Literature and class: From the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution 9781526125828

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ANDREW HADFIELD

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Literature and class

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Literature and class From the Peasants’ Revolt to the French Revolution Andrew Hadfield

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Andrew Hadfield 2021 The right of Andrew Hadfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 2583 5  hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: A fifteenth-century depiction of the killing of Wat Tyler, leader of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. From Jean Froissart’s Chronicles (Bib. Nat. Fr. 2644, fol. 159v), fifteenth century. Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press Typeset by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

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For Maud Rosa May

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Contents

List of figures page viii List of tables ix Acknowledgements x Abbreviations xii Introduction: hidden in plain sight 1 Class in England from the late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century 2 Perceptions of class in the late Middle Ages 3 Class struggle in Renaissance literature 4 The Civil War and its aftermath 5 An increasingly commercial society, 1700–50 6 Gathering pace: towards the revolutions, 1750–98 Epilogue: Shelley in Ireland

1 31 80 117 162 203 242 284

Bibliography 287 Index 321

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List of figures

1.1. Nicholas Breton, The Court and the Country (1618), title page. 2.1. Quentin Massays’ ‘Ill-Matched Lovers’ (c.1520–25). 3.1. Arden of Faversham’s House, Faversham. Photo by Alison Hadfield. 3.2. Arden of Faversham (1592), title page. 3.3. John Taylor, The Sculler (1612).

page 55 97 128 132 143

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List of tables

1.1. English society at the end of the seventeenth century. page 58

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Acknowledgements

For reading and commenting on the whole book (and much else besides) my special thanks to Willy Maley. For reading sections my thanks to David J. Baker, Peter Boxall, Alex Davis, Matthew Dimmock, Pat Palmer and Neil Rhodes. For stimulating conversation, helpful observations, answering queries and recommended reading, my thanks to Richard Adelman, Jennifer Batt, Jill Burke, Lesley Carvello, Paul Davies, Alison Hadfield, Paul Hammond, Tim Hitchcock, John Mullan, Emma Newport, Sarah Prescott, Kirsty Rolfe, Jim Shapiro, Cathy Shrank, Naomi Tadmor, Elizabeth Upton, John Watts, Henry and Deborah Woudhuysen. I have wanted to write about literature and social class for many years, and I am glad I have finally managed to produce something. The book has gone through a number of possible forms, iterations, and guises, large and small, broad-brush and myopically focused. I hope I have written a book in a form and style that more or less works for some, possibly many, readers. Consideration of class has been a relatively marginal subject in English and literary studies for a long time now, despite the occasional complaints of scholars, and the wonderful work of literary critics such as David Aers, John Barrell, Sandy Byrne (whose book, Poetry and Class appeared just as I was finishing this one so is not as fully incorporated into the argument as it might have been), John Goodridge, Donna Landry, Neil Rhodes (and many others acknowledged in the text), and historians such as Patricia Crawford, Rodney Hilton, Anne Laurence, Sara Mendelson, Steve Rigby, Kevin Sharpe, Alex Shepard, E. P. Thompson, Andy Wood and Keith Wrightson. It will be obvious to many pioneering writers how much I owe to their work. I hope the book stimulates productive further debate, whatever its failings. A second volume covering material from the beginning of the nineteenth century should follow in due course. It has been a pleasure to work on this book with Matthew Frost at Manchester and I am only sorry that I have kept him waiting so long. Thanks also to David Appleyard, Paul Clarke and Caroline McPherson at Manchester, who saw the book through the press. Back in Hove Alison has

Acknowledgements xi

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had to put up with my ravings, meanderings and assertions about class for far too long. I am grateful to her for listening, responding and making suggestions, reminding me that I am right far less often than I imagine, as well as so much more. The book is dedicated to Maud Rosa May Hadfield, a wonderful daughter and star nurse.

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Abbreviations

AHR AJES BJS BLJ CH CI CL CLAJ CLS CR Ec.HR ECS ECTI EE EF EETS EHR ELH GH HJ HLQ HR HWJ ILS ISLE ISR JECS JEGP JEH JHE JHEc.T JHI JHS

The Agricultural History Review The American Journal of Economics and Sociology The British Journal of Sociology The British Library Journal Church History Critical Inquiry Comparative Literature College Language Association Journal Comparative Literature Studies The Chaucer Review The Economic History Review Eighteenth-Century Studies Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation Environmental Ecology Eighteenth-Century Fiction Early English Text Society English Historical Review English Literary History Garden History The Historical Journal The Huntington Library Quarterly The Hudson Review History Workshop Journal Interdisciplinary Literary Studies Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Irish Studies Review Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Journal of English and Germanic Philology Journal of Economic History Journal of the History of Education Journal of the History of Economic Thought Journal of the History of Ideas Journal of the History of Sexuality

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Abbreviations xiii JIE JIH JMH JMI JRMA JPE JSH KR L. & H. LC LRB N. & Q. NH NPG ODNB P. & P. PBA PCP PIMS PMLA PQ RES RoP RS SEL SH SiN SP Sp. St. SQ SSH SSL TEAMS TEC TP TRHS VLC WF WMQ YES YLJ

Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics Journal of Interdisciplinary History Journal of Medieval History Journal of the Motherhood Initiative Journal of the Royal Music Association Journal of Political Economy Journal of Sport History The Kenyon Review Literature and History Literature Compass London Review of Books Notes and Queries Northern History National Portrait Gallery Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Past and Present Proceedings of the British Academy Pacific Coast Philology Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies Publications of the Modern Language Association of America Philological Quarterly The Review of English Studies The Review of Politics Renaissance Studies Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 Social History Studies in the Novel Studies in Philology Spenser Studies Shakespeare Quarterly Social Science History Studies in Scottish Literature Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages The Eighteenth Century Textual Practice Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Victorian Literature and Culture Western Folklore William & Mary Quarterly Yearbook of English Studies Yale Law Journal

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Introduction: hidden in plain sight

‘literature can be made to yield the outlines of social history’ 1

Afternoon tea and social mobility As so many writers have recognized, the realities of class underpin our lives in superficial and profound ways. Class determines our material existence, our prospects, our horizons, how we relate to other people, our tastes, our manners, our feelings of well-being and anxiety and so much more. Our understanding of who we are is conceived in terms of our social status so that the fundamental aspects of our existence, ‘our bodily movement, speech and actions … are formed by class’.2 Such matters are all, of course, the stuff of literature: they lie behind its mode of production and are represented within specific texts.3 It is easier to state this truth than to provide a convincing analysis. As Gareth Stedman Jones has observed, ‘in England more than in any other country, the word “class” has acted as a congested point of intersection between many competing, overlapping or simply differing forms of discourse – political, economic, religious and cultural – right across the political spectrum.’ 4 ‘Class’ is both a political-economic structure and a language, hence the familiar paradox that an improvement in living standards as Britain became more industrialized could be perceived as a ‘catastrophic experience’ by most people.5 Two examples from relatively recent literary works will demonstrate the significance of this distinction. I will start with a significant, apparently trivial example. Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978) follows the protagonist, Charles Arrowby, a successful, philandering actor, director and playwright, who leaves London and buys a large house by the sea on the edge of an unnamed village. He intends to write his memoirs away from the bustle of his life in the metropolis, only to encounter his first love, Hartley. They had planned to marry but she had suddenly disappeared and now re-appears, unhappily married to a brutal man with a troubled son. Charles thinks that it is his duty to save

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her and, in doing so, recover the innocence of their first love. Towards the end of the novel, after her son, Titus, has drowned at Charles’ house (Charles had befriended him in order to get closer to Hartley), Hartley invites Charles round to tell him that she and her husband are emigrating to Australia to start a new life. Murdoch’s novel is full of symbolic material, much of it warning Charles that he cannot return to his past as easily as he thinks and that his selfappointed role as Hartley’s saviour is deluded and doomed to failure. One of the many things he fails to understand is the gulf in class that separates him from Hartley, a central reason why their early love would never have flourished and why his clumsy attempts to rekindle her affections cannot work. Despite his conscious affection for Hartley, Charles is repelled by what he sees as the shabby, mundane nature of her house and everyday existence. Confronted by a barking black and white collie, he is disgusted by the atmosphere: ‘The smell of roses, of which there were several vases even in the hall, mingled with the stuffy stench of the house, a sweetish sickly fussy interior smell like the smell of a very old woman’s room.’ 6 The repetition of ‘smell’ demonstrates not just how strongly this affects Charles, but how his senses overwhelm his intellect and his eloquence. He makes a snobbish and belittling connection between lower-middle class and old age, an observation that clearly does not reflect well on him and should serve as a serious warning sign that there can be no meaningful link with Hartley. The reader understands that Hartley has gone to a great deal of trouble, partly because, we infer, she is unused to having guests and wishes to please them and be understood to have behaved properly; and partly because she is afraid of Charles, a powerful man of higher social status, to whom she is about to give some unwelcome news. Accordingly, ‘An elaborate tea had been laid out on a little round table and on a plate stand. There was bread and butter, scones, jam, some kind of sandwiches and an iced cake.’ This afternoon tea (Charles has been invited round at four o’clock) clearly mimics one served in a café or department store, a meal that Hartley thinks of as a special treat but which Charles would never eat. Afternoon tea became popular in the late nineteenth century after the fashion of Anna Russell, Duchess of Bedford (1783–1857), who wanted a meal to bridge the gap between an early lunch and the later evening meal eaten after 8pm. English working-class families would eat their evening meal, often called tea, at around 6pm when they returned from work, so afternoon tea was a meal associated with privilege and aspiration.7 For a well-heeled metropolitan bohemian like Charles it is to be endured rather than enjoyed. Murdoch emphasizes Hartley’s social discomfort through her humorous speech patterns, designed to make Charles feel more comfortable, but which only serve to increase the tense atmosphere and distance between the two.

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Introduction: hidden in plain sight

3

‘Sit you down’, she tells Charles, summoning a familiar, jokey command, ‘I’ll wet the tea’, an Irish-English phrase and, so probably associated with the influx of Irish workers into Britain after the Second World War.8 The social awkwardness continues as she poses questions without waiting for an answer to assuage her anxiety: ‘You don’t mind milk in first? A sandwich? Or something with jam? The cake’s home-made but not in this home, I’m afraid!’ (p. 450). Pouring milk into tea is an activity replete with class significance, as George Orwell recognized.9 The tradition was that only the finest china cups could withstand the heat of boiling water so that the upper classes would pour the milk in last; pouring the milk in first was an indication that you were of lower social status.10 Hartley continues with her familiar habit, but apologizes because she feels that Charles will disapprove. She apologizes too for not having made a cake, while recognizing that shop-bought cakes are inferior and therefore has bought a home-made one. In making the nature of her purchase clear Hartley also lets Charles know that she has not baked him a cake, which would have been an act of hospitable friendship. The scene becomes more comic in its representation of English social awkwardness. Charles is discomforted when Hartley asks him to have another cucumber sandwich, a symbol of social aspiration, the cucumber having upper-class associations because only the rich had enough garden space and could afford the cold frames necessary to grow the vegetable, the cucumber sandwich becoming popular as part of the Victorian afternoon tea.11 However, Charles has not finished the one he has, and he accidentally crushes the new one ‘and some cucumber sped onto the floor’ (p. 452). He attempts to put the sandwich in his pocket and, almost as if to draw attention away from this insignificant faux pas, blurts out his condolences for the death of their adopted son, Titus (who Hartley’s husband, Ben, hates because he thinks he is Charles’), his intention only becoming clear to the reader at the end of his words: I said, ‘I am so sorry – I am so sorry – about –’ ‘About Titus,’ said Ben. ‘Yes. So are we.’ He paused, then added, ‘It was one of those things.’ ‘It was a tragedy,’ said Hartley. She spoke as if this was some sort of definitive description. I went on desperately. I wanted to drag us all down into some common pool of feeling. I wanted to stop this conventional machine of awful insincere politeness. But I could not find suitable words. I said, ‘I feel it was my fault – I can’t – I shall never –’ (p. 452).

This is a rich mixture of tragedy and comedy, its hybrid complexity signalled by Hartley’s description of Titus’s death as a ‘tragedy’; Charles wants there

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to be common feeling between them but his clumsy introduction of the subject is as much about his social discomfort as it is genuine sympathy for the bereaved couple. Ben, as his words suggest, is not especially concerned about Titus, having had little affection for the boy, and he has even less for Charles, retreating into an inappropriate cliché, as if death by drowning were a sad, but inevitably frequent occurrence. Hartley is genuinely affected by Titus’s death and her description of a young life needlessly cut short as a ‘tragedy’ is surely appropriate. Charles, however, through whose eyes we see this exchange, inwardly sneers at her use of the word, something that emphasizes the distance between the characters, demonstrating how hopelessly inappropriate is his desire to find common ground between them. There is a beautiful irony in a man who has made a successful career in the theatre being tone deaf not just to his insensitive snobbishness in appealing to the ‘correct’ use of a literary term, but also in his not recognizing conversation that could have appeared in a well-made play at the West End, ordinary words, pauses and hesitations carrying significant meaning.12 Charles wants there to be an authenticity – a familiar demand of the culturally entitled of the less privileged – but cannot see that he, as much as anyone, prevents genuine communication from taking place. As he leaves, Charles makes a desperate and feeble attempt to coerce Hartley into coming away with him but the novel ends with Ben and Hartley in Australia and Charles having returned to his former London life. The Sea, The Sea is not a novel about class, but it reveals throughout a keen eye for the existence of social barriers and how these contribute to human comedy, misunderstanding and misery. A novel that is much more centrally concerned with class is E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910). Forster’s epigraph was ‘Only Connect’, inviting the reader to wonder whether there had been meaningful connection between the sexes, the generations and the classes by the end of the work. Forster suffered from a complex understanding of his own social position as a homosexual upper-middle class intellectual, simultaneously part of and cut off from the establishment, an acknowledgement that circumscribed his writing.13 As his biographer, Wendy Moffat, has noted, Forster’s ‘attitude to his social inferiors was complicated. More than many men of his class, [he] saw how working-class people were slighted, treated as nearly invisible.’ 14 Forster’s concern was not simply to counteract prejudice and to make his readers aware of a more inclusive social reality than he thought they were used to encountering, but to show how their social being determines their consciousness far more potently than they realized. Howard’s End concerns the fate of three families: the intellectual, cultured Schlegels; the wealthy Wilcoxes, who have made their money through industry; and the Basts, a young working-class couple struggling to keep their heads

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Introduction: hidden in plain sight

5

above water on Leonard Bast’s clerk’s wages. The Wilcoxes and the Schlegels live close to each other in central London; the dying Ruth Wilcox befriends Margaret Schlegel and, on her deathbed, writes a note promising to leave her Howard’s End, her beloved farmhouse in Sussex. Her widower, Henry, destroys the note. Some years later, now betrothed to Margaret, he advises Leonard Bast – who has been befriended by Margaret’s sister, Helen – to leave his job in a bank and seek more gainful employment in insurance. The change of jobs is disastrous, and Leonard and Jacky fall into dire poverty. They are invited to Margaret and Henry’s wedding where Henry recognizes Jacky as his former mistress. Helen subsequently has an affair with Leonard and becomes pregnant. Margaret asks Henry to forgive her sister as she has forgiven him his past, but he refuses. The novel reaches its climax at Howard’s End where Charles Wilcox, Henry’s son, attacks Leonard who dies of heart failure. Charles is convicted of manslaughter; Margaret stands by Henry who rewrites his will to leave her Howard’s End, and, after her death, it will pass to his nephew, Helen and Leonard’s son. Whatever the problematic coincidences in the plot Forster’s analysis of class immediately before the First World War is never superficial. In conversation with her aunt, and obviously in part to shock someone from an older generation, Margaret asserts that she is planning to take some risks, while also acknowledging that for people with money, apparent risks are never really dangerous gambles: You and I and the Wilcoxes stand upon money as upon islands. It is so firm beneath our feet that we forget its very existence … we ought to remember, when we are tempted to criticize others, that we are standing on these islands, and that most of the others are down below the surface of the sea. The poor cannot always reach those whom they want to love, and they can hardly ever escape from those whom they love no longer … I’m tired of those rich people who pretend to be poor, and think it shows a nice mind to ignore the piles of money that keep their feet above the waves. I stand each year upon six hundred, and Helen upon the same, and Tibby will stand upon eight, and as fast as our pounds crumble away into the sea they are renewed … And all our thoughts are the thoughts of six-hundred-pounders, and all our speeches[.]15

This speech hovers over the subsequent action. Margaret is obviously right about the difference between rich and poor and the opportunities that money provides, and those taken away from people without an adequate supply of it. The novel also surely expresses significant anxiety about rich people pretending to be poor. Margaret herself secures her independence and obtains Howard’s End through marrying an extremely wealthy man and then is able to stand by him on a matter of principle (his suffering because his son is sent to prison) when it seemed as though she might have had to leave him because of his condemnation of her sister after Margaret

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had forgiven his shameful past. Such moral luck means that she never has to choose between poverty and her conscience. Helen takes a different path, but she also is saved from having to make a choice by Leonard Bast’s fortunately untimely death. Her son will inherent the house but he will never have had to endure the poverty that afflicted his father. Most significantly Margaret’s speech poses an uncomfortable question for the reader: are our thoughts determined by our social standing? Forster might even seem to be echoing one of Marx’s most famous pronouncements: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’ 16 Margaret speaks again in the final scene where the sisters are reunited, along with Paul and Charles’ wife, Dolly, Helen’s baby and Tom, a small boy who lives next door. Her speech brings a form of closure to the action, as she ranges outward from her sister and child to the family and on beyond humanity: Don’t fret yourself, Helen. Develop what you have; love your child. I do not love children. I am thankful to have none. I can play with their beauty and charm, but that is all – nothing real, not one scrap of what there ought to be. And others – others go further still, and move outside humanity altogether. A place, as well as a person, may catch the glow. Don’t you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences – eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow perhaps, but colour in the daily gray. Then I can’t have you worrying about Leonard. Don’t drag in the personal when it will not come. Forget him (p. 328).

Helen asks what Leonard has ‘got out of life’, to which Margaret replies ‘an adventure’. When asked if that is enough, she responds, ‘Not for us. But for him.’ The celebration of the different ways in which individuals can live their lives requires that they forget the tragic life and death of Leonard and concentrate on the rainbow colours that obliterate the grey. Margaret’s speech might be seen as a quasi-religious counterpoint to her earlier quasisocialist speech about money and class. Read one way her speech is generous and forgiving; read another way it is myopic and small-minded. Leonard’s posthumous son will be given the opportunities that he never had by wellmeaning people who were always sympathetic to him. But, on the other hand, Forster shows that the upper classes have appropriated a lower-class baby and will turn him into one of them. It is hard not to conclude that Margaret’s words, whatever their good intentions, are those that someone with a secure income who fears no risk would make in the circumstances, exactly as she noted earlier.

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Introduction: hidden in plain sight

7

Indeed, Foster’s most trenchant social criticism is centred on the fate of Leonard. Leonard, unlike the Schlegel sisters, is devoid of good fortune, and of luck. He desperately wants to improve himself, move up the social scale so that he and Jacky can have a more secure and comfortable life. But he also wants to become more cultured and intellectually sophisticated, like the Schlegel sisters who are at ease with difficult books, music and paintings. To this end he works to improve his written style, attempting to imitate a passage of Ruskin, the famous and elegantly written opening of chapter two of The Stones of Venice, describing the island of Torcello: Seven miles to the north of Venice, the banks of sand, which nearer the city rise little above low-water mark, attain by degrees a higher level, and knit themselves at last into fields of salt morass, raised here and there into shapeless mounds, and intercepted by narrow creeks of sea (cited on p. 61).17

Leonard understands that Ruskin is ‘the greatest master of English prose’ and wants to write as much like him as he can, but finds that his efforts are doomed to failure. He discovers there is an unbridgeable gap between his dark and stuffy flat and the beauty signalled by Ruskin’s evocative description of Venice (to which, of course, Leonard has never been). Leonard’s own, more restricted, imagination starts to intrude as he introduces one of the familiar, clichéd images of Venice into his response: And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodramatically of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard’s life. For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger are (p. 62).

Leonard moves swiftly from a belief in effort and hard work to faith in ‘sudden conversion’, at which point the narrator intrudes to comment that such notions are ‘peculiarly attractive to a half-baked mind’. The comment is deliberately harsh and jarring. Forster’s critique of the English class system and its relationship to the country’s educational institutions is even more pointed than Thomas Hardy’s representation of Jude Fawley’s harsh rejection by Christminster University. Jude was refused entry on the grounds of his class and told to stick to his profession; Leonard is provided with an aspirational goal that is doomed to inevitable failure.18 As a young man Forster had taught at the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street, London. The college had been established in the 1860s to ‘provide a university-style education for men of the working classes’, its courses ‘set to self-consciously mirror the most advanced curricula of the day: systematic study of controversial political subjects, great literature and art’.19 Ruskin had been a keen supporter, eager to promote his understanding

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of the dignity of manual labour and the need for there to be a more integral relationship between work and the creative processes.20 Yet, reading Ruskin makes Leonard despair. Instead of raising him up to think more creatively about his own labour and providing him with a more satisfying and inspiring way of living, his studies only serve to point out how dreary, drab and confined his existence has become and will inevitably be. Forster is pointing out the harsh reality of over-optimism, the cruel truth that in a rigidly class-structured society not everyone can enjoy the fruits of their labour. While Margaret is seen as a radical socialist by her aunt for pointing out that the leisured classes are able to think as they do because of the island of wealth that supports them, we now see Leonard thinking like a man on a wage that will barely support a young couple and which not only leaves little time for productive leisure but serves as a constant reminder of the futility of his hard work. Leonard believes himself superior to those who have been able to raise their social status because they have had a ‘bit of luck’ on the stock exchange, but he is forced to anticipate a dramatic shift of fortune that will also transform his cultural knowledge and status: He did believe in effort and in a steady preparation for the change that he desired. But of a heritage that may expand gradually he had no conception: he hoped to come to Culture suddenly, much as the Revivalist hopes to come to Jesus. Those Miss Schlegels had come to it; they had done the trick; their hands were upon the ropes, once and for all. And meanwhile his flat was dark as well as stuffy (pp. 62–3).

Leonard is placing his faith in an impossible goal, a sudden acquisition of a cultured education. He is not indulging in a risk so much as diminishing his happiness by taking on extra labour that reminds him how limited his prospects are and how dreary his surroundings. Reading Ruskin does not provide him with legitimate aspirations and the ability to see his work as a more creative force but a bitter resentment of the more privileged. For Leonard there is a stark reality: work can be interesting and fulfilling rather than dull, laborious and deadening. But not for him. Forster’s critique of the glass ceiling placed above Leonard points not just to the self-interest of the upper classes – even the most enlightened and empathetic. More radical still, perhaps, is the sad and moving analysis of Leonard himself. Leonard’s ideas are, indeed, ‘half-baked’. But, then, so are Margaret’s and Helen’s. Margaret is capable of acknowledging inconsistencies and hypocritical thinking by members of her class, but she marries a wealthy industrialist and, at the end of the novel, excludes Leonard from her vision of a hopeful future because thinking about him will make them unhappy and, she reasons, at least he has had an adventure (even though it killed

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Introduction: hidden in plain sight

9

him). Helen also sees the failings of her class and the brutal treatment of those beneath them, which is surely why she falls for Leonard and has a child with him. The novel’s ending is surely as bleak as it is hopeful. Helen and Leonard’s child will inherit Howard’s End, but he will be a member of the upper-middle classes and will think like someone on an island of six hundred pounds a year, not like his dead father.21 The beautiful prospect of the gathered families in the sunny garden looking out towards fields with the prospect of a magnificent crop of hay is not for the likes of Leonard. Leonard’s story may indeed be one that Forster designed as a response to that of Hardy’s Jude.22 Jude cannot succeed because too many obstacles are placed in his way. Leonard cannot succeed because he is not quite good enough. He has cultural aspirations but cannot reach them. If he had been born into another class, probably no one would have noticed and his limitations would not really have affected his life and prospects. Through the miserable story of Leonard Bast, Forster criticizes the meritocracy of the Edwardian education system.23 With limited places at university – only about 1% of students were working class – evening classes were all that most could hope for, and even the acquisition of culture from such labour was unlikely to transform the lives of many.24 Unless you had a significant income you were unlikely to benefit much from acquiring knowledge of literature, art and music. Most people from the lower classes who believed they could become cultured enough to rise up the social scale were doomed, like Leonard, to bitterness and failure. Forster has often been seen as a spokesperson for a rather elitist and intellectually homogenizing ‘liberal humanism’, remote from the nature of class experience, but Howard’s End is arguably as hard-hitting as any novel on class written in the first half of the twentieth century.25

The history of class struggle ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.’ 26 These words, surely the most famous about social class, open The Communist Manifesto (1848), the most influential work on class and class struggle in history.27 The Manifesto has shaped how people have imagined class, both those who have accepted its broad-brush outline of history, as well as those hostile to its analysis, and those who are bewildered and bored by, or indifferent to, the ideas of Marx and Engels. Subsequent analysis of class, even when sympathetic to Marx and Engels, has attempted to build on Marx’s rather sketchy notions of class structure, the vital question being whether such work undermines or detracts from the gnomic force of the original formulation.28

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The ending of the work is as famous as its beginning: ‘the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men [sic.] of all countries, unite!’ 29 As Aijaz Ahmad has argued, Marx had written thousands of pages before he was thirty and the Manifesto ‘distilled, in prose of great brevity and beauty, a wide range of themes – from history, philosophy, political economy, philosophy of history, socialist theory, and much else besides – that had preoccupied him at much length’.30 Marx, largely following classical economists, represented history as a series of transformations, from a political economy based on slavery to a feudal mode of production, then, with the rise of industry, a bourgeois mode of production centred on profit rather than assumed inherent social relations. With the rise of capitalism comes the rise of globalism: ‘And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.’ 31 The phrase ‘world literature’ is pivotal: Marx, as is well-known, was both influenced by his wide reading in world literature, and, in turn, his conceptions of society, revolution and class depend on his literary sensibility and imaginative engagement with literary texts.32 It is surely no surprise, therefore, that notions of class, class distinctions and class consciousness are not only the stuff of much literature, but that thinking about class is intimately bound up with literary categories, structures and details. For Ernst Fischer, art and class society are inextricably related, the birth of art being ‘an expression of the beginnings of alienation’, mankind’s rupture with nature as a small number of the powerful exploited those in their power.33 We do not need to take Fischer’s narrative on trust to understand that the history of literature, therefore, is the history of class – perhaps even of class struggle. In order to make this apparently grand claim one has to make the case that an understanding of class, class identity and class consciousness existed before the advent of ‘modernity’ and modern industrial society, a history that is often disputed or dismissed. The word ‘class’ entered English – certainly as a widely used term – in the seventeenth century and many commentators have argued that what we understand by social class post-dates its usage.34 Peter Laslett’s influential book, The World We Have Lost (1965), for example, claimed that the division of society into classes was a direct result of industrialization, which swept away pre-industrial society based on the family and the local community.35 In some ways Laslett’s understanding of social change mirrors that of Marx, envisaging the world becoming ever more connected with the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. But the belief that society was more or less unified before ‘modernity’ is open to serious challenge. Laslett’s analysis, which often



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employs literary examples (Arnold Bennett, Defoe, George and Weedon Grossmith, Pepys, Shakespeare), stands as a counterpart to T. S. Eliot’s attack on the impoverishment of experience after the Industrial Revolution. In his essay on ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), Eliot argued that modern men and women could no longer experience the world in the ways that their ancestors had done because they had lost a unified, common sensibility. Writing about how he thought John Donne interacted with the world, Eliot argues that A thought to Donne was an experience: it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. We may express the differences by the following theory: The poets of the seventeenth century … possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience.36

Eliot’s words are not simply about how poets and poetry have changed after the advent of industrial society; they are an analysis of the consequences of the division of labour that had to happen for that transformation to occur and, therefore, implicitly a comment on social division and social class. Before the advent of ‘modernity’ people were socially united and shared a common experience so that the most articulate and sensitive of them, a poet like Donne, ‘could feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose’.37 Afterwards, even the best poets, like Tennyson and Browning, are unable to feel or write in the same way. Eliot’s historical narrative is also an inversion of that of Marx: while Marx sees the rise of capitalism and the division of labour connecting people through the creation of global links and the consequent advent of ‘world literature’, Eliot sees only separation and division so that even reading a high-brow philosopher such as Spinoza cannot build any bridges in the nature of experience. It is worth noting that Peter Laslett’s understanding of pre-modern society is remarkably similar to Eliot’s in terms of questions asked, analysis and – most significantly here – language. Laslett sees a society that had a hierarchy that was both inchoate and definite, a fundamental division between those who had power and those who did not: [T]he head of the poorest family was at least the head of something. The workers did not form a million outs facing a handful of ins. They were not in what we should call a mass situation. They could not be what we should call a class. For this, it has been claimed, if the expression can be used at all, was a one-class society.38

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Despite all the careful qualifications, Laslett argues that society was simple enough: a common experience of life, with a few governing who also shared the social horizons of those over whom they exercised power. There was a ‘graduated ladder from top to bottom of the social scale’, the ‘status system’, but this was really only significant for the ‘nobility and the gentry’.39 For the rest there was a shared sense of order and purpose: The plain Richard Hodgsons, Robert Boswells, Humphrey Eltons and John Burtons of the English villages, the labourers and husbandmen, the tailors, millers, drovers, watermen, masons, could become constables, parish clerks, churchwardens, ale-conners, even overseers of the poor. They had something of a public life, within the tiny boundaries of the village, and this might give them a minor consequence in the surrounding villages. If they happened to be technically qualified, they might even cast a vote at an election. But in none of these capacities did their opinion matter very much, even in the last. They brought no personal weight to the modest offices which they could hold. As individuals they had no instituted, recognized power over other individuals, always excepting once again those subsumed within their families.40

Laslett concentrates on the unified, collective social experience, one that connects members of society: ordinary people can exercise power at certain points but they still share the worldview of their fellow villagers. Eliot made a similar case that apparently diverse modes of thinking and experiencing the world were unified in pre-modern society, a sensibility that was later lost. Common to both is a view of society as a fundamentally homogenous entity, something accepted by virtually all its members. It is, of course, true that society changed dramatically with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and the transformation of the means and relations of production that this entailed. Keith Wrightson, like Peter Laslett, sees early modern English society as one dominated by local interests and not possessing the wider institutional and organizational means to foster ‘broader class consciousness’.41 Even so, he acknowledges that it was ‘perhaps a society which possessed an incipient class dimension in its distribution of wealth, productive relations and market situation, and in which antagonisms between social strata undoubtedly existed’.42 Undoubtedly the most fundamental problem that any social historian examining the evidence for this period faces is that most people were illiterate and so leave behind no obvious traces or clues about what they really thought of their position in society; how things might be changed for the better; or whether, indeed, they had any coherent thoughts on such subjects.43 Accordingly, it is surely helpful to think about class in terms of Marx’s comments on ‘small holding peasants’ in nineteenth-century France in a rather later work, one which, like The Communist Manifesto, is saturated with literary learning, style and references: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852).44 The

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peasants, according to Marx, ‘form a vast mass’, but their social conditions of heavy toil and isolation, as well as their lack of access to the media and printed word, mean that they are not able to enter into ‘manifold relations with one another’.45 Therefore, ‘They are … incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own name … They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.’ 46 The same is true of any largely illiterate group/class – and, it is worth pointing out, there has frequently been moral panic about the consequences of spreading literacy too widely and too rapidly, most notably after the Reformation.47 It is surely significant that the leaders of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 seem to have adopted names that were literary and literate, and also emblematic of the class they sought to represent: Jack Straw, Jakke Mylnere, Jakke Carter and Jakke Trewman. One chronicler even thought that one of the leaders of the revolt was called Piers Plowman, a sign of the close relationship between literature and class identity.48 Might this be an indication that Langland’s great poem was more widely read than is often assumed, perhaps as an oral work? Or that its radical message inspired the leaders of the revolt, even if they knew relatively little about its substance?49 This desire to speak for others, to represent them as a class, suggests that we might sometimes usefully think of class, following Benedict Anderson’s influential categorization of the nation, as an ‘imagined community’ – one that connects people who do not know each other and have no obvious link other than, here, their socio-economic position in society.50 For Anderson it is the growth of a print culture in the form of the mass circulation of newspapers that leads to the growth of nationalism, as people are able to start imagining connections to others who live in the same territory and share a common language.51 Anderson’s chronology has been widely criticized by many keen to point out that a number of apparently modern phenomena have a much longer history than is often assumed.52 The same might be said of class, especially if one thinks of class in terms of assumed and imagined links between people with shared interests, rather than solely in terms of structures of hierarchy and inequality (which is the point made by both Laslett and Wrightson). We should, therefore, be able to date class and class consciousness back beyond the Industrial Revolution, especially as writers such as Christopher Dyer have no difficulty in writing about the Middle Ages in terms of class analysis, real and ‘imagined’.53 It should not, therefore, be such a hard task to write a history of literature and class. Obviously, the changing nature of class relations and the relations of production needs to be acknowledged and analysed; the frame of frame of reference has to be defined and restricted; and a paradigmatic set of examples selected that will enable readers to range more widely themselves. Any study will face a number of daunting restrictions, but it is important

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to acknowledge that a history of literature and class is neither impossible, misguided nor confined to an analysis of post-industrial society.

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Identity and equality This book charts and analyses the relationship between conceptions and literary representations of social class in Britain from the late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century. The enterprise is fraught with intellectual pitfalls, problematic notions and potential dangers. Few people seriously deny that social and material existence influences peoples’ lives – and many argue that the one determines the other. Exactly what the relationship is, however, is the source of much debate.54 I hope the previous section has established that ideas of class are not exclusively modern and the term can be used to trace a longer history of social existence.55 Even so, the fundamental questions of the relationship between material existence and conceptions of class (class consciousness), and how changes in the nature and relationship of classes take place, remain. These will be more fully elaborated in Chapter 1, a historical survey of the idea and reality of class, c.1380–1798. My basic contention is that there is a symbiotic relationship between literature and class. Literary production depends on the material conditions of society as well as representing that society. Literary texts do not simply reflect a pre-existing social reality of class but influence and change our understanding of that reality – even when this representation is hidden or disguised.56 This book is principally concerned with the ways in which class is represented in literary texts between the end of the fourteenth century and the end of the eighteenth. There is an enormous wealth of material that has been overlooked, sidelined and misrepresented, as the case of a more modern work like Howard’s End would seem to demonstrate. Much writing on class has concentrated on the literature of the working class and the representation of the working class.57 My concern is to think more generally about classes, their complicated interaction, how people defined themselves and others in class terms, how authors of different classes imagined the class system they encountered and how such matters appeared in literary texts. Current discussions of equality and disadvantage, in academia as well as public life, have been especially successful at exposing issues of sexual, gender and racial prejudice. However, as commentators have noted, there is sometimes a tendency to concentrate on particular issues at the expense of seeing a larger picture.58 Nowhere is this problem more acute than in discussions of class. Matters have clearly gone seriously awry when terms

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such as the ‘white working class’ have become adopted in mainstream academic and political discourse and works are published that suggest that dividing groups up into such identity-driven categories is normal and helpful.59 To subdivide in this manner makes individual ‘identity’ the most significant category, taking peoples’ identities at face value and relegating larger social formations to a secondary importance. Identity politics can be exploited as a means of dividing and ruling, the ruling class trying to ‘buy the racial loyalty of poor whites’ rather than ‘eradicat[ing] their poverty’.60 Hence, ‘white’ and ‘class’ are equated as categories defining identity even though a more comprehensive analysis suggests that the latter is a more significant cause determining peoples’ lives than the former: ‘while ethnic, gender and cultural backgrounds are factors in explaining a person’s life prospects, it is the social class into which one is born that is still the most determinant’.61 It is therefore problematic – dangerous even – to refer to the ‘white working class’ as if this were a valuable tool of sociological analysis when the reality is that we need to think about class and race as factors that intersect, overlap and determine how larger groups of people can be defined. Starting with the notion of an ‘identity’ rather than finishing with one has the effect of limiting and distorting our understanding of both an individual and a collective sense of the self. As Owen Jones has pointed out in his trenchant and popular analysis, Chavs, the (white) working class are derided as ‘backward-looking, bigoted and obsessed with race’, in conflict with other members of the working class from different ethnic groups. The very use of the term ‘white working class’ is designed to encourage and foster racial conflict, that subdivision having become ‘another marginalized ethnic minority … [its] concerns … understood solely through the prism of race’.62 Akala argues in his hard-hitting book Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018), which analyses the inter-relationship between modes of discrimination and oppression in contemporary Britain, that a focus on reasons for the under-achievement of the ‘white’ working class is invariably racist. Articles in newspapers concentrate on this section of the population as if they need to be distinguished from other ethnic groups when the real truth is far more obvious: ‘the gap between white working-class boys and other ethnic groups in the same social class is far smaller than the gap between poor white boys and the white middle class’.63 This distortion of the truth leads to ‘the ludicrous assertion that the white working class are being neglected because they are white’, whereas it is because they are working class.64 When it suits those eager to prevent change race comes before class, which can be a means of disguising a much more uncomfortable social reality.

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In his anthology, Class, published over a quarter of a century ago, Patrick Joyce lamented the decline of studies that highlighted class as the primary factor in explaining social existence: Feminism has offered as great a challenge as any to the sovereignty of class in social theory, sociology, and history. Feminist theory – and feminist political practice – has offered a new subject for analysis, and new conceptions of identity for our understanding, in the shape of gender. More than simply offering a new category – either competing with or complementing the old ones, such as class – feminist theory has problematized the whole question of what identity is.65

The analysis is surely right, but also problematic, principally because the question of identity comes first. Older studies of class invariably ignored or sidelined women, as an adjunct to the serious issue of class analysis, a flaw that vitiates many of them and which clearly needed to be corrected.66 There is no reason why ‘class’ and ‘gender’ need to be competing as categories: they will only do so if the question of identity assumes precedence or if, as Joyce argues, factors such as race, gender, class, etc., complement each other as though they were stable entities that could be summoned to explain and/ or create that individual identity. It is not helpful to weigh up factors, as if they were fixed, pre-existing determinants, in order to work out exactly how an individual fits into a grid of identity formation – white working-class man; upper-class white woman; black middle-class man and so on. Rather, the point is to explore and analyse how such factors create complicated individuals within larger socio-economic systems and to ask how they influence and determine – or fail to influence and determine – their lives. That is what literature does, and why it is worth exploring when thinking about class. The complexities of the inter-relationship between gender and class in the early modern period (broadly that covered by the book) are highlighted by Anne Laurence, notably in her comments about political and public life in the early modern period. Women were … excluded from formal political processes. So … were most men: a woman who mixed with the political nation had much more opportunity to exercise influence, even though it was not formally recognized, than any man from the laboring or artisanal classes. But in many important ways the lives of the richest and most privileged women in early modern England more closely resembled those of the poorest and least privileged women than they resembled the lives of men.67

Other evidence can be provided to make this case. Indeed, upper-class women sometimes had worse lives than women further down the social scale. It was considered a sign of status and privilege to have wet nurses to feed infants, so these were employed by families rich enough to have them.68

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Unfortunately the effect was often to reduce the social horizons and shorten the lives of many upper-class women. Lactation serves as a contraception and if children are not breast-fed the mother is more likely to become pregnant. Women who breast-fed tended to have fewer children and often to live longer as they had a greater chance of overcoming the dangerous years of childbirth and getting past the menopause when their life expectancy was greater than their male counterparts. Upper-class women were often excluded from much social life and were transformed into baby-making machines as families sought to have more than an heir and a spare to secure their futures.69 As many studies have pointed out, the novel developed as a form often written by women for women, even though conventional histories minimized and excluded their contribution, distorting its literary history.70 Women did not just write ‘romances’, stories of ‘fabulous persons and things’, as the pioneering novelist Clara Reeve (1729–1807) rather dismissively termed them, but were interested in the conventions of ‘realism’ as the new genre of the novel was established as the dominant literary form.71 It is especially important that women’s thinking about class is not just included in this study but given some prominence, notably as it appears in Frances Burney’s ground-breaking novels, which include her fictionalized observations on the brutal nature of master–servant relations. As Roger Richardson has pointed out, a significant interest in life in the English country house has developed in Britain in the last few decades, fuelled by the growth of bodies such as the National Trust. This has led to the ‘heavy irony’ that ‘household servants in England, the unsung, frequently downtrodden workhorses of the past, are fast becoming a “fashionable” subject’.72 Burney’s representation of the appalling foot race between two elderly ladies in Evelina (1778) is a reminder that servants, especially women servants, were often either invisible to members of the upper classes or treated like possessions to be used as the owner desired (see below, pp. 253–6). It was not simply upper-class men who failed to see what women were doing. Mary Collier felt obliged to respond to the thresher-poet Stephen Duck’s description of women workers chattering and shirking while their male counterparts toiled hard in the fields in his celebrated The Thresher’s Labour (1736). Her The Woman’s Labour (1739) corrects his sexism, pointing out that as women were always responsible for domestic and family duties after their working day, they worked even harder than men (see below, pp. 226–31). While I hope that the book ranges sufficiently widely through subjects related to the history of class and its representation in literature, I have had to adopt certain boundaries and accept limitations if it is to be at all coherent and contained within a relatively short space. I have concentrated on Anglophone literature written by authors from the island of Britain and

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omitted Ireland, a necessary decision that can, however, be justified: the English language connects the writers who are included here and they share a fundamental social understanding. Ireland, while having certain social structures in common with parts of Britain – in particular the more rural areas of Wales and Scotland, as historians have acknowledged – is another country.73 I have also concentrated on imperial and colonial expansion only as they transformed Anglophone British society and its understanding of class, as represented in literature and culture. As Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate, the relationship between social class, imperial expansion and global economic exploitation was becoming more obvious to many writers in the eighteenth century and determining the lives of many within Britain and Ireland, transforming class structures. This work does include significant discussion of Scotland after the union of 1707, the relationship between Scotland and England and the impact of Scots’ writers on Anglophone culture – Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and Robert Burns in particular. Despite official attacks on the Welsh language, Welsh writers often wrote in Welsh before 1800 and I will deal with the vicious attempts to extirpate the Welsh language and the rise of Anglophone Welsh culture in the nineteenth century in a subsequent study.74 The relationship between England and Ireland is perhaps even more complicated, as Ireland was England’s first overseas colony.75 Marx famously argued that the English Revolution was shipwrecked in Ireland, as colonialism displaced class: The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland … Ireland came to grief because, in fact, from a revolutionary standpoint, the Irish were too far advanced for the English Church and King mob, while on the other hand the English reaction in England had its roots (as in Cromwell’s time) in the subjugation of Ireland.76

Marx’s enigmatic comments demonstrate that it is problematic to study a national culture or literature in isolation, especially when dealing with a subject such as class, determined by global forces that also create and shape the nations in question. The complicated and fraught relationship between classes in Britain and Ireland becomes much more obvious in the nineteenth century, especially in literary works, and so will also be dealt with in the subsequent study.77

Class in English/British history The book is largely an analysis of ways in which writers represented the voices of people from their own and other classes, a form of ventriloquism

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that has been central to the development of English literature.78 The opening chapter outlines the principal issues in the study of class and applies them to the history of England from the late Middle Ages to the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. The chapter shows how unstable English society was in the late fourteenth century. Ravaged by the Black Death, it was seriously under-resourced with pressures on both knights and peasants, as well as urban society, and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was the predictable result. The chapter shows how a series of revolts throughout the late Middle Ages enable us to understand the fractious nature of late medieval society in England, one in which class consciousness developed as both a reality and a concept. The chapter also revisits the vexed question of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, arguing that, while we cannot see an obvious transfer of power from one class to another – as older historians argued was often the case – we can observe social relations changing as the material conditions of existence alter. The move towards a more commercial and commercialized society was accelerated by the sale of monastic lands after the Reformation and subsequent technological developments enabled the development of agrarian capitalism. At the same time there was a significant growth in urban society, most pronounced in London, which precipitated further class conflict. Class distinctions were as often local as they were national. By the end of the eighteenth century, England was a country characterized by, in E. P. Thompson’s words, class struggle without class society – a reality acknowledged in numerous literary works. Daily life has always been structured in terms of class: therefore, if issues of class are ignored or disguised, literary history is accordingly distorted and impoverished. Chapter 2 examines issues of class, hierarchy and class consciousness in the late fourteenth century, principally through a study of three major works: William Langland’s Piers Plowman, in particular the relationship between this literary text and The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381; Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and its relationship to the genre of medieval estates satire as well as social reality; and John Gower’s Vox Clamantis. Piers Plowman emerges as an excoriating attack on the corruption of English society in the late fourteenth century, as principles of profit threaten to sweep away the last vestiges of society’s moral order. Langland celebrates the dignity of ordinary labour but concludes that a self-sufficient, functioning society cannot be achieved until a point in the distant future, if at all before the return of Christ. Instead the task of the dutiful Christian citizen must be to save souls not society. Chaucer has often been contrasted to Langland as a poet who sneered at the pretensions of social climbers. Through an analysis of The Miller’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale the chapter shows that, like Langland, the more urban-focused Chaucer also saw a society in disarray, falling prey

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to the forces of greed and commercialization. His satirical attacks are less concerned with individual classes than the failures of the collective whole. In contrast, Gower has no problem in blaming the rebellious peasants for England’s social ills and, accordingly, he dehumanizes them as ignorant beasts. Chapter 3 explores the issue of class relations in the Renaissance. There may not have been an obvious language for class relations and class consciousness, but Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum (written in the 1560s, published in 1583) has an elaborate taxonomy of social ranks from those born to govern down to those who cannot rule ‘and yet they be not altogether neglected’, which surely suggests that thinking of socio-economic groups which had common interests was not beyond the bounds of early modern thinkers. The classification of social strata was applied to literary texts by George Puttenham, indicating that class and literature were connected by contemporary literary theorists and that writers in Renaissance England certainly had the intellectual tools at their disposal to think about class. The chapter explores the economic prospects and social assumptions of a number of writers, most of whom came from the ‘middling sort’ (upper tradesmen, professional people), and many of whom felt themselves overeducated given their prospects, one reason why they gravitated towards writing. A number of plays are analysed, including Arden of Faversham, which explores the social changes inaugurated by the Reformation and the availability of cheap land; The Shoemaker’s Holiday, which examines fantasies about work and holiday; and Massinger’s A New Way To Pay Old Debts, a play that laments the destruction of stable social values and the rise of the unscrupulously wealthy under James I. I examine Edmund Spenser’s acute sense of class status in the Amoretti, where he urges ‘tradeful merchants’ to admire his wife rather than courtiers; Richard Barnfield’s representation of Lady Pecunia, an allegorical representation of wealth; and, in more detail, the career of John Taylor the water poet, a writer whose work expresses the anxieties of uncertain class status and who fashions himself as a someone outside social systems, able to speak truth to power. Chapter 4 covers the period from the Civil War/War of Three Kingdoms to the Restoration. In many ways this debate has been elided because once fashionable theories of class conflict with a forward-thrusting bourgeoisie replacing a backward-looking aristocracy have long been discredited and marginalized. Instead the conflict has been explored in terms of religion, the authority of the crown and parliament, local and national clashes. It is important that we explore the impact of the Civil War in terms of class conflict because of the varied and radical ideas that were generated, which either saw the war in terms of social strife, or, more frequently, saw it as an opportunity to eradicate such problems and establish a restore a more

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egalitarian order. The Levellers sought to establish new social and political principles that would facilitate equality. Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers railed against enclosure and the appropriation of the common land, as well as the pernicious effects of money, hoping and believing that their social experiments would inaugurate a return to the values that had been lost since the Norman Conquest. In many ways their Royalist opponents, Isaac Walton and Robert Herrick, shared the Diggers’ belief in the need for a common culture based on agrarian values. In contrast, urban radicals such as John Milton had a somewhat elastic representation of the ‘people’, one that elided thinking about class. John Bunyan, whose readable style did so much to establish a religious, class-based literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was another critic of the commercialization of society and the disappearance of common rights and land. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the writings of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, and Aphra Behn. While Rochester is relatively thoughtful about gender differences, he is blind to issues of class. Behn desires the equality of the sexes in her erotic poetry, but a re-establishment of a hierarchical social order in her novel, Oronooko, even though her work was later used as an anti-slavery tract. Chapter 5 surveys literature that represents class relations from 1700 to 1750. It begins with an analysis of Daniel Defoe’s A Tour Through The Whole Island of Great Britain and Moll Flanders. While Defoe’s geographical survey, despite an anxiety about imports undermining native industries in a period of free trade, sees a united England and Scotland after the Union of 1707 working together to increase the prosperity of its inhabitants, the novel explores the nature of class divisions in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies. Moll, desperate to escape from the drudgery of servitude, finds economic redemption in the American colonies, a place where the past is forgiven and entrepreneurial spirit is rewarded (a similar story is told in Colonel Jack). Hard work leads to Moll’s upward social mobility. In Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, a work that defined the scope and possibilities of the ‘marriage novel’, the union of the aspirational, virtuous Pamela and the rakish upper-class Mr B. functions to revivify what might otherwise be a moribund social order. The novel shows its middle-class readers that the aristocracy needs their virtues. In reality, such marriages were all too rare, making the novel as much a fantasy as Defoe’s stirring tale of redemption. For labouring-class poets such as Stephen Duck, whose example inspired the subsequent popularity of such writers, life was undeniably complicated, often hard. Duck’s rapid rise left him with anxieties and a sense of deracination that was exploited by his detractors. Mary Collier, who responded to Duck’s criticism of female indolence, explored the conflicted ways in

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which women labourers existed within communities of women, as well as agricultural workers. Like Duck, there is a genuine anger in her work, one that laments the lack of opportunities of the many who can never really recover from a lack of education. By 1750, the traditional rural ways of life were disappearing as farming became more mechanized and many who would once have been employed as agricultural labourers became domestic servants. The chapter concludes with a comparison and contrast of Henry Fielding’s novel, Tom Jones (1749), and Thomas Gray’s poem, Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1750). While Fielding’s narrator looks back with nostalgia to a rapidly disappearing way of life, Gray’s acknowledges its class-bound limitations. Chapter 6 studies the relationship between literature and class from the onset of the Agricultural Revolution in the middle of the eighteenth century to the impact of the French Revolution at its end. As earlier there were those who embraced change, like Adam Smith, who saw the benefits of the onset of the division of labour which could create hitherto unimaginable prosperity (although Smith did also realize that adopting such working practices would make labour unutterably dull for many, but it would probably be worthwhile if the benefits were spread around and people had more leisure time to enjoy). And those who saw a future characterized by alienation from nature and the destruction of stabile communities as people lost their humanity and ability to perform a wide variety of complicated and enjoyable tasks. While enthusiasts for ballads and the poems of the bardic Ossian looked to recover what they could of the past, the middle-class cult of sensibility, introduced by Henry MacKenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling and other works, created a culture that enabled readers to condemn what they witnessed without having to take action. Like MacKenzie’s protagonist, they could feel repelled by enclosure, and angry at the behaviour of officials in the occupied Indian sub-continent, from a safe distance. Frances Burney’s novels are more direct in their condemnation of the exploitation of servants and the ways in which a culture of politeness is deployed to disguise vicious class bullying, showing that attitudes seemed to be changing in the 1780s before the advent of events in France. George Crabbe and William Cowper demonstrate that other writers were also aware of the increasingly dangerous class divisions that were emerging in the 1780s. Robert Burns also developed his belief in a common humanity, writing in support of the American War of Independence against British occupation. Edmund Burke’s sophisticated attack on the values of the French Revolution led to a number of important responses that helped to create political ideas in the modern world. Burke argued that, far from creating liberty, equality

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and fraternity, the Revolution risked destroying more than social order in producing the dictatorship of a disgruntled section of the ruling class determined to have its revenge on its rivals. In response Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine argued that the upper class, that had duped the people for far too long, had to be removed in order for society to progress. The book concludes with brief readings of two major writers who initially embraced the principles of the Revolution. William Blake opposed Adam Smith’s belief in the division of labour through his integrated artistic practices, as well as condemning the horrific conditions to which children were exposed in late eighteenth-century London, deadening their imaginations and human potential. In the first edition (1798) of Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth (and Samuel Taylor Coleridge) produced poetry inspired by the ballad tradition that had been recovered throughout the eighteenth century, deliberately writing poetry that used ‘the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society’. In many ways this was a poetic revolution; in others, it was the culmination of a longstanding tradition as change had been coming for a long time.79

After all Common and recurring themes and questions will become apparent as the book progresses. Did literary works reflect the reality of class in society, or did they represent society as it might be, never could be, or should never be?80 Was Trotsky right to claim that art and literature lag behind politics, that ‘The political writing of a class hastens ahead on stilts, while its artistic creativity hobbles behind on crutches’?81 Can members of different classes understand each other? Or is there always bemusement, suspicion and hostility? How can a class be represented politically or in a literary work? To what extent are representatives from the lower classes adopted as tokens by those from higher classes, signs that class mobility does take place and the social order can be left as it is? Or are they figures whose lives point to real change? What dangers accompany the use of a language of ‘authenticity’ to describe working class writing; e.g., if a language can be learned and imitated, to what extent can it represent ‘authentic’ experience? How are classes determined, by primarily economic or social factors? How can someone change their class identity? Will ability, education and hard work suffice? Or is this impossible rather than just difficult? And, of course, we should ask how much class actually matters, as every now and again we are told that society has become more or less classless and that it distorts our understanding of the past as well as the present.82

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A sign of how long it can take to change class and to erase undesirable origins is provided in a well-known anecdote about upper-class identity from the early seventeenth century. In May 1621 in the House of Lords Robert Lord Spencer, first Baron Spencer of Wormleighton (1570–1627) delivered a long speech about English history. He was interrupted by the obviously bored Thomas Howard, 14th Earl of Arundel, who observed that times had indeed changed because ‘When these things were doing the noble Lord’s ancestors were keeping sheep.’ 83 Lord Spencer’s witty reply, ‘When my ancestors were keeping sheep the noble Lord’s ancestors were plotting treason’, illustrates the dangers of family life spent close to the crown, but its memorable nature also ensured that the uncertain social status of the Spencers was trumpeted abroad. The Spencers, to whom the poet, Edmund Spenser had connections through his marriage (and possibly via shared ancestors), had risen dramatically up the social scale through successful sheep farming on a grand scale in Northamptonshire, but they were still not really accepted as proper aristocrats.84 Some years earlier the family had followed many of their peers in employing a genealogist to provide evidence of their ancient ancestry and prove that they were descended from the Norman De Spencers who came to England with William the Conqueror, but the links were fabricated.85 The story does not end there. Many years later the Spencers were able to assume the bragging rights of ancient nobility. Lord Robert’s descendant, Lady Diana Spencer (1961–97), married the heir to throne, Prince Charles. The Windsor family, originally Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, acquired its current name in 1917 when it was changed to become more English (after Windsor Castle) owing to the anti-German sentiment that flourished in the First World War. The family’s occupation of the throne dates from 1902 with the accession of Edward VIII, son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, from whom the line is descended (although his family is a branch of the House of Wettin, which can be dated back to the Holy Roman Empire).86 George V (reigned 1917–36) was the first monarch of the Windsor dynasty. Sadly, the marriage foundered and a phone call between the Princess and James Gilbey, heir to the gin company and a second-hand car dealer, was illicitly recorded on 31 December 1989, the infamous ‘Squidgygate tape’. The Princess is heard complaining that she feels ‘very low’ and had burst into tears when she thinks of her service to the Royals: ‘Bloody hell, after all I’ve done for this fucking family.’ 87 Sneered at for being arrivistes in the seventeenth century it would appear that the Spencers could now look down on the Windsors as a family with a less secure noble lineage than they possessed. Such aristocratic spats are not devoid of significance, certainly for those involved: but to many others outside these narrow social circles they appear to be little more than rearranging the furniture in a game of musical



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chairs. The period covered in this book demonstrates that most groups of people experienced a series of scarcely imaginable social transformations; however, for a small number, pride and honour apart, things may have remained more or less the same.88

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Notes 1 René Wellek and Austen Warren, The Theory of Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 103. 2 Beverley Skeggs, ‘Feeling Class: Affect and Culture in the Making of Class Relations’, in George Ritzer, ed., The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 269–86, at p. 270. 3 For one analysis of the objective reality of class, see Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London: Verso, 1976). 4 Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 2. 5 E. P. Thompson cited in Zygmunt Bauman, Memories of Class: The Pre-history and After-life of Class (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 34. 6 Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea (London: Vintage, 1999), p. 450. 7 Vicky Straker, A History and Guide to the Great Edwardian Tradition (Stroud: Amberley, 2015), p. 15. 8 Peter Hennessy, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 369–70. 9 ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, 4 vols, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 3, pp. 58–60. 10 Matthew Smith, ‘Should milk go in a cup of tea first or last?’ (https://yougov.co.uk/ topics/food/articles-reports/2018/07/30/should-milk-go-cup-tea-first-or-last) (accessed 29 September 2020). 11 Bee Wilson, The Sandwich: A Global History (London: Reaktion, 2010), pp. 42–3. 12 Susan Moffat, Twentieth-Century Drama Dialogue as Ordinary Talk: Speaking Between the Lines (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007), p. 81. 13 Max Saunders, ‘Forster’s Life and Life-Writing’, in Bradshaw, ed., Cambridge Companion to E. M. Forster, pp. 8–31, at pp. 13–14. 14 Wendy Moffat, E. M. Forster: A New Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 209. 15 E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 72. 16 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 425. 17 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, 3 vols (London, 1851–53), II, p. 11. 18 Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895), ed. Patricia Ingram (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 2.6.

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19 Moffat, Forster, p. 64. 20 Derrick Leon, Ruskin: The Great Victorian (London: Routledge, 1949), p. 230; Caroline Levine, ‘Visual Labour: Ruskin’s Radical Realism’, VLC 28 (2000), 73–86. 21 David Bradshaw, ‘Howard’s End’, in Bradshaw, ed., Cambridge Companion to Forster, pp. 151–72, at pp. 169–70. 22 Forster was an admirer of Hardy: Moffat, Forster, p. 83. 23 For a very different – to my mind erroneous – reading of Forster’s representation of Bast, see Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), ch. 12. For a trenchant recent critique of the increasing belief in meritocracies, see Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (London: Penguin, 2020). 24 Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 260. See also Gillian Sutherland, ‘Education’ in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 1, pp. 119–70, at pp. 154–8; David Cannadine, Class in Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 47–8. 25 See, for example, Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), p. 100; Tony Davies, Humanism (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 41–2. 26 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. A. J. P. Taylor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 79. 27 George Lichtheim, Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (London: Routledge, 1964), pp. 57–75; George Lichtheim, A Short History of Socialism (London: Fontana, 1975, rpt. of 1970), p. 247. 28 Alex Callinicos, ‘Class Struggle’, in Marcello Musto, ed., The Marx Revival: Key Concepts and New Critical Interpretations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 92–107, at pp. 103–4. 29 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 121. 30 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘The Communist Manifesto and “World Literature”’, Social Scientist 28 (2000), 3–30, p. 5. 31 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 84, cited in Ahmad, ‘Communist Manifesto’, p. 9. 32 The major study is S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). See also Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Literature and Art, ed. and trans. Anon (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976); Maynard Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (Brighton: Harvester, 1979). 33 Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art, trans. Anna Bostock (Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1963), p. 38. 34 Gary Day, Class (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 6. 35 Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965). Day also argues ‘Strictly speaking we cannot apply the term “class” to English society before the mid-seventeenth century’ (Class, p. 11). See also Bauman, Memories of Class, p. 5.

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36 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber, 1975), pp. 59–67, at p. 64. 37 Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, p. 64. 38 Laslett, World We Have Lost, p. 54. 39 Laslett, World We Have Lost, p. 40. 40 Laslett, World We Have Lost, p. 28. 41 Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 64. 42 Wrightson, English Society, p. 65. 43 David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); James Daybell, ‘Interpreting Letters and Reading Script: Evidence for Female Education and Literacy in Tudor England’, JHE 34 (2005), 695–715. 44 Edward W. Said, The World, The Text, and The Critic (London: Faber, 1982), pp. 121–5. 45 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, trans. Anon (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 105. 46 Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 106. 47 Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 13. 48 Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Methuen, 1977, rpt. of 1973), pp. 177–8. 49 David Aers, ‘Reading Piers Plowman: Literature, History and Criticism’, L. & H., 2nd Series, 1, 1 (Spring 1990), 4–23. 50 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). See also James Thompson, ‘After the Fall: Class and Political Language in Britain: 1780–1900’, HJ 39 (1996), 785–806, pp. 793–4. 51 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 61–2. 52 Alan V. Murray, Lesley Johnson and Simon Forde, eds, Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages (Leeds: Leeds Studies in English, 1995). 53 Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England, c.1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 16–26. See below pp. 32–3. 54 In particular, see Patrick Joyce, ed., Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); ‘Class’, in Raymond Williams, Keywords (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 60–9. 55 For different readings of the evidence, see the influential essay by Asa Briggs, ‘The Language of “Class” in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, in M. W. Finn and T. C. Smout, eds, Essays in Labour History (rev. edn, London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 43–71; and Stephen Wallech, ‘“Class Versus Rank”: The Transformation of Eighteenth-Century English Social Terms and Theories of Production’, JHI 47 (1986), 409–31, which argues that notions of class are bound to discussions of political economy in the second half of the eighteenth century. For arguments that class is a more ancient concept, see Peter W. Rose, Class in Archaic Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

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56 Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 376–90, passim; Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey, ‘On Literature as an Ideological Form’ (1974), reprinted in Terry Eagleton and Drew Mine, eds, Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), pp. 275–5; Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 85–90. 57 See, for example, the recent trilogy, Nicholas Coles and Paul Lauter, eds, A History of American Working-Class Literature; John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, eds, A History of British Working-Class Literature; and Michael Pierse, ed., A History of Irish Working-Class Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 58 For discussion, see Amy Guttman, ‘The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly of Identity Politics’, in Identity in Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 1–38; Cressida Heyes, ‘Identity Politics’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/) (accessed 29 September 2020); Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Sexual Dissidence, Cultural Materialism and Identity Politics Now’, TP 33 (2019), 705–13. 59 Justin Gest, The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Justin Gest, The White Working Class: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). 60 Akala, Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire (London: Two Roads, 2018), p. 63. 61 Gest, White Working Class, p. 16. See also Fiona Devine, Social Class in America and Britain (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), p. 14. 62 Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (London: Verso, 2011), p. 8. 63 Akala, Natives, p. 245. 64 Akala, Natives, p. 246. 65 Joyce, ed., Class, p. 5. See also Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 464 (‘However often today’s literary scholars repeat the mantra of race, class, and gender, they clearly have a problem with class’); Pamela Sharpe, ‘Introduction’, in Sharpe, ed., Women’s Work, pp. 1–17, at p. 5. 66 Studies in a variety of disciplines from the 1970s and 1980s often register the uneasy relationship between studies of class and gender: see, for example, Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 21–2, 93–5; Rosemary Crompton, ‘Class Theory and Gender’, BJS 40 (1989), 565–87. 67 Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500–1760: A Social History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994), p. 16. 68 The practice continued well into the nineteenth century, as is explored in George Moore’s novel, Esther Waters (1894). 69 Chris Wilson, ‘The Proximate Determinants of Marital Fertility in England, 1600–1799’, in Lloyd Bonfield, Richard M. Smith and Keith Wrightson, eds, The

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World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 203–30; Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, eds, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 154–5, 194–201. 70 Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999), p. 1; Nicholas Seager, The Rise of the Novel: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 89–108. 71 Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, pp. 1–2. 72 R. C. Richardson, Household Servants in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. viii. 73 See, for example, Hugh Kearney, The British Isles: A History of Four Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 156; R. V. Comerford, ‘Isaac Butt and the Home Rule Party, 1870–77’ in W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland: Vol. VI, Ireland Under the Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 1–25, at pp. 3, 6. 74 English was imposed as the official language of Wales in the Act of Union of 1536 but more sustained attacks on Welsh date from the nineteenth century, especially after the ‘treachery of the blue books’ (1847): Alan R. Thomas, ‘English in Wales’, in Robert Burchfield, ed., The English Language: Vol. 5, English in Britain and Overseas: Origins and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 94–147; Gwyneth Tyson Roberts, The Language of the Blue Books: The Perfect Instrument of Empire (Cardiff: The University of Wales Press, 1998). On the scarcity of a vibrant tradition of Welsh writing in English before the twentieth century, see Raymond Garlick, An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press: Cardiff, 1970). 75 John Patrick Montãno, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 76 Marx to Engels, 10 December 1869, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 284–5; Callinicos, ‘Class Struggle’, p. 102. I am grateful to Willy Maley for reminding me of these references. 77 See, for example, Pierse, ed., History of Irish Working-Class Writing. 78 For one history of the cultural implications of ventriloquism, much more wideranging and specific than this study, see Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 79 John Bugg, ‘Revolution’, in Andrew Bennett, ed., William Wordsworth in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 173–81. 80 For a related discussion see Laslett, World We Have Lost, pp. 84–8, on the age of Shakespeare’s Juliet and marriage. 81 Leon Trotsky, Class and Art, in Solomon, ed., Marxism and Art, p. 196. See also Dave Randall, Sound System: The Radical Power of Music (London: Pluto, 2017), p. 165–6. 82 Alwyn W. Turner, A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (London: Aurum, 2013); Devine, Social Class, pp. 1–15.

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83 Georgina Battiscombe, The Spencers of Althorp (London: Constable, 1984), p. 11. The earls of Arundel did have a more established pedigree than the Spencers and could date their peerage back to the Normans, their title having been established in 1138/9. 84 Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 19–22, 297. 85 J. Horace Round, Studies in Peerage and Family History (London: Constable, 1901), pp. 292–300. 86 Edward Tauerschmidt, Prince Albert’s Ancestry, a brief historical account of the Dukedom and Ducal House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (London, 1840). 87 ‘The Infamous “Squidgygate” Transcript’, www.geocities.ws/rickanddarvagossip/ diana_gilbey.html (accessed 29 September 2020). 88 See Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–14, 201; Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy (London: Radius, 1988).

