupers. Municipal government throughout the century was a system not
of government but of property. It did not matter to the patron whether
Winchester or Colchester had any drains or constables: the patron
had to humour the corporation or the freemen, the corporation or the
freemen had to keep their bargain with the patron. The patron gave
the corporation money and other considerations: the corporation gave
the patron control over a seat in Parliament. Neither had to consider
the interests or the property of the mass of burgesses. Pitt so far
recognised the ownership of Parliamentary boroughs as property, that he
proposed in 1785 to compensate the patrons of the boroughs he wished to
disenfranchise. Every municipal office was regarded in the same spirit.
The endowments and the charities that belonged to the town belonged to
a small oligarchy which acknowledged no responsibility to the citizens
for its proceedings, and conducted its business in secret. The whole
system depended on the patron, who for his part represented the
absolute supremacy of the territorial aristocracy to which he belonged.
Civic life there was none.
If we turn to local government outside the towns there is the same
decay of self-government.
One way of describing the changes that came over English society after
the break-up of feudalism would be to say that as in France everything
drifted into the hands of the intendant, in England everything drifted
into the hands of the Justice of the Peace. This office, created in
the first year of Edward III., had grown during his reign to very
great importance and power. Originally the Justices of the Peace were
appointed by the state to carry out certain of its precepts, and
generally to keep the peace in the counties in which they served.
In their quarterly sittings they had the assistance of a jury, and
exercised a criminal jurisdiction concurrent with that which the king’s
judges exercised when on circuit. But from early days they developed
an administrative power which gradually drew to itself almost all the
functions and properties of government. Its quasi-judicial origin is
seen in the judicial form under which it conducted such business as
the supervision of roads and bridges. Delinquencies and deficiencies
were ‘presented’ to the magistrates in court. It became the habit,
very early in the history of the Justices of the Peace, to entrust to
them duties that were new, or duties to which existing authorities
were conspicuously inadequate. In the social convulsions that followed
the Black Death, it was the Justice of the Peace who was called in to
administer the elaborate legislation by which the capitalist classes
sought to cage the new ambitions of the labourer. Under the Elizabethan
Poor Law, it was the Justice of the Peace who appointed the parish
overseers and approved their poor rate, and it was the Justice of the
Peace who held in his hand the meshes of the law of Settlement. In
other words, the social order that emerged from mediæval feudalism
centred round the Justice of the Peace in England as conspicuously
as it centred round the bureaucracy in France. During the eighteenth
century, the power of the Justice of the Peace reached its zenith,
whilst his government acquired certain attributes that gave it a
special significance.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were still many
small men taking some part in the affairs of the village. The old
manorial civilisation was disappearing, but Mr. and Mrs. Webb have
shown that manor courts of one kind or another were far more numerous
and had far more to do at the beginning of the eighteenth century
than has been commonly supposed. Such records as survive, those,
_e.g._ of Godmanchester and Great Tew, prove that the conduct and
arrangement of the business of the common fields--and England was
still, at the beginning of this period, very largely a country of
common fields--required and received very full and careful attention.
Those courts crumble away as the common fields vanish, and with them
there disappears an institution in which, as Professor Vinogradoff has
shown, the small man counted and had recognised rights. By the time of
the Reform Bill, a manor court was more or less of a local curiosity.
The village vestries again, which represented another successor to the
manorial organisation, democratic in form, were losing their vitality
and functions, and coming more and more under the shadow of the
Justices of the Peace. Parochial government was declining throughout
the century, and though Professor Lowell in his recent book speaks of
village government as still democratic in 1832, few of those who have
examined the history of the vestry believe that much was left of its
democratic character. By the end of the eighteenth century, the entire
administration of county affairs, as well as the ultimate authority in
parish business, was in the hands of the Justice of the Peace, the High
Sheriff, and the Lord-Lieutenant.
The significance of this development was increased by the manner
in which the administration of the justices was conducted. The
transactions of business fell, as the century advanced, into fewer and
fewer hands, and became less and less public in form and method. The
great administrative court, Quarter Sessions, remained open as a court
of justice, but it ceased to conduct its county business in public.
Its procedure, too, was gradually transformed. Originally the court
received ‘presentments’ or complaints from many different sources--the
grand juries, the juries from the Hundreds, the liberties and the
boroughs, and from constable juries. The grand juries presented county
bridges, highways or gaols that needed repair: the Hundred juries
presented delinquencies in their divisions: constable juries presented
such minor anti-social practices as the keeping of pigs. Each of these
juries represented some area of public opinion. The Grand Jury, besides
giving its verdict on all these presentments, was in other ways a very
formidable body, and acted as a kind of consultative committee, and
perhaps as a finance committee. Now all this elaborate machinery was
simplified in the eighteenth century, and it was simplified by the
abandonment of all the quasi-democratic characteristics and methods.