Chapter 1

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Class in England from the late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century

After the catastrophic impact of the Black Death (c.1348–49, 1361–62), great strain was placed on the social fabric of England.1 Not all of it was bad, however (not quite). As John Hatcher comments: Just as the abundance of people prior to 1348 played a major part in reducing the standards of life of the peasantry and strengthening the power of landlords, so the progressive shortage of people in the ensuing era played a major part in undermining demesne agriculture [land retained by the feudal landlord] and in bringing about a fundamental redistribution of wealth.2

Before the advent of the plague, over-population led to the cultivation of unsuitable farming land, too many small, inefficient land holdings and widespread unemployment.3 Afterwards, serfdom and traditional principles of land tenure that disadvantaged peasant-tenants were eliminated in many areas and real wages grew to levels that were only exceeded in the nineteenth century.4 Some survivors were able to become relatively wealthy, inheriting the property of the deceased and having greater demand for their labour or produce, enabling a certain amount of conspicuous consumption, ostentation and social aspiration that was noted and condemned.5 The population was reduced by a third to a half, which led to the abandonment of many villages as local systems of agriculture collapsed.6 As far as can be calculated, population in Europe had reached the limit for an agrarian society in about 1300; England had a population of somewhere between 4 and 7 million which declined to about 2.5 to 3 million in 1400.7 However, if some people did gain, for most the reality was far more sobering and immiserating: ‘The fourteenth century witnessed considerable dislocation of both families and communities by reason of the tremendous mortality caused by disease and epidemic and the ensuing economic instability.’ 8 Traditional bonds between landlords and tenants could not be maintained as there were too few labourers to operate field systems and more skilled workers were over-stretched and in great demand. Furthermore, a feudal system of obligation, whereby a percentage of a crop was given to the

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landlord as rent, was mutating to a mixed economy based more on the exchange of money. As Paul Freedman has pointed out, the agrarian economy was much more complicated and diverse than was once envisaged and peasants did not simply work under a manorial system (although that system did dominate the economy), but often served a number of landlords (hence the need for a monetary economy); they held different amounts of land and, therefore, did not constitute a straightforwardly homogeneous social group.9 Classes higher up the social scale were also being squeezed by economic circumstances. The obligations of knighthood – especially military obligations – were proving ever more onerous in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. More land was being acquired by the church and estates were getting smaller as a result, which in a period of inflation meant that incomes of those who were ennobled were often inadequate for their needs. As Peter Coss has argued, ‘the knightly class was passing through a period of economic crisis, a crisis that was both extensive and prolonged’.10 The richer knights may well have done well out of straightened times and been economically empowered to buy even more land and so strengthen their position in society.11 But many of the less economically advantaged knights struggled and by the time of the late fourteenth century fulfilling traditional duties would have been a challenge, perhaps one reason why Chaucer’s knight fights so many battles for dubious causes.12 In the late fourteenth century the interests of landlords and peasants were at odds in a dangerously underresourced economy, making conflict likely, if not inevitable. If anything, ‘class war’ (Samuel K. Cohn’s phrase) was more pronounced in towns and cities, which were in any case closely integrated, economically and socially, with the countryside around them.13 Not all urban riots had a class dimension, and some were organized by court factions for their own ends. Most, however, did, making visible the class struggle that enveloped English towns and cities in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Disputes over wages, protests about working conditions, anger at the imprisonment of individuals and revolts against the crown or the papacy, were either triggered by, or triggered off, class conflict. Throughout Europe trade guilds protected the interests of their members, restricting access to the higher levels of their ranks to ‘the wealthy and privileged sons of existing masters … [blocking] the social advancement of anyone from the lower classes, aggravating existing inequalities’.14 Like rural life, inequalities in urban life ‘contributed to a state if discontent, which proved a favourable breeding ground for illicit “alliances” and the earliest social movements’.15 Social mobility was certainly not impossible, especially in the church where a man of relatively humble origin, such as Robert Grosseteste (c.1175–1253), reputedly from a villein family, was able to become Bishop of Lincoln.16 There was never an aristocratic monopoly on clerical preferment and ‘the

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English Church was relatively open to those with talents and who were lucky enough to find a patron at an early age’.17 Such examples, however, were the exception rather than the norm. In England tensions reached a height during the last months of the reign of Edward III in 1377, as the crown was about to be passed on to his grandson, Richard II, under the protection of John of Gaunt: ‘His crass alienation of the London population, corruption of the court, and the circumstances of weak and divided kingship set the stage for the most radical and widespread revolts in England during the Middle Ages, the so-called Peasants’ Revolt that reverberated throughout English cities and towns.’ 18 This perfect storm of inter-related factors led to the most dangerously radical event in the late Middle Ages: ‘perhaps for the first time in English social history, peasant protest against their lords now reached beyond single manors or single landlords to spread across county lines, uniting numerous villages in struggles against multiple lords’.19 A society weakened and made vulnerable by disease, population decline and dearth with intermittent bouts of famine was always likely to be destabilized by a specific crisis of real and imagined events, with class antagonisms foregrounded.20 The Peasants’ Revolt and the economic situation of the late fourteenth century serve as the backdrop to such literary works as Piers Plowman and The Canterbury Tales, as well as John Gower’s Vox Clamantis (1380s) (see Chapter 2), and it was ‘long remembered as an explosion of rustic fury against the landed classes’.21 In such crises the peasants, for all their differences, united as a class with a specific set of interests ‘framed in terms larger than local grievances’.22 The Peasants’ Revolt, therefore, although it was an urban uprising as well as a rural one, helped define the peasants as both a real and an ideal of a specific class with common interests and with a clear sense of grievance against the enemies who exploited them and lived off the fruits of their labour.23 The Revolt was probably the pivotal moment that defined how class was understood in the later Middle Ages. The effects of high taxation to support foreign campaigns ‘brought economic burdens … but in the long run it may have also served to widen the political consciousness of the peasantry’.24 The Revolt reflected ‘worries, complaints, and grievances experienced in rural England, on manors, in small towns, and by people not represented fully by the Commons in parliament’.25 In particular, the rebels complained about serfdom and villeinage, the practices whereby indentured peasants were effectively owned by landlords, and could be bought or sold.26 The Revolt began in June 1381 as a protest against taxation: as the peasants had ‘no voice in tax bargaining’ they fought back with other means.27 Royal commissioners in Essex and Kent were resisted as they

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sought to crack down on tax evasion.28 The violence quickly spread with legal documents seized and publicly burned, prisons over-run and prisoners freed, and the property of local officials destroyed. Labourers, artisans and peasants assumed control of local government infrastructure in opposition to landlords and royal authority. As soon as new areas learned of what was happening they joined in the rebellion, indicating the deeply held sense of class grievance. Representatives from Kent and Essex travelled to London to present a series of complaints and demands to the new king, styling themselves as the true defenders of the king replacing his false advisers. They demanded that the powers of landlords be controlled and that the Statute of Labourers (1351), which limited wages and the movement of the labour force, be rescinded.29 The rebels expressed particular hostility to bureaucrats, with the demand to ‘Kill all the lawyers!’, and asserted that the false laws of the realm be replaced by true justice.30 In Kent the famous but shadowy leaders Wat Tyler and John Ball had emerged and directed the Kentish arm of the rebellion.31 Thousands of peasants gathered on both sides of the Thames near London demanding to see the king to present their grievances and claims. After he had rowed down the river to meet the rebels on 12 June with some of his advisers, Richard thought better of the encounter and fled into the Tower of London. However, he did agree to meet the Essex faction on 14 June in Mile End where he appears to have partially defused the crisis by agreeing to many of the rebels’ demands – including the abolition of serfdom – and promising to act as their true king.32 The men of Kent led by Wat Tyler were not so easily pacified and they entered the city, where they freed prisoners, and stormed the Tower, where they seized and killed the Lord Chancellor and Bishop of London, Simon Sudbury, and the Lord Treasurer, Robert Hales, and other members of the king’s household. A day of destructive violence followed, much aimed at foreigners living in the capital. The king agreed to meet Tyler and the rebels near Smithfield (15 June) where Tyler demanded a further charter to protect the rights of the peasants. Perceiving his assumption of familiarity with the king to be insolent (Tyler greeted Richard as ‘brother’), royal servants reprimanded him and in an ensuing melee he was fatally stabbed by William Walworth, The Lord Mayor of London, and Ralph Standish, a royal squire. Richard again acted to defuse the situation, leading the crowd to Clerkenwell Fields, and it eventually dispersed.33 There had been a number of rebellions throughout England, most dangerously in East Anglia where the revolt was eventually suppressed by Henry Despenser (c.1341–1406), Bishop of Norwich. With its leader now dead the rebels fled and government troops were assembled to restore order. Over 1500 people were executed or killed, including the leaders, John Ball, Jack Straw and William Grindecobbe. Unrest continued for some years afterwards,

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peasants criticizing the greed of royal officials and clergy (as in Piers Plowman), and suffering the consequences as further executions followed. As one couplet put it, ‘The ax was sharpe, the stoke was harde, / In the xiiii. Yere of kyng Richarde’, an indication that the brutality of the authorities was remembered and resented.34 In the longer term, serfdom declined; the unpopular poll taxes were not raised again and the crown had to curtail its military campaigns in France. Government adopted a punitive language of harsh repression, while it was forced to make concessions. Richard II, according to the chronicler Thomas Walsingham, told a delegation of peasants in Essex that far from alleviating their grievances the rebellion would make their lives become harder: You wretches … detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were and rustics you are still. You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal. Choose now which course you want to follow.35

The reality was often less clear and even these stern words from the king failed to quell discontent in East England until supported by military might.36 There were a number of conspiracies in the next few years, with a plot in Norfolk to capture the Bishop of Norwich and other high-ranking officials (1382) and then one to murder the sheriff of Devon (1383), surely just the tip of an iceberg of discontent and class-based hostility.37 The leaders and participants, as has often been pointed out by historians, were not from the lowest and most oppressed ranks of the peasantry, but were from diverse social strata. Many were more affluent peasants; some were from the gentry; and many had urban backgrounds. Insisting on the importance of these varied backgrounds, aims and interests risks missing the significance of the revolt as an event that combined a massive range of social forces united by their discontent with what they regarded as the harsh and unsympathetic nature of government and a common cause. That this shared enterprise took the form of a belief in an agrarian economy of free peasantry is understandable as the manorial system was the dominant mode of economic production in England, something understood and resented.38 The Peasants Revolt, while not a rebellion undertaken solely by peasants, did establish the peasant, specifically the ploughman, as the symbol of political and economic virtue – an ideology that continued until at least the Civil War in the seventeenth century (one motive being, of course, to devalue the social significance of the rebels and to dismiss them as a bunch of uneducated peasants).39

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The peasants styled themselves the ‘true commons’, those who had the proper right to till the land, a belief that regularly resurfaced in English political thought, most powerfully in the ideas of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers (and it is surely a sign of the discontinuous, complex history of class and its language, the idea as well as the reality of class overlapping with other forms of social and economic reality, that the notion of the ‘commons’ continues from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century).40 The most radical expression of their shared ideals was articulated by the preacher John Ball in his famous sermon on Blackheath to the assembled rebels, as reported by the hostile chronicler Thomas Walsingham. Taking as his text the famous radical couplet ‘What Adam dalf, and Eve span, / Wo was thane a gentleman?’, according to Walsingham, Ball argued that as all were born equal before God, so should they remain throughout their lives, and that any contrary argument was a false imposition invented by selfish men for their own glory: From the beginning all men were created equal by nature, and that servitude had been introduced by the unjust and evil oppression of men, against the will of God, who, if it had pleased Him to create serfs, surely in the beginning of the world would have appointed who should be a serf and who a lord. Let them consider, therefore, that He had now appointed the time wherein, laying aside the yoke of long servitude, they might, if they wished, enjoy their liberty so long desired. Wherefore they must be prudent, hastening to act after the manner of a good husbandman, tilling his field, and uprooting the tares that are accustomed to destroy the grain; first killing the great lords of the realm, then slaying the lawyers, justices and jurors, and finally rooting out everyone they knew to be harmful to the community in future.41

God was on the side of the revolutionary peasants, determined to help them restore the true values of rural England and expunge the oppressive ruling class. Such claims were, hardly surprisingly, derided by their opponents, in particular Walsingham who regarded the revolt as a punishment from God for sins of the English: ‘For at that time they … considered that no name was more honourable than that of community, nor, according to their stupid estimation, were there to be any lords in the future, but only Kings and Commons.’ 42 Walsingham saw the world turned upside down: ‘Men who had once been serfs of the lowest sort went in and out like lords, and swineherds, who were not even the swineherds of the knights but of the peasants, laid down the law to knights.’ 43 The revolt demonstrates that both sides had an identical understanding of the social and political hierarchy in England. The supporters of the revolt wanted change so that a more egalitarian, horizontal class structure based



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on the notion of the ‘commons’ replaced the hierarchical structure in place; their opponents wanted to preserve the status quo as the best means of providing for the needs of the nation. For Walsingham the revolt was a nightmarish carnival, which has got badly out of hand: on the morrow, which was the very feast of Corpus Christi [Thursday 13 June], as they [the rebel leaders] went in and out of the city and began discussions with the ordinary common people of London about gaining their liberty and seizing the traitors, especially their pet hate the duke of Lancaster, they quickly and easily persuaded all the poorer people in the city to join in their conspiracy. And as the sun rose higher on that day and it grew warm and the rebels began drinking all the different wines that took their fancy out of the most expensive goblets, they became not so much drunk as mad (for the wealthier citizens and the common people had left all their cellars open for them) and began to have long talks with the simpler elements in the city about the traitors. Besides other schemes they encouraged each other to hurry to the Savoy, the house of the duke of Lancaster [John of Gaunt], in its beauty and grandeur the fairest house in the kingdom, and to set fire to it and burn it to the ground.44

The rebellion, according to Walsingham, is an aberration, a melange of causes and factors – celebration, charismatic and bullying leaders, discontent, poverty, class envy – combining to produce a dangerous explosion, one that will soon dissipate. For decades afterwards there seems to have been an anxious stand-off between governors and governed, the Revolt colouring political and class relations, and ‘What happened in Corpus Christi week finally spilled more ink than blood.’ 45 The peasants and their supporters had suffered an excessive tax burden and, being unable to represent themselves in political terms, had fought back in other ways, the literary representation of the rebellion perhaps exceeding the importance of the event itself – significant though that undoubtedly was. As Rodney Hilton argued some years ago, although there were many differences between the aims of ‘the late-medieval peasant movements, there was one prominent feature which they had in common: the emergence, among some of the participants, of a consciousness of class’.46 This particular form of class consciousness may have been limited and based on the construction of a common enemy, the nobility, but it structured social and literary thought well beyond the late fourteenth century. The Revolt may also have generated a tradition of political thought based on the notion of ‘commonality’, the union of all social strata below the nobility, something that might even be termed a ‘res plebia’. David Rollinson has claimed that ‘Usages of “commons” and “commonality” to denote the “third estate”, laboriaris, “those who work”, were central to political and constitutional discourse in England from the Commons Rebellion of 1381

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to the Civil Wars of the 1640s.’ 47 Far from being simply the preserve of an elite strata thinking about the lower orders, ideas of the ‘commonwealth’ were a central feature of a political discourse that served to define the ‘public sphere’, however elastic the term might have been at times.48 ‘Common’ certainly had class connotations but it could never be equated simply with a class-based representation of the people or the ‘lower orders’: ‘it evoked both the political community and an idea of the mass of the population’.49 However we read it, the existence of the term indicates that there was a vocabulary based on class divisions that could be used to articulate an understanding of how society functioned and how it could and should be structured. This discourse of ‘commonality’ or ‘commonwealth’ looked backwards as well as forwards and existed at a tangential relationship to reality. Between the late fourteenth and the sixteenth century English – and European – society changed out of all recognition, the transformation that (probably) should still be called the ‘transition from feudalism to capitalism’.50 The causal nature of this change is controversial and open for discussion, judgements differing over whether it took place because the ruling classes could no longer control those they exploited; the advent of a monetary economy which reduced the obligations of feudalism to an economic transaction and ultimately overwhelmed them; the growth of towns that fuelled a new social and economic order and so diluted the reliance on a stable rural economy; and whether, in the final analysis, it was push or pull factors that generated fundamental change. Probably, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, we should not think in terms of class revolution but of a transformation of the relations of production because ‘it might be closer to the truth to say that capitalism was advanced by the assertion of the landlords’ powers against the peasants’ claims to customary rights’.51 The relationship between classes changed; but one did not replace another. The ‘capitalist mode of production … is necessarily based on a division of classes’, as Eric Wolf pointed out, but that does not mean that class divisions were absent in pre-capitalist social formations.52 The feudal economy, as noted, was based on the manor, ‘the administrative organization through which lords collected rents’, and which provided the structure of medieval society which divided most people into landlords and peasants.53 The landlord did not simply own an area of land, however, but an institution that gave him a series of ‘legal and jurisdictional rights’ over his tenants, including the supervision of a manorial court.54 Feudal society was based on conspicuous consumption, with wealth concentrated in ‘the hands of a few, who were then expected not to hoard or save, but to redistribute the goods among their followers and supporters in acts of generous giving’.55 Such a consumption-based mode of production was



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inherently unstable and eventually would be overwhelmed by market forces as a desire for self-improvement became a reality: The medieval economy was complicated by the market. The wealthy aristocratic consumers put some of their wealth back into circulation by buying goods and services, so townsmen and rural craftsmen gained some indirect benefit from the riches of lords. The peasants did not forfeit all of their surplus income, and they too generated a demand for manufactures. The towns that had grown up initially to serve the needs of these rural consumers became sufficiently complex to generate an internal market, so that urban traders and craftsmen made much of their living by selling to their fellow townsmen. The commercial economy had to some extent developed a life of its own[.]56

Much of the story of fifteenth-century English social history is of the market for land, aspirational and wealthy families struggling to accumulate enough property to support future generations, often wearing themselves out on the process. As Helen Castor has pointed out in her study of the fortunes of the Paston family in East Anglia, ‘The increase in social mobility meant that, for every gentry family which died out or mismanaged its affairs, there was a wealthy newcomer – or, more likely, several wealthy newcomers – waiting to snap up its estates.’ 57 Powerful families enclosed land in order to protect and increase the size of their estates, swallowing up common pasturage in the period when ideas of commonality were becoming ever more stridently asserted.58 By the end of the fifteenth century a complicated combination of geographical, economic and social factors (‘law, custom and local power’) determined the nature of English society.59 English trade, in particular wool and cloth, developed significantly.60 Manufacturing might still have resembled a cottage industry, concentrated in villages and on a relatively small scale, but it was expanding and starting to influence the nature of English economy and society.61 An industrial working class was not yet a serious factor in the country’s social make up, but ‘The many thousands of out-working textile makers were a … significant germ of a future industrial proletariat[.]’ 62 Many towns had shrunk in the years after the Black Death, but by 1520 many were growing again and were back to the size they had been in the 1370s.63 Trade guilds developed in size and started to direct local commerce and crafts and industries – weaving, fishmongering, the cloth trade, etc. Towns had not changed significantly in terms of numbers nor in terms of their share of the overall size and structure of the population from the fourteenth century, but their importance was becoming clear by the end of Henry VIII’s reign and they pointed the way to future economic, civic and industrial development.64 The incorporation of towns in the sixteenth century – such as Great Yarmouth, the powerful centre of the herring trade – enabled

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them to establish their own practices and regulations, which led to an important sense of civic consciousness, establishing local elites with their own particular character.65 In towns wealth and social status were often more closely intertwined than they were in the country, and ‘urban social stratification’ was more visibly graded.66 Literature written in the fifteenth century, as often as not, was acutely conscious of the chaotic and intermittently destructive dynastic struggle that dominated English political society, later represented as ‘The Wars of the Roses’. The struggle was precipitated by the economic and political consequences of the Hundred Years War – a further influence on general feelings of hostility towards the ruling class – and understandably generated a nostalgia for more stable and secure times.67 In one of the most celebrated passages from Thomas Malory’s epic prose retelling of the Arthurian legends, the narrator pauses his narrative to lament the current state of England. At the start of the last book Mordred has taken over the kingdom while Arthur besieges Lancelot’s castle in northern France, forced to turn against his friend and most powerful ally when his affair with the queen is publicly revealed. At last, and despite losing the support of many of his subjects, Arthur returns to take back his kingdom from his usurping illegitimate son: Then came word to Sir Mordred that King Arthur had araised the siege for Sir Launcelot, and he was coming homeward with a great host, to be avenged upon Sir Mordred; wherefore Sir Mordred made write writs to all the barony of this land, and much people drew to him. For then was the common voice among them that with Arthur was none other life but war and strife, and with Sir Mordred was great joy and bliss. Thus was Sir Arthur depraved, and evil said of. And many there were that King Arthur had made up of nought, and given them lands, might not then say him a good word. Lo ye all Englishmen, see ye not what a mischief here was? For he that was the most king and knight of the world, and most loved the fellowship of noble knights, and by him they were all upholden, now might not these Englishmen hold them content with him. Lo thus was the old custom and usage of this land; and also men say that we of this land have not yet lost nor forgotten that custom and usage. Alas, this is a great default of us Englishmen, for there may no thing please us no term. And so fared the people at that time, they were better pleased with Sir Mordred than they were with King Arthur; and much people drew unto Sir Mordred, and said they would abide with him for better and for worse.68

In times of shifting and unstable allegiances when authority passed not only between different monarchs, Henry VI and Edward IV, but seemed at other times to be invested in a usurper, Richard, Duke of York, and a ‘kingmaker’, Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick (‘Warwick the Kingmaker’), the trust based on the vassalage, the feudal oath and the profession of loyalty must

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have seemed a distant but comforting prospect.69 What is also worth noting in Malory’s description is the anxious use of the term ‘commons’, the fear that the times will be so out of joint that the people will make a foolish judgement and act against their interests with almost one voice because they cannot see things as they really are. And, of course, they have a point: Arthur’s overseas conquests have de-stabilized society and, as a result, they will support a ruler who promises peace and plenty, whatever his claims to the throne. The narrator criticizes the English people for their fickleness, but also gives the reader the means to understand that their rulers, even much admired and ‘good’ rulers, are also seriously at fault. The ‘common voice’ may be mistaken in siding with Mordred, but is surely not unreasonable in wanting an end to civil war, and they decide to remain loyal to him, perhaps out of desperation. Unfortunately, their actions have the opposite effect to that intended, splitting the country and starting a new civil war. Le Morte D’Arthur probably dates from c.1469, while the author was in prison two years before his death, soon after the capture of Henry VI and probably during Richard Neville’s attempted coup against Edward IV, whom he had imprisoned.70 The English would indeed have seemed fickle and disloyal, failing to support the ruler – or rulers – who had made their fortunes, the commons torn apart and unsure who to support. The Wars of the Roses were not without revolts, most significantly Jack Cade’s Rebellion (1450). The Rebellion is most famously represented in Shakespeare’s King Henry VI, Part Two (c.1591), where it appears as a cynically manipulated uprising planned by Richard, Duke of York. York stirs up his former servant, Cade, to support his attempted coup d’état, unleashing the fury of the mob who plot spiteful revenge on their social superiors in a carnivalesque orgy of destruction.71 Shakespeare represents Cade’s Rebellion in terms of class ressentiment, a desire to destroy an old oppressive order but with little sense of what might replace it. Not surprisingly, the project peters out and becomes inherently self-interested and corrupt almost as soon as it has begun. Shakespeare imagines Cade’s rebellion in explicitly class terms: one of the rebels, George, states that ‘Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the commonwealth, and turn it, and set a new nap [cloth] upon it’, depicting England as a nation in need of new political clothes, which the rebels, as workers, are able to provide.72 The rebels are right to attack the nobility for failing to govern properly. George further comments that ‘the King’s Council are no good workmen’ (12–13), which is true but also a confused understanding of how societies should work with different sections, classes and strata performing different tasks. However, Cade’s hypocrisy and his true motive are later exposed when he falsely claims that he is the illegitimate son of Edmund Mortimer, fifth earl of March (1391–1425), who had a claim to the throne (the historical figure

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of Cade did take the name of Mortimer to claim an aristocratic heritage). In Shakespeare’s play Cade is shown to use his power as a populist demagogue to further his own ambitions to rule over both workers and nobles, a sign of the degeneration of England before the Tudors assumed the throne, all classes malfunctioning and at odds, precipitating Cade’s rise and fall. As John Watts has pointed out, ‘the real Jack Cade spoke the language and concerns of “all the comynealte of Ynglond”, and he was a far more formidable figure’.73 In Shakespeare’s play Cade’s rebellion is incited by Richard, Duke of York, to further the duke’s plot to seize the throne. The reality was somewhat different and there was no connection between the two, although the government, in assuming that threats to their authority were linked, seem to have believed Cade’s claims to be John Mortimer.74 The rebellion was inspired by resentment of the chaos and corruption of Henry VI’s regime and the behaviour of his hated courtiers, as represented in a number of contemporary poems (On the Popular discontent at the Disasters in France, A Warning to King Henry, On the Corruptions of the Times and others).75 The immediate trigger was the death of William de la Pole, first duke of Suffolk (1396–1450), killed while fleeing into exile in a ship off the coast of Kent, and the subsequent rumour that the king planned to take a terrible revenge on local people, turning Kent into a giant forest.76 Cade emerged as a leader early on, the rebels assembling on Blackheath where they were offered a royal pardon – and so dispersed. In the immediate aftermath some royal leaders were killed and several members of the gentry expressed sympathy for the rebels’ hostility to many in the king’s closest circle. The rebels returned to Blackheath and then moved towards London. Some unpopular figures were publicly executed, and the rebels entered London causing a great deal of destruction before being repelled by the capital’s inhabitants. The rebels presented a petition to representatives of the king and most took the pardon offered and returned to their homes. Cade was eventually tracked down and killed in Heathfield, Sussex. The rebellion again exposed the faultline between the ‘haves’ and ‘havenots’ and was perceived in terms of the ruling class (gentlemen, squires, gentry and above) and ordinary workers, with no particular perception of the ‘middling sort’. There were obvious parallels to events in 1381. Both rebellions were able to flourish in times of chaotic and weak government; both were about pernicious and unfair taxation; both targeted unpopular advisers of the king, while professing loyalty to him; and both were inspired and prolonged by charismatic leaders. The significant changes from The Peasants’ Revolt, which was frequently cited throughout the rebellion (again demonstrating the potent hold the event had on the public imagination), was that labour was not equated with the peasantry and the rising. Although

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agrarian in character, the rebellion was not cast as the prerogative of the dispossessed.77 Indeed, many of the rebels were inspired less by hunger and more by hostility to the incumbent monarch and his inability to rule, so that the aim of the revolt was political rather than economic reform.78 It is likely that many of the organizers of the rebellion were forty-shilling freeholders, ‘merchants, well-to-do artisans, and the up-and-coming yeomen who formed a group so characteristic of fifteenth-century Kentish society’; most of the participants were artisans and other workers.79 The ranks of the rebels may not have come from a homogenous class, but the sense of grievance reflected in the language of the petitions to the king suggests that the rising was directed by the lower strata of property owners, which enabled Cade to speak as their voice, that of the ‘commons’.80 In the petitions to the king – three versions of which, of uncertain date, survive – the petitioners refer to themselves as the ‘commons’, but it is not clear whether this means they regard themselves as a social or a political class. The opening item in one petition claims that ‘the kyng is steryd & mevyd to lyve only on his comyms & other men to have the revenues of the crown whyche harth causyd porete in his excellence & grete paiements of the peple nou late to the kyng grauntyd in his parlements’, the familiar complaint that the monarch is being abused by his advisers and exploiting the people without understanding the serious consequences of his actions.81 Another petition contains what looks like a challenge to the belief that the monarch could call parliament as an advisory body: ‘they seye the Kynge schuld lyve upon his Comyns, and that her bodyes and goodes ern his; the contrarie is trew, ffor than nedid hym nevur to set parlement and to aske good of hem’.82 The king needs to summon parliament in order to consult with the people, as without the proper use of this representative body to govern, the monarch has power without responsibility. The third petition speaks with the voice of the ‘true commons’, loyal to the king who will help him rule like a proper, royal king if only he removes his false, treacherous advisers. The true commons ‘deserith the welfare of oure soueraign lord the Kyng, and of all his trewe lordes spirituall and temporall, desiryng of our soueraigne lord and all his trewe counseill to take ageyn all his demaygnes, and he shall then raign lyke a Kyng Riall as he is born our trewe cristen Kyng anoynted. And who saith the contrary we woll all lyue and dye in that quarell.’ 83 Rebellions are useful barometers of the state of society because they reveal contemporary social conflict and often influence political thinking afterwards. The language used in Cade’s Rebellion indicates that political ideas may have shifted so that what was once imagined in terms of estates and an agrarian society was now seen as a conflict between rulers and commons. As John Watts has argued, ‘So broad and so deep was the failure

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of government that the authority of king and lords momentarily, but entirely, collapsed’, to be replaced by ‘the commons of England, both the people themselves and their soi-disant representatives in parliament’, and they dictated the political agenda for the next couple of years.84 Of course, it may be that the two rebellions were different in cause and participation, but, as was the case with the Peasants’ Revolt, the language generated by such conflict resonated long after the event itself had passed. Cade’s rebellion demonstrates the development and significance of the idea of the ‘commons’ to describe opposition to the ruling class. The notion of the ‘common people’ does not feature often in political poetry before the late fourteenth–early fifteenth century, an exception being the macaronic French-Latin poem, ‘Song Against the King’s Taxes’, written in the reign of Edward II, aimed against the heavy burden imposed to support the war with the Scots (which culminated in the disastrous defeat at Bannockburn in 1314): Ore court en Enletere de anno in annum Le quinzyme dener, pur fere sic commune dampnum. E fet avaler que soleyent sedre super scamum; E vendre fet commune gent vaccas, vas, et pannum.     Non placet ad summum quindenum sic dare nummum. [Now goes England from year to year – the fifteenth penny, to do thus a common harm. – And it makes them go down, who used to sit upon a bench – and it obliges the common people to sell both the cows, vessels, and others. – It does not please thus to pay the fifteenth to the last penny]85

The word ‘common’ is used more frequently in political terms in the fifteenth century, notably in ecclesiastical satires. Jack Upland, a ‘Wycliffite prose treatise against friars’ of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, attacks the mendicant religious order as enemies of the people.86 The author, undoubtedly following Piers Plowman, claims that ‘To the comoun peple hath Antcrist govun leve to leve her trewe laboure and bicome idil men ful of discetis to bigile eche othere’.87 The satire was answered by Friar Daw’s Reply, which claimed that the people, far from being misled, are happy to work for the church, as a body works for a person: For right as in thi bodi, Jake, ben ordeyned thin hondis, For thin heed, and for thi feet, and for thin eyen to wirken: Right so the comoun peple God hath disposed To laboren for Holi Chirche and lordshipis also.88

The body politic, when correctly nourished and ordered, represents a properly functioning society, a common image.89 Elsewhere, poets described England



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as a garden in disorder because it has not been properly cultivated, an abuse of the place where everyone lives, as in this political poem written c.1462–63, which appeals to King Edward IV to sort out the disasters of the civil wars: Wherfore I lykken England to a gardayne, Whiche that hathe ben overgrowen many yere With wedys, whiche must be mowen doune playne, And than schul the pleasant swete herbes appere. Wherfore alle trewe Englyshe people, pray yn fere For kyng Edward of Rouen, oure comfortoure, That he kepe justice and make wedis clere, Avoydyng the blak cloudys of langoure.90

While the notion of the commons with a common culture developed, it is probably too limiting to see late medieval society characterized solely by the mutual antagonism of two classes, an exploiting upper class and an exploited lower class. The theory of estates, while often an ideological distortion, represented a reality of mutual co-operation on occasions, indicating that we sometimes need to see medieval society as a series of localities rather than an inter-connected whole.91 There were conflicts of interest between classes, but also a perception of shared interests, an important feature of a ‘deference society’ (even though we should acknowledge that ‘deference’ and ‘class’ are in ‘constant, trans-historical friction’).92 The balance of these factors within English society had undoubtedly changed by the sixteenth century. How the transformation took place is a matter of controversy, but the fifteenth century is probably best understood as an age of transition, the economy changing from a manorial system which still had the residue of serfdom to a ‘proto-capitalist economy run to a large degree by a class of upwardly-mobile elite yeoman farmers’.93 In England in the ‘long fifteenth century’ (1350–1520), ‘social structures and methods of production were remodelled’.94 In Christopher Dyer’s words, in 1150 England was an agricultural economy with very few towns and industry ‘based on handicrafts in family workshops’. A powerful aristocracy dominated a subordinate peasantry; the church ‘enjoyed great landed resources, controlled education, and influenced the whole of society through its teachings’; and ‘custom, tradition, patronage, honour, service, and coercion played a large part in social relations’. By 1550, ‘Trade had become part of everyone’s daily experience, towns had multiplied, England was one of the most industrialized countries in Europe’, the land worked in such large estates that tenants could no longer be called peasants in any meaningful sense. The titled aristocracy no longer dominated the social order as they had done as market forces started to drive the economy. The church was still powerful but was now controlled by the state; service in exchange for land tenure had largely

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disappeared and many traditional customs had lapsed.95 Whether we call this ‘early modernity’ or not, English society had undoubtedly changed dramatically and become a ‘commercialized society’, if not a capitalist one.96 One of the most significant developments was the distribution of the vast monastic estates after the Reformation.97 The crown’s sale of monastic lands had an impact on the market for land, not, as was once thought, because there was a competitive scramble for religious property, but because the extent of land for sale flooded the market and probably depressed the price of land. The sale did not create a new class of landowners; rather it transformed the power and status of those who already had major landholdings, many of whom were eager to secure as much land as they could before the religious orders had even been dissolved.98 For Dom David Knowles, an obvious conclusion could be drawn about the crown’s motives in suppressing the religious orders and appropriating their property: ‘financial, and not spiritual or ethical, considerations were responsible for the move against the monasteries’.99 As was once claimed, the Reformation may not have caused a change in mentality that led directly to the rise of capitalism, the agrarian revolution ‘watering the seeds of that individualistic conception of ownership which was to carry all before it after the Civil War’.100 However, it did change the nature of the market for land and so may well have helped inaugurate the Industrial Revolution through making areas available for industrial development in the next 150 years.101 It is hardly surprising that the dissolution led to the most serious threat to Henry VIII’s reign, the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536–37), when 40,000 men from the north marched towards London.102 The rebellion was characterized more by class unity than division, although the use, again, of the term ‘commons’ distinguished the rebels from their political masters.103 The rebels had a common aim, to restore the ‘old religion’, and so aimed their hostility at the ‘new men’ who had led the king astray through their greed and plans to exploit the common people, although their motives for wanting to restore the old order were varied.104 The Twenty-Four Articles (The Commons’ Petition), drawn up under the leadership of Robert Aske at Pontefract Castle (2–4 December 1536), demanded that the English church submit to the See of Rome (article 2); the monasteries be restored to their houses, lands and goods (article 4); and that the instigators of the Reformation, specifically Thomas Cromwell and Richard Rich, be punished as ‘subverters of the good laws of the realm and maintainers and inventors of heretics’.105 The Pilgrimage was a shock for Henry’s regime but it was dispersed, like the Peasants’ Revolt, through a series of false promises exploiting the rebels’ faith in the word of the monarch and the authority of the king was preserved.106 The transformation of the relationship between land and people, and the concomitant rise of a monetary economy, is probably the most important

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factor in the change in English society in the centuries before industrialization. Both church and crown reduced their possession of lands so that they had dwindled to almost nothing by the 1640s, the church through compulsion, the crown in order to fight expensive foreign wars, so that land became a saleable commodity that could be acquired by those with means.107 What had been integrated, stable and fixed – at least in theory – with local landlords controlling tenants, became a market, one that led to the transformation of class relations. Lawrence Stone’s case that the changes in the economy in the century after the Reformation led to the rise of the gentry at the expense of the aristocracy, as estates were divided up and traditional social relations dissolved, has been criticized and refined but never fundamentally challenged as a narrative of English social history leading up the Civil War.108 Stone’s contention is that aristocratic power receded for a variety of inter-related reasons, the most significant of which are the decline in the wealth of peers and the increase in the wealth of the gentry; the loss of aristocratic lands; the decay of their military power; aristocratic titles becoming a commodity that could be bought (notably in the reign of James I), which increased the size of the peerage; the loosening of bonds between landlords and tenants so that the relationship became a monetary rather than an affective one; the extravagant habits of the aristocracy and their preference for country living over proximity to court; and the rise of individualism.109 The ‘rise of individualism’ has been seized on by many, in particular literary scholars, as an explanation for the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the advent of capitalism and its concomitant literary forms, most significantly the novel.110 The connections made are open to challenge, not least because it is surely an error to imagine that individualism, capitalism and the advent of modernity can be so easily equated. Medievalists have rightly objected that such ontological assumptions ignore the wealth of evidence – specifically, literary evidence – of individualism in medieval works.111 Such over-arching narratives are surely doomed to failure, even though they persist because they provide a satisfyingly straightforward version of historical narrative.112 But there are surely technological developments that transform social relations and class structures, as well as the practical possibilities and opportunities open to many. If we are concerned with the ‘rise of individualism’, then changes in material culture have a major influence on the ways in which people relate to the world. The development of paper manufacturing in England in the seventeenth century, making it cheaper and more accessible, promoted the spread of literacy and enabled individuals to record their thoughts and impressions.113 It does not follow, of course, that the widespread use of paper precipitated a belief in the significance and sanctity of the individual. Rather, the ability to write and record thoughts, made possible for many more people who were now educated enough to

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write and able to afford a few books, significantly transformed how many thought and acted. People used what materials they had to hand to order and make sense of their lives, recording thoughts, diaries, lists and other information in the few books they possessed.114 The access to technological developments always has profound class implications. The production of written texts and the ability to disseminate them to a wide audience also affected class relations, so that technology may have initiated waves of transformations that could no longer be traced back to its impact. It became possible to produce newspapers and newsbooks for mass audiences, as there was a readership educated enough to read them and manufacturing, production and distribution costs meant they were a practical proposition for entrepreneurial printers, stationers and booksellers.115 The newspaper played a significant role in creating modern notions of nationhood, an imagined homogeneous, connected community that elided class relations even as the newspapers themselves fuelled debate intimately connected to notions and matters of class.116 Cheap printed works were easy to produce and a vast number appeared in the seventeenth century, responding and moulding popular taste.117 More lives could be recorded as information on people was produced and stored, not only in official documents, but also in biographies, often brief and based on funeral orations, a development that increased an understanding of the importance of individuals.118 Books on courtesy and manners could be easily obtained by the aspirant bourgeois so that notions of properly civilized behaviour were not restricted to the upper classes, but could be acquired by those eager for social advancement.119 Other technological developments impacted on the sense of the self and class relations. The advent of more efficient methods for heating houses, in particular the chimney, transformed the interior of the houses of many relatively wealthy people. Houses no longer had to have a large central room with an open fire to keep the inhabitants warm throughout winter: when it became possible to install chimneys, space could be divided and rooms built which created, for a fortunate few, privacy – a further spur to the growth of individualism.120 The ‘closet’, a private room cut off from the sociable nature of early modern life, clearly had a significance beyond its limited existence, an aspirational goal for those eager to explore their own company and to perform tasks that they would not have wanted others to observe.121 My point is that notions of individualism became more prominent from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, as has often been argued, and the belief in the individual as a sacrosanct entity underlies the development of political ideas, the rights of the individual, aesthetic forms, as well as ordinary life in British and European society.122 However, I would contend that these

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changes cannot be regarded as an ontological revolution in the history of the self as has often been claimed, whether that transformation originates in the changes in consciousness inaugurated by the printing press, the advent of perspective in Renaissance art, or the dynamic sense of the self unleashed by the Reformation.123 Of course, these developments are extremely important, but they do not constitute the epistemic breaks that their historians often claim, as an understanding of individuality cannot be regarded as a modern phenomenon.124 When significant changes take place they have to be considered in terms of the political economy of the society in question and as such have a dynamic relationship to material reality and, therefore, to class structures. Probably it is the falling away of older ideas of social stability and loyalty that is important rather than the rise of ideas of individualism on its own, certainly when we are considering the social structure of a nation. As Andy Wood has argued, late medieval rebels ‘were more likely to perceive [the state] as an agency that needed to be strengthened against gentry violence and corruption’ than as ‘the coercive arm of the ruling class’.125 Throughout the sixteenth century, there was constant low-level class conflict owing to the ‘emergence of agrarian capitalism’, which was driven by ‘the entrepreneurial energies of wealthier yeoman farmers and the cash-grabbing fiscal seigneurialism of the gentry’.126 In Norfolk ‘social relations … were probably most precariously balanced, and plebeian anger at its most intense’, which is why the ‘largest and most sustained popular challenge to the authority of the English gentry and nobility during the early modern period’ broke out in East Anglia.127 The rebellions in the East of England followed on from the Prayer Book Rebellion in the West country, which was in response to the imposition of a new Book of Common Prayer by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and so can be seen as a continuation of the Pilgrimage of Grace.128 The Prayer Book Rebellion forms the backdrop for William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (written 1553, published 1561), a magical realist tale of the alternative society of cats who form a shadowy state that mirrors the ‘legitimate’ one. The protagonist, Master Streamer, is able to hear the voices of the cats when he takes a magic potion one night, in his room in the printer John Day’s house. He describes the body parts of the rebels on London’s city walls just before he witnesses the cacophonous voices of the cats, the stories he witnesses demonstrating the unstable religious chaos in the country in which few have any grasp of the religious changes the radical Protestant government of Edward VI have just made – an indication of the state of the nation in 1549.129 The rebellions in the East, in contrast, were less concerned with religion than with the pernicious effects of enclosure. They are often referred to as

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‘Kett’s Rebellion’, after their leader, Robert Kett, a prosperous yeoman farmer who agreed to take on the role after he was asked to remove some of the enclosures that he had set up.130 The rebels, whose band grew in size as they went, headed towards Norwich, destroying fences and enclosures. In the city they were joined by the urban poor, also victims of enclosure. They set up camp themselves on Mousehold Heath, east of Norwich, where they established an alternative government. While risings elsewhere – such as in Cambridge – were easily put down, in Norfolk the rebellion gathered strength as other rebel camps were established throughout the county. In his correspondence with the rebels, the Lord Protector, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset (1500–52), acknowledged that there was extensive local corruption and that the local people should be able to nominate some of the enclosure commissioners.131 The rebels seized Norwich, despite the hopes of Somerset that the revolt would soon stall, and an army under John Dudley, duke of Northumberland (1504–53) was dispatched. Northumberland’s forces were initially defeated, while rebel outposts elsewhere in Norfolk were overwhelmed. A larger army of at least 7500 men fought a running series of battles with the rebels in the city before a battle in the valley of Dussindale ensured victory for government troops. The rebellions played a major role in crystallizing a class-based socioeconomic language as central to political and literary discourse in Tudor England. ‘Commonwealth writing’, a response to the traumatic impact of the Reformation, enclosure and the rise of the gentry, had developed in the 1530s and 1540s, arguing that preaching and social reform were necessary in order to create a more integrated society loyal to the crown.132 However, it was the rebellions of 1549 that really changed the intellectual landscape and made it impossible to ignore the destructive reality of class division. The rebellions surely influenced the thinking of many mid-Tudor intellectuals, such as Sir Thomas Smith.133 They also lie behind such literary works as Thomas Churchyard’s Davy Dyker’s Dream. Churchyard, a young soldier-poet, was undoubtedly affected by the rebellion, as well as the dearth, social conflict and hostility towards the gentry experienced throughout England in the late 1540s and early 1550s.134 Churchyard’s poem is an imitation of Langland’s alliterative verse, the title taken from the ending of Passus VI in Robert Crowley’s recently published text of Piers Plowman, which warns the idle and the industrious alike of an immanent famine: Ac I warne yow werkmen – wynneth [obtain (food)] whil ye mowe [can], For Hunger hiderward hasteth hym faste! He shal awake [thorugh] water, wastours to chaste, Thorough flodes and thorough foule wedres, fruytes [crops] shal faille – And so seith Saturne and sent yow to warne;



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Whan ye se the [mo]ne amys and two monkes heddes, And a mayde have the maistre, and multiplie by eighte, Thanne shal deeth withdrawe and derthe be justice, And Dawe the Dykere deye for hunger – But if God of his goodnesse graunte us a trewe [truce].135

While the famine is a punishment from God, Davy represents the poor, defenceless and lowest class of worker who needs protection from the rest of Christian society. Churchyard imitates Langland’s style in the form of a prophecy to outline the hopes and dreams that Davy might have, and to provide a damning analysis of contemporary society: When faith in frendes beare fruit, and folysh fancyes fade, & crafty catchers cum to nought, & hate gret love hath made Whan fraid flieth far from towne, & lewterers [loiterers] leave the fielde, And rude shall runne a rightfull race, and all men be well wude [mad?]: Wehngropers after gayne, shall carpe for comen welth, And wyly workers shall disdayne, to fugge [fight] and lyve by stelth: When wisdome walks a loft, and folly syts full low, And virtue vanquish pampered vice, and greate begins to grow. When Justice ioynes to truth, and law lookes not to meede [gain, reward] & bribes help not to build fair bowres, nor gifts gret glotons feede… Then balefull barnes [children] be blythe, that here in England wonne [live], Your strife shal steynte I undertake, your dreadful daies are done.136

Churchyard’s poem also belongs to a wider tradition of prophecy, much of it derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century Historia Regum Britanniae.137 More specifically, the list of impossible and improbable happenings dreamed of by the suffering working class recalls the prophecy of the Land of Cockaigne, the mythical place where work was impossible because not only did ripe fruit fall within the easy reach of every man and woman, but roast pigs ran around with carving knives stuck in their sides crying, ‘Eat me! Eat me!’.138 Davy Dyker looks forward to a time when justice will exist for all and the nation’s goods will be evenly and fairly distributed, in the full understanding that this will undoubtedly never happen. Such political prophecy provides the means of social critique without the need for specificity and with the proviso that life has always been like this so things may never change. The Davy Dykers of this world will always be with us and always be dreaming impossible dreams. A language of connected class politics was therefore available from the middle of the sixteenth century. This shared language of politics could be employed in both conservative and radical ways. A conservative usage would concentrate on the integrated nature of society, stressing the mutual benefits of inter-class loyalty and the shared goal of ensuring that the commonwealth

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functioned effectively for the benefit of all. A radical usage would stress the ways in which a ruling elite exploited the poor and dispossessed, failing to live up to the idea of social justice and harmony that it espoused: instead of a society of reciprocal benefits, one of rapacious greed had developed using the language of political reason to disguise the selfish aims of the ruling class.139 Accordingly, it is often hard to work out exactly where the sympathies of a piece of early modern writing lie, which has generated lively debate among modern historians who can read identical bodies of material in very different ways – as examples of support for a conservative establishment or radical critiques of the status quo.140 The question of shared or divergent values is at the heart of all political debates from the middle of sixteenth century until the advent of the Civil War nearly a century later, an indication that Andy Wood’s contention that the 1549 rebellions created both the instruments of state control and the political language of the early modern English state has much to commend it.141 One cataclysmic social and political upheaval set the agenda until another one broke the mould. Much was indeed shared in early modern England. As Peter Burke has pointed out, throughout early modern Europe ‘popular culture was everyone’s culture’.142 While elite culture – art, chamber music, the court masque – was for a select few, everyone enjoyed the raucous humour of jest books, the excitement of carnival and the gossipy nature of broadside ballads. In other aspects of everyday life, however, there was much more obvious class division and conflict. Ideals of manhood, especially those associated with the massed youth apprenticed in London, often assumed a class-based character, bonding together those of unclear status and with an uncertain future in a unity that was unstable, dangerous and sometimes violent, especially towards foreigners.143 Over a fifth of men born in the reign of James I never married, most through adverse economic circumstances, a factor in increasingly fractious class relations in the capital. The dependence of many men of non-elite status on wage labour meant that their ‘patriarchal authority … became more exclusively focussed on their relationship with women’ rather than a wide-ranging authority over their social inferiors, demonstrating that gender relations need to be read alongside and in terms of class relations.144 Furthermore, we should also acknowledge that the advice about proper obeisance and submission to authority for women and servants ‘flew in the face of the established dynamics of London middling-sort households’.145 Courtesy and conduct books may have controlled class relations and reduced conflict but they did not eliminate them. The tension between masters and servants was both a defining feature of everyday Tudor and Stuart life and a common subject of literature, especially commercial drama.146 As pressure on agricultural land increased,

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more people flocked into the cities, in particular London, placing great strain on its ability to cope as it became an ever larger metropolis.147 It has been estimated that wages fell by at least 20% in the sixteenth century and, in real terms, perhaps as much as 50%.148 Increasing an already pronounced demographic shift, a statute of 1589 ‘ordered that no cottage should be built with less than 4 acres of land attached’, i.e., what must have been considered the minimum amount necessary to support a family. As population increased, pressure on smallholdings became ever more intense – especially as most poorer families divided land amongst their sons rather than leaving everything to the eldest one, as was common for families of the middling sort and above. Farms became smaller until many were no longer viable, fuelling the growth of larger estates and producing an ever larger stock of landless labourers, many of whom became servants in households in both the city and the country.149 The younger sons of the wealthy were also likely to migrate to the cities in search of gainful employment as they did not inherit land, many seeking positions in households as secretaries or in some other functionary role, serving intermittently in the army, or trying their hand at writing – in particular for the newly burgeoning commercial theatre.150 We do not know why Shakespeare joined the theatre but for a married man with a family to feed becoming an apprentice was not an option, so joining the theatre was a sensible career choice which worked out rather well.151 For women the possibilities were usually much more stark: domestic service, shop-keeping, prostitution or marriage.152 In Anthony Fletcher’s words, ‘Women’s work comprised everything that was left after men had had their say; as well as bearing the major burden inside the home.’ 153 If anything women had fewer opportunities in early modern England than they had had earlier, especially in straightened times when they were seen as a threat to male labour and were excluded from the powerful trade guilds in London. Accordingly, ‘women were almost totally excluded from the vast majority of crafts and trades, except when unofficially assisting their husbands’.154 In the later Middle Ages, as wage-labourers, ‘women could be found in most occupations’ in the towns and the country.155 London grew in size and relative importance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from under 50,000 in 1485 when Henry VII became the first Tudor monarch, to about 500,000 in 1700, making it ‘comfortably the biggest city in Europe’.156 Its expansion was fuelled by extremely high birth rates that exceeded the high death rates as well as immigration.157 As Steve Rappaport has noted, ‘Nowhere [in England] was the gap between rich and poor wider than in London.’ 158 The city was brimming with class tension through this period, ‘Recurrent food riots, outbreaks of violence against aliens, quasi-class conflict within guilds, and so on made the capital “notorious for popular unrest in the sixteenth century”.’ 159

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London’s power, real and imagined, provoked considerable opposition and resentment. Just before the outbreak of Civil War, the gentleman-poet, Sir John Denham (1614/15–69), represented himself looking out from his estates at Cooper’s Hill, Surrey, and surveying the dangerous active crowds milling around the London streets: So rais’d above the tumult and the crowd I see the city, in a thicker cloud Of business, than of smoke, where men like ants Toil to prevent imaginary wants; Yet all in vain, increasing with their store, Their vast desires, but make their wants the more. As food to unsound bodies, though it please The appetite, feeds only the disease. Where, with like haste, though several ways they run, Some to undo, and some to be undone; While luxury, and wealth, like war and peace, Are each the other’s ruin, and increase; As rivers lost in seas, some secret vein Thence reconveys, there to be lost again. Some study plots, and some those plots t’ undo, Others to make ‘em, and undo ‘em too, False to their hopes, afraid to be secure, Those mischiefs only which they make, endure, Blinded with light, and sick of being well, In tumults seek their peace, their Heaven in Hell.160

The means of representing the crowd are familiar enough.161 The people are dehumanized, appearing like tiny insects, ants, industriously working away, but to no purpose. Their labour is futile as it functions only to create new needs that have to be satisfied and so does not solve any real problems – unlike, it is implied, the purposeful and ordered labour that takes place on country estates where people know their place and have clearly defined roles that function to benefit the community they serve. Consumption, which should drive a healthy economy, only manages to create new illnesses. Those in the city are lost, slaves to the acquisition of luxury products, which, the poem indicates, is a dangerous obsession, as it can catapult the country from peace to war. It is as if the natural world were disturbed and at odds with itself, the rivers, waterways that should serve as the nation’s arteries, engulfed in the sea. Cooper’s Hill is an ideologically driven poem, written to defend the value of country estates, a particularly urgent concern of the landed gentry as the prospect of Civil War gathered pace.162 It is hard now to accept uncritically the belief in a division between a parliamentary country and a royalist court – as the example of Sir John

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Denham, a supporter of the crown, demonstrates.163 However, it is clear that these divisions were perceived and understood in the seventeenth century, even if we cannot separate them neatly in political terms. As David Underdown has pointed out, many of the familiar representations of court and country were actually written by courtiers. A language was forged that had real political force: ‘parliamentary orators in the 1620s knew that they were appealing to people who had made the Court-Country dichotomy the very core of their politics’, whatever its reality.164 Nicholas Breton (1545–1626), a prolific author, represented just this split in his dialogue, The Court and Country (1618), with a helpful image on the title page (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1  Nicholas Breton, The Court and the Country (1618), title page.

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In the dialogue, it is clear that the countryman, who dominates the dialogue, answering all the points raised by the courtier at great length, has the best of their exchange.165 The courtier boasts of the great riches and fine things that can be acquired at court, but the countryman responds that these are all produced in the country and that staying there and working properly is the best route to a happy life. The countryman points out that the courtier has no idea about what takes place in the country and so fails to understand the nature of the country from which he benefits so much: yet take the Evening with the Morning, and all the weeke with the holyday, the sower with the sweet, and the cost with the pleasure, and tell me then if once in seaven yeares, when your state is weakened and your Land wasted, your Woods untimberd, your Pastures unstored, and your Houses decayed; then tell me whether you find the proverbe true, of the Courtier young and old: though sometime a Bell-weether may bee fat, when many a better sheepe cannot hit on so good a feeding.166

It is another familiar story of the country producing the wealth and the court/city consuming it, unable to cope when adversity sets in. The real animus of the text is that labour is disguised, the conspicuous consumption of the court takes place in ignorance of the work of production. Breton’s countryman argues that true gentility is a country value: I thinke we have more ancient and true Gentlemen that hold the plough in the field, then you have in great places that waite with a trencher at a Table; and I have heard my father say, that I beleeve to bee true, that a true Gentleman will bee better knowne by his inside then his outside, for (as he said) a true Gentleman will be like himselfe, sober, but not proud; liberall, and yet thrifty; wise, but not full of words; and better seene in the Law, then be too busie with the lawes; one that feares God, will be true to his King, and well knowes how to live in the world, and whatsoever God sends, hath the grace to be content with it, loves his wife and his children, is carefull for his family, is a friend to his neighbour, and no enemy to himselfe: and this (said my father) is indeed the true Gentleman (B1r–B1v).

A true gentleman does not rely on the absurd habits of the court with its fussy and pointless code of manners and politeness, but is virtuous through working hard, behaving well and understanding the sociable nature of a neighbourly community. Breton, as is obvious from his writing, was not a courtier and imagines England in terms of its longstanding rural traditions, in particular the figure of the ploughman. Despite the increasing importance of the capital, England was still a predominantly rural society and would remain so until well into the nineteenth century. There were distinctions between the nobility and the gentry in the seventeenth century but, in effect, they formed ‘a single

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economic class’.167 Below them were the amorphous ‘middling sort’, ‘yeomen and substantial tenant farmers in the countryside and lesser merchants, shopkeepers, and independent craftsmen in the towns’.168 And below them were those who did not possess any land and who had to live as wage-earners alone. Breton’s understanding of English society in the first half of the seventeenth century is substantially accurate and points to the rivalries and jealousies as well as the realities of social existence. Classes were bonded together through a series of links that varied from region to region but were real enough. For Keith Wrightson, class involved ‘a loose aggregate of individuals of varied though comparable economic position, who are linked by similarities of status, power, lifestyle and opportunities, by shared cultural characteristics and bonds of interaction’.169 People from different classes were conscious of having shared values and imagined themselves as distinguished from other sorts/groups/classes: ‘Class was not an exclusive consciousness … but a language of “differentiation”.’ 170 Then, as now, class consciousness was intermingled with other factors – gender, region, race, profession and so on – so that it rarely, if ever, existed in anything like a pure form. To give just one example: women ‘were transmitters of status by marriage’, so were directly involved in social mobility, upwards and downwards.171 As most marriages were arranged by families, invariably based on the need and desire to acquire property and making use of local connections as well as a number of affective relationships, the institution had an inevitable relationship to class status in the seventeenth century, but cannot be reduced to simply a class transaction.172 The material conditions of different social groups and regions changed throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, owing to a variety of climactic, population, technological and other factors.173 However, in many ways, before the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the creation of modern class structures, the social order remained largely the same. Even such violent irruptions as the Civil War and the Protectorate (1642–60), which transformed the political order, had a negligible effect on the social structure of England.174 Historians no longer believe that the Civil War was created by class tension or that it inaugurated a new order.175 As Blair Worden has stated, ‘There were indeed sociological differences, as there will be in any political conflict, but while they sometimes help to explain men’s responses to the crisis itself, which has no discernable place in any long-term development of the social structure.’ 176 It is hard to argue that class had changed when the monarchy was restored in 1660: surprisingly, the economic consequences of the conflict may have been beneficial as well as harmful, freeing up new areas of trade.177 But there was clearly a far greater sense of division between people than there had been before and a sharper awareness of conflict, including class conflict.

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Literature and class Table 1.1  English society at the end of the seventeenth century

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Social role Landowners Farmers and freeholders Professionals, including clergy Merchants and shopkeepers Artisans and handicraftsmen Labouring people and out-servants Cottagers and paupers The armed forces

Percentage of population 1.2% 24.3% 3.4% 3.7% 4.4% 26.8% 29.4% 6.8%

Note: Cited in Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p. 63.

David Underdown argues that while ‘older, vague divisions’ between court and country morphed into political divisions between Whigs and Tories, the real change was ‘the gentry’s growing distrust of the common people’. There were shared values before 1640: ‘defence of the Ancient Constitution, resistance to popery and foreign influences’, but after 1660 ‘they became much more suspicious, using the militia to break up their conventicles, rather than encouraging their political independence’.178 The pioneering statistician, Gregory King (1648–1712) estimated that by the end of the seventeenth century, English society could be divided into a series of discernible social classes. The percentages include families and dependents (Table 1.1). Roy Porter points out that the figures cannot be quite right – ‘there must have been far more merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, and craftsmen … and domestic servants … do not appear as a separate category’, and surely there are too many farmers and too few people in the least remunerative categories, over-estimating the ‘middling sort’.179 Even so, the profile is helpful, and indicates that society remained predominantly rural and agricultural throughout the seventeenth century.180 Towns were established but ‘The scale of urban expansion between 1700 and 1750 was … tiny by later standards.’ About 18% of the population lived in towns in 1700 and that increased to 23% by 1750, and it was not until the 1800s that the number of towns with a population in excess of 100,000 increased from eleven.181 English society was hardly egalitarian and there was suspicion and conflict, but it was the Industrial Revolution that really polarized social classes. According to Robert Allen’s statistics, while the aristocracy registered only a slight increase, perhaps from 30,000 to 50,000 by 1850, and was never

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more than 2% of the population, the ‘bourgeoisie’, already more numerous than the aristocracy in 1688, had grown seven times in the same period, their percentage increasing from about 3 to 8–9% of the total population.182 The number of farmers steadily declined, while the number of workers correspondingly increased as new social formations started to emerge.183 But what is most obvious from Allen’s calculations is that while the number of farmers halved in the course of the eighteenth century, and cottagers and paupers increased by 50%, in terms of class change little happened before the major transformation of English society in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the English working classes appear to have been much better off than their European, Asian and Latin American counterparts.184 It was surely the wealth of the country that explains the nature of its social history in the period, as England was relatively prosperous.185 For E. P. Thompson the eighteenth century in England was the site of a class struggle without the modern understanding of class, as a rapacious upper class creamed off gargantuan quantities of wealth because there was no powerful upper-middle class to thwart them.186 This history of sustained exploitation was possible because it could be hidden in plain sight when, compared to much of the rest of the world, those at the bottom of the social pile were doing well enough. Accordingly, people generally saw themselves in terms of vertical, trade or local relationships, ‘rather than the ‘horizontal” consciousness of a “mature” industrial working class’.187 There may not have been an explicitly formulated language of class: that was to develop properly in the nineteenth century. However, there was a ‘lively plebeian culture which the “hegemony” of the gentry did not succeed in stifling through paternalism or repression’ and considerable evidence of ‘class struggle which preceded the formation of self-conscious classes’.188 What also characterized English society in the long eighteenth century (c.1688–1815) was the fine gradation of formal class distinction, not simply a division based on the means of production. Such small differences pervaded most aspects of social life and had what might seem like a disproportionate influence on behaviour. To give one example: as R. H. Sweet has pointed out, ‘The fluidity between the upper levels of the middling sort and the gentry classes which marked the period is undoubtedly one of the reasons for the popularity of the “how to be polite” genre of literature.’ 189 Social distinctions were understood as vital to the preservation of an ordered society, but were hard to maintain. Accordingly, it was difficult but not impossible to change social status, particularly through marriage, the theme of so many eighteenth-century novels – the burgeoning genre that dominated the literary culture of the period.190 After 1707 England and Scotland were united. The causes and consequences of the Scottish Parliament passing the Act have long been debated, but it

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is likely that they acquiesced in the hope of future economic gain (again, whether Scotland benefited has not been resolved, but the country did gain access to English and colonial markets).191 Scotland’s bargaining position was weak and the Scots were presented with promises that they ‘could either take or leave’.192 What is more significant for this book is that there were closer literary ties between Anglophone Scotland and England, and a more obviously common culture emerged in the eighteenth century, as will be clear in the last two chapters of the book.193 English society was dominated by the village, but throughout the eighteenth century a retreat from the social nature of village life started to take place, a change that had a profound effect on class relations.194 The gentry started to draw away from the lower classes within the villages they oversaw, educating their children separately and withdrawing from the rituals of everyday life. Popular culture was no longer ‘everyone’s culture’, and became more obviously class based: To further distance themselves from the lower orders, they built their houses outside the villages and surrounded them with parks. Yet if they had withdrawn from village society, preferring class and family as the bases of their social life, they still controlled the villages; they were still landowners and magistrates, and they still continued to perform the duties of traditional paternalism. But in the long run their sense of responsibility to the poor was compromised by their economic dependence upon agricultural capitalism.195

The gentry were followed by the farmers. In the eighteenth century ‘they too became conscious of themselves as a class with common interests and a common culture’. As they benefited from agricultural improvements they started to adopt a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, acquiring luxury products and ‘a recognizably middle-class way of life’, and also cut themselves off from everyday village affairs.196 These changes left the rural labourers isolated, cut off from the benefits of economic developments of more efficient farming, as yields increased through better land use and knowledge of soils; cross-breeding of livestock became more systematic; technology enabled farmers to work more effectively; and better communication systems facilitated trade and distribution.197 Rural workers ‘preserved … much of the older outlook, including a less intense family life and a deferential goodwill to their superiors’.198 Accordingly, and surprisingly given more recent expectations that ideas of class develop from the bottom upwards, it was the upper and middle classes who developed an understanding that they had common interests and were classes. Paul Langford has argued that ‘[t]he language of class … owes its origin to the mid-eighteenth century’.199 The labourers ‘were objectively a class but subjectively unsure of their position vis-à-vis the other classes … By degrees they became more literate, disciplined, and

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self-reliant’, and developed an understanding that they had common interests apart from the immediate reality of village life.200 Class consciousness is intricately bound up with developments of literacy, as well as economic advancement, which is why the links between class and literature are so significant and such an important indication of social change. Such transformations took until well into the nineteenth century when industrialization had already started to change the nature of social life in England. What does seem to be clear is that while there was class consciousness, there was not the same level of class conflict and hostility that became normal and frequent later.201 There were, of course, riots, mass assemblies and outbreaks of sporadic violence, especially after the French Revolution (1789), but serious, organized class conflict really developed in the nineteenth century.202 The other major socio-economic change, registered throughout the literature of the eighteenth century, was the development of commerce and the advent of consumerism as, especially in a metropolitan environment, ‘an increasing sector of middle-class society had the means to acquire more consumer goods for “ready cash”’.203 As middle and upper class people became conscious of being having property, education and possessing taste as well as objects that demonstrated their good taste, they employed the language of class ‘as a means of identifying all those who were possessed of little or no politeness, education or property’.204 An increasingly commercialized society, able to import goods through world trade and the establishment of an empire, combined notions of culture and acquisition to reinforce ideas of competitive class values. This significant development was encapsulated in the phenomenon of the ‘South Sea Bubble’ (1720–21). The South Sea Company was granted a monopoly on trade with South America and the South Seas during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). The Company was able to sell shares as a joint-stock company established in partnership with the government, who had agreed to the enterprise as a means of reducing national debt. Although there was never a serious chance of the Company making a vast income from its licence – Spain and Portugal dominated South America and the South Sea Islands were insignificant in terms of population and the production of goods – its shares proved immensely popular and they rose higher and higher as more people became convinced that they were a means to secure quick profits. In 1720 the speculation reached its peak; the Company’s share price collapsed, ruining many; and joint-stock companies were more carefully regulated afterwards.205 Serious as the financial disaster’s consequences were in the short term, it is at least arguable that the Bubble’s more significant consequence was to serve as an indication of the grip that consumerism had on society – one that lasted for most of the century.206 As Julian Hoppit has argued, ‘The South Sea Bubble could be viewed as a symptom of wider problems, where

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luxury had infected society … Contemporary reactions … were often less about the Bubble itself than much wider perceived failings in the politicoreligious order.’ 207 The Bubble had a particular impact on the anxious middle class, eager not to over-stretch themselves and end up ruining their families, which is why it played such an important role in literature and culture.208 John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, first performed on 29 January 1728, satirizes contemporary politicians, casting them as villains from the London underworld.209 Near the end of the opera a beggar explains to an actor that ‘Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high and low life’, indicating that no one can hope to escape the corrupting effects of a consumer society.210 In the play itself the two major female characters, Lucy and Polly, are rivals for the hand of the villainous MacHeath. Realizing that they have been betrayed, both imagining that he has chosen them as his bride, they sing a duet to an ‘Irish Trot’ (a lively dance tune): Polly: I’m bubbled. Lucy: I’m bubbled. Polly: Oh how I am troubled! Lucy: Bamboozled, and bit! Polly: My diseases are doubled. Lucy: When you come to the tree, should the hangman refuse,    These fingers, with pleasure, could fasten the noose. Polly: I’m bubbled, etc (2.13.52–7).

‘Bubbled’ means ‘deluded, duped, or hoodwinked’ (OED, ‘bubble’, v. 5), and here, in a satire that compares the chief criminal, Peachum, to the long-serving prime minister, Robert Walpole (1676–1745; in office, 1721–42), the contemporary resonance could not be clearer. The ladies are ‘bubbled’ just like those who invested in the South Sea Company – one of whom was John Gay.211 Other writers observed the growth of a commercial culture with an equally critical eye, notably Gay’s friend, Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Pope represented the abuse of religious rites, which had been replaced by the worship of objects, in his famous description of Belinda’s toilet in The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714): And now, unveil’d, the Toilet stands display’d, Each Silver Vase in mystic Order laid. First, rob’d in White, the Nymph intent adores With Head uncover’d, the Cosmetic Pow’rs. A heav’nly Image in the Glass appears, To that she bends, to that her Eyes she rears; Th’ inferior priestess, at her Altar’s side, Trembling, begins the sacred Rites of Pride. Unnumber’d Treasures ope at once, and here

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The various Off’rings of the World appear; From each she nicely culls with curious Toil, And decks the Goddess with the glitt’ring Spoil. This Casket India’s glowing Gems unlocks, And all Arabia breathes from yonder Box. The Tortoise here and Elephant unite, Transform’d to Combs, the speckled and the white. Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows, Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux. Now awful Beauty puts on all its Arms; The Fair each moment rises in her Charms, Repairs her Smiles, awakens ev’ry Grace, And calls forth all the Wonders of her Face[.]212

Belinda, staring at her face in her mirror, arms herself with cosmetics and fashionable, expensive devices to repair and augment her natural beauty, as she prepares to defeat a number of society beaux. She is described like a heroic goddess from a classical epic (Pope was translating Homer at the same time as he was writing The Rape of the Lock), arming herself for battle. Pope’s satire focuses on the absurd vanity of the upper classes, who have lost sight of real values and started to worship the superficial pursuit of pleasure, seeking admiration in an intensely competitive and restricted society instead of performing the traditional role of setting an example to the lower classes and providing proper leadership. Cut off from any sort of community, they live in a tiny world that has no real value or meaning, very like that which produced the South Sea Bubble. Instead of worshipping in church they perform sacred rites of pride. Belinda’s toilet stand is an altar, a shrine to the new gods of material consumerism, showing that the upper classes place their faith in objects rather than spiritual values: lost amidst the powders, love letters, brushes and items for applying cosmetics, are Bibles, valued because of their appearance rather than their contents. Pope shows us how much labour has been expended to manufacture Belinda’s vain beauty, work that she does not appreciate or understand, a further indication of the deracinated nature of the upper classes who do not know or care how the objects they value reached their grand houses. Belinda has gems from India and perfumes from Arabia, valuable commodities obtained from international trade and imperial aggression, under the auspices of the East India Company.213 Of course, the gems had to be mined and polished, and the perfumes manufactured, before both were transported a great distance, work that Belinda does not notice as she performs her own mock heroic toil. Her comb is made from ivory and tortoise shell, a combination of luxury products that make a stunning object, one that involves slaughtering two rare, exotic animals.214 Belinda’s

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world is based entirely on surface appearance so that beauty, however it is constructed and maintained, disguises all the work that has been undertaken to produce it: any concern for a wider social order has disappeared as the ruling class pursue pleasure rather than actually governing. Pope describes Hampton Court at the start of the third canto: Here Britain’s Statesmen oft the fall foredoom Of Foreign Tyrants, and of Nymphs at home; Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes Tea (3.5–8).

The juxtaposition of two jarring examples of zeugma (the connection of two distinct ideas through the use of one verb) works to demonstrate the frivolous nature of British government. Statesmen cannot distinguish between the trivial and the profound, their conversation failing to separate significant matters of state that they can influence and implement (the overthrow of foreign governments deemed tyrannical) and who is likely to seduce whom at home. The queen, Anne (1665–1714), who formally rules three realms (Britain, Ireland and France), is offered advice along with tea, a fashionable, exotic and very expensive drink in the early eighteenth century, consumed principally by society ladies.215 Like Belinda, according to Pope, she appears to have little understanding of the labour that is undertaken in her name to maintain her nation and burgeoning empire. Pope saw the overthrow of traditional values of government and religion as a consumer society developed at a ferocious pace. The upper classes were taking the lead and had lost sight of what really mattered so that soon all of English society would be enveloped by the corrosive values of greedy materialism. While it is true that the structure and nature of English class society did not change radically in the eighteenth century, the ways in which classes imagined themselves and interacted with other social strata, and their relationship to the material culture available to them, changed much more dramatically. Adam Smith (1723–90), sought to combine a traditional, patriarchal model of the social order with a belief in the value of free trade as the best means of creating wealth that would benefit everyone. Far from being the advocate of rapacious capitalism, as he is sometimes represented by both his admirers and detractors, Smith sought to unite the moral and economic nature of the social order that Pope had seen being torn asunder.216 Instead, he attempted to demonstrate how the different orders or classes of society could and should work together for the greater good of the whole. Accordingly, he ‘championed the interest of consumers against monopolistic producers and identified their demands as the critical spur to the creation of wealth’.217 Smith transferred the economic focus from the producer to the consumer



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in order to make the case that the consumption of products would, if properly managed, create a society that was as ideal and fair as possible. In Book Four of The Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith criticizes the ‘French philosophers, who have proposed the system which represents agriculture as the sole source of revenue and wealth of every country’.218 These philosophers divide countries along traditional lines into three classes: The different orders of people who have ever been supposed to contribute in any respect towards the annual produce of the land and labour of the country, they divide into three classes. The first is the class of the proprietors of the land. The second is the class of cultivators, of farmers and country labourers, whom they honour with the peculiar appellation of the productive class. The third is the class of artificers, manufacturers and merchants, whom they endeavour to degrade by the humiliating appellation of the barren or unproductive class (4.9 (pp. 662–3)).

Smith’s aim in The Wealth of Nations is to challenge such socio-economic logic and to direct the attention of economic thinkers to the consumers rather than the producers. In doing so he overturns received wisdom not just about the economy but also about class. Smith duly notes that the class of proprietors ‘contributes to the annual produce by the expence which they may occasionally lay out upon the improvement of the land, upon the buildings, drains, enclosures and other ameliorations’. The ‘cultivators or farmers’ contribute through ‘original and annual expences’, ‘the instruments of husbandry, in the stock of cattle, in the seed, and in the maintenance of the farmer’s family, servants and cattle’ (p. 663). Smith acknowledges that the labour of artificers and manufacturers (i.e., the workers) ‘never adds any thing to the value of the whole amount of the rude produce of the land’ (p. 665). However, to imagine, as traditional economic theorists have done according to Smith, that they are therefore a parasitic class dependent on those who actually produce things, would be a category error and a wilful failure to understand the nature of society. The allegedly ‘unproductive class’ are, in fact, nothing of the sort and are vital to the healthy functioning of the socio-economic system. They produce goods for consumption, which, while they add nothing to the long-term wealth of the country, are vital for immediate prosperity, liberating those who work on the land to concentrate on what they know best: ‘By means of the industry of merchants, artificers and manufacturers, the proprietors and cultivators can purchase both the foreign goods and the manufactured produce of their own country’ (p. 667) using up less energy than they would have to expend if they made the items themselves. The division of labour, according to Smith, results in a society that is specialized and divided into classes. However, the members of each class

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share mutual interests and can have no desire to exploit or oppress the others:

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The greater the liberty which this unproductive class enjoys, the greater will be the competition in all the different trades which compose it, and the cheaper will the other two classes be supplied … The establishment of perfect justice, of perfect liberty, and of perfect equality, is the very simple secret which most effectively secures the highest degree of prosperity to all three classes (p. 668).

Smith’s theory of class is based on his understanding of the reward individuals receive for their labour, which then enables them to consume what they have produced.219 His vision of a balanced society with not only the three classes supporting each other, but with town and country exchanging goods to their mutual benefit, can be seen as an attempt to merge more traditional theories of the social order dating back to medieval ideas of the three estates and Sir Thomas Smith’s account of the commonwealth of England, with the economic reality of an advanced manufacturing society that engaged in free trade: what was later to be called ‘capitalist’. Smith does not use the word, but it had been first introduced two years before The Wealth of Nations was published by Isaac di Pinto (1717–87), an economist of Portuguese-Jewish origin living in Holland. Arguing for taxes on consumption rather than on income in his major work on free trade, An Essay on Circulation and Credit (1774), di Pinto notes that ‘in the richest and most opulent states, the number of persons who possess a real fortune (I mean, of those who would be subject to a capitation, and who, in Holland, are called the Capitalists) is very small in comparison with the other inhabitants’.220 The word might have originated with the meaning of those of great wealth who are liable for heavy taxation, but it soon began to mean those who ‘possesses capital assets … one who invests these especially for profit in financial and business enterprises’ (OED, capitalist, n. and adj., A.n), as it does in both classical and Marxist economics. Marx represented the figure, nearly a century later, as a caricature of pathological greed: ‘This boundless drive for enrichment, this passionate chase after value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser.’ 221 By the end of the eighteenth century the language of class, trade, commerce, consumerism and capital had become available, if not yet commonplace, in what was still a predominantly rural society – albeit one on the cusp of major socio-economic transformation. Class may have originated in the middle and upper classes as a way of describing and defining their social distinction from the lower orders, but it had become a means of defining society as a whole. Conceptions of class in the late eighteenth century were undoubtedly out of kilter with social reality. Not only was rising above

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one’s station a fantasy rather than the aspiration it appeared to be in so much literature – e.g., Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), analysed below – but the representation of class undoubtedly had an ideological purpose: ‘there was a deep need, perhaps reinforced by the very instability of commercial society, to stress the divine requirement and political desirability of social subordination’.222 Indeed, in an apparently ordered society to represent conflict in class terms may have been a way of defusing it rather than drawing attention to its significance. Acute anxiety was undoubtedly generated by the clash between landed and commercial interests, something that has been represented as though it were class conflict whereas it was more about changing the nature of the upper strata of society. In reality it was the sign of a transformation of material existence, one that was created by forces that resulted in the industrialized British society of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, characterized by prolonged and open class conflict, inspired also by the French Revolution which ‘provided a model for a total attack on society’s power structure’.223

Notes 1 For an overview, see S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 80–7. For changes in diet and social structure that resulted, see Joan Thirsk, Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashions, 1500–1760 (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 2. See also Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ernest Mandel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), I, pp. 383–4. 2 John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 11, 31. 3 Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, p. 33. 4 Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, p. 11; Peter Spufford, ‘Trade in Fourteenth-Century Europe’, in Michael Jones, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, VI, c.1300-c.1415 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 155–209, at p. 200. 5 Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, pp. 33–4. See below, p. 83. 6 Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy, p. 25; Maurice Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (Gloucester: Sutton, 1983), pp. 158–64; W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), ch. 4. 7 Christine Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Plague and Family Life’, in Michael Jones ed. The New Cambridge Medieval History, VI, c.1300-c.1415 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 124–54, at pp. 124, 127. 8 Paul Freedman, ‘Rural Society’, in Jones ed. The New Cambridge Medieval History, pp. 82–101, p. 85.

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9 Freedman, ‘Rural Society’, p. 83. 10 P. R. Coss, ‘Sir Geoffrey de Langley and the Crisis of the Knightly Class in Thirteenth-Century England’, in T. H. Aston, ed., Landlords, Peasants and Politics in Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 166–202, at p. 188. 11 D. A. Carpenter, ‘Was There a Crisis of the Knightly Class in the Thirteenth Century? The Oxfordshire Evidence’, EHR 95 (1980), 721–52, p. 752. 12 See below, p. 93. 13 Samuel K. Cohn, Jr., Popular Protest in Late Medieval English Towns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 33; Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 146–7. 14 Jean-Pierre Leguay, ‘Urban Life’, in Jones, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, pp. 102–23, at p. 121. 15 Leguay, ‘Urban Life’, p. 122. 16 Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, p. 226. 17 Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, p. 228. 18 Cohn, Popular Protest, pp. 98–9. 19 Cohn, Popular Protest, pp. 99–100. On the impact of the Revolt, see Lister M. Matheson, ‘The Peasants’ Revolt Through Five Centuries of Rumor and Reporting: Richard Fox, John Stow, and Their Successors’, SP 95 (1998), 121–51. 20 As J. R. Maddicott has argued, serious uprising might have happened earlier, notably in 1338, ‘if timely remedies had not been provided’, an indication of a society that was ripe for change: ‘The English Peasantry and the Crown, 1294–1341’, in Aston, ed., Landlords, Peasants and Politics, pp. 285–359, at p. 348. 21 Freedman, ‘Rural Society’, p. 98; Ian Cornelius, ‘Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt’, Representations 131, 1 (summer 2015), 22–51; Hilton, Bond Men, p. 176. The best analysis of the revolt remains R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (rev. edn Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983). Following Dobson, I have retained the name ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ instead of opting for ‘The Great Revolt’, ‘because of its familiarity’ (p. 13) and because of the representation of the rebellion as agrarian in character. 22 Freedman, ‘Rural Society’, p. 96. 23 Paul Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 36–9. 24 Maddicott, ‘English Peasantry’, p. 329. 25 Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (London: Allen Lane, 2005), p. 123. 26 John Hatcher, ‘English Serfdom and Villeinage: Towards A Reassessment’, in Aston, ed., Landlords, Peasants and Politics, pp. 247–83; Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 27–30. As Rigby points out, most villeins were more secure than legal theory suggests and held their lands, which were usually inherited by their children, according to the custom of the manor. Most of the obligations of villeins were given in money or kind rather than in terms of work, i.e., effectively as rent (p. 29).

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27 Rodney Hilton, ‘Introduction’, in Aston, ed., Landlords, Peasants and Politics, pp. 1–5, at p. 4. Hilton’s point is not specifically directed at the Peasants Revolt. 28 Rubin, Hollow Crown, p. 123; Cornelius, ‘Gower and the Peasants Revolt’, p. 22. The account here largely follows Rubin (pp. 123–7); The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham (1376–1422), trans. David Preest (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2005), pp. 120–31. 29 Cohn, Popular Protest, pp. 125–8. 30 Cohn, Popular Protest, pp. 125–6; Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, p. 133. 31 Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 147–58; Richard Firth Green, ‘John Ball’s Letters: Literary History and Historical Literature’, in Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed., Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 176–200. 32 English revolts in this period were characterised by professions of loyalty to the monarch, which were not common in the rest of Europe: Cohn, Popular Protest, p. 327. 33 See Jean Froissart, Chronicles, trans. Geoffrey Brereton (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 226–7; Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 166–7. 34 Anon., ‘Distich on the Year 1391’, in Thomas Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History Composed during the Period from the Accession of Edward III to that of Richard III, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), I, p. 278. 35 Cited in Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 74. See also Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 310–11. 36 Saul, Richard II, pp. 74–5. 37 Rubin, Hollow Crown, p. 127. 38 R. H. Britnell, ‘Minor Landlords in England and Medieval Agrarian Capitalism’, in Aston, ed., Landlords, Peasants and Politics, pp. 227–46. Though not the only one: see above, p. 32. 39 See, for example, ‘The Complaint of the Ploughman’, in Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, I, pp. 304–46. More generally, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Foresters, Ploughmen and Shepherds: Versions of Tudor Pastoral’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds, The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 537–53; Walter F. Murphy, ‘The Political Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley’, RoP 19 (1957), 214–38, p. 221. On the last point see Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, pp. 36–45. 40 John Watts, ‘Public or Plebs: The Changing Meaning of “the Commons”, 1381–1549’, in Huw Pryce and John Watts, eds, Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 242–60, at pp. 249–50. See also W. M. Ormrod, Political Life in Medieval England, 1300–1450 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 34–7. See below, pp. 165–7. 41 Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, p. 375. 42 Cited in Rubin, Hollow Crown, p. 125. 43 Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, p. 125.

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44 Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, p. 123. John of Gaunt was especially hated by the rebels, having been identified as a driving force behind the recent high taxation: Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 103, 123, 128, 175, passim. 45 Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 193. See also Derek Pearsall, ‘Interpretative Models for the Peasants’ Revolt’, in Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico, eds, Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 63–70; Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, pp. 4–5, 33–56, on the ways in which the rebels were characterized after 1381. 46 Hilton, Bond Men, p. 130. 47 David A. Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 240. 48 Rollinson, Commonwealth, pp. 236–7. 49 John Watts, ‘The Commons in Medieval England’, in Jean-Philippe Genet, ed., La Légitimité Implicite (Paris: Editions de la Sorbonne, 2015), pp. 207–22, at p. 221. 50 Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Verso, 1976). See also Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), pp. 222–8; William H. Shaw, Marx’s Theory of History (London: Hutchinson, 1978), pp. 133–48. Although, as Steve Rigby has noted, ‘the class structure of medieval England was made up of a mixture of “feudal” and “capitalist” elements’: S. H. Rigby, ‘Introduction: Social Structure and Economic Change in Late Medieval England’, in Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod, eds, A Social History of England, 1200–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 57–8. See also the discussion in Alex Davis, Imagining Inheritance from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 243–8. 51 Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (rev. edn, London: Verso, 2017), p. 118. 52 Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 79. 53 Dyer, Standards of Living, pp. 6–7. See also H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1937). 54 Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 26–7. 55 Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 7. 56 Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 7. The process is central to ‘primitive accumulation’, the Marxist theory of the transition from feudalism to capitalism: Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ernest Mandel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 873–940. For the possible implications of ‘primitive accumulation’, see Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 57 Helen Castor, Blood & Roses: The Paston Family in the Fifteenth Century (London: Faber, 2004), p. 16. 58 D. C. Coleman, The Economy of England, 1450–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1977), p. 33. See also Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), ch. 10.

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59 Coleman, Economy of England, p. 34. 60 Coleman, Economy of England, pp. 49–51. 61 Coleman, Economy of England, p. 71. 62 Coleman, Economy of England, p. 88. 63 Dyer, Making a Living, pp. 298–304. 64 Dyer, Making a Living, pp. 312–13. 65 Withington, Politics of Commonwealth, pp. 8–12; Phil Wittington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), pp. 177–8; Andy Wood, ‘Tales from the “Yarmouth Hutch”: Civic Identities and Hidden Histories in an Urban Archive’, P. & P. 230, Supplement 11 (2016), 213–30. 66 Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, p. 154. 67 D. McCulloch and E. D. Jones, ‘Lancastrian Politics, the French War, and the Rise of the Popular Element’, Speculum 58 (1983), 95–138. See also K. B. McFarlane, ‘War, the Economy and Social Change: England and the Hundred Years War,’ P. & P. 22 (1962), 3–13; M. M. Postan, ‘The Costs of the Hundred Years War,’ P. & P. 27 (1964), 34–53. 68 Sir Thomas Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur, ed. Janet Cowen, 2 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), II, pp. 506–7. 69 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1961), I, p. 220. 70 Lotte Hellinga and Hilton Kelliher, ‘The Malory Manuscript’, BLJ 3 (1977), 91–113. 71 For comment see Andrew Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 120–1; Stephen Longstaffe, ‘“A short report and not otherwise”: Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI’, in Ronald Knowles, ed., Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), pp. 13–35. 72 William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part Two, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: Thomson, 1999), 4.2.4–5. 73 John Watts, ‘Popular Voices in England’s Wars of the Roses, c. 1445-c. 1485’, in Jan Dumolyn, Jelle Haemers, Hipólito Rafael Oliva Herrer and Vincent Challet, eds, The Voices of the People in Late Medieval Europe: Communication and Popular Politics (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), pp. 107–22, at p. 122. 74 I. M. W. Harvey, ‘Cade, John [Jack] [alias John Mortimer; called the Captain of Kent]’, ODNB. 75 Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, II, pp. 221–4, 229–31, 235–43. 76 I. M. W. Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 74. 77 Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion, p. 9. 78 Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion, pp. 32, 91. 79 Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion, p. 105. 80 Watts, ‘Public or Plebs’, pp. 250–1. 81 Cited in Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion, p. 187. 82 Cited in Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion, p. 188. 83 Cited in Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion, p. 191.

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84 John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 205. See also Rollinson, Commonwealth, p. 273. 85 Wright’s Political Songs, p. 183. 86 James Dean, ed., Six Ecclesiastical Satires (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1991), p. 115. 87 Anon., ‘Jack Upland’, in Dean, ed., Six Ecclesiastical Satires, pp. 115–44, at p. 120; Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, II, introduction, xii–xxvii, pp. 16–39. 88 Anon., ‘Friar Daw’s Reply’, in Dean, ed., Six Ecclesiastical Satires, pp. 145–200, at p. 151 (lines 59–62). 89 John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols (London: EETS, 1924–27), Book 2, 827–917 (I, pp. 223–5); Derek Pearsall, John Lydgate (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 244, 249; George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1971). 90 Anon., ‘A Political Retrospect’, in Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, II, pp. 267–70, at p. 269. 91 Rigby, ‘Introduction: Social Structure’, pp. 1–30, at pp. 3–5. 92 Rigby, ‘Social Structure’, p. 7; Andy Wood, ‘“Poore Men Woll Speke One Daye”: Plebeian Languages of Deference and Defiance in England, c.1520–1640’, in Harris, ed., Politics of the Excluded, pp. 67–98, at p. 71. 93 Eliza Hartrich, Politics and the Urban Sector in Fifteenth-Century England, 1413–1471 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 16. 94 Christopher Dyer, An Age of Transition?: Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 1. 95 Dyer, Age of Transition, p. 2. 96 Dyer, Age of Transition, p. 5. 97 Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), p. 120. 98 H. J. Habakkuk, ‘The Market for Monastic Property, 1539–1603’, Ec.HR 10 (1958), 362–80; David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948–59), III, pp. 292–3. 99 Knowles, Religious Orders, III, p. 294. 100 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 152. See also Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Unwin, 1985). 101 Leander Heldring, James A. Robinson and Sebastian Vollmer, ‘The Long-Run Impact of the Dissolution of the English Monasteries’, www.semanticscholar.org/ paper/The-Long-Run-Impact-of-the-Dissolution-of-the-%E2%88%97-HeldringRobinson/af394d1fe6ebf414d50fde183d0d94f8ce89338f?p2df) (accessed 29 September 2020). 102 The most comprehensive narrative account remains Madeleine Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace 1536–1537 and the Exeter Conspiracy 1538, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915). 103 R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 13; Watts, ‘Public or Plebs’, p. 252.

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104 Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 127. 105 Twenty Four Articles of the Pilgrimage of Grace Rebels (1536), www.luminarium. org/encyclopedia/24articles.htm) (accessed 29 September 2020). 106 Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (Harlow: Longman, 1983), pp. 36–7. 107 Coleman, Economy of England, p. 43. 108 This is not to claim that class conflict is considered the main cause of the Civil War: for an overview, see Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars, 1640–1660 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009). For criticisms of Stone, which concentrate on his statistical interpretations and failure to deal with local variations, see the debate, ‘Stone and Anti-Stone’ by Conrad Russell, Christopher Thompson and Lawrence Stone, Ec.HR, 2nd Series, 25 (1972), 114–36. Barry Coward argues that aristocratic authority was already limited and powerful local families did not undergo a crisis in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: ‘A “Crisis of the Aristocracy” in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries? The Case of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby, 1504–1642’, NH 18 (1982), 54–77. See also Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (London: Routledge, 1972), pp. 26–43. 109 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 748–9. 110 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). See also Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London: Methuen, 1984); Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985). 111 David Aers, ‘A Whisper in the Ear of Early Modernists; or, Reflections on Literary Critics Writing the “History of the Subject”‘, in David Aers, ed., Culture and History, 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1992), pp. 177–202. 112 For a recent example see Theodor Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London: Minerva, 1994). 113 D. C. Coleman, ‘Combinations of Capital and of Labour in the English Paper Industry, 1789–1825’, Economica 21 (1954), 32–53, p. 32. 114 Adam Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 115 Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Joad Raymond ‘News’, in Raymond, ed., Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, I, pp. 377–97; Andrew Pettegree, The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 116 Anderson, Imagined Communities: see above, p. 13. 117 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 118 Alan Pritchard, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century: A Critical Survey (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005).

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119 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 87–9, passim; Nicholas Cooper, ‘Rank, Manners and Display: the Gentlemanly House, 1500–1750’, TRHS XII (2002), 291–310, p. 294. See also John Gillingham, ‘From Civitas To Civility: Codes of Manners in Medieval and Early Modern England’, TRHS 12 (2002), 267–89, who urges caution about using such works to assume that over-arching sociological changes took place from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. 120 Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 182–3; Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 99–101. 121 Orlin, Locating Privacy, pp. 296–326; Alan Stewart, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations 50 (1995), 76–100. 122 C. B. McPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). 123 Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1958); Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), ch. 1; Tawney, Religion. 124 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1970), ch. 3. The reason for ‘epistemic breaks’ is never properly explained by Foucault. 125 Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 7. I am following Wood in referring to the ‘state’, a term not all political historians would use: see Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 126 Wood, 1549 Rebellions, p. 14. 127 Wood, 1549 Rebellions, p. 59; Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 60–1. 128 Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, pp. 54–60; Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions, pp. 40–53. 129 William Baldwin, Beware the Cat: the First English Novel, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. and William Flachmann (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1988), p. 10; Robert W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 78–9. 130 The brief narrative here follows Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions, pp. 54–68; Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, pp. 60–71; Wood, 1549 Rebellions, pp. 58–69. 131 Wood, 1549 Rebellions, p. 64. 132 See Wood, 1549 Rebellions, pp. 30–8; Fritz Caspari, Humanism & the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1954); Albert J. Schmidt, ‘Thomas Wilson and the Tudor Commonwealth: An Essay in Civic Humanism’, HLQ 23 (1959), 49–60.

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133 On Smith, see below, pp. 117–23. ‘Commonwealth’ writing, a response to the economic developments of the 1530s and 1540s, specifically the exponential growth of the practice of enclosure: see Barrett L. Beer, Rebellion and Riot: Popular Disorder in the Reign of Edward VI (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), p. 23; Wood, Memory of the People, p. 67. For further discussion, see Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tree of Commonwealth, 1450–1793 (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), ch. 2; Rollinson, Commonwealth of the People. 134 Matthew Woodcock, Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword, & Ego (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 68–74. 135 Langland, Piers Plowman, Passus VI, 320–30; William Langland, The Vision of Pierce Plowman now fyrste imprynted by Roberte Crowley (London, 1550). 136 Thomas Churchyard, Davy Dycars Dreame (London, 1552), 1–10, 27–8. The use of the word ‘Meed’ (9), recalls Langland’s Lady Meed. 137 See Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). 138 A. L. Morton, The English Utopia (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1978), pp. 15–45. 139 See the overview in Kevin Sharpe, ‘A Commonwealth of Meanings: Languages, Analogues, Ideas and Politics’, in Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 38–123. 140 See, for example, J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (Harlow: Longman, 1986); Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992). 141 Wood, 1549 Rebellions, pp. 195–202. 142 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Hounslow: Temple Smith, 1978), p. 270. 143 Alex Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 210–3; Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 78, 126–7. 144 Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, p. 252. 145 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex & Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 117. 146 Richardson, Household Servants, ch. 2; Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997). 147 Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 86. 148 See Mark Netzloff, ‘Work’, in Andrew Hadfield, Matthew Dimmock and Abigail Shinn, eds, The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Culture in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 163–76, at p. 164. 149 Alison Sim, Masters and Servants in Tudor England (Stroud: Sutton, 2006), p. 67.

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150 See, in particular, Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). 151 Robert Bearman, Shakespeare’s Money: How Much Did He Make and What Did This Mean? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 3. 152 Tim Reinke-Williams, Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014); Jane Whittle, ‘Housewives and Servants in Rural England, 1440–1650: Evidence of Women’s Work from Probate Documents’, TRHS 15 (2005), 51–74. 153 Fletcher, Gender, p. 254. See also Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 100–2, 145–7, 169–71. 154 Eleanor Hubbard, City Women: Money, Sex, & The Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 190. 155 Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 253, 274. 156 Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, p. 61; J. F. Merritt, ‘Introduction: Perceptions and Portrayals of London, 1598–1720’, in Merritt, ed., Imagining Early Modern London, pp. 1–24, at p. 1. 157 Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, ch. 4. 158 Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, p. 4. See also David Hitchcock, Vagrancy in English Culture and Society, 1650–1750 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 8. 159 Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, p. 4 (citing Paul Clark and Paul Slack). 160 John Denham, Coopers Hill. A Poeme (London, 1642), A2v-A3r. For comment, see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Chorography, Map-Mindedness, Poetics of Place’, ch. 36 in Catherine Bates, ed., A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2018), 485–97. 161 See Christopher Hill, ‘The Many-Headed Monster in Late Tudor and early Stuart Political Thinking’, in Charles H. Carter, ed., From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honour of Garrett Mattingly (New York: Random House, 1965), pp. 296–324. 162 See Clare Bucknell, ‘Luxury and Political Economy in Estate Poetry, 1670–1750’, PQ 96 (2017), 349–72. More generally see Matthew Dimmock, Andrew Hadfield and Margaret Healy, eds, The Intellectual Culture of the English Country House (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 163 Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the Court of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 9–10. For the ‘court and country’ thesis, see Perez Zagorin, ‘The Court and the Country: A Note on Political Terminology in the Earlier Seventeenth Century’, EHR 77 (1962), 306–11; The Court and the Country: the Beginning of the English Revolution (New York: Atheneum Press, 1969). 164 David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in SeventeenthCentury England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 30. 165 Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), refers to the work as ‘a scathing attack on the courtly code of behaviour and demeanour’ (p. 41). 166 Nicholas Breton, The Court and Country, or A briefe discourse dialogue-wise set downe betweene a courtier and a country-man contayning the manner

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and condition of their lives, with many delectable and pithy sayings worthy observation (London, 1618), A4v. 167 Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 13. 168 Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, p. 14. 169 Keith Wrightson, ‘The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches’, in L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith and K. Wrightson, eds, The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 177–202, at p. 196; H. R. French, The Middle Sort of People in Provincial England, 1600–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 5. 170 Braddick, State Formation, p. 1. 171 Laurence, Women in England, p. 17. 172 Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death, chs 12–16; Laurence, Women in England, pp. 273–4; Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, pp. 112–15. 173 Barry Coward, Social Change and Continuity in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (Harlow: Longman, 1988), pp. 31–83. 174 However, for a sceptical analysis of presumed changes in political culture, see Kevin Sharpe, ‘“An Image Doting Rabble”: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, eds, Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 25–56. 175 Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 1–6. 176 Worden, English Civil Wars, p. 49. The Civil War has long attracted explanations based on class change: see, for example, Eduard Bernstein, Cromwell and Communism: Socialism and Democracy in the Great English Revolution, trans. H. J. Stenning (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930); Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976). 177 Ben Coates, The Impact of the English Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642–50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); John Miller, ‘The Long-Term Consequences of the English Revolution: Economic and Social Development’, in Michael J. Braddick, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 501–17. 178 Underdown, Freeborn People, p. 130. 179 Porter, David, English Society in the Eighteenth Century. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982, p. 63. 180 Ann Kussmaul, A General View of the Rural Economy of England, 1538–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 181 F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Town and City’, in Thompson, ed., Cambridge Social History of Britain, I, pp. 1–86, at p. 8. 182 Robert C. Allen, ‘Class Structure and Inequality during the Industrial Revolution: Lessons from England’s Social Tables, 1688–1867’, Ec.HR 72 (2019), 88–125, pp. 104–5.

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183 184 185 186

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Allen, ‘Class Structure’, p. 105. Allen, ‘Class Structure’, p. 107. Allen, ‘Class Structure’, p. 111. E. P. Thompson, ‘Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle without Class?’, SH 3 (1978), 133–65, p. 142. 187 Thompson, ‘Class Struggle’, p. 145. 188 W. A. Armstrong, ‘The Countryside’, in Thompson, ed., Cambridge Social History of Britain, I, pp. 87–153, at pp. 95–6. 189 R. H. Sweet, ‘Topographies of Politeness’, TRHS 12 (2002), 355–74, p. 372. 190 Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, pp. 22–6: see below, pp. 213–14. 191 Christopher A. Whatley, ‘Economic Causes and Consequences of the Union of 1707: A Survey’, SHR 68 (1989), 150–81. 192 Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 523–4. 193 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1994), ch. 4. 194 On the nature of village life in eighteenth-century England, see Thomas Turner, The Diary of a Village Shopkeeper, 1754–1765, ed. David Vaisey (London: Folio Society, 1998). 195 James Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 26. 196 Obkelkevich, Religion and Rural Society, p. 26. 197 Porter, English Society, pp. 221–2; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 9. 198 Obkelkevich, Religion and Rural Society, p. 27. 199 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 652. 200 Armstrong, ‘Countryside’, p. 151. 201 Armstrong, ‘Countryside’, p. 151. 202 George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbance in France and England, 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1964); Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969); Tim Harris, ‘Perceptions of the Crowd in Later Stuart London’, in Merritt, ed., Imagining Early Modern London, pp. 250–72. 203 Helen Berry, ‘Polite Consumption: Shopping in Eighteenth-Century England’, TRHS 12 (2002), 375–94, p. 393. 204 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 653. 205 Porter, English Society, p. 220; Julian Hoppit, ‘The Myth of the South Sea Bubble’, TRHS 12 (2002), 141–65, pp. 141–3. 206 For comments on the immediate aftermath, see Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (London: Dent, 1974), pp. 90–1. 207 Hoppit, ‘Myth’, pp. 162–3. 208 W. A. Speck, Society and Literature in England, 1700–60 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), pp. 98–9, 167; Silke Stratmann, Myths of Speculation: The South Sea Bubble and 18th-century English Literature (Munich: Fink, 2000). 209 Speck, Society and Literature, p. 28; Paul Goring, Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (London: Continuum, 2008), p. 86.

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210 John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, ed. Edgar V. Roberts (London: Arnold, 1968), 3.16.16–17. 211 David Nokes, John Gay: A Profession of Friendship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), ch. 10. 212 Alexander Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1963), 121–42 (p. 222). 213 William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 214 On the enthusiasm for exotic animals in eighteenth-century England, see Christopher Plumb, The Georgian Menagerie: Exotic Animals in EighteenthCentury London (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). 215 Lizzie Collingham, The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World (London: Bodley Head, 2017), pp. 79–81. 216 Edward W. Coker, ‘Adam Smith’s Concept of the Social System’, JBE 9 (1990), 139–42. 217 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 3. 218 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Mark G. Spencer (Ware: Wordsworth, 2012), p. 662. 219 John Milios, ‘Social Classes in Classical and Marxist Political Economy’, AJES 59 (2000), 283–302, pp. 284–6. 220 Isaac di Pinto, An Essay on Circulation and Credit, trans. S. Baggs (London, 1774), p. 116. 221 Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p. 254. 222 Langford, Polite and Commercial Society, p. 654. 223 Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 35.

Chapter 2

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Perceptions of class in the late Middle Ages

Piers Plowman It is hard to imagine a poem that is more concerned with rank, status and hierarchy than Piers Plowman, written and rewritten, c.1370–c.1390. The poem opens as the narrator falls asleep in the Malvern Hills, a series of low and gentle peaks in the West of England. Imagining that he is looking east over a large flat plain towards London, he sees in the distance a castle on a hill and, directly in front of him, ‘a fair field full of folk’.1 The people perform a variety of activities, some productive, others conspicuously less so: Some applied themselves to plowing, played very rarely, Sowing seeds and setting plants worked very hard; Won what wasters gluttonously consume. And some pursued pride, put on proud clothing, Came all got up in garments garish to see. To prayers and penance many put themselves, All for love of our Lord lived hard lives, Hoping thereafter to have Heaven’s bliss – Such as hermits and anchorites’ that hold to their cells, Don’t care to go cavorting about the countryside, With some lush livelihood delighting their bodies. And some made themselves merchants – they managed better, As it seems to our sight that such men prosper. And some make mirth as minstrels can And get gold for their music, guiltless, I think. But jokers and jugglers, Judas’ children, Invent fantasies to tell about and make fools of themselves, And have whatever wits they need to work if they wanted. What Paul preaches of them I don’t dare repeat here: Qui loquitur turpiloquium2 is Lucifer’s henchman. Beadsmen and beggars bustled about Till both their bellies and their bags were crammed to the brim; Staged flytings3 for their food, fought over beer.



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In gluttony, God knows, they go to bed, And rise up with ribaldry, those Robert’s boys [i.e., robbers]. Sleep and sloth pursue them always (Prologue, 20–45).

It is easy to see why the figure of Piers Plowman was so widely understood as a critic of a complacent social order; why so many subsequent poems copied and adapted the figure to articulate their critique of society so that a plowman tradition of literature developed, especially among writers attracted to the radical religious tradition of Lollardy; and why Piers Plowman played a role in major rebellions such as the Peasants Revolt of 1381, by which time a version must have been circulating in manuscript and have been well known.4 Thomas Walsingham, in his Historia Anglicana, which chronicled events in England from 1272 to 1422 (when he died) cites a letter from one of the leaders, the cleric, John Ball, which not only refers to Piers Plowman, but is based on the poem’s style and its use of names: John Schep, som tyme Seynt Marie prest of York, and nowe of Colchestre, greteth welle Johan Nameles, and Johan the Mullere, and Johan Cartere, and biddeth hem that their war of gyle in borugh, and stondeth togiddir in Goddis name, and biddeth Peres Ploughman go to his wereke, and chastise welle Hobbe the Robbere, and taketh with you Johan Trewman, and alle his felawes… [emphasis added].5

There was a long tradition of political literature in English and Latin and a large number of poems criticized the apparent ineptitude and self-serving nature of the upper classes, many writers perhaps conscious that ‘A new audience was emerging comprised of the gentry, the merchants, the artisans and the professional classes of lawyers and doctors’, who would not necessarily support the monarchy uncritically.6 ‘A Song on the Times’, a Latin poem written during the reign of Henry III (1216–72), launched a pithy assault on the socio-economic culture that the writer felt had been allowed to flourish which bears an obvious relation to that in Piers Plowman: ‘The King and his nobles are sufficiently bitter; almost all the rich men are too avaricious; the poor man, who possesses little, must be robbed and spoiled of his property to enrich the wealthy.’ 7 There were also a number of European literary traditions that were explicitly based on an understanding of class and class conflict, notably the chansons de geste, French epic poems that celebrate the heroic deeds of Charlemagne and other great warriors, that were composed from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Although they could not be said to form a separate genre in England as they did in France they were widely read, adapted and influenced the development of English romance.8 As Luke Sutherland has argued, ‘class consciousness drove the genre, a particular “class enunciatory position” – that of the barons – defines many epics from the twelfth century and long after that’.9 Those who read

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Piers Plowman as a political work about class conflict were certainly not the only readers who read literature that way. Langland’s complex and nuanced vision of late fourteenth-century English society is an imaginative tour de force of political analysis. Society is not only divided into a series of professions or stations, as in estates satire.10 The estates of the religious, musicians, merchants and so on, are acknowledged. However, the fundamental division of society was into producers and consumers, those who are of benefit to others, and those who exploit their fellow men and women.11 This is a moral conception of society, but it is also, I would argue, one that understands class divisions and may even articulate a form of class-consciousness. The passage opens by dividing people into those who sow and plough and who spend little time in leisure and those who conspicuously consume what others have worked hard to produce. The possession of things inspires the deadly sin of pride, the illusion that what has been obtained unfairly actually reflects well on the owner rather than badly. There are, of course, numerous Biblical verses that support this belief, such as Christ’s pronouncement to his disciples that ‘a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven … It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’ (Matthew 19, 23–4). Here, however, we have a more developed and carefully focused understanding of wealth based on the division of labour and the consequent stratification of society into the classes of ‘have nots’ who work hard and the classes of ‘haves’ who do not. Langland carefully divides and sub-divides the estates. Hermits and anchorites are virtuous people who consume little and produce spiritual wealth that is of benefit to others (although, of course, there are numerous rather less impressive clerics who exploit the people they should serve).12 Merchants are represented with studied ambiguity: they will undoubtedly prosper, but their labour may benefit others and so could be valuable if used properly or it could lead to superfluous production and consumption that will inspire yet more pride. Musicians are also ambiguous figures. Their music undoubtedly creates pleasure, which the narrator thinks may be a good thing, with the implicit reservation that it could also waste time and lead people away from the productive activities of the plowman. However, comedians and jugglers are the descendants of the arch-betrayer, Judas, presumably because they encourage treachery rather than productivity.13 Beggars are also condemned for their failure to contribute to society, as are beadsmen, professional prayers employed by the wealthy to reduce the time they or their relatives would have to spend in Purgatory.14 Even so, it is clear that the real villains are the rich, as the opening of the passage indicates with its contrast between those who sow seeds and plant crops and those who ‘gluttonously consume’ and wear ‘proud clothing’

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(Piers Plowman may well have been influenced by another poem in a similar midlands dialect, Winner and Waster, which takes the form of a debate between prudent productivity and wastefulness ).15 It is no surprise that Langland’s poem was widely read and that it seems to have been known by the peasants it celebrated as the backbone of English society.16 Piers Plowman was written in the wake of the deadly outbreak of the plague in the middle of the century, when two outbreaks killed first 40–60% of the population (1348–49), and then a further 20% more (1361–62). One of the many consequences of such a drastic population loss was that demand for labour grew to previously unimaginable levels and many peasants were able to demand unheard of wages.17 The poem condemns the drift towards pride and greed caused by these developments, which undermine the traditional fabric of society and its supposed reliance on the basic division into the work of the plowman who grows food; the knight, who defends it; and the parson who looks after everyone’s souls.18 As the passage in the Prologue demonstrates, Langland’s fear is that society will cease to exist in terms of moral checks and balances, and will become instead one structured around producers and consumers, the wealthy peasants becoming upwardly mobile, spending their extra income in ways that detract from their fundamental role, i.e., to grow food. The first section of the poem recounts the series of visions of the dreamer, Will, as he observes the forces of good trying to save society, culminating in Piers the Plowman’s attempt to secure a pardon for mankind. In Passus 1 Holy Church reminds him that the rich have responsibilities to the poor: ‘Though you’re mighty men at law, be meek in your deeds, / For the same measure you mete out, amiss or otherwise, / You shall be weighed with it when you go hence’ (I, 176–8). In Passus 2 he dreams he witnesses the marriage of her counterpart, Lady Meed (Reward), who is announced in the form of a proclamation written by False and read out by Simony (the buying and selling of church offices for profit) and Civil (civil law, notorious in the fourteenth century for its corruption): Let men now living and those to come after know, etc. Let all who are on earth hear and bear witness That Meed is married more for her property Than for any goodness or grace or any goodly parentage. Falseness fancies her for he knows she’s rich, And Favel with his fickle speech enfeoffs them by this charter That they may be princes in pride and despise Poverty[.] (2, 74–80).19

Meed is to be sold to the highest bidder, the one who thinks they can gain the most profit from her.20 Marriage, like other contracts and institutions in England, has been corrupted by money, one of the chief effects being

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the deliberate oppression of the poor who are now despised rather then helped. Casting them aside is a serious loss because ‘poverty … naturally wards off vice [and] … it is nearly impossible for the poor not to do well because they are habitually downtrodden and therefore much less susceptible to sin than the rich are’.21 Serving Meed reduces the moral and spiritual level of society. Feudal relations of enfeoffment, whereby a lord grants a retainer land in return for service (usually military), have been corrupted, and become based on profit, an indication of one order of class relationship becoming another.22 Perceptive late-fourteenth-century observers registered a seismic shift in class relations taking place. Langland has become the spokesperson of the peasants, a class that cannot represent themselves so have to be represented, placing their values in direct opposition to current social trends.23 Those who should uphold the law now help the more wealthy and powerful to exploit the poor: Mayors and mace-bearers that are intermediaries between The King and the commons in keeping the laws, Who should punish on pillories and pining-stools Brewers and bakers, butchers and cooks; For these are the ones in the world who work most harm To the poor people that purchase small portions; Because they poison the people privily and often They get rich through their retail-sales and buy rental property With what the poor people should be putting in their bellies: For if their earnings were honest, their houses were less high, And they’d buy no borough-freeholds – you can be sure of that (Passus III, 76–86).

Local government conspires to delude and mislead the central government it exists to serve, reversing the order of authority in order to facilitate the exploitation of the peasants. Local constables and justices of the peace (‘mace-bearers’) protect wealthy tradesmen – presumably because it is in their interests – and do not punish them for defrauding the peasants. Accordingly, local elites are enabled to make larger profits and so acquire property on more advantageous terms (freehold, whereby the landlord owned the land and property outright), and build grander houses, all at the expense of the poor peasants who should be benefiting from their own hard work. Instead the fruits of their labour are appropriated by a parasitic class who will continue to increase their power until they are stopped. Yet again, it is easy to see why Piers Plowman was read as such a radical, revolutionary work. Will’s hope in the early sections of the poem is that ‘Truth will be found in honest labour … [and] that a fairer system of reward and punishment would create a world of peace and concord.’ 24 In Passus 3 the King wants to marry Lady Meed to Conscience, a marriage that makes sense for a



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worldly ruler, enabling him to distribute wealth to his subjects in an appropriate manner: It becomes a king who takes care of a realm To give meed to men who meekly serve him, To aliens, to all men, to honor them with gifts. Emperors and earls and all kinds of lords With gifts get young men to gallop on their errands. The Pope and his prelates expect to get presents, And they give meed to men to maintain their laws. Servants for their service – we see well the truth – Take meed from their masters as they may agree. Beggars for their prayers they beg men for meed; Minstrels for their mirth demand the meed. The king has meed from his men to make peace in the land; Priests that preach to the people good behavior Ask for meed and mass-pennies and their meals as well[.] (3, 209–24).

The speech starts with a reasonable principle, that true service deserves proper reward, and it is hardly surprising that the king, who has to govern as best he can in a flawed and corrupt world, is persuaded by her words (‘By Christ, it strikes me / Meed has argued so ably’ (228–9). But as Lady Meed continues it becomes obvious that she has blurred the division between just reward and the distribution of favours. The figures from the Field of Folk in Will’s dream reappear – the compromised priests, beggars and minstrels – and, if Meed has her way, the king will use his power to preserve the status quo rather than reforming the realm as Conscience demands. Meed’s speech is plausible enough, which is why her power is so insidious and dangerous, her influence working incrementally to undermine the nature of government. Conscience will not tolerate her presence. His rousing speech in opposition to Meed’s influence, structured like a sermon, concludes with an apocalyptic vision of the triumph of the peasants: Each man shall play with a plow, pickax or spade, Spin or spread dung – or spoil himself in sloth. Priests and parsons with Placebo shall hunt And ding upon David each day till evening.25 On hunting or on hawking if any of them go, The living he delights in he shall lose straightaway. Shall neither king nor knight, constable nor mayor, Lay such care upon the commons as to make them come to court And put them in a panel and have them plight their oaths.26

In this passage Conscience starts with words that look as if they are an expansion of the rhetorical question posed in a sermon by John Ball in the Peasants’ Revolt, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, / Who was then the

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gentleman?’ 27 Conscience provides an apocalyptic vision of a peasant society in which priests support the peasants by praying for their souls, reciting Psalms instead of hunting and hawking.28 There is no need for knights to protect them because ‘There shall be no battles, and no man shall bear arms’ (323). Instead, Conscience counters Meed’s worldly common sense with a radical vision of an ideal society, exactly as the peasants would want it to exist. Everyone works and is equal, either producing crops and husbanding animals or labouring for the salvation of souls. Conscience moves from this radical vision to more mundane and specific details: people will not be summoned to court to take part in court cases, a costly undertaking for little compensation which prevents them from working productively in the fields. The whole system of medieval justice, hated by the peasants, will be reformed, streamlined and become immune to corruption: ‘King’s court and common court, consistory and chapter, / All will be but one court and one man be justice’ (320–1).29 Throughout the visio, which constitutes the first part of Piers Plowman, the world is seen through the eyes of the exploited peasants.30 Peace presents a plea at court that Wrong has seized his wife and raped the widow of his neighbour, Reginald: Both my fowls and my farrows [litters of piglets] fall prey to his followers. I don’t dare for fear of him fight or complain. He borrowed Bayard [his horse] from me and never brought him back, And I got no farthing for him for any plea I made. He encourages his company to kill my hired hands, Preempts what I have to sell, harasses me in my bargaining, Breaks down my bard doors, bears away my wheat And leaves only a talley in return for ten quarters of oats (4, 51–8).

The description serves as a litany of the worst fears of any peasant farmer and the need to counter a sustained threat despite the overwhelming odds against success. Peace’s plea inaugurates a vicious battle between the forces of right and justice, led by Conscience and the commons who ‘could perceive the truth’ (80) and those who wish to protect Wrong. Some of his supporters are corrupt and villainous, like Meed; others, allegorical values which would work effectively under proper government, such as Wisdom and Peace (who, when confronted by so many powerful forces, joins those urging the King to forgive Wrong). Eventually the King summons Reason and Conscience and banishes Meed for perverting the law. However, he receives a stark warning from Conscience: ‘Unless the commons will assent, / It’s very hard, by my head, actually to effect this, / And to arbitrate equitably for all your liegemen’ (181–4). Conscience’s judgement is a forceful reminder that the common people need to be heeded if the structures of society are to work

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in a fair and equitable manner, yet another acknowledgement of the need for the powerful to pay heed to the demands of the peasants. But Conscience is also warning the peasants that they need to be united, not to be corrupted by greed and, as a consequence, sow division between themselves. The warning is prescient. After a sermon to the people the Seven Deadly Sins all agree to repent and go on a pilgrimage. Unfortunately, they get lost but Piers the Plowman appears and promises to help the pilgrims repent if they help him plough his half-acre. He is remarkably effective at setting everyone, including the shirkers, to work: Fakers for fear fled into barns And flogged sheaves with flails from morning till evening. So that Hunger wouldn’t be eager to cast his eye on them. For a potful of peas that Piers had cooked A heap of hermits laid hands on spades And cut off their copes and made short coats of them And went like workmen to weed and to mow, And dug dirt and dung to drive off Hunger (6, 183–90).

We have a vision of society working together properly, inspired by mutual interest in producing food as well as the fear of starvation. As with the details of the law courts, Langland is eager to remind readers of the reality of the life of the peasant, the true heart of English society. The description serves to unite the peasants as a class, and to remind those who do not work like them to be inspired by their example and join or support what they do properly. The dignity of hard, ordinary labour stands as a pointed contrast to the wasteful self-serving endeavours that are rewarded when Lady Meed holds sway. The pardon that Piers secures for mankind in Passus 7 emphasizes the importance and dignity of the manual labour of agricultural workers, in contrast to the pernicious lies of those who exploit them: Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them.31 All living laborers that live by their hands That truly take and truly earn And live in love and in law, for their low hearts Had the same absolution that was sent to Piers. Of beggars and street-beadmen the bull makes no mention Unless there’s a real reason that renders them beggars. For whoever asks for alms, unless he has need, Is as false as the Fiend and defrauds the needy, And also beguiles the giver against his will (7, 62–9).

Society only works when there is mutual respect and all forms of work are properly respected and performed honestly and with dignity. There is never any room for deception and exploitation.

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However, Piers is convinced that the work carried out under his direction will not lead his followers to heaven and he tears the pardon, realizing that he has to start his journey again and seek truth inwardly.32 At the end of the Prologue, Will had seen a vision of a parliament of mice and rats determined to put a bell round the neck of a court cat that oppressed and tormented them. A rat argues that it would be for their ‘common profit’ (Prologue, 169) to do so. They club together to buy a bell but none of them is brave enough to attempt to hang it around the cat’s neck. A wise mouse counsels them to abandon their plan, which he argues is doomed to inevitable failure: Though we killed the cat, yet there would come another To scratch us and all our kind though we crept under benches. Therefore I counsel all the commons to let the cat alone, And let’s never be so bold as to show the bell to him … Where the cat is a kitten, the court is wholly wretched. That’s how Holy Writ reads, whoever wants to look: Woe to the land where the king is a child!33 For no creature may rest quiet because of rats at night, And many a man’s malt we mice would destroy, And also you rabble of rats would ruin men’s clothing If it weren’t for the court-cat that can outleap you. For if you rats held the reins, you couldn’t rule yourselves (Prologue, 185–8, 194–201).

The beast fable sends the potent message that the people are not yet ready to govern themselves – and perhaps may never be able to do so. They need a strong central authority figure who will keep them in check and rule them properly for their own good. Therefore a weak king, a child, is a curse as their own base natures will be given free reign and the commonwealth will not function for common profit.34 The fable explains why Piers’ enthusiastic desire to reform the peoples’ moral and spiritual health comes to a sudden halt. Despite his good intentions and early success his plan is doomed to failure, because he cannot create a just and equal society on earth as he imagines. The people need a king just as they need a God. The first part of Piers Plowman provides a vision of the perfect society, labourers and priests working together to provide sustenance for the body and the soul (there is no need for knights) that will never exist. Piers ceases work and begins a new long quest for Do-Well in the hope of improving himself ready to instruct others. When Will has his vision of Piers at the end of the poem he has returned in the guise of Christ to fight for mankind. The agricultural references are now symbolic as Piers ploughs for souls: Grace gave Piers a team, four great oxen. The first was Luke, a large beast with lowly mien,



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And Mark, and Matthew the third, mighty beasts both; And joined to them one John, most gentle of all, The prize ox of Pier’s plow, surpassing all the others. And Grace of his goodness gave Piers four horses, To harrow afterward all that his oxen plowed. One had the name Austin [Augustine], and Ambrose another, Gregory the great clerk, and the good Jerome (19, 262–70).

At last, Piers the Plowman, ‘whose deeds are like God’s’ (430), has found a way to work productively to save souls and create a true Christian society. Instead of focusing his anger on the wasters and beggars who exploit the deserving poor, Piers is urged to turn his attention to the most important ecclesiastical problem: And may Piers amend the pope who pillages Holy Church And over the king claims to be keeper of Christians, And does not care though Christians are killed and robbed, And pays people to fight and spill Christian blood Against the Old Law and New law, as Luke bears witness: Thou shalt not kill; vengeance is mine, etc.35 It seems as if as long as he himself has his will He takes no heed at all of any one else (19, 442–8).

The work to create a society that it is as just as it can be has to start within the church. But what needs to be emphasized is that Langland’s conception of church reform has to come from the bottom upwards. While the people need to be governed by a king, it is not clear they need to worship in a church presided over by the Pope. The ‘B’ text of Piers Plowman seems to have been written just after the Papal Schism (1378), and the conflict between rival Popes, one in Rome, the other in Avignon (alluded to in the Prologue, 107–11).36 The Schism meant that the Papacy was, understandably, thought by many Christians to be in urgent need of reform and to have surrendered its authority and ability to unite the church. Langland’s vision of a church that is imagined in terms of the dignity of agricultural labour had an obvious appeal, as the invocation of the name Piers Plowman by rebellious clerics indicates.37 Piers Plowman represents the vision of a self-sufficient agrarian society as a utopian fantasy that will never be implemented because it will always be an ideal not a reality.38 Even so, Langland makes the peasant and his labour central to a conception of society in his great poem, a class-based ideal that was to become a central tradition in English writing and thinking.

The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, probably written just after Piers Plowman (c.1387–1400), also places great value on the figure of the

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ploughman. In the General Prologue, Chaucer appears to be following the tradition of estates writing in valuing the figures of the knight, parson and ploughman as ideals.39 The ploughman is described in ways that resemble, but perhaps qualify, Langland’s representation of Piers Plowman: With hym ther was a PLOWMAN, was his brother, hadde ylad of dong ful many a fother; A trewe swynkere and a good was he, Lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee. God loved he best with al his hoole hert At alle tymes, thogh him gamed or smerte, And thanne his neighebor right as hymselve. He wolde thresshe, and therto dyke and delve, For Cristes sake, for every povre wight, Withouten hire, if it lay in his myght. His tithes payde he ful faire and wel, Bothe of his propre swynk and his catel. In a tabard he rood upon a mere.40

The ploughman is the brother (perhaps literally) of the virtuous parson who looks after his flock in the same way that the ploughman tends the fields. There is the same interest in the nature of the ploughman’s labour as there is in Langland, Chaucer describing him carrying cartloads of dung, threshing, digging ditches, looking after cattle and riding on a mare. It is possible that the use of the word ‘delve’ for work is intended as a recollection of John Ball’s re-use of the couplet describing Adam’s toils after the Fall, and it is surely a recollection of Langland’s use of the word.41 The ploughman is virtuous, a good neighbour and a true Christian, working to benefit the commonwealth. However, there is little of the imaginative energy here and, as Jill Mann has pointed out, the ploughman does not suffer as Langland’s ploughmen do.42 Rather, the ploughman appears to be a colourless, marginal figure, not having the vitality of many of the other pilgrims, such as the miller, the nun and the pardoner. Significantly enough he lacks a tale, although one was added in many later editions.43 Chaucer may have been demonstrating that the traditional ideals represented in Langland’s poem were ‘inadequate to account for the workings of society’.44 Was Chaucer, as John Simons has argued in a suggestive essay, reassuring his readers that after the rebellions of recent years, legitimate authority had been re-established and the dangerous aspirations of the lower classes could be laughed at?45 This might be true of the tales in the A fragment, on which Simons bases most of his argument, The Miller’s Tale and The Reeve’s Tale, which show a foolish carpenter and a greedy miller humiliated,

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but would not seem to account for the chivalric plot of The Knight’s Tale (however we read that) or, indeed, the wide social mix of the pilgrims. Chaucer, a vintner’s son, was closely associated with the upper strata of London society, and did very well out of his relationship to patrons, forging a lucrative career.46 His wife’s sister was mistress to John of Gaunt and it seems as though Chaucer received Gaunt’s patronage and, after the death of Gaunt’s wife Blanche of Lancaster in 1568, he wrote one of his earliest poems, The Book of the Duchess, for him.47 By 1380, having travelled abroad on diplomatic missions, Chaucer was ‘quite an important person’, having ‘a responsible and well-paid job as a customs official’, as well as revenues from the exchequer as ‘an esquire of the royal household’ and (probably) from John of Gaunt. Furthermore he lived rent-free in a comfortable dwelling in London and associated with ‘well-placed and powerful men’.48 He was from a family of some status already in London trade circles: but he had clearly risen to a position of wealth and celebrity by the time of his death having become the pre-eminent poet at the English court in the decade before.49 Chaucer, who occupied an uncertain social position which was part gentility, part mercantile, certainly had more reason than Langland to be grateful to the Ricardian regime.50 Like Langland, his work was co-opted by anti-clerical and Protestant traditions so that by the late sixteenth century Chaucer was associated with the radical ideas of Wycliff and the Lollards and seen as a disaffected writer eager for the reform, even disestablishment, of the late medieval church.51 However, for many modern critics, this is at odds with his true position as a champion of the aristocracy, eager to support the ruling class and to blame the aspirational lower orders for England’s ills. The Canterbury Tales ‘seeks to divert and thereby contain the resentment of the economically unprivileged … the familiar ruse of a threatened power structure’.52 In this reading, Chaucer and Langland are, therefore, polar opposites in political, ideological and class terms.53 While Langland based an image of the ideal society on the figure of the peasant, Chaucer’s attitude to the peasants was that of a ‘comparative newcomer to [his] class’ and, therefore, ‘insufferably patrician’.54 Is this true? Was Chaucer a hired hand of the upper classes, and not the genial author who saw ‘God’s plenty’ in the foibles of the world rather than the greed and sinfulness of the ‘field full of folk’, or the pious religious author whose The Parson’s Tale finally corrects the errors of the pilgrims and shows them the true path to heaven?55 Certainly he is no friend to the aspirational and the ostentatious in the General Prologue, but is his critique consistent and always travelling in one direction? Can we fit the tales to the tellers?56 The miller, who is described immediately after the ploughman,

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is coarse, brutish and vulgar and his character is represented in The General Prologue as choleric and unbalanced: The MILLERE was a stout carl for the nones Ful byg he was of brawn, and eek of bones. That proved wel, for over al ther he cam, At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram. He was short-sholdred, brood, a thikke knarre; Ther was no dore that he nolde heve of harre, Or breke it at a rennyng with his heed. His berd as any sowe or fox was reed, And therto brood, as though it were a spade. Upon the cop right of his nose he hade A werte, and theron stood a toft of herys, Reed as the brustles of a sowes erys; His nosethirles blake were and wyde. A swerd and a bokeler bar he by his syde. His mouth as greet was as a greet forneys. He was a janglere and a goliardeys, And that was moost of synne and harlotries. Wel koude he stelen corn and tollen thries; And yet he hadde a thombe of gold, pardee. A whit cote and a blew hood wered he. A baggepipe wel koude he blowe and sowne, And therwithal he broghte us out of towne (545–66).

We learn that the miller is exceptionally physically strong and aggressive, thick set (‘short-sholdred’), with a red beard and a wart on his broad nose out of which grow thick hairs. He is clearly not of man of delicate breeding and refined culture. Presumably his physical strength is a natural attribute but has also been developed by the hard physical labour that milling requires. We do not know whether the miller has a watermill or a windmill and he could have operated either. Watermills were easier to construct and there were probably more than 10,000 of them by 1300.57 If the miller operated a windmill he would have had a post mill, the type that were most popular in Western Europe, which was a large wooden structure that rotated on a thick pole.58 Both types of mill would have been physically demanding to operate so millers were traditionally represented as powerful, because running a mill would not have been a job for someone who was not healthy and robust.59 Mills were built by landowners to increase their profits and millers were employed to make money for them. They became notorious for their deviousness and desire to exploit ordinary people, even though evidence would suggest that millers were no more corrupt than many people in positions



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of local power and authority.60 Chaucer’s miller is represented as aspirational and eager to assert his status by wearing a sword and a buckler, as though he had some knightly status, a swaggering self-image that may be even more ridiculous than is at first apparent given the anachronistic nature of the knight’s own bearing and his social irrelevance in late fourteenth-century society.61 In the drama of the tale telling, he drinks too much and when the knight has finished his tale pushes himself forward, insisting that he can tell a story that is as good as that of the knight: The Millere, that for dronken was al pale, So that unnethe upon his hors he sat, He nolde avalen neither hood ne hat, Ne abyde no man for his curteisie, But in Pilates voys he gan to crie, And swoor, ‘By armes, and by blood and bones, I kan a noble tale for the nones, With which I wol now quite the Knyghtes tale.’ (3120–7)

The notoriously vulgar The Miller’s Tale is in line with the bawdy songs that the miller is said to sing in the description in The General Prologue and, in an obvious manner, highlights his boorish class pretensions. The same might be said of the bagpipes he plays. Bagpipes were generally associated with folk music for local festivals and often with ribald entertainment, as well as being an obvious symbol of the male sexual organs. They were linked to excess, gluttony and lust.62 The miller is an unsettling and complicated mixture of different elements and modes of representation. Much of his character, as has long been recognized, can be attributed to medieval notions of physiognomy, the science of identifying the relationship between physical features and personality traits.63 It is also clear, however, that issues of class are important when considering the role and significance of the miller. The miller is sly and cunning, but in a manner that is very easy for a reader to recognize, exactly like the red beard he has grown, advertising his vulpine nature. He wears what he thinks is a status symbol in the sword and buckler but sporting these symbols of military prowess only serves to draw attention to his vulgar lack of gentility. The knight, who has fought in numerous battles on Crusades in Southern Spain and Northern Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Northern Europe, does not carry arms, and neither does the squire who has served in Flanders, Artois and Picardy, appropriate for a military apprentice.64 The miller’s insistence in doing so singles him out as someone, for all his strength, unfit for military service, lacking training, restraint and with an inability to curb his appetites or to moderate his speech. Chaucer represents the miller as a puffed up, arrogant social climber, eager to improve

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his standing and advertise his success and, in doing so, exposing the gap between his pretensions and the reality of his coarse, boastful nature. The character of the miller would seem, therefore, to support the case made by various critics that Chaucer was an arriviste, eager to look down on his social inferiors and deflect attention from his own rise up the class ladder, as well as support a status quo from which he had substantially benefited.65 Even so, it needs to be pointed out that Chaucer’s satire is not significantly at odds with that in Piers Plowman and its excoriating, repeated attacks on the crimes of the nouveaux riches. If we read the portrait of the miller in terms of his tale doubts about Chaucer’s social and political views will probably grow. While the miller is unable to hide his vulgar nature beneath his pretensions of gentility, The Miller’s Tale stands in direct contrast. The tale is ostensibly coarse, but, in substance, sophisticated and, in terms of the drama of the first Canterbury Tales, an entirely appropriate counterpoint to The Knight’s Tale. While the tale of Palamon and Arcite’s love contest for Emily is chivalric (further emphasizing the absurdity of the miller bearing arms), historically distant and rural in setting, the tale of Nicholas and Absolon’s competition for the favours of Alison is lustful, contemporary and urban. Theseus, the patriarch who presides over the action of The Knight’s Tale seems wise and dignified; John, Alison’s husband, is duped by a bogus story of an impending apocalyptic flood and is the stock figure of a myopic old man married to a libidinous younger woman who delights in deceiving him. Emily, despite her desire to remain single, is manipulated by divine forces beyond her control into a marriage she does not want; Alison, who begins the tale trapped in a loveless marriage, is the only character who escapes punishment for her behaviour: John breaks his arm, Absolon suffers the indignity of rejection and bodily contempt, and Nicholas has his backside branded.66 Few scholars now believe that the fabliau, a story of bawdy cunning with an ingenious ending, was a genre written by predominantly middle-class writers.67 But Charles Muscantine’s famous distinction between the courtly Knight’s Tale and the ‘bourgeois’ Miller’s Tale has an obvious explanatory force.68 For all his evident lack of gentility and good manners the miller tells a tale that systematically undercuts the perceptions and values of The Knight’s Tale: the hierarchy of that earlier tale is now replaced with a more horizontal understanding of social relations.69 The knight, away on Crusades for most of his life and so rarely in mixed company, is indifferent to women who are represented as prizes for virtuous knights to win (as the women lament after Arcite is killed, ‘Why woldestow be deed … / ‘And haddest gold ynough, and Emilye’ (The Knight’s Tale, 2835–6)). The miller, in contrast, although hardly represented as a proto-feminist, exposes the dishonesty and deception of courtly language through his representation of the effete Absolon,



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with his excessive attention to his appearance and self-interested aping of what he imagines is upper-class speech, presumably based on his reading of romance. He stands beneath the window of the marital bedroom, assuming that John is out of town buying timber (3665–6), and attempts to woo Alison: What do ye, hony-comb, sweete Alisoun, My faire bryd, my sweete cynamome? Awaketh, lemman myn, and speketh to me! Wel litel thynken ye upon my wo, That for youre love I swete ther I go. No wonder is thogh that I swelte and swete; I moorne as dooth a lamb after the tete. Ywis, lemman, I have swich love-longynge That lik a turtel trewe is my moornynge. I may nat ete na moore than a mayde (3698–707).

Absolon imagines he is demonstrating his sophisticated learning, unaware that he is extremely unlikely to impress Alison, who is far more cunning and far less innocent than he imagines and certainly more than a match for him. He has been out-manoeuvred by his social superior and rival, Nicholas, who has combined his knowledge of the Bible and ability to manipulate those less intellectually adept than he is to good effect in separating the willing Alison from John (only when Nicholas relaxes and fails to appreciate Absolon’s understandable desire for revenge does he over-reach himself and suffer the consequences).70 Absolon sings in a way designed to appeal to the tender affections of ladies with his list of sweets, love-tokens and cute animals, but betrays his true desires in representing himself like a lamb who desires its mother’s teat.71 The reader is forced to ask whether Absolon is ridiculous because his aping of courtly language is absurd (which would indicate that Chaucer is sneering at inappropriate class pretensions) or whether the miller is right to expose the facile nature of courtly language, which pretends to be focused on higher matters, but is really as base in its aims as that of the characters in the tale. It is obvious that we are reading satire, but it is not quite so clear what is being satirized. Absalon has clearly not seen Alison as the reader has: Fair was this yonge wyf, and therwithal As any wezele hir body gent and smal. A ceynt she werede, barred al of silk, A barmclooth as whit as morne milk Upon hir lendes, ful of many a goore. Whit was hir smok, and broyden al bifoore And eek bihynde, on hir coler aboute, Of col-blak silk, withinne and eek withoute.

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Literature and class The tapes of hir white voluper Were of the same suyte of hir coler; Hir filet brood of silk, and set ful hye. And sikerly she hadde a likerous ye; Ful smale ypulled were hire browes two, And tho were bent and blake as any sloo. She was ful moore blisful on to see Than is the newe pere-jonette tree, And softer than the wolle is of a wether. And by hir girdel heeng a purs of lether, Tasseled with silk and perled with latoun (3233–51).

Absolon associates Alison with soft, pliable animals that are easy to control, but she is really more like a weasel, beautiful but dangerous, ferocious and self-interested. Furthermore, the rhyme of ‘wether/lether’ towards the end of the passage reminds us that she has a practical outlook – presumably why she might have ended up married to a relatively successful carpenter when there were few life choices available for women – and is associated with the use of animals for human purposes in a less benign way than Absolon conceives. The production of leather involved the slaughter of cows; wethers were castrated rams, used to produce wool as they were surplus to breeding requirements. Alison might seem soft but she will use her ability to attract and charm men as she pleases. In comparing her to a ‘pere-jonette’ (a St John pear, which ripens early) and her eyebrows to sloes, Chaucer shows readers that she is mature in the ways of the world at a young age (eighteen (3223)) and there is a bitter, strong-tasting edge to her (sloes were easily available in medieval England; they have to be treated before they can be consumed, flavouring gin, making pickles or chutneys and in flavouring puddings).72 The description of Alison concludes, ‘She was a prymerole (primrose), a piggesnye (pig’s eye, a flower), / For any lord to leggen in his bedde, / Or yet for any good yeman to wedde’ (3268–70). Like the objects that represent her, Alison has her value and place in the world.73 It is easy to see how Alison’s character works as part of the comedy in the tale and as a pointed contrast to the passive Emily in The Knight’s Tale. Emily is represented by the knight as Absolon thinks he is representing Alison when he woos her outside her bedroom window. She is described perfunctorily and in terms of her physical appearance: ‘That Emelye, that fairer was to sene / Than is the lylie upon his stalke grene, / And fressher than the May with floures newe – / For with the rose colour stroof hire hewe’ (The Knight’s Tale, 1035–8). The physical details used to represent Alison have a symbolic and/or metonymic significance, another pointed contrast between the two tales. In the tragedy, things happen to Emily, as

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she laments, and her trust in Diana proves ill-founded (2362–4); in the comedy, Alison not only inspires lust but makes things happen, notably when she sticks her bottom out of the window to be kissed by Absolon (The Miller’s Tale, 3729–41), which leads to the cruel comic resolution. It is harder to see how the representation of Alison functions as a precise class satire, even though she is represented as having value in explicitly class terms. John Simons points out that Alison has an absurd amount of clothes and fashion accessories for the wife of a carpenter (so she is neither the mistress of a lord nor a yeoman’s spouse), even if she is married to a ‘rich gnof’, a Chaucer coinage that seems to mean ‘churl, boor, lout’ (OED), one that is surely loaded with derogatory class associations.74 Is Chaucer representing the miller as a social climber who laughs at other social climbers and, therefore, is exposing his hypocrisy in doing so – a complicated game of triple bluff given the author’s own social rise? More plausibly, John and Alison are the classic badly-suited couple frequently represented in fabliaux and paintings, such as Quentin Massays’ ‘Ill-Matched Lovers’ (c.1520–25) (Figure 2.1), depicting an old rich fool and a duplicitous trophy wife with no money and no morals who is stealing his purse.75 There is a satire of greed here: Alison gets everything she wants in material terms – indeed, a fabulously absurd amount of expensive objects are showered upon her and

Figure 2.1  Quentin Massays’ ‘Ill-Matched Lovers’ (c.1520–25).

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described in careful detail – but her aged husband cannot satisfy her sexual desires. However, if this is a class satire of social aspiration, then the miller is demonstrating that he is a rather brilliant satirist, at odds with the savage representation of his appearance and character in The General Prologue. While the miller has the desire to seem more cultivated, educated and well-born than he really is, his tale exposes the likely hubris of similar over-reachers, in particular John and Absolon, whose pretensions lead directly to their humiliation and suffering. If Chaucer had meant to expose the miller through his tale for his class aspirations he would surely have given him one that was vulgar and stupid rather than vulgar and clever. If anything, the opening section of The Canterbury Tales can be read alongside rather than against Piers Plowman. Chaucer may not have much interest in the peasants, as his representation of the ploughmen seems to indicate.76 However, the dynamic relationship of The Knight’s Tale and The Miller’s Tale would seem to reflect better on the miller than the knight. The knight tells a manly story in which there is no place for women other than as trophies for men to win; the miller tells one in which unscrupulous clever women throw off their demeaning status as trophy wives and run rings round the men. The Knight’s Tale, in particular Theseus’s speech which argues that as there is a ‘first mover’ everything must have a cause and a reason, reads like bad undergraduate philosophy.77 In The Miller’s Tale a scheming undergraduate shows how learning can be put to effective – if not good – work. Far from supporting the upper classes, the opening fragment of The Canterbury Tales seems to expose their limitations. The aestheticization of violence and justification of a brutal male culture in The Knight’s Tale surely places the relatively petty concerns of the characters in The Miller’s Tale in perspective.78 This is not, of course, to suggest that Chaucer was a revolutionary writer eager to confront his social superiors and demand a change of the class structure. Rather, it is to caution against reading Chaucer as a reactionary who particularly enjoyed laughing at social climbers. Like Piers Plowman, The Miller’s Tale voices a concern about an excessively material culture, surely a result of the social disruption caused by the fall in population after The Black Death. But it is hard to read this problem, especially if we take into account the disjunction between the Miller and his tale, as the fault of one particular class. The Miller’s Tale inspires a spirited response when the reeve, a former carpenter, now an official supervising a landlord’s estates, takes umbrage at the miller’s portrayal of his former profession. Here we have another form of class rivalry, with the reeve eager to put the upstart miller in his place.79 Reeves, like millers, were in pivotal positions. Their job was to advise their employer how best to run their estates, protecting his ‘lord’s



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interests by paying attention to detail’.80 Furthermore, reeves, like millers, were notorious, invariably portrayed as bullying and over-sensitive, as well as dishonest.81 They lorded it over tenants but were subject to the authority of the steward who would periodically inspect their conduct.82 The description of the reeve is even less complimentary than that of the miller, making his cunning ability to calculate the value of everything clear. Emaciated and irritable, Wel koude he kepe a gerner [granary] and a bynne [grain store]; Ther was noon auditour koude on him wynne. Wel wiste he by the droghte and by the reyn, The yeldynge of his seed and of his greyn. His lordes sheep, his neet [cattle], his dayerye, His swyn, his hors, his stoor [livestock], and his pultrye Was hoolly in this Reves governing, And by his covenant yaf the rekenynge, Syn that his lord was twenty yeer of age. There koude no man brynge hym in arrerage. There nas baillif, ne hierde [herdsman], nor oother hyne [servant], That he ne knew his sleighte [trickery] and his covyne [treachery]; They were adrad of hym as of the deeth (593–605).

His peasant cunning and desire to engage in sharp practice in order to facilitate his social climbing and accumulation of material benefits is foregrounded even more than the miller’s. Equally important is the fear he inspires in other relatively powerful servants, as the reeve is able to use his abilities and the resources available to him to defeat anyone who dares to cross his path. The description indicates that he will be a formidable opponent, and when we later learn that he started his professional career as a carpenter (614), it is obvious that the spiteful, touchy and sober reeve will confront the drunken miller for his careless portrayal of foolish John the carpenter in his tale.83 The conflict between the miller and the reeve is that between two aspirational social climbers eager to distinguish themselves from their fellows. While the miller is insulted by the knight’s vision of a world that excludes him, the reeve resents the miller reminding him of his social origins and wants to assert his own ability to best his rival through telling a tale that exposes the generally perceived malign reputation of millers. Reeves were generally from the ranks of peasants but able to lord it over them as the most powerful of servants, often combining their duties with the offices of other important functionaries such as bailiffs.84 All three figures in the completed tales of the ‘A Fragment’ of The Canterbury Tales are essentially conservative figures, accepting the hierarchies of the status quo. While the knight is nostalgic, his vision of feudal society ludicrously outdated, the

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reeve and the miller are only competing because they want to enjoy a slightly higher position in the social hierarchy than their rival.85 But it is the knight’s backward-looking social vision that sets off the petty class conflict of the subsequent tales. The opening of The Reeve’s Tale highlights the issues of class and status that the teller wishes to employ in taking his revenge on the miller, through the representation of the wife who is to cuckold Symkyn (his name implying that he is pug-nosed and ugly, and a gullible dupe).86 Symkyn sounds like a more extreme version of the reeve himself:     He was a market-betere atte fulle. Ther dorste no wight hand upon hym legge, That he ne swoor he sholde anon abegge. A theef he was for sothe of corn and mele, And that a sly, and usaunt for to stele [accustomed to stealing]. His name was hoote deynous [proud] Symkyn (3936–41).

He is belligerent, grasping, cunning and selfish. It sounds as though he has made an advantageous match but the first line of the description is immediately undermined by the second:     A wyf he hadde, ycomen of noble kyn; The person of the toun hir fader was. With hire he yaf ful many a panne of bras, For that Symkyn sholde in his blood allye. She was yfostred in a nonnerye;     For Symkyn wolde no wyf, as he sayde, But she were wel ynorissed and a mayde, To saven his estaat of yomanrye (3942–9).

Symkyn’s wife is the illegitimate daughter of the local parson who has been packed off to a nunnery. She is from a relatively high status family but is an embarrassment rather than an heiress. Children of clerics raised questions about the nature of clerical celibacy, marriage and morality: ‘Born from a mingling of carnality and spirituality, they created disorder within sacred space.’ 87 Accordingly she is forced to join a religious order so that she is raised in proper spiritual surroundings and kept hidden from view. Unfortunately, it is clear that her story is widely known and her enthusiastic participation in vigorous sexual activity with the students not only implies that Symkyn fails to satisfy her in bed, but that her education has not eradicated her carnal nature. Her father in forcing her to marry the miller with a few brass pots indicates his indifference to, even contempt for, his daughter. Even so, Symkyn believes that he is gaining a spouse who raises his social status above that of the upper echelons of

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the peasantry (the yeomanry), rather than a castoff from a higher class. Accordingly, he boasts about a match the origins of which a more sensible husband would attempt to disguise, especially as she uses her native wit and relative sophistication to betray him. A maid she may be when she marries (the line implies that Symkyn demands that she is a maid so her family could be pretending that she is untouched, or that Symkyn is covering his tracks to ensure his social respectability), but Oswald the reeve’s tale shows her to be just as cunning, manipulative and prepared to use her charms to satisfy her own desires as Alison, the carpenter’s wife in The Miller’s Tale.88 The satirical description of the sexually and socially dysfunctional family continues as a prelude to the action. We learn that the couple have a daughter, Malyne, of twenty – possibly conceived out of wedlock and the reason that the couple got married – and that a little boy of six months sleeps in a cradle, something that becomes an important prop in the farcical comedy later, causing confusion when the students and the mother and daughter are switching beds. Significantly, we never learn whether the child is Symkyn’s son or grandson, a further slur on the family’s reputation, which confirms their status as outsiders, caught between the peasantry and the gentry.89 The daughter is described as a sturdy peasant woman, who has inherited her father’s pug-nose (3934, 3974). Her grandfather, however, had been eager for her mother to rise up the social scale, which is why he had objected to her marriage (and presumably why she gets such an inadequate dowry): This person of the toun, for she was feir, In purpos was to maken hire his heir, Bothe of his catel and his mesuage [household], And straunge he made it of hir mariage. His purpos was for to bistowe hire hye Into som worthy blood of auncetrye; For hooly chirches good moot been despended On hooly chirches blood, that is descended. Therfore he wolde his hooly blood honoure, Though that he hooly chirche sholde devoure (3977–86).

Symkyn’s father-in-law cares more for social status than he does religion and is clearly disappointed that his daughter marries beneath her, having hoped that he could marry her off to someone from the gentry. The lines are clearly meant to recall the description of Alison as a young woman who might become a lord’s mistress or a yeoman’s wife. In The Reeve’s Tale it is the unwanted by-product of a clerical liaison who is ear-marked

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for upward mobility. Certainly the description of her character indicates that she is far from satisfied with her lot in life and thinks she could have done better, distancing herself from those about her:

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She was as digne as water in a dich [proud as ditch-water], And ful of hoker [disdain] and of bisemare [scorn]. Hir thoughte that a lady sholde hire spare [be aloof], What for hire kynrede and hir nortelrie [education] That she hadde lerned in the nonnerie (3964–8).

There is a pointed contrast between the airs and graces of the mother and the more homely charms of the daughter with ‘her buttockes brode and brests rounde’ (3975), physical characteristics that suggest that she is more suited to marry a yeoman and bear children than aspire to the socially advantageous union that her grandfather had desired for her mother and that her mother would also appear to imagine should have been hers. Father and daughter believe that breeding and education have marked them out for social success, a pointed contrast to the pug-nose that Symkyn passes on to his daughter. The family is divided in its characteristics and understanding of its place in the local hierarchy, the reeve cruelly pointing out the manifold forms of social unease that marked the position of a miller in late fourteenth-century England. Symkyn is oblivious to his uncertain status and has a blithe confidence in his ability to control situations, a complacency that the tale will cruelly expose. When the students, Aleyn and John, arrive from King’s Hall (Solar Hall) in Cambridge with the corn to be milled for the college, they wait by the mill’s hopper pretending that they have an interest in technology, when their real purpose is to make sure that the miller does not cheat them. Symkyn sees through their ruse easily and applauds himself for his peasant cunning and ability to dupe his better-educated social superiors: ‘But by my thrift, yet shal I blere [trick] hir ye/ For al the sleighte in hir philosophye’ (4049–50). He imagines that, unlike John the carpenter in The Miller’s Tale, he can best the students. Unfortunately, his cunning is a prelude to his undoing at their hands and those of his better-educated, socially superior wife. Symkyn releases the students’ horses so that they have to chase after them and he can steal some of their grain. Their quest necessitates an overnight stay, for which Symkyn charges them, then sarcastically challenges them to use their education to expand the size of the cramped bedroom space so that they can all sleep more easily. During the night, Aleyn gets into Malyne’s bed and has sex with her; John switches the cradle so that her mother gets into his bed when she returns from relieving herself after drinking a great deal of wine. Malyne tells John to take a large cake and he goes to wake John, but, because the cradle has been moved, he wakes

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the miller instead who now realizes what has gone on. In the ensuing melee the miller is beaten unconscious by his wife, thinking he is a burglar, and the tale concludes with Aleyn and John leaving having triumphed over the foolish miller. The reeve boasts that he has ‘quyt the Millere’ (4324) in his tale, but the joke may also be on him. Reeves were in general no more educated than millers and were often illiterate, so a tale of the educated defeating over-ambitious social climbers from the lower classes may just as well reflect badly on him and his social anxieties. At the conclusion of The Reeve’s Tale the reader might well wonder what has actually changed: the fabliau was invariably a rather socially conservative genre that saw those who stepped out of place brutally punished and humiliated for their ambition and transgression.90 If The Miller’s Tale opened up the possibility of a less hierarchical society through a structural and generic revision of The Knight’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale would seem to take us back to where we started. There is no obvious change for the socially and sexually frustrated women. The miller’s wife hits her husband with a club, but we do not learn whether this changes their relationship. Malyne and Aleyn exchange tender goodbyes, and he promises ‘evermo, wher so I go or ryde, / I is thyn awen clerk, swa have I seel! [as I may prosper]’ (4238–9). Significantly, she starts to weep when she tells him to take the cake made out of the stolen meal (4244–8). Why does she cry? It may be because of her part in the deception of the students, possibly her own behaviour, but most likely because she knows that Aleyn’s tender words to her are a romantic fiction, learned like Absolon’s imitation of what he thinks is courtly speech in The Miller’s Tale, closing a brief interlude in her life. A woman of twenty with an illegitimate son – assuming it is hers – did not necessarily have rosy marriage prospects.91 In both tales social aspirations are frustrated, just as Langland’s vision of a revolutionary peasant-based society is doomed to failure: whether rooted in the collective or the individual it is a Utopian ideal that will surely never be realized. Langland and Chaucer are not necessarily at odds in their understanding of the workings of late medieval English society, whatever might be the divergence of their political views. Langland concentrates on rural peasant society, Chaucer thinks more in terms of large and small communities, villages, towns and cities. Both are acutely aware of the powerful impact of rank, status and hierarchy – of class – on the consciousness, horizons and ambitions of individuals living within such a rigidly stratified world. For Marion Turner, Chaucer is a ‘radically egalitarian’ writer, The Canterbury Tales juxtaposing all classes and styles, so that the social and the literary are intertwined: ‘Just as he placed the romance next to the fabliau, so he placed women next to men, the poor next to the noble, the

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moral next to the fable.’ 92 Writing in opposition to European authors obsessed with hierarchy – such as Dante – Chaucer, like Langland, opened up the possibility of a more equal way of imagining society through his art. Even so, opposition to the status quo, the desire to change either class or the society that imposed existing class divisions, was fraught with difficulties and dangers. Transforming the social order, or even understanding how the complicated interaction of feudal and commercial systems worked in late fourteenth-century England, was clearly the more arduous task.93 Changing class, as the A Fragment of The Canterbury Tales demonstrates, was also a hazardous enterprise, likely to expose an individual and their family to public humiliation – or even worse – powerful factors in a society that placed such emphasis on avoiding shame.94 In a fast moving society that seemed to exist in a state of perpetual flux, it was hard to know whether it was safest to stay still or make a move, to stick with what one had, or risk everything.

Vox Clamantis While Langland and Chaucer engage with the nature of the Peasants’ Revolt in sympathetic and nuanced ways, their contemporary, John Gower (c.1330–1408) was far more hostile. So much so that Chaucer parodied his aggressive response when representing the disorder in the farmyard in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale:     Ran Colle oure dogge, and Talbot and Gerland, And Malkyn, with a dystaf in hir hand; Ran cow and calf, and eek the verray hogges, So fered for the berkyng of the dogges And shoutyng of the men and wommen eeke They ronne so hem thoughte hir herte breeke. They yolleden as feendes doon in helle; The dokes cryden as men wolde hem quelle; The gees for feere flowen over the trees; Out of the hyve cam the swarm of bees.     So hydous was the noyse – a, benedicitee! – Certes, he Jakke Straw and his meynee Ne made nevere shoutes half so shrille Whan that they wolden any Flemyng kille, As thilke day was maad upon the fox. Of bras they broghten bemes, and of box, Of horn, of boon, in whiche they blewe and powped, And therwithal they skriked and they howped. It semed as that hevene sholde fall (3383–3401).95



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Chaucer is parodying Gower’s description of the rebels as animals in his poem, Visio Anglie (A Vision of England), produced as an immediate response to the Revolt, and incorporated into his long poem, Vox Clamantis.96 Gower’s poem opens with the dreamer heading out into the lush countryside only to be rudely disturbed by a raucous and disgusting mob who are transformed before his eyes into a collection of baying animals: I saw uncounted monsters, full of dread. In many bands the hordes of common folk Were wandering throughout the fields enraged; And while my eyes beheld the raging mob And marveled at all its boorishness, Then suddenly the curse of God blazed down On them and changed their form and made them beasts.97

The dreamer sees a variety of domestic beasts revealed in their true threatening colours: Proud asses saw I suddenly transformed, Rebellious with none to bridle them; Their inner parts filled with lions’ rage, As they roamed everywhere in search of prey … The cow that yesterday was lightly led To till the fields, now slashes with its horns … They have the feet of bears and dragons’ tails, At which all cringe in terror, petrified. The cavern of their mouth breathes Sulphur flames Which, as they spread, no water can put out. Both wood and stone and all that feel its touch Are swallowed up by all-consuming flames (183–6, 245–6, 255–60).98

Gower probably had more reason than most to excoriate the rebels as his poetry suggests that his house in Aldington, Kent, was near one of the centres of the rebellion and was probably ransacked by the rebels, and it was likely that he witnessed friends die.99 Yet, as David Aers points out, Chaucer, as someone who ‘servic[ed] the legal and fiscal apparatus of the English ruling classes’, was also a likely target for the rebels, and may also have been in danger.100 Chaucer’s parody may be a hostile attack on Gower, or rather less critical satire, a recognition that discontent was still simmering after the Revolt was crushed and that violence could break out at any point. It is hard to know how to read the unsettling passage in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, but critics have perhaps been guilty of reading its parody as more complacent and self-regarding than it is.101 Dedicating his most sophisticated poem, Troilus and Criseyde, to Gower a few years later does not suggest that the two poets were at odds.102

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Gower’s attack on the rebels is, as might be expected, based on class. Whereas Langland represents the economy failing through the greed of those who exploit the peasants, Gower targets the peasants themselves. He describes the peasants leaving their tools in empty fields (277), drawing attention to the implements that lie idle when they should be producing sustenance: The ploughshare does not claim its wonted rights; The rakes and hoes and mattocks lie around; They scorn beam, moldbrand, handle, and the rope: No yoke or collar or restraining string Or stake or shaft or guide was any use. The plough and coulter blade are left unused, And harrows may not pay their lawful dues (278–84).

The poet is showing that he understands the machinery used by farm labourers and can therefore comment on the impact of the revolt with some authority. Gower always claims that his political views are based on those of the people and so must be true, his last major work, Confessio Amantis (1389), stating that the long poem follows ‘The comun vois, which mai noght lie.’ 103 He asserts that he is not simply an urban sophisticate commenting on events from afar but someone closely involved in agricultural production (as he would have been as a squire of Kent). He has seen the devastating impact caused by Wat Tyler and Jack Straw: ‘Where eye can see, the land remains untilled; / The fields lie waste and no one lays a claim. / In vain the barns await the promised yield’ (289–91).104 The true essence of things has been perverted so that ‘cowishness forgets its real self’ (294), meaning that the peasants do not understand their role and place in the social hierarchy. Instead of being like the cows they are supposed to tend, docile, loyal and useful, they have become savage wild boars in their assemblies: ‘they run together, jaws stretched wide to bite. / They strut in lordly way with tails erect / And nothing’s safe they want to tear apart’ (414–16). Significantly enough, they have assumed a social status to which they are not entitled, one that threatens the stability of the commonwealth. Throughout the poem Gower reminds his readers that one of the worst aspects of the rebellion is its attempt to subvert the proper social order. After a description of the Biblical plagues to which the rebels should be compared (frogs, flies) the dreamer laments that This was the day when weak wore out the strong, The lowest those on high, the small the grand… This was the day that set the serfs on high, Subduing lords, denying equal rank (649–50, 659–60).



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The last comment cited here (‘sinit esse pares’) attacks the rebels for not even granting their superiors equality, despite their professed ideals of establishing common values.105 The result is carnage as ‘The peasant gives command of life or death’ (1174), usurping the prerogative of the monarch (whom the peasants profess to serve). The bodies of the citizens (‘cives’), the urban-dwelling superiors of the peasants, litter the landscape: Like sheep they fell before the hand of death. Their slaughtered bodies are not borne in style But lie in open streets, spread here and there. Lest monuments survive, the raging mob Cuts, tears, and tramples bodies limb by limb. The bodies of the dead they hang on walls Like brutes, the brutes deny due burial (1164–70).

The rebels have assumed the right to distribute justice, hanging bodies on walls, as though their victims were traitors whose body parts were displayed on town walls after they were hanged, drawn and quartered pour encourager les autres; whereas, for Gower, it is the peasant rebels who are the real traitors.106 The mob produces a cacophony that threatens to obliterate all reasonable thought, speech and action: They shriek and shout aloud with monster cries, And vary pitch and volume, out of tune, Some bray and whinny wildly, donkey-like; Some match the ox’s bellow with their moos; Some utter grumps and grunts, like pigs but worse, And earth begins to tremble at the sound. The foaming boar in frenzy gnashes teeth; Its mate responds, redoubling the noise; Wild barking bruises all the city’s ears; Discordant din of dogs disturbs the air … The ditches tremble at the sudden sound. The whirring, buzzing wasps strike fear in all, For who could count the numbers of the swarm? The roar resounds like lions, hairy-maned, And everything once bad is now far worse. What rustic row, shrill shriek, and bitter brawl! (797–815).

There is an obvious comparison to Piers Plowman here, as the crowd rapidly gets out of control, but also a pointed contrast, as the peasants dehumanize themselves and others rather than their labour providing an answer to the problems of social disorder (this is the passage that Chaucer must have in mind in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale). What Langland saw as a field of folk with clerics, wastrels, beggars and others living off the surplus produced by the toiling peasants, Gower sees as the peasants fouling their own nest, a ‘rustic

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row’ that needs to be stopped. The peasants first become barnyard animals then gradually appear as more exotic and dangerous beasts, first boars and uncontrolled packs of dogs, then wasps, traditionally the most unpleasant insects in the British Isles – scavengers and parasites unfavourably contrasted to productive bees, and finally lions.107 As the rebellion continues things will only get worse, the countryside transformed from the centre of productivity to the source of all that destroys society, inspired by the devil, Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies (679–782). Wat Tyler, the peasant leader, is described as a ‘haughty jay’ (1861), talkative and rude with uncontrolled speech, inspiring confusion and chaos.108 The narrator is thankful that the Revolt is now over, but recognizes that the country is still a long distance from a peaceful settlement, that resentment simmers away and violence is likely to break out in the near future: Thus, by God’s help, Satanic might is crushed But still it lurks, for peasants are untamed. The peasants always plot towards our death, If they can subjugate the noble class [genus]. No love restrains the peasants’ savage rage, Whose hostile hearts are filled with bitterness. The subject ploughman serf knows fear, not love; He’s swift to soil the one that keeps him clothed (2097–2104).

Again, the contrast to Piers Plowman is pointed and instructive: the peasants here are sly, scurrilous opportunists waiting for an opportunity to undermine their social superiors and seize what they imagine should be theirs but to which they are not entitled. And, again, the central image is one of disgusting self-harm, the counter-productive desire to bite the hand that feeds them and decrease their standard of living. They are savage, eaten up with class envy, failing to realize that the social order benefits rather than oppresses them. They should be pious, accept their lot and love those who provide for them, but instead they have become parasites – like wasps – not realizing that if they attack the host they risk killing it and causing disaster. In his description of the aftermath of the rebellion Gower uses the word ‘genus’ to describe the nobility, a word he had also employed earlier to represent them: The peasant said to noble: ‘We have power – Henceforth let your nobility depart!’ O class [genus] dismayed by fear of freezing death, What varied chance has brought you to those ills? (1291–4).

The nobility form a distinct ‘genus’, a group or class, perhaps in contrast to the massed, confused and confusing ranks of the peasants. It is clear that Gower is thinking in terms of social classes. The peasants are rebelling

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because they have not been properly cared for: therefore, the nobility need to work thoughtfully and sensibly to protect their own interests, which involves them fulfilling their social responsibilities in ensuring that the lower orders are protected and nurtured too – and so remain quiet and loyal.109 In making the case Gower was surely being conspicuously reactionary and deliberately eliding the distinction made in English law that separated the free and the unfree, asserting the need for a noble class to control society as in other European countries.110 Like Chaucer and Langland his class-based politics were not founded on an obvious external reality – at least, not one that currently existed – but an ideologically-driven ideal. While Langland opted for the peasants, Gower sided with the nobility. The urban-dwelling Chaucer would seem to have situated himself somewhere in between.

Notes 1 William Langland, Piers Plowman. I have cited Donaldson’s translation rather than the Middle English as this book is designed for readers who are not specialists in medieval language. The poem exists in a number of versions and was probably revised by the author to whom it has been attributed, William Langland, although nothing is known of him. The Norton uses the ‘B’ text (based on the manuscript, Bodleian Laud Misc. 581). This version is generally agreed to be livelier and more vivid than the ‘C’ text, probably the final version of the text, which clarifies a number of theological issues at the expense of the poetry, but which does not affect my concerns in this book. The ‘A’ text is shorter, probably an earlier version; the ‘Z’ text is either another earlier version or a manuscript that combines versions of the poem. 2 ‘Who speaks foul language’: ‘Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but rather giving of thanks’, Ephesians 5.4. 3 Poetic contests in which the participants took it in turn to insult the other in ingenious ways. 4 Helen Barr, ed., The Piers Plowman Tradition (London: Everyman, 1993); James Dean, ed., Six Ecclesiastical Satires, pp. 51–5. On Lollardy, see J. Patrick Hornbeck II, Bose, M. and Somerset, F., eds, A Companion to Lollardy (Leiden: Brill, 2016). On the Peasants’ Revolt, see above pp. 33–8. 5 Cited in John M. Bowers, Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), p. 103. See also Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 14–15. Ball was especially critical of clerical abuses: Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, p. 235. 6 Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Reign of Richard II’, in Jones, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, pp. 297–333, at p. 299. 7 Anon., ‘A Song on the Times’, in Thomas Wright, Thomas Wright’s Political Songs of England: From the Reign of King John to that of Edward II, ed.