Presentments by individual justices gradually superseded presentments
by juries. By 1835 the Hundred Jury and Jury of Constables had
disappeared: the Grand Jury had almost ceased to concern itself with
local government, and the administrative business of Quarter Sessions
was no longer discussed in open court.
Even more significant in some respects was the delegation of a great
part of county business, including the protection of footpaths, from
Quarter Sessions to Petty Sessions or to single justices out of
sessions. Magistrates could administer in this uncontrolled capacity a
drastic code for the punishment of vagrants and poachers without jury
or publicity. The single justice himself determined all questions of
law and of fact, and could please himself as to the evidence he chose
to hear. In 1822 the Duke of Buckingham tried and convicted a man of
coursing on his estate. The trial took place in the duke’s kitchen: the
witnesses were the duke’s keepers. The defendant was in this case not
a poacher, who was _fera naturæ_, but a farmer, who was in comparison
a person of substance and standing. The office of magistrate possessed
a special importance for the class that preserved game, and readers of
_Rob Roy_ will remember that Mr. Justice Inglewood had to swallow his
prejudices against the Hanoverian succession and take the oaths as a
Justice of the Peace, because the refusal of most of the Northumberland
magistrates, being Jacobites, to serve on the bench, had endangered
the strict administration of the Game Laws. We know from the novels of
Richardson and Fielding and Smollett how this power enveloped village
life. Richardson has no venom against the justices. In _Pamela_ he
merely records the fact that Mr. B. was a magistrate for two counties,
and that therefore it was hopeless for Pamela, whom he wished to
seduce, to elude his pursuit, even if she escaped from her duress in
his country house.
Fielding, who saw the servitude of the poor with less patience and
composure, wrote of country life with knowledge and experience.
In _Joseph Andrews_ he describes the young squire who forbids the
villagers to keep dogs, and kills any dog that he finds, and the lawyer
who assures Lady Booby that ‘the laws of the land are not so vulgar to
permit a mean fellow to contend with one of your ladyship’s fortune. We
have one sure card, which is to carry him before Justice Frolic, who
upon hearing your ladyship’s name, will commit him without any further
question.’ Mr. Justice Frolic was as good as his reputation, and at
the moment of their rescue Joseph and Fanny were on the point of being
sent to Bridewell on the charge of taking a twig from a hedge. Fielding
and Richardson wrote in the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1831
Denman, the Attorney-General in Grey’s Government, commented on the
difference between the punishments administered by judges at Assize and
those administered by justices at Quarter Sessions, in the defence of
their game preserves, observing that the contrast ‘had a very material
effect in confusing in the minds of the people the notions of right
and wrong.’ This territorial power was in fact absolute. In France the
peasant was in some cases shielded from the caprice of the seigneur by
the Crown, the Parlements and the intendants. Both Henry IV. and Louis
XIII. intervened to protect the communities in the possession of their
goods from the encroachments of seigneurs, while Louis XIV. published
an edict in 1667 restoring to the communities all the property they had
alienated since 1620. In England he was at the landlord’s mercy: he
stood unprotected beneath the canopy of this universal power.
Nor was the actual authority, administrative or judicial, of the
magistrates and their surveillance of the village the full measure of
their influence. They became, as Mr. and Mrs. Webb have shown, the
domestic legislature. The most striking example of their legislation
was the Berkshire Bread Act. In 1795 the Berkshire Court of Quarter
Sessions summoned justices and ‘several discreet persons’ to meet at
Speenhamland for the purpose of rating husbandry wages. This meeting
passed the famous resolution providing for the supplementing of wages
out of the rates, on a certain fixed scale, according to the price
of flour. The example of these seven clergymen and eleven squires
was quickly followed in other counties, and Quarter Sessions used to
have tables drawn up and printed, giving the justices’ scale, to be
issued by the Clerk of the Peace to every acting magistrate and to
the churchwardens and overseers of every parish. It was a handful of
magistrates in the different counties, acting on their own initiative,
without any direction from Parliament, that set loose this social
avalanche in England. Parliament, indeed, had developed the habit of
taking the opinion of the magistrates as conclusive on all social
questions, and whereas a modern elected local authority has to submit
to the control of a department subject to Parliament, in the eighteenth
century a non-elected local authority, not content with its own
unchecked authority, virtually controlled the decisions of Parliament
as well. The opposition of the magistrates to Whitbread’s Bill in 1807,
for example, was accepted as fatal and final.
Now if the Crown had been more powerful or had followed a different
policy, the Justices of the Peace, instead of developing into
autonomous local oligarchies, might have become its representatives.