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Peter Coss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 46–51, at p. 47. 8 Melissa Furrow, ‘Chanson de geste as Romance in England’, in L. Ashe, I. Djordjevic and J. Weiss, eds, The Exploitations of Medieval Romance (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2010), pp. 57–72. 9 Luke Sutherland, Rebel Barons: Resisting Royal Power in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 6. 10 See Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). On Langland’s conceptions of class in relation to those of other medieval poets, see Sandie Byrne, Poetry and Class, ch. 1. 11 For a discussion of the impossibility of separating class and economic relations, see D. Vance Smith, Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), pp. 21–3. 12 See Wendy Scase, Piers Plowman and the New Anti-Clericalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 13 Paul B. Newman, Growing Up in the Middle Ages (Jefferson: McFarland, 2015), p. 96. 14 While individual beggars were seen sympathetically and given charity in late medieval England, beggars in general were often seen as lazy and dangerous, see Elaine Clark, ‘Institutional and Legal Responses to Begging in Medieval England’, SSH 26 (2002), 447–73. Purgatory was largely a medieval invention, one that was thought by many to be a means of enriching the church and clergy: see Jacques LeGoff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986); Jerry L. Wallis, Purgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 35. 15 A. C. Spearing, Medieval Dream Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 129–30. On the poem’s anti-commercial themes, see Mike Rodman Jones, Radical Pastoral, 1381–1594: Appropriation and the Writing of Religious Controversy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), ch. 1. 16 Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–1520 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 282. 17 Philip Zeigler, The Black Death (London: Collins, 1969), ch. 15; Dyer, Making a Living, ch. 8. Peter Coss, The Foundations of Gentry Life: The Multons of Frampton and their World, 1270–1370 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 117. See above p. 31. 18 Paul Hardwick, ‘Chaucer: the Poet as Ploughman’, CR 33 (1998), 146–56; Scase, Piers Plowman, pp. 73–4. 19 On complaints against the Court of Chancery, where civil law was practised, see J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths, 2002), p. 103. On the significance of Lady Meed in terms of class analysis, see David Aers, ‘Class, Gender, Medieval Criticism, and Piers Plowman’, in Britton J. Harwood and Gillian R. Overing, eds, Class & Gender in Early

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English Literature: Intersections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 59–75, at pp. 64–70. 20 Langland’s poem may have had an influence on other uses of the term in the later fourteenth century, given the establishment of the ‘Ploughman Tradition’ (see above pp. 56–7). See, for example, Anon., ‘On the Corruptions of the Times’, in Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs, II, pp. 238–42. 21 Emily Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 152. 22 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, I, pt. 4. 23 Although in south-east England, one of the key areas where the Peasants’ Revolt was most successful because it was well-organized, ‘literacy was much more widespread and access to writing more common than the chroniclers were willing to recognise’: Barron, ‘Reign of Richard II’, p. 305. See also the discussions in Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 13–66; Green, ‘John Ball’s Letters’; Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 379–85. On representation of class, see above p. 33. 24 Margaret E. Goldsmith, The Figure of Piers Plowman (Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 1981), p. 34. 25 Placebo, from the Office of the Dead, ‘placebo Domino in regione vivorum’ (‘I will please the lord in the land of the living’, Psalm 114, 9 (Vulgate); ‘ding upon David’, i.e., recite the Psalms. 26 That is, serve as jurors in court cases. 27 The phrase was made famous by John Ball but was already in wide circulation, and used in different contexts: Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, p. 211; G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), p. 291; Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, p. 374; Thomas G. Duncan, ed., Medieval English Lyrics and Carols (Cambridge: Brewer, 2013), p. 264. See above, p. 36. 28 On Langland’s apocalypticism and its derivation from a variety of sources, including oral ones, see Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 29 For details of medieval law courts, see Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to The Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 30 On the structure of the poem, see T. P. Dunning, ‘The Structure of the B-Text of Piers Plowman’, RES 27 (1956), 225–37. 31 ‘For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again’: Matthew 7, 2. 32 Goldsmith, Figure of Piers Plowman, p. 47. 33 ‘Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child, and thy princes eat in the morning!’, Ecclesiastes 10, 16. 34 The reference is probably to Richard II, who was only ten when he was crowned in 1377: Steiner, Reading Piers Plowman, pp. 6–7. 35 ‘Thou shalt not kill’: Exodus 20, 13; ‘Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness,

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Honour thy father and thy mother’: Luke 18:20; ‘To me belongeth vengeance and recompence; their foot shall slide in due time: for the day of their calamity is at hand, and the things that shall come upon them make haste’: Deut. 32, 35; ‘For we know him that hath said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense, saith the Lord. And again, The Lord shall judge his people’: Hebrews 10, 30. 36 Joseph Canning, Ideas of Power in the Late Middle Ages, 1296–1417 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), ch. 6; Anna Baldwin, A Guidebook to Piers Plowman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 3, 24. 37 Evidence of early annotations suggests that readers identified with the voice of the poet, indicating that they shared the poem’s outlook and worldview: Sarah Wood, ‘Two Annotated Piers Plowman Manuscripts from London and the Early Reception of B and C.’, CR, 52 (2017), 274–297. 38 On the more complicated reality of medieval social structure in country and town, see Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, chs 2–4. 39 Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, pp. 67–74; Bowers, Chaucer and Langland, pp. 169–73; Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 17. 40 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), Fragment 1 (Group A), 529–41. 41 Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, p. 70. 42 Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, pp. 72–3. 43 Dean, ed., Six Ecclesiastical Satires, pp. 51–114. 44 Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, p. 73; Dyer, Standards of Living, p. 17. 45 John Simons, ‘The Canterbury Tales and Fourteenth-Century Peasant Unrest’, L. & H., 2nd Series, 1, 2 (Autumn 1990), 4–12. 46 For details see Marion Turner, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), chs 1–2. 47 Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 50, 84. 48 Pearsall, Life of Chaucer, p. 128. 49 Pearsall, Life of Chaucer, p. 12. As Ardis Butterfield argues, to be recognized as the most significant poet in English still carried assumptions of cultural inferiority in Europe: The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 143–51, passim. 50 J. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the Gawain. Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), introduction; Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 11; Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 34, 39. 51 Peter Brown, Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 138–47; Peggy Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Contest (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 61–94.

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52 Alcuin Blamires, ‘Chaucer the Reactionary: Ideology and the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales’, RES 51 (2000), 523–39, p. 524. 53 Bowers, Chaucer and Langland, chs 4–5. 54 Pearsall, Life of Chaucer, p. 148; Blamires, ‘Chaucer the Reactionary’, p. 526. See also Derek Brewer, ‘Class Distinction in Chaucer’, Speculum 43 (1968), 290–305. 55 G. L. Kitteridge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970); D. W. Robertson, Jr., A Preface to Chaucer. Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). 56 Warren Ginsberg, Tellers, Tales & Translation in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 57 Dyer, Making a Living, p. 131. 58 John Langdon, Mills in the Medieval Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 116–25. 59 Langdon, Mills in the Medieval Economy, pp. 247–8. 60 Langdon, Mills in the Medieval Economy, pp. 243–6. 61 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, pp. 178–9. 62 Edward A. Block, ‘Chaucer’s Millers and Their Bagpipes’, Speculum 29 (1954), 239–43. 63 Walter Clyde Curry, Chaucer and the Medical Sciences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), pp. 81–9. 64 Thomas J. Hatton, ‘Chaucer’s Crusading Knight, A Slanted Ideal’, CR 3 (1968), 77–87. 65 For Lee Patterson, the miller still has a peasant mentality: Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 246. 66 For analysis, see Knapp, Chaucer and the Social Contest, pp. 32–44; Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1992), pp. 171–82. 67 See, for example, Norris J. Lacey, Reading Fabliaux (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011). 68 Charles Muscantine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1957). John Hines comments, ‘However doubtful we should be about attempts to associate the emergence of the medieval fabliau with any particular social class, it is significant that Chaucer wishes to represent the fabliau in precisely such terms’: The Fabliau in English (London: Longman, 1993), p. 109. 69 Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 139. 70 Richard Newhauser and Michael Raby, ‘Curious Labor in “The Miller’s Tale”’, ELH 86 (2019), 1–25. 71 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 261. 72 Eve Salisbury, Chaucer and the Child (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017), p. 153; Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas, eds, The Cambridge History of World Food (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 1853. 73 The notion that a young woman – in particular, a daughter – might serve a king or aristocrat well is a common theme in fabliaux: see, for example, Guillaume le Normand, ‘The Priest and Alison’, lines 121–4 (Nathaniel E.

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Dubin, ed. and trans., The Fabliaux: A New Verse Translation (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2013), p. 29). 74 Simons, ‘Canterbury Tales’, p. 8. On the complicated semantics of ‘gnof’, see R. T. Lambdin, ‘Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale’, The Explicator 47 (1989), 4–6; Ricks Carlson, ‘Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale’, The Explicator 50 (1992), 66–7. 75 John Oliver and Martha Woolf, Early Netherlandish Painting (Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1986), pp. 146–9. 76 Strohm, Social Chaucer, p. 174. 77 See David Aers, ‘Imagination, Order and Ideology: The Knight’s Tale’, in Chaucer, Langland, and the Creative Imagination (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 174–95. 78 ‘the patterned edifice of The Knight’s Tale is not a bulwark against chaos, but a façade to hide the reality of the warring class, where neither war, nor the pursuit of love in its midst, is noble’: Larissa Tracey, Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature: Negotiations of National Identity (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), p. 239. See also Terry Jones, Chaucer’s Knight: Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (rev. edn, London: Methuen, 1994); John Finlayson, ‘The “Knight’s Tale”: The Dialogue of Romance, Epic, and Philosophy’, CR 27 (1992), 126–49. 79 On possible echoes of the Peasants’ Revolt in the reeve, see Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 224–6. 80 Dyer, Making a Living, p. 35. 81 Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, pp. 163–7. 82 Dyer, Making a Living, p. 123. 83 See Frederick Tupper, ‘The Quarrels of the Canterbury Pilgrims’, JEGP 14 (1915), 256–70. 84 H. S. Bennett, ‘The Reeve and the Manor in the Fourteenth Century’, EHR 41 (1926), 358–65. 85 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, p. 274. 86 John M. Steadman, ‘Simkin’s Camus Nose: A Latin Pun in the Reeve’s Tale?’, MLN 75 (1960), 4–8. 87 Laura Wertheimer, ‘Clerical Parentage, Illegitimacy, and Reform in the Middle Ages’, JHS 15 (2006), 382–407, p. 384. 88 The line, ‘And she was proud, and peert as is a pye [magpie]’ (3950) refers to the description of Alison in terms of animals; here, suggesting her devious and grasping nature, as well as an attraction to the superficial. 89 Twenty is quite old to be an unmarried woman in the late fourteenth century, and most women would have already had children by their late teens, increasing the likelihood that the boy is Malyne’s son: Henri Bresc, ‘Europe: Town and Country (Thirteenth-Fifteenth Centuries)’, in Andre Burguiere, Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen and Francoise Zonabend, eds, A History of the Family, trans. Sarah Hanbury Tenison, Rosemary Morris and Andrew Wilson, 2 vols (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), I, pp. 430–66, at pp. 446–51; Ian

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Mortimer, The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England (London: Vintage, 2008), p. 37. 90 Although rather less obviously conservative in terms of gender: see Dubin, ed. Fabliaux, introduction. 91 As Becky R. Lee points out ‘The lot of an unwed mother in medieval England could be desperate indeed’: ‘Unwed Mothers in Medieval England’, JMI 5 (2014), 218–27, p. 225. 92 Turner, Chaucer, p. 364. 93 See above pp. 31–2. 94 Mary C. Flannery, ‘The Concept of Shame in Late-Medieval English Literature’, LC 9/2 (2012), 166–82. 95 For commentary, see Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 207–13; David Aers, ‘Vox Populi and the Literature of 1381’, in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 432–53, at pp. 450–1. 96 Michael Bennett, ‘John Gower, Squire of Kent, the Peasants’ Revolt, and the Visio Anglie’, CR 53 (2018), 258–82, p. 259. 97 John Gower, Visio Anglie in Poems on Contemporary Events, ed. David Carlson and trans. A. G. Rigg (Toronto: PIMS, 2011), lines 170–6 (p. 41). See Byrne, Poetry and Class, pp. 42–3. 98 In referring to Chaunteclere strutting around the farmyard looking like a ‘grym leoun’ (line 3179), Chaucer is surely referring to Gower’s description of asses being like lions. 99 Bennett, ‘Gower, Squire of Kent’, pp. 260–1, 281. 100 Aers, ‘Vox Populi’, p. 451. 101 The illuminating discussion in Malte Urban, Fragments: Past and Present in Chaucer and Gower (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2009), pp. 89–91, makes, I think, the mistaken claim that Chaucer attempts to ‘seal [the tale] off from the historical context external to it’ (p. 91). On the contrary, the tale reminds its readers that recent events cannot be erased or ignored. 102 Turner, Chaucer, pp. 268–9. 103 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1980), prologue, 124. For analysis, see Sarah Vovak, ‘Braying Peasants and the Poet as Prophet: Gower and the People in the Vox clamantis’, Etudes Anglais 66 (2013), 311–22, p. 311. 104 On the significance of waste in medieval and Renaissance literature, see Eleanor Johnson, ‘The Poetics of Waste: Medieval English Ecocriticism’, PMLA 127 (2012), 460–76; Catherine Nicholson, ‘Proper Work, Willing Waste Pastoral and the English Poet’, in Catherine Bates, ed., A Companion to Renaissance Poetry (Oxford: Wiley, 2018), pp. 401–13. 105 Rubin, Hollow Crown, p. 126. On the importance of equality in the Revolt, see Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, p. 121. 106 W. R. J. Baron, ‘The Penalties for Treason in Medieval Life and Literature’, JMH 7 (1981), 187–202.

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107 Jonathan Wolfson, ‘The Renaissance of Bees’, RS 24 (2010), 281–300. Wasps are, of course, essential to the environment: see Seirian Sumner, Georgia Law and Alessandro Cini, ‘Why we Love Bees and Hate Wasps’, EE 43 (2018), 836–45. 108 ‘Jay’, ‘The Medieval Bestiary’ http://bestiary.ca/beasts/beast543.htm) (accessed 29 September 2020). 109 See Kim Zarins, ‘Gower and Rhetoric’, in Ana Saez-Hidalgo, Brian Gastle and R. F. Yeager, eds, The Routledge Research Companion to John Gower (London: Taylor & Francis, 2017), pp. 37–55, at pp. 47–8. 110 John H. Arnold, What is Medieval History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), p. 100.

Chapter 3

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There may not have been an obvious language for class relations and class consciousness in the sixteenth century, but Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum (written in the 1560s, published in 1583) has an elaborate taxonomy of social ranks from those born to govern down to those who cannot rule ‘and yet they be not altogether neglected’. Smith’s work surely suggests that thinking of socio-economic groups which had common interests was not beyond the bounds of early modern thinkers.1 Writing about the period, William M. Reddy argues that historians should think of ‘class as relationship’, what connects people in a particular social stratum who understand that they have common interests that are different from those above or below them.2 Smith’s treatise would appear to be in line with this useful definition of class. Smith (1513–77) has a very clear understanding of the social divisions that exist in early Elizabethan England and he provides an overview of the hierarchies that he has witnessed in his lifetime. The son of a ‘small-scale sheep farmer’, who became ambassador to France and Secretary of State to Elizabeth, he had ample opportunity to observe classes and ranks and reflect on them during his meteoric rise.3 Smith concludes the first book of De Republica Anglorum with nine short chapters that outline ‘The division of the parts and persons of the common wealth’.4 Smith is clear that his social analysis is not confined to the upper classes, and that anyone wishing to understand the nature of English society in the second half of the sixteenth century has to engage with his observations: For it is not enough to say that it [the parts of the commonwealth] consisteth of a multitude of houses and families which make stretes and villages, and the multitude of townes the realme, and that freemen be considered only in this behalf, as subjects and citizens of the commonwealth, and not bondmen who can beare no rule nor jurisdiction over freemen, as they who can be taken but as instruments and the goods and possessions of others (pp. 29–30).

Although he excludes women, because they are confined to the home unless they are in positions of exalted authority (p. 30), Smith’s focus is centred

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on the need to ensure that the commonwealth functions properly and in the interests of all its members, hence his interest in ideas of citizenship and the nature of the newly incorporated towns. It is not surprising that there are attacks on the rapacious and destructive problems caused by greedy members of the gentry or that the notion of political legitimacy outlined in De Republica Anglorum is rooted in the people.5 As Smith asserts, ‘the common wealth must turne and alter as before from one part to a few, so now from a few to many and the most part’ (p. 27). Autocracy was once an inevitable political system, but now the balanced state has to hear the voices of the majority of its (male) citizens. At the top of society are the ‘Nobilitas Major’, the ‘Dukes, marquises, erles, vicountes, and barrons’ (p. 31) created by the monarch as a reward for good service. Smith shows his republican cast of mind by comparing the ‘barrony or degree of Lordes’ to the ‘Senators of Rome’, with the implication that they have duties to serve the people as well as rights to their titles. Smith notes that all such lords are required to earn a stipulated amount to keep their titles, and that ‘if they decay by excesse, and be not able to maintaine the honour … so sometimes they are not admitted to the upper house in the parliament’ (p. 32). The observation is aimed not just at the wealth of the upper reaches of the nobility but the ways in which they dissipate their fortunes, a frequent and familiar critique of aristocratic behaviour.6 Indeed, the next chapter, on the ‘Nobilitas minor’, makes clear that Smith is much more enthusiastic about educational systems and training in establishing a hierarchical system based on merit than he is on inheritance: No man is a Knight by succession, not the king or prince … Knightes therefore be not borne but made, either before the battle to encourage them the more to adventure their lives, or after the conflict, as advauncement for their harinesse and manhood already shewed: or out of the warre for some great service done, or some good hope through the certues which do appeare in them … And that order seemeth to aunswere in part to that which the Romanes called Equites Romanos, differeing in some pointes, and agreeing in other, as their common wealth and ours do differ and agree (32–3).

The ‘Equites Romanos’ are the equites, the second order of the property owning classes in republican Rome, below the senatorial class, who were eligible for election to the senate and so played a pivotal role in governing.7 Smith’s careful comparison of the Roman Equites to English knights demonstrates his desire to think of his country in terms of the values of the Roman republic, where a mixture of property qualification, innate ability, achievement and wider support provided an individual with the right to enter public life.8 The key phrase here is ‘not borne but made’, a further republican sentiment that argues that offices are not for life but will be

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rotated to those who can demonstrate that they have earned them, creating – in theory at least – the best and fairest political system.9 Smith’s comments also suggest that he had read Machiavelli carefully and accepted his judgement that republican virtue was most active when tested in combat.10 A society needed to maximize the virtue of its citizens in public life and in war in order to function properly, opening up its class system and accepting that ability not birth should determine the right to act. A Greek scholar, Smith made us of the umbrella term, ‘common’, to link the lower house of parliament (the House of Commons) with a democratic understanding of the rights of the people to take part in the government of their country.11 Smith’s analysis can be read to claim that England can be divided into two classes, lords and commons, the second category containing ‘knights, esquires, and other gentlemen, with citizens, burgeses and yeomen’ who can all be elected to parliament to ‘consult upon the greatest affaires of the Realme’ (34–5); read another way it can be divided into four: Nobilitas Major, Nobilitas Minor, esquires/gentlemen/yeoman, and the fourth sort of men. However we read his social analysis, it is clear that Smith is – again – emphasizing the flexible nature of the English class system and the ability of the state to include those in its government who have only a small stake in the country (through owning a limited amount of property). The next rank are gentlemen, ‘those whom their blood and race doth make noble and known’, inheriting their rank and titles from an ancestor who ‘hath bin notable in riches or vertues, or (in fewer wordes) old riches or prowes remaining in one stock’. Smith, however, in line with his republican principles, is sceptical about the value of this hereditary system. He notes that if a gentleman’s successors follow his example they will become ‘veré nobiles’; but if they do not, ‘yet the fame and wealth of their ancestors serve to cover them so long as it can, as a thing once gilted though it be copper within, till the gilt be worne away’ (38). This is an aggressive attack on hereditary rights and the assumption of privilege, illustrated once more with an example from the Roman republic. Smith criticizes those who retained the ‘memorie of the glorie of their progenitors fame’ without any corresponding merit because ‘This matter made a great strife among the Romanes, when those which were Novi homines [i.e., those who were the first in their family to serve in the Roman senate] were more allowed, for their vertues new and newly showen, than the olde smell of auntient race newly defaced by the cowardice and evill life of their nephews and discendauntes could make the other to be’ (38–9). The comments maybe a reflection on his experience as someone who had risen through the ranks to prominence in the 1540s, before being side-lined, eclipsed and only partially restored to favour by the time he wrote De Republica Anglorum. Smith is emphatic that it is the duty of a good prince to ignore the claims of those with ancient rights and

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sweep away the old nobility to bring in the new.12 Princes must honour virtue where they find it and it is true that proper education can encourage the sons of the gentry to ‘priketh forward to ensue in their fathers steps’. Unfortunately, the nature of the world dictates that things will change so the prince and common wealth have the same power that their predecessors had, and as the husbandman hath to plant a new tree where the olde fayleth, so hath the prince to honour virtue where he doth find it, to make gentlemen, esquires, knights, barons, earles, marquises, and dukes, where he seeth virtue able to beare that honour or merits, and deserves it’ (39).

Root and branch change should be the order of the day, the old, complacent and inefficient cut off to make room for a new generation eager to ascend the class ladder and govern properly. However, although Smith’s view of society may be republican in essence, he is acutely aware and sardonically critical of the current state of the English class system. Gentlemen, he argues, can be ‘made good cheape in England’ (39), and anyone with a university degree ‘who can live idly and without manuall labour’ can ‘beare the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman’ (40). Smith does not use the term, but he is alluding to the frequent criticism of ‘carpet knights’ – men whose advancement was thought to depend on their bowing and scraping to the good and great rather than relying on hard work for their country in battle or through proper service.13 Furthermore, such knights can then obtain a pedigree as ‘a king of Heraulds shal also give him for mony, armes newly made and invented, the title whereof shall pretende to have beene found by the sayd Herauld in perusing and viewing of olde registers, where his auncestors in times past had bin recorded to beare the same’. Smith is alluding to the practice in late Elizabethan England of families employing genealogists to ‘discover’ their exalted ancestry and prove the nobility of their family, a practice he notes is often viewed with contempt: ‘Such men are called sometime in scorne gentlemen of the first head.’ 14 An ideal England is based on (republican) merit, but the real one is somewhat more problematic. Even so, Smith declares that he is in favour of current practices of creating a large strata of the lower section of the upper classes, partly because it brings in revenue for the monarch (a strategy James I was to adopt some years later) but mainly because it benefits other classes: As for their outward shew, a gentleman (if he wil be so accompted) must go like a gentleman, a yeoman like a yeoman, and a rascall like a rascall … he [a gentleman] must shew also a more manly corage and tokens of better education, higher stomacke and bountifuller liberalitie than others, and keepe about him idle servauntes, who shall doe nothing but waite upon him. So that no man hath hurt by it but he himselfe, who hereby perchance will beare a bigger saile than he is able to maintaine (p. 41).15

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It is some way short of an enthusiastic endorsement of the status quo and Smith evidently regards the quest for honour and advancement – at least here – with wry amusement. His conclusion that those who ‘goe in higher buskins than their estate will beare’ because the commonwealth is really governed by ‘persons tried and well knowen’ cannot but be self-serving praise. Smith has more time for citizens who oversee local government – and so actually help govern the realm – and, in particular, yeomen. A yeoman is a ‘Legalem hominem’ [a man in law], ‘a freeman borne English, and may dispend of his owne free lande’ (p. 42).16 Smith emphasizes the specific nature of yeomen, who ‘confesse themselves to be no gentlemen, but give the honour to al which be or take upon them to be gentlemen, and yet they have a certaine preheminence and more estimation than laborers and artificers’, indicating that the yeoman knows his place and is clear about his position in the social order.17 Smith, of course, was the son of a yeoman and it is hard not to read this passage as a piece of life writing, his contempt for those above him, and desire to distinguish himself and his family from those beneath him, palpable. Smith heralds the triumph of the industrious yeomen who will triumph over the idle gentlemen: These [yeomen] be (for the most part) fermors unto gentlemen, which with grasing, frequenting of markettes, and keeping servauntes not idle as the gentleman doth, but such as get both their owne living and parte of their maisters: by these meanes doe come to such wealthe, that they are able and daily doe buy the lands of unthriftie gentlemen, and after setting their sonnes to the schoole at the Universities, to the lawe of the Realme, or otherwise leaving them sufficient lands whereon they may live without labour, doe make their saide sonnes by those meanes gentlemen (pp. 42–3).

Again, it is difficult not to read such a passage as the story of the son of a yeoman who went to Cambridge, becoming its vice-chancellor and then one of the chief governors of England. The meritocracy represented in De Republica Anglorum clearly worked spectacularly well for the author, as it did for one of his closest friends and political allies, William Cecil (1520–98), and he surely has his own origins in mind when he lists the surnames of those among whom a yeomen would live: Luter, Finch, White and Browne.18 Yeomen are the backbone of English society: they ‘tende their owne businesse, come not to meddle in publicke matters and judgements but when they are called, and gladde when they are delivered thereof … These are they which in the old world gat that honour to Englande, not that either for witte, conduction, or for power they are or were ever to be compared to the gentlemen’ (pp. 43–4). Smith is also careful to include a fourth category, the proletariat, or ‘operae’ (workers): ‘day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marchantes or retailers which have no free lande, copiholders, and all artificers, as Taylers,

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Shoomakers, Carpenters, Brickemakers, Bricklayers, Masons, &c’. These men ‘have no voice nor authoritie in our common wealth, and no account is made of them but onelie to be ruled, not to rule other’ (p. 46). In towns, Smith explains, as there are no yeomen, they often take on significant roles, acting on juries to administer the law. In villages they serve as churchwardens, ale conners (checking food standards and weights and measures) and constables, the most significant of the three offices mentioned here, one not normally trusted to people of lowly status. What might we conclude from Smith’s elaborate taxonomy of English social class? First, he judges classes in terms of their utility and value to the commonwealth, which is why he places such emphasis on yeomen, and reminds his readers of the importance of ordinary workers, perhaps fearing that their labours are often overlooked. Yeoman may well be subservient to gentlemen but they are a far more productive class who actually till the soil and graze the sheep, which, according to Smith, means that they often acquire the land and property of their social superiors, even if they have no plans to do so. Second, Smith encourages and desires upward social mobility, believing that the deserving of the lower classes – specifically, yeomen – have the right to replace those above them. He also takes some pleasure in observing the fall of those inefficient and profligate gentlemen who are unable to maintain their ill-deserved social status. Third, he bases his understanding of class on the nature of work, introducing a value judgement and arguing for a meritocratic understanding of society that can discard the ephemeral trappings of ostentatious appearance. Fourth, his vision of society is predominantly rural, following on from medieval estates models, which were outdated long before the end of the fourteenth century. Smith’s judgement is largely correct, as by 1600 only just over 8% of the population lived in towns of larger than 5000 people, but that includes 200,000 in London – and the urban population was rising rapidly with mutual antipathy between town and countryside already.19 Smith’s understanding of the social order of Elizabethan England is inherently nostalgic, looking back to the apparent stability of a rural economy, rather as Langland did in Piers Plowman.20 Even the notion of class mobility is centred on the yeomanry, that agricultural class bringing stability to the rest of society when able to replace the frivolous, over-stretched and unreliable layer of gentlemen. Smith’s concern with class stratification was taken up by George Puttenham in his Art of English Poesie, published in 1589, six years after De Republica Anglorum. Puttenham cites Smith, referring to him as ‘a man of great learning and gravity’, through his application of his understanding of Greek to English.21 Puttenham may have known of Smith through his attempts to encourage other scholars and thinkers, such as Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser at his House at Hill Hall in Essex, or simply through his published

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writings.22 His classification of English literary styles would appear to owe something to Smith’s analysis of social class. In his reflections on types of writing Puttenham claims that there should be a correlation between style and subject matter. In his chapter ‘Of style’ he argues that a writer needs ‘to have the style decent and comely it behoveth the maker or poet to follow the nature of his subject: that is, if his matter be high and lofty, that the style be so too, if mean, the style also be mean, if base, the style humble and base accordingly’ (p. 140). Puttenham admits that there cannot be an exact equation of style and class because kings can indulge in ‘petty pleasure’ which might require a poem in a ‘very base and vile’ style, and it would be inappropriate to use the high style to write about the foul deeds of Nero and Caligula and other pernicious Roman tyrants. However, in representing literary language in a range of terms from ‘high’ to ‘base’, Puttenham’s scheme of literary taxonomy is intertwined with an understanding of social class. In the following chapter, ‘Of the high, low and mean subject’, these values become far more obvious. Puttenham argues that matters of ‘Gods and divine things’ have to be described using the highest forms of writing, followed closely by ‘the noble gests and great fortunes of princes’, as well as the ‘notable accidents of time and, as the greatest affairs of war and peace’ (he has classical epics in mind). Then follows a Smithian division between ‘mean’ and ‘base’ men: The mean matters be those that concern mean men, their life and business, as lawyers, gentlemen and merchants, good householders and honest citizens, and which sound neither to matters of state nor of war, nor leagues, nor great alliances, but smatch [taste of] all the common conversation, as of the civiler and better sort of men. The base and low matters be the doings of the common artificer, servingman, yeoman, groom, husbandman, day-labourer, sailor, shepherd, swineherd and such like of homely calling, degree and bringing-up (p. 142).

While Smith is careful to place yeomen below gentlemen and above common artificers, Puttenham places them in the lower class. The lists of professions overlap, as it also seems that Puttenham places greater social value on merchants than Smith, but this may be because he has a slightly different idea of the term, thinking of important citizens of London rather than tradesmen or shopkeepers. These are, however, relatively inconsequential distinctions: the point is that both writers are eager to provide a useful classification of social types and classes with Puttenham believing that such divisions will illuminate ways of reading and writing literature. Puttenham’s reflections take place before the rise of the public stage, a development that might have changed his understanding of literary styles:

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‘all hymns and histories and tragedies were written in the high style, all comedies and interludes and other common poesies of loves and such like in the mean style, all eclogues and pastoral poems in the low and base style’ (p. 142). Here, it would appear that he has applied Aristotle’s distinction – between tragedy in which people appear more noble than they are in real life and comedy in which they appear worse – to matters of style.23 The advent of professional theatre, even if someone from his aristocratic background was unlikely to attend the theatres on Bankside, would surely have further complicated his judgement of the relationship between class and its literary representation. Like Smith, Puttenham understands society primarily in terms of an agrarian economy, and he acknowledges that poetry first developed as a bucolic form. However, his representation of pastoral poetry as a sophisticated literary mode leads him to contradict his elaborate taxonomy of styles: I do deny that the eclogue should be the first and most ancient from of artificial poesy, being persuaded that the poet devised the eclogue long after the other dramatic poems, not of purpose to counterfeit or represent the rustical manner of loves and communications, but under the veil of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate and glance at greater matters, and such as perchance had not been safe to have been disclosed in any other sort, which may be perceived by the eclogues of Virgil, in which are treated by figure matters of great importance than the loves of Tityrus and Corydon (p. 89).24

The equation of style and class breaks down when satire or critique is involved and disguise proves necessary.25 What Smith and Puttenham’s comments demonstrate is that writers in Renaissance England not only had the intellectual tools at their disposal to think about class, but were also able to think about the relationship between class and literature. It may also be true that ‘broader class consciousness was inhibited for those below the level of the gentry by their lack of alternative conceptions of the social order’, as well as localism and relationships which demanded deference.26 Even so, whatever model we might choose to define the social order and the hierarchies it relied on and precipitated, we need to recognize that society was structured in terms of a material reality; that material reality changed in the early modern period; and people understood that social changes were taking place. In Keith Wrightson’s words: Older economic institutions, relationships and expectations were dislocated. The economic structure of society was transformed and simplified around the three fundamental divisions of land, capital and labour in which ‘men arrange themselves according to the things they own and exchange’.27

Writers were, of course, acutely conscious of existing within a society structured by class and having to adopt a class position. It is often pointed



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out that Shakespeare’s life was intimately bound up with money and anxieties about class and status, concerns that for some diminish his literary celebrity, as though we should expect a universal genius to transcend the stuff of everyday life.28 Writing to challenge this misguided belief in Shakespeare’s other-worldliness, Katherine Duncan-Jones argues that she does not think that ‘any Elizabethans … were what might now be called “nice” – liberal, unprejudiced, unselfish’. Rather, For most men of talent and ambition in this period, even for those who, unlike Shakespeare, enjoyed the privileges of high birth, some degree of ruthlessness was a necessary survival skill … Three topics used to be traditionally taboo in polite society and in Shakespearean biography: social class, sex and money.29

In his recent study of Shakespeare’s money, Robert Bearman shows how complicated, unstable and changeable his life, career and wealth were.30 Shakespeare’s father was a glover, a respectable trade, who enjoyed intermittent periods of prosperity but who fell on hard times during Shakespeare’s youth and was forced to sell off some of his property. Shakespeare worked as an actor and hack writer before becoming the shareholder of a company and accumulating enough wealth to buy significant property himself, enabling him to apply for a coat of arms. He clearly did well, but, if Dr Bearman’s informed judgements are correct, he was by no means as wealthy as many assume and may well have struggled towards the end of his life.31 Shakespeare’s material existence, access to wealth and giddy – but insecure and unstable – ride up the social hierarchy were hardly unusual for those outside the upper classes, a factor which surely increased awareness of social divisions and class status. Edmund Spenser, almost certainly from a similar background, achieved great wealth and status through acquiring an estate in Ireland and, as a result, the title of gentleman. Spenser’s wealth came from his career in the civil service rather than his writing and his estate proved a precarious asset when the Munster Plantation was overrun during the Nine Years War and he was forced to flee; dying in London – according to Ben Jonson – ‘for lack of bread’. Jonson was probably not entirely accurate as the Spenser family retained the estates until the eighteenth century, but his offhand comment indicates the general belief in the instability of success as well as showing how common was the belief in the fickle nature of fortune.32 The soldier-poet Thomas Churchyard toiled for years without conspicuous success until, like Spenser, he was awarded a pension by the queen towards the end of his life, presumably reward for his longevity as much as his literary skill. His biographer wonders whether Churchyard sought ‘material prizes as monetary enrichment’, or ‘more intangible rewards’ for his achievements, concluding that he would undoubtedly have accepted anything.33 Writers such as Thomas Chettle and Robert Greene wrote an extraordinary number

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of works amounting to thousands of pages as their long entries in the Short-Title Catalogue demonstrate. Unlike Shakespeare and Spenser, they were not shareholders in a successful company and did not have another lucrative career which gave them the opportunity to accumulate property. They had to rely on their writing alone for income.34 John Donne was a successful man on the make enjoying significant patronage until his secret marriage ended his hopes of a court career and catapulted him into relative poverty. Having converted to the Church of England, his immediate elevation to senior positions, Dean of St Paul’s and royal chaplain, was probably based on his literary talents but – whatever the reason – was certainly an ‘irregularly … rapid promotion’.35 Ben Jonson, like his collaborator and rival, Inigo Jones, was from a trade background, becoming important enough to have plays staged in the commercial theatre and at court, and have his works published in a folio the same year as the king published his.36 This list could go on and include writers such as John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Nashe, John Webster and many others who could easily be considered in terms of shifting/unstable class positions, in particular the numerous younger sons who did not inherit land and property and who were forced to seek a living in London.37 Class was a significant and obvious factor in the lives of most writers, structuring their relationship to everyday reality: some, such as Sir Philip Sidney, were aristocratic and perhaps looked down on those beneath them.38 Many more belonged to the ‘middling sort’, in terms of both rank and wealth, suspended between the sort of material success that Jonson, Shakespeare and Spenser achieved (for a while, at least) and disappearing into poverty like Chettle and Greene.39 However, this is a wide social band so that thinking about classes as sealed units which had a particular mentality or ideology is a problematic over-simplification and it does not follow that we can therefore chart the histories of a series of classes and write about the rise of the middle class as a coherent group with their own ways of thinking, ideas, prejudices and tastes.40 As Terry Eagleton sardonically – and rightly – pointed out recently, ‘If you open a history of Britain at random, it will tell you two things about the period you chance on: that it was a time of rapid change, and that the middle classes went on rising.’ 41 Analysing the ‘middling sort’ may be complicated and fraught with pitfalls but we ignore the reality of the social relations under which writers existed at the cost of our own understanding of who they were – and how they understood the society in which they lived.42 It therefore follows that we cannot separate what writers wrote from their identities, one obvious reason why it is important to understand how people existed in the past.43 English Renaissance literature, like the early modern lives of those who wrote it, is saturated with class consciousness.

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Most obviously writers endured the anxiousness generated by their insecure status: most were younger sons who had not inherited property and had to make use of their education and live by their wits, making them socially mobile (both upward and downward).44 Their readerships were expanding, consisting of many from similar backgrounds: the process was even more pronounced in the public playhouses, which were patronized by many young apprentices with equally dubious prospects.45 It is hardly surprising that so many literary works focus, directly or indirectly, on the subject of class and social mobility. The tragedy, Arden of Faversham (published in 1592, possibly first performed in the late 1580s), recently claimed for the Shakespeare canon, dramatizes a famous murder case from Holinshed’s Chronicles.46 Thomas Arden (b. 1508) is a successful citizen, originally from Norwich, who lives in the village of Faversham where he has made a fortune from acquiring property after the Dissolution of the Monasteries (Figure 3.1). His disaffected wife, Alice, and her lover, Thomas Mosby, hire two exsoldiers from Calais, Black Will and Shakebag, to murder him. After several unsuccessful attempts they finally manage to kill Arden in his house on 14 February 1551, leaving his body out in a snowstorm in the hope that the inclement weather would cover up the crime. Unfortunately for the hapless assassins the storm stopped and blood trails led back to the house so that the crime was easily detected. Moseby and Alice confessed and were executed; Black Will fled but was probably executed in Flanders. Shakebag alone escaped justice. The crime was notorious and well known before the play was performed, and appeared in a number of murder pamphlets and a broadside ballad, an indication of its potent appeal to a wide audience.47 The principal reason was surely that the chief criminal was a woman, but the story was also probably popular because it outlined the rapacious greed inspired by the land grab resulting from the Reformation, a topical subject throughout the sixteenth century.48 One of the protagonists in the story, Richard Green, particularly hates Thomas Arden because he ‘had wrested a peece of ground on the backeside of the abbeie of Feversham, and there had blowes and great threats passed betwixt them about that matter’, which is why he gets involved in the murder plot (the motive is reproduced in the play).49 While following the same basic story the play makes significant changes in detail from the account in Holinshed’s Chronicles. The chronicle account concentrates on the mechanics of the murder and the number of failed attempts in various locations (including St Paul’s Churchyard); in contrast the action of the play takes place in Faversham, the population of which only reached 1500 by the late sixteenth century.50 More significantly, the dialogue is, of course, almost entirely invented so that Arden’s conversations with his

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Figure 3.1  Arden of Faversham’s House, Faversham. Photo by Alison Hadfield.

friend, Franklin, about how to win his wife back, and her conversations with Moseby, are entirely new, much of the rest a series of inferences based on the historical record. Immediately after the murder the adulterers have a lovers’ tiff explicitly centred on class status. As Alice and Mosby come closer to committing murder, they express doubts about their projected crime and desire to return to a tranquil existence. Alice laments her compromised status: Ay, to my former happy life again; From title of an odious strumpet’s name To honest Arden’s wife – not Arden’s honest wife. Ha, Mosby, ‘tis thou hast rifled me of that, And made me sland’rous to all my kin.



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Even in my forehead is thy name engraven, A mean artificer, that low-born name. I was bewitched; woe worth the hapless hour And all the causes that enchanted me!51

Alice describes her fall from grace in terms of her honest status as a loyal wife, but suggests that her shame is more dramatic as her partner in adultery is of a lower class than she is. Her claim that she has been bewitched into acting against her best interests cleverly mirrors the more usual complaint of men led astray by unsuitable women and, understandably, provokes a reaction in Mosby.52 He states that he now sees her in her true colours, because ‘the rain hath beaten off thy gilt’ so that ‘Thy worthless copper shows thee counterfeit’ (lines 100–1). He counters her claim that he is a witch with the assertion that she is a fake, a counterfeit coin now revealed for all to see, following on from her self-description as a woman who has her adultery emblazoned on her forehead, a public sign of her shame (with the implication that class plays a significant part in her humiliation).53 The verbal sparring is represented in terms of the reality of the lover’s lowly status finally coming to light. Moseby concludes his speech with the taunt that she is ‘a copesmate for thy hinds’, a contemptuous insult which casts Alice as someone best suited for an affair with a servant, because he is ‘too good to be [her] favourite’ (lines 104–5). Alice claims that he has bewitched her, undermining her good sense and compromising her status as a respectable married lady; Moseby argues that he is the one who has been taken in, imagining that she is a valuable asset when in fact she is nothing more than a loose woman who chases after her servants. The exchange is replete with dramatic irony: far from vindicating either, what the audience understands is that both are greedy, unscrupulous and self-interestedly aspirational criminals, prepared to stop at nothing to satisfy their base desires and fuel their petty ambitions, as the monetary imagery demonstrates. Alice has acted as a social climber in marrying a wealthy man she does not love; Moseby has similar ambitions in planning to dispose of Arden and marry an affluent widow. Their reconciliation is also cast in terms of anxieties about class status. When Alice claims that she will not trouble him anymore, Moseby responds: Moseby: Oh no, I am a base artificer, My wings are feathered for a lowly flight. Mosby? Fie, no! not for a thousand pound. Make love to you? Why, ‘tis unpardonable; We beggars must not breathe where gentles are (lines 135–9).

In the context of the play – a murder for gain during the time after the dissolution of the monasteries when the Reformation provided immense

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opportunities for the personal enrichment of those able to acquire land – these lines add further levels of irony. As the plot makes clear, following the historical record in Holinshed’s Chronicles, this was exactly how the hard-headed Arden acquired his wealth. In the opening scene when he had learned of Moseby’s approaches to his already interested wife, Arden had asserted his rights as a husband – and as a man of status: I am by birth a gentleman of blood, And that injurious ribald that attempts To violate my dear wife’s chastity – For dear I hold her love, as dear as heaven – Shall on the bed which he thinks to defile See his dissevered joints and sinews torn, Whilst on the planchers [floorboards] pants his weary body, Smeared in the channels of his lustful blood (Scene 1, lines 36–43).

Arden’s bloodthirsty desire for revenge for a crime that has not yet taken place, along with his professed love for his loyal wife, demonstrates his insecure status and the need for him to perform his role as a gentleman. He imagines an ancient status through an unspecified bloodline, whereas in reality he is an arriviste and, here, reveals himself to be a petty tyrant.54 In representing himself as someone who has the right to torture those who wrong him he encourages the audience to make the connection between the head of the household and the monarch, one deeply enshrined in Tudor thought.55 Furthermore, Arden’s assertion of his power to torture and kill any rival is a prefiguration of his own grisly death at the hands of four murderers, a memento mori that the audience would have understood. Alice is indeed a tarnished coin passed between two men of differing status who see her as a means to an end. Her character has to be seen in terms of both class and gender.56 Moseby’s profession of hurt innocence is as vulgar as Arden’s bragging assumption of his lofty status. Indeed, as Alice and Moseby are reconciled and move ever closer to committing a capital crime, it is not clear to the audience how sincere they have been in their quarrel or whether, like Arden, they are playing roles in order to get what they think they want. Moseby’s profession of principled and hurt innocence is countered by Alice’s performance of womanly supplication: Sweet Mosby is as gentle as a king, And I too blind to judge him otherwise. Flowers do sometimes spring in fallow lands, Weeds in gardens, roses grow on thorns; So whatso’er my Mosby’s father was, Himself is valued gentle by his worth (scene 8, lines 140–5).

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Alice’s lines cunningly mix the language of tender love and the language of class. Furthermore, they intertwine two contrasting notions of class identity. The opening line casts Moseby as a gentle king, well-behaved and regal with an ancient bloodline, a pointed contrast to the brutal monarch in command of the torture chamber which Arden asserts as his right. As she claims that she is only now seeing the truth, countering Moseby’s statement that he had finally seen her for the bogus money she really is, Alice flatters Moseby’s belief in his own self-sufficiency that his rise to higher status was entirely due to his own merits. Her strategy succeeds: even though Moseby recognizes that she may not be entirely sincere (‘how you women can insinuate, / And clear a trespass with your sweet-set tongue’ (lines 146–7)), he ends the quarrel and promises to resume their relationship. Arden of Faversham details the crime of petty treason, the murder of the head of the household (men who killed their wives were tried for murder; women who killed their husbands, petty treason, a crime against the state).57 As such, it is a ‘domestic tragedy’.58 Yet the audience is always aware that the play also works as a complicated allegory of class relations in the wake of Henry VIII’s decision to break with the Catholic Church. Arden’s representation of himself as a powerful – tyrannical – monarch surely reminded the audience that his rise to the status of gentleman was made possible by the actions of a king who – in his later years and by reputation – was quite prepared to torture and execute any opposition, making the crime Arden suffers strangely appropriate.59 The social revolution inaugurated by the Dissolution of the Monasteries made possible Arden’s rise, but also those of his nemesis, Alice and Mosby. The title page of the printed edition aligns the play with the sensational morality of contemporary murder pamphlets (Figure 3.2).60 Indeed, the play does seem to vindicate the notion of retributive justice, as all the villains pay for their crimes, but the relationship between crime and punishment in the play is by no means straightforward. There is no obvious ethical centre in the play, no undivided authority in this particular representation of status conscious, class-riven, post-Reformation England. Rather, there is an acute awareness that concepts of right and wrong were inevitable casualties in a country where the old order had crumbled and a new one was yet to be established so that it was every man and woman for themselves, as the story of Arden demonstrates. Arden is murdered because of his unscrupulous desire to ascend the social scale and his carelessness in causing enmity. Alice spirals out of control, mingling desire for financial and sexual gratification, a traditionally misogynist portrait set against the background of the social upheaval in the years immediately after the Reformation.61 Moseby, in his conversations with Alice, articulates snarling class resentment, and together they represent the anxieties of sliding up and down

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Figure 3.2  Arden of Faversham (1592), title page.

the social ladder. Arden indicates how many Elizabethans saw the chaos of the mid-sixteenth century, as well as standing as a fable for its own times, an appropriate subject for one of the plays performed in the relatively early days of the commercial theatre.62 A more positive representation of class relations is provided in Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, performed about a decade after Arden of Faversham in 1599.63 The play shows the shoemakers enjoying their work, which is as much sociable leisure as hard labour, the workers drinking beer and conversing while they toil. Moreover, their profession, one of the most powerful and successful of the London trade guilds, is buoyant enough to be able to absorb and celebrate foreign workers who can join their guild without problems, which was not the case with every guild.64 The audience would have known that in the world outside the playhouse making a living was rarely as straightforward or as pleasurable: ‘Work for most English

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men and women was … hard and monotonous, dirty and cold.’ 65 The play is therefore framed as a fantasy, almost like the popular images of the ‘poor man’s heaven’, the ‘Land of Cockaigne’.66 It concludes with the king attending a feast held in Simon Eyre’s honour, but the last lines, ‘When all our sports and banquetings are done, / Wars must right wrongs which Frenchmen have begun’, are a pointed reminder that in the real world many Londoners will have to endure the fate of Ralph, who returns from his conscripted service with a wooden leg, if they return to the capital at all.67 Given the hostilities in Ireland in which huge numbers of English troops were involved, The Shoemaker’s Holiday might well be described, following James Shapiro, as an ‘at war’ play.68 The play opens with a scene that transports the audience from their familiar world into one that gradually shades into fantasy. The audience witnesses an animated conversation that has started before the action begins, a common way of beginning Elizabethan and Jacobean plays (see, for example, Measure for Measure (c.1604), John Ford’s The Broken Heart (c.1627–33)). Sir Hugh Lacy, earl of Lincoln, and Sir Roger Oatley, the Lord Mayor of London, have been discussing dining arrangements, but once on stage they turn their attention to the projected marriage of Lacy’s nephew, Roland, and Oatley’s daughter, Rose. It is a match that neither father wants to see take place and each adopts what they imagine are cunning tactics in order to prevent the union. When Lincoln raises the subject, observing in an affectedly casual manner, ‘I hear my cousin Lacy / Is much affected to your daughter Rose’ (scene 1, lines 5–6), Oatley turns what might be thought of as welcome news into something far more negative, setting the agenda for the dialogue that follows: ‘and she loves him so well / That I mislike her boldness in the chase’ (lines 8–9). Lincoln’s ‘much affected’ has become an unseemly boldness, a good example of paradiastole, rhetorical redescription which transforms the nature of the comment into its opposite.69 In blaming his daughter for her behaviour Oatley is attempting to generate further opposition to the match. When Lincoln provides him with a cue about Oatley’s apparent reluctance to see the names joined, designed to emphasize the gap in social status and pedigree between the families and so intimidate the Lord Mayor, Oatley responds: Too mean is my poor girl for his high birth. Poor citizens must not with courtiers wed, Who will in silks and gay apparel spend More in one year than I am worth by far. Therefore your honour need not doubt my girl (lines 11–6).

Oatley’s short speech begins with what appears to be due deference, but, like Mosby’s sarcastic representation of his humble status to Alice, his words are laced with class-based hostility. Oatley is defending the status and character

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of the London citizens, a self-sufficient class which he assumes can look after themselves, unlike the ridiculously profligate aristocracy who fritter away their money on ridiculous ephemera – echoing the familiar conflict between old and new money so frequently represented on the stage in this period.70 The last line praises the character of his daughter, but it is ambiguous. Does he mean that she will be true in her suit because London citizens are steadfast and reliable? Or that she is of good character and, therefore, will eventually realize that it is not in her interests to be married to a feckless upper-class twit? It does not really matter which way the earl reads Oatley’s comments as he takes the opportunity to discourage the union by expanding on his nephew’s profligacy: Take heed, my lord, advise you what you do. A verier unthrift lives not in the world Than is my cousin; for, I’ll tell you what, ‘Tis now almost a year since he requested To travel countries for his experience. I furnished him with coin, bills of exchange, Letters of credit, men to wait on him, Solicited my friends in Italy Well to respect him. But to see the end: Scant had he journeyed through half Germany But all his coin was spent, his men cast off, His bills embezzled, and my jolly coz, Ashamed to show his bankrupt presence here, Became a shoemaker in Wittenberg – A goodly science for a gentleman Of such descent! (lines 16–31).

The speech is carefully designed to cause maximum irritation and panic for Oatley. The opening line is a reprimand, reminding the Lord Mayor that he is talking to a social superior and so needs to mind how he speaks, even if the second line suggests that he is merely advising him about his wayward nephew. He soon moves to a more intimately conspiratorial style, confiding his knowledge about Roland to someone who needs to understand what his nephew is really like. This manoeuvre then provides a guarantee that the details that follow are all accurate. According to Lincoln, Roland expressed the desire to undertake a grand tour, a venture that only aristocrats could possibly afford and which was invariably a means of marking the transition into responsible adulthood by providing the young man with one last opportunity to sow his wild oats before settling down – as well as acquiring useful cultural and political capital.71 Lincoln forcefully rams his point home by detailing all the forms of financial support the young man has been

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provided with and abused: coin, bills of exchange, letters of credit, servants and the good will of influential friends. The list – indeed the act of making a list – mimics the professional concerns of the merchant class, patronizing Oatley in the process, as he realizes.72 And the bankruptcy of Roland forces him to enter the class of apprentice labourers as a shoemaker, a descent down the social ladder which is anathema to the wealthy Lord Mayor, a position famous in legend, as the play recounts, for having more than its fair share of spectacularly successful social climbers who started off as tradesmen.73 There may be a further joke in the selection of Wittenberg, the location for the inauguration of the Reformation when Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the church door on 31 October 1517. If Hamlet was staged in anything like its eventual form before the first performance of The Shoemaker’s Holiday at the Rose Theatre in autumn 1599, there is also perhaps a sly reference to another young dissolute aristocrat who came to a bad end.74 The earl’s speech works at a meta-dramatic level as well: when he concludes that Lacy should really find ‘some honest citizen / To wed [his] daughter to’ (lines 36–7), the audience, which probably contained many apprentices and craftsmen, would already have recognized the snobbish hostility of both men to their social class which sets up the plot whereby Ralph finds both love and redemption as a shoemaker.75 Oatley acknowledges that Roland might well do better now that he has an honest trade, but his aside to the audience, ‘And yet I scorn to call him son-in-law’ (line 44), positions him nearer to the earl than them. The earl’s speech is not an unqualified success. Oatley sees through his transparent disguise, as, of course, the audience would have done too: ‘Well, fox, I understand your subtlety’ (line 39). But the joke is also on him as he is playing exactly the same game. In the end not only does Lincoln’s cunning trick to have Roland made chief colonel of the companies mustered in and around London fail, but the couple are united against all odds. In a time when most marriages needed to have some element of parental support, playgoers would have known that this was a significantly implausible fantasy of the triumph of love over class barriers.76 Paying attention to the class references in The Shoemaker’s Holiday emphasizes the nature of the play as a fantasy. Throughout, the audience is aware of its fictive status, realizing that what we witness on stage rarely happens in life. Dekker’s play is much more like Shakespeare’s romantic comedies than the satirical comedies of humours that had first appeared the previous year when Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour had been staged at the Curtain Theatre. In the ‘Wars of the Theatres’, The Shoemaker’s Holiday looks like a play designed to appeal to an audience who might also enjoy As You Like It, probably also staged in 1599, as well as Henry V, another ‘at war’ play which was also written with Essex’s impending

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Irish campaign in mind.77 Furthermore, Flavius’s pointed rhetorical question to the commoners celebrating the triumphs of Julius Caesar, ‘Is this a holiday?’ at the start of Julius Caesar, one of whom is a cobbler, looks as if it were written with a knowledge of Dekker’s play, reminding the audience that the Globe trumped the Rose.78 Class references played a significant role in establishing the structure of drama in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, as well as the nature of individual plays. Many works satirized the acquisitive society that was thought to have developed after the accession of James I, perhaps even competing with each other to see how far they could go. Certainly, the usury play, attacking the selfish accumulation of wealth at the expense of more honest citizens, became a staple genre in Jacobean England.79 A relatively late example of the usurer figure appears in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (c.1621/2–25, published 1633), the title commenting sardonically on the monarch’s ability to pay off creditors by making them new peers.80 Few stage villains have enjoyed exploiting the poor and oppressed with as much enthusiasm as the newly ennobled Sir Giles Overreach. He explains his methods to his pupil, Jack Marall: I’ll therefore buy some cottage near his manor, Which done, I’ll make my men break ope his fences; Ride o’er his standing corn, and in the night Set fire on his barns; or break his cattle’s legs. These trespasses draw on suits, and suits expenses, Which I can spare, but will soon beggar him. When I have harried him thus two, or three year, Though he sue in forma pauperis, in spite Of all his thrift, and care he’ll grow behind-hand.81

Sir Giles’s professed tactics are a mixture of sharp but legitimate practice (buying properties bordering the victim’s land); illegal operations (destroying fences, burning barns and mutilating cattle); and, to complete the process, legal bullying, knowing that he has deeper pockets than any opponent (in forma pauperis meant being too impoverished to pay legal fees). Enclosure – its extent and effectiveness in improving yields – is a matter of controversy among economic historians. What is clear is that the ruthless ambition of landowners like Sir Giles enabled them to extinguish common rights to the use of ‘fallow arable fields’ and ‘common pasture’. Feelings of injustice and resentment at the destruction of ancient practices proliferated, often leading to riots in times of hardship, and were a common feature of the reality and perception of the reality of the economic conditions of pre-Civil War England.82



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A New Way to Pay Old Debts demonstrates that feelings of class conflict and economic grievance were not confined to London. This should not surprise us: after all, given the net migration of people to the capital, many would have chosen or been forced to leave the country as economic migrants. As Steve Rappaport points out, Given the very high level of mortality in early modern London it is not surprising that the increase in its population was due entirely to the migration of people to the capital from towns, villages, hamlets, and farms throughout the realm where the birth rate was higher than the death rate, immigrants who represented much of the natural increase in the population elsewhere in England.83

It should also not surprise us that Massinger’s play shows that the criminal practices of Sir Giles bear a striking resemblance to those levelled against witches, who were invariably accused of harming livestock and destroying crops. In her opening speech in Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley’s The Witch of Edmonton, which is almost exactly contemporary with A New Way to Pay Old Debts as it was first performed in 1621, Mother Sawyer laments that because she is ‘poor, deformed and ignorant’ it is thought that her ‘bad tongue … / Forspeaks their cattle, doth bewitch their corn’.84 Accusations of witchcraft were often rooted in economically deprived areas where there was competition for scarce resources: given that the majority of accusations were made against women, we have a further reminder that questions of class and gender should not be prised apart.85 The more over-arching point is that the stage was used to represent class conflict and class-based resentment and anxieties, exactly as we might expect given the social composition of theatre goers, many of whom were young, insecure and hoping for improved fortunes, and so would have experienced the social issues of the city or the country. Issues of class were not confined to drama but were the stuff of poetry too, especially work written by writers outside the metropolis who appeared to resent what they thought was the excessive influence of the court. One of these, I suspect, was the dominant poet of the 1590s, Edmund Spenser, writing from the most significant English colony established in Elizabeth’s reign, the Munster Plantation in Ireland.86 Just as we cannot think about class without considering gender (and vice versa) we should also acknowledge that we cannot sever class politics from colonial expansion and occupation. Spenser’s one sonnet sequence, the Amoretti, was designed as a celebration of Spenser’s marriage, a new departure in the recently established genre, which – following Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, first published in 1591 – had charted adulterous love or unrequited passion.87 The Amoretti tell the story of Spenser’s courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, his second wife, the sequence

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culminating in another new form of English poem, the marriage-hymn, the Epithalamion, as no one before had combined ‘the roles of bridegroom and poet-speaker’.88 As Kenneth J. Larsen has demonstrated, The eighty-nine sonnets of the Amoretti, as numbered in the 1595 octavo edition, were written to correspond with consecutive dates, beginning on Wednesday 23 January 1594 and running, with one interval, through to Friday 17 May 1594: they correspond with the daily and sequential order of scriptural readings that are prescribed for those dates by the liturgical calendar of the Church of England.89

Spenser narrates the course of his courtship and marriage of Elizabeth in terms of the prescribed Bible readings used by the established church, a token of his allegiance to that church as well as a manifestation of the establishment of English culture in Ireland. Most importantly, he places his own identity as a poet at the centre of the poetic sequence. The 1594 experimental volume shows that, for Spenser, the colonists on the Munster Plantation believed that they had established a civilized order in Ireland that could rival and even supersede the tired culture of the court.90 The sequence, therefore, charts a significant shift in class culture as the aspirational literature of the colonists seeks to replace the language of court culture, locating the true focus of Englishness in the margins not the centre, where the hard-pressed colonists protect the lives and identities of those secure in the metropolis, a familiar, class-inflected colonial myth.91 Spenser appropriates the language of the courtly lyric – in the main that of Sidney’s sequence – in order to praise his bride-to-be, translating the tropes of courtiers to a conspicuously provincial, commercial scene: Ye tradefull Merchants that with weary toyle, do seeke most pretious things to make your gain: and both the Indias of their treasures spoile, what needeth you to seeke so farre in vaine? For loe my loue doth in her selfe containe all this worlds riches that may farre be found; if Saphyres, loe her eies be Saphyres plaine, if Rubies, loe hir lips be Rubies found; If Pearles, hir teeth be pearles both pure and round; if Yuorie, her forhead yuory weene; if Gold, her locks are finest gold on ground; if siluer, her faire hands are siluer sheene, But that which fairest is, but few behold, her mind adornd with vertues manifold.92

The sonnet states that Spenser’s Elizabeth is as beautiful as any courtly lady, and the poet may well have one of Sir Philip Sidney’s sonnets from his



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sequence Astrophil and Stella in mind, in which Astrophil gives an ornate description of Stella’s face. If so, then he is transposing the elaborate ironies of that poem to a new, middle-class setting and a different series of literary co-ordinates. Sidney’s poem reads: Queen Virtue’s court, which some call Stella’s face, Prepar’d by Nature’s choicest furniture, Hath his front built of alabaster pure; Gold in the covering of that stately place. The door by which sometimes comes forth her Grace Red porphyr is, which lock of pearl makes sure, Whose porches rich (which name of cheeks endure) Marble mix’d red and white do interlace. The windows now through which this heav’nly guest Looks o’er the world, and can find nothing such, Which dare claim from those lights the name of best, Of touch they are that without touch doth touch, Which Cupid’s self from Beauty’s mine did draw: Of touch they are, and poor I am their straw.93

Sidney’s poem asserts that his lady has all these marvellous possessions as part of her substance; in pointed contrast, Spenser claims that his is better than these things, establishing a distance between her (middle-class, trade) virtues and the riches that the merchants bring back from far flung lands, most of which, presumably, end up at court and in the possession of courtiers. Furthermore, Spenser’s love is witnessed by merchants, not courtiers, and his lady’s commodified body serves to revitalize them, the real substance of society, not those at court who imagine that their actions run the country.94 The opening quatrain suggests that foreign exploration is probably a waste of time, as more profit will be gained, financially and spiritually, by planting colonies within the ‘British Isles’, a development that would involve the strengthening and proliferation of provincial society, not the spectacular voyages of explorers and empire builders which frequently disappointed investors.95 Of course, in doing so, Spenser is performing a cunning sleight of hand, writing as though Ireland were not a colony but part of the queen’s legitimate possessions and that in marrying Elizabeth and establishing their home in Ireland, they are effecting domestic harmony and shoring up the realm, making them better citizen than their more celebrated and exalted counterparts who grab overseas possessions.96 In domesticating the colonial context of his wedding Spenser is disguising the origins of his own wealth and obscuring his role as a man on the make.97 The description is repeated in the tenth stanza of the Epithalamion, when the poet-narrator asks, ‘Tell me ye merchants daughters did ye see / So fayre a creature in your towne before’ (lines 168–9), followed by a similar depiction of his new wife in

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terms of a blazon invariably applied to court beauties.98 Spenser reminds his readers that his bride has a radiance that puts them to shame, marking the couple out as both part of the community and yet also separate from it, a poet and his wife who simultaneously represent and transcend the virtues of the merchant community in south-west Ireland. Spenser’s sonnet can be read as part of a concerted attempt to place himself as the next national poet after Sidney, which probably explains why his poem Astrophel (1591), lamenting the premature death of Sidney in 1586, appears so late and coincides with Spenser’s rise as a poet rather than appearing immediately after the funeral.99 For many poets lacking secure patronage the economic reality of their working lives was far harsher than it was for Spenser.100 The treadmill of producing work for profit, or in the hope of securing a wealthy patron, was often more debilitating and penurious than for the impoverished hack writers struggling in George Gissing’s New Grub Street.101 Writing, whatever its practitioners might think, was very much a trade for everyone outside the court around 1600, with authors working hand-in-hand with their social equals, printers, publishers and booksellers.102 Richard Barnfield’s The Prayse of Lady Pecunia, published as part of Barnfield’s last short volume in 1598, fits into a long tradition of poetic complaints about money. Barnfield refers to Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, a model for his representation of Lady Pecunia – the personification of money, but the poem can be related to the ploughman tradition lamenting that the once stable values on which society was founded have been corrupted by the lure of financial gain.103 As Barnfield’s editor George Klawitter suggests, it is hard to tell ‘whether Barnfield is commenting on the lack of money in his own pocket or commenting more generally on the lack of patrons for all poets’, but the scarcity of dedications in Barnfield’s books suggest that he is writing from personal experience.104 Barnfield’s narrator states that ‘The Meane is best, and that I meane to keepe’, the quibbling line suggesting that money is not bad in itself, only when it is responsible for malign effects.105 Like Massinger and other dramatists, his persona argues that money has become the dominant force in contemporary society and subsumed everything else: She is the Soveraigne Queene, of all Delights: For her the Lawyer pleades; the Souldier fights. For For For For For For

her, the Merchant venters on the Seas: her, the Scholler studdies at his Booke: her, the Usurer (with greater ease) sillie fishes, layes a silver hooke: her, the Townsman leaves the Countrey Village: her, the Plowman gives himselfe to Tillage.



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For her, the Gentleman doeth raise his rents: For her, the Servingman attends his maister: For her, the curious head new toyes invents: For her, to Sores, the Surgeon layes his plaister. In fine for her, each man in his Vocation, Applies himselfe, in everie sev’rall Nation. What can thy hart desire, but thou mayst have it, If thou hast readie money to disburse? Then thanke thy Fortune, that so freely gave it; For of all friends, the surest is thy purse. Friends may prove false, and leave thee in thy need; But still thy Purse will bee thy friend indeed. (lines 95–114)

Barnfield surely has one of Erasmus’s most celebrated adages in mind here, ‘Friends hold all things in common’, in showing how Lady Pecunia has become everyone’s new best friend and so destroyed all previous relationships of friendly equality.106 Every productive activity and all social relations have been undermined by the advent of monetary relations. As in other conservative critical traditions, Barnfield refers nostalgically to a time of order, justice and a proper understanding of a balanced and harmonious society.107 Barnfield’s examples of professions are traditional and look back to the late Middle Ages: lawyers, soldiers, merchants, scholars, ploughmen, surgeons and usurers. His most likely sources are the fourteenth-century literature of Chaucer and Langland, both of whose work were published in substantial editions in the sixteenth century, and the style of this passage bears more than a passing resemblance to the ending of Troilus and Criseyde.108 Barnfield is arguing that society is out of joint. Even though he praises Elizabeth as a queen who has restored the proper value of money, purified a debased and counterfeited coinage (lines 204–10) and so rebalanced social relations, he makes it clear that all is not yet right: No flocke of sheepe, but some are still infected: No peece of Lawne so pure, but hath some fret: All buildings are not strong, that are erected: All Plants prove not, that in good ground are set: Some tares are sowne, amongst the choicest seed: No garden can be cleansd of every Weede. (lines 211–16)

The stanza might be read alongside the comments about coinage in Arden of Faversham, emphasizing the corrosive impact of monetary exchange and the consequent distortion of ‘proper’ values. Again, the analogy represents society in a very traditional light – this time explicitly employing the rural idiom of the ploughman, gardener and shepherd. Barnfield’s speaker’s real fear, one articulated throughout the early modern period, is that vertical

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and horizontal social relations have been obliterated by money so that no one understands any longer where they are or where they should be. What Barnfield’s poem shows is that writers responded in complicated ways to the advent of an increasingly monetarized economy, one that challenged traditional notions of social hierarchy. There was still relatively little money in circulation and business transactions were conducted in terms of faith in an individual’s credit, but it was clear that times were changing.109 The rapid acquisition of wealth was now a much more distinct possibility than it had been for many aspirant people of the middling sort and, therefore, the chance of social climbing, hence the anxiety expressed in some literary works and the celebration of newfound opportunities in others. A particularly conflicted series of attitudes is demonstrated in the long literary career of the ‘water poet’, John Taylor (1578–1653). After elementary and grammar school, Taylor was apprenticed as a Thames boatman, a waterman, an essential trade that enabled members of the Waterman’s Trade Guild to ferry passengers across the Thames. The Thames had only one bridge, London Bridge, and roads were notoriously poor, so the Waterman’s Trade Guild was extremely powerful and its members relatively well paid after its establishment in 1555, which stipulated that watermen had to undertake a seven year apprenticeship. The Lord Mayor of London and the aldermen could choose a select group of eight watermen to oversee the guild’s members. In return for having a monopoly on river crossing from Gravesend to Windsor, freemen of the company had to pay a quarterly fee to the city – a cost that was resented.110 Although he confessed that he could not master Latin, perhaps the reason for his leaving school and choosing the profession that he did, Taylor would have been a relatively highly educated member of what was often regarded as a powerful but rough profession, well remunerated, like the shoemakers.111 Like many other watermen, Taylor served in the navy after his apprenticeship, serving in the fleets of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, to Cadiz (1596) and the Azores (1597), as well as other campaigns in the Tudor navy. Taylor settled in Southwark, married at some point before 1612, and ferried people across the Thames for a good income for most of the rest of his life. In 1613 he became one of the king’s watermen, serving the monarch on state occasions. Taylor, like other watermen, profited from rowing theatre-goers to Bankside, and his work inspired his literary ambitions which resulted in his first collection of poetry, The Sculler, Rowing from Tiber to Thames, with his Boate laden with a hotch potch, or Gallimawfrey of Sonnets, Satyres, and Epigrams (1612).112 The frontispiece shows a woodcut of Taylor rowing his boat, drawing attention to the unusual nature of a literary boatman (Figure 3.3). The title and the image combine a mixture of self-promotion and self-deprecation, indicating Taylor’s obsession with

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Figure 3.3  John Taylor, The Sculler (1612).

his class status; his reverence for high culture; and his sense of own achievement as well as his exclusion from higher social circles. One verse ignited a quarrel with Thomas Coryat, another eccentric cultural figure, who had just published his Coryat’s Crudities (1611), an account of his journey on foot to Venice and back, complete with literary dedications from over sixty figures.113 Taylor was always keen to learn from other writers and surely gleaned much of his own entrepreneurial relationship to the printing press from Coryat. Claiming that he was friendly with a number of significant literary figures, notably Ben Jonson, Nicholas Breton and Thomas Dekker, Taylor’s output was prolific in the next few years.114 Often drawing attention to the limits

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of his education and his lack of Latin, he was clearly well read in English literature and was a careful student of many challenging authors of uncertain class status such as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Heywood.115 Although he never achieved the recognition that he felt he deserved, as he often complained in his writings, Taylor generated interest in his projects through advance publicity, persuading his friends and acquaintances to sponsor him on various journeys by agreeing to buy copies of the subsequent publication in advance. He travelled to Hamburg, Scotland and Prague (which he used to persuade his fellow countrymen to support the war of the Bohemian Protestants in their struggle against the Hapsburg Empire), and down the Thames in a boat made of paper kept afloat by inflated animal bladders. Taylor published his collected works in 1630, on one level an act of extraordinary self-confidence that placed him on the same level as a writer as Jonson and Shakespeare; on another, it was a recognition of his relatively lowly status as it failed to attract sponsors and was dedicated ‘To the Most High, Most Mighty, and Most Ancient Producer, Seducer, and Abuser of Mankind, the World’.116 Taylor presented a serious figure during the reign of Charles I (1625–49), his more humorous persona being out of fashion, although he produced largely journalistic work. He continued to serve the Watermen’s Company as overseer and clerk, an indication of his significance within the guild. In the Civil War he took the king’s side and was welcomed by him in Oxford in 1642 (although he had supported Parliament’s attack on Catholicism and some versions of radical religion, which he hated). Taylor wrote pamphlets supporting the Royalists (he appears to have become more politically and socially conservative as he got older), but after the triumph of Parliament he spent his last years in relative poverty, running an alehouse, The Poet’s Head, with a sign bearing his own portrait.117 He was unable to work for the Watermen, the company being in Parliamentary hands, and he supplemented his income with more writing. Taylor’s Works is a fascinating literary document, a testimony to the author’s productivity, range of achievements, fluent writing, immersion in English literary culture, as well as his hard-headed self-promotion, demonstrating an astute understanding of the possibilities that the printing press could afford an author of his social position and with his ambition. It is also a work fraught with anxiety, an indication of the possibilities of social and cultural advancement and the very strict limitations that were likely to frustrate such hopes in a pernicious hierarchical society.118 Moreover, a number of the works draw attention to Taylor’s penury and need for remuneration: The Travels of Twelvepence, The Praise, Antiquity, and Commoditie of Beggerie, Beggers, and Begging and The Pennyles Pilgrimage, or The Money-Lesse Perambulation, following more or less in succession

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in the volume.119 The large folio of nearly five hundred pages contains sixty three works, as the author proudly boasts on the title page, containing all his previously published work as well as ‘sundry new additions’. The prelims provide a fascinating insight into the nature of client–patron relationships in the early modern period.120 They consist of dedications to three prominent aristocrats and literary patrons, each with an anagram of their names describing their virtues: ‘The Lord Marquesse Hamilton, Master of the Horse to his Majesty’ (‘James Hamilton: Anagramma, I amm all honesty’); William Herbert, earl of Pembroke (‘Anagramma, Liberally meeke, for repute honourable’); Philip Herbert, earl of Montgomery (‘Anagramma, Firme Faith Begot All My Proper Honer’).121 After the embittered letter addressed to the world, the poet himself opens the series of dedicatory poems with, ‘Errata, or Faults to the Reader’, describing the inadequacies of his verse, followed by poems by Abraham Viell, Thomas Brewer, Robert Branthwaite, Richard Leigh and others, the most celebrated being Thomas Dekker.122 This is an astonishingly gauche performance and we have no idea what the dedicatees thought of this page.123 There is nothing quite like it in English Renaissance literature. The anagrams of the aristocrat’s names implies a familiarity that Taylor certainly did not have, and the use of the Latin term for the word, far from giving the page gravitas, as was surely the intention, only serves to draw attention to the author’s lack of knowledge of the common language of scholarship, gentlemanly intercourse and patronage (dedications were frequently in Latin). The attempt to impress the reader by representing his implied familiarity with such grandees actually demonstrates Taylor’s social isolation. It is not hard to discover Taylor’s inspiration for his dedications. However, the contrast to the prelims of the folios of Jonson and Shakespeare, men from slightly but significantly higher social backgrounds, is striking. Jonson’s folio opens with a page listing the plays and their dedicatees, among them: Every Man in His Humour to William Camden, the historian; Every Man in His Humour to the Inns of Court; Cynthia’s Revels to the court; The Alchemist to Lady Mary Wroth; and Catiline to William Herbert, earl of Pembroke.124 There follows a Latin dedicatory poem by John Selden (1584–1654) – like Jonson, still alive when Taylor’s folio was published – the foremost legal scholar of the time, who had collaborated with Michael Drayton to produce the historical interpretations for his chorographical poem, Poly-Olbion (1613).125 English and Latin poems by George Chapman, John Donne, Hugh Holland, Francis Beaumont and others, all writers and intellectuals, demonstrate the ease with which Jonson could negotiate his own social world, his genuine friendship with the authors and his ability to procure without fuss, and without having to proclaim it too loudly, aristocratic patronage and the good will of the foremost institutions in the

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country (¶3v–¶7v). Shakespeare’s posthumous first folio is rather less concerned with broadcasting the grand connections of its author, but creates a similar impression of social ease and confidence in the author’s literary abilities, a celebration of his achievements made available for the many readers who will want to possess his works. The volume opens with a poem by Jonson, as author of the pioneering literary folio of works, a witty comment on the woodcut of Shakespeare’s face on the page opposite, which notes that the engraver may have captured the great poet’s likeness rather well but he has little chance of reproducing his wit so that task must be left to the reader.126 There follows a dedicatory letter to the earls of Pembroke; one to ‘The great variety of Readers’, advertising the volume’s wide-ranging appeal; before the dedicatory poems from Jonson, Hugh Holland, Leonard Digges and others. The volume is deliberately linked to Jonson’s. Jonson provides two poems; there is one from Hugh Holland, who praised Jonson’s works; and, most significantly, there is the connection to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery (A2r–A6r), which Taylor was later to attempt to exploit, presumably to link his folio to those of the two major authors who had gone before him. The tone and style of the letter from the actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, to the aristocratic brothers is at once deferential and familiar, appropriate for formally communicating with social superiors: Whilst we studie to be thankful in our particular for the many favors we have received from your L.L. [Lordships], we are fallen upon the ill fortune, to mingle two the most diverse things that can be: feare, and rashnesse – rashnesse in the enterprize, and feare of the successe. For, when we valew the places your H.H. sustaine, we cannot but know their dignity greater, then to descend to the reading of these trifles: and, while we name them trifles, we have depriv’d our selves of the defence of our Dedication. (A2r)

Letter writing manuals were widely available and counselled writers how to write every type of letter imaginable.127 Here, the authors already know the addressees, as William Herbert (1580–1630), had been Lord Chamberlain, head of the royal household, and so dealt with the King’s Men when they played at court.128 The jocular tone never loses sight of the relative social positions of the writers and addresses: Heminges and Condell ostensibly make light of their editing enterprise, a ploy designed to flatter the lords who not only possess great estates but also carry out major state duties. The nearest they come to crossing the line from deference to over-familiarity is when they refer to the brothers as ‘H. H.’, combining the initials of their surnames. However, they only do this after having used ‘L. L.’ for lordships, making the joke one that comes in its wake and so equates ‘H. H.’ and ‘L. L.’. And, having apparently dismissed the substantial tome presented as a

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‘trifle’, they return to their apparent social unease – which is, of course, nothing really of the sort – in order to suggest that they have made a faux pas when they are really being elaborately polite. The letter restates in a pleasant and light-hearted manner what is obvious from the start: they are dedicating a significant work by an important writer to two powerful, literate and cultured patrons, whom they already know, in the hope of generating interest in the project. The contrast to Taylor’s edition is indeed marked. He may have been hoping to imitate the prestige and success of Jonson and Shakespeare but he only succeeds in highlighting his lack of literary distinction and social ease. The anagrams are obviously misconceived and surely generated embarrassment for both addressees and readers, as playing with the name of a titled patron is to suggest an intimacy that cannot have existed (and which is never assumed in the Heminges and Condell letter). The couplets produced after each peer’s name are similarly clumsy. Taylor would seem to want to praise Herbert with the verse ‘What can be more then is explained here / T’expresse a worthy well deserving Peere’ (A2v), but is surely assuming too much in telling the aristocrat who he is and what his virtues are in such definite terms. Perhaps Taylor meant his praise to be read as perfunctory and slightly brusque, drawing attention to their failure to support him, a strategy employed by Taylor’s contemporary, the aged and disgruntled Michael Drayton (1563–1631).129 This is plausible but when read alongside the embittered letter to the world on the facing page it is hard not to speculate about his motives in addressing his possible patrons in the manner he chooses: Most Potent and Powerfull Imposture, take it not amisse that I a poore worme of your own breeding, doe (in waie of retribution) give you here the encrease of my Tallent, which I have beene almost 60 yeeres a gathering. It was told me that when I first came to visit you, that I cri’d and Waw’ld, and that when I leave you, I shall sigh and grone: and ever since I knew you, I have loved you so well for the good parts I have seen in you, that I could verie willingly be glad to change you for a better. I know not what Title to put upon you, you have as many stiles alreadie as the great Turke; with the soldier, you are a hard World; with the Divine, you are a wicked world; with the Lawyer you are a contentious world, with the Courtier you are a slipperie world; with most men a mad world; and with all men a bad  world. The Divell (your brother) and your sister the (Flesh) hath quite spoiled you of all your good qualities and conditions; and (worse then that) they have made you blinde, that you cannot or will not see your owne faults, and you have blinded all your inhabitants that they can neither feele or perceive their miseries: for which cause, I have made bold to dedicate this Volume to your greatnesse, wherein (as in a glasse) you may view your imperfections (A3r).

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The tone of this opening is markedly different from that adopted in the Heminges and Condell letter, even if the purpose is similar. At the start Taylor is being ostensibly humble, referring to himself as a ‘poore worme’, but it soon becomes clear that this is far from the case. He draws attention to his long years of literary production, his hard life and the neglect he has received from the indifferent, cruel world. Just as he addressed the aristocrats in knowing terms, being able to define who and what they are, so does he address the world, having the confidence to state what it is through his experience, which can now be read in the volume. He is fashioning himself as a poet laureate, probably like Spenser, and it is surely significant that Taylor adopts the nine-line Spenserian stanza in the first poem in the collection, a conspicuously Spenserian work, Taylor’s Urania, first published in 1615 – the title glancing towards the literary traditions of the Sidney family to which the dedicatees belonged (Mary Wroth, who published the scandalous romance Urania, in 1621, was the partner of William Herbert).130 Spenser had represented himself as a poet who had the right to reflect on the world and advise rulers accordingly.131 ‘Glasse’ (mirror) is a familiar term with Spenserian connotations.132 In a world-weary manner that combines sententiousness with a self-regard that is rather less mocking than he pretends, Taylor provides a series of proverbial statements that could have been garnered from most collections of commonplaces (life is hard for a soldier, slippery for a courtier and so on).133 The world has blinded its inhabitants so his works will be able to make them see it as it really is. The letter concludes with a pointed class-based assessment of his worth and reputation. First, he asks for good clothes, as these ‘bear a monstrous sway’ and he has ‘occasion to speake with great men, and without good cloathes (like a golden sheathe to a leaden blade) there is no admittance’ (A3v), a request that highlights his virtuous poverty as a self-sacrificing writer and serves as a boast that he has friends in high places. The second request is that his readers understand that he is the true author of the works published in the collection: thou wilt keepe close from my Readers all prejudicate opinions, or let them be perswaded that this following Booke is not of my writing; for oppinion doth worke much in such cases; There were Verses once much esteemed for their goodnesse, because it was thought that a learned Italian Poet named Sanazarus made them; but afterward, being found to bee of a poore mans writing, they lost their estimation (A3v–A4r).

There is no evidence that readers attributed Taylor’s works to the Neapolitan humanist and poet Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530) – a celebrated European poet, best known for his prose romance, Arcadia, whose work influenced Sidney and Spenser and bears little obvious resemblance to that of Taylor.134

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Taylor may have made this rumour up or been pleased to spread it around here as it suggests that he is a sophisticated writer of European standing, who writes as well as his better educated peers, and who is only neglected because of class prejudice. The letter concludes with a defiant boast, as the poet prepares himself for the inevitability of death (which, for Taylor, was still twenty-three years away). In doing so Taylor celebrates his unique status: ‘resolving to take my lot as it fals with patience, fortitude, and as many vertues as I have, and more too; knowing my selfe for two conditions to have no fellow; first, in beeing a Sculler; secondly a Water-Poet; of the last of which, there is and shall bee no more I hope’ (A4r). Taylor hopes that no one follows him because his life has been so hard and his poetry unfairly neglected despite its many merits. Again, Taylor ignores any protocol or convention of letter writing and appeals for patronage, effectively sealing himself off from the social world of poetry, and leaving his works for the reader to judge. The manoeuvre is not without precedent – Michael Drayton represented his later works in a similar way – nor is it devoid of guile, given Taylor’s methods of self-promotion elsewhere. However, it does place his anxieties about class, real and imagined, at the forefront of the reader’s mind as he or she begins the volume. Taylor’s uncertainty about his status and his merit looms large throughout the collection. In Taylor’s Urania he surveys the estates of the commonwealth and satirizes the greedy excesses and self-justification of a ‘miser-churl’, who uses one of Aesop’s most frequently reproduced fables to defend his vast horde of riches: Me thinkes I heare a Miser-Churle object, None railes at Wealth, but those which live in want: The idle Grashopper cannot affect The toylesome labours of the frugall Ant: The Prodigall by no meanes will be checkt So much as when his Purses lining’s scant. Fox doth scorne the Grapes, but wot you why? Because out of his reach, they hang too high. So doth a sort of poore and needy Hyndes, The scum and dregs, of every Common wealth: The shag-rag-shag-hand crue, whose boundles minds Must be supplide with shifting, or by stealth. Like sick men, when their paines their Reason blinds They envy all men that are well in health. So doth a swarme of Drones, and idle mates Revile and envie at our happy states. But let them storme, and raile, and curse, and sweare, Within our coffers, we will keepe the Gold:

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Let them themselves, themselves in pieces teare. What we have got with toyle, with care we’le hold. What is’t doth men to reputation reare, But when their goods & wealth growes manifold, We care not then, let needy Rascalls raile Till Tyburne eat them, or some lothsome Jayle. (stanzas 70–2; B4r)

The stanzas satirize the rapid accumulation of wealth, exactly as Massinger does in A New Way To Pay Old Debts, first performed a few years later. However, one might ask how they work as ventriloquized speech. Is Taylor condemning out of hand the abuse of a fable to condemn the poor and justify the self-satisfied logic of the aspirant middle class? Or do these lines, which echo Spenser’s description of the shape-shifting Malengin and the rabble who flock to support the Giant with the Scales in The Faerie Queene, Book Five, express something of Taylor’s own sentiments?135 After all, he had boasted of his unique status as the water poet, a man who stood alone and apart from the crowd, as well as his connections with those in high places. Taylor does represent himself as a member of the Waterman’s Guild, but usually in order to distinguish himself from other groups, not because he wants his identity to be subsumed entirely by his trade. In these stanzas Taylor distances himself from both the greedy bourgeoisie (he is poor because he is a writer), as well as the common rabble, who change shape without assuming a stable identity (unlike him); are like a swarm of drones when they from a crowd; and risk ending their days on the gallows. Describing them as the ‘shag-rag-shag-hand crue’, reads more as vigorous poetic invention – perhaps based on cony-catching pamphlets or ballads? – than carefully targeted satire of the upwardly mobile.136 A later satirical work, The Water-Cormorant (1622), would appear to express the same class anxieties. The work, fully titled on the second page, ‘The Water-Cormorant his Complaint: Against a Brood of Land-Cormorants. Divided into Fourteen Satyres’, is dedicated ‘To Gentlemen, and those that are gentle’ (3A1r), an ambiguous formula that leaves the issue of gentility both undefined and unrooted. The work satirizes a series of character types, greedy cormorants who exploit people for their own ends, but it also defines the author as a cormorant, a truth-teller who cannot be silenced, in the opening lines of the dedicatory letter: Subjects may seeme scarce, or Printers lacke worke when a Cormorant flies into the Preffe, yet Cormorants oppresse, and therefore worthy to the prest; but my Cormorant hath neither dipt his tongue in oyle to smooth the faults of the vicious, nor stopd his mouth to conceale the merits of the vertuous: I have thought good to sympathize a subject fit for the time, and I have done my best to handle it in a suitable straine. The Cormorant is not easily induced to affability, nor I to flattery (3A1r).

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The Cormorant is both hero and villain, an everyman figure who exposes the vices of his fellows, like John Skelton’s Colin Clout, later adopted by Edmund Spenser.137 The question is then what is the relationship between the water cormorant and the gentlemen and gentle people to who the work is dedicated? Are they being praised or satirized? Is the water cormorant on their side because he exposes the vices of the land cormorants? However we read Taylor’s representation of himself, here he is cast as an isolated figure. Satire twelve describes a country yeoman, lambasting his upward mobility, adoption of airs and graces and taste for luxury goods, having lost sight of his role as the backbone of English economy and society: Here Dauy Dicker comes, God speed the Plough, Whose Sonne’s a Gentleman, and hunts and hawkes: His Farme good cloathes and feeding will allow, And whatso’ere of him the Country talkes, His Sonne’s in silkes with feather in his head, Untill a Begger bring a Foole to bed (3A6r).

Thomas Churchyard’s honest labourer has been transformed into an absurd dandy, profligate and a conspicuous consumer, frittering away the fruits of generations of rural labour.138 This is a neat literary touch, as Taylor shows that the Langland tradition of the ploughman as truth-teller has now migrated from the fields to the rivers as the water cormorant travels the waterways observing the folly taking place on the land. Farming was once an honourable and stable profession but now the yeoman-cormorant has taken over, leasing land from the landlord at an inflated price so that he can exploit the poor, and then spend his excess profit on useless goods and services that damage rather than benefit everyone: ‘Tis plenty makes this Cormorant to whine, To hoard up corne with many a bitter ban, From windowes, Orphanes, and the labring man, He prayes for raine in harvest, night and day, To rot and to consume the graine and hay: That so his mowes and reeks, and stacks that mould, At his owne price he may translate to gold. But if a plenty come, this rauening thiefe Torments & sometimes hangs himselfe with griefe. An all this raking toyle, and carke and care, Is for his clownish first borne Sonne and heyre, Who must be gentled by his ill got pelfe, Though he to get it, got the divell himselfe, And whil’st the Fathers bones a rotting lye, His Sonne his cursed wealth, accurst lets slye, In whores, drinke, gaming, and in revell coyle, The whil’st his fathers Soule in flames doth broyle. (3A6r)

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Taylor perhaps has in mind the hoarding that took place during the disastrous harvests of the 1590s and again in 1608.139 Shakespeare, as is well known, was cited for storing malt at his grand house, New Place, in Stratford-uponAvon, but it is unlikely that he is one of Taylor’s targets.140 The point is that profiteering and the desire to rise up the social scale are ruining English agriculture and undermining the stability of society, with the once stable figure of the yeoman farmer now hoping for a poor harvest. Here the term ‘gentled’ is clearly satirical. Not only are the son’s pursuits selfish and pointless, but they ape gentility in a parodic manner, which suggests that the dedication to ‘Gentlemen, and those that are gentle’, assumes meaning only through the reading of the satires. It is the poet, the water cormorant, who has the right to decide what is really gentle. He is not thought ‘gentle’ by society, but he knows its real value because he cannot do anything other than tell the truth. Yet again the water poet stands as a proud man apart. He sees the truth but is rejected by those above him who cannot cope with his incisive vision, and is cut off from those below him, as he rows the country’s waterways observing and recording the nation’s folly. Taylor’s solution to this conundrum was often to retreat into the past, to produce a vision of a past perfect society, just like the powerful tradition of literary ploughmen. A few pages on from the satire of Davy Dyker, the yeoman farmer, Taylor praises ‘the noble Antiquitie of Shepheardes’ (3E2r) in Taylors Pastoral (1624), a work that belongs to the familiar genre of religious and social satire.141 Society was once determined by ‘happie Shepheardes, and their harmlesse flockes’, the familiar image of the golden age before class division started to corrode harmony and unity.142 Now, in times of vice, dominated by disguise, hypocrisy, greed and self-regard, it needs the wandering figure of the deracinated water poet to speak truth to power.

Notes 1 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum: A Discourse on the Commonwealth of England, ed. L. Alston (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1972), p. 46. 2 William M. Reddy, ‘The Concept of Class’, in M. L. Bush, ed., Social Orders & Social Class in Europe Since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (Harlow: Longman, 1992), pp. 13–25, at p. 24. 3 Ian W. Archer, ‘Smith, Sir Thomas’, ODNB; Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: a Tudor Intellectual in Office (London: Athlone, 1964). 4 ‘Commonwealth’ is a translation of ‘Republica’ or ‘Respublica’: Jones, The Tree of Commonwealth, p. 14. 5 Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),

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pp. 37–8; David Rollison, Commune, Country and Commonwealth: The People of Cirencester, 1117–1643 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer Ltd, 2011), p. 15. 6 Elias, Civilizing Process, pp. 421–35; Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, pp. 547–86. 7 Andrew Lintott, ‘Political History, 146–95 B.C.’, in J. A. Crook, Andrew Lintott and Elizabeth Rawson, eds, The Cambridge Ancient History, 2nd edn, IX: The Last Age of the Roman Republic, 146–43 B. C. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 40–103, at p. 46. 8 Anne McLaren, ‘Reading Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum As Protestant Apologetic’, HJ 42 (1999), 911–39. 9 Hadfield, Shakespeare and Republicanism, pp. 40–2. 10 John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir Thomas Smith (Oxford, 1820), pp. 274–81; Alessandra Petrina, Machiavelli in the British Isles: Two Early Modern Translations of The Prince (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 20. 11 Neil Rhodes, Common: The Development of Literary Culture in SixteenthCentury England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 16–17. 12 Smith is undoubtedly following Polybius, whose history of the decline of the Roman Republic argued that history was cyclical: The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). 13 ‘usually, a contemptuous term for a knight whose achievements belong to ‘the carpet’ (i.e. the lady’s boudoir, or carpeted chamber) instead of to the field of battle; a stay-at-home soldier.’: OED, n. carpet-knight. Thomas Nashe refers to a ‘carpetmunger or primerose knight of Primero’: The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), III, p. 148. 14 See Sara Trevisan, Royal Genealogy in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Brewer, 2020); Sara Trevisan ed. Mythical Ancestry in World Cultures, 1400–1800 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018). The Biblical resonance of the phrase ‘first head’ (see OED, n., ‘firsthead’) signals the level of the contempt. 15 See Lawrence Stone, ‘The Inflation of Honours 1558–1641’, P. & P. 14.1 (1958), 45–70’; Lawrence Stone ‘Social Mobility in England, 1500–1700’ P. & P. 33.1 (1966), 16–55. 16 See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2, p. 309. On yeomen, see Gordon Batho, ‘Noblemen, Gentlemen, and Yeomen’, in Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History, pp. 276–306, at pp. 301–6. 17 See Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman Under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942). 18 Dale Hoak, ‘Sir William Cecil, Sir Thomas Smith, and the Monarchical Republic of Tudor England’, in John F. McDiarmid, ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 37–54; Stephen Alford, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 147–8, 198, passim. 19 E. Anthony Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the Early Modern Period’, JIH 15 (1985), 683–728, pp. 686–8;

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Alan Everitt, ‘The Marketing of Agricultural Produce’, in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. IV, 1500–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 466–92, at p. 568. 20 See above, pp. 82–3. 21 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie in Gavin Alexander, ed., Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesie’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), pp. 55–203, at p. 177. 22 Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, ‘“Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, P. & P. 129 (1990), 30–78; Hadfield, Spenser: A Life, pp. 63–6, 88–91, passim. 23 D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom, eds, Classical Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 56–9. 24 Tityrus and Corydon are shepherds in Virgil’s Eclogues, and also in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, which Puttenham mentions, although he does not know the author’s name. 25 For further comment see Paul Alpers, ‘Pastoral and the Domain of Lyric in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender’, in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., Representing the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 163–80, at p. 165. 26 Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680, pp. 64–5. 27 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 16 (citing W. J. Ashley). 28 Specifically, see Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: Fourth Estate, 1999). For comment, see Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: California University Press, 1992), pp. 21–4. See also Virginia Woolf’s comment: ‘it is unthinkable that any woman in Shakespeare’s day should have had Shakespeare’s genius. For genius like Shakespeare’s is not born today among the working classes. How, then, could it have been born among women whose work began … almost before they were out of the nursery, who were forced to it by their parents and held to it by all the power of law and custom? Yet genius of a sort must have existed among the working classes. Now and again an Emily Brönte or a Robert Burns blazes out and proves its presence’ (A Room of One’s Own (1929), ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 62–3). I owe this point to Willy Maley. 29 Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life (London: Thomson Learning, 2000), pp.x–xi. 30 Bearman, Shakespeare’s Money. I am very grateful to Neil Rhodes for helpful discussion of this issue. 31 Bearman, Shakespeare’s Money, pp. 155–66. 32 For details, see Hadfield, Spenser: A Life, chs 6, 11. On the loss of the Spenser family fortune in the eighteenth century, see Duncan Fraser and Andrew Hadfield, eds, Gentry Life in Georgian Ireland: The Letters of Edmund Spenser (1711–1790) (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), introduction, p. 4. 33 Woodcock, Churchyard, p. 234.

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34 On Chettle and Greene’s precarious professional life, see Harold Jenkins, The Life and Work of Henry Chettle (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1934); Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes, eds, Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 35 John Donne, The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne: Volume 1, Sermons Preached at the Jacobean Courts, 1615–1619, ed. Peter McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), introduction, p. xix. 36 Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 56–7, 304–31. 37 See above, p. 53. See also Alex Davis, Inheritance, pp. 59–61. For an incisive discussion of one case of education and social mobility, see David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 2004), pp. 44–96. 38 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Murdering Peasants: Status, Genre and the Representation of Rebellion’, Representations 1 (1983), 1–29. For a response, see Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 167–9. 39 Theodore B. Leinwand, ‘Shakespeare and the Middling Sort’, SQ 44 (1993), 284–303; H. R. French, ‘The Search for the “Middle Sort of People” in England, 1600–1800’, HJ 43 (2000), 277–93. 40 A problem which vitiates Lawrence James’ The Middle Class: A History (London: Little Brown, 2006). 41 Terry Eagleton, ‘The New Politics of Class review – has the working class been left behind?’, The Guardian 19 January 2017 (www.theguardian.com/ books/2017/jan/19/the-new-politics-of-class-review-geoffrey-evans-james-tilley) (accessed 29 September 2020). 42 In his introduction to the collection The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800, edited with Christopher Brooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), Jonathan Barry laments the harm that J. H. Hexter’s ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’ (Reappraisals in History (London: Longman, 1961), pp. 71–116) had on a generation of social historians. See also Tim Harris, ‘The Political Culture of the Middling Sort in English Rural Communities, c.1550–1700’, in Harris, ed., Politics of the Excluded, pp. 125–52. The subject is being investigated by the AHRC-funded project, ‘The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort: Writing and Material Culture 1560–1660’, University of Kent, 2019–22. 43 See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Foreword: Why Does Literary Biography Matter?’, SQ 65 (2015), 371–8. 44 Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals. 45 Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Martin Butler, ‘Appendix 2: Shakespeare’s Unprivileged Playgoers, 1576–1642’, in Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 293–306. 46 Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles (London, 1586), pp. 1062–6. On the play’s authorship, see Jack Elliott and Brett Greatley-Hirsch, ‘Arden of Faversham, Shakespearean Authorship and “The Print of Many”’, in

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Gary Taylor and Gabriel Egan, eds, The New Oxford Shakespeare Authorship Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 139–81. 47 Barrett L. Beer, Tudor England Observed: The World of John Stow (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. 41–5; Sandra Clark, Women and Crime in the Street Literature of Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 2; Anon., [The] Complaint and Lamentation of Mistresse Arden of [Fev]ersham in Kent (1610–38?) (University of California Santa Barbara English Broadside Ballad Archive: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/30458/image (accessed 29 September 2020). 48 Felicity Heal, Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 140–7. 49 Holinshed, Third Volume of Chronicles, p. 1063. 50 Paul Wilkinson, ‘The Historical Development of the Port of Faversham, Kent 1580–1780’, The Kent Archaeological Field School (www.kafs.co.uk/pdf/port.pdf) (accessed 29 September 2020). 51 Anon., Arden of Faversham, ed. Martin White (London: A. C. Black, 1982), scene 8, lines 71–9. 52 See Christa Grössinger, Picturing Women in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), ch. 3. 53 Adultery was often punished by public humiliation, such as the ‘Skimmington Ride’: see Johanna Rickman, Love, Lust and Licence in early Modern England: Illicit Sex and the Nobility (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 22–3. 54 Anon., Arden, ed. White, introduction, p. xix. 55 Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700 (Harlow: Longman, 1984), pp. 96–102. 56 For one pioneering reading (which concentrates more on gender than class), see Catherine Belsey, ‘Alice Arden’s Crime,’ in Subject of Tragedy, 129–48. 57 Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, p. 44; John Bellamy, The Tudor Law of Treason: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 9. 58 Belsey, ‘Alice Arden’s Crime’. 59 Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 1–29; J. J. Scarisbrick, Henry VIII (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 241–304. 60 The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M. Arden of Feversham in Kent Who was most wickedlye murdered, by the meanes of his disloyall and wanton wyfe, who for the love she bare to one Mosbie, hyred two desperat ruffins Blackwill and Shakbag, to kill him. Wherin is shewed the great malice and discimulation of a wicked woman, the unsatiable desire of filthie lust and the shamefull end of all murderers. On ‘murder pamphlets’, see Clark, Women and Crime, pp. 145–79. 61 Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), p. 255. 62 Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 27–41. See also Jean E. Howard, The

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Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 30–1. 63 I have followed the play’s editor, Anthony Parr, in placing the apostrophe to make the title refer to a single shoemaker, Simon Eyre. It is at least as likely that it should be placed after the ‘s’, making the play that of the shoemakers. Certainly this would emphasize the class relations that the play foregrounds. Thomas Deloney might also be cited as a writer who celebrates the ‘aristocracy of labour’ represented by the shoemakers: see, for example, Elizabeth Rivlin, ‘Forms of Service in Thomas Deloney’s The Gentle Craft’, ELR 40 (2010), 191–214. 64 David Scott Kastan, ‘Workshop and/as Playhouse: Comedy and Commerce in The Shoemaker’s Holiday’, SP 84 (1987), 324–37; Mihoko Suzuki, ‘The London Apprentice Riots of the 1590s and the Fiction of Thomas Deloney’, Criticism 38 (1996), 181–217. 65 Fletcher, Gender, p. 223. 66 See above, p. 51. 67 Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Anthony Parr (London: A. C. Black, 1990), scene 21, lines 193–4. On returning soldiers becoming beggars, see A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 93–5. See also Tom Nicholl, The Art of Poverty: Irony and Ideal in Sixteenth-Century Beggar Imagery (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 119, 125. 68 James Shapiro, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber, 2005), p. 104. 69 On ‘paradiastole’, see Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume III, Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 98–113. 70 Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton (London: Hart-Davies, 1968), pp. 35–6; Howard, Stage and Social Struggle, pp. 29–30. 71 Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour In The Eighteenth Century (Gloucester: Sutton, 1992). 72 Ceri Sullivan, The Rhetoric of Credit: Merchants in Early Modern Writing (Cranbury: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), pp. 30–2; Smyth, Autobiography, pp. 57–122. 73 Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward, London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 8–9. 74 Dekker, Shoemaker’s Holiday, ed. Parr, introduction, p. x. Hamlet was parodied in other plays, notably Dekker’s collaboration with Ben Jonson (often eager to parody his rivals) and John Marston, Eastward Ho! (1605): see James Knowles, ed., The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 95. 75 Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, pp. 14–15; Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642, pp. 293–306. 76 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage & Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 298–315.

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77 James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare & The Poets’ War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Shapiro, 1599, pp. 98–118, 228–57. 78 William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (London: Thomson, 1998), 1.1.2. 79 Knowles, ed., Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies, p. 113; Lloyd Edward Kermode, ed., Three Renaissance Usury Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 80 Frederick M. Burelbach, Jr., ‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts: Jacobean Morality’, CLAJ 12 (1969), 205–13. 81 Philip Massinger, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ed. T. W. Craik (London: A. C. Black, 1964), 2.1.lines 34–47. 82 Coleman, Economy of England, p. 40. More generally, see Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 83 Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, p. 76. 84 The Witch of Edmonton, 2.1.lines 3, 11–12, in Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge, eds, Three Jacobean Witchcraft Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 159. 85 Penny Roberts, ‘Witchcraft and Magic’, in Beat Kümin, ed., The European World, 1500–1800: An Introduction to Early Modern History (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 203–14; Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004). 86 Michael McCarthy-Morrogh, The Munster Plantation: English Migration to Southern Ireland, 1583–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). The following passage is based on analysis in my Edmund Spenser: A Life, pp. 303–5. 87 Maurice Evans, ed., Elizabethan Sonnets (London: Dent, 1977); J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London: Methuen, 1956), ch. 5; Reed Way Dasenbrock, ‘The Petrarchan Context of Spenser’s Amoretti,’ PMLA 100 (1985), 38–50. 88 Thomas M. Greene, ‘Spenser and the Epithalamic Convention’, CL 9 (1957), 215–28, p. 222. See also Enid Welsford, Spenser: Fowre Hymnes, Epithalamion: A Study of Edmund Spenser’s Doctrine of Love (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), p. 70. 89 Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion: A Critical Edition, ed. Kenneth J. Larsen (Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 1997), introduction, p. 3. See also Alexander Dunlop, ‘Calendar Symbolism in the Amoretti,’ N. & Q. 16 (1969), 24–6; William C. Johnson, ‘Spenser’s Amoretti and the Art of the Liturgy,’ SEL 14 (1974), 47–61. 90 Spenser, having worked in Ireland since 1580, lived on the Munster Plantation –established on land confiscated from the estates of the earl of Desmond after his rebellion was defeated – from 1589: Hadfield, Spenser, ch. 6. 91 See Andrew Hadfield, ‘War Poetry and Counsel in Early Modern Ireland’, in Valerie McGowan-Doyle and Brendan Kane, eds, Elizabeth I and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 239–60. 92 Edmund Spenser, The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain,

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Alexander Dunlop and Richard Schell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 394. 93 Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnet 9 (Maurice Evans, ed., Elizabethan Sonnets (London: Dent, 1977), p. 5). 94 Christopher Warley, Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 110–12. 95 Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), ch. 1. Thomas Nashe had a similar view: see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Lenten Stuff: Thomas Nashe and the Fiction of Travel’, YES 41 (2011), 68–83. 96 For discussion, see Montaño, Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland. 97 For more detail, see Hadfield, Spenser, chs 5 and 9. 98 Spenser, Shorter Poems, p. 668. On the blazon as a poetic form representing women, see Nancy Vickers, ‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme’, CI 8 (1981), 265–79. 99 See Hadfield, Spenser, pp. 313–22. 100 For a sophisticated discussion of literary patronage, see Richard McCabe, ‘Ungainefull Arte”: Poetry, Patronage, & Print in the Early Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch. 13. See also Melnikoff and Gieskes, eds, Writing Robert Greene; Eleanor Rosenberg, Leicester, Patron of Letters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955). 101 George Gissing, New Grub Street, ed. John Goode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); James, Middle Class, pp. 382–3; Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 418. 102 Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, p. 12. 103 Richard Barnfield, The Complete Poems, ed. George Klawitter (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1990), introduction, p. 39. See also Katherine C. Little, Transforming Work: Early Modern Pastoral and Late Medieval Poetry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), pp. 111–41; and, more generally, David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace: Idolatry and Commodity Fetishism in English Literature, 1580–1680 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 35–52, passim. 104 Barnfield, Poems, introduction, p. 40. On the little known about Barnfield’s life, see the ODNB entry. 105 Richard Barnfield, ‘The Prayse of Lady Pecunia’, in Barnfield, Poems, pp. 151–60, line 19. 106 See Kathy Eden, Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property, and the Adages of Erasmus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 107 See, for example, Scott Lucas, ‘Diggon Davie and Davy Dicar: Edmund Spenser, Thomas Churchyard, and the Poetics of Public Protest’, Sp. St. 16 (2001), 151–65. 108 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Book 5, lines 1828–69 (Riverside Chaucer, pp. 584–5). 109 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998). See also

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Mark Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), p. 23; Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 54–5. 110 For details, see Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water Poet, 1578–1653 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 8–11. 111 Bernard Capp, ‘Taylor, John [called ‘The Water Poet’], ODNB. 112 On Taylor’s entrepreneurial use of Thomas Coryat, who was famous for his walking feats, see Michelle O’Callaghan, The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 57–8. 113 Capp, Taylor, p. 13. On Coryat, see Michael Strachan, The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 114 On Jonson, see O’Callaghan, English Wits, p. 58. 115 Capp, Taylor, pp. 42–4, 83–6; Laurie Ellinghausen, ‘The New Bourgeois Hero: The Self-Presentation of John Taylor “The Water Poet”’, in Labor and Writing in Early Modern England, 1567–1667 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 93–120. 116 John Taylor, All The Workes of John Taylor, The Water Poet (London, 1630), A3r. 117 On Taylor’s increasing conservatism, see Capp, Taylor, pp. 49–54. 118 Capp, Taylor, p. 54. 119 I owe this point to Neil Rhodes. 120 For further details, see McCabe, ‘Ungainefull Arte’. 121 Taylor, Works, Sig. A2v. 122 Abraham Viell was probably a grocer from a family of immigrants from the Low Countries (see Thomas Egerton, The Egerton Papers, ed. John Payne Collier, 12 vols (London: Camden Society, 1840), XII, p. 345; Thomas Brewer (fl. 1605–40) was known as a ballad writer (ODNB; Capp, Taylor, p. 44); Robert Branthwaite worked at the Tower of London (Capp, Taylor, p. 12). 123 On the Herberts as patrons, see McCabe, ‘Ungainefull Arte’, pp. 274, 293–8; Michael G. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988), chs 6–10; Capp, Taylor, p. 63, who comments, ‘Taylor’s approach was never subtle, and sometimes shameless’. 124 Ben Jonson, The Workes of Benjamin Jonson (London, 1616), ¶3r. 125 On Selden, see G. J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 126 William Shakespeare Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (London, 1623). 127 Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe, Letterwriting in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004), pp. 21–34; James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practices of Letter Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 63–73. On patronage, see McCabe, ‘Ungainefull Arte’, pp. 88–103. 128 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (3rd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 72; Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Playing Companies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 7.

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129 See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Michael Drayton’s Brilliant Career’, PBA 125 (2004), 119–47. 130 Capp, Taylor, p. 17. More generally, see Gavin Alexander, Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 131 Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), ch. 2. 132 Kathleen Williams, Spenser’s Faerie Queene: The World of Glass (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966). 133 Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace Books and the Structure of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 134 For Sannazaro’s influence on Spenser, see Hadfield, Spenser, pp. 129, 131; on Sidney, see David Kalstone, ‘The Transformation of Arcadia: Sannazarro and Sir Philip Sidney’, CL 15 (1963), 234–49. 135 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 2001), 5.9.5–19; 5.2.30–51. 136 See, for example, ‘A scurviy shag-ragge Gentleman, new come out of the North, a Punie, a Freshman, come up hither to learne fashions and seeke to expell me?’: Anon., A Merrie Dialogue Between Band, Cuffe, and Ruffe (London, 1615), A3v. 137 See Andrew Hadfield, ‘“Who knows not Colin Clout?” The Permanent Exile of Edmund Spenser’, in Literature, Politics and National Identity, pp. 170–201. 138 See above, pp. 50–1. 139 W. G. Hoskins, ‘Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic History, 1480–1619’, AHR 12 (1964), 28–46, pp. 38–9. 140 Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, pp. 121–2. 141 Capp, Taylor, pp. 87, 94; Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Pastoral’, in Michael Hattaway, ed., A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 307–16. 142 Taylor cites Ovid in his opening lines, referring to Ovid’s representation of the Golden Age in Metamorphoses 1.89–112. On the power of the myth in pastoral, see John Barrell and John Bull, eds, The Penguin Book of Pastoral Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), introduction, pp. 4–6.

Chapter 4

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The Civil War and its aftermath

The advent of the Civil War in 1642 saw all restrictions lifted from the printing presses and a wealth of popular political material appeared as the variety of factions that started to develop – Presbyterians, Levellers, Diggers, Royalists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Muggletonians and so on – published their own works free from the fear of censorship.1 Central control had disappeared over publishing and, consequently, from the political world. If opposition to the king was more or less united in 1640, by the beginning of 1642 ‘that confidence, optimism, and unity of purpose had evaporated’, as a series of crises caused the king’s opponents to splinter into a series of groups, a situation that continued until the Restoration nearly twenty years later.2 Fifty-two books were published in London in 1500, growing to 200 per annum in the late sixteenth century, 450–500 in the early seventeenth century, 500–700 by the 1630s, and then mushrooming to 2000 titles in 1641, 3700 in 1642, and then falling back to between 1000 and 2000 for the rest of the 1640s.3 According to Tom Corns As the decade [the 1640s] progresses, debate is widened by more fundamental discussion of what the state is for, how it is to serve its citizens, what the rights and powers may be and what indeed is the contract between government and the governed. By the 1650s something approaching a mature republican theoretical position may be identified. Moreover, in the Levellers, England had its first modern political party, indeed, a party that probably more closely resembled the popular movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than the Whigs and Tories of the late Stuart and early Hanoverian period.4

Political life in England had developed as elections to parliament were now more widely and genuinely contested. Until the English Revolution local figures of substance could rely on the support of people they regarded as their clients. But by the 1640s a more literate, property-owning electorate – still a relatively small section of the population – with very different political and religious ideas voted for candidates of opposed views.5 It finally mattered what people thought. Alongside the growth of political representation there developed a concomitant interest in newspapers and news books, a

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sign of intellectual and technological changes that made a concern with current affairs feasible and desirable beyond the political elite.6 The Levellers emerged in 1647 as a political group eager to build on the perception that the Civil War had been fought to right earlier wrongs, encouraged by the New Model Army’s growing perception of itself as ‘the champion of the people, whose liberties the parliament had ostensibly raised its forces to defend, but who in the soldiers’ eyes had been betrayed by it’.7 Their political ideals were disseminated in a frequently revised pamphlet, later reprinted as a broadsheet, An Agreement of the People for a Firme and Present Peace, upon Grounds of Common-Right and Freedome (1647). The pamphlet laid out the principles that needed to be adopted before society could be properly transformed to end class conflict and ensure justice for all.8 This work laid out the basic principles of government that the Levellers believed were fundamental to the establishment of a fair and just society and which were necessary to end years of bitter conflict. They sought to establish agreement on basic human rights and to protect the individual from the encroaching power of the state, a reversal of the fundamental premise of most political treatises from the early 1600s onwards which assumed that the object of politics was to persuade or force the people to pledge obedience to their protector, the monarch, who would offer them protection and sustenance.9 The Levellers were determined having won the war to win the peace too and to move into a new, more harmonious political era, one in which class divisions would disappear: We do now hold our selves bound in mutual duty to each other, to take the best care we can for the future, to avoid both the danger of returning into a slavish condition, and the chargable remedy of another war: for as it cannot be imagined that so many of our Country-men would have opposed us in this quarrel, if they had understood their owne good, so may we safely promise to our selves, that when our Common Rights and liberties shall be cleared, their endeavours will be disappointed that seek to make themselves our Masters[.]10

The pamphlet aims to sweep away the assumption that society must be divided into the governors and the governed, concentrating instead on a language of common rights and liberties for all, as well as a hope that the last war can be put aside as swords are transformed into ploughshares, building on familiar traditions of class-based political language in English history. The Levellers – along with other radical groups – were also fiercely opposed to Cromwell’s attempts to subjugate resistance to English-led Protestant rule in Ireland, something they rightly saw would cause serious future problems.11 There is the further hope here that because the principles outlined here seem so obvious and reasonable to the author that all foolish

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opposition will just melt away, a familiar trope of idealistic political discourse, which is repeated later: ‘every true English man that loves the peace and freedome of England will concurre with us’ (p. 12). The pamphlet outlines four basic principles. First, that there be equal units ‘for the election of their Deputies in Parliament’ (p. 2); second, that the current Parliament be dissolved in order to inaugurate the new political era in England; that Parliaments should be elected every two years (p. 3); that Parliament is sovereign and has the power to govern the country, in the name of the people, as the power of deputies is ‘inferior only to those who chuse them’. The Agreement further laid out a series of universal rights, most importantly that there should be no restriction on individual religion: ‘That matters of Religion, and the ways of Gods Worship, are not at all instructed by us to any humane power, because therein wee cannot remit or exceed a tittle of what our Consciences dictate to be the mind of God, without wilfull sinne’ (p. 4). For the Levellers it was a question of establishing the way forward for the ‘Free-born People of England’ after ‘the King raised warre against you and your Parliament’ (p. 7). Originally signed by ten officers in the New Model Army, the Agreement was designed to put an end to the need for war, to replace a political language of power and domination with one of shared rights and principles, and to ensure that no one faction could govern for ever without the will of the people. In short, to draw a line under previous class conflict by creating a political system that would enable liberty and justice to flourish. Such explicit political language would have been unthinkable in earlier periods when political thought was more firmly based on the ideal of the preservation or restoration of an ordered society, founded on clear hierarchies and a patriarchal system that protected and looked after people.12 The Levellers’ demands were obviously radical in aim and scope and, as Tom Corns has noted, they read like more modern political manifestos. However, in other ways they draw on familiar political traditions and languages, in particular the hope for a common culture and a return to the stability of a land-based economy that would sweep away all the dangerous excesses of the burgeoning market economy, an ideal shared, at least in part, by more obviously mainstream conservative figures, such as Sir John Denham.13 The belief that a fixed, stable agrarian society should be the model for a future society is clearly present in Gerrard Winstanley’s A Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England (1649), which is a radical vision but one that looks backwards to better times: And we are moved to send forth this Declaration abroad, to give notice to every one whom it concerns, in regard we hear and see, that some of you,

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that have been Lords of Manors, do cause the Trees and Woods that pretend a Royalty unto, to be cut down and sold, for your own private use, Thereby the Common Land, which your own mouths doe say belongs to the poor, is impoverished, and the poor oppressed people robbed of their Rights, while you give them cheating words, by telling some of our poor oppressed Brethren, That those of us that have begun to Dig and Plough up the Commons, will hinder the poor; and so blinde their eyes, that they see not their Priviledge, while you, and the rich Free-holders make the most profit of the Commons, by your over-stocking of them with Sheep and Cattle; and the poor that have the name to own the Commons, have the least share therein; nay, they are checked by you, if they cut Wood, Heath, Turf, or Furseys, in places about the Common, where you disallow.14

Winstanley (1609–76) provides a number of signals to demonstrate that he is writing as part of a long, English tradition of class conflict that will only end when social divisions have finally been abolished. His language conspicuously echoes past conflicts, most significantly the Peasants’ Revolt.15 The Declaration is addressed to ‘all that call themselves, or are called Lords of Manors, through this Nation’ (p. 31), provocatively asserting that England was effectively the same society that it had been immediately after the Norman Conquest, one organized around the landlords who oversaw the manorial system on which the tenant peasant farmers worked. Winstanley was invoking the well-known theory of the ‘Norman Yoke’, the notion that the rights of the English had been appropriated in the vast land grab after the defeat at the Battle of Hastings.16 The destruction of the forests is a familiar complaint in this period, a sign of the rapacious oppression of the people as well as the environment, as landlords cut down trees in order to enclose land that should be common. As Joan Thirsk has pointed out, ‘In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries men made war upon the forests, moors, and fens with a zeal which they had not felt for some three hundred years.’ 17 Winstanley also attacks the fencing off of common land to provide more pasturage in which landlords can contain their large herds of sheep and cattle, echoing the well-known complaint in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) that sheep were eating men because of the frantic pace of enclosure, and often cited as a long-term cause of the Civil War.18 As Ellen Meiksins Wood has observed, ‘enclosure meant not simply a physical fencing of land but the extinction of common and customary use rights on which many people depended for their livelihood’.19 The image of the common man as a ploughman, ‘a profoundly traditional figure in rural literature, defined by a repetitive activity rather than a more comprehensive perception of the business of agriculture’, further emphasizes Winstanley’s hostility to current developments, as well as the deliberately anachronistic nature of his social critique.20 The common people are united in their demand to make use of

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the common land and, therefore, their opposition to those who enclose it and so deprive them of their traditional rights. Like the Levellers, the Diggers felt that the Civil War had not resulted in the profound revolution that they had anticipated and that the English people deserved. In 1649, Winstanley’s writings inspired the Diggers, the True Levellers, to establish a community in the waste grounds on St George’s Hill, Surrey, twelve miles from Cooper’s Hill, where Sir John Denham reflected on the possible outbreak of civil war seven years earlier. Inspired by a widespread belief that ‘England’s wastes and commons could be better managed in the interests of feeding the poor and enriching the nation’, the enthusiastic Diggers were not necessarily ready or properly equipped for the task of creating a sustainable agricultural system, and their ‘agrarian technology was more like that of the pre-Roman Iron Age than that of Stuart or republican England’.21 They were eager to follow their leader’s belief in the ‘primacy of action over words’, and so chose a site that would enable them to develop their beliefs causing as little disruption as possible to the local people (who, even so, were hostile to the experiment).22 Winstanley wanted communities to be self-sufficient and so was against the use of money. He argued that money impeded this desired independence, and made impossible his vision of ‘primitive communism’ in which people keep what they have produced and trade what they have to supply their needs and those of others, rather than converting material goods into profit: And to prevent your scrupulous Objections, know this, That we Must neither buy nor sell; Money must not any longer (after our work of the Earths community is advanced) be the great god, that hedges in some, and hedges out others; for Money is but part of the Earth: And surely, the Righteous Creator, who is King, did never ordain, That unless some of Mankinde, do bring that Mineral (Silver and Gold) in their hands, to others of their own kinde, that they should neither be fed, nor be clothed; no surely, For this was the project of Tyrant-flesh (which Land-lords are branches of) to set his Image upon Money. And they make this unrighteous Law, That none should buy or sell, eat, or be clothed, or have any comfortable Livelihood among men, unless they did bring his Image stamped upon Gold or Silver in their hands (pp. 32–3).

Winstanley’s objections to money are Biblical, social and, in many ways, reactionary. The introduction of money facilitates exploitation, as a few start to accumulate large amounts (through the labours of others), and imagine that they are therefore superior to their fellow men. There are a number of implicit Biblical references in this passage: money as the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10); Christ’s expulsion of the money-lenders from the Temple (John 2: 13–16); the injunction not to worship graven images (Exodus 20: 4) and the Israelites subsequent worship of the Golden Calf (Exodus

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32); as well as examples of tyranny from the Old Testament (2 Chronicles 23: 3; Job 15: 20; Proverbs 28: 15).23 There are familiar moral injunctions, such as the common image of mining as a sinful enterprise in league with the devil, a rape of the earth, which Milton employed in Paradise Lost, Book 1 to represent one of the many futile ways in which the fallen angels spent their time while Satan travelled to earth.24 Nevertheless, the most significant aspect of this passage is its depiction of money as an instrument of class oppression and slavery. The stamping of the monarch’s face on a coin enshrines his or her power in an everyday physical form, making it impossible for people to avoid the image of the monarch as their ruler, and so reducing them to a servile status. Winstanley’s argument chimes with the fears of contemporary republicans that a change in public culture, from royal image to godly word, had to be initiated if England was to break free of its slavish past.25 The publication of the pamphlet in the same year that the king was executed (30 January 1649) is surely not a coincidence and suggests that, for Winstanley, removing the king’s head from the coin of the realm after removing his head from his shoulders was a logical step. The materials that make money should be re-deployed to create useful things that can be traded, and not to forge an instrument of class oppression that reduces mankind to slaves. The most explicit declaration of Winstanley’s hopes of what the Diggers might be able to achieve occurs in the pamphlet that announced the establishment of the community on St George’s Hill, A Declaration to the Powers of England (1649). The aim is clearly to build on the principles of the Levellers and use their political principles to establish liberty, justice and a classless society: Take notice, that England is not a free-people, till the poor that have no Land, have a free allowance to dig and labour the Commons, and so live as comfortably as the Landlords that live in their Inclosures. For the people have not laid out their moneyes, and shed their blood, that their Landlords, the Norman power, should still have its liberty and freedome to rule in Tyranny in his Lords, Landlords, Judges, Justices, Bayliffs, and State-Servants, but that the oppressed might be set free, prison-doors opened, and the poor peoples heart comforted by an universall consent of making the earth a Common Treasury, that they may live together as one House of Israel, united in brotherly love into one Spirit; and having a comfortable livelihood in the Community of one earth their Mother.26

Winstanley suggests that the English can become the modern Jews, a sign of the impending end of the world.27 The English are not yet free as the landlords still enclose much of the land and oppress the people, and they have been forced to spend money and shed blood in the recent conflict. However, the Norman Yoke, the history of the French ruling class exploiting the English

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like beasts of burden, will be cast off and the resources of the earth can be shared fairly and enjoyed by everyone. The prisons will be emptied as the people re-assume the freedoms that were taken away from them. Winstanley’s radical vision of a common culture rooted in rural England finds interesting counterparts in the work of a number of writers who might seem to have diametrically opposed political views. Royalists were also nostalgic for a long-lost bucolic society, even if they never had Winstanley’s faith in an imminent revolution. They did, however, also often long for a shared culture that would return England to the stability it had lost, provide comfort and consolation for the people and eradicate all forms of warfare, which, of course, included class conflict. Isaac Walton (c.1593–1683) first published The Compleat Angler in 1653 (and revised and expanded it significantly in 1676), a work that, as has often been noted, is a reflection on the catastrophic impact of the Civil War, expressing the hope that the divisions opened up during the conflict might be closed and connections that were severed re-established.28 Walton’s representation of fishing as a pastoral retreat stands as a rather less laborious counterpart to Winstanley’s belief in the virtues of digging. In retreating into the deep recesses of the countryside, away from the dangers of society, Walton’s ‘brothers of the angle’ are establishing a common culture that eschews the competitive, money-oriented society condemned so vociferously by Winstanley.29 Indeed, the word ‘common’ features frequently throughout Walton’s dialogue between Piscator and Venator. The fishermen discuss the verse of George Herbert, whom they posthumously induct into their brotherhood when Venator comments that he has heard that the preacher and poet ‘loved angling; and I do the rather believe it, because he had a spirit suitable to Anglers, and to those Primitive Christians that you [Piscator] love, and have so much commended’ (p. 112). Piscator uses this opportunity to draw more people into their fellowship and common culture: And since you like these verses of Mr. Herberts so well, let me tell you what a reverend and learned Divine that professes to imitate him (and has indeed done so most excellently) hath writ of our Book of Common Prayer; which I know you will like the better, because he is a friend of mine, and I am sure no enemy to Angling (p. 260).30

Herbert’s poetry and the Book of Common Prayer are invoked to produce a wider community of like-minded thinkers who, like friends in Erasmus’s adage, share everything in common.31 These commoners love the established church and the communal spirit of fishing. In obvious ways, Walton’s vision of a united society is a conservative one, but it is notable that he emphasizes the horizontal communitarian layers that bring people together, not the hierarchical divisions that separate them into social strata. The Civil War

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had changed the language of society and class on both sides of the political divide, if not the reality of class structure. The representation of the king as a martyr in Eikon Basilike did much to counteract the political discourse of the Parliamentarians and Republicans, but it also produced an image of a monarch whose sufferings, even as the language of Christ’s sacrifice was appropriated for him, were not of a different order to his subjects.32 Throughout The Compleat Angler religion and fishing are represented as integral elements of a common culture. Piscator states that ‘Moses appointed Fish to be the chief diet for the best Common-wealth that ever yet was’ (p. 187).33 In the prefatory epistle to his friend, John Offley of Madeley Manor, Walton opens with a quibble about fishing as a shared enterprise: At which time, if common Anglers should attend you, and be eyewitnesses of the success, not of your fortune, but your skill, it would doubtless beget in them an emulation to be like you, and that emulation might beget an industrious diligence to be so; but I know it is not attainable by common capacities: and there be now many men of great wisdom, learning, and experience, which love and practice this Art, that know I speak the truth [my emphases] (p. 167).34

The ostensible meaning of this sentence is that there is a special art to fishing that can be learned by the initiated and hidden from neophytes, which is true, as there has always been a competitive aspect to angling, a sport/ pastime that demands a considerable element of skill if it is to be done well.35 But this is surely a shared joke between friends who hold things in common – and probably refers to Erasmus’s adage – as one praises the other’s skill in fishing. It is the shared experience of the pastime that matters, as it does throughout The Compleat Angler, not the apparently exclusionary statement. As the last section of the sentence asserts, more people are becoming anglers, and, even if they can never match the skill of Offley, they can learn from his expertise. If you get the joke, reader, you can join the club. In the final chapter of the book, as they walk back to their homes, Piscator gives Venator some useful tips about fishing, which becomes advice about life and religion. Again, he turns to the importance of the ‘common’: let not the blessings we receive daily from God, make us not to value, or not praise Him, because they be common; let us not forget to praise him for the innocent mirth and pleasure, we have met with since we met together. What would a blind man give to see the pleasant Rivers, and meadows and flowers and fountains, that we have met with since we met together? I have been told, that if a man that was born blind could obtain to have his sight for but only one hour, during his whole life, and should at the first opening of his eyes, fix his sight upon the Sun when it was in its full glory, either at the rising or setting of it; he would be so transported, and amased, and so admire the glory of it, that he would not willingly turn his eyes from that first ravishing object, to behold all the other various beauties this world could present to him. And

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this, and many other like blessings we enjoy daily; and for the most of them, because they be so common, most men forget to pay their praises but let not us [my emphasis] (p. 365).36

At once a paean to the beauties of nature this passage is also a reminder that we must not lose sight of what really matters: the enjoyable routines of everyday life that can be experienced by most people in current times, or far more if society provides more opportunities for leisure. The suppressed premise here is that living through turbulent times should remind everyone to be grateful for what they have, and to value experiences, activities, sensations, thoughts and so on that might seem trivial but which are vitally important. The detail of the blind man seeing the sun for the first time is a reminder that much that we take for granted is actually wonderful if we could only realize our good fortune, especially as we can enjoy such things daily. The common is indeed extraordinary. The Compleat Angler is opened and concluded with pointed and carefully directed references to the ‘common’, the reader encouraged to take pleasure in everyday life; to see what surrounds them more carefully (and so be wary of despoiling and destroying the good things they have); and to appreciate what relates them to other people. The practice and symbolism of the ancient art of fishing can serve as an instructive guide. If this is not quite class politics it is close enough, the pastoral world of the thoughtful anglers serving as a counterpoint to Winstanley’s vision of an England of self-sufficient, sociable agricultural labourers. Walton’s political aim is undoubtedly to stem revolutionary sentiment, but the means of doing so bear a striking resemblance to the visions of England articulated by his political opponents, as well as being a robust defence of the virtues of the country against the vices of the court. Venator recites a poem by Sir Henry Wotton, a ‘description of such Country-Recreations as I have enjoyed since I had the happiness to fall into your company’: Quivering fears, heart tearing cares, Anxious sighs, untimely tears, Fly, fly to Courts, Fly to fond worldlings sports, Where strain’d Sardonick smiles are glosing stil And grief is forc’d to laugh against her will. Where mirth’s but mummery, And sorrows only real be. Fly from our Countrey-pastimes, fly, Sad troops of humane misery, Come serene looks, Clear as the Christal Brooks,



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Or the pure azur’d heaven that smiles to see The Rich attendance on our poverty; Peace and a secure mind, Which all men seek, we only find. Abused Mortals did you know Where joy, hearts ease and comforts grow, You’ld scorne proud Towers, And seek them in these Bowers, Where winds sometimes our woods perhaps may shake, But blustering care could never tempest make, No murmurs ere come nigh us, Saving of Fountains that glide by us. Here’s no fantastick Mask nor Dance, But of our kids that frisk and prance; Nor wars are seen, Unless upon the green Two harmless Lambs are butting one the other, Which done, both bleating, run each to his mother: And wounds are never found, Save what the Plough-share gives the ground … Blest silent Groves, oh may you be For ever mirths best nursery, May pure contents For ever pitch their tents Upon these downs, these Meads, these rocks, these mountains, And peace still slumber by these purling fountains Which we may every year find when we come a fishing here. (pp. 160–1)37

The poem, written before the Civil War, nevertheless here serves as a reflection on that conflict. In the countryside there is none of the bustling mania of court life; instead, relative tranquillity dominates life. Storms may shake the forests but wars are never known. Those in rural England are relatively poor compared to their counterparts in the city, but they can enjoy the richness of the azure skies, and, when people go fishing, there is an equality that really matters. Robert Herrick (1591–1674), another writer with obvious Royalist sympathies, represents an idealized English society in similar ways to Walton.38 Herrick deliberately parodies the practices of the Parliamentary forces in his major collection, Hesperides (1648), published during the Second Civil War (1648–49), just before the execution of the king.39 Many of Herrick’s poems signal their allegiance to traditional ceremonies and the rituals of everyday life that had marked the calendar year and which had become a

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major feature of Royalist culture. The Book of Sports (1617), James I’s list of the games and pastimes that could be legitimately undertaken on Sundays, re-issued by Charles in 1633, had become a particular focus of Puritan anger.40 The poem, Corinna’s Going A-Maying, for example, is an exhortation to readers not simply to preserve the rituals of the May Day celebrations, but to ensure that the sensual delight of such occasions is celebrated and enjoyed: Get up, get up for shame, the Blooming Morne Upon her wings presents the god unshorne.    See how  Aurora throwes her faire     Fresh-quilted colours through the aire:     Get up, sweet-Slug-a-bed, and see     The Dew-bespangling Herbe and Tree. Each Flower has wept, and bow’d toward the East, Above an houre since; yet you not drest,     Nay! not so much as out of bed?     When all the Birds have Mattens seyd,     And sung their thankfull Hymnes: ‘tis sin,     Nay, profanation to keep in, When as a thousand Virgins on this day, Spring, sooner than the Lark, to fetch in May.41

The urgency of the opening stanza would seem to be designed to remind readers of the erotic lyrics of Latin poets such as Catullus and Ovid, the speakers either hastening their mistresses to bed, or cursing the dawn that signals the end of the night of love. Here, the speaker is desperate for Corinna not to waste the day but to extract as much enjoyment as she possibly can from the May Day rituals, implicitly comparing them to sexual pleasure (especially as the poem opens with an image of a beautiful young woman in bed). The poetic language also draws attention to the religious rituals performed by nature, indicating that the world God has created supports both traditional religious rites and the connections Royalists made between pleasure, holidays and Christian worship.42 The energy of the stanza also seems planned to mock the Puritan emphasis on the virtues of hard work and criticism of the idleness generated by holidays interrupting the normal pattern of work: here, it is the celebrations that require immediate attention, planning and labour. May Day ushered in the summer season that was to last until July and was celebrated with outings to the countryside at dawn, when local inhabitants would ‘return with flowers and greenery to deck streets and houses’.43 The day would also be celebrated with May Day ales and games.44 For good measure Herrick also includes a reference to a ‘thousand virgins’ in the penultimate line, deliberately combining a detail that may well be a sexual allusion to the pagan origins of the festival

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(will all these virgins be intact by the end of the day?) and one that is also surely Catholic, a reminder of the Catholic emphasis on virginity and the number of virgin saints celebrated by the Catholic Church.45 Slightly more subtle, but just as confrontational, is Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve, which celebrates the rituals performed on the 1 February before the celebrations for the day on which Jesus entered the Temple for the first time and the purification of the Virgin Mary.46 The celebration of Candlemas was banned in Oxford by Parliamentary soldiers in 1648, along with other traditional religious ceremonies.47 As Gerald Hammond has pointed out, Herrick imitates the ways in which Parliamentary soldiers removed icons and ornaments from churches in his description of the changes taking place within the church itself as the parishioners get ready for the ceremony: Down with the rosemary and bays, Down with the misletoe; Instead of holly, now up-raise The greener box (for show). The holly hitherto did sway; Let box now domineer Until the dancing Easter day, Or Easter’s eve appear (1–8).48

Again, the poem is a direct provocation to the pious and godly. The church is seasonally decorated with different plants and flowers, which Puritans found pagan and blasphemous. Furthermore, these are all ‘for show’, at best ‘things indifferent’ (adiaphora), acceptable to Christians who accepted that ritual was a part of church worship; at worst, idolatrous. The debate over what could be counted adiaphora was one of the central issues that characterized English churches after the Civil War and long into the Restoration, the ‘hotter’ sort of Christians refusing to accept that any part of godly worship could really fall into this category.49 The use of ‘dancing’ as an adjective to describe ‘Easter day’ is another direct challenge to Puritans, associating the holiest day in the Christian calendar with festive celebration rather than sober reflection.50 Herrick celebrates an idealized representation of rural society in a number of poems, one of the most significant being The Country Life, dedicated to his influential friend, Endymion Porter (1587–1649). The Pro-Spanish, Catholic Porter, although he was critical of the king, was a loyal Royalist, who had refused to vote for the impeachment of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, one of the key supporters of the king, in 1642; had been involved in various plots to help the king; and went into exile in 1645 when the Royalist cause was lost.51 Choosing such a dedicatee, who had fled the

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country and was abroad when the volume went to press, exhorts the reader to interpret the depiction of a ‘happy, bucolic existence’ in the lyric, as a sense of what once was and what might still be.52 The poem, using the familiar rhetorical trope ‘occupatio’ (drawing attention to matters the work claims it does not wish to describe), opens by reminding the reader how fleeting pleasure can be and the unstable nature of the rural retreat.53 Porter is praised in a manner entirely at odds with his situation: Sweet Country life, to such unknown, Whose lives are others, not their own! But serving Courts, and Cities, be Less happy, less enjoying thee. Thou never Plow’st the Oceans foame To seek, and bring rough Pepper home: Nor to the Eastern Ind dost rove To bring from thence the scorched Clove. Nor, with the losse of thy lov’d rest, Bring’st home the Ingot from the West. No, thy Ambition’s Master-piece Flies no thought higher then a fleece: Or how to pay thy Hinds, and cleere All scores; and so to end the yeere: But walk’st about thine own dear bounds, Not envying others larger grounds: For well thou know’st, ‘tis not th’extent Of Land makes life, but sweet content. (1–18)

It is hard to see how such a poem would be particularly comforting for a prominent figure who had left the country to go into exile.54 Porter had served the court loyally and his political allegiances had forced him to flee abroad. He may not have ploughed the ocean to bring back pepper from the East but he had had to cross the English Channel and live in France and the Netherlands, and it surely cannot be the case that his ambition never rose above keeping sheep. Moreover, such lines are a reminder that rural life was sustained by what happened elsewhere, the success of overseas trade generating a healthy economy. The reference to the trade with the East Indies, specifically the Moluccas (the Spice Islands), cannot be innocent. The Dutch had assumed control over these colonial territories and their increasing naval power had led to rivalry and conflict with the British crown in the 1630s.55 Charles and his court had been involved in extensive negotiations with the Dutch throughout the 1630s, in which Porter had played a role as one of the key figures at court with knowledge of Spain.56 Far from celebrating a life that Porter would have enjoyed, Herrick is reminding him and the readers of the poem of a way of life that he had worked hard to

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protect, but failed to do so. Therefore, Porter is someone who has not been able to possess his own life but has had to live for the benefit of others. He has served courts and cities and has not had the benefits of the rural life he might have desired to live, having been unable to visit his country estates in Gloucestershire very often, until forced into exile.57 The opening lines of the poem are both a defence of country life and a forceful acknowledgement of the costs that have to be paid by those who work hard to preserve it. Porter has been prevented from enjoying the pleasures of the countryside, and so is ‘less happy’ as a result because he has done the right thing by fighting to defend those who can benefit from his sacrifice. He cannot walk about his ‘own dear bounds’ because he has had to abandon the estates he acquired through loyal service to Charles and go into exile. He would have to be a saint not to envy ‘others’ larger grounds’, as many have acquired these, in Herrick’s view, unscrupulously and deserve them far less than Porter does. ‘Extent’ (17) is a pun, quibbling on both amount and value (extent, n., OED, I.1.a) and forfeiture and seizure (2.b), meaning that Porter could well be happy even though his lands have been taken from him (but probably he is not). The implication is, however, that many who could have enjoyed their lives have not done so because they have either chosen or been forced to take part in a civil war after parliament declared war on the king. The poem represents the countryside as an ordered, working environment, not as a pastoral retreat: When now the Cock (the Plow-mans Horne) Calls forth the lilly-wristed Morne; Then to thy corn-fields thou dost goe, Which though well soyl’d, yet thou dost know, That the best compost for the Lands Is the wise Masters Feet, and Hands. There at the Plough thou find’st thy Teame, With a Hind whistling there to them: And cheer’st them up, by singing how The Kingdoms portion is the Plow. This done, then to th’enameld Meads Thou go’st; and as thy foot there treads, Thou seest a present God-like Power Imprinted in each Herbe and Flower: And smell’st the breath of great-ey’d Kine, Sweet as the blossomes of the Vine. (19–34)

The poem is georgic rather than pastoral, describing the way that a farm should work.58 The master is up with the workers ready to oversee them. He knows all about the soil on his lands and where different crops will grow

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best; how to drive the plough and how to keep the team of oxen cheerful and attentive to their duties; how to maintain the flower meadows on the estates, and the names and nature of each plant that grows there. Herrick’s description is of an ideal landlord, something that Porter probably never was, making the lyric a close relation of the country house poem, which usually described how an estate should work rather than how it did work.59 There is a balance of work and pleasure as the estate observes holidays, festivals and celebrations that mark the cycles of the year and provide relief from what might otherwise be a tedious routine, the long list another provocation to opponents of these practices, agreed between masters and servants: For Sports, for Pagentrie, and Playes, Thou hast thy Eves, and Holydayes: On which the young men and maids meet, To exercise their dancing feet: Tripping the comely country round, With Daffadils and Daisies crown’d. Thy Wakes, thy Quintels, here thou hast, Thy May-poles too with Garlands grac’t: Thy Morris-dance; thy Whitsun-ale; Thy Sheering-feast, which never faile. Thy Harvest home; thy Wassaile bowle, That’s tost up after Fox I’th’Hole. Thy Mummeries; thy Twelfe-tide Kings And Queenes; thy Christmas revellings: Thy Nut-browne mirth; thy Russet wit; And no man payes too deare for it (46–61).

All forms of country pleasure are on display here: dancing, drinking, competitions, performances and plays, celebrations, display of flowers and produce, laughing and joking and so on. Herrick represents a countryside that provides a plentiful cornucopia of good things that sustains life and has enough left over for excessive consumption and leisure at frequent intervals. Even so, the poem ends on a jarring note, with a reminder that such good things may not last: O happy life! if that their good The Husbandmen but understood! Who all the day themselves doe please, And Younglings, with such sports as these (70–3).

The ‘husbandman’ is the estate owner, here exhorted to care for himself and his workers (the possessive pronoun, ‘their’, is ambiguous). Whether this admonishment includes Porter is not clear, but, however the couplet is

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read, a note of anxiety is introduced into the apparent harmony of life on the farm. The estate owner may well have happy times hare coursing (62–3), catching larks (64–5), pheasant hunting (66–7) and setting traps for other birds (68–9). However, sandwiched between the apparently benign statement that ‘no man pays too deare for it’ (the country pleasures and celebrations) and the fear that not all estate owners get the balance between work and pleasure right, there would seem to be a warning that it is all too easy to dissipate the wealth of the country in pointless and idle pastimes instead of working to maintain it properly.60 The ‘Younglings’ must be the children of the estate owner, and there is a reminder that the world outside the estate and on which it depends may not be quite as benign as the estate itself. The poem also reminds the reader that the pleasures afforded by country estates are manifold and should be preserved, but that those whose responsibility it is to maintain them must not allow themselves to be infantilized, to over-indulge in their delights and to forget what needs to be done in order to ensure that they survive. By 1648 such warnings seemed more like a reminder of what might have been than a means of halting future trouble. Herrick’s representation of class relations is of a well-managed estate overseen by a beneficent master. There is an order and a hierarchy but a constant reminder that the popular culture of the countryside was everyone’s culture and that all classes could and should participate in it. In important ways Royalist visions of society were almost as horizontal as those of their radical counterparts. However, while Herrick and Walton were acutely aware that they were representing ideals in their works that would only partially correspond with reality, the Levellers and Diggers had to work impossibly hard to implement their social ideals. All, however, shared an understanding that in the distant past there had been a more equal and desirable version of England based on the proper use of the land for the benefit of the people. In contrast, intellectual Republicans such as John Milton lost faith in the people precisely because they had great hope that their understanding of what had to be done would be widely shared. When the expected results failed to materialize they restricted their boundaries accordingly. As Paul Hammond has argued, Milton’s ‘conception of the people … became entrusted to a smaller and smaller group, until after the Restoration his hopes seem directed towards lone individuals rather than communities’.61 In Areopagitica (1644), written in response to attempts to restrict the freedom of the press, Milton argued that publishing should never be licensed.62 If it were, the people would not grow to maturity, which required that they learned how to distinguish between good and evil: Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with

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the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.63

After the Fall we need to be exposed to the nature of the world and to make our own choices. Milton acknowledges that in interesting times there is a need for argument and he does not expect – or desire – there to be agreement until the time is right. Radical argument has been quashed by the ruling class because they assume that ‘they are the natural rulers and any radical challenge is reactive, disruptive, subversive’.64 He applies the agrarian image commonly used in discussions of the nation, society and classes to the people and their eager search for education, one that will eventually reap a truly radical harvest: What could a man require more from a nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge? What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soil, but wise and faithful labourers, to make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies? We reckon more than five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks; had we but eyes to lift up, the fields are white already. Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making. Under these fantastic terrors of sect and schism, we wrong the earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and understanding which God hath stirred up in this city (p. 744).

For Milton in the early years of the Civil War, vigorous argument was a sign of proper thinking, a desire to prepare the ground and sow the seed so that a bumper crop could eventually be harvested. A people that argued incessantly were a people who had already started to throw of the yoke of servitude. Milton’s use of a rural metaphor is an interesting choice, because he was very much an urban writer rooted in civic values who imagined that ‘the task of religious and political reformation as something that is to be carried out in a city’.65 His use is a sign of how, even for inhabitants of the capital, the notion that England was an agrarian nation dominated political discourse. Perhaps it also indicates the limitations of his specific form of millennial hopes and expectations, as well as a desire to co-opt the language of the countryside adopted by his Royalist opponents.66 Milton abandoned such faith in the people after the Restoration. Towards the end of Paradise Regained, published in 1671, Satan tempts Jesus with the possibility that he could become a good Roman Emperor, replacing the



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current corrupt incumbent tyrant, Tiberius, and so govern a new free people and lead them towards the light of God’s truth: Might’st thou expel this monster from his throne, Now made a sty, and, in his place ascending, A victor-people free from servile yoke! And with my help thou may’st; to me the power Is given, and by that right I give it thee. Aim, therefore, at no less than all the world; Aim at the highest; without the highest attained, Will be for thee no sitting, or not long, On David’s throne, be prophesied what will.67

Satan now speaks the language of the ‘good old cause’, urging Jesus to cast off the servile (Norman) yoke, save men and women from being slaves and inaugurate the realm of liberty and freedom, exactly what Winstanley had thought he could achieve through his social experiment on St George’s Hill. But Jesus is aware that those hopes had been dashed long ago and they now stand as a Satanic temptation rather a revolutionary Christian ideal because the people have enslaved themselves and cannot be helped until they learn to help themselves:     I was not sent, nor yet to free That people, victor once, now vile and base, Deservedly made vassal – who, once just, Frugal, and mild, and temperate, conquered well, But govern ill the nations under yoke, Peeling their provinces, exhausted all By lust and rapine; first ambitious grown Of triumph, that insulting vanity; Then cruel, by their sports to blood inured Of fighting beasts, and men to beasts exposed; Luxurious by their wealth, and greedier still, And from the daily Scene effeminate. What wise and valiant man would seek to free These, thus degenerate, by themselves enslaved, Or could of inward slaves make outward free? (IV, 131–45).68

Freedom was once a cherished ideal but now serves only to point out what the people have given away, an argument that neatly reflects Herrick’s anxiety about the loss of the festivals of merry England.69 There is no longer the hope that debate and argument will lead people forward to godliness, but an understanding that peoples who are enslaved deserve to be in chains and Jesus’s kingdom, therefore, has to be of the mind, not a political one. Milton has reversed his hope that public culture would change mankind

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for the better and argues instead that people need to be virtuous before they can change society.70 The English were not good enough to have a revolution and so deserved to live under the yoke of a monarchy. Milton is not an author who engages with the issue of class, as his rather elastic conception of the people demonstrates. He was never interested in the reality of English society – far less so than Herrick, to make a comparison that might seem counter-intuitive at first glance – in particular, rural and provincial life, which surely limited his understanding of the ‘people’. Milton was also never especially concerned with notions of equality, in contrast to the arguments of the Diggers and the Levellers and the implicit assumptions in the writings of Walton and Herrick.71 It should therefore not surprise us that there is very little work on Milton and class.72 Other writers were far more concerned with the issues of class definition and class structure in their writings, implicitly and explicitly. John Bunyan (1628–88) was among the best-selling authors of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) leaving a lasting mark on Anglophone culture. As W. R. Owens has noted, ‘No other work in English, except the Bible, has been so widely read over such a long period.’ 73 Most importantly, the work appealed to working-class and lowermiddle-class readers so that, in E. P. Thompson’s judgement, The Pilgrim’s Progress, along with Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) can be seen as one of the ‘two foundation texts of the English working-class movement’.74 For Christopher Hill, Bunyan’s imaginative writing was, in effect, ‘a conscious take-over of elite literature for a middle- and lower-class audience’.75 Why was Bunyan so important for readers from less privileged backgrounds? How did his work help them to make sense of their lives and place in English society? One answer is, as Tamsin Spargo has argued, ‘his repeated criticisms of the worldly ungodly, combined with the message of a life beyond the oppressions and miseries of daily life’, a reading in line with Marx’s frequently cited opinion that ‘religion is the opium of the people’.76 Another is Bunyan’s lucid and accessible prose, his literate and imaginative writing with its powerful repetitions and reiterations that bears no obvious debt to anything that his readers could not have accessed and understood themselves, and which clearly resembled the language his readers would have heard in chapel and read in the Bible.77 Bunyan’s description of Vanity Fair carefully mingles a moral discourse, disapproving of worldly corruption, and an attack on the excessive consumption of the ruling classes: [T]he name of that Town is Vanity; and at the town there is a Fair kept, called Vanity-Fair. It is kept all the year long: it beareth the name of Vanity-Fair, because the Town where ‘tis kept, is lighter then Vanity; and also, because all

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that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is Vanity. As is the saying of the wise, All that cometh is vanity. This Fair is no new erected business, but a thing of Ancient standing; I will shew you the original of it. Almost five thousand years agone, there were Pilgrims walking to the Coelestial City, as these two honest persons [Christian and Faithful] are; and Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, with their Companions, perceiving by the path that the Pilgrims made, that their way to the City lay through this Town of Vanity, they contrived here to set up a Fair; a Fair wherein should be sold of all sorts of Vanity, and that it should last all the year long. Therefore at this Fair are all such Merchandize sold, as Houses, Lands, Trades, Places, Honors, Preferments, Titles, Countreys, Kingdoms, Lusts, Pleasures, and Delights of all sorts, as Whores, Bauds, Wives, Husbands, Children, Masters, Servants, Lives, Blood, Bodies, Souls, Silver, Gold, Pearls, Precious Stones, and what not. And moreover, at this Fair there is at all times to be seen Juglings, Cheats, Games, Plays, Fools, Apes, Knaves, and Rogues, and that of all sorts. Here are to be seen too, and that for nothing, Thefts, Murders, Adulteries, False-swearers, and that of a blood-red colour. And as in other fairs of less moment, there are the several Rows and Streets, under their proper names, where such and such Wares are vended: So here likewise, you have the proper Places, Rows, Streets (viz. Countreys and Kingdoms) where the Wares of this Fair are soonest to be found: Here is the Britain Row, the French Row, the Italian Row, the Spanish Row, the German Row, where several sorts of Vanities are to be sold. But as in other fairs, some one Commodity is as the chief of all the fair, so the Ware of Rome and her Merchandize is greatly promoted in this fair[.] (pp. 85–6).

Bunyan has already established the significance of vanity as a likely danger for contemporary Christians. Christian falls asleep in a pleasant arbour half way up the Hill of Difficulty where he temporarily loses the roll he carries on his journey, which is ‘the assurance of his life’. He sees this as ‘the vanity of his sleeping’ (p. 45), a sin that demonstrates that he is not watchful enough nor adequately vigilant on his pilgrimage. Later, when the pilgrims are accompanied by Talkative he (rightly) points out that conversation can lead to knowledge of ‘the vanity of earthly things, and the benefit of things above’ (p. 75) Talkative’s problem is that he never turns talk into action, imagining that identifying a problem rather than solving it is an adequate response; in itself, a form of vanity. Vanity Fair, therefore, is not a sudden irruption into the allegory, but a manifestation of a sin already recognized and made clear to the reader. The Fair demonstrates that all earthly delights are ephemeral, vanities of no substance when seen against the rewards of everlasting life, the obvious sentiment of the verse cited from Ecclesiastes (11.8) at the end of the first paragraph.

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As the three devils, Beelzebub (Satan, Matthew 10:25), Apollyon (Abaddon, the king of an army of locusts: Revelation 9: 11) and Legion (the unclean spirits who possess the man narrated in Mark 5: 9 and Luke 9: 30), establish the Fair the reader understands that the sins encountered there are of ancient origin and have been a human weakness almost since the beginning of time.78 However, it is then made clear that our understanding that sin besets all humans is somewhat qualified by the recognition that if all earthly pleasures are vain temptations then some people are more susceptible to sin than others, i.e., those who have the greatest access to worldly goods, the rich. The list of what the Fair supplies starts off with ordinary, legitimate trade in commodities and services – houses, land and labour – but soon progresses to a description of corrupt practices that identifies the behaviour of the ruling class after the Restoration. At Vanity Fair desirable positions (places), honours and titles can be bought, as can countries and kingdoms, because everything is for sale to those who have enough money. The Fair also sells sex, and every form of bodily pleasure imaginable, all worldly vanities that imperil the soul of the purchaser. The sacred vows of marriage are undermined as people can buy not just wives and husbands, but also children and servants, blood and bodies traded alongside precious gems. It is easy to see why this description appealed to readers outside the higher levels of society, because it amplifies the familiar critiques of riches in the Bible, in particular the proverbial, ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God’ (Mark 10: 25). Everyone sins, but the rich sin more than the poor, who they buy and sell as they do kingdoms, professions, influence, sex and jewellery. Bunyan’s list is carefully constructed so that major and petty sins merge, indicating the careless and callous nature of the ruling class who cannot distinguish between the things that their excessive wealth can procure, a sign that they are trapped in sin and unable to escape from its lure. The deprived are able to see God’s plans more clearly and are relatively immune to temptation. The list has a specific resonance as a critique of Restoration England, and what was seen as the commercially-driven culture overseen by Charles II and his court. For those, like Bunyan, who had placed great hopes in the possibility of radical change after the Civil War, the 1660s marked a return to the worst aspects of the hierarchical social systems of the past, allied to a vulgar materialism. Offices and titles could be bought and sold; sexual immorality and promiscuity, often for personal gain, thrived; wealth was squandered by the few while the common people starved; and kingdoms were bought and sold by a ruling class who regarded them as their own personal property.79 Politics and morality are neatly combined so that religion and class are aligned.