When feudal rights disappeared with the Wars of the Roses, the
authority of the Justice of the Peace, an officer of the Crown,
superseded that of the local lord. Mr. Jenks[3] is therefore justified
in saying that ‘the governing caste in English country life since the
Reformation has not been a feudal but an official caste.’ But this
official caste is, so to speak, only another aspect of the feudal
caste, for though on paper the representatives of the central power,
the county magistrates were in practice, by the end of the eighteenth
century, simply the local squires putting into force their own ideas
and policy. Down to the Rebellion, the Privy Council expected judges
of assize to choose suitable persons for appointment as magistrates.
Magistrates were made and unmade until the reign of George I.,
according to the political prepossessions of governments. But by the
end of the eighteenth century the Lord Lieutenant’s recommendations
were virtually decisive for appointment, and dismissal from the bench
became unknown. Thus though the system of the magistracy, as Redlich
and Hirst pointed out, enabled the English constitution to rid itself
of feudalism a century earlier than the continent, it ultimately gave
back to the landlords in another form the power that they lost when
feudalism disappeared.
Another distinctive feature of the English magistracy contributed to
this result. The Justice of the Peace was unpaid. The statutes of
Edward III. and Richard II. prescribed wages at the handsome rate of
four shillings a day, but it seems to be clear, though the actual
practice of benches is not very easy to ascertain, that the wages in
the rare instances when they were claimed were spent on hospitality,
and did not go into the pockets of the individual justices. Lord Eldon
gave this as a reason for refusing to strike magistrates off the list
in cases of private misconduct. ‘As the magistrates gave their services
gratis they ought to be protected.’ When it was first proposed in 1785
to establish salaried police commissioners for Middlesex, many Whigs
drew a contrast between the magistrates who were under no particular
obligation to the executive power and the officials proposed to be
appointed who would receive salaries, and might be expected to take
their orders from the Government.
The aristocracy was thus paramount both in local government and in
Parliament. But to understand the full significance of its absolutism
we must notice two important social events--the introduction of family
settlements and the abolition of military tenures.
A class that wishes to preserve its special powers and privileges has
to discover some way of protecting its corporate interests from the
misdemeanours and follies of individual members. The great landlords
found such a device in the system of entail which gave to each
successive generation merely a life interest in the estates, and kept
the estates themselves as the permanent possession of the family. But
the lawyers managed to elude this device of the landowners by the
invention of sham law-suits, an arrangement by which a stranger brought
a claim for the estate against the limited owner in possession, and got
a judgment by his connivance. The stranger was in truth the agent of
the limited owner, who was converted by this procedure into an absolute
owner. The famous case known as Taltarums case in 1472, established
the validity of these lawsuits, and for the next two hundred years
‘Family Law’ no longer controlled the actions of the landowners and the
market for their estates. During this time Courts of Law and Parliament
set their faces against all attempts to reintroduce the system of
entails. As a consequence estates were sometimes melted down, and the
inheritances of ancient families passed into the possession of yeomen
and merchants. The landowners had never accepted their defeat. In
the reign of Elizabeth they tried to devise family settlements that
would answer their purpose as effectually as the old law of entail,
but they were foiled by the great judges, Popham and Coke. After the
Restoration, unhappily, conditions were more propitious. In the first
place, the risks of the Civil War had made it specially important
for rich men to save their estates from forfeiture by means of such
settlements, and in the second place the landowning class was now
all-powerful. Consequently the attempt which Coke had crushed now
succeeded, and rich families were enabled to tie up their wealth.[4]
Family settlements have ever since been a very important part of our
social system. The merchants who became landowners bought up the
estates of yeomen, whereas in eighteenth-century France it was the land
of noblemen that passed to the _nouveaux riches_.
The second point to be noticed in the history of this landlord class
is the abolition of the military tenures in 1660. The form and the
method of this abolition are both significant. The military dues were
the last remaining feudal liability of the landlords to the Crown. They
were money payments that had taken the place of old feudal services.
The landlords, who found them vexatious and capricious, had been trying
to get rid of them ever since the reign of James I. In 1660 they
succeeded, and the Restoration Parliament revived the Act of Cromwell’s
Parliament four years earlier which abolished military tenures. The
bargain which the landlords made with the Crown on this occasion was
ingenious and characteristic; it was something like the Concordat
between Francis I. and Leo X., which abolished the Pragmatic sanction
at the expense of the Gallican Church; for the landowners simply
transferred their liability to the general taxpayer. The Crown forgave
the landlords their dues in consideration of receiving a grant from the
taxation of the food of the nation. An Excise tax was the substitute.
Now the logical corollary of the abolition of the feudal dues that
vexed the large landowners would have been the abolition of the feudal
dues that vexed the small landowners. If the great landlords were no
longer to be subject to their dues in their relation to the Crown, why
should the small copyholder continue to owe feudal dues to the lord?