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As in The Beggar’s Opera, there is a symbiotic relationship between the criminal wiles of the underclass – jugglers, cheats, fool and knaves – and the machinations of the ruling class, the two blending into one as cabals of self-interested tricksters.80 In Bunyan, they form a pincer movement eager to ensnare the unwary Christian. The Fair might seem innocent to some but it generates crime and sin – murder, adultery, theft and lying – vices that have overwhelmed the proper order of society that God desires. It is up to the good, sober citizens below the ruling class and above the criminal class to restore the nation’s honour and moral probity. The Fair contains a number of streets in which customers can obtain vanities from every country, showing how they have all become equivalent marketable commodities that can be traded for each other and bought and sold. Customers hold sway over nations, a critique of rampant commerce. The last sentence cited here alleges that there is a blindness to the suzerainty of Roman Catholicism, a warning to the English people that they are in danger of being sold to Rome and dominated by a false, foreign religion without their consent or the knowledge of parliament. As Tim Harris has pointed out, ‘The prominence of Catholics in high places and the pro-Catholic leanings of the court inevitably created the impression that popery was on the increase.’ 81 For Bunyan, Restoration England is back to the future. Catholicism, the hierarchical religion that exploited the people, has not only returned through the secret wiles of those in power, but, as a religion dominated by all forms of vanity, has proved more appealing in a world dominated by commerce than true Christianity. Bunyan’s critique of England in the grip of vain commercial values is similar to those made by Denham, Walton and Herrick.82 All value the simple life of the lower classes, however idealized and distorted their representations. But it was only Bunyan who wrote in a language that the non-elite would have recognized as their own – principally, of course, because it was produced by one of them, not someone seeking to represent them. Winstanley, another writer with a vigorous, plain Biblically-based style, was probably rather too idealistic, his analysis not rooted in recognizable values or everyday life, for him to have a significant influence on his contemporaries or subsequent generations of readers. He had revolutionary ideas with no revolutionary audience.83 For Q. D. Leavis, Bunyan’s style works because ‘one is in contact through him with a genuine culture … by modulating from allegory to realism and correspondingly from the movement and language of the Bible to the movement and idiom of common speech’.84 As Mary Ann Lund has noted, although analysis of Bunyan’s style has often been rather perfunctory, he ‘is recognized to have a distinctive style … [and] his writing has become a byword for plainness, homeliness, directness, and popular vigour’.85 Lund points out,

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however, that Bunyan’s style is much more carefully crafted than is often imagined and the resemblance to speech is not a result of simple copying of the spoken word. His sentences are often paratactic, clauses linked by ‘and’ rather than having a more causal relationship (hypotactic), reminiscent of the English Bible and the lack of complexity in everyday speech as speakers have not yet been able to connect their thought patterns.86 The effect is to force readers to determine for themselves how sections of the text fit together and what the relationship is between the words and sentences (as the description of Vanity Fair demonstrates). Bunyan’s style was heavily influenced by Arthur Dent’s guide to Christian life, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1606), a book that his wife gave him as part of her dowry.87 Dent emphasized the need for dialogue in Christian instruction and for language to be clear, precise and straightforward, influencing the division of religious language after the Restoration between an ideal of the ornately beautiful, valued by Catholics and high church Anglicans, and the direct and instructive, preferred by Nonconformists. The plain style was designed to appeal directly to an individual’s experience.88 In obvious ways, Bunyan’s style can be defined by what it is not, as a contrast to the elaborate, educated style of the high church clergy – as well as their more polemical attacks on opponents – and more ‘literary’ authors such as Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82).89 Even the unadorned style of a relatively plain writing bishop, such as Bunyan’s contemporary Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99), reveals the difference between the prose of high church divines and that of Bunyan, as well as their contrasting assumptions about their audiences.90 Writing about opposition to swearing oaths of loyalty to church and state, Stillingfleet adopts a hypothetical argument in order to persuade his educated audience: Suppose those who take the Oaths are to blame; If they act according to their Consciences therein, what Ground can there be of Separation from them for so doing, unless it be lawful to separate from all such who follow the Dictate of an Erroneous Conscience? And so there can be no End of Separations, till all Men’s Consciences judge alike: for a Man’s Conscience in his practical Judgment concerning Moral Actions; and there are so many Circumstances, which vary the Nature of such Moral Actions, as Oaths, that I do not wonder to see Men differ about them; but I should wonder and lament to see them separate from each other for the sake of such a Difference.91

There is nothing remotely approaching this sort of moral philosophy or theological reasoning in Bunyan’s work: rather, as The Pilgrim’s Progress demonstrates throughout its narrative, the reader is provided with an allegory that they can interpret without exceptional difficulty and relate directly to their own experience or that of their fellow Christians. Stillingfleet’s logical

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distinctions, and his attempt to demonstrate that because Christians swear oaths for subtly different reasons there should be no sensible reason for refusing to take one, are a world away from Bunyan’s direct communication with his reader. There is an equally important gulf in style. Faithful is tried and summarily executed for slandering the nobility.92 This forceful passage directs readers either to draw on their own experience of persecution by the authorities – who by 1678 had been persecuting Nonconformists more vigorously than they had been in the years immediately after the Restoration – or to understand the sacrifices of those who had been prepared to stand up and be counted so that their proper Christian worship could continue.93 The law, according to the Judge, is based on those passed to prevent idolatry by Pharaoh the Great, Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, and Faithful has been found guilty of disputing religion and so he deserves to die as a traitor (p. 94). Bunyan explicitly compares Charles II to the worst persecutors of the Israelites in the Old Testament, whereas official propaganda compared him Moses, David, Josiah and Constantine.94 The faithful Nonconformists must therefore be God’s true servants. The Jury, with their serio-comic names, represent the conglomeration of the various forces of authority that conspire to persecute the true Christian: Then went the Jury out, whose names were, Mr. Blind-man, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr. Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Lyar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr. Hate-light, and Mr Implacable, who every one gave in his private Verdict against him among themselves, and afterwards unanimously concluded to bring him in guilty before the Judge. And first Mr. Blind-man the Foreman, said, I see clearly that this man is an Heretick. Then said Mr. No-good, Away with such a fellow from the Earth. Ay, said Mr. Malice, for I hate the very looks of him. Then said Mr. Love-lust, I could never endure him. Nor I, said Mr. Live-loose, for he would always be condemning my way. Hang him, hang him, said Mr. Heady. A sorry Scrub, said Mr. High-mind. My heart riseth against him, said Mr. Enmity. He is a Rogue, said Mr. Lyar. Hanging is too good for him, said Mr. Cruelty. Lets dispatch him out of the way, said Mr. Hate-light. Then said Mr. Implacable, Might I have all the World given me, I could not be reconciled to him, therefore let its forthwith bring They conclude him in guilty of death; And so they did, therefore he was presently Condemned, To be had from the place where he was, to the place from whence he came, and there to be put to the most cruel death that could be invented (pp. 94–5).

The jury members all behave in character, their self-serving comments ostensibly exonerate them as they condemn the scapegoat, but all are easily decoded by a reader. The episode serves as a thumbnail sketch of the wealth and range of forces designed to undermine the faith of the true, honest

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Christian: from selfish and careless living to ferocious persecution. The spirit of Vanity Fair, described only a few pages earlier, lives on in a more pernicious form as a true Christian is martyred for his faith. The final comments here make it clear that Bunyan is writing about contemporary England, as well as having the long history of the persecution of Christianity in mind, for they resemble the words judges repeated to the condemned criminal.95 Faithful suffers the ignominious tortures that Christ and Biblical martyrs experienced. He is scourged, stoned, his flesh pierced with knives, before being burned to death in the manner of the Marian martyrs, a reminder to the reader that martyrdom was a longlasting and living tradition that kept the faith alive.96 Such persecution, Bunyan claims, is meted out to Nonconformists, victims of the wrath, selfishness and malice of their social superiors. Therefore, as E. P. Thompson recognized, true Christianity has become equated with working-class experience, a tradition that was only to be strengthened in the next hundred and fifty years: ‘faith in a life to come served not only as a consolation to the poor but also as some emotional compensation for present sufferings and grievances: it was possible not only to imagine the “reward” of the humble but also to enjoy some revenge upon their oppressors, by imagining their torments to come’.97 Bunyan’s representation of class persecution was not confined to spiritual matters, encompassing other, more practical matters of everyday life. After Faithful’s death Christian is accompanied by Hopeful, who has been inspired by his companion’s martyrdom, on the pilgrimage.98 One night they sleep in the grounds of Doubting Castle, owned by the giant, Despair. The pair are woken by the unreasonable, aggressive giant: with a grim and surly voice he bid them awake, and asked them whence they were? And what they did in his grounds? They told him, they were Pilgrims, and that they had lost their way. Then said the Giant, You have this night trespassed on me, by trampling in, and lying on my grounds, and therefore you must go along with me. So they were forced to go, because he was stronger then they. They also had but little to say, for they knew themselves in a fault. The Giant therefore drove them before him, and put them into his Castle, into a very dark Dungeon, nasty and stinking to the spirit of these two men: Here then they lay, from Wednesday morning till Saturday night, without one bit of bread, or drop of drink, or any light, or any to ask how they did (pp. 109–10).

The episode describes the immiserating nature of arbitrary and sudden imprisonment; again, designed to either appeal to the reader’s own experience or so that they can understand something that is likely to happen to them or someone they know in the near future. Bunyan had written The Pilgrim’s Progress while in prison (either during his first incarceration, 1660–72, or his second, 1676–77).99

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More specifically, this is an attack on the rampant enclose of common land, identical to those of Winstanley, the perception that a small number of landlords were appropriating what was once common land for their own profit. The Pilgrims, represented as itinerant manual workers, are guilty of ‘trespass’.100 The word had been used to describe a wide range of misdemeanours (torts), but by the seventeenth century was assuming its more modern meaning of the unauthorized presence on another’s property as enclosure became a more common feature of everyday life.101 As Bunyan makes clear, ignorance of property boundaries was no defence and trespassers could be imprisoned for accidentally straying onto another’s land as intention was irrelevant.102 Shared religious belief binds a class together but the experience of that class and the stamp of its identity are also constructed and reinforced by the nature of everyday experience and the material relationship to other classes. Here, the rights of property and the law combine to separate landowners from the rest; again, exactly as Winstanley had argued. At the other end of the social scale, the culture of the libertine that developed at the Restoration court is easily identifiable as an upper class/ aristocratic mode of representation, however accurately it could be mapped onto a reality. Libertines were glamorous, dangerous figures beyond the reach of dull, ordinary morality, especially as preached and practised by Puritans.103 The most obviously transgressive and subversive figure was John Wilmot, 2nd earl of Rochester (1647–80), whose work circulated widely in manuscript in the late 1660s and 1670s.104 Rochester was constantly alive to the absurdity and instability of a literary posture based on the unreliable and ephemeral nature of the human body, nowhere more so than in the poem, The Imperfect Enjoyment, a work that satirizes the ‘cocky assurance’ of other libertine poets.105 The libertine ejaculates prematurely, leaving his forlorn mistress asking him ‘Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?’ 106 The poem concludes with the narrator delivering a long attack on his errant, flaccid penis: Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame: False to my passion, fatal to my fame; By what mistaken magic dost thou prove So true to lewdness, so untrue to love? What oyster-, cinder-, beggar-, common-whore Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before? When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way, With what officious haste doest thou obey! Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets That scuffles, cuffs, and ruffles all he meets… Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most, Through all the town a common fucking post,

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On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt. Mayst thou to ravenous chancres be a prey, Or in consuming weepings waste away; May stranguries and stone thy days attend; May’st thou ne’er piss, who didst refuse to spend When all my joys did on false thee depend. And may ten thousand abler pricks agree To do the wronged Corinna right for thee (46–55, 62–72).

There is a humorous pathos in the humiliated lover cursing his penis so comprehensively that he not only wishes that more proficient lovers service his lady, but that he will suffer the torments of venereal disease (which Rochester may well have contracted by the time the poem was written). As well as a satire of rakish culture, the poem fits into a long tradition of impotency poems running from classical times, and demonstrates Rochester’s longstanding interest in the Hobbesian philosophy of the body (the lover here speaking as though his body were deracinated from his self or his soul).107 After all, he actually likes Corinna, who is equally inspired by her passion for him.108 However, if he is attentive to at least some aspects of gender divisions, Rochester would seem to be far more myopic about class.109 His penis is unable to function with a woman who is his social equal because he truly desires her. With women from a conspicuously lower class, the oyster, cinder, beggar and common whores, the narrator’s lust over-rides any possible anxiety, presumably because he feels nothing for them, as the poem suggests. The list is Rochester’s invention, based on the common form, ‘oyster-woman’, oysters being a food gathered and generally consumed by the lower classes; cinder-women raked up ashes, another conspicuously menial and unpleasant profession.110 Rochester’s speaker demonstrates blithe contempt for these women – and it is hard to argue that his stance is notably ironic – who can arouse him but do not have his respect. More significantly, they are the ones who demonstrate agency in the physical encounter, each relieving her ‘tingling cunt’ on his ‘common fucking post’. The aristocratic man has become objectified, the focus of the lower-class women’s collective lust, although we are not given an insight into their responses to the series of encounters that have taken place. Rather, it is the speaker’s shame that dominates the poem, his witty and amusing apology to the ‘wronged Corinna’, his delightful Ovidian mistress.111 It is not clear whether Aphra Behn’s poem, The Disappointment, which narrates a similarly unsatisfactory encounter from the woman’s point of view, was written in response to The Imperfect Enjoyment, or earlier. The



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title might suggest that it was read as a response, and Behn was certainly condemned by many readers for ‘her use of the libertine discourse in poetry and her representation of sexual desire’.112 Moreover, the two poems were first published in a collection of Rochester’s poems, Poems on Several Occasions (1680), indicating the close connections readers certainly made between the two works.113 In Behn’s poem the two lovers, Lysander and Cloris, are social equals and their amorous encounter promises mutual satisfaction:     And now without Respect or Fear,     He seeks the Objects of his Vows,     (His Love no Modesty allows)     By swift degrees advancing – where     His daring Hand that Altar seiz’d,     Where Gods of Love do Sacrifice.     That awful Throne, that Paradice     Where Rage is calm’d, and Anger pleas’d,     That Living Fountain where Delight sill flows, And gives the Universal World Repose.     Her Balmy Lips incountring his,     Their Bodies as their Souls are joyn’d;     Where both in Transports Unconfin’d,     Extend themselves upon the Moss.    Cloris half dead and breathless lay;     Her soft Eyes cast a Humid Light,     Such as divides the Day and Night;     Or falling Stars, whose Fires decay;     And now no signs of Life she shows, But what in short-breath’d Sighs returns & goes.114

Behn’s poem uses the language of Neo-Platonism in a sly and knowing manner, the body acting as a portal through which souls are enabled to merge and so unite. In contrast to the hierarchies established in Rochester’s poem, the shepherd is able to approach his lover ‘without Respect or fear’ (respect here meaning ‘heed, care, or attention’).115 Social considerations are removed in this poem, and there is no obvious difference between the shepherd and shepherdess. Both are amorous and ready for the encounter, as there are no outside forces that can interfere with their love-making, as Behn’s use of Neo-Platonic imagery indicates. While Lysander is eager, Chloris is ready to receive his advances, retreating from alert consciousness into a dreamy state of blissful anticipation. Therefore, while Rochester’s narrator’s failure can be put down to outside forces pressing upon the sexual encounter, Lysander’s cannot. Chloris flees

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and in the final stanza the narrator intervenes to speak in what a reader surely takes to be Behn’s own voice, as she judges the state of the lovers: The Nymph’s resentments none but I Can well Imagine and Condole: But none can guess Lysander’s Soul, But those who sway’d his Destiny. His silent Griefs swell up to Storms, And not one God his Fury spares; He curs’d his Birth, his Fate, his Stars; But more the Shepherdess’s Charms, Whose soft bewitching Influence Had Damn’d him to the Hell of Impotence (131–40).

The narrator does not declare what Chloris feels, but states that she knows because, as a woman, she has experienced similarly embarrassing encounters – a world-weary joke aimed to combat the boasts of rakes. The joke continues with the ironic statement that ‘none can guess’ the state of Lysander’s soul, before the narrator explains that, as usual, the man blames the woman for his inadequacy, casting her as a witch, her lovely appearance, like Circe’s, serving only to disable his potency. Even so, unlike Rochester’s speaker, he does not blame the lady’s social standing, making this an encounter between equals that is disrupted by gender politics, untouched by issues of class. The poem stands as ‘a manifestation of a general crisis over the representation of masculinity, as well as anxiety over the phallic order’, shifting debates from concern over male ability and actions to the ‘exchange of pleasure for pleasure’.116 The proposed equality, I would suggest, stems also from a desire for social parity; that pleasure should be able to break down class barriers. Class was undoubtedly important to Behn, who enjoyed an elevated social position for a time as an adult, but who appears to have worked hard to conceal her reactively humble social origins. Indeed, in her novel, Oronooko (1688), she implies that her origins were relatively elevated, and the ‘lack of clarity has allowed much interesting speculation from readers wanting her to be more … aristocratically connected’.117 It is most likely that she was the daughter of a barber and a mother ‘from a trading family’ and she was probably born in Sturry near Canterbury, Kent, making her background similar to those of Winstanley and Bunyan. After a period in the colony of Surinam, she worked as a spy in Europe, and then enjoyed a prolific career writing for the stage. In the 1670s she emerged as a political propagandist for the monarchy, writing to counter the various plots against the crown, her life and career standing in marked contrast to those of Winstanley and Bunyan. As her theatre career dried up in the 1680s, she

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turned more to verse and prose, although she appears to have remained in debt as well as ill health. Behn had few court connections – and these were probably secured through her work as a spy.118 Whatever success and security she achieved was principally through her work and literary endeavours, a reality at odds with her support for the ideal of a rigidly structured social order and the rights of those born into the aristocracy as natural governors. Oronooko, her celebrated story of an African prince sold into slavery in Surinam, is studded with references to his innate nobility, charismatic presence and natural superiority as a member of the ruling class. Oronooko’s race is offset by his class: Whoever had heard him speak, wou’d have been convinced of their errors, that all fine wit is confined to the white men, especially to those of Christendom; and wou’d have confess’d that Oronooko was as capable even of reigning well, and of governing as wisely, has as great a soul, as politick maxims, and was as sensible of power, as any prince civiliz’d in the most refined schools of humanity and learning, or the most illustrious courts.119

Behn elides debates, inspired in recent history by the Civil War, about whether the ruling class was a hereditary group based on their family’s acquisition of property, or whether they should be an open elite, so that, in theory at least, anyone could join if they had acquired the right education and had significant enough ability. Instead she asserts that Oronooko, a black prince, has birth, breeding and education, placing him beyond any possible European challenge to his natural rights. If, on the one hand, Oronooko is a work designed to combat racial prejudice, on the other, in casting its protagonist as an exotic other, it aims to place the principles of natural, hereditary right beyond any possible challenge: ‘racial difference … is … a marker for class difference and its political implications’.120 Those of innate nobility instinctively recognize their qualities in others. Like Europeans, Oronooko practises slavery, capturing the soldiers he has defeated in battle and curtailing their freedoms. However, he makes an exception for his rival military leader, Jamoan, who becomes ‘very dear to him’ as he is ‘a man very gallant, and of excellent graces and fine parts’. Accordingly, ‘he [Oronooko] never put him amongst the rank of captives, as they [his people] used to do, without distinction, for the common sale, or market, but kept him in his own Court, where he retain’d nothing of his prisoner but the name’ (p. 55). When an English ship arrives in port, Oronooko entertains an English Captain, ‘of a finer sort of address and conversation, better bred, and more engaging, than most of that sort of men are; so that he seem’d rather never to have been bred out of a Court, than almost all his life at sea’. Oronooko ‘who was more civiliz’d, according

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to the European mode, than any other had been, and took more delight in the white nations’ (p. 56), trusts the Captain, who then betrays him, getting him drunk on board his ship, imprisoning him with irons, before selling him into slavery. Oronooko ‘struggled for his liberty’, but with no hope of success as he was so carefully bound, the sailors rightly preventing him from using ‘a hand in his defence to quit himself of a life that wou’d by no means endure slavery’ (p. 57). Behn’s target is surely those who look like they are noble because they have acquired some trappings of education and civility, but who are really mean, vicious and self-interested: the captain only seems well-bred. The text urges the reader to recoil in horror not at the institution of slavery, ‘which is unobjectionable when it involves common people’, but at the enslavement of a prince, ‘born and brought up to command others’.121 Later, the slaves in Surinam discover that Oronooko ‘was that Prince who had, at several times, sold most of ‘em to these parts’, but, rather than objecting to his behaviour and treating him with hostility, they recognize his natural nobility: ‘And from a veneration they pay to great men, especially if they know ‘em, and from the surpirize and awe they had at the sight of him, they all cast themselves at his feet, crying out, in their language, Live, O King! Long live, O King! And kissing his feet, paid him even diviner homage’ (p. 64). The language is carefully chosen to make the message clear to English readers: whatever race he belongs to, a king is a king, and should inspire the unconditional devotion of his subjects. Behn was writing Oronooko immediately before the Glorious Revolution deposed James II (11 December 1688), so this is clearly as much a defence of his right to rule and a plea to his disloyal subjects to support him as their rightful ruler – whatever he might have done – as it is a critique of racial prejudice.122 The slaves recognize Oronooko, not just because they have encountered him before, but because he is a great man whose presence naturally inspires awe and reverence. The repetition of ‘feet’ emphasizes that they do not simply prostrate themselves before him, but kiss his feet, as Mary Magdalene anointed and kissed Christ’s feet (Luke 7: 44–6), a sign of her absolute devotion to her lord. Oronooko, and by implication English monarchs, deserve such tribute, as figures of Christ, as had been established in the best-selling Eikon Basilike.123 Throughout, Oronooko suggests that such people are natural slaves and that they should be looked after properly and respected for the work that they do, as the rebellion in the colony is caused by the poor treatment of the slaves by the upstart colonial masters (although it is doomed to failure as it is badly thought out).124 Trefry, Oronooko’s master in Surinam, is another man of ambiguous status. He is cultured, being a good mathematician and linguist, and treats Oronooko with great respect, eventually naming



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him Caesar because of his noble qualities. A friendship, signalling their equality, develops: ‘he entertain’d Oronooko so agreeably with his art and discourse, that he was no less pleas’d with Trefry, than he was with the Prince’ (p. 62). Trefry reintroduces Oronooko to his wife, Imoinda, now re-named Clemene, making a rather disturbing confession: I confess … when I have, against her will, entertained her with love so long, as to be transported with my passion even above decency, I have been ready to make use of those advantages of strength and force nature has given me; but oh! She disarms me with the modesty and weeping, so tender and so moving, that I retire, and thank my stars she overcame me. The company laugh’d at his civility to a slave, and Caesar only applauded the nobleness of his passion and nature, since that slave might be noble, or, what was better, have true notions of honour and virtue in her (p. 66).

This passage describing an aborted rape is troubling on a number of levels. In colonial society such acts are clearly not just acceptable but even encouraged, as the laughter of the slave owners demonstrates. In such a society Trefry’s restraint can, therefore, seem admirable, but it is also perhaps a sign that as he possesses such appetites he is like an aristocrat but not quite one (Rochester’s narrator, in contrast, would never have to rape a woman of lower status; later middle-class writers had no problem in accusing the upper classes of such sexual misdemeanours).125 Just as colonial subjects might imitate their masters effectively but could never become exactly like them, so can Trefry work hard at being civilized but never actually become properly noble and civil.126 Caesar/Oronooko’s reaction is perhaps the most challenging of all for a modern reader. He splits the two modes of acquiring nobility – via nature and nurture – that are united in him, and professes his opposition to the rape of a slave only because she might be noble in either or both of the ways he outlines. Other slaves, by implication, are fair game. Caesar has the power to inspire rebellion because of his natural authority among the slaves, an indication of a dangerous instability in the colonial social order, but one that reflected what had happened in England in the 1640s. Motivated by the fear that his unborn child will start life without freedom, he rouses his fellow slaves with a powerful speech, concluding with the rhetorical questions: ‘And shall we render obedience to such a degenerate race, who have no one human virtue left, to distinguish them from the vilest creatures? Will you, I say, suffer the lash from such hands?’ (p. 83). For Behn, rebellion against the lawfully anointed is never permissible, but when then natural order is disturbed, it needs to be reinstated by any means possible. When the revolt fails because the slaves will not stand firm, Caesar confesses that ‘he was ashamed of what he had done, in endeavouring to make those free, who were by nature slaves’ (p. 88).127

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Oronooko is a work suffused with anxiety and despair. There is a natural hierarchy, a social order that accepts the right of those who are born to rule. Once this particular social contract has been broken there is no easy way to restore order and proper hierarchy. Oronooko’s rebellion is regrettable but justified, although it cannot succeed because the people fail him (much as Milton argued had happened to the ‘good old cause’). He is eventually killed after his superhuman, heroic Stoic resistance by ‘one Bannister, a wild Irish man, and one of the [ruling colonial] council, a fellow of absolute barbarity, and fit to execute any villain, but rich’ (p. 98). Bannister is really a villain himself, and the best he should have hoped for was to become a public executioner, a well-paid job but not a role for a governor or elected leader.128 It is his wealth that has elevated him to un-merited and unprecedented heights in the colonial world. Behn’s critique of contemporary England resembles that of more radical critics, as she targets the advent of a commercial society based on wealth rather than rank, as the most significant cause that undermined a once cohesive nation. Once again, we are reminded of the assumptions that writers shared, specifically about social class, stability, and the need for a fixed order based on land and/or birth rather than money. Behn herself was something of an anomaly. Consistent in her critique of gender politics, her vision of a hierarchical society in Oronooko also holds together better than many critics allege.129 It was, of course, pointedly at odds with her own life (though not most of her drama), although her critique of commercial values is surely explained in part by the exhausting way in which she had to make a living, one that left her in a precarious position for most of her life and did not prevent her from sliding into poverty towards its end.130 Oronooko remained steadfast to the hierarchical ideals of his social class in Behn’s novel. In real life, however much she wanted – or had – to climb the greasy pole, so did Aphra Behn.

Notes 1 For an overview, see Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 2 Jason McElligott, ‘1641’, in Raymond, ed., Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, I, pp. 599–608, at p. 599. 3 McElligott, ‘1641’, pp. 599–600. 4 Tom Corns, A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), p. 296. 5 Derek Hirst, The Representative of the People? Voters and Voting in England Under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 6 Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper.

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7 Worden, English Civil Wars, p. 93. See also Marytn Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland, 1638–1651 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 268–74. 8 Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: Dent, 1961), p. 210. 9 Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, Pt. 1. 10 Anon., An Agreement of the People for a Firme and Present Peace, upon Grounds of Common-Right and Freedome (London, 1647), p. 1. 11 Norah Carlin, ‘The Levellers and the Conquest of Ireland in 1649’, HJ 30 (1987), 269–88; Christopher Hill, ‘Seventeenth-Century English Radicals and Ireland’, in Patrick J. Corish, ed., Radicals, Rebels and Establishments: Historical Studies 15 (Belfast: Appletree Press, 1985), pp. 33–49. 12 See Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, 2 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), I, ch. 1. 13 See above, pp. 54–5. 14 Gerrard Winstanley, A Declaration From The Poor Oppressed People of England, in The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), II, pp. 31–43, at p. 35. On Winstanley see especially James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000), ch. 9. 15 Annabel Patterson, ‘The Very Name of the Game: Theories of Order and Disorder’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday, eds, Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 21–38, at p. 29; James Holstun, ‘Communism, George Hill and the Mir: Was Marx a Nineteenth-Century Winstanleyan?’, in Bradstock, ed., Winstanley and the Diggers, pp. 121–48, at p. 139. 16 John Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 159; J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (rev. edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 17 Joan Thirsk, ‘The Farming Regions of England’, in Thirsk, ed., Agrarian History, pp. 1–112, at p. 2. See also Andrew McRae, ‘The Land and its Human Occupation in Poly-Olbion’, in Andrew McRae and Philip Schwyzer, eds, Poly-Olbion: New Perspectives (Woodbridge: Brewer, 2020), pp. 69–88, at p. 73. 18 Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 18–19; Todd Andrew Borlock, ed., Literature and Nature in the English Renaissance: An Ecocritical Anthology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 403–12; Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 9–10; Maurice Ashley, The English Civil War (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), p. 10–11. 19 Wood, Origin of Capitalism, p. 108. 20 McRae, ‘Land and its Human Occupation’, p. 81.

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21 Gurney, Brave Community, p. 106; Gerald Aylmer, ‘The Diggers in Their Own Time’, in Bradstock, ed., Winstanley and the Diggers, pp. 8–18, at p. 17. 22 Gurney, Brave Community, pp. 127, 138, 159. 23 Winstanley cites the Bible more than any other book and there are no classical references in his works: Winstanley, Works, I, introduction, p. 59. 24 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1968), 1, 685–92; Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 95; Ken Hiltner, What Else is Pastoral? Renaissance Literature and the Environment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), p. 104. 25 Sharpe, ‘“Image-Doting Rabble”’. 26 Gerrard Winstanley, A Declaration to the Powers of England in Works, II, pp. 1–30, at p. 13. 27 Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 258–60; Claire Jowitt, ‘“The Consolation of Israel”: Representations of Jewishness in the Writings of Gerrard Winstanley and William Everard’, in Bradstock, ed., Winstanley and the Diggers, pp. 87–100. 28 Smith, Literature and Revolution, pp. 326–30; Andrew McRae, ‘The Pleasures of the Land in Restoration England: The Social Politics of The Complete Angler’, in Roze Hentschell and Kathy Lavezzo, eds, Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), pp. 163–79. 29 Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, 1653–1676, ed. Jonquil Bevan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 64, 238. 30 Added in 1676. 31 Rhodes, Common, pp. 3–6. 32 Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, pp. 147–50, 192–5. 33 Another addition in the 1676 edition. It is not clear which verse he has in mind: Leviticus 11: 9–12 permits the Israelites to eat sea creatures that have fins and scales but does not recommend them as ideal food. 34 The last sentence was added in the revised 1676 edition. 35 See I. G. Cowx, ‘Recreational Fishing’, in Paul J. B. Hart and John D. Reynolds, eds, Handbook of Fish Biology and Fisheries, 2 vols (Oxford: Wiley, 2002), II, pp. 367–90, at p. 367. 36 Added in 1676. 37 Sir Henry Wotton, Reliquiae Wottonianae (London, 1672), pp. 391–2. 38 For other comments on Herrick and class, see Byrne, Poetry and Class, pp. 128–32; and the ground-breaking analysis of Raymond Williams (Country and the City, pp. 33–4, 72–3). 39 Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, pp. 402–33; Bennett, Civil Wars, ch. 11. 40 Alistair Dougall, The Devil’s Book: Charles I, The Book of Sports and Puritanism in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). See also Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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41 Robert Herrick, ‘Corinna’s Going a Maying’, in The Complete Poems of Robert Herrick, ed. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), I, p. 64. For comment, see George Walton Scott, Robert Herrick: The Life of a Poet, 1591–1674 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1974), pp. 127–36; Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616–1660 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 243. 42 Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, pp. 127–9. 43 Hutton, Ritual Year, p. 27. 44 Hutton, Ritual Year, p. 28. 45 Anke Bernau, Virgins: A Cultural History (London: Granta, 2008), pp. 50–2. 46 Hutton, Ritual Year, pp. 51–2. 47 Christopher Durston, ‘Puritan Rule and the Failure of Cultural Revolution, 1645–1660’, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, eds, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan), pp. 210–33, at pp. 218–19. 48 Hammond, Fleeting Things, pp. 243–5; Smith, Literature and Revolution, pp. 262–3. 49 Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Debate Over Authority: Adiaphora, the Civil Magistrate, and the Settlement of Religion’, in N. H. Keeble, ed., Settling the Peace of the Church: 1662 Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 29–56; John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 126–7; Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 205–9. 50 Francis J. Bremer, Puritanism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 60. 51 On Porter, see the ODNB entry; Gervas Huxley, Endymion Porter: The Life of a Courtier, 1587–1649 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959); Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, p. 126; Herrick, Complete Poems, I, introduction, liii. Herrick was a client of Porter’s in the 1620s so the poem may have been written earlier: Complete Poems, introduction, xxxix. 52 Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, p. 173. 53 On ‘occupatio’, see Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 1968), pp. 135–6. 54 ‘The Country Life’ may date from the early 1630s but would certainly have taken on new meanings when published in 1648, assuming it had not been revised: Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 265–6. 55 Simon Groenveld, ‘The English Civil Wars as a Cause of the First Anglo-Dutch War, 1640–1652’, HJ 30 (1987), 541–66 56 Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 75–8; Huxley, Endymion Porter, pp. 65–72, 81–113, 187–94. 57 ODNB entry. 58 Low, Georgic Revolution, pp. 265–70; McRae, God Speed the Plough, pp. 190–7.

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59 Low, Georgic Revolution, pp. 266–7; Alistair Fowler, ed., The Country House Poem: Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994). 60 McRae, God Speed the Plough, pp. 296–7. 61 Paul Hammond, Milton and the People (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 12. See also Feisal G. Mohamed, Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020): ‘the “people” fit to exercise political agency remain an imagined elite bearing little resemblance to the nation largely in thrall to stale custom’ (p. 10). 62 Joad Raymond, ‘The Development of the Book Trade in Britain’, in Raymond, ed., Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, I, pp. 59–75, at p. 72. 63 John Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), pp. 716–49, at p. 728. 64 Michael Wilding, ‘Milton’s Radical Epic’, in Lucas, ed., Writing and Radicalism, pp. 19–38, at p. 25. 65 Hammond, Milton and the People, p. 91. 66 A frequently employed tactic of the pamphleteering Milton: later he sought to counteract the representation of the king as a saintly icon through the language of image-breaking: see Andrew Hadfield, ‘Milton and the Struggle for the Representation of the Nation: Reading Paradise Lost through Eikonoklastes’, in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens, eds, Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 51–72. 67 John Milton, Paradise Regained, in The Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey (London: Longman, 1971), IV, 100–8. 68 For comment, see Hammond, Milton and the People, p. 232; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber, 1977), pp. 412–27. 69 For comment, see Paul Hammond, ‘Free’, in Milton’s Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 166–202, at p. 187. 70 A change that mirrors that in Piers Plowman: see above, pp. 88–9. 71 Hammond, Milton’s Complex Words, p. 101. 72 An exception is Andrew Milner’s John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1981), a study based on Lucien Goldmann’s Marxist analysis of the ideologies of class consciousness. 73 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. W. R. Owens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), introduction, xiii. 74 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (rev. edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 34. Bunyan was indeed an influence on Paine: The Rights of Man, ed. Eric Foner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 52. 75 Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 357. 76 Tamsin Spargo, John Bunyan (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2015), p. 84; Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction in Early Writings, pp. 243–57, at p. 244.

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77 Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (rev. edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 87–101; Rose, Intellectual Life, pp. 33–4, 91–6, 104–7; Mary Ann Lund, ‘The Prose Style of John Bunyan’, in Davies and Owens, eds, Oxford Handbook of Bunyan, pp. 397–412. 78 The Geneva Bible contained a chronology of the world from Adam to 1560, dating the world as 5534 years old: Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Owens, p. 301. Bunyan used both Authorised and Geneva versions of the Bible: Alison Searle, ‘Bunyan and the World’, in Davies and Owens, eds, Oxford Handbook of Bunyan, pp. 86–100, at p. 90. 79 For the political issues, see Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms, 1660–1685 (London: Penguin, 2005), chs 1–2; Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 194–222. On sexuality, see Tim Harris, ‘Sexual and Religious Libertinism in Restoration England’, in Matthew Augustine and Steven N. Zwicker, eds, Lord Rochester in the Restoration World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 162–83. On commerce, see Natasha Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England, 1660–1720 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006). 80 See above, p. 62. 81 Harris, Restoration, p. 74. 82 Other writers had more positive views of trade and commerce: see John McVeagh, Tradefull Merchants: The Portrayal of the Capitalist in Literature (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 49. 83 Aylmer, ‘Diggers in Their Own Time’, p. 8. 84 Leavis, Fiction, p. 89. 85 Lund, ‘Prose Style’, p. 399. 86 Lund, ‘Prose Style’, p. 401. 87 Lund, ‘Prose Style’, p. 403. Arthur Dent, The Plain Mans Pathway to Heaven wherein every man may clearly see whether he shall be saved or damned (London, 1601); for analysis of its significance see Christopher Haigh, The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 88 N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later SeventeenthCentury England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), p. 249. 89 Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘The Restoration Bishops and the Royal Supremacy’, CH 68 (1999), 549–80; John Spurr, ‘Latitudinarianism’ and the Restoration Church’, HJ 31 (1988), 61–82; Austen Warren, ‘The Style of Sir Thomas Browne’, KR 13 (1951), 674–87. 90 On Stillingfleet, see the ODNB entry; Spurr, Restoration Church, passim. 91 Edward Stillingfleet, A Discourse Concerning the Unreasonableness of a New Separation, on account of the oaths with an answer to the History of passive obedience, so far as relates to them (London, 1689), p. 3. 92 Hill, Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, p. 215. 93 Spurr, Restoration Church, pp. 55–8. 94 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, pp. 130, 7, 56, 47. 95 See, for example, T. B. Howell, T. J. Howell, W. Cobbett and D. Jardine, eds, A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and

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Other Crimes and Misdemeanors: From the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, 21 vols (London, 1816–28), IX, p. 83. 96 Bunyan was an avid reader of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which he read while in prison (1660–72): John R. Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 179–215. 97 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 37. 98 Hill, Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, p. 199. 99 Hill, Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, p. 197. 100 Hill, Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People, pp. 219–20. As Hill points out, the pilgrims will inherit their reward in heaven. 101 On the general change in the meaning of ‘trespass’, see John Hudson, The Formation of English Common Law: Law and Society in England from the Norman Conquest to the Magna Carta (Harlow: Longman, 1996), p. 164; J. H. Baker, ‘Trespass, Case and the Common Law of Negligence 1500–1700’ in E. J. H. Schrage, ed., Negligence: The Comparative History of the Law of Torts (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), pp. 47–71, at p. 66. On the specific use to apply to property, see George Desier, ‘The Development of Principle in Trespass’, YLJ 27 (1917), 220–36; George E. Woodbine, ‘The Origins of the Actions of Trespass’, YLJ 33 (1924), 799–816; 34 (1925), 343–70; Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 60. As J. R. Wordie has pointed out, the seventeenth century holds ‘the pre-eminent position in the history of English enclosures’: ‘The Chronology of English Enclosures, 1500–1914’, Ec.HR 36 (1983), 483–505, p. 483. 102 Nicholas J. McBride and Roderick Bagshaw, Tort Law (6th edn, Harlow: Longman, 2018), pp. 380–91. On the insistence of the importance of boundaries in English legal history in the Middle Ages and early modern period, see R. A. Houston, ‘People, Space and Law in Late Medieval and Early Modern Britain and Ireland’, P. & P. 230 (February 2016), 47–89, p. 82. 103 Erin Mackie, ‘Boys Will Be Boys: Masculinity, Criminality and the Restoration Rake’, TEC 46 (2005), 129–49. 104 As Paul Davis has pointed out, ‘Rochester was the last major English poet whose natural medium of publication was manuscript’: ‘From Script to Print: Marketing Rochester’, in Augustine and Zwicker, eds, Rochester in the Restoration World, pp. 40–57, at p. 40. See also Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex Between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 5. 105 Corns, Seventeenth-Century English Literature, p. 355; Caroline Fabricant, ‘Rochester’s World of Imperfect Enjoyment’, JEGP 73 (1974), 338–50. 106 John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, in Selected Poems, ed. Paul Hammond (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1981), 24. 107 See Hannah Lavery, The Impotency Poem From Ancient Latin to Restoration English Literature (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), ch. 7; Fabricant, ‘Rochester’s World’, pp. 346–50.

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108 Reba Wilcoxon, ‘Pornography, Obscenity, and Rochester’s “Imperfect Enjoyment”‘, SEL 15 (1975), 375–90. 109 For relevant discussion of class difference in same-sex relationships, see Paul Hammond, Love Between Men in English Literature (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 48, 50–2. 110 Valerie Wayne, Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), p. 39. 111 M. L. Stapleton, “Thou idle Wanderer, about my Heart”: Rochester and Ovid’, Restoration 23 (1999), 10–30. Stapleton points out that Rochester is acutely aware that Charles is not Augustus and he is not Ovid. 112 S. J. Wiseman, Aphra Behn (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1996), p. 16. 113 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Poems on Several Occasions by the right honourable the E. of R. (London, 1680), pp. 28–30, 92–7. 114 Aphra Behn, ‘The Disappointment’, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols (London: Pickering, 1992–6), I, pp. 65–9, lines 41–60. 115 Respect, n., OED3 n.I.3a. 116 Janet Todd, ‘Introduction’, in Todd, ed., Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1–12, at p. 8. 117 ODNB entry. See also Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: The Life of Aphra Behn, 1640–1689 (London: Phoenix, 1977), ch. 1. 118 On Behn’s connection to Sir Thomas Killigrew, see Duffy, Passionate Shepherdess, chs 8–9. 119 Aphra Behn, Oronooko and Other Stories, ed. Maureen Duffy (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 34. My analysis is indebted to the pioneering work by many critics, most significantly, Laura Brown, ‘The Romance of Empire: Oronooko and the Trade in Slaves’, in Laura Brown and Felicity Nussbaum, eds, The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 41–61; and Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), ch. 1. 120 Christopher F. Loar, Political Magic: British Fictions of Savagery and Sovereignty, 1650–1750 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 70. 121 Anita Pacheco, ‘Royalism and Honor in Aphra Behn’s Oronooko’, SEL 34 (1994), 491–506, pp. 493, 496. 122 Elliott Visconsi, Lines of Enquiry: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 164–5; Harris, Restoration, pp. 4–16. 123 It was the tradition that the monarch washed and kissed the feet of the poor on Maundy Thursday (the Thursday before Easter), abolished by William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution: Visconsi, Lines of Enquiry, p. 164. 124 David E. Hoegberg, ‘Caesar’s Toils: Allusion and Rebellion in Oronooko’, EF 7 (1995), 239–58, pp. 252–3. 125 See below, pp. 215–16. 126 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 85–92. 127 See Corns, Seventeenth-Century English Literature, p. 415.

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128 Stassa Edwards, ‘A Short History of the Executioner’, The Appendix http:// theappendix.net/posts/2014/06/a-short-history-of-the-executioner) (accessed 29 September 2020). 129 For other readings, see, for example, Pacheco, ‘Royalism and Honor’; Hoegberg, ‘Caesar’s Toils’; Corinne Harol, ‘The Passion of Oronooko: Passive Obedience, The Royal Slave, and Aphra Behn’s Baroque Realism’, ELH 79 (2012), 447–75. 130 Duffy, Passionate Shepherdess, p. 260. On the style and substance of Behn’s drama, see, for example, Wiseman, Behn, pp. 58–60, who points out that Behn’s interest in women’s freedom only really extends to the upper classes. Susan J. Owen makes a similar point: ‘royalist satire of Whiggish citizens and puritans co-exists quite comfortably with feminism. Women scheme for greater freedom and control within the framework of upper-class solidarity and shared values’: ‘Sexual Politics and Party Politics in Behn’s Drama, 1678–83’, in Todd, ed., Aphra Behn Studies, pp. 15–29, at p. 18.

Chapter 5

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An increasingly commercial society, 1700–50

In 1721, Daniel Defoe published his immensely popular A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, the most comprehensive and detailed account of the island produced in the early eighteenth century. Defoe’s long work was based on travels over a number of years (his visits to Scotland were between 1706 and 1712, for example), many made when he was fairly young, and it is unlikely that he went to all the places he describes in the work.1 Alive to the particular characteristics and nature of places in England, Scotland and Wales, Defoe represents Britain as a commercial society, an archipelago of nations of impressive resources and resourceful people, ready to dominate the new world order. Describing the small towns of Essex, he observes how the present increase of wealth in the city of London, spreads itself into the country, and plants families and fortunes, who in another age will equal the families of the ancient gentry, who perhaps were bought out. I shall take notice of this in a general head, and when I have run thro’ all the counties, collect a list of the families of citizens and tradesmen thus established in the several counties, especially round London (p. 15).

While so many writers after the Civil War and the Restoration were disillusioned because their causes had been defeated and they looked back to times of stability and/or hope, Defoe embraces the future as inevitable change for good and a myriad of possibilities for those with drive and ambition. London acts as a thriving capital that benefits the various settlements around it and a new model of wealth distribution appears to have arrived, one no longer tied to aristocratic land ownership.2 Although the use of ‘perhaps’ strikes a cautious note in the first sentence, Defoe clearly believes that what he sees as the increase in wealth will lead to citizens and tradesmen replacing the gentry just as they had replaced the aristocracy. For him, the middle classes of a nation of shopkeepers really were rising, ‘their ambition, graft and enterprise … the bedrock of national greatness and prosperity’.3

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Defoe is able to praise the old order with some extravagance. Wilton House, the seat of the earls of Pembroke, established nobility by the eighteenth century, is praised for its orderly and sensible government, because it has adapted to the modern world.4 The house is ‘a noble princely palace’, with a ‘noble scituation’, with pleasure gardens to serve the ‘noble and proper inhabitants’. The lord, Thomas Herbert, the eighth earl (1656–1733), the dedicatee of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), is ‘a true patriarchal monarch’, who ‘reigns here with an authority agreeable to all its subjects (family); and his reign is made agreeable, but his first practicing the most exquisite government of himself, and then guiding all under him by rules of honour and vertue’ (p. 193). Such a description might seem out of place for a writer noted for his entrepreneurial adventures, a keen supporter of the Glorious Revolution and the Whig party and, as the earlier passage indicates, eager to promote the virtues of urban, commercial tradesmen. Moreover, the dedicatee, Pembroke, was notably cautious in public life, so may not have welcomed Defoe drawing attention to his affairs.5 What becomes clear is that Wilton works well as an estate because it is connected to the rest of the country and its thriving commerce via the newly established system of canals, one of which runs through the Wilton estate.6 Here, the ancient and new values of Britain merge in harmony, symbolically through the union of the natural River Wylye and the artificial canal: The canal before the house lyes parallel with the road, and receives into it the whole river Willey, or at least is able to do so; it may indeed be said, that the river is made into a canal; when we come into the court-yards before the house there are several pieces of antiquity to entertain the curious; as particularly, a noble column of porphyry, with a marble statue of Venus on the top of it (p. 193).

Here we can now see the force of the earlier ‘perhaps’. Classes may not need to be replaced, as their more innovative and flexible members will adapt to changed circumstances, just as the river can be diverted/transformed into a canal. A well-run estate can place technological development alongside art collected from the ancient world. The products of the Grand Tour can provide additional ornamentation to the waterways and pleasure gardens at Wilton, in themselves an example of nature, enterprise, art, technology and hard work in harmony in a commercial society.7 Trade and commerce will inspire an impressive unity that will drive Britain forward, eliminating, it is implied, past class conflict through the accumulation of wealth for all. There are two important aspects of the commercial society. On the one hand there is the utilitarian success as people make the best of what they



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have. An uninspiring area of the geographically indistinct Surrey landscape is, nevertheless, part of Britain’s success story and, in its own humble way, attractive. Defoe, a writer not given to rhetorical flourishes, describes it in relatively purple prose: Nothing can be more beautiful; here is a plain and pleasant country, a rich fertile soil, cultivated and enclosed to the utmost perfection of husbandry, then bespangled with villages; those villages fill’d with these houses, and the houses surrounded with gardens, walks, vistas, avenues, representing all the beauties of building, and all the pleasures of planting: It is impossible to view these countries from any rising ground and not be ravish’d with the delightful prospect (pp. 167–8).8

The commercial revolution has transformed the countryside, another sign of nature and culture working in harmony when connected by trade. There are also the immense advantages of a trading empire, which brings hitherto unimagined riches. These are immediately available for those at the top of society, but Defoe argues that very soon there will be a ‘trickle down’ effect and taste and enthusiasm will spread more widely. For Defoe, the Glorious Revolution and the accession of William and Mary is inextricably bound to imperial trading success, although there is a cost too: It is since the Revolution that our English gentlemen, began so universally to adorn their gardens with those plants, we call ever greens … King William and Queen Mary introduced each of them two customs, which by the people’s imitating them became the two idols of the town, and indeed of the whole kingdom; the queen brought in (1.) the love of fine East-Indian callicoes … which afterwards descended into the humours of the common people so much, as to make them grievous to our trade, and ruining our manufactures and the poor … (2.) The queen brought in the custom or humour … of furnishing houses with china-war, which increased to a strange degree afterwards … till it became a grievance in the expence of it, and even injurious to their families and estates (pp. 165–6).

William was known to be especially keen on evergreen plants and started a trend when he became King of England.9 Calico also became incredibly popular as the British seized control of India and imported its textiles.10 In the early eighteenth century, Chinese porcelain became much sought after in upper-class homes – especially those of keen collectors – the obvious material to use for storing and consuming the tea that was imported in ever increasing quantities from India and China.11 Defoe’s comments would appear to suggest that his hope for social improvement through commerce and trade has its limits. The model works well when there is an ordered regional centre such as Wilton House, but there may be a conflict between the desire to produce goods and to import

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them, prefiguring later conflicts between advocates of free trade and protectionism in the nineteenth century.12 Commercial Britain would not appear to have been quite as stable and self-regulating as Defoe, usually an enthusiastic advocate of free trade, had hoped.13 Elsewhere Defoe acknowledges and echoes the criticisms of enclosure, now regarded as a historical phenomenon.14 Travelling down from Wiltshire to Hampshire he passes through the New Forest, which he notes was created by ‘that violent tyrant William the Conqueror’ (p. 199). During his reign he ‘unpeopled the country, pull’d down the houses, and which was worse, the churches of several parishes or towns, and of abundance of villages, turning the poor people out of their habitations, and possessions, and laying all open for his deer’ (pp. 199–200). For Defoe, as for earlier writers such as Winstanley, the history of the Norman Yoke was still a reality, as the forest testified, one that could be thrown off now that the British had control over their borders and could engage in trade with the rest of the world. For the most part, however, Defoe encountered prosperous settlements, wealthy towns and villages with thriving markets, focal points for the surrounding countryside. The area between Guilford and Godstone in Surrey is described as ‘very agreeably pleasant, wholesome and fruitful … and is accordingly overspread with good towns, gentleman’s houses, populous villages, abundance of fruit, with hop-grounds and cherry orchards, and the lands well cultivated’ (p. 156). Shrewsbury has ‘the greatest market, the greatest plenty of good provisions, and the cheapest that is to be met with in all the western part of England’ (p. 76). Liverpool is ‘one of the wonders of Britain’ (p. 255). When Defoe first visited it in 1680 it was ‘a large, handsome, well built and encreasing or thriving town’ (2, pp. 255–6). On his second visit ten years later it was larger still, and, on his third, it was double the size of the city he saw on his second visit, as it ‘visibly increases both in wealth, people, business and buildings’. Like Bristol, Liverpool is prosperous because it is a Western port, and the ‘town has now an opulent, flourishing and encreasing … trade to Virginia, and the English island colonies in America’, but it also trades ‘round the whole island’, with Ireland and Europe, so that Liverpudlians ‘are almost become like the Londoners, universal merchants’ (2, p. 256).15 The driving force behind the island’s conspicuous success, according to Defoe, has been the Act of Union (1707), the formal unification of England and Scotland.16 Both nations have benefited, in particular the counties on either side of the border ‘which, by reason of the long and cruel wars between the two nations in former reigns, lay waste and unimproved, thinly inhabited, and the people not only poor because of the continual incursions of troops on either side; but barbarous and ravenous in themselves’ (2, p. 138). These areas have been transformed by ‘the communication of privileges,

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influence of government, and enlarging of the liberty of trade’ (2, pp. 137–8), inaugurated by the union.17 Defoe gives four main ways in which Scotland can be ‘in many parts … as rich in soil, as fruitful, as populous, as full of trade, shipping, and wealth, as most, if not as the best counties of England’ (2, p. 280). First, time, because ‘public changes cannot be brought about in a day’; second, a ‘change in the disposition of the common people’, who need to stay at home and develop their native land rather than travelling abroad in search of opportunity; third, to transfer Scottish industriousness abroad back home; and, fourth, by changing their methods of farming. The real transformation lies in the future when Scotland will develop as England has developed to become a commercial nation: erecting manufactures there under English direction, embarking stocks from England to carry on trade, employing hands to cut down their northern woods, and make navigations to bring the fir-timber, and deals to England, of which Scotland is able to furnish an exceeding quantity; encouraging their fishery, and abundance of fine things more (2, p. 281).

Later, Defoe provides a long list of Scotland’s exports (2, pp. 373–5), telling his readers that ‘Scotland would have an advantageous trade with England, and not the worst for the Union, were not the Court remov’d, and did not their nobility dwell abroad, and spend their estates abroad’ (2, p. 372). Again, the way for Scotland to thrive is to follow England’s example with England’s help, and to combine a commitment to trade and manufacturing with a revitalization of the ancient nobility. In many ways Defoe’s description of Scotland is accurate, as its economy had been developing rapidly and was about to enter a new phase of spectacular growth – the famous ‘take off’ – Scotland standing ‘on the brink of great things’ in the early eighteenth century.18 Defoe was, as much recent research has pointed out, acting as a government spy on his visits to Scotland, establishing trade links and preparing the way forward for the proposed union.19 It is easy to understand how his arguments in the Tour are designed to persuade sceptical readers in England and Scotland of the benefits that were likely to result from the union of the kingdoms. However, this does not mean that he was cynical in his belief that the passing of the Act of Union would increase prosperity north and south of the border, nor that Linda Colley’s description of him as the ‘committed publicist for Great Britain as the Protestant Israel’ is simply the result of his taking the government shilling.20 There is a pious hope that the expansion of free trade and the commercialization of society would eradicate poverty and class conflict, as agriculture, manufacturing and the resulting wealthy and ordered society would unite Britain as a meaningful nation.

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Defoe registers a number of contradictions in the Tour, most significantly that the goals of national unity and unfettered trade were not necessarily in harmony, especially if people preferred foreign imports to home-produced goods and manufactures.21 The class consciousness that he hoped would almost entirely vanish, and which he almost never mentions in the Tour, is often foregrounded in his many novels, which he had started to publish just before that work (the first, Robinson Crusoe, appeared on 25 April 1719).22 Moll Flanders (1721) is the story of a resourceful ‘poor, economically destitute’ woman, ‘born in Newgate and familiar with high and low society’, in whose path stand ‘social relations, class conflicts and the growth of capital’; a work saturated in the consciousness of the significance of social class, conspicuously at odds with the representation of Britain in the Tour.23 As Moll slides up then down the social scale and moves through the London underworld, before finding financial and marital salvation in the American colonies, we are conscious that Defoe has updated Bunyan’s narrative, telling the story of ‘a secularized pilgrim’s progress with the achievement of wealth and status as a sign of salvation or even in place of salvation’.24 Moll is abandoned by her desperate criminal mother who has been ‘convicted of felony for a petty theft, scarce worth naming, viz. borrowing three pieces of fine Holland of a certain draper in Cheapside’.25 The sentence neatly balances a number of the novel’s major concerns, prefiguring their discussion throughout the work. Moll’s mother is clearly excessively punished: pleading ‘her belly’ (pregnancy), she is transported to the colonies seven months later anyway.26 However, she has clearly stolen not ‘borrowed’ three pieces of ‘fine Holland’ – cloth that might be valuable but was probably not, Holland cloth being ‘the most commonly owned imported textile in England’.27 Moll’s mother’s actions are evidently borne out of desperation and her adult daughter’s description of them mixes sly euphemism, defensive self-justification and a sad acknowledgement of just how far the law is weighed to the detriment of the poor. The novel moves swiftly to a discussion of what gentility is and how to acquire it, imitating the conduct books available for the middle classes eager to learn how to behave better as they aspired to rise up the social ladder.28 Moll is placed in ‘bad Hands’ (p. 8), and is then abandoned in Colchester where, being only three, she is located by the sympathetic local authorities with a woman (her nurse) who runs a small school. Terrified at the prospect of being sent off into domestic service, the hard-working Moll declares that she wants to become a ‘gentlewoman’, much to the amusement of the assembled women.29 It soon transpires that Moll and everyone else have very different notions of what a gentlewoman might be: [M]y good old nurse, Mrs. Mayoress [in whose household Moll may work as a domestic servant], and all the rest of them, did not understand me at all,



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for they meant one Sort of thing, by the Word Gentlewoman, and I meant quite another; for alas, all I understood by being a Gentlewoman, was to be able to Work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible Bug-bear, going to Service, whereas they meant to live Great, Rich, and High, and I know not what (p. 12).

When pressed to explain herself Moll repeats her determination not to go into domestic service – making that the opposite of her definition of gentility – and praises an un-named woman ‘that mended Lace and wash’d the Ladies’ Lac’d-heads’, as she is ‘a Gentlewoman, and they call her Madam’. Her old nurse pities her ignorance and replies in words the child cannot understand but the reader will: ‘you may soon be such a Gentlewoman as that, for she is a Person of ill Fame, and has had two or three Bastards’ (p. 12). This is a morally complicated and nuanced exchange. The nurse is, of course, quite right about what the future holds for Moll, as she has three illegitimate children, as well as periods of ‘ill fame’ (prostitution), and so becomes a ‘gentlewoman’ like the lace-mender and hairdresser.30 But the novel also forces the reader to think hard about the nature of gentility, its relationship to virtue and social status. Moll ends the novel legitimately married (finally), an elderly lady of sixty-eight with substantial assets at her disposal and so now has the means to repent at leisure. The couple settle in England and ‘resolve to spend the Remainder of [their] years in sincere Penitence for the wicked Lives [they had] lived’ (p. 295). They have finally become respectable and secured a place in English society as gentlefolk of sorts. However, the route to this position, which will not be obvious to Moll’s new neighbours, has been anything but respectable, Moll both choosing to break laws and behave in morally problematic ways and being compelled to do so by her circumstances. Throughout Moll Flanders the reader is constantly challenged to think whether they would have behaved differently given the circumstances, whether Moll is a ‘natural criminal’ or forced to act as she does by a malign combination of society and fate and simply seizes what opportunities she has to improve her lot. The conversations in the opening pages confront the reader with a double dilemma: what is gentility and is it something to which they should aspire, or that they already possess? Moll’s innocent misunderstanding is, of course, actually a much more sophisticated understanding of ‘gentility’ than that of those who fondly ridicule her. ‘Gentility’ is about status and a basic standard of living, and it is what distinguishes the free man or woman able to sell their labour and so have some control over their lives from servants who are bound to a master or mistress. Defoe had strong opinions about servants, which he outlined in a series of tracts published between 1715 and 1724 at the same time that he was writing his novels.31 In The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d (1724), Defoe explains that the ‘servant

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problem’ is perhaps the gravest danger facing early eighteenth-century England: The unsufferable Behaviour of Servants in this Nation is now (it may be hop’d) come to its Height; their Measure of Insolence, I think, may be said to be quite full. Private families have struggled long with it; the injur’d Reputation of Masters, Mistresses, Young Ladies, and Gentlemen, which has lain so long at the Mercy of their Servants Tongues, has groan’d under it; the Patience of the Heads of Families, under the Rudeness and Insults they have suffer’d, has been enough, and indeed too much provok’d; the poor Husbandman, Artificer, and Manufacturer, have suffer’d sufficiently, in a Word, the Grievance is become national, and calls for a Remedy … the Husbandmen are ruin’d, the Farmers disabled, Manufacturers and Artificers plung’d, to the Destruction of Trade, and Stagnation of their Business; and that no Men who, in the Course of Business, employ Numbers of the Poor, can depend upon any Contracts they make, or perform any-thing they undertake, having no Law, no Power to enforce their Agreement, or to oblige the Poor to perform honestly what they are hir’d to do, tho’ ever so justly paid for doing it.32

Defoe summarized his argument in the short pamphlet, Every-body’s Business, is No-body’s Business; or, Private Abuses, Publick Grievances: exemplified in the pride, insolence, and exorbitant wages of our Women-Servants, Footmen, etc (1725), which went through four printings in rapid succession. Defoe’s attack on the vices and obstructive behaviour of servants is the logical corollary of his belief in the principles of free trade and individualism.33 Free men and women need to be economically active in order to generate wealth; servants need to serve them. More significantly here, the analysis of the ‘servant problem’ explains why Moll draws a line between servants and gentlewomen. The others may well laugh, but Moll is explaining one of Defoe’s key social principles: that while many apparent social distinctions are artificial, pointless and serve to hinder the generation of wealth, that between the servants and the gentle is fundamental. As Moll’s lively life and career demonstrate, the distinction is not absolute – Moll is at times a servant, a convict, a wife, a mistress and an entrepreneur – nor enshrined in birth, as people can always move up and down the social ladder, changing class. But the young Moll is right that the most significant class difference in early eighteenth-century England – at least, according to Defoe – is between those who serve and those who are able to make their own way in the world and determine their own lives. Moll, a good-looking woman, makes the most of her opportunities and, true to her principle of exploiting whatever assets she has to ensure her independence, soon learns that everything, including love, has a price:

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‘Marriages were … the Consequences of politick Schemes, for forming Interests, and carrying on business, and that love had no share, or but very little, in the matter’ (p. 57). Meeting a decent man she travels to the Virginia colony where he has significant interests in the plantation and they live with his mother, who, it later transpires, is also Moll’s mother, transported to the colonies for her petty crimes. The older woman explains the nature of life in the colony to her daughter-in-law. In Virginia there are two principal types of colonist, she says, most having travelled ‘in very indifferent circumstances from England’. There are those who come as servants and those who have been transported, but their social origins do not matter in the democratic colonial world: When they come here … we make no difference; the planters buy them, and they work together in the field, till their time is out. When ‘tis expired … they have encouragement given them to plant for themselves; for they have a certain number of acres of land allotted them by the country, and they go to work to clear and cure the land, and then to plant it with tobacco and corn for their own use; and as the merchants will trust them with tools and necessaries, upon the credit of their crop before it is grown, so they again plant every year a little more than the year before, and so buy whatever they want with the crop that is before them. Hence … many a Newgate-bird becomes a great man, and we have … several justices of the peace, officers of the trained bands, and magistrates of the towns they live in, that have been burnt in the hand … There’s Major —– … he was an eminent pickpocket; there’s Justice Ba—r, was a shoplifter, and both of them were burnt in the hand; and I could name you several such as they are (pp. 72–3).

Virginia stands as a perfect social laboratory: removed from the need to commit crimes to survive, the ex-convicts can thrive when provided with favourable economic conditions and produce the wealth they require to enable them to transform themselves from servants and transported convicts into self-sufficient entrepreneurs making the most of their opportunities, just as Moll does. The author reminds his readers that there is a fine line between affluent respectability and criminality, and that the same entrepreneurial qualities may well ensure success for those following either route to the top. In Colonel Jack (1722), Defoe tells a similar story of financial success and personal transformation in Virginia, with a former Newgate inmate indentured on the protagonist’s plantation declaring with great sincerity, ‘How much is the Life of a Slave in Virginia, to be preferr’d to that of the most prosperous Thief in the World!’ 34 His redemption, like Colonel Jack’s, has begun in the colonies where he is able to start afresh and re-build his life, starting the route to freedom and gentility through an education in morality, economic reality and hard work.35 Slavery, for Defoe, who never

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travelled to Virginia, was simply another form of servitude, the opposite of freedom.36 Enticing as they are, these stories of redemption are really fantasies based on the world Defoe wanted to believe existed, where one could start again and re-enter society to begin a pilgrimage using everything one had learned in a previous life.37 At one level Moll’s colonial history has a didactic function, arguing, not for legal or penal reform, but for a more forgiving attitude to criminals who have served their time and are truly reformed, showing that the young Moll is right that she can become a gentlewoman of sorts with luck and hard work. Moll Flanders is a historical novel, ending nearly fifty years before it was written, but it is conceived in terms of contemporary events, specifically the Transportation Act of 1718. This major transformation of the penal system, ‘one of the most significant innovations the eighteenth century bequeathed to later criminal law and penal practice’, formally allowed the British government to transport criminals to the American colonies before the advent of a widespread prison system on home soil.38 As Defoe’s novel was published three years after the act was passed, none of the individual transformations that it outlines could possibly have taken place, hence Moll’s story imagines ‘the possibility of reform under the transportation system’, not the reality.39 In fact, the act was passed because many convicts who had been transported simply returned ‘to England to continue their lives of crime [and] simply flouted the old system of conditional pardon’.40 The Act was designed to resolve the problems of unreformed criminals at home and the lack of servants who were prepared to travel to and live in the colonies.41 Defoe’s tale of the beneficial effects of life in the colonies clearly worked as a way of supporting the policy of the Whig government for whom he was acting as a spy.42 But, more importantly, it supports his perception of the ways in which class distinctions could – and should – operate in a fluid manner, enabling those who worked hard to rise upwards: specifically, to cross the crucial boundary between the indentured, servile and restricted mass of servants and slaves and join the ranks of the liberated and gentle, who can determine their own fate.43 Colonel Jack shows people in the colonies moving in and out of indenture and slavery as though this were not only possible but almost normal in Virginia. Moll Flanders shows the rocky route to respectability and repentance that should be possible after the Transportation Act. Whereas most criminal biographies – a popular genre in the early eighteenth century – ended with the protagonist paying for their crimes on the gallows, Moll has the time and leisure to reflect on her life herself in comfortable retirement.44 While one particular way of rising in social status was rooted in the pious hope that transportation to the colonies would enable the penitent subject

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to re-enter society equipped with both wealth and a revitalized moral compass, a more obvious route was to marry someone from a higher class. The ‘marriage plot’ was one of the central features of the novel in eighteenthcentury England. It was effectively re-invented by Samuel Richardson in 1740, when he anonymously published Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded in 1740.45 Richardson’s epistolatory novel tells the story of a young servant girl, Pamela Andrews, who resists the advances of her employer, Mr B., eager to make her his mistress. Eventually she does fall in love with him, and he realizes that she is virtuous enough to become his wife not just his mistress. Overcoming the opposition of his family, they marry and oversee their new household in a benevolent manner, respecting and rewarding their servants for their good service. Love, marriage and class were therefore intertwined in the history of the English novel from its inception; Pamela being the work that ‘made novels respectable’.46 While Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack are reformed in the colonies and are therefore able to raise themselves morally and socially, it is the dubious morals of the landowner, Mr B., that are reformed by his social inferior, Pamela, enabling him to enter a marriage with serious intentions (so serious that he provides her with forty-eight rules on how to conduct herself as his wife).47 As Karen Lipsedge has argued, the novel demonstrates that ‘social mobility can facilitate domestic order and the pursuit of prudential morality’.48 It is hard to think of many fictional women who had been cast as agents or exemplars of social change before. However, the story is not necessarily wholly triumphal, or devoid of anxiety. For Christopher Flint, ‘Pamela’s history, while it registers the exhilaration of class ascent, also stresses the anxieties accompanying radical change’.49 There is the disapproval of Mr B.’s sister, Lady Davers, who expresses, in a letter to her brother, what must have been the standard response to a match that threatened to undermine the property and, therefore, the security of an established aristocratic family. Mr B. duly shows Pamela the letter. Lady Davers counsels Mr B. against taking Pamela as his mistress because ‘there are enough to be had, without ruining a poor Wench my Mother lov’d’. She is even more strongly opposed to their marriage: Consider, Brother, that ours is no up-start Family; but is as ancient as the best in the Kingdom; and, for several Hundreds of Years, it has never been known that the Heirs of it have disgraced themselves by unequal Matches: And you know you have been sought to by some of the first Families in the Nation, for your Alliance. It might be well enough, if you were descended of a Family of Yesterday, or but a Remove or two from the Dirt you seem so fond of. But, let me tell you, that I, and all mine, will renounce you for ever, if you can descend so meanly; and I shall be ashamed to be called your Sister. A handsome Gentleman as you are in your Person; so happy in the Gifts of your Mind,

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that every body courts your Company; and possess’d of such a noble and clear Estate; and very rich in Money besides, left you by the best of Fathers and Mothers, with such ancient Blood in your Veins, untainted! for you to throw away yourself thus, is intolerable. (p. 257)

This is surely a speech to which readers of the middle classes imagined they would be treated were they ever to be in Pamela’s position. In reality, there were very few such marriages between women of undistinguished social origin and aristocratic men, and the occasional examples were invariably notorious.50 As Roy Porter has observed, when considering the marriage of their offspring, the ‘prime considerations [for wealthy parents] were security, family, title, and land’.51 Marriages were largely based around issues of property, and upper-class men could indulge themselves with mistresses (Pamela, like Clarissa, appeals to a middle-class sensibility that was both fascinated and repelled by upper-class social mores and morality).52 In representing Mr B. as a reformed rake, who has had a mistress, Sally Godfrey, but has severed ties with her and given her a proper settlement to care for their illegitimate child, Richardson was consciously inverting reality and, like Defoe, using his art to try to bring about a transformation of attitudes.53 The sad truth was that ‘though promises of marriage had been made to servant maids by predatory masters, nuptials conspicuously failed to materialise’.54 Lady Daver’s speech is conspicuously backward-looking, confirming a reader’s understanding that, in contrast to their social superiors, they were English people with forward-thinking, enlightened attitudes. The novel demonstrates throughout the ‘moral bankruptcy of the aristocracy in its attitude to marriage and family’.55 Mr B., according to his sister, should be aiming higher up the social ladder, but, ironically, it is his libidinously rakish desires that eventually lead him to moral redemption as he discovers the virtues of the middle class, which saves him from a fate that the reader assumes would be an unhappy, unequal marriage made bearable by the affections of various extra-marital liaisons. In one of her early letters to her parents Pamela tells them that Mrs Jervis, the elderly housekeeper who befriends her, has explained why Mr B. is behaving so oddly towards her: My Master is a fine Gentleman; he has a great deal of Wit and Sense, and is admir’d, as I know, by half a dozen Ladies, who would think themselves Happy, in his Addresses. He has a noble Estate; and yet I believe he loves my good Maiden, tho’ his Servant, better than all the Ladies in the Land; and he has try’d to overcome it, because he knows you are so much his Inferior; and ‘tis my Opinion that he finds he can’t; and that vexes his proud Heart … and so he speaks so cross to you (p. 41).

Mr B. struggles to maintain his class position and to carry on with the assumptions his sister articulates so carefully to him, knowing the consequences

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that his feelings for a servant may have for him and his family. Even so, he cannot help himself and his appetites and desires lead him better than his reason, a sign in itself of the bankruptcy of aristocratic values. Like Defoe’s description of the estate at Wilton, thriving because it is connected to the modern world and open to the virtues of trade, Mr B., Richardson implies, can only save himself and his estate through an exogamous marriage outside his class, one that will enable him to curb his aristocratic vices and acquire new virtues. In the opening letter to her parents, Pamela tells them that her employer, Lady B., has just died. However, she has ensured that Pamela will continue in the household of the new master, her son, which is just as well, as she has ‘put me to write and cast Accompts, and made me a little expert at my Needle, and other Qualifications above my Degree’ [my emphasis] (p. 11), accomplishments that would have made her future elsewhere doubtful, as an over-trained servant. Pamela’s sense of gratitude and social obligation here is obvious enough, but after the first of Mr B.’s unwelcome advances she starts to re-consider her understanding of class hierarchy and values, as she unleashes a sarcastic tirade: O this Angel of a Master! This fine Gentleman! This gracious Benefactor to your poor Pamela! who was to take care of me at the Prayer of his good dying Mother; who was so careful of me, lest I should be drawn in by Lord Daver’s Nephew; that he would not let me go to Lady Daver’s: This very Gentleman (yes, I must call him Gentleman, tho’ he has fallen from the Merit of that Title) has degraded himself to offer Freedoms to his poor Servant! He has now shew’d himself in his true Colours, and to me, nothing appears so black and so frightful (pp. 21–2).

As Defoe does in Moll Flanders, Richardson uses his female protagonist to question accepted ideals of class stratification and conduct, specifically the definition of a ‘gentleman’.56 Mr B.’s libidinous behaviour and lack of respect for his servants forces the reader to ask what the relationship between class and behaviour is and what it should be. While the fraught courtship between Mr B. and Pamela is based around – forced – sex, it is noticeable that once they are married the issue disappears.57 Sexuality was a complicated class issue in the first half of the eighteenth century, something that was openly enjoyed, especially by the upper classes and lower classes.58 But sex was rarely publicly discussed by the aspirant middle classes, who saw it is a sign of their virtue that they were able to control their appetites and regulate their behaviour (as, of course, is clear in Pamela), saving themselves for the production of children in a ‘companionate marriage’.59 Certainly courtesy books, guides to behaviour which had been an upperclass preserve in previous centuries but were now aimed principally at

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middle-class women, discussed most relevant personal and social issues relating to everyday life, but not sex.60 The history of the eighteenth-century courtesy book and the novel cannot be separated: Richardson’s didactic fiction is designed to supplement and qualify the advice that his women readers were receiving in other forms. In fact, ‘Richardson had set out to write a conduct book but saw that his material could instead be dramatized in the form of a novel’.61 Many of his early readers thought that the novel was actually a true story reproduced for their benefit.62 Mr B.’s list of rules for Pamela certainly demands to be read in terms of advice proffered to women elsewhere. Some of Mr B.’s demands/requests are clearly in line with advice given in courtesy books. For example, items 41, ‘That she must value his Friends for his sake’, and 43, ‘That whatever Faults she sees in him, she never blames him before Company’ (p. 451) follow the substance of manuals already in circulation, such as The Whole Duty of A Woman (1696), written by ‘A Lady’. That manual places great emphasis on the need for a wife to ensure that her husband does not lose face in public and that she pays heed to the opinions of his friends: Consider where a Husband is Governed as it were by his Friends, he is easily inflamed by them; and he that is not so, will notwithstanding for his own sake expect to have them considered, it is easily improved to a point of Honour in a Husband, not to have his Relations neglected: and nothing is found more dangerous in this kind, than to raise an objection grounded on Pride[.]63

Item 10 states that Pamela should not allow their children ‘to be too much indulged in their Infancy’, which is also a fairly anodyne demand. The same manual insists that Feminine passion, usually exceeds the Father. Therefore to regulate this Affection you are to Advert to these two Rules. 1. That you hurt not your self by this excess of Love. 2. That you hurt not your Children (p. 72).64

Again, Mr B.’s demands would not seem to be out of line with advice generally dispensed to young married women. However, other demands are far less reasonable – as might be expected in a list that stretches to a hefty 48 items – notably the first demand, ‘That I must not, when he is in great Wrath with any body, break in upon him, without his Leave’, and it is surely not surprising that Pamela adds a rather whimsical comment that suggests she will find ways to circumvent this dictat: ‘Well, I’ll remember it, I warrant. But yet I fansy this Rule is almost peculiar to himself’ (p. 448). In other places she acquiesces with his strident demands, such as item 21, ‘Some Gentlemen can compromise with their wives, for Quietness-sake; but he can’t’, her comment appearing to be a sly

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acknowledgement of differences that will need bridging in the future: ‘Indeed I believe that’s true! – I don’t desire he should’ (p. 449). Do her words recall her sarcastic repetition of the word ‘gentlemen’ after his attempted seduction/rape, reminding us that she has strong opinions and can act in self-defence when she needs to? In item 22 he states that love before marriage is ‘absolutely necessary’, but then returns to his rakish assumptions in item 23, ‘That there are fewer instances of Mens than Womens loving better after marriage’. She retorts, ‘But why so? I wish he had given his Reasons for this! I fansy they would not have been to the Advantage of his own Sex’ (p. 449). Pamela demonstrates, as she has done throughout Mr B.’s brutal method of treating her, that she has an independent mind and will not simply accept whatever terms and conditions he lays down. While Mr B. is either assertive or abject, Pamela has learned how to be diplomatic, to negotiate and to think carefully about how to ensure that their marriage will work. This is exactly how courtesy books recommend that a woman behave in marriage. Once she understands the proper ideals of the union she is entitled to manipulate her husband in order to secure their marital harmony. As ‘A Lady’ argues The Sexes are made of different tempers, that the Defects may be the better supplied, by mutual assistance. Our Sex wants the others Reason for our Conduct, and their Strength for our protection. Their want our Gentleness to Soften and Entertain them, our Looks have more Strength than their Laws; there is more power in our Tears, than in their Arguments; and therefore things prudently managed, will by degrees, bring over a Husband to see his Errors; and by acknowledging his failings, take care for the future, to amend them; but then the Wifes Gentleness and Virtue, must be the Mirror. wherein he must see the deformity of his Irregularities. (p. 69)65

Pamela can use her wiles in order to ensure that her marriage is a success. What the novel shows its readers is that, while aristocrats might imagine that they are in charge because they have wealth and power – assets that they can and do abuse (as Richardson demonstrates more clearly in Clarissa), it is the upwardly mobile who really understand how English society works because they have studied class distinctions and know how to negotiate them. Pamela’s letters demonstrate that she is a dutiful servant who does not broadcast her experiences in a great household, but, nevertheless, provides Richardson’s readers with insight into the scandalous world of the upper classes.66 The resourceful protagonist deserves her success and social elevation through a combination of moral probity, a principled and emollient personality, and acute, pragmatic, hard-headed, self-interest. While Pamela describes a fictional mixed-class marriage, one that was extremely unusual, there had been a startling and well-publicized case of

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real social elevation only a few years earlier. Stephen Duck (1705?–56) was a poor agricultural labourer from Charlton, near Pewsey, a small village in Wiltshire.67 He left the charity school he attended at fourteen and, soon afterwards, married and had three children. Early in his marriage he bought some books and started to read poetry in the evenings, including Milton, Dryden and Prior, according to his first biographer, the literary scholar and historian, Joseph Spence (1699–1768).68 His first efforts were noticed by a prominent local clergyman, Lured Clarke (1696–1742), later dean of Exeter, who introduced him to courtiers and, eventually, Queen Caroline, wife of George II. Duck completed an early version of his most significant poem, The Thresher’s Labour, and he was presented at court in 1730 where he impressed the queen. Duck started to become a literary sensation, Spence’s life appearing in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1731 and his poems in a number of licensed and pirated editions, selling in large numbers. In 1733 he remarried, his first wife, Ann, having died in 1730 near the start of his success. His new wife, Sarah Big, was a housekeeper at Kew and Duck was made a Yeoman of the Guard (1733), then keeper of the Queen’s Library in Merlin’s Cave in Richmond Gardens.69 Duck was by now quite well-off, having a pension from the queen of over £30 per annum and a house. His major collection, Poems on Significant Occasions, appeared in 1736, including a revised edition of The Thresher’s Labour, and Duck was popular with many readers, although ridiculed by major poets (although many liked him personally) – including Swift and Pope.70 When Queen Caroline died in 1737 Duck, his fame as a poet waning, studied for Holy Orders. Although he appears to have been a popular, hard-working parish priest, he drowned himself in 1756. Robert Southey attributed Duck’s probable suicide to insanity.71 David Fairer and Christine Gerrard argue that ‘it is tempting, but probably wrong, to ascribe [his death] to the labouring-class poet’s alienation from his roots and community’.72 Even so, Duck’s story is a peculiarly strange and sad tale. Some of his contemporaries, especially his erstwhile friend and supporter, Thomas Morrell (1703–84), who fell out badly with Duck and savagely lampooned his character and poetry frequently afterwards, felt that Duck’s dislocation from his roots was much to blame.73 His biographies stress his unusual fortune in being noticed and rewarded by generous, well-meaning patrons, as well as his own diligence, piety and humility, making him a worthy recipient of their favour.74 Furthermore, Spence, writing while Duck was just becoming a celebrated writer, worries that, with the Queen’s support, he may be danger of being given too much when he once had too little, a warning that his rural charm might have been tarnished by success.75 Southey reprints a satirical squib by Jonathan Swift which reveals the ridicule to which the thresher-poet was subjected.76



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Duck’s major collection, Poems on Several Occasions (1736), combines poems detailing the harsh life of the rural labourer with the elaborate fictions of the classical tradition of pastoral verse.77 The dedicatory poems by John Wainwright and Thomas Morrell foreground this social and literary unease.78 Wainwright’s poem, Upon Her Majesty’s Bounty to the Thresher, emphasizes Duck’s good fortune in being elevated to a position of significance, and the simultaneously just and arbitrary nature of his fate: To chear the Muse by Poverty opprest, To free from meaner Cares th’inspired Breast, To give the Genius Liberty to fly, And mount with easier Wings its native Sky, Was worthy HER, who always understood The noblest Use of Pow’r was doing Good. So, when the oaten Pipe’s melodious Strain Reach’d CAESAR’S Royal Ear, not reach’d in vain, Safe, and protected, for himself employ’d, His Song, his Harvest, TITYRUS enjoy’d; O’er his own Fields, his Flocks, and Cattle, stray’d, And on Mincio’s Bank securely play’d.79

There is a pointed contrast between Duck’s success in escaping poverty and the general existence of rural misery, also emphasized in the biographies.80 Duck has been rescued by a force he had no reason to expect, but now his duty is to celebrate the goodness of the monarchy as it has made his rural existence secure. Duck ceases to be a labourer and becomes a pastoral poet, putting aside his scythe and taking up the oaten pipe. Wainwright is surely referring to one of the most celebrated of pastoral poems, Milton’s Lycidas: the rural ditties were not mute, Temper’d to th’oaten flute; Rough Satyrs danc’d, and Fauns with clov’n heel, From the glad sound would not be absent long.81

Milton refers to rustic song – the rudest form of pastoral – here, appropriate for Duck to sing his relatively unpolished praises of the English Augustan court.82 Duck is indeed privileged, but he needs to remember his good fortune and whence he came. Other details here demonstrate how far he is from an accepted member of the upper classes. Virgil was born in Mantua, the town being on the River Mincio, which flows from Lake Garda to the main arterial river of north Italy, the Po. The river was noted on grand tours by those able to travel to Italy, but here the reference is surely a reminder of Duck’s obscure provincial origins, his nearest river being the Avon, due West of Charlton.83

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Casting Duck as Tityrus, the bucolic figure of Virgil himself, praises the poet, but also serves as a cruel reminder of what Duck could never aspire to be, the epic poet of the Aeneid. While Duck should remain as a pastoral poet, Wainwright probably has in mind the poetic career of Alexander Pope as a pointed contrast. Pope had first come to public attention with the publication of his Pastorals (1709), and more recently had translated Homer’s Illiad (1715–20) and Odyssey (1725–26), consciously linking his poetry to that of Augustan Rome. It was a stellar career that Duck could never hope to emulate. While Wainwright’s poem draws a comparison between Duck and the classical muses, Morrell’s conspicuously denies the connection: No fancied Muse, nor Helionian Stream, Inspires my Verse, but thy well-chosen Theme; Well-chosen, well-express’d, while, void of Art, Thou speak’st the Dictates of an Honest Heart Truth needs no specious Gloss; but, ever bright, Shines, like the Sun, with pure unborrow’d Light; And such thy pleasing Strains: no pompous Phrase Bribes the Unworthy with unhallow’d Praise; No servile Flattery, nor dull Design, Creeps, with soft Accent, thro’ the fawning Line.84

Duck is represented as an artless poet who speaks with an authentic, untrained voice, in contrast to the sophisticated but insincere poetry of those at court and in metropolitan circles who, presumably, produce inauthentic pastoral poetry as a means of getting ahead. The poem draws attention to Duck’s lack of education, but, also, through the emphasis on other’s desires, his startling success and social rise. It concludes that Duck is A Soul sincere, to Gratitude inclin’d, An Heart untainted, and an humble Mind. Inspir’d by these, write on, and charm the Age, Nor dread the envious Critic’s idle Rage, For who the snarling ZOILUS regards, When SPENCE approves, and CAROLINE rewards (29–34).

Duck, according to Morrell, knows his place and his debt to those who have aided him. He will be attacked – Morrell has in mind criticism of his lack of Augustan urbanity, not that of Mary Collier (see below, pp. 226–31) – but he has his champions and his verse has its particular value. The volume is also prefaced by a letter to the queen from the poet; an address to the reader, apologizing for the quality of the verse – a familiar trope but here with added significance (‘I don’t think them [the poems] good, and better Judges will doubtless think worse of them than I do’ (vii)); an abridged version of Spence’s life of the poet; and a long list of subscribers,

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including the queen, the prince of Wales, an impressive array of dukes, earls and ladies, prominent clergymen, lawyers, Pope, Swift and other men of letters (xxi–xxxi). This array of paratexts is clearly designed to establish the volume’s significance as the first serious collection of a labouring poet, the work representing the literary endeavours of a man from the lower classes, poems that are of interest and value to ‘polite’ readers, but which do not challenge the status quo. Duck is both within and outside established literary culture: he accepts and imitates its value system, even if he cannot reproduce its norms perfectly.85 His work is remarkable for its authentic reproduction of the honest values of the rural labourer, a role often ascribed to, and frequently accepted by, authors producing literature outside the literary establishment. As John Goodridge and Brigit Keegan have argued From the early eighteenth century onward, poets of humble origin were encouraged to write about their own working lives, and were presented to the reading public by their patrons and publishers in ways that foregrounded a class-based biographical context. The phenomenon of the ‘peasant-poet’ was perceived as a species of natural genius, a kind of home-grown noble-savage, whose poetry miraculously emerged from a rustic lifestyle, specifically without benefit of formal training and thus tainted with classicism and sophistry.86

To live up to such an ideal was difficult; to reproduce it in a volume, impossible, as Duck’s Poems – the first book that seeks to fashion a superstar working-class poet – demonstrates. Duck even refers to his own ‘unpolish’d Genius’ in the opening poem, ‘To a Gentleman, who requested a copy of Verse from the Author’ (p. 4).87 The Thresher’s Labour, the poem for which Duck was best known in his lifetime and afterwards, is an ‘anti-pastoral work’, detailing the hard life of the labouring poor, even though the poet has to use ‘the only poetic language available to him … the neo-classical literary tradition’.88 The same might also be said of On Poverty, although its sentiments and style are familiar enough: O despicable Name! We, thee to shun, On ev’ry other Evil blindly run. For fear of thee, distrustful Niggards go In tatter’d Rags, and starve their Bodies too, And still are poor, for fear of being so. For fear of thee, the cheating Trader vows, His Wares are good … That Man deserves the Praise of human Kind, Who bears ill Fortune with a Christian Mind. (pp. 5, 7)89

There are also two pastorals, one on Gratitude and A Pastoral Elegy, dialogues between Menalcas and Colin, which is derived from Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579) – a volume that was also imitated by other Augustan poets, notably John Gay in his The Shepheardes Week

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(1714).90 Duck’s poetic dialogues combine the familiar pastoral literary world of melancholy shepherds reflecting on their isolation and exile with details of rural life, the second detailing his own sorrow after he learns of the death of his wife while at court.91 In Gratitude, Colin (Duck), denies that he is ungrateful to his queen for her help, and imagines this uncommitted sin in terms of a series of rural catastrophes: May hungry Foxes kill my tender Lambs, May pois’nous Serpents such their bleating Dams: And may my Cows distended Udders fail, Elude my Hopes, and never fill the Pail; In short (to make my Curse the more complete, Tho’ ‘tis the only Thing I dread and hate) May Heaven and Heav’nly CAROLINE remove Their smiles, if COLIN e’er ungrateful prove (50–1)

However, for the most part the volume is full of the mode of imitative poetry that the prefatory material claims Duck avoids. There is Truth and Falsehood: A Fable, a familiar genre that surely also owes much to Gay, who was well-known for his Fables (1727).92 There is an Ode to Death; verse letters; Biblical imitation (The Shunammite); poems on parks and gardens; poems celebrating friendship; poems celebrating female beauty and virtue; poems celebrating the birthdays of royalty; poems on surprisingly well-crafted objects; dramatic monologues by melancholy lovers; poems on virtue; poems on the arts; all kinds of poetry familiar in England in the first half of the eighteenth century.93 The cultural anxiety of the working-class writer is not just palpable, but foregrounded throughout the volume. The Thresher’s Labour is a similarly divided work. On the one hand it emphasizes the hard labour that rural workers have to endure, as the poet promises ‘To sing the Toils of each revolving Year; / Those endless Toils, which always grow anew, / And the poor Thresher’s destin’d to pursue’ (p. 10). On the other, it celebrates the ‘gen’rous Favours’ of his patron, and, more significantly, the cornucopia of harvest time: ‘the golden Harvest quits the Plain, / And CERES’ Gifts reward the Farmer’s Pain’ (p. 11). The poem celebrates the dignity of hard physical labour for an audience that will understand the classical allusions but perhaps does not realize the exhausting toil that is carried out to put food on their tables: DIVESTED of our Cloathes, with Flail in Hand, At proper Distance, Front to Front we stand: And first the Threshal’s gently swung, to prove Whether with just Exactness it will move: That once secure, we swiftly whirl them round; From the strong Planks our Crab-tree Staves rebound,

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And echoing Barns return the rattling Sound. Now in the Air our knotty Weapons fly, And now with equal Force descend from high; Down one, one up, so well they keep the Time, The CYCLOPS’ Hammers could not truer chime; Nor with more heavy Strokes could Aetna groan, When VULCAN forg’d the Arms for THETIS’ Son. In briny Streams our Sweat descends apace, Drops from our Locks, or trickles down our Face. No Intermission in our Work we know; The noisy Threshal must for ever go. (p. 12)

Duck alludes to the Cyclops forging the most potent weapons for the Gods, perhaps a reference to Hamlet, ‘And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall / On Mars’s armour forged for proof eterne / With less remorse than Pyrrus’ bleeding sword / Now falls on Priam’, and Vulcan, God of metal-working, producing the impregnable armour of Achilles.94 These are easy references for anyone with a grounding in classical literature to detect, so the point that the working man has earned equality with the heroes studied and cited by the leisured and monied classes surely must have hit home. The Thresher’s Labour may not look like a classical epic, but it shows lives and work that are just as heroic in their patient endurance of monotony. Although the poem, as in many of Duck’s works, professes gratitude for the patronage he has received, the detail of the labourers without clothes asks the reader to imagine them, not as they were represented in fine art, as marginal figures in the background of a crowd, or slightly comical figures at a feast, but naked, like the classical heroes and gods the poem claims they resemble.95 Moreover, the military imagery of powerful men wielding implements that are described in terms of weapons of war is a reminder that it is a good thing that their purpose is agricultural and the comparison metaphorical. Duck’s poem explicitly refuses the pastoral, a genre signalled elsewhere in the volume: Our Eye beholds no pleasing Object here, No chearful Sound diverts our list’ning Ear. The shepherd well may tune his voice to sing, Inspir’d with all the Beauties of the Spring. No Fountains murmur here, no Lambkins play, No Linnets warble, and no Fields look gay; ‘Tis all a gloomy, melancholy Scene, Fit only to provoke the Muse’s Spleen (p. 13).

Not only does this passage highlight the distinction between the countryside as imagined by poets and the far less pleasing reality, but it also, pace the

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professed modesty of the poet, points to his skill and honesty in finally representing rural life as it really is. Against the fiction of the shepherd, Duck presents the reality of the thresher, an oppositional figure whose labour is not properly rewarded, unless one, like Duck, is plucked from obscurity and showered with gifts and honours. However hard he tried, and, indeed, whether he tried or not, Duck could never separate himself from his social origins and he was always the ‘thresher-poet’.96 In summer the threshers suffer under ‘the Master’s Curse’ (p. 14), allowing themselves to be goaded into working even harder when he tells them that his neighbour’s labourers are out-stripping their efforts. In spring, relaxed because he is not under the strain of having to get the harvest in, the Master is more supplicating, and the threshers, pleased to be working outdoors in better weather, set to their tasks with gratitude: now, the rural economy works rather better. However, we are reminded ‘There’s always Bitter mingled with the Sweet’ (p. 15) and they suffer again in the heat of the day: At first our Labour seems a sportive Race: With rapid Force our sharpen’d Blades we drive, Strain ev’ry Nerve, and Blow for Blow we give. All strive to vanquish, tho’ the Victor gains No other Glory, but the greatest Pains. BUT when the scorching Sun is mounted high, And no kind Barns with friendly Shade are nigh; Our weary Scythes entangle in the Grass, While Streams of Sweat run trickling down apace. Our sportive Labour we too late lament; And wish that Strength again, we vainly spent. (pp. 16–17)

The sweat not only emphasizes the hard physical nature of the work but also distinguishes those who perform such labour from the work of those higher up the social scale, perhaps even demonstrates that labouring men are imagined as more akin to working animals such as horses than men.97 Competition clearly dulls the edge of the monotony of a day spent threshing, but the reader is shown that any deviation from the work itself brings with it a series of obvious penalties. The Threshers’ Labour was written to counteract the representation of rural labour as a festive cycle in James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), a further sign of Duck’s critically ambivalent stance to his circumstances and to the establishment.98 In Summer, the popular Scottish poet James Thomson (1700–48) represents Britain – properly united since 1707 – as a contented land with its people in harmony with nature: Happy Britannia! where the Queen of Arts, Inspiring vigour, Liberty abroad Walks unconfined even to thy farthest cots, And scatters plenty with unsparing hand.

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Rich is thy soil, and merciful thy clime; Thy streams unfailing in the Summer’s drought; Unmatch’d thy guardian oaks; thy valleys float With golden waves; and on thy mountains flocks Bleat numberless; while, roving round their sides, Bellow the blackening herds in lusty droves. Beneath, thy meadows glow, and rise unquelled Against the mower’s scythe. On every hand Thy villas shine. Thy country teems with wealth; And Property assures it to the swain, Pleased and unwearied in his guarded toil.99

Thomson sees a land in which liberty dominates so effectively that it can be exported, Britannia the familiar figure spreading her cornucopia of magnificent produce; Duck shows the labouring classes struggling in servitude while others enjoy the fruits of their labour.100 Thomson has shepherds and mowers working as one to maintain the beauty and productivity of the British countryside; for Duck the one is an artistic and literary fiction, the other an all-too-often disguised reality that needs to be made visible. For Thomson the mower is maintaining meadows, perhaps a figure cutting the grass in the fashionable gardens on country estates, or a classical literary fiction; whereas for Duck the thresher is an agricultural labourer on a working farm.101 Above all, for Thomson, work is pleasure, indistinguishable from the delights of the countryside; whereas for Duck work is unrelenting toil, a fact the worker can only forget to his cost. Even when there is beauty to be found in the fields it is ephemeral and the threshers have to destroy it: Ye Reapers, cast your Eyes around the Field; And view the various Scenes its beauties yield: Then look again, with a more tender Eye, To think how soon it must in Ruin lie! For, once set in, where-e’er our Blows we deal, There’s no resisting of the well-whet Steel (p. 23).

Here, their agricultural tools really do seem uncomfortably close to weapons. Threshing ‘was hard … dirty, inefficient, slow, and at a time of rapid agricultural change and some agricultural progress, primitive’.102 The first threshing machine, described by Arthur Young as ‘by far the most capital mechanized invention in husbandry that has appeared this century’, was invented in 1786 after which it was quickly adopted and the old-fashioned method of using a flail disappeared.103 Duck’s poem is hardly a revolutionary work, but it is a potent reminder of spectacular social inequality, which draws attention to the gap between those who produce food and those who eat it: ‘LET those who feast at ease on dainty Fare, / Pity the Reapers, who their Feasts prepare’ (p. 25). It also reminds readers of how hard manual labour is – ‘Our Labours ev’n in Sleep don’t cease; / Scarce HERCULES

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e’er felt such Toils as these!’ (p. 25) – and how endless, ‘Like SISYPHUS, our Work is never done’ (p. 27) – the obvious classical allusions emphasizing the point for the reader fortunate enough to have benefitted from an education. Throughout Duck’s poem there is a clear anger and scarcely suppressed violence at the level of class exploitation, even if the conclusions seem benign and passive, the poet accepting the gift of patronage that raised him out of the miserable estate his literary work represents. Duck’s example led to a significant cultural movement and, as Jennifer Batt has demonstrated, ‘shaped what it meant to be a laboring class writer in the 1730s’.104 Being a labouring poet enabled writers not only to declare that they were innovative, but that their verse could be excused its defects, an astute, self-protecting move for a hack writer, and it is little wonder that some established writers adopted pseudonyms, e.g., James Drake, Arthur Duck, Philip Goose, to support their productivity.105 Moreover, as already noted, the Duck phenomenon attracted significant hostility from those who saw it as a debasement of refined cultural values.106 Duck was, however, most obviously culpable in his representation of women and women’s work, which he referred to disdainfully in The Thresher’s Labour: SOON as the rising Sun has drank the Dew, Another Scene is open to our View: Our Master comes, and at his Heels a Throng Of prattling Females, arm’d with Rake and Prong; Prepar’d, whilst he is here, to make his Hay; Or, if he turns his Back, prepar’d to play: But here, or gone, sure of this Comfort still; Here’s Company, so they may chat their Fill. Ah! were their Hands so active as their Tongues, How nimbly then would move the Rakes and Prongs? (pp. 19–20)

Given this supposed division of attitudes to work, it is hardly surprising that Duck was forcefully answered by a rural woman labourer. Mary Collier (c.1688–1762), from Midhurst, Sussex, worked as a washerwoman, brewer and manual labourer.107 She read The Thresher’s Labour as soon as it came out, and, as she explains in the autobiographical preface to the 1762 edition of her poems, was determined to answer Duck’s charge that women did not work as hard as men: Duck’s Poems came abroad, which I soon got by heart, fancying he had been too Severe on the Female Sex in his Thresher’s Labour brought me to a Strong propensity to call an Army of Amazons to vindicate the injured Sex: Therefore I answer’d him to please my own humour, little thinking to make it Public it lay by me several Years and by now and then repeating a few lines to amuse myself and entertain my Company, it got Air.



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I happen’d to attend a Gentlewoman in a fit of Illness, and she and her Friends persuaded me to make Verses on the Wife Sentences, which I did on such Nights as I waited on her. I had learn’d to write to assist my memory, and her Spouse transcrib’d it with a promise to keep it private, but he exposed it to so many, that it soon Became a Town Talk, which made many advise me to have it printed and at length I comply’d to have it done at my own charge, I lost nothing, neither did I gain much, others run away with the profit.108

Whether Collier’s account of the genesis of her poem is entirely accurate is not important, but the story she tells of how she refuted Duck is a significant element of the meaning of the poem. While Duck is plucked from his humble circumstances and elevated to great, albeit unsteady, social heights, Collier remains firmly rooted in a female world, one in which women of the same class stick together and gentlewomen look after the women in their orbit.109 While Duck endlessly thanks the good and the great for saving him from the miseries of his class, Collier remains with her fellow workers. Duck’s poems have a mysterious origin, but only matter when those of a higher class read them; Collier’s are intended for her fellow workers, also angered by Duck’s slanders, and it is their popularity with those of her own class that enable them to be disseminated further afield. The poem represents women working together to refute Duck, an army of Amazons set against his naked, heroic, pagan deities threshing corn, at first imagined, and then realized. The narrator exists among them, not as a lone poetic outcast reflecting on the miseries he has left behind. The gentlewoman and her friends encourage those in their employ to confront male prejudice, a picture of gender mattering even more than class (the implication is that all women understand Collier’s frustrations). Indeed, even the gentlewoman’s husband helps the women, transcribing the poem for publication, a pointed contrast to Duck’s isolation (and, of course, Duck was dead by this point, something that may have affected how Collier represents her writing). Collier gains nothing personally from the poem, as others run off with the profits – again, unlike Duck – but she retains a balanced sense of who she is and why her work matters: as a testimony to the value of women’s labour, and their ability to work as a collective (the gentlewoman does not appear like the master in The Thresher’s Labour, alternating between generous bonhomie to his workers, and aggressive exploitation). In The Woman’s Labour Duck is asked to remember his origins (for different reasons to those of his upper class detractors), as he has now become one of the ‘haves’, cut off from the people: Immortal Bard! Thou Fav’rite of the Nine! Enrich’d by Peers, advanc’d by CAROLINE! Deign to look down on One that’s poor and low, Remembring you yourself was lately so.110

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Collier is drawing on a tradition of ‘critical epistolary verse essays by women poets addressed to specific male poets’, sardonically pointing out just how favoured Duck has been by the Nine Muses, and so taking his formulaic language of pious modesty at face value.111 The poet represents her life ‘always spent in Drudgery’ (p. 6), never having received the gift of learning, someone who ‘ever was, and’s still a Slave’ (p. 5), repeating this sense of her oppressed status a few lines later, when in bed after a hard day’s work she declares with incredulity that women ‘Could never be for Slavery design’d’ (p. 6).112 The words are carefully chosen: women have no more status than the black slaves in the colonies, that particular form of commerce being well established by this time.113 Duck’s sense of his suffering is provocatively exceeded, and by someone who continues to endure her humiliating status; unlike Duck she never escapes hard labour and poverty. Collier takes particular exception to Duck’s complaint that the women waste their time in idle chatter and she cleverly shows that his apparently demotic scorn is part of much wider political and philosophical debates: But if you’d have what you have wrote believ’d, I find, that you to hear us talk are griev’d: In this, I hope, you do not speak your mind, For none but Turks, that ever I could find, Have Mutes to serve them, or did e’er deny Their slaves, at work, to chat it merrily. Since you have liberty to speak your mind, And are to talk, as well as we, inclin’d, Why should you thus repine, because that we, Like you, enjoy that pleasing liberty? What! wou’d you lord it quite, and take away The only privilege our sex enjoy? (pp. 8–9)

Collier picks up the theme of slavery that she introduced earlier, a sign that this is one of the central comparisons made in the poem: men may be servants but women are slaves. Collier is probably referring to James Thomson’s popular poem, Liberty (1735–36), which celebrated Britain as an island in which the people are free to speak and do as they please without the intervention of government, the culmination of the history of liberty from its birth in classical Greece.114 Collier is sternly reminding Duck that in Britain the principle of liberty was supposedly extended to both men and women, so that women should not be silenced as if they were slaves (even repressive regimes, like the Ottoman Empire, allow women to speak).115 Collier outlines the arduous working lives of rural women, in the fields and as washerwomen, work the poet had undertaken for significant periods of her life by 1739. While men are able to relax and are provided for after



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their hard day’s toil, women have a further series of domestic duties to perform after the working day is supposedly over: So many things for our attendance call, Had we ten hands, we could employ them all. Our children put to bed, with greatest care, We all things for your coming home prepare: You sup and go to Bed without delay, And rest yourselves till the ensuing day; While we; alas! but little sleep can have, Because our froward Children cry and rave (pp. 10–11).116

Probably the most sustained poetic passage in Collier’s poem is one that focusses on both gender and class grievances. The description of the washerwoman’s life imitates Duck’s representation of the uneasy relationship between a master who is at once benign and exploitative and his labourers, sometimes generously providing them with jugs of ‘Humming Ale’ (p. 26), at others, claiming that the workers on the neighbouring farm are far more industrious than they are (p. 14). In The Woman’s Labour the mistress does both at the same time, showing the reader how complicated and compromised the woman worker’s life is and how hard it might be to challenge an intimate socio-economic group that both nurtures and exploits: Then comes our Mistress to us without fail, And in her Hand, perhaps, a Mug of Ale To cheer our Hearts, and also to inform Herself what Work is done that very Morn; Lays her Commands upon us, that we mind Her Linen well, nor leave the Dirt behind: Nor this alone, but also to take care, We don’t her Cambricks nor her Ruffles tear; And these most strictly does of us require, To save her Soap, and sparing be of Fire; Tells us her Charge is great, nay furthermore, Her Cloaths are fewer than the Time before. Now we drive on, resolv’d our Strength to try, And what we can we do most willingly; Until with Heat and Work, ‘tis often known, Not only Sweat, but Blood runs trickling down Our Wrists and Fingers; still our Work demands The constant Action of our lab’ring Hands. (pp. 13–14)

There are few, if any, more careful, nuanced and perceptive comments on class articulated in the eighteenth century. The lines compress Duck’s general complaint into a carefully articulated, pithy recollection of a particular incident. The mistress may or may not mean to exploit the labour of those

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in her charge through her combination of a minor act of generosity and a much more serious demand, one that leaves the women with longstanding physical injuries. The emphasis on the word ‘perhaps’ (the italics is surely significant), expresses a doubt about whether she actually brings her workers mugs of ale, representing her uncertain and unfocussed relationship to them.117 The passage also shows, through the use of reported speech, how the mistress imagines that she is the one being careful and fair by warning the women to look after her property, whereas, in fact, her commands leave them with unpleasant injuries that she does not even notice. The women work willingly, but the labour eventually takes its toll on them. Collier answers Duck’s complaint that male workers have to sweat as they toil in the hot sun, showing how women give their blood as well as their sweat. More significantly, she shows how the emphasis on property and an individual’s liberty to protect what they have has a pernicious effect on those whose task it is to maintain its state and value. The women are reduced to their bleeding hands, making the sense of a labourer as a ‘hand’ literal, with the accompanying irony that this is what is usually unseen.118 Collier makes visible for her readers – as Duck had done in his poem – the hard, brutalizing and invariably unrecognized labour that was expended to make the world in which the cultivated reader lived. The poem concludes with another – gentler – swipe at Duck. While the threshers live a life like Sisyphus, endlessly pushing rocks up a hill, the washerwomen are like the Danaides, the fifty daughters of Danaus, who were condemned to carry water in sieves after they murdered their husbands on their wedding nights (Collier again showing that she has some education and cannot be pigeon-holed as an untutored genius). However, the last lines unite the two working-class poets against their masters and mistresses: So the industrious Bees do hourly strive, To bring their loads of Honey to the Hive; Their sordid Owners always reap the Gains, And poorly recompense their Toil and Pains (p. 17).

The beehive was a common image of a functioning society, following Virgil’s Georgics, most famously in Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of The Bees (1714), in which each worker pursues his or her own selfish interests but the combination of their labours leads to the greater social good.119 Duck may fail to notice what women workers do, and he has now been elevated to ‘great DUCK’, on ‘whose happy Brow, / The Muses seem to fix the Garland’ (p. 7). He is not the real problem, however. Collier surely has Mandeville in mind as she returns his shocking fable to its more familiar conclusion. The ‘sordid Owners’ pursue their selfish interests, which are

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not to everyone’s benefit but simply their own. Like the Queen inside the hive, she implies, they cannot see all the work that they demand and create but simply enjoy its benefits. The ‘unnaturally silent’ women worker bees are forced to labour in a manner that ‘perpetuates the very systems of work that are … responsible for their unrelenting struggle’.120 Far from selfishness working to everyone’s benefit, it leaves those at the bottom of the social ladder impoverished, exploited and resentful. By 1750 the rural way of life represented in both poems was obviously under threat with the rapid mechanization of farming. As E. L. Jones has observed, ‘English agriculture underwent a transformation in its techniques out of all proportion to the rather limited widening of its markets.’ 121 Mary Collier’s representation of the two roles of women labourers is prescient as well as confrontational: soon more women would be working as servants and rather fewer in the fields.122 The ostensibly benign vision of England represented in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) is rooted in a recent past that is about to disappear. Fielding’s opening sentence carefully links gentlemen and workers through its invocation of that socially inclusive British institution, the pub.123 The narrator comments that An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary [charitable] treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary [tavern], at which all persons are welcome for their money … Men who pay for what they eat, will insist on gratifying their palates, however nice and even whimsical these may prove; and if every thing is not agreeable to their taste, will challenge a right to censure, to abuse, and to d—n their dinner without control.124

The comment combines the notion of an inclusive society, a meeting place for all social levels, as a pub has always been, with the democratic ideal of a market, which dictates that anyone can choose to buy or not buy something and then comment as they see fit. What is not quite so obvious is that these two ideals may be at odds, the market forces that would appear to unify the classes as consumers with their own free choices also undermining the sense of community in which the novel places such value. James E. Evans is surely right to argue that Fielding’s social vision is inclusive: while individuals may be egotistical, the author ‘peoples his imagined communities with figures whose bonds are apparent to the reader, though not necessarily to the characters themselves’.125 In Tom Jones the author presents his ‘parochial vision’ of a society that works as a locally integrated system, a whole that is only seen in part by the characters in the novel.126 The problem is, as the opening to chapter two implies, that society has surely already disappeared, the vagueness of the reference indicating an uncertainty of the relationship

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between the novel and contemporary English society: ‘In that part of the western division of this kingdom, which is commonly called Somersetshire, there lately lived (and perhaps lives still) a gentleman whose name was Allworthy, and who might well be called the favourite of both Nature and Fortune; for both of these seem to have contended which should bless and enrich him most’ (p. 53). The opening phrase imitates an ancient chronicle, possibly connoting the historic kingdom of Wessex where King Alfred ruled, but, more importantly, a time past that may still exist in the present but which almost certainly does not. Like Collier’s ‘perhaps’, Fielding’s ‘perhaps’ also does a great deal of work, establishing here an indeterminable, quasilegendary timeframe for the novel, one in which its allegorical first character can be called ‘Allworthy’. Tom Jones takes place in an England that only ever existed in part and which has either already vanished or is about to disappear for ever.127 The readers who buy the novel can make of it what they will and are entitled to do so, but the existence of the book as a commercial commodity, and the ways in which the opening passages draw attention to its status, indicate that the rural society it depicts can no longer be observed. Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750) has a similar sense of a lost world as Fielding’s novel. Like Fielding, Gray does not attempt to reproduce the authentic voices of the rural labourers represented in the poems of Stephen Duck or Mary Collier and ‘No one could mistake [his] speaker … for one of the rude forefathers who are celebrated wistfully in his poem.’ 128 Indeed, Gray’s understanding of his inability to reproduce the voices of the humble rural dead is central to his melancholy reflection on their disappearance and the poet’s attempt to recreate what they might have been in life.129 The poem is popularly read as though it were a lament for the lost voices of the ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ whose works will never now be written, and that was how many of Gray’s contemporaries understood the poem.130 But the elegy is surely far more ambivalent and sophisticated than this backward glance would imply. Gray is acutely conscious of the fixed social order that has produced these mute poets, a pointed contrast to his own rise up the social scale. Gray’s was by no means as heady or unstable a progress to literary celebrity as that of Stephen Duck. He was from a prosperous trade background, his father being a scrivener while his mother kept a milliner’s shop, which enabled him to go to Eton and Cambridge. His rise to prominence – he was offered but declined the Poet Laureateship in 1757 – was never without its personal cost and he stopped writing poetry in that year, fourteen years before his death (1771). Like Duck, Gray suffered from melancholy and depression throughout his life and always felt like an outsider, although this was as much due to his homosexuality as his class status.131



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Gray’s description of the labourer’s daily life sounds as though it could be based on Duck’s poem:

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The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock’s shrill clarion or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed. For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to list their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share. Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield, Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke; How jocund did they drive their team afield! How bowed the woods beneath their sturdy stroke! (17–28).

Read one, obvious, way, Gray has translated Duck’s experience into the poetic idiom of a sympathetic member of the educated classes that Duck emulated and from which he felt alienated. As in The Thresher’s Labour Gray treats his mute, dead subjects with respect. Their work and lives were valuable and were not recognized properly outside the communities in which they lived and died. However, unlike Fielding’s novel, Gray’s poem is anything but nostalgic for a class system that actively prevented people from changing their social class, as his use of bucolic but resolutely anti-pastoral imagery demonstrates: ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air’ (55–6).132 To outsiders the well-ordered rural village seen at dusk from the graveyard may well look idyllic; to the weary ploughman plodding home after work, suggests Gray, it will seem like a desert wasteland in which he is trapped, very much as Duck represented his former rural life in his most celebrated poem. The subsequent stanzas list the lost potential of lives that never happened, people who would have been unable to live the lives that others lived. There are the mute Miltons, inglorious because they either never had the chance to write, or their words are now lost for ever; the ‘village-Hampden’ (after John Hampden (c.1595–1643), the most famous opponent of Charles I’s excessive taxation; also Cato) who may or may not have resisted the ‘little tyrant of his fields’ (58); and a Cromwell, ‘guiltless of his country’s blood’ (60) because he never rose to national prominence. Instead, ‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife / Their sober wishes never learned to stray’ (73–4). For Gray these are not graves of the happy, resigned dead who lived contented lives, leaving ‘the warm precincts of the cheerful day’, without casting ‘one longing lingering look behind’ (87–8). Rather, he suggests, they were men who never had a chance to participate in the crowds of urban

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life because they were imprisoned in their villages, unable to escape should they have wanted to and make a different life for themselves. Gray’s Elegy is a dirge for the rural dead, and an attempt to recover what might have been the significance of their now lost lives. However, it is not a poem that looks back sadly at a passing way of life that should be preserved, but one written on the cusp of a new age, conscious that changes in agriculture will transform static class-bound English rural life for ever. There will still be, of course, rich and poor, but they will not necessarily remain fixed and the possibility of social mobility will be opened up.133 In the future, perhaps fewer people will die with their ambitions unfulfilled. They might seem to represent importantly different aspects of eighteenth-century literary history, but Gray and Defoe are probably not that far apart in their assumptions about class, society and progress.

Notes 1 James Sutherland, Defoe (London: Methuen, 1937), pp. 29–30; ODNB entry. 2 Speck, Society and Literature, pp. 128–9; J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 231. 3 James, Middle Class, p. 95. 4 On Wilton House, see Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and Christopher Simon Sykes, Great Houses of England and Wales (London: King, 1994), pp. 116–31. 5 On Pembroke in public life, see Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), pp. 77, 257. 6 On the importance of water to the estate, see Louise Noble, ‘Wilton House and the Art of Floating Meadows’, in Dimmock et al., eds, Intellectual Culture of the English Country House, pp. 232–47. On the early development of a canal network, see Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 410. 7 On art collecting and the Grand Tour, see Black, British Abroad, pp. 260–83. 8 See Coleman, Economy of England, p. 127. 9 K. H. D. Haley, ‘William III as Builder of Het Loo’, in John Dixon Hunt, ed., The Dutch Garden in the Seventeenth Century (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990), pp. 1–11, at p. 10; Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (London: Harper-Collins, 2009), pp. 21–2. 10 On the taste for calico, see Collingham, Hungry Empire, pp. 77–9; P. J. Marshall, ‘The British in Asia: Trade to Dominion, 1700–1765’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 487–507, at p. 487. 11 David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 139; Emma Newport, ‘The Fictility of Porcelain: Making and Shaping Meaning in Lady Dorothea Banks’s “Dairy Book”‘, EF 31 (2018), 117–42.

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12 Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 1. 13 Srinivas Aravamudan, ‘Defoe, Commerce, and Empire’, in John Richetti, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 45–63, at p. 48. See also Coleman, Economy of England, p. 131. 14 Wordie estimates that 75% of English land was enclosed by 1760 and that between 1600 and 1760, the peak period of enclosure, 28% of the land was enclosed: ‘English Enclosure’, pp. 486, 495. 15 Defoe would have been aware of Liverpool’s spectacular expansion through the African slave trade, given his earlier role as a propagandist for the joint-stock monopoly company, the Royal Africa Company: William A. Pettigrew, ‘Free to Enslave: Politics and the Escalation of Britain’s Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1688–1714’, WMQ 64 (2007), 3–38. 16 Davies, The Isles, pp. 523–8. 17 For fuller discussion, see Katherine Clark, ‘Defoe and the Union of 1707: Constructing a British Identity’, in Daniel Defoe: The Whole Frame of Nature, Time and Providence (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 78–94. 18 T. C. Smout, A History of the Scottish People, 1560–1830 (London: Collins, 1969), p. 230. 19 Defoe in Scotland: A Spy Among Us, ed. Anne McKim (Dalkeith: Scottish Cultural Press, 2006). On Defoe’s Unionist convictions, see John Kerrigan, ‘Defoe, Scotland, And Union’, in Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 326–49. 20 Colley, Britons, p. 32. 21 G. A. Starr, ‘Defoe’s Tour Through The Dialects and Jargons of Great Britain’, MP 110 (2012), 74–95, at pp. 77–8. 22 Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 537. 23 Macherey, Theory of Literary Production, p. 247. 24 Burke, Popular Culture, p. 258. Defoe knew Bunyan’s works and may even have met Bunyan: Sutherland, Defoe, p. 20. Novak, Defoe, pp. 59–60. See also Elizabeth R. Napier, Defoe’s Major Fiction: Accounting for the Self (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2016), p. 9. 25 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, ed. Linda Bree and G. A. Starr (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 8. 26 For the harsh punishment of petty crime, its consequences and the widespread belief that London was over-run by criminals, see Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Tim Hitchcock, ‘The Publicity of Poverty in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, in Merritt, ed., Imagining Early Modern London, pp. 166–84; David Hitchcock, Vagrancy in English Culture, pp. 10, 30–6. 27 Margaret J-M Sönmez, Defoe and the Dutch: Places, Things, People (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015), p. 121.

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28 Tim McLoughlin, ‘Fielding’s Essay on Conversation: A Courtesy Guide to Joseph Andrews?’, in Jacques Carre, ed., The Crisis of Courtesy: Studies in the Conduct Book in Britain, 1600–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 93–102, at p. 99. As McLoughlin points out, such aspirational guides were satirized in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. 29 For discussion, see Michael Shinagel, Daniel Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 143–5. 30 Illegitimacy was seen to be a major problem in eighteenth-century England, not entirely correctly: Derek Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 65–6; Porter, English Society, p. 163. 31 For an overview, see Richardson, Household Servants, pp. 180–4. 32 Daniel Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d; or, the insolence and unsufferable behaviour of servants in England (London, 1724), preface, i–ii. 33 Watt, Rise of the Novel, p. 105. 34 Daniel Defoe, Colonel Jack, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 162. 35 As Michael Shinagel points out, Jack’s ‘entry into a life of crime is the direct result of his lack of education and his not being bred to any trade’ (Defoe and Middle-Class Gentility, p. 164). 36 George E. Boulukos, ‘Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack, Grateful Slaves, and Racial Difference’, ELH 68 (2001), 615–31; Hans H. Anderson, ‘The Paradox of Trade and Morality in Defoe’, MP 39 (1941), 23–46. Defoe acknowledges that most slaves are black Africans, but thinks of the problem of slavery in terms of commerce and religion rather than race. 37 For the rather different reality, see Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation: The Formation of the Criminal Atlantic (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004). 38 Gabriel Cervantes, ‘Convict Transportation and Penitence in Moll Flanders’, ELH 78 (2011), 315–36, p. 318. 39 Cervantes, ‘Convict Transportation’, p. 320. 40 John Wareing, Indentured Migration and the Servant Trade from London to America, 1618–1718: ‘There is Great Want of Servants’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 241. 41 Wareing, Indentured Migration, p. 243. 42 John Richetti, The Life of Daniel Defoe: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley, 2015), p. 339. 43 For an analysis of the wider significance of the links between indentured servants and slaves, see Wolf, Europe and the People Without History, p. 202. 44 Cervantes, ‘Convict Transportations’, p. 324; Gregory Durston, Moll Flanders: An Analysis of an Eighteenth-Century Criminal Biography (Chichester: Barry Rose, 1997). 45 Lisa O’Connell, The Origins of The English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 5; John Mullan, Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (London: Faber, 2007), p. 123.

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46 Mullan, Anonymity, p. 123. 47 Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 448–51. 48 Karen Lipsedge, ‘Social Hierarchy and Social Mobility’, in Peter Sabor and Betty A. Schellenberg, eds, Samuel Richardson in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 304–10, at p. 306. 49 Christopher Flint, ‘The Anxiety of Affluence: Family and Class (Dis)order in Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded’, SEL 29 (1989), 489–514, p. 489. 50 Richardson, Household Servants, p. 167. 51 Porter, English Society, p. 40. 52 On mistresses, see Roy Porter, ‘Mixed Feelings: The Enlightenment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Paul-Gabriel Bouce, ed., Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 1–27, at pp. 10–11. On Clarissa and the competition/clash between class based moralities, see Watt, Rise of the Novel, pp. 257–8; Graham Smith, Novel and Society, pp. 78–9; James H. Maddox, Jr., ‘Lovelace and the World of Ressentiment in Clarissa’, TSLL 24 (1982), 271–92. 53 Gwendolyn B. Needham, ‘Richardson’s Characterization of Mr. B. and Double Purpose in Pamela’, ECS 3 (1970), 433–74, p. 445. 54 Richardson, Household Servants, p. 168. 55 Flint, ‘Anxiety of Affluence’, p. 496. 56 See John Mullan, ‘High-Meriting, Low-Descending’, LRB, 24, 24, 12 December 2002. More generally, see P. J. Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number in Eighteenth-Century England’, History 72 (1987), 38–61, p. 43. 57 John Allen Stevenson, ‘“A Geometry of His Own”: Richardson and the Marriage-Ending’, SEL 26 (1986), 469–83, p. 413. 58 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (rev. edn Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), pp. 315–38; Porter, English Society, pp. 278–83; Tim Hitchcock, ‘Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England’, HWJ 41 (1996), 72–90. 59 Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, pp. 234–9. 60 Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 69. 61 Belinda Jack, The Woman Reader (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 197. 62 Kate Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1660–1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 175–96. 63 A Lady, The Whole Duty of a Woman: or a guide to the female sex (London, 1696), p. 71. 64 See also N. H., The Ladies Dictionary, being a general entertainment of the fair-sex (London, 1694), pp. 370–2. 65 C.f., ‘Men … had the larger share of Reason bestow’d upon them’: George Saville, Marquis of Halifax, The Lady’s New-Year’s-Gift: or, advice to a daughter (London, 1701), p. 27. 66 Eve Tavor Bannet, ‘Readers and Reading’, in Sabor and Schellenberg, eds, Richardson in Context, pp. 128–35, at p. 129.

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67 For details of Duck’s life, see the ODNB entry; a useful overview of his significance can be found in Bridget Keegan, ‘Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Occasions’, in Womersley, ed., Milton to Blake, pp. 301–7. 68 Joseph Spence, A Full and Authentick Account of Stephen Duck, The Wiltshire Poet (London, 1731), pp. 6–11. 69 On Merlin’s Cave, a significant literary venue, see Judith Colton, ‘Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as Political Propaganda’, ECS 10 (1976), 1–20. 70 Pat Rogers, ed., The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood, 2004), pp. 92–3; William J. Christmas, The Lab’ring Muses: Work, Writing, and the Social Order in English Plebian Poetry, 1730–1830 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001), pp. 17–18. 71 Robert Southey, Lives of the Uneducated Poets, to which are added attempts in verse by John Jones (London, 1836), p. 111. 72 David Fairer and Christine Gerrard, eds, Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 304. 73 On Morrell, see Ruth Smith, ‘Thomas Morrell and Handel’, JRMA 127 (2002), 191–25, pp. 196–8; Jennifer Batt, Class, Patronage, and Poetry in Hanoverian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), ch. 9. I am grateful to Dr Batt for letting me read this work in advance of publication. Duck was preferred to Morrell as vicar of Kew, a post Morrell especially coveted. 74 Spence, Duck, p. 25; Southey, Uneducated Poets, p. 113. 75 Spence, Duck, p. 14. 76 Southey, Uneducated Poets, pp. 109–10. 77 Williams, Country and the City, p. 88. 78 John Wainwright (1657–1741), was Baron of the Irish Exchequer, and friendly with many in the Queen’s circle. He was a champion of the philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley: NPG, ‘Baron John Wainwright’ (www.npg.org.uk/collections/ search/person/mp123710/baron-john-wainwright) (accessed 29 September 2020); Katherine Byerly Thomson, Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon, 2 vols (London, 1847), II, pp. 165–6, passim. I am grateful to Jennifer Batt for this last reference. 79 J. Wainwright, ‘Upon Her MAJESTY’S Bounty to the Thresher’, in Stephen Duck, Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1736), xxxiii–v, lines 1–12. For comment, see Byrne, Poetry and Class, p. 175. 80 Southey, Uneducated Poets, pp. 88–93. 81 John Milton, Lycidas, lines 32–5, in Shorter Poems, p. 242. 82 See Renato Poggioli, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 35–9. 83 Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour, 4 vols (London, 1749), III, p. 169. 84 T. Morrell, ‘To Stephen Duck: Occasion’d by his Poem on Friendship’, lines 1–10 in Duck, Poems, xxxvi–viii, at xxxvi. After Morrell was frustrated by Duck’s preferment, he changed the poem to a hostile satire of Duck, see Batt, Class, Patronage, and Poetry, pp. 176–80. 85 According to Barrell and Bull, Duck was never given ‘a chance to develop an original poetic voice within the [neo-classical] tradition – he was taken up by

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the court, and his poetry rapidly lost whatever individuality it had possessed in his anxiety to conform with the expectation of his patrons’ (English Pastoral Verse, p. 378). 86 John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, ‘Introduction’, in Goodridge and Keegan, eds, British Working-Class Literature, pp. 1–9, at p. 4. 87 ‘Genius’ here means disposition or talent (genius, OED, n. and adj., II.6.a), not exceptional brilliance. 88 Barrell and Bull, eds, English Pastoral Verse, p. 378. 89 See, for example, Robert Herrick, ‘Riches and Poverty’, in Complete Poetry, I, p. 341; Kate Crassons, The Claims of Poverty: Literature, Culture, and Ideology in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). 90 John Gay, Selected Poems, ed. Marcus Walsh (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), pp. 25–40. 91 Duck, Poems, pp. 54–65; ODNB entry. 92 Gay, Selected Poems, pp. 70–94. 93 For an overview, see David Fairer, ‘Poetry’, in Womersley, ed., Milton to Blake, pp. 560–74. 94 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson, 2006), 2.2.427–30. 95 On the relationship between nudity and social class, see Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Doubleday, 1959), ch. 1 (who distinguishes between the naked and the nude, art elevating bare flesh above vulgarity); Raymond Grew, ‘Picturing the People: Images of the Lower Orders in Nineteenth-Century French Art’, JIH 17 (1986), 203–31; Jill Burke, The Italian Renaissance Nude (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), introduction. On the poor in eighteenth-century painting, see John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 96 Batt, Class, Patronage, and Poetry, passim. 97 ‘Horses and humans are the only species that can sweat profusely’ (J. R. McNeill, ‘Biological Exchange in Global Environmental history’, in J. R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Maudlin, eds, A Companion to Global Environmental History (Oxford: Wiley, 2015), pp. 435–51). I am grateful to Matthew Dimmock for this point. 98 Keegan, ‘Duck’, pp. 305–6. 99 James Thomson, ‘Summer’, in Poetical Works, ed. James Logie Robertson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), 1442–56. For comment, see Williams, Country and the City, p. 89; John Goodridge, Rural Life in EighteenthCentury English Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chs 1–2. 100 For further commentary on the idealization of labour relations in Thomson’s work see Barrell, Dark Side, pp. 38–9. 101 Noble, ‘Floating Meadows’; A. D. Cousins, ‘Andrew Marvell’s Mower Poems and the Pastoral Tradition’, IJCT 18 (2011), 523–46.

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102 Stuart MacDonald, ‘The Progress of the Early Threshing Machine’, AHR 23 (1975), 63–77, p. 77. 103 Arthur Young, Annals of Agriculture, XX (1998), p. 248. 104 Jennifer Batt, ‘“Stirr’d up by Emulation of the Famous Mr. Duck”: Laboring Class Poetry in the 1730s’, in Goodridge and Keegan, eds, British Working-Class Literature, pp. 24–38, at p. 37. See also the poetry reproduced in David Wright, ed., The Penguin Book of Everyday Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 309–28. 105 Batt, ‘“Famous Mr. Duck”’, pp. 30, 28. 106 William J. Christmas, ‘The Verse Epistle and Laboring Class Literary Sociability from Duck to Burns’, in Goodridge and Keegan, eds, British Working-Class Literature, pp. 39–69, at p. 47. 107 On Collier’s life, see ODNB entry; H. Gustav Klaus, ‘Mary Collier’, N. & Q. 47 (2000), 201–4. On her significance, as the ‘first published laboringclass woman poet in England’, see Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-Class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 2 (quotation, p. 56); Goodridge, Rural Life, chs 1–2. 108 Mary Collier, Poems, on Several Occasions (London, 1762), ‘Some Remarks on the Author’s Life drawn by herself’, iii–iv. See also Moira Ferguson, ed., Stephen Duck, The Thresher’s Labour and Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1985), introduction, vi; Gary Lenhart, The Stamp of Class: Reflections on Poetry and Social Class (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), pp. 8–19. 109 See Landry, Muses of Resistance, p. 61. 110 References to the 1739 edition in Ferguson, ed., Thresher’s Labour, p. 5; for comment see Landry, Muses of Resistance, pp. 63–4. 111 Christmas, ‘Verse Epistle’, p. 46. 112 Bridget Hill, ‘Women’s History: a study in Change, Continuity or Standing Still?’, in Sharpe, ed., Women’s Work, pp. 42–58, at p. 43. 113 David Dabydeen, ‘Commerce and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Literature’, Kunapipi 5 (1983), 2–23; Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam R. Beach, eds, Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination (London: Routledge, 2016). 114 James Thomson, Liberty, in Poetical Works, pp. 309–421. On liberty as a central feature of eighteenth-century political thought in Britain, see H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Methuen, 1977). 115 On perceptions of the illiberal nature of the Ottoman Empire, see Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (rev. edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), pp. 60, 81, passim; Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 11–16. 116 Landry, Muses of Resistance, p. 67. 117 Compare Defoe’s use of the word above (p. 203).

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118 ‘hand’, n. OED, 14.a. 119 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, ed. Philip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989). 120 Anne Milne, ‘Gender, Class, and the Beehive Mary Collier’s “The Woman’s Labour” (1739) as Nature Poem’, ISLE 8 (2001), 109–29, p. 114. See also Andrew O’Malley, The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature in the Late Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 150. 121 E. L. Jones, ‘Economic Growth in England, 1660–1750: Agricultural Change’, JEH 25 (1965), 1–18, p. 1. 122 Leonard Schwarz, ‘English Servants and Their Employers during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Ec.HR 52 (1999), 236–56. See also Caroline Steedman, ‘The Servant’s Labour: The Business of Life, England, 1760–1820’, SH 29 (2004), 1–29. 123 Steven Earnshaw, The Pub in Literature: England’s Altered State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 147–56. 124 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, ed. R. P. C. Mutter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 51. 125 James E. Evans, ‘The Social Design of Fielding’s Novels’, CL 7 (1980), 91–103, p. 91. 126 Scott MacKenzie, ‘“Stock the Parish with Beauties”: Henry Fielding’s Parochial Vision’, PMLA 125 (2010), 606–21. 127 See also Bauman, Memories of Class, pp. 12–3. Contrast Georg Lukacs, who argues that in Fielding ‘time and place of action acquire much greater concreteness than was customary in the earlier period of the social novel’: Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 16. 128 Fiona Stafford, ‘Scottish Poetry and Regional Literary Expression’, in John Richetti, ed., The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 340–65, at p. 346. 129 For comment see Barrell, Dark Side, pp. 157–8. 130 Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, in Thomas Gray, William Collins and Oliver Goldsmith, The Poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Harlow: Longmans, 1969), pp. 103–41; Adam Santesso, A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006), p. 21. 131 Robert L. Mack, Thomas Gray: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 32–9; Robert Lance Snyder, ‘The Epistolary Melancholy of Thomas Gray’, Biography 2 (1979), 125–40; The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), I, pp. 66, 209; II, p. 589, passim. 132 For discussion of the ‘gem’ stanza, see William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1935), pp. 4–5; John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), pp. 93–5. 133 Guillory, Cultural Capital, p. 93.

Chapter 6

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Gathering pace: Towards the revolutions, 1750–98

Adam Smith was not a thinker who wanted to look back. He was clear that the division of labour was a principle that would benefit all societies, as men and women concentrated on different tasks in order to produce more commodities. As they did so everyone would benefit, as it was in their interests to ensure that the increase in wealth generated by the division of labour, if not distributed along entirely equitable principles, drove up everyone’s income and ability to purchase goods and services, therefore increasing the future cycle of production. The days of static, primitive societies would come to an end and societies would be able to plan and look to the future: In that rude state of society, in which there is no division of labour, in which exchanges are seldom made, and in which every man provides every thing for himself, it is not necessary that any stock should be accumulated, or stored up beforehand, in order to carry on the business of society. Every man endeavours to supply, by his own industry, his own occasional wants, as they occur. When he is hungry, he goes out to the forest to hunt; when his coat is worn out, he clothes himself with the skin of the first large animal he kills: and when his hut begins to go to ruin, he repairs it, as well as he can, with the trees and the turf that are nearest it. But when the division of labour has once been thoroughly introduced, the produce of a man’s labour can supply but a very small part of his occasional wants. The far greater part of them are supplied by the produce of other men’s labour[.]1

Although he notes that society is divided into different ranks (p. 107), Smith’s understanding of class is based on what they produce, not their social position. Hence, he refers to the two productive classes, proprietors and cultivators, and the unproductive classes, ‘merchants, artificers, and manufacturers’ (p. 667), descriptions that are conspicuously not political or moral, but designed to persuade the reader to think about how a society is best organized to produce as much wealth as possible for the benefit of all its citizens.2 All classes should work together for the benefit of all. People

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do not have to behave in an altruistic manner because what is best for one is best for everyone so that ‘It can never be in the interest of the unproductive class to oppress the other two classes’. In conclusion, the best and fairest system is the one that allows everyone to act in their own interests and create as much wealth as possible for, from that goal, everything else that is socially and politically desirable will result: ‘The establishment of perfect justice, of perfect liberty, and of perfect equality, is the very simple secret which most effectively secures the highest degree of prosperity to all the three classes’ (p. 668). Smith, however, is not blind to the cost of progress, an acknowledgement that suggests that there are limits – specifically based on more familiar understandings of class in terms of rank and hierarchy – to his belief that adopting a laissez faire approach to political economy will benefit everyone.3 In a ‘rude society’ individuals perform a variety of tasks: everyone can be a warrior and a statesman, as well as a producer. Primitive societies have one major advantage over more sophisticated ones: ‘Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people’ (p. 778). Smith admits that the adoption of the division of labour comes at a cost for the majority of people: In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations: frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgements concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life (pp. 777–8).4

The Enlightenment, according to Smith’s own analysis a phenomenon made possible by the social advancement of a commercial society based on the principles of laissez faire, would be an irrelevance for the greatest number of people.5 It was at least arguable that most would have been happier – albeit poorer – living in less developed societies where their faculties and talents would have been more carefully developed. Smith attempts to offset the possibly catastrophic consequences of his analysis by arguing that the benefits of education need to be disseminated to the ‘common people’

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(p. 780), so that they can, at least, make more productive use of the little leisure time that they have.6 In making this case Smith demonstrates that he is a humane and far-sighted thinker, but it is also clear that he is nervous about the distinct prospect of class hostility that an unfettered free market system will undoubtedly generate. Smith’s theory is based on the prospect of constant economic growth and, as Ingrid H. Rima argues, for Smith ‘it is the advancement of riches that keeps conflict at bay’, with the further assumption that such class-based hostility occurs in times of dearth rather than in times of prosperity.7 Unfortunately, as earlier events such as the Peasants’ Revolt demonstrated, relative prosperity could also be a spur to violent insurrection.8 While Smith looked to the future, believing that ‘the desire of bettering our condition … comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us till we go into the grave’ (p. 336), others, wary of the costs of a commercial society, looked to the past to understand what had been lost as people strove to increase their wealth and better their living conditions. Many shared Smith’s assumptions about history, while providing a strikingly different emphasis. In the eighteenth century there was a sustained interest in the recovery of ancient forms of literature, in particular ballads.9 When introducing a selection of Robin Hood ballads, the editor of the anonymous A Collection of Old Ballads (1723), in polemical mood, laid down a challenge to what he saw as prevailing critical norms: I know not how Our Criticks will relish this; but I would have ‘em remember, that our Poets of old scorn’d to curb the Poetick Fire to give way to dull Rules. They had no tedious Bossu’s, nor D-nn-s’s to guide ‘em, or, at least, they had too much Sense to be guided by them. Their works were the first Flight of a lively imagination, and Poets were look’d upon like other Englishman, born to live and write with Freedom.10

The editor imitates colloquial speech forms (‘em; look’d) in order to confront what he regards as the misleading principles of Neo-Classical literature advocated by John Dennis and Rene Le Bossu.11 Instead he advocates a poetics of ancient authenticity, one in which natural, untutored writers expressed themselves with an unrestrained vigour and freedom that the more civilized poets who obey the rules of Neo-Classical composition cannot rival. Robin Hood, aristocratic by birth, ‘created an earl for some considerable Service done his Country in War’, decides to live, like the poets, without rules after he dissipates his fortune (presumably because it is a burden to him): ‘rather chusing to venture his Life for every Thing he got, than to live in a dependent state, and be beholden to any body for his Bread’ (p. 65).

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Art and life coalesce in a version of history that is the mirror of that of Adam Smith. This historical myth, one in which an ancient state was populated exclusively by the upper classes and peasants, is saturated in class-consciousness. As Steve Newman has demonstrated, the notion that society was once so easily divided was deployed by aspirant middle-class writers eager to distance themselves from the lower classes and Grub Street hacks who were enmeshed in a commercial bind, having to write for money; and from the upper classes, from whose high culture they invariably felt excluded. Fixating on their particular version of rural peasant literature meant that they could control it as they saw fit, and manipulate what they saw for their own ends.12 Ballads were imagined to be the unfettered expression of free bards/poets of ancient origin, although in reality they were ‘frequently of late origin and upper-class derivation’.13 The assumption that ballads were the genuine poetic expression of a free people and were produced by poets who were either classless or of relatively humble origins appeared in its most influential form in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). Percy based his collection largely on one manuscript, obtained from already existing collections held in the Ballad Warehouse near Aldermary Churchyard (a further indication of the manufactured reality behind the Romantic belief in the rediscovery of the heroic past).14 Like the anonymous collection of old ballads, which influenced his work, Percy saw the literature he collected as evidence of a simple, divided society and contrasted the past with the present. He explains the principles behind the anthology in his preface: In a polished age, like the present; I am sensible that many of these reliques of antiquity will require great allowances to be made for them. Yet have they, for the most part, a pleasing simplicity; and many artless graces, which in the opinion of no mean critics have been thought to compensate for the want of higher beauties, and if they do not dazzle the imagination, are frequently found to interest the heart. Select ballads in the old Scottish dialect, most of them of the first-rate merit, are also interspersed among those of our ancient English Minstrels: and the artless productions of these old rhapsodists, are occasionally confronted with specimens of the composition of contemporary poets of a higher class: of those who had all the advantages of learning in the times in which they lived, and who wrote for fame and for posterity. Yet perhaps the palm will be frequently due to the old strolling minstrels, who composed their rhymes to be sung to their harps, and who looked no farther than for present applause and present subsistence.15

Percy is less obviously confrontational than the anonymous earlier editor, but he shares a similar value system and belief in the desirable nature of the

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freedoms that existed in the distant past. There are two fundamental types of poetry; those produced by the upper class court poets who wrote for ‘fame and posterity’; and those of immediate authenticity sung by wandering minstrels who did not care whether their poems survived. The ‘pleasing simplicity’ of their verse stands as a refreshing antidote to the sophisticated culture of the upper classes, which, Percy implies, as it is read by aspiring court poets, has formed a canonical tradition that is ripe for challenge. Throughout his influential collection Percy claims that the literature he has collected rescues a vital strand of English history and culture from oblivion, of a time when natural sentiments could more easily be expressed and there was a shared popular culture beyond that of the elite, one in which almost everyone wanted to participate.16 Like Adam Smith, Bishop Percy would appear to have accepted that there was far less wealth in times before the division of labour but that society was more united, people were less confrontational and class consciousness not as significant. From evidence of a pageant performed for the Queen at Kenilworth in 1575 Percy deduces that the minstrels were themselves divided into classes. The minstrel who performed before the queen was a ‘squire minstrel’, one of a superior class of performers. More widespread were ‘yeoman minstrels’ (I, xxi), indicating that poets were united with the sturdy land-owning peasants of ancient English tradition who provided the bulk of the nation’s wealth (before the advent of the division of labour). Such figures survive in the north of the country because There is hardly an ancient Ballad or Romance, wherein a Minstrel or Harper appears, but he is characterized by way of eminence to have been ‘OF THE NORTH COUNTRIE’ and indeed the prevalence of the Northern dialect in such kind of poems, shews that this representation is real. The reason of which seems to be this; the civilizing of nations has begun from the South: the North would therefore be the last civilized, and the old manners would longest subsist there. With the manners, the old poetry that painted these manners would remain likewise; and in proportion as their boundaries became more contracted, and their neighbours refined, the poetry of those rude men would be more distinctly peculiar, and that peculiarity more strikingly remarked (I, xxi–ii).

Just before the economic theories generated by the Scottish Enlightenment were travelling south, Percy was arguing that the ancient literature of the backward north needed to be preserved. As their ancient customs would now stand out more clearly, it should not be too hard a task for scholars, antiquarians and enthusiasts to find and preserve what was still left. The culture that remains needs to be carefully sifted for the true testimony of ballad culture: ‘as the old Ministrels gradually wore out, a new race of ballad-writers succeeded, an inferior sort of minor poets, who wrote narrative

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songs meerly for the press’ (I, xxii). Grub Street values have corroded the united, classless popular culture of tradition.17 Like the anonymous editor of the earlier collection, Percy found authentic testimony and literature of value in the Robin Hood ballads (I, pp. 74–6). He also judged the ‘ancient English pastoral’, the ballad Harpalus, ‘far superior’ to any of the eclogues in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender in its ‘natural, unfettered sentiments, its simplicity of style, in easy flow of versification, and all other beauties of pastoral poetry’ (II, p. 61). Spenser is roundly admonished because he ‘ought to have profited more by so excellent a model’, presumably instead of being misled by a desire to be too sophisticated and literary in his pastoral, and so undermining the vital relationship between the poet and the people. Percy’s essay on ‘Ancient Metrical Romances’ develops this argument, claiming that, until the advent of written prose, kings and their courts could remain in touch with the history and culture of the people through sponsoring poets: So long as poetry continued a distinct profession, and while the Bard, or Scald was a regular and stated officer in the Prince’s court, these men are thought to have performed the functions of the historian pretty faithfully; for though their narrations would be apt to receive a good deal of embellishment, they are supposed to have had at the bottom so much of truth as to serve for the basis of more regular annals. At least succeeding historians have taken up with the relations of these rude men, and for want of more authentic records, have agreed to allow them the credit of true history (III, ii).

It is the loss of contact with the ‘rude men’ that is lacking in contemporary society and the fear that, if ballads were not collected and analysed; poets like Stephen Duck and his ilk were not feted; and high and popular culture not reunited on some way, then society would lose its unity and fall prey to the unrestrained forces of commerce. Such values also lay behind the phenomenon of the Ossian poems, fragments of ancient Bardic poetry discovered – or invented – by Sir James MacPherson (1736–96), which led to a sustained, European-wide cult of authentic, ancient literature lasting well into the nineteenth century.18 In his ‘Dissertation’, first published in 1762, as a preface to Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Eight Books; Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1763), MacPherson claims If tradition could be depended upon, it is only among a people, from all time, free of intermixture with foreigners. We are to look for these among the mountains and inaccessible parts of a country: places, on account of their barrenness, uninviting to an enemy, or whose natural strength enabled the natives to repel invasions. Such are the inhabitants of the mountains of Scotland. We, accordingly, find, that they differ materially from those who possess the

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low and more fertile part of the kingdom. Their language is pure and original, and their manners are those of an antient and unmixed race of men. Conscious of their own antiquity, they long despised others, as a new and mixed people. As they lived in a country only fit for pasture, they were free of that toil and business, which engross the attention of a commercial people. Their amusement consisted in hearing or repeating their songs and traditions, and these intirely turned on the antiquity of their nation, and the exploits of their forefathers. It is no wonder, therefore, that there are more remains of antiquity among them, than among any other people in Europe.19

Again, we can see the belief in a pure, unsullied, ancient people whose essence has not been diluted by contact with modernity. The Gaelic-speaking Scots understand their history and preserve their traditions, making them ‘conscious of their antiquity’ and eager to ensure that their practices and customs do not get lost or forgotten. They are isolated and live in inaccessible places where they cannot mix with others in lowland, more fertile areas, which has encouraged them to be fiercely proud of their isolation. Their society is pastoral and, perhaps most significant of all for his audience, they are not a commercial people, making them the very opposite of the Britons described in Daniel Defoe’s or Adam Smith’s works. The division of labour and the creation of wealth would destroy them. Meanwhile, a Scottish lawyer was working on a novel that would define another major strand of class culture in Britain. Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling was eventually published anonymously in 1771, although the author had been at work on the novel since 1767.20 His identity was widely known, and Mackenzie (1745–1831), a prominent figure in the Scottish capital’s intellectual society, was called the ‘man of feeling’ for the rest of his long life.21 The Man of Feeling, like the Ossian poems, had a major and lasting impact on the development of European culture. Peter Gay remarked that Mackenzie’s novel ‘taught a generation to shed delicious tears about doomed love and the sad lot of unfortunates’.22 For Paul Langford the novel ‘offered nothing that would upset the pious or the prudish’ and acted as the ‘motor of essentially social virtues’, helping to ensure that ‘sentiment came fully into its own in England’.23 Sensibility was intimately and intricately bound up with class values, specifically those of the amorphously defined middle classes. According to G. J. Barker-Benfield, ‘the culture of sensibility depended on the possession of or access to property for its literacy, consumerism, and self-indulgence … Sentimental fiction endorses the view that the novel embodies the values of an emerging middle class.’ 24 Mackenzie’s best-selling novel clearly did much to fuel the familiar association of sentimental feeling and refined middle-class sensibilities and values, enabling an expanding readership to identify with a hero whose acute distress at the suffering of others dominates

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the short work’s narrative.25 As many commentators have observed, Harley’s disabling sensitivity stands in sharp contrast to the unfeeling, often brutal, nature of those who succeed in the world.26 The novel places commerce and sensibility at odds and so can be read as a sardonic comment on its bashful and retiring hero; a satire of the unsavoury values of the modern world; or a combination of both.27 Like many other works, most significantly Oliver Goldsmith’s equally celebrated poem, The Deserted Village (1770) – published a year earlier and an obvious influence on sections of The Man of Feeling – Mackenzie laments the malign effects of progress and the fast disappearance of a world of stable rural communities before the onset of modern progress.28 Unlike Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard, both works target enclosure as a malign social force.29 When Harley returns to Scotland, having failed to prosper in London, he encounters Old Edwards from his childhood village and the old man, who has fallen on hard times, shows him the ruins of the old school, much to Harley’s vocal distress: Just then a woman passed them on the road, and discovered some signs of wonder at the attitude of Harley, who stood, with his hands folded together, looking with a moistened eye on the fallen pillars of the hut. He was too much entranced in thought to observe her at all, but Edwards, civilly accosting her, desired to know if that had not been the school-house, and how it came into the condition in which they now saw it. ‘Alack a day!’ said she, ‘it was the school-house indeed; but to be sure, sir, the squire has pulled it down because it stood in the way of his prospects.’–’What! how! prospects! pulled down!’ cried Harley –’Yes, to be sure, sir; and the green, where the children used to play, he has ploughed up, because, he said, they hurt his fence on the other side of it.’—’Curses on his narrow heart,’ cried Harley, ‘that could violate a right so sacred! Heaven blast the wretch! “And from his derogate body never spring “A babe to honour him!”— But I need not, Edwards, I need not’ (recovering himself a little), ‘he is cursed enough already: to him the noblest source of happiness is denied, and the cares of his sordid soul shall gnaw it[.]’ (pp. 96–7).

Harley’s lament is powerful, but conspicuously ineffective, encouraging the reader to condemn what has taken place without actually taking any action – or feeling the need to do so. Rather, the strong feelings of Harley stand as a displacement of or substitute for opposition to enclosure itself. The quotation is adapted from King Lear, the well-known misogynist attack by the ancient king on his eldest daughter, Goneril, for refusing him hospitality and casting him out onto the heath to face the storm.30 Harley’s quotation perhaps serves less to demonstrate his cultural knowledge, given

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that he chooses such an obvious play, than to demonstrate his excessive and impotent fury. It links the culture of sensibility to the theatre, implying that he has learned his opinions, feelings and gestures there, like many other keen students of sensibility.31 Harley concludes that the enclosing gentleman who has destroyed the social fabric and aesthetic appearance of the village has brought shame and suffering to himself and so requires no further punishment. Characters complain of the social disruption caused by the onset of progress and the unstoppable rise of commercial society in ways that are familiar enough.32 Soon after the distressing vision of the ruined school, Harley visits his aunt and they discuss a forthcoming marriage of which his aunt approves because the betrothed are both from old, established families. The match preserves the proper standards unlike so many because, as she claims, ‘it is money, not birth, that makes people respected; the more shame for the times’ (p. 108). When Harley replies that he has no interest in such matters, his aunt issues a reproach, re-asserting the need to have the social order based on ‘people who are come of something’, rather than ‘your mushroom-gentry who wear their coats of arms in their purses’ (p. 109). The novel, however, provides no solution to this particular social problem, and the hero dies with nothing resolved. Its social critique focuses on rogue individuals rather than a series of systemic changes in the nature of money, work, land, technology and so on that are transforming the island of Britain.33 Even the critique of colonial trade and the creation of needless luxury is anaemic, focussing on excess rather than exploitation, and concluding that honourable poverty is better than having too much.34 Harley is indeed sceptical of the motives of the East India Company traders and their assumption that they have the right to rule a foreign country, but his radical attack soon becomes a complaint about what the colonial experience does to the colonizer rather than the colonized. ‘When shall I see a commander return from India in the pride of honourable poverty?’ (p. 103) he asks, which is a considerable swerve from the opening question in his speech (‘what title have the subjects of another kingdom to establish an empire in India?’ (p. 102)). Edwards responds that he imagines there must be ‘great temptations in a great degree of riches, which it is no easy matter to resist’ (p. 104), something of which he, as a poor man, has no knowledge and which would also seem to let violent asset-strippers like Clive of India off the hook.35 They conclude with a rapprochement focussed on their own sensitive responses when Harley apologizes, presumably for his insensitively strident tone, and urges them both to ensure that ‘the feelings are not yet lost that applaud benevolence, and censure inhumanity’ and to ‘endeavour to strengthen them in ourselves’ (p. 104).

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Harley, moreover, is upper class not middle class, from an impoverished ancient family with pedigree, which further emphasizes his status as an eccentric outsider, charming and likeable in many ways, as well as absurd. His is a lone voice speaking out, making a series of deracinated comments that emphasize his own sensibility, along with nostalgia for a stable, feudal order.36 The Man of Feeling frequently gestures towards a more radical social critique, always drawing back as soon as more collective, class-based conclusions would appear to present themselves, a characteristic manoeuvre that perhaps explains the extent of its success, sensibility displacing the need for action. Other works published soon afterwards contained far more forceful observations about class that placed much heavier demands upon the reader. Frances Burney’s second novel, Cecilia (1782) describe the young orphan heiress’s stay with one of her guardians, Mr Harrel, analysing his negligent treatment of the men and women in his service. Cecilia will come into a reasonable fortune on her twenty-first birthday, but has to make sure that any man she marries takes her name. Burney (1752–1840), an ambitious and prolific writer from before her teenage years, found herself frequently at odds with the norms and expectations of society before she established her name as a major author and literary celebrity.37 Cecilia is shocked at the ways in which Mr Harrel, husband of her old school friend, Priscilla, can be charming, witty and relaxed, yet pay no regard to the sufferings that his offhand actions cause in other people. While making a social call, Cecilia is confronted by a woman as she is about to enter her carriage. The woman walks ‘with a slowness of pace that indicated extreme weakness; and, as she approached and raised her head, she exhibited a countenance so wretched, and a complexion so sickly, that Cecilia was impressed with a horror at the sight’.38 Like Harley in The Man of Feeling, Cecilia feels great pity and is affected by what she sees, but, unlike him, she transforms her sensibility into more direct action.39 There follows a conversation in which the two interlocutors are speaking at cross purposes that could have been taken from a stage comedy such as Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1771) were it not so embarrassing and serious.40 After Cecilia gives her a half guinea, presumably hoping to save herself an embarrassing encounter, the woman reveals that she has fallen on hard times and lost a son, Billy, after which Cecilia invites her into the house and starts to listen to her story of affliction. She is asked to intercede with Mr Harrell, one phrase, ‘he thinks little of our distress, because he has been afflicted with none himself’ (p. 69), embarrassing her as she now feels that her offering has been too small to compensate for the tragic loss of a son. When the woman asks if she would like a receipt the truth emerges. The woman is Mrs Hill, wife of a carpenter who has helped build the

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fashionable new temple at Mr Harrell’s house, and he has not yet been paid for his work and has £22 owing to him, well over six months wages, much to his family’s dismay.41 She thinks that Cecilia is Mr Harrell’s wife, hence the combination of aggression and supplication in her manner. Burney makes sure the significance of the sum is not lost on her readers: ‘Ah, madam, you gentlefolks little think how much that is to poor people! A hard-working family, like mine, madam, with the help of £20 will go on for a long while quite in paradise. ‘Poor worthy woman!’ cried Cecilia, whose eyes were filled with tears of compassion, ‘if £20 will place you in paradise, and that £20 only your just right, it is hard, indeed, that you should be kept without it; especially when your debtors are too affluent to miss it. Stay here a few moments and I will bring you the money immediately’ (pp. 70–1).

Unlike Harley, Cecilia springs immediately into life in order to sort out this significant problem, the repetition of the sum drawing readers’ attention to its importance and demonstrating that the vulgar and practical subject of money could and should be included in the novel.42 Cecilia’s desire to right economic wrongs stands in sharp contrast to the indifference of Mr Harrel, who has forgotten the debt and regards the request for money as a vulgar intrusion: ‘A debt!’ cried he, with an immediate change of countenance, ‘to whom?’ ‘Her name, I think, is Hill; she is wife to the carpenter you employed about a new temple at Violet-Bank.’ ‘O what—what that woman?—Well, well, I’ll see she shall be paid. Come, let us go to the library.’ ‘What, with my commission so ill executed? I promised to petition for her to have the money directly.’ ‘Pho, pho, there’s no such hurry; I don’t know what I have done with her bill.’ ‘I’ll run and get another.’ ‘O upon no account! She may send another in two or three days. She deserves to wait a twelvemonth for her impertinence in troubling you at all about it’ (p. 71).