The injustice of abolishing the one set of liabilities and retaining
the other struck one observer very forcibly, and he was an observer
who knew something, unlike most of the governing class, from intimate
experience of the grievances of the small landowner under this feudal
survival. This was Francis North (1637-1685), the first Lord Guildford,
the famous lawyer and Lord Chancellor. North had begun his career by
acting as the steward of various manors, thinking that he would gain
an insight into human nature which would be of great value to him in
his practice at the bar. His experience in this capacity, as we know
from Roger North’s book _The Lives of the Norths_, disclosed to him an
aspect of feudalism which escaped the large landowners--the hardships
of their dependants. He used to describe the copyhold exactions, and
to say that in many cases that came under his notice small tenements
and pieces of land which had been in a poor family for generations were
swallowed up in the monstrous fines imposed on copyholders. He said he
had often found himself the executioner of the cruelty of the lords
and ladies of manors upon poor men, and he remarked the inconsistency
that left all these oppressions untouched in emancipating the large
landowners. Maine, in discussing this system, pointed out that these
signorial dues were of the kind that provoked the French Revolution.
There were two reasons why a state of things which produced a
revolution in France remained disregarded in England. One was that the
English copyholders were a much smaller class: the other that, as small
proprietors were disappearing in England, the English copyholder was
apt to contrast his position with the status of the landless labourer,
and to congratulate himself on the possession of a property, whereas
in France the copyholder contrasted his position with the status of
the freeholder and complained of his services. The copyholders were
thus not in a condition to raise a violent or dangerous discontent,
and their grievances were left unredressed. It is sometimes said that
England got rid of feudalism a century earlier than the continent. That
is true of the English State, but to understand the agrarian history of
the eighteenth century we must remember that, as it has been well said,
‘whereas the English State is less feudal, the English land law is more
feudal than that of any other country in Europe.’[5]
Lastly, the class that is armed with all these social and political
powers dominates the universities and the public schools. The story of
how the colleges changed from communities of poor men into societies of
rich men, and then gradually swallowed up the university, has been told
in the Reports of University Commissions. By the eighteenth century the
transformation was complete, and both the ancient universities were the
universities of the rich. There is a passage in Macaulay describing the
state and pomp of Oxford at the end of the seventeenth century, ‘when
her Chancellor, the venerable Duke of Ormonde, sat in his embroidered
mantle on his throne under the painted ceiling of the Sheldonian
theatre, surrounded by hundreds of graduates robed according to their
rank, while the noblest youths of England were solemnly presented to
him as candidates for academical honours.’ The university was a power,
not in the sense in which that could be said of a university like the
old university of Paris, whose learning could make popes tremble, but
in the sense that the university was part of the recognised machinery
of aristocracy. What was true of the universities was true of the
public schools. Education was the nursery not of a society, but of an
order; not of a state, but of a race of rulers.
Thus on every side this class is omnipotent. In Parliament with its
ludicrous representation, in the towns with their decayed government,
in the country, sleeping under the absolute rule of the Justice of
the Peace, there is no rival power. The Crown is for all purposes its
accomplice rather than its competitor. It controls the universities,
the Church, the law, and all the springs of life and discussion. Its
own influence is consolidated by the strong social discipline embodied
in the family settlements. Its supremacy is complete and unquestioned.
Whereas in France the fermentation of ideas was an intellectual revolt
against the governing system and all literature spoke treason, in
England the existing régime was accepted, we might say assumed, by
the world of letters and art, by the England that admired Reynolds
and Gibbon, or listened to Johnson and Goldsmith, or laughed with
Sheridan and Sterne. To the reason of France, the government under
which France lived was an expensive paradox: to the reason of England,
any other government than the government under which England lived was
unthinkable. Hence De Tocqueville saw only a homogeneous society, a
society revering its institutions in the spirit of Burke in contrast
with a society that mocked at its institutions in the spirit of
Voltaire.
‘You people of great families and hereditary trusts and fortunes,’
wrote Burke to the Duke of Richmond in 1772, ‘are not like such as I
am, who, whatever we may be by the rapidity of our growth and even
by the fruit we bear, flatter ourselves that, while we creep on the
ground, we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour,
yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our season, and
leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to
be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate
your benefits from generation to generation.’ We propose in this book
to examine the social history of England in the days when the great
oaks were in the fulness of their vigour and strength, and to see what
happened to some of the classes that found shelter in their shade.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] House of Commons, May 26, 1797, on Grey’s motion for Parliamentary
Reform.
[2] The only person who is known to have declined to sit on this
account is Southey.
[3] _Outline of English Local Government_, p. 152.
[4] A clear and concise account of these developments is given by Lord
Hobhouse, _Contemporary Review_, February and March 1886.
[5] Holdsworth’s _History of English Law_.