Again, the dialogue serves to highlight the unsettling nature of the episode: Cecilia’s insistence on immediate action encouraging Mr Harrel to be ever more evasive and stubborn in his determination not to settle his debts. He relies on an upper-class understanding of good manners, that a gentleman should not be troubled with the tiresome details of economic necessity, transforming the problem into one of proper behaviour. The women are

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forced to be insistent, even rude, in their demand that their rights be satisfied. Mr Harrel assumes the complacent superiority of the upper class: if he pays his bills, he is behaving well; if he is asked for money he owes, then his debtors are over-stepping the mark. Mr Harrell tries to persuade Cecilia that she has betrayed the ignorance and ill-manners of someone new to fashionable society and she will learn to change her ways: ‘“what a dismal tale she has been telling you! No doubt she saw you were fresh from the country! But if you give credit to all the farragos of these trumpery imposters, you will never have a moment to yourself, nor a guinea in your purse”‘ (p. 72).43 For Mr Harrell the lower orders are best kept out of sight and mind, there to provide labour so that their social superiors can pursue their pleasures: as he runs out of money through his spendthrift habits, he turns his attention to Cecilia’s fortune to preserve his precarious, undeserved status. Cecilia is, of course, shocked, having imagined that Mr Harrel had not understood the needs of those he employed, but now she realizes that it is his ‘total indifference’ not lack of knowledge that enables him to ‘distress the poor by retaining the recompense for which alone they labour’ (p. 73). Eventually the bill is paid with bad grace and Cecilia resolves to leave the house bewildered by what she has seen and started to understand: That a young man could appear so gay and happy, yet be guilty of such injustice and inhumanity; that he could take pride in works which not even money had made his own, and live with undiminished splendour, when his credit itself began to fail, seemed to her incongruities so irrational, that hitherto she had supposed them impossible (pp. 82–3).

Burney’s critique in the novel is poised between the radical and the reactionary.44 Read one way Cecilia looks back with so many other eighteenthcentury works to a time when the upper classes were not misled by the values of a commercial society and the vagaries of taste and fashion and took their social responsibilities to the classes beneath them with appropriate seriousness Mr Harrel, significantly, ‘seemed to consider his house merely as an hotel’ (p. 49), an indication that he does not understand what it means to run a grand house and the responsibilities that possession entails. On the other, as the references to labour and wages makes clear, there is an indignation that people are not paid properly for work they have done, that they are exploited by those who assume superiority over them and who do not understand that there is always a reciprocal relationship between people, whoever they are. An even more scathing attack on casual class abuse had appeared in her first novel, Evelina (1778), one that demonstrated that Burney had a clear sense of ‘class consciousness’ from the start of her writing career.45 Near

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the beginning of Book Three, two competitive upper-class men, Lord Merton and Mr Coverley, decide to have a wager for a thousand pounds. The sensible and more feminized Lord Orville, whom Evelina will eventually marry, reduces the foolish bet to one of a hundred pounds.46 However, the ‘empty-headed and conceited’ punters have decided that their bet will be settled by a foot-race between two elderly women servants.47 The race dominates the early sections of Book Three and obviously has a significance beyond its function as a plot device (which is negligible). It alludes to the vast array of cruel sports practised in the eighteenth-century – cock-fighting, dog-fighting, badger-baiting, fox-tossing and others – but here, the participants are people.48 Burney makes it clear that the competitive nature of the spectacle is what matters to the instigators, encouraging the reader to consider the episode in terms of such sports, which had already attracted considerable criticism, notably from authors whom Burney would have known and read: The race is to be run in Mrs Beaumont’s garden; the two gentlemen are as anxious as if their joint lives depended upon it. They have, at length, fixed upon objects, but have found great difficulty in persuading them to practise running, in order to try their strength. This grand affair is to be decided next Thursday.49

The heroine does not escape the author’s satire as it is clear that she refuses to place a bet because she dislikes Lord Merton, not because she disapproves of the race itself. Indeed, the ladies are as involved in the preparations for the spectacle as the men and have no moral issues with the event itself, as Evelina informs her guardian, the Rev. Villars: Lord Merton breakfasted here, and stayed till noon. He wanted to engage the Ladies to bet on his side, in the true spirit of gaming, without seeing the racers. But he could only prevail on Lady Louisa, as Mrs Selwyn said she never laid a wager against her own wishes, and Mrs Beaumont would not take sides. As for me, I was not applied to. It is impossible for negligence to be more pointed, than that of Lord Merton to me, in the presence of Lady Louisa (p. 367).

Burney shows that politeness and the niceties of social interaction among a particular class matter far more than any disapproval of what is obviously a hideously exploitative act, one that reduces people to the level of beasts. The elderly ladies are treated far worse than thoroughbred racehorses. The sport was already established and popular by the early eighteenth century, but was reaching new heights in the early years of Burney’s career and becoming serious business.50 It ‘benefitted by the rage for gambling’, and three classics were established immediately before and after the novel was published: the St Leger (1776), the Oaks (1779) and the



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Derby (1780).51 As with Mr Harrel and his treatment of Mr and Mrs Hill, Burney shows that in polite society good manners and conversation actually serve to blind the privileged to the humanity of others and their duties towards them.52 The appearance of the two elderly ladies inspires sympathy in Evelina, and also serves to divide the spectators: The place marked out for the race, was a gravel-walk in Mrs Beaumont’s garden, and the length of the ground twenty yards. When we were summoned to the course, the two poor old women made their appearance. Though they seemed very healthy for their time of life, they yet looked so weak, infirm, so feeble, that I could feel no sensation but that of pity at the sight. However, this was not the general sense of the company, for they no sooner came forward, than they were greeted with a laugh from every beholder, Lord Orville excepted, who looked very grave during the whole transaction (p. 368).

Several points can be made about this description. It is notable that the event is associated with garden improvement and design, good taste hiding atrocious behaviour. In Cecilia Mr Harrel’s studied negligence concerned the erection of a Greek Temple, a fashionable and desirable addition to a landscaped garden, as was a gravel walk, designed to provide visitors with a relaxed view of the best areas of the garden not for a sporting event.53 Both Evelina and Lord Orville are discomforted, a sign of their sensibility, as well as a signal to the reader that they will eventually get married. The rest of the company are in danger of losing their sense of humanity in failing to register the brutality of the spectacle, Evelina’s comment about their relative healthiness perhaps an indication that she has initially seen the women as horses, and now changes her mind. The women try their best in the race but the exertion is too much for them: ‘When the signal was given for them to set off, the poor creatures, feeble and frightened, ran against each other, and neither of them able to support the shock, they both fell on the ground’ (p. 368). In a parody of good manners, Lord Merton and Mr Coverley rush to their assistance and force them to drink wine, but only to protect their property and interests, not out of genuine sympathy. Although both are badly bruised, the fashionable gravel injuring them, ‘as they seemed equal sufferers, both parties were too eager to have the affair deferred’ (p. 368). Both continue to suffer until Mr Coverley’s charge falls and is too infirm to continue. Although Evelina tries to help her, the sponsors refuse and argue that the rules have been infringed. Mr Coverley is ‘quite brutal; he swore at her with unmanly rage, and seemed scarce able to refrain even from striking her’ (p. 369). But, it is no good, and, despite his pleas that she be given time to recover, ‘he was pronounced the loser’ (p. 369).

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The episode is an excoriating attack on the dehumanization of people on the grounds of class and gender. The women can play no part in the marriage games of polite society on either account – they are too old and too poor – and are only valuable as sources of entertainment.54 The point is emphasized in the conversation immediately afterwards. Evelina attempts to leave the unpleasant scene: complaining I was tired, I quickened my pace, with intention to return to the house; but Lord Merton, hastily following, caught my hand, and saying the day was his own, vowed he would not let me go. ‘You must, my Lord,’ cried I, extremely flurried. ‘You are the most charming girl in the world,’ said he, ‘and never looked better than at this moment.’ ‘My Lord,’ cried Mrs Selwyn, advancing to us, ‘you don’t consider, that the better Miss Anville looks, the more striking is the contrast with your Lordship; therefore, for your own sake, I would advise you not to hold her.’ ‘Egad, my Lord,’ said Mr Coverley, ‘I don’t see what right you have to the best old, and the best young woman too, in the same day’ (p. 370).

Lord Merton’s threat of sexual violence, as he coerces Evelina into staying, citing her attractiveness as the reason for his transgressive rudeness, would surely remind readers that the prospect of rape was never entirely absent in polite literature and culture, as the case of Lovelace and Clarissa demonstrated.55 His coercive actions finally separate the men and the women, as Mrs Selwyn, who is acting as Evelina’s guardian and who has, we presume, articulated no particular criticism of the race, steps in to warn him that he has gone too far.56 She stands in contrast to the monstrously insensitive Mr Coverley, who demonstrates that he is continuing his futile competition with Lord Merton. The aristocrat stands as the dominant male, so that Mr Coverley’s complaints that his rival gets all the women, old and young, only serve to draw attention to his inadequacies in this competitive male-dominated society. Burney’s frustrations with the gender politics of English society have frequently been noted; her equally forceful comments on its class relations have not.57 By the 1780s English poetry had started to register the change – and imminent changes – in social structure, as well as the recognizing that hitherto ubiquitous literary representations of England needed to be challenged. Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village represents the destruction of traditional village communities in ways that had already been challenged, but which still had a potent sentimental force: Even now the devastation is begun, And half the business of destruction done; Even now, methinks, as pondering here I stand,



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I see the rural virtues leave the land. Down where yon anchoring vessel spreads the sail, That idly waiting flaps with every gale, Downward they move, a melancholy band, Pass from the shore, and darken all the strand. Contented toil, and hospitable care, And kind connubial tenderness, are there; And piety, with wishes placed above, And steady loyalty, and faithful love (lines 395–406).58

The labourers leave the village where they have been happy and well-provided for, taking their virtues with them as they are scattered to the furthest corners of the empire, their community torn apart by the forces of commerce. It is against such literary representations that George Crabbe (1754–1832), clergyman, surgeon and poet, aimed his depiction of rural life in The Village (1783).59 Crabbe places himself as a follower of Stephen Duck in opposition to the dominant poetic tradition:     the Muses sing of happy swains, Because the Muses never knew their pains. They boast their peasants’ pipes, but peasants now Resign their pipes and plod behind the plough; And few, amid the rural tribe have time To number syllables and play with rhyme; Save honest Duck, what son of verse could share The poet’s rapture and the peasant’s care? Or the great labours of the field degrade With the new peril of a poorer trade?60

Crabbe’s villagers stand in marked contrast to those in Goldsmith’s poem. Not only is their labour invariably tedious, but they face the prospect of life becoming more uncertain and impoverished, presumably as new mechanized systems of agriculture threaten their jobs. Whereas peasants in Tityrus, Virgil and Mantuan (lines 15, 16 and 18) pipe and sing, modern rural workers are too tired to compose and recite, worn out and their imaginations deadened by their efforts in the day. The lachrymose verses of Goldsmith, far from uniting poets and peasants, serve only to drive the two further apart. Instead, Crabbe will use his poetry to tell the truth, a message emphasized by the copious repetition of parallel heroic couplets:              I paint the Cot, As Truth will paint it, and as Bards will not: Nor you, ye poor, of letter’d scorn complain, To you the smoothest song is smooth in vain; O’ercome by labour, and bow’d down by time, Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme?

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Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtles round your ruin’d shed? Can their light tales your weighty griefs oerpower, Or glad with airy mirth the toilsome hour? (lines 53–62)

Crabbe cites the word ‘cot’ for ‘cottage’ or ‘hut’, signalling the usage of rural workers and the meagre comforts provided by their basic housing, demonstrating his aim to represent such workers as they truly were and not as poets saw them.61 His realistic poetry is partly addressed to the rural workers, and not just to an educated public who may be sympathetic to their plight, again signalling a departure in English poetry, but one that was already prefigured by the double-address in Mary Collier’s The Woman’s Labour. Crabbe mocks the flowery pretensions of traditional poets whose words can have no meaning for those who actually toil in the fields and know how hard life as a rural labourer can be.62 Poetry cannot assuage hunger (although it is hard to see how Crabbe’s realism is of greater benefit than Goldsmith’s idealized version of rural life). Crabbe represents nature as a force to be overcome, not a benign friend eager to be controlled by the happy labourer: Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o’er, Lends the light turf that warms the neighboring poor; From thence a length of burning sand appears, Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears; Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o’er the land and rob the blighted rye: There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, And to the ragged infant threaten war; There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil, There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil; Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf, The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf; O’er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade, And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade; With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, And a sad splendor vainly shines around. (lines 63–78)

Crabbe proclaims his bond with those who work the soil because he can recite the names of many of the plants and soils that make their lives so hard: the brake (brushwood) that covers the turf they want to use for their domestic fires; the sandy soil that makes it hard to grow corn; rye, which is more susceptible to the fungal growth, ergot, than other cereals; thistles that threaten to choke the young cereal crops; red poppies, blue bugloss and purple mallow, which look attractive to the uninitiated and which were grown in ornamental gardens, but which make growing and harvesting

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crops more difficult; and the weeds, charlock (field mustard, which has a yellow flower) and tares (vetches, sometimes an attractive purple), which together provide a series of pretty colours, superficially attractive to the visitor, but a sight that the experienced rural worker knows is a sign of a field that requires hard work to transform into something that will provide a good yield (which is why the splendour is sad).63 The narrator imagines ‘the nymph whom wretched arts adorn’ (line 79), the spirit of the countryside, betrayed and abandoned as those – like Crabbe – who see the truth, understand that the more art attempts to disguise the reality of rural life, the more uncomfortable the experience: her ‘outward splendour is but folly’s dress, / Exposing most, when most it gilds distress’ (lines 83–4). Poetry (and art) that covers up the real poverty and distress of the rural working class has to be exposed, challenged and corrected. As in Goldsmith’s poem the landless poor are emigrating and depopulating the countryside, the greatest number leaving to become indentured servants in the North American colonies.64 Crabbe is aware not just of absolute poverty, but of the importance of the expanding gap between rich and poor, as well as the agricultural improvements benefitting the haves and the have-nots: Where Plenty smiles—alas! she smiles for few– And those who taste not, yet behold her store, Are as the slaves that dig the golden ore,– The wealth around them makes them doubly poor (lines 137–40).

The produce of the land should be shared around, as the traditional image of the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, indicates. Instead, the labourer’s life is akin to that of the miner working underground, who not only has no chance to enjoy what he produces but endures a terrible working life, mines being common images of Hell, most significantly, surely, in Paradise Lost (Crabbe’s father read him passages from Milton as a child).65 Mining, especially for gold, conjured images of the notoriously brutal treatment of native labour in the Spanish Empire – one of Milton’s sources – as well as linking rural labour to the newly emerging machines that inaugurated the Industrial Revolution, in particular iron smelting and steam power.66 Most significantly, Crabbe sees the gap between those who produce the country’s wealth and those who consume it getting ever wider. Technological progress, according to Crabbe, is harnessed as a means to exploit the powerless, exactly the opposite of what Adam Smith claimed would happen as the division of labour became more widespread as a principle of work. In Book Two Crabbe argues that the production of excessive luxury based on the exploitation of the working class has a deleterious effect on the rich as well, so that both ends of the social spectrum join together in

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their corruption and depravity. Crabbe urges his imaginary reader to ask him why show the petty crimes of the poor (principally, poaching): Yet why, you ask, these humble crimes relate, Why make the poor as guilty as the great? To show the great, those mightier sons of pride, How near in vice the lowest are allied; Such are their natures and their passions such, But these disguise too little, those too much: So shall the man of power and pleasure see In his own slave as vile a wretch as he; In his luxurious lord the servant find His own low pleasures and degenerate mind: And each in all the kindred vices trace Of a poor, blind, bewilder’d, erring race; Who, a short time in varied fortune past, Die, and are equal in the dust at last (Book 2, lines 87–100).

The comparison between rich and poor, all of whom end up in the ground, recalls the central point of Gray’s Elegy; the vices of the lower classes mirroring those of their betters resembles Gay’s critique in The Beggar’s Opera.67 However, Crabbe’s point is, if anything, more class consciousness still, as in The Village the one is directly caused by the other. The greed of the upper classes and their addiction to luxury destroys the balance of the village and reduces it to depopulated poverty and petty crime. Crabbe does not explicitly draw the conclusion, but it is implicit in his social analysis, following Pope and Defoe, that the empire exists to serve the luxury goods market, stimulating pointless and perverse tastes and demands and destroying native agriculture.68 Wealth separates the classes; crime binds them together. Crabbe has long been recognized as an honest and realistic poet, pushing an Augustan tradition to its limits, his verse that of its final representative.69 More significantly, his verse demonstrates that by the 1780s a wide and diverse range of poets writing in English were aware of the nature of a class-riven society, and eager to represent the disunity and disharmony they saw in their work. The Industrial and French Revolutions undoubtedly exacerbated divisions and the consequent awareness of them, but they did not create stratification and conflict ex nihilo and post-revolutionary writers had a long and distinguished tradition on which to build their revolutionary poetics and politics.70 William Cowper (1731–1800), in his long, reflective poem, The Task (published 1785), also draws the reader’s attention to the gulf between the lives of those who produce and those who consume: perhaps like Crabbe,



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he looks back to the work of Stephen Duck.71 In his serio-comic georgic description of growing cucumbers in a garden, Cowper draws attention to the laborious and scientific nature of the task, which begins: The stable yields a stercoraceous heap, Impregnated with quick fermenting salts, And potent to resist the freezing blast; For ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf Deciduous, and when now November dark Checks vegetation in the torpid plant Exposed to his cold breath, the task begins. Warily therefore, and with prudent heed, He seeks a favoured spot; that where he builds The agglomerated pile, his frame may front The sun’s meridian disk, and at the back Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge Impervious to the wind. First he bids spread Dry fern or littered hay, that may imbibe The ascending damps; then leisurely impose, And lightly, shaking it with agile hand From the full fork, the saturated straw.72

Cowper’s lines are cast a modern georgic, showing how the recent developments in plant husbandry and breeding can ensure higher crop yields and more effective avoidance of crop failure. Mankind has to work as a result of the Fall – hence The Task – but God has given men and women the means to labour more effectively and to make their lives better with more time for repose and contemplation, as well as the discipline of work so that leisure can be understood and properly appreciated.73 Work requires planning, hence the selection of the site, planting in November, and description of the gardener’s impressive knowledge of how to complete his task. It is not always glamorous, perhaps why the poet chooses the inflated poetic adjective ‘stercoraceous’, to describe a dung heap, which draws attention to the substance used. The lines show what care and attention needs to be taken to grow a salad vegetable such as a cucumber, familiar enough in eighteenth-century England, but experiencing a new popularity through the enthusiasm for gardening and the consequent use of greenhouses, cold frames and other constructions.74 Cowper is conscious of the originality of his poetic labours, which match the hard work of the gardener, and should make him a georgic poet worthy of comparison to Theocritus and Virgil. Raising the ‘prickly and green-coated gourd, / … is an art / That toiling ages have but just matured, / And at this moment unassayed in song’ (lines 446, 449–51). The

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Task is a reminder of the labour that needs to be made visible because it is ignored or neglected: Grudge not, ye rich (since Luxury must have His dainties, and the world’s more numerous half Lives by contriving delicates for you), Grudge not the cost. Ye little know the cares, The vigilance, the labour, and the skill, That day and night are exercised, and hang Upon the ticklish balance of suspense, That ye may garnish your profuse regales With summer fruits, brought forth by wintry suns. Ten thousand dangers lie in wait to thwart The process. Heat and cold, and wind and steam, Moisture and drought, mice, worms, and swarming flies Minute as dust and numberless, oft work Dire disappointment that admits no cure, And which no care can obviate. It were long, Too long to tell the expedients and the shifts Which he, that fights a season so severe Devises, while he guards his tender trust, And oft, at last, in vain (lines 544–62).

The work described by Cowper takes place in the garden of the house in Olney, Buckinghamshire, where he lived with Newton and Mary Unwin, after a benefactor, Lady Ann Austen, bought him a sofa to help him recover from one of his periodic bouts of depression and to encourage him to write.75 On one level Cowper’s verse is a defence of his own poetic labours and the painful struggles he endured to produce his work: he may have seemed indolent sitting on a comfortable sofa looking out of the window but he was really hard at work. But the really serious point is the same as that made half a century earlier by Stephen Duck, that the work undertaken to produce the luxuries that the rich consume is rarely seen, imagined or understood, and the labouring classes are not properly rewarded for their toil. The cucumber grows despite the range of obstacles placed in the gardener’s way – weather, heat and cold, pests large and small, good and bad fortune – so that the vegetable should be regarded as a major feat of horticultural engineering. In order to produce the luxuries that the rich demand the gardener has to work with and against nature, producing summer fruits using winter suns, technological triumphs that signal a fragile, potentially dangerous, victory for mankind, one almost as likely to fail as succeed. There is surely a sarcastic irony in the oxymoronic (?) phrase, ‘the World’s more numerous half’, as there were far more producers than consumers, many more have-nots than haves in the 1780s.76

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While Crabbe represents working-class labour as unremittingly grim and Cowper as meticulous and intense, other representations indulged in Utopian fantasy. By the 1780s the celebrity of Robert Burns (1759–96) had begun in earnest, generated by a potent combination of the myth of the ‘peasant poet’; an enthusiasm for Scotland and Scottish culture; and the longstanding understanding of the disappearance of traditional rural society.77 Burns, together with John Johnstone (1750–1811), an Edinburgh ‘music-engraver’, collected together a serious archive of traditional Scottish songs, many written and adapted by Burns, which was published in six volumes as The Scots Musical Museum (1787–97).78 The Poor Thresher describes an unlikely encounter between a labourer and a nobleman. The thresher is represented as a man resolutely determined to enjoy his work: This poor man was seen to go early to work, He never was known for to idle or lurk; With his flail on his back and his bottle of beer, As happy as those that have thousands a year. In summer he toil’d thro’ the faint, sultry heat; Alike in the winter, the cold, and the weet: So blythe and so merry he’d whistle and sing As canty as ever a bird in the Spring (p. 451).

One evening he encounters a sympathetic nobleman and in the course of the conversation the nobleman asks the thresher how he manages to remain so cheerful when his life is so hard and he has so many children and so little money. The thresher explains that his arduous labour is shared by his loving wife and that the evenings with his family are a source of delight. Impressed, the nobleman invites the thresher and his family to dinner the next day and, after they have eaten, gives them a forty-acre farm, which can be inherited by their heirs. The poor family are duly grateful but the song brings the reader/hearer back to earth in its final stanza: No tongue then was able their joy to express, Their tokens of love, and their true thankfulness; And many a low humble bow to the ground: But such Noblemen there’s but few to be found (p. 452).

A forty-acre farm with freehold rights was way beyond the dreams of most tenant farmers, let alone agricultural labourers in the 1780s. Scotland was undergoing an agricultural revolution after the Highland Clearances from the 1750s onwards. There was indeed improvement in productivity but there was also dispossession, periodic crop failure and significant rent rises and subsequent evictions.79 Although it was not entirely a fair judgement as it was hard to resist the forces of commercialization, tenants often felt

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that ‘landowners … had somehow deserted a historic role and were now just out for what they could get’.80 The song, therefore, needs to be read as ironic and literate, the author (probably not Burns) perhaps aware of Stephen Duck’s poem and the tradition of anti-pastoral literature in England. The relentlessly cheerful labourer; the perfect, stress-free family life based on mutual love; the financially secure and generous landlord; and the reciprocal respect between people at opposite ends of the social scale, are as likely as the existence of the peasant fantasy of the Land of Cockaigne, as the last line ruefully acknowledges.81 Accordingly the comic poem highlights what the rural labourer does not have and the feelings of bitterness towards the ruling class who, it is implied, rarely perform their duties to those who need their help. Burns’ song, In the Character of a Ruined Farmer, represents the reality of the changes inaugurated by improvement and the commercialization of Scottish agriculture: The prosperous man is asleep, Nor hears how the whirlwinds sweep; But Misery and I must watch     The surly tempests blow: And it’s O, fickle Fortune, O!82

Although he carefully cultivated his image as the ‘ploughman-poet’, Burns was not from the labouring poor and had received a good education.83 Even so, his tenant father farmer was often caught with the unwelcome dilemma of either feeding his family and running up debts to the landlord, or paying his rent and letting his family go hungry.84 Burns’ radical enthusiasms and support for the republican principles of the American and French Revolutions are well attested.85 His poems frequently attest the common bonds that join humanity together, artificially separated by the barriers of wealth and class, most famously in A Man’s A Man For A’That, published in 1795: Is there for honest poverty That hings his head, an’ a’ that; The coward slave – we pass him by, We dare be poor for a’ that! For a’ that, an’ a’ that. Our toils obscure an’ a’ that, The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, The man’s the gowd for a’ that. What though on hamely fare we dine, Wear hoddin grey, an’ a’ that? Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;



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A man’s a man for a’ that: For a’ that, and a’ that, Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that; The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor, Is king o’ men for a’ that (lines 1–16).

Burns repeats the familiar motif of labour disguised and overlooked by those not directly involved, even though they benefit from what it produces. Read in a benign manner the poem celebrates the virtues of the poor and dispossessed who are the same as those that employ the trappings of fortune and success. Read with a more revolutionary slant the fools and knaves with their silks, wine and ‘tinsel show’ are exploiters appropriating needless luxuries and ripe for overthrow.86 Elsewhere Burns could be more obviously revolutionary in sentiment: Grant me, indulgent heaven, that I may live To see the miscreants feel the pains they give; Deal Freedom’s sacred treasures free as air, Till slave and despot be but things which were.87

The spirit of the revolutions means that eventually tyrants and the systems of oppression they perpetuate will be no more. Burns celebrates George Washington as a revolutionary leader opposing tyranny in an Ode that aims to democratize the form: No Spartan tube, no Attic shell, No lyre Æolian I awake; ‘Tis Liberty’s bold note I swell, Thy harp, Columbia, let me take! See gathering thousands, while I sing, A broken chain exulting bring, And dash it in a tyrant’s face, And dare him to his very beard, And tell him he no more is feared— No more the despot of Columbia’s race! A tyrant’s proudest insults brav’d, They shout—a People freed! They hail an Empire saved (Ode for General Washington’s Birthday, lines 1–12).

Burns’ poetry is most obviously inspired by songs and ballads, part of a Scottish Romantic movement that sought to produce an inclusive national literature distinct from English Romanticism.88 Washington has led his people to liberty against the tyranny of George III’s empire, reclaiming that empire for its people.89 The implication is, of course, that Scotland should be able

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to do the same and free its people – although Burns was also capable of unleashing his political principles in the opposite, Unionist cause, as is demonstrated in his 1795 ballad, The Dumfries Volunteers (‘Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat?’) written during the French Revolutionary War (1793–1802). The poem concludes: The wretch that would a tyrant own, And the wretch, his true-born brother, Who would set the Mob above the Throne, May they be damn’d together! Who will not sing “God save the King,” Shall hang as high’s the steeple; But while we sing “God save the King,” We’ll ne’er forget THE PEOPLE! But while we sing “God save the King,” We’ll ne’er forget THE PEOPLE! (lines 31–40).

As well as indicating that Burns could be pragmatic and self-interested, the poem demonstrates that it is the democratic nature of the poem/ballad/song that matters to him, an appeal to the people against authority, the many rather than the few.90 Responses to the French Revolution in England were similarly polarized, not just between those who were inspired or horrified by the prospect of dramatic change in England, but in their understanding that the Revolution divided people into those who ruled, the upper class, and those who were ruled, the lower class; or, put another way, the people and the enemies of the people.91 Edmund Burke, the most distinguished critic of the Revolution, argued immediately after the Revolution in 1790, that this simple division of society would dismantle the sophisticated and much more egalitarian model that had evolved in England. The British House of Commons, a central as well as a paradigmatic example, is ‘by the sure operation of adequate causes, filled with every thing illustrious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in acquired opulence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and politic distinction, that the country can afford’.92 The elaborate list serves to contrast the political institutions in Britain to those in France, the Third Estate having, according to Burke, a much narrower range of expertise and social class. Many of the finest minds may well come from the upper echelons of society, but the House of Commons does not shut ‘its doors to any merit in any class’, indicating that the sophisticated, hierarchical character of British society and institutions serves the people much better than those in post-revolutionary France.93 The ideological unity of the Third Estate is a disaster for France as it removes the checks and balances of political life. Burke argues that the Revolution’s egalitarian



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principles will, paradoxically, lead to the dominance of a section from the aristocracy, who will be able to govern without restraint: To observing men it must have appeared from the beginning that the majority of the Third Estate, in conjunction with such a deputation from the clergy as I have described, whilst it pursued the destruction of the nobility, would inevitably become subservient to the worst designs of individuals in that class. In the spoil and humiliation of their own order these individuals would possess a sure fund for the pay of their new followers. To squander away the objects which made the happiness of their fellows would be to them no sacrifice at all. Turbulent, discontented men of quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order (p. 135).

Far from liberating the people from tyranny, the Revolution paves the way for malcontents to destroy the fabric and infrastructure of society in the name of a new order, one that actually enslaves those in whose name the overthrow of the old order was carried out. In England the talented can change their lives, move up a class if their abilities are recognized; in France, the flattening out of society prevents this happening and perpetuates a tyrannous rule by a new sector of the same class, the aristocracy. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), whose work shaped and formed much of the language of working-class politics and culture in the nineteenth century was more interested in rights than class.94 His work appealed to readers of different backgrounds and status and his ‘ideology … cuts across class lines’.95 Paine declared that ‘There are two distinct classes of men [sic) … those who pay taxes, and those who receive and live upon the taxes.’ 96 Like Burns, Paine emphasized a common humanity, one that had been usurped by the establishment of monarchy and the principle of hereditary succession, a case he made in his influential pamphlet, Common Sense (1776). For Paine, however, political and social divisions cannot be separated from relative wealth, an indication of the central role that principles of taxation played in his thinking: Mankind being originally equals in the order of creation, the equality could only be destroyed by some subsequent circumstance; the distinctions of rich, and poor, may in a great measure be accounted for, and that without having recourse to the harsh, ill-sounding names of oppression and avarice. Oppression is often the consequence, but seldom or never the means of riches; and though avarice will preserve a man from being necessitously poor, it generally makes him too timorous to be wealthy.97

For Paine there should always be enough wealth to be spread around and only a series of cunning tricks by an avaricious ruling class have deprived the people of their rightful rewards: he was among the first political thinkers to argue that a basic wage should be established so that no one could fall

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into poverty.98 In the American colonies there is the chance to restore something approaching natural justice. As Paine was concerned with universal rights that he argued were natural before they became civil, he is more interested in class structures that diminish the rights of everyone than arguing for the rights of oppressed classes (although he does argue that ‘There are two classes of people to whom the laws of England are particularly hostile, and those the most helpless; younger children and the poor’ (Rights of Man, p. 257)). In general, however, The Rights of Man describes the class that abrogates the rights of others, the hereditary aristocracy, which ‘has a tendency to degenerate the human species’ (p. 83). The monarchy and upper echelons of the aristocracy are ‘a band of parasites, living in luxurious indolence, out of the public taxes’ (p. 203). They have no desire to reform society and introduce rights for all because, first, they are not answerable to anyone, all ‘hereditary government is in its nature tyranny’ (p. 172) and, second, the class with these mysterious and incomprehensible rights wants to cling onto its power because when ‘such a vicious system is established it becomes the guard and protection of all inferior abuses’.99 The man who is in the receipt of a million a year is the last person to promote a spirit of reform, lest, in the event, it should reach to himself’ (p. 203). Paine’s assumptions about class both oppose and mirror those of Burke: for Burke revolution simply strengthens the grip on power of the aristocrat who hates his class, whereas for Paine once the aristocratic class is eliminated, reform can begin and the rights of man will follow. Americans have understood this crucial change and insist that oaths are sworn to the nation and not a monarch, as ‘putting any individual as a figure for a nation is improper’ (p. 206). Other enthusiasts for the principles of revolution were also less concerned with class than rights. Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) criticized earlier writers on women’s rights for addressing ladies rather than women. Her aim was to ‘pay particular attention to those in the middle class because they appear to be in the most natural state’.100 Elsewhere Wollstonecraft demonstrates that, like many other thinkers about class, she defines social and political status in terms of an imagined group united by respectability and property ownership, the emphasis being on ‘middle’ rather than ‘class’.101 If aristocratic ladies are the target at one point, she can also write that ‘with respect to propriety of behaviour, excepting one class of females, women have evidently the advantage’ (p. 236). It is not clear here whether ‘class’ means lower class or a particular group, i.e., prostitutes, but the distinction does not really matter in context. Later on she observes that class distinctions are understood in terms of the acquisition of property (echoing Paine): ‘One class presses on another, for all are aiming to procure respect on account of their property; and property once gained

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will procure the respect due only to talents and virtue’ (p. 257). Wollstonecraft clearly disapproves of this confusion of possession and merit, but the sentence reveals how much her thinking is bound to an understanding that rights and property are bound together.102 As Hannah Arendt put it, ‘In the eighteenth century … in the English-speaking countries, property and freedom still coincided.’ 103 At about the same time William Blake (1757–1827) wrote the first part of an enthusiastic poem about the French Revolution, one that was never published and which may not have been completed. Blake’s ‘main purpose was to give an imaginative history of the attempt by the aristocracy to browbeat the commons, of the commons’ defiance, and of the sense of catastrophe pervading the whole period, even before violence had broken out’.104 For Northrop Frye, Blake’s representation of the conflict between liberty and tyranny ‘deserves recognition as the one really spontaneous flash of sympathy for the great revolution that English poetry produced’.105 Blake’s poem assumes the same understanding of society – albeit expressed in a radically different way – as Burns:           In the seventh tower, named the Tower of God, was a man, Mad, with chains loose, which he dragged up and down; fed with hopes year by year, he pined For liberty; vain hopes: his reason decayed, and the world of attraction in his bosom Centred, and the rushing of chaos overwhelmed his dark soul. He was confined For a letter of advice to a King, and his ravings in Winds are heard over Versailles (lines 47–51).106

There are tyrants who will enslave people, binding them in chains, and a popular resistance that sometimes, as in France, leads to revolution. Blake may have put aside or abandoned the poem because of its formal demands, or decided that he had no particular wish to write in such a straightforwardly allegorical manner. The poem stands alongside the works of Paine and Wollstonecraft in opposition to the conservative arguments of Burke, as the poem demonstrates that in 1791 ‘Blake believes the Revolution will restore mankind to its original, uncorrupted state before the distinctions of class and birth had divided human society’.107 This particular desire is evident throughout Blake’s writing life, and informs many of his most celebrated lyrics, notably Jerusalem, the preface to his long poem, Milton, as well as many of his prophetic poems, including America (1791–93). That poem, started soon after The French Revolution, succeeds better because it is more symbolic and abstract and the reader observes the ‘spirit of the

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revolution … at work, rather than the events of the revolution itself’.108 The spirit of Albion attempts to hold back the fires of Orc, the spirit of Revolution, but the rear-guard action will eventually fail as the world gives way to the new order of popular liberty: Stiff shudderings shook the heavenly thrones, France, Spain and Italy In terror viewed the bands of Albion and the ancient guardians Fainting upon the elements, smitten with their own plagues They slow advance to shut the five gates of their law-built heaven, Filled with blasting fancies and with mildews of despair With fierce disease and lust unable to stem the fires of Orc; But the five gates were consumed, and their bolts and hinges melted, And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens and round the abodes of men (lines 219–26).

The utopian desire to overcome differences and distinctions and to find an ideal future that is also a return to a prelapsarian past actually serves to circumvent or veer away from thinking about class.109 As Nicholas M. Williams has argued, ‘Blake is involved in the redemption of labor as a constructive practice and also necessarily the redemption of the class consciousness peculiar to the working class’.110 The problem is that in esoteric poetry the substance of the analysis is either buried or elided. Perhaps Blake’s most radical thinking about labour and class is invested in his unique mode of book production. Blake invented new techniques of creating books so that he had control over his labour and its relationship to his writing and art. As Saree Makdisi suggests, ‘Blake’s high-entropy works … were, far from being mass produced, the products of a slow, inefficient, labor-intensive, archaic and wonderfully anachronistic method of production.’ 111 Blake forces his readers to consider what a book might be, what goes into producing it, and the relationship between the producer and the consumer of words and visions. Blake ‘wrote, printed, illustrated, and published his own poems’, using a method of printing that combined the work of the painter and the poet, enabling him to communicate his ‘inventions’ and ‘illuminations’, as he considered them, directly with the reader.112 Furthermore, each book is an individual artifact, no copy exactly the same as another: some illustrations of The Tyger, for example, make the creature look ‘mysterious or ferocious’, others ‘rather pathetically tame, if not altogether silly’.113 Blake’s technique, which limited his sales and appeal to a wide readership in his lifetime, can be seen as a riposte to the commercialization of society and, in particular, to economic theorists like Adam Smith, who insisted that, whatever the obvious costs, adopting the principle of the division of labour would benefit everybody. For Blake such soulless mechanized production

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alienated men and women from the world in which they lived, deadening their imaginations and preventing them from seeing and understanding their place within it. Blake had published a number of versions of Songs of Innocence after he first produced copies in 1789, but the poems assume a greater significance when published in 1794 together with Songs of Experience. Many of the poems are to be read alongside their counterparts, the voice of Innocence balanced by the voice of Experience, neither necessarily understanding the truth.114 The two versions of The Chimney Sweeper demonstrate very different perceptions of poverty and deprivation in the rapidly expanding capital, fuelled by industry and mechanized labour, its buildings covered in dirt, its death rate, in particular infant mortality, appallingly high.115 The voice of Innocence understands the little boys in terms of their relationship to God and their impending death, England being notorious for the death rate of its chimney sweeps, usually boys under ten.116 When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue, Could scarcely cry weep weep! ‘weep weep, So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep. There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head That curl’d like a lamb’s back, was shav’d, so I said. Hush, Tom never mind it, for when your head’s bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair. And so he was quiet, & that very night. As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight, That thousands of sweepers Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack, Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black, And by came an Angel who had a bright key, And he open’d the coffins & set them all free. Then down a green plain leaping laughing they run And wash in a river and shine in the Sun. Then naked & white, all their bags left behind. They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind. And the Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, He’d have God for his father & never want joy. And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark And got with our bags & our brushes to work. Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.117

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Here, the voice of the Innocence is especially sinister, urging the poor boys, who would have been children from exceptionally poor families, orphans, or, like the speaker, sold into indentured labour, to reconcile themselves to an early death as their only escape from an otherwise unimaginably brutal, short life. Even the consolations given, such as the reassurance to Tom that his shaven head cannot be blackened by the soot, serves only to draw attention to the misery that these working children face. Tom’s vision of an angel releasing the boys from their coffins to heaven where they will be able to play as children should is an even stronger condemnation of the exploitation of the vulnerable in contemporary society. The final line, with its trite moral that children should do their duty by behaving well and being obedient, exposes what Blake saw as the bullying, crushing conformism of pious eighteenth-century Christian culture, exemplified in the hymns of Isaac Watts (1674–1748). Books for children were designed to repress and deaden children’s imagination, whose fate might not be quite as full of suffering as that of the little chimney sweeps, but was still abusive.118 Only a deluded voice of Innocence, determined to see good instead of evil, could possibly have celebrated these tragic lives. The voice of Experience provides the necessary corrective: A little black thing among the snow: Crying weep, weep in notes of woe! Where are thy father and mother? say? They are both gone up to the church to pray. Because I was happy upon the heath. And smil’d among the winter’s snow: They clothed me in the clothes of death. And taught me to sing the notes of woe. And because I am happy and dance & sing, They think they have done me no injury: And are gone to praise God & his Priest and King Who make up a heaven of our misery (p. 37).

The more cynical voice of Experience recognizes what has been happening to him and others like him. The thumbnail sketch of his life stands for wider social transformations. The move from the heath to wearing the ‘clothes of death’ symbolizes the migration from the country to the city and the consequent impoverishment and premature death that the move involved (echoing the complaints of so many eighteenth-century writers), as well as the obvious loss of childhood innocence. The parents may be praying in church – in which case they are complicit in the child’s exploitation – or they may be dead. Experience sees his suffering as part of a plot, not an accidental consequence of social changes, hence his repetition of ‘because’. Traditional religion, far from offering the release that the voice of Innocence

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assumed, actively participates with industrialized processes in crushing and killing the children that it should be nurturing. It is the child’s happy disposition, resembling that of the children in Innocence, that enables the exploiters to disguise or ignore the consequences of their actions. Blake’s solution to the brutalization and immiseration of the working class is rooted in his belief in the liberation of the imagination, in particular through reclaiming labour as a process that enables the individual to grow and flourish. Blake and Adam Smith had similar perceptions of the deleterious effects of mechanized, repetitive labour on the class that had to perform such tasks. For Smith, the problem had to be offset by education that could enhance the additional leisure time that the division of labour would provide for the working class; for Blake it was not a bargain that could or should ever be made. By the time that he and Coleridge published the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, Wordsworth’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution had long faded, shocked by the violence of the Sans-Culottes and Girondins. But he had retained his desire to be ‘a radical critic of his own government and legal system’.119 The short advertisement that prefaced the poems highlights the relationship between literature and class as the main concern of the volume and the language of the poems within in terms that directly confront the reader, who is assumed to be complacent and not yet ready for the experimental nature of the volume: The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and aukwardness … Readers of superior judgment may disapprove of the style in which many of these pieces are executed … It will perhaps appear to them, that wishing to avoid the prevalent fault of the day, the author has sometimes descended too low, and that many of his expressions are too familiar, and not of sufficient dignity.120

The opening two sentences are deliberately unpoetic: the verse within the volume is experimental, and so may not appeal to traditional lovers of poetry; it is conversational in nature; and that conversation is that of the bottom half of society (which is how we should probably read ‘middle and lower classes’). Readers are challenged not to tackle the volume as it may offend their taste being strange and awkward rather than gaudy and inane – a device designed to stimulate interest, as no reader could possibly have wanted to be characterized like this whatever their actual tastes. Even those who may be in sympathy with the aims of the authors will probably find

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their sense of class propriety challenged as the language of the poems is too demotic and lower class. The expansion of the preface into the essay in the 1805 edition, while it incorporates many of the sentences from 1798, does not retain the reference to the ‘middle and lower classes’. The much more famous formulation, that the poems fit ‘to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation’, may explain the nature of the poems included rather more accurately, but it lacks the earlier version’s polemical edge.121 The subject matter and style of the poems is less confrontational, certainly in terms of class politics, than the advertisement might have led readers to imagine.122 The volume might also be rather less challenging and radical in its class politics than much of the literature of the eighteenth century – Duck, Collier, Crabbe and Burney in particular. The poems concentrate less on ideas of classes, types, groups and institutions, than on individual, solitary figures, the impoverished, the unfortunate and the abandoned, such as the little boy whose siblings have perished in We Are Seven; the homeless, The Female Vagrant; the disturbed and damaged The Mad Mother and The Idiot Boy; and those cast adrift through anti-social behaviour, age and infirmity, The Convict and Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman. Furthermore, the poems, principally those by Wordsworth, owe much to the experiments of Robert Burns, to a lesser extent, Blake, and those who had been assiduously rescuing a fast disappearing ballad tradition since the start of the eighteenth century.123 However, as Jonathan Bate comments, ‘The new and radical thing about Wordsworth’s treatment of [the poor] … was the sense of personal encounter on the “public road”.’ 124 It is the nature of these encounters, ordinary people meeting each other by accident while they are wandering in no particular direction, who then strike up a conversation that marks a departure in English poetry. The chance meeting of the educated poet and the social outcast, propertyless beggar or rural poor, who converse as equals, serves as a confirmation of the radical political views that were present in the English-speaking world before the French Revolution, and which became much more widespread after it.125 In We Are Seven the poet recalls an encounter in 1793 with a small girl in the Bristol area, a poem that bears some resemblance to Blake’s To A Chimney Sweeper in Songs of Innocence, as well as the dialogues in ballads such as Sir Patrick Spence and Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne in Percy’s Reliques.126 The girl refuses to believe that two of her siblings are dead: I met a little cottage Girl: She was eight years old, she said; Her hair was thick with many a curl That clustered round her head.



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She had a rustic, woodland air, And she was wildly clad: Her eyes were fair, and very fair; - Her beauty made me glad.

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‘Sisters and brothers, little Maid, How many may you be?’ ‘How many? Seven in all,’ she said, And wondering looked at me. ‘And where are they? I pray you tell.’ She answered, ‘Seven are we; And two of us at Conway dwell, And two are gone to sea. ‘Two of us in the church-yard lie, My sister and my brother; And, in the church-yard cottage, I Dwell near them with my mother.’ (lines 5–24).

What promised to be an enjoyable encounter with a charming child has become rather disturbing. Despite the poet’s insistence that the girl accept that her brother and sister are dead, she refuses and describes how she visits them and does her sewing and knitting and sometimes eats her supper by the graves.127 Like Blake’s narrator, she is happy that a child does not have to suffer any longer. The poem concludes with the adult frustrated that he cannot convince a child what he knows is the obvious truth: ‘How many are you, then,’ said I, ‘If they two are in heaven?’ Quick was the little Maid’s reply, ‘O Master! we are seven.’ ‘But they are dead; those two are dead! Their spirits are in heaven!’ ‘Twas throwing words away; for still The little Maid would have her will, And said, ‘Nay, we are seven!’ (lines 61–9).

It is the adult who appears ridiculous in this dialogue, his imagination deadened by his experiences, his education and his loss of humanity and spontaneity. Wordsworth’s understanding of childhood is widely known and analysed, especially his gnomic statement that ‘the child is the father of the man’, in the short poem, My heart leaps up when I behold.128 Here, the child is teaching him how to think and feel – and to recover the imagination he has lost, something he manages to achieve through writing the poem and recording his earlier failure.

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What is less often noticed is the matter of class, which was, after all, highlighted as a major – if not the major – feature of the voices represented in the poems contained in Lyrical Ballads. The girl is not only young (eight) but the daughter of a rural labourer who lives in a cottage. She does not read in the graveyard but knits and mends, probably a prefiguration of the work she might expect to do in her life and a sign that her childhood may all too swiftly come to an end as adult responsibilities take over. She is probably illiterate. The narrator feels guilty later because he attempted to disabuse a child who would discover the harsh reality of life soon enough anyway, because of her class as well as her age. Even so, they are shown talking more or less as equals, in the common ‘language of real men’, a sign that attitudes to class – if not its structured reality – were at least starting to change.

Notes 1 Smith, Wealth of Nations, p. 267. 2 See Bauman, Memories of Class, p. 37. 3 Jacob Viner, ‘Adam Smith and Laissez Faire’, JPE 35 (1927), 198–232. 4 See Bauman, Memories of Class, p. 103. 5 Christopher J. Berry, The Idea of Commercial Society in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 1–31. 6 Alex M. Thomas, ‘Adam Smith on the Philosophy and Provision of Education’, JIE 30 (2017), 105–16. 7 Ingrid H. Rima, ‘Class Conflict and Adam Smith’s “Stages of Social History”’, JHEc.T 20 (1998), 103–13, p. 112. 8 See above p. 31. 9 Branford P. Miller, ‘Eighteenth-century Views of the Ballad’, WF 9, 2 (1950), 124–35. 10 Anon., ed., A Collection of Old Ballads (London, 1723), pp. 66–7. For discussion of the Robin Hood ballads, see Stephen Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), ch. 3. 11 On le Bossu (1631–89), see Alexander Frederick Bruce Clark, Boileau and the French Classical Critics in England, 1660–1830 (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965, rpt. of 1925), ch. 4; on Dennis (1657–1734), see Henry Gilbert Paul, John Dennis: His Life and Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911). 12 Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon: The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to New Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 23. 13 Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature, p. 47. See also Geoffrey Grigson, ed., The Penguin Book of Ballads (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), introduction, p. 13.

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14 See William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 340–6. 15 Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 3 vols (London, 1765), I, preface, x–xi. 16 Burke, Popular Culture, ch. 5. 17 On Grub Street, see Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Sub-Culture (London: Methuen, 1972). 18 Howard Gaskill, ed., The Reception of Ossian in Europe (London: Continuum, 2004); Dafydd Moore, ed., Ossian and Ossianism: Subcultures and Subversions, 1750–1850, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 2004). 19 James MacPherson, Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Eight Books; Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal (London, 1763), ii. 20 Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), xxix. 21 For details of Mackenzie’s life, see the ODNB entry. Mackenzie chaired the committee that examined MacPherson’s translations of Ossian in 1805, concluding that the poems were authentic but that the editor had inserted some passages of his own invention: Fiona Stafford, ‘Romantic Macpherson’, in Murray Pittock, ed., The Edinburgh Companion to Scottish Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), pp. 27–38, at p. 28. 22 Peter Gay, The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, Vol. 4 (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 13. 23 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 481. 24 J. G. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 282. 25 On the novel’s commercial success, see Maureen Harkin, ‘Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling: Embalming Sensibility’, ELH 61 (1994), 317–40, p. 320. 26 See, for example, Robert L. Platzner, ‘Mackenzie’s Martyr: the Man of Feeling as saintly Fool’, Novel 10 (1976), 59–64, p. 61. 27 Harkin, Embalming Sensibility’, p. 321; William J. Burling, ‘“A Sickly Sort of Refinement”: The Problem of Sentimentalism in Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling’, SSL 23 (1988), 136–49. 28 R. Peter Burnham, ‘The Social Ethos of Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling’, SSL 18 (1983), 123–37, p. 128; Poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, p. 670. 29 Earl Miner, ‘The Making of The Deserted Village’, HLQ 22 (1959), 125–41. See above, pp. 232–4. 30 William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (London: Arden, 1997), 1.4.272–3. 31 On the relationship between the theatre and the culture of sensibility, see Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 32 See above, pp. 182–3, 244–5. 33 Burnham, ‘Social Ethos’, pp. 128–9. 34 Harkin, ‘Embalming Sensibility’, pp. 325–6.

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35 For details of Clive’s unimaginable fortune, see Dalrymple, The Anarchy, pp. 139–40. 36 Burnham, ‘Social Ethos’, p. 134. 37 For details, see Joyce Hemlow, The History of Fanny Burney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), chs 1–6. 38 Fanny [Frances] Burney, Cecilia; or Memoirs of an Heiress, ed. Judy Simons (London: Virago, 1986), p. 68. 39 It is possible that Harrell can be read as a parody of Harley. 40 The novel started life as a play, The Witlings: see Barbara Darby, Frances Burney, Dramatist: Gender, Performance and the Late Eighteenth-Century Stage (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997), ch. 2. See also Catherine M. Parisian, Frances Burney’s Cecilia: A Publishing History (London: Routledge, 2012), ch. 1. 41 T. H. Aston estimates that carpenters in London earned about £3 5s. per month, wages inflated by the American Revolutionary War (1776–83): An Economic History of England: The Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1955), p. 226. Carpenters in the provinces would have earned far less. 42 For an analysis of the relationship between romance and commerce in Burney’s novels, see Miranda J. Burgess, ‘Courting Ruin: The Economic Romances of Fanny Burney’, Novel 28 (1995), 131–53. Burney’s own precarious economic position, despite the success of her first novel, is surely also a relevant factor; see Edward W. Copeland, ‘Money in the Novels of Fanny Burney’, SiN 8 (1976), 24–37, p. 28. 43 On manners and politeness in the novel, and how social expectations disadvantage women, see Daniel Waterfield, ‘“My brain is on fire”: Anglian Womanhood and the Limits of Politeness in Frances Burney’s Cecilia’, JECS 42 (2018), 49–66. 44 For one reading of the novel’s ambiguity, see Meghan Jordan, ‘Madness and matrimony in Frances Burney’s Cecelia’, SEL 55 (2015), 559–78. 45 Earl R. Anderson, ‘Footnotes More Pedestrian Than Sublime: A Historical Background for the Foot-Races in Evelina and Humphrey Clinker’, ECS 14 (1980), 56–68, p. 68. 46 On Lord Orville, see Kia Isaacson, ‘Polite Language and Female Social Agency in Frances Burney’s Evelina’, Lumen 31 (2012), 73–89. 47 Anderson, ‘Footnotes’, p. 56. 48 Allen Guttmann, ‘English Sports Spectators: The Restoration to the Early Nineteenth Century’, JSH 12 (1985), 103–25, pp. 103–9; Edward BrookeHitching, Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports (London: Simon & Schuster, 2015), pp. 103–7. 49 Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Margaret Anne Doody (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 355. William Cowper, Alexander Pope, and James Thomson were among those who disapproved of cruel sports: Guttmann, ‘English Sports Spectators’, p. 108. 50 Porter, English Society, pp. 254–5. 51 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, p. 574.

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52 Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 8, passim. 53 John Phibbs, ‘The Structure of the Eighteenth-Century Garden’, GH 38 (2010), 20–34. 54 Heike Hartung, Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 100. 55 Gordon Fulton, Styles of Meaning and Meanings of Style in Richardson’s Clarissa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), p. 151. On Burney and Clarissa, see Martha J. Koehler, Models of Reading: Paragons and Parasites in Richardson, Burney, and Laclos (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005), ch. 3; Tita Chico, ‘Clarissa’s Readers’, ECTI 49 (2008), 273–8, p. 276; Susan Staves, ‘Evelina; Or, Female Difficulties’, MP 73 (1976), 368–81, p. 370. 56 On Mrs Selwyn’s role in the novel, see Timothy Dykstal, ‘Evelina and the Culture Industry’, Criticism 37 (1995), 559–81, pp. 559–60. 57 See, for example, Beatriz Villacaňas Palomo, ‘Female Difficulties: Propriety and Violence in Frances Burney’s World’, Atlantis 18 (1996), 443–52; Barbara Zonitich, Familiar Violence: Gender and Social Upheaval in the Novels of Frances Burney (Cranbury: University of Delaware Press, 1997). 58 On the reception of the poem, see G. S. Rousseau, ed., Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1974); Alfred Lutz, ‘The Politics of Reception: The Case of Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village”‘, SP 95 (1998), 174–96. 59 See, F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 118. 60 George Crabbe, ‘The Village’, in The Poetical Works of George Crabbe, ed. A. J. Carlyle and R. M. Carlyle (London: Oxford University Press, 1908), Book I, lines 21–30. 61 OED, n.1. ‘A small house, a little cottage; now chiefly poetical, and connoting smallness and humbleness, rather than the meanness and rudeness expressed by hut.’ 62 Given his own precarious status at the time, when he was dependent, like Duck, on powerful patrons for his own livelihood and was treated with suspicion by those beneath him in the social scale, he may have one eye on his own problematic position in mind: for details, see Neil Powell, George Crabbe: An English Life (London: Pimlico, 2004), pp. 89–98. 63 On the use of ornamental flowers in gardens in this period, which includes Poppies, bugloss and mallow, see Sarah Rutherford, ‘Hardy Plants and Plantings for Repton and Late Georgian Gardens (1780–1820)’, ‘Historic England: Building and Landscape Conservation’ (http://thegardenstrust.org/wp-content/ uploads/2019/02/47–08_Rutherford.pdf) (accessed 29 September 2020). See also Powell, Crabbe, p. 95. 64 James Horn, ‘British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain, 1680–1815’, in Marshall, ed., Oxford History of the British Empire, II, pp. 28–52.

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65 Warren Tormey, ‘Milton’s Satan and Early English Industry and Commerce: The Rhetoric of Self-Justification’, ILS 13 (2011), 127–59; Rodger Martin, ‘The Colonization of Paradise: Milton’s Pandemonium and Montezuma’s Tenochtitlan’, CLS 35 (1998), 321–55; T. E. Kebbel, Life of George Crabbe (London: Walter Scott, 1888), p. 12. 66 Langford, Polite and Commercial People, pp. 168–70; Porter, English Society, pp. 340–1. 67 See above, pp. 232–4, 67. 68 On Pope and Defoe, see above, pp. 62–3, 205. 69 Donald Davie, Purity of Diction in English Verse (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 154; Patrick Cruttwell, ‘The Last Augustan’, HR 7 (1955), 533–54; Williams, Country and the City, ch. 9. 70 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 27. 71 Crabbe, ‘The Village’, Book 1, lines 27–8. 72 William Cowper, The Task, IV, lines 463–79, in The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980–95). I am grateful to Richard Adelman for drawing my attention to this passage. 73 Dustin Griffin, ‘Redefining Georgic: Cowper’s Task’, ELH 57 (1990), 865–79, p. 866; Thomas E. Blom, ‘The Structure and Meaning of The Task’, PCP 5 (1970), 12–8, p. 16. 74 Roderick Floud, An Economic History of the English Garden (London: Penguin, 2019), ch. 7. 75 James King, William Cowper: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), chs 7–9; ODNB entry; Kenneth Povey, ‘Cowper and Lady Austen: New Documents and Notes’, RES 10 (1934), 417–27. 76 See above, pp. 64–5. 77 Nigel Leask, ‘Robert Burns and Romanticism in Britain and Ireland’, in Pittock, ed., Scottish Romanticism, pp. 127–38, at p. 135. 78 The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns, II, The Scots Musical Museum, Part One, ed. Murray Pittock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), introduction, p. 15. 79 Smout, History of the Scottish People, pp. 283–310, 321–37. 80 Smout, History of the Scottish People, p. 281. 81 See above, p. 51. 82 Robert Burns, ‘In the Character of a Ruined Farmer’, in The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. James Kinsley, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), lines 6–10 (I, pp. 40–1). 83 See Nigel Leask, ‘Was Burns a Labouring-Class Poet?’, in Kirstie Blair and Mina Gorji, eds, Class and the Canon: Constructing Labouring-Class Poetry and Poetics, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), pp. 16–34; Murray Pittock, ‘Robert Burns Was No Peasant-Poet, he was a Master of Self-Promotion’, The Conversation, 24 January 2018. 84 Philip Butcher, ‘Robert Burns and the Democratic Spirit’, Phylon 10 (1949), 265–72, p. 265.

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85 Christopher A. Whatley, ‘“It Is Said That Burns Was a Radical”: Contest, Concession, and the Political Legacy of Robert Burns, ca. 1796–1859’, JBS 50 (2011), 639–66, p. 640. 86 In ‘Scotch Drink’ (pp. 84–7), Burns celebrates ‘Scotch beer’ as his alcoholic drink of choice leaving other poets to praise wine. 87 Burns, Poems and Songs, 2, p. 693. 88 Steve Newman, ‘Ballads and Chapbooks’, in Pittock, ed., Scottish Romanticism, pp. 13–26. 89 Neil York, ‘George III, Tyrant: The Crisis as Critic of Empire, 1775–1776’, History 94 (2009), 434–60. 90 On Burns’ public and private sentiments, see Robert Crawford, The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography (London: Random House, 2011), pp. 382–5. 91 See Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (London: Penguin, 1989), pt 4. 92 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 132. 93 On the composition of the Third Estate, most of whom shared similar political beliefs, if not social background, see Schama, Citizens, pp. 297–9. 94 Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 93–113, 544–6; Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, pp. 118, 123, 158, passim. 95 Alfred Owen Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984), p. 23. See also Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, p. 104. 96 Cited in Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, p. 75; Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 100–01. See also Rights of Man, Pt 2, ch. 5. On the significance of taxation in Paine’s political thinking, see A. J. Ayer, Thomas Paine (London: Faber, 1988), pp. 103–6. 97 Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 71–2. 98 J. E. King and John Marangos, ‘Two Arguments for Basic Income: Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and Thomas Spence (1750–1814)’, HEI 14 (2006), 55–71. 99 As John Barrell points out, ‘it was Paine who had first represented the ancient regime in Britain and elsewhere as an entirely fictive system of government and society, entirely without substance because entirely the creature of the imagination’: Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 20. 100 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 81. 101 Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class, pp. 14, 59–60. 102 For an important discussion of Wollstonecraft’s ideas of economics, property and society, see Catherine Packham, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Cottage Economics: Property, Political Economy, And The European Future’, ELH 84 (2017), 453–74. 103 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 280.

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104 William Blake, The Complete Poems, ed. W. H. Stevenson and David V. Erdman (London: Longman, 1971), p. 124. 105 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 205. As Burns was Scots, and Wordsworth’s famous, enthusiastic lines (‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very Heaven!’ (The Prelude (1805–6), Book 10, lines 693–4: The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J. C. Maxwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972)), were written later, Frye’s judgement has some validity. 106 As S. Foster Damon points out, the poem was written ‘in the rare, probably unique, meter of anapestic-iambic septenary’, which Blake never used again (A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), pp. 146). 107 William Richey, ‘The French Revolution: Blake’s Epic Dialogue with Edmund Burke’, ELH 59 (1992), 817–37, p. 818. 108 D. G. Gillham, William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 157. 109 Nicholas Royle, Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), ch. 1. 110 Nicholas M. Williams, Ideology and Utopia in the Poetry of William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 23. 111 Saree Makdisi, Reading William Blake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 10. See also David Bindman, ‘Introduction: Blake as a Graphic Artist’, in The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake, ed. David Bindman (London: Thames & Hudson, 1978), pp. 10–22, at p. 10. 112 The Illuminated Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), introduction, p. 10. See also Kathleen Raine, William Blake (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970), ch. 3. 113 Makdisi, Blake, pp. 9, 21. 114 See, for example, Gillham, Blake, pp. 61–91; Makdisi, Blake, pp. 10–19. 115 Michael Ball and David Sunderland, An Economic History of London, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 2001), ch. 1; Mary Kilbourne Matossian, ‘Death in London, 1750–1909’. JIH 16 (1985), 183–97. 116 Nadia Benmoussa, John-David Rebibo, Patrick Conan, and Philippe Charlier, ‘Chimney-Sweeps’ Cancer: Early Proof of Environmentally Driven Tumourigenicity’, The Lancet: Oncology 20 (2019), 338. 117 William Blake, Songs of Innocence & Experience, ed. Richard Holmes (London: Tate, 2006), p. 12. 118 Raine, Blake, pp. 46–7. 119 Jonathan Bate, Radical Wordsworth: The Poet who changed the World (London: Collins, 2020), pp. 127, 241. 120 Anon. (William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Lyrical Ballads; with a few other poems (Bristol: Biggs and Cottle, 1798), Advertisement, i–iii. 121 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, 1805, ed. Derek Roper (Plymouth: Macdonald & Evans, 1976), p. 18. See John Jones,

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The Egotistical Sublime: A History of Wordsworth’s Imagination (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), pp. 65–6. 122 Many middle-class radicals found it easier to ‘advocate the political programme of equality … than they did to shed the cultural attitudes of superiority’: E. P. Thompson, cited in Bate, Radical Wordsworth, p. 205. 123 Russell Noyes, ‘Wordsworth and Burns’, PMLA 59 (1944), 813–32; Charles Wharton Stork, ‘The Influence of the Popular Ballad on Wordsworth and Coleridge’, PMLA 29 (1914), 299–326; Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–99 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 23–4, 54. 124 Bate, Radical Wordsworth, p. 204. 125 On Wordsworth’s sense that poets and readers should be equals, see John F. Danby, The Simple Wordsworth: Studies in the Poems, 1797–1807 (London: Routledge, 1960), pp. 23–4. 126 William Wordsworth, The Poems, Volume One, ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 947. On Blake and Wordsworth on childhood, see Alan Richardson, ‘The Politics of Childhood: Wordsworth, Blake, and Catechistic Method’, ELH 56 (1989), 853–68. On the ballads, see Percy, Reliques, I, pp. 62–75; Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, pp. 110–1. 127 For a recent analysis see Yimon Lo, ‘“A Tale of Silent Suffering”: Wordsworth’s Poetics of Silence and its Function of Reintegration’, English 69 (2020), 25–41, pp. 29–31. 128 Peter Newbon, ‘Wordsworth, Child Psychology, and the Growth of the Mind’, in Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson, eds, The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 712–32; Danby, Simple Wordsworth, pp. 12–13.

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Epilogue: Shelley in Ireland

In February 1812, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his new wife, Harriet, sailed to Ireland, as it ‘seemed the obvious place to get his propaganda poems printed, and to make his first venture into political activism’ and ‘to campaign for the repeal of the Union between Ireland and Britain, and to play their part in the fight for Catholic emancipation’.1 The result was the publication of the pamphlet, An Address to the Irish People, which Shelley had started writing in January and which he published in Dublin at his own expense towards the end of February.2 The pamphlet made the case for Catholic Emancipation, broadened out through the influence of David Hume, Tom Paine and William Godwin to argue for the necessity of equality.3 In Shelley’s thinking, class is invariably the central concern: Oh Irishmen! I am interested in your cause; and it is not because you are Irishmen or Roman Catholics, that I feel with you and feel for you; but because you are men and sufferers. Were Ireland at this moment, peopled with Brahmins, this very same Address would have been suggested by the same state of mind. You have suffered not merely for your religion, but some other causes which I am equally desirous of remedying. The Union of England with Ireland has withdrawn the Protestant aristocracy and gentry from their native country, and with these their friends and connections. Their resources are taken from this country, although they are dissipated in another; the very poor people are most infamously oppressed by the weight of burden which the superior ranks lay upon their shoulders. I am no less desirous of the reform of these evils (with many others) than for the Catholic Emancipation.4

The injustice of prejudice against Catholics, an immediate cause that could be addressed and which inspired Shelley to make a number of public orations in the Irish capital, was merely a symptom of the main problem with existing human society. For Shelley ‘Nature never intended that there should be such a thing as a poor man or a rich one’ (p. 50) and Catholic Emancipation should lead to ‘universal emancipation’ (p. 54). Once the delusions of religious division have been cast aside, people will realize that they are ‘not slaves and brutes, because they are poor’, but because ‘it has been the policy of

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the thoughtless, or wicked of the higher ranks … to conceal from the poor the truths which I have endeavoured to teach them’ (p. 59). Accordingly, collective action by the working classes of both England and Ireland (Shelley does not state it but it is clear that he includes Scotland and Wales) will transform society in ways that individual action cannot. The pamphlet may well be ‘a rather disorganized popular tract’ and its author someone who had a rather hazy understanding of class divisions of labour and the often debilitating and brutal nature of working-class toil.5 But the work demonstrates that Shelley was probably the only major writer who really understood the importance of the connections between classes in England, the British Isles and Ireland, as well as the links between the metropolitan centre and the empire that had developed throughout the eighteenth century. Wordsworth and Coleridge were notably hostile to popular protest and rebellion in Ireland, although Byron was more sympathetic.6 Jonathan Swift had represented the dehumanizing effects of English rule on the Irish lower classes in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and A Modest Proposal (1729).7 But it was Shelley who demonstrated the integral relationship between the union, formalized by the act of 1800, and the exploitation of class, arguing that classes throughout Ireland and Britain needed to unite if they were ever to be liberated. In doing so he paved the way for much thinking about and analysis of class in literary texts from the start of the nineteenth century to the present day. As Paul O’Brien has put it, Shelley: travelled as an outcast from his family and his class. In Ireland he came face to face with the misery, degradation and despair of the new industrial working class and it was this experience more than anything else that transformed his youthful sympathy for the poor and the oppressed into the anger, indignation and compassion of his adult life.8

The famous ending of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, written in the wake of the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ (16 August 1819), is aimed at Shelley’s fellow countrymen, as the earth reminds them of their untapped power and exhorts them to do their duty: ‘Men of England, heirs of Glory, Heroes of unwritten story, Nurslings of one mighty Mother, Hopes of her, and one another; ‘Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number, Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you Ye are many – they are few.’ 9

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Shelley was clear to whom he was speaking via his prosopopeia here, just as he acknowledged in the opening sentence of An Address to the Irish People that he was ‘not an Irishman’.10 Even so, he always sought to make international connections and was certain that the abolition of inequality in one country was unlikely to work on its own, especially without an understanding of the relationship between class structure and imperial expansion.11

Notes 1 Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), p. 99; Paul O’Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland (London: Redwords, 2002), p. 19. 2 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Prose, or the Trumpet of Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (Alburquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1954), p. 40. 3 O’Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland, p. 100. 4 Shelley’s Prose, p. 46. 5 Holmes, Shelley, pp. 106, 87. In a letter from Dublin to his friend, Hamilton Rowan (25 February 1812), Shelley asserted that he had ‘intentionally vulgarised the language’ of the pamphlet (cited in O’Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland, p. 217). 6 E. Wayne Marjarum, ‘Wordsworth’s View of the State of Ireland’, PMLA 55 (1940), 608–11; Timothy Webb, ‘Coleridge and Robert Emmet: Reading the Text of Irish Revolution’, ISR 8 (2000), 303–24; G. Wilson Knight, Lord Byron: Christian Virtues (London: Routledge, 1952), p. 133. 7 Ann Cline Kelly, ‘Swift’s Explorations of Slavery in Houyhnhnmland and Ireland’, PMLA 91 (1976), 846–55. 8 O’Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland, p. 20. 9 ‘The Mask of Anarchy; Written on the Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester’, in Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), lines 364–72 (pp. 338–44, at p. 344). 10 Shelley’s Prose, p. 40. Although he did state in a letter to William Godwin (26 January 1812) that he was ‘Irish’ and claimed kinship with them because he had ‘done with the English, I have witnessed too much of John Bull and I am ashamed of him’ (cited in O’Brien, Shelley & Revolutionary Ireland, p. 213). 11 Paul Foot, Red Shelley (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980), p. 252.

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Index

Aers, David 105 adultery 129, 156n.53 agrarian, agriculture 22, 31, 35, 43, 45, 58, 122, 124, 152, 164, 165, 166, 178, 207, 223, 257–9, 260 Agricultural Revolution 22, 46, 225, 231, 263 Ahmad, Ajaz 10 Akala 15 Alfred, King 232 alienation 10, 22 Allen, Robert 58 America 21, 211–12, 268 American War of Independence 22 American Revolution 264 Anabaptists 162 animals 96, 114n.88, 224 exotic 63, 79n.214 Ancient Constitution 58 Anderson, Benedict 13 Anne, Queen 64 apprentices, apprenticeships 53, 127, 135 Arden of Faversham 20, 127–32, 141 Arendt, Hannah 269 Aristotle 124 aristocracy 20, 21, 24, 32, 39, 45, 47, 58–9, 73n.108, 91, 118, 126, 134, 145, 148, 187, 188, 190, 191, 193, 203, 213, 214–15, 217, 244, 256, 267, 268, 269, 284 Arthurian Legends 40–1 Aske, Robert 46 Augustan 219, 220, 260 Augustus 201n.111

Austen, Lady Ann 262 authenticity 23, 244, 246, 247 authority 20, 34, 40, 44, 46, 49, 52, 73n.108, 84, 88, 90, 117, 131, 185, 193 patriarchal authority 52, 64, 164, 204 bagpipes 93 Baldwin, William 49 Ball, John 34, 36, 81, 85, 90, 111n.27 ballads 22, 23, 52, 127, 244–7, 266, 274 Barker-Benfield, G. J. 248 Barnfield, Richard 20, 140–2 barons 81 Bate, Jonathan 274 Batt, Jennifer 226 Bearman, Robert 125 Beaumont, Francis 145 beast fable 88 bees 230–1 beggars 82, 89, 110n.14, 157n.57, 274 Behn, Aphra 21, 188–94, 202n.130 Bennett, Arnold 11 Bible 82, 95, 138, 166–7, 180, 182, 183, 184, 196n.23, 199n.78 Black Death 19, 31, 39, 83, 98 Blackheath 42 Blake, William 23, 269–73, 274, 275 blazon 140, 159n.98 body 188 body politic 44 book production 270 Bossu, Rene Le 244 bourgeois, bourgeoisie 10, 20, 59, 94, 150

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322 Index breast feeding 16–17 Breton, Nicholas 55–7, 143 British Isles 285 Browne, Thomas 184 Browning, Robert 11 Bunyan, John 21, 180–7, 190, 198n.74, 208, 235n.24 Burke, Peter 52 Burke, Edmund 22, 266–7, 268, 269 Burney, Frances 17, 22, 251–6, 274 Burns, Robert 18, 22, 263–6, 267, 269, 274, 281n.86 Butterfield, Ardis 112n.49 Byron, Lord George Gordon 285 Cade, Jack 41–4 calico 205 Cambridge 50, 102, 121, 232 Camden, William 145 canals 204 Candlemas 173 capitalism 10, 11, 19, 38, 46, 47, 64, 66, 70n.50, 70n.56 agrarian capitalism 19, 49, 60 proto-capitalism 45 Caroline, Queen 218 carpenters, carpentry 278n.41 Castor, Helen 39 Catholicism 173, 183, 184 Catholic Emancipation 284 Catullus 172 cattle 165 Cecil, William 121 censorship 162, 177 Chapman, George 145 Charles I 144, 167, 171, 172, 174, 175 Charles II 182, 185, 200n.111 Charles, Prince 24 Chaucer, Geoffrey 19, 32, 33, 89–105, 109, 141 Book of the Duchess, The 91 General Prologue 91–2, 93, 98 Knight’s Tale 91, 94, 96, 98, 103 Miller’s Tale 93–8, 101, 102, 103 Nun’s Priest’s Tale 104–5, 107, 115n.98 Parson’s Tale 91 Reeve’s Tale 99–103 Troilus and Criseyde 105, 141

Chettle, Henry 125, 126 children 271–2, 274–6 chimneys 48 chimney sweeps 271–2 China 205 Christians, Christianity 19, 89, 90, 168, 172, 173, 179, 181, 183–6, 272 church 32–3, 44, 45, 46, 47, 63, 83, 89, 91, 138, 173, 206, 272 Church of England 126 Anglicans 184 Churchyard, Thomas 50–1, 125, 151 citizens 107, 117–19, 121, 134 civil war 41, 45 Civil War, English 20, 35, 38, 46, 47, 52, 54–5, 57, 77n.176, 144, 162–202, 203 Clarke, Lured 218 class and economics 1 and language 1, 36, 60, 61, 131, 163 and literature, literary style 123, 273 as political structure 1 class abuse 253 class ascent 213 class/social aspiration 3, 31, 39, 48, 90, 91, 93, 98, 99, 103 class barriers 135, 190 class conflict 19, 20, 32, 57, 61, 67, 73n.108, 81, 82, 100, 137, 163, 164, 165, 168, 204, 207, 208 class consciousness 10, 12, 13, 14, 19, 37, 57, 61, 81, 82, 117, 124, 126, 198n.72, 208, 245, 246, 253, 260 class culture 138 class definition 180 class difference 191, 201n.109, 210 class distinctions 10, 19, 212, 217, 268 class division 46, 52, 82, 104, 152, 163, 165, 260, 285 class envy 37, 108 class exploitation 226 class hierarchy 164, 194, 215, 243

Index 323

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class class class class

hostility 133, 244 identity 10, 23, 131 interest 13 mobility 23, 122, 127, 135, 213, 232, 233, 234, 267 class oppression 167 class persecution 186 class politics 51, 137, 170, 274 class prejudice 149 class pretensions 93–5 class propriety 274 class relations 47, 48, 52, 60, 84, 117, 157n.63, 177, 256 class resentment 41, 131, 137 class rivalry 98 class satire 97–8 class society 19, 64 class status 57, 129, 143 class stratification 215 class structure 98, 124, 169, 180, 268, 286 class struggle 10, 19, 32, 59 class system 14, 191, 233 class tension 53, 57 class unity 46 class war 32 classless 245, 247 classless society 167 labouring class 218, 221, 225, 226, 262 landed classes 33 leisured and monied classes 223 lower class 6, 9, 23, 32, 45, 51, 60, 63, 66, 90, 103, 109, 122, 129, 180, 183, 188, 221, 245, 253, 266, 273–4 lower-middle class 2, 180 middle class 15, 21, 23, 60, 61, 62, 66, 94, 126, 139, 180, 193, 203, 214, 215, 216, 245, 248, 251, 268, 273–4, 283n.122 middling sort 20, 42, 52, 53, 57, 58, 126, 142, 155n.42 one-class society 11 productive classes 242–4 ruling class 36, 38, 40, 44, 49, 52, 64, 91, 105, 178, 180, 182, 183, 191, 264, 267 social class 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 18, 58

underclass 183 upper class 3, 6, 8, 16–17, 21, 45, 48, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66, 81, 91, 95, 98, 117, 120, 125, 134, 187, 193, 202n.130, 205, 214, 217, 219, 245, 246, 251, 252, 253, 254, 260, 266 upper-middle class 4, 9, 59 women and class 227 working class 2, 4, 7, 9, 14, 15, 18, 23, 39, 59, 154n.28, 180, 186, 221, 222, 230, 259, 263, 267, 270, 273, 285 white working class 15 Clive of India 250 closet 48 Cockaigne, Land of 51, 133, 264 Cohn, Samuel K. 32 coins 167 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 23, 273, 285 Colley, Linda 207 Collier, Mary 17, 21–2, 220, 226–31, 232, 258, 274 colonialism, colonies 18, 21, 137, 138, 139, 192–4, 206, 208, 211–12, 213, 228, 250, 259, 268 commerce 19, 20, 21, 39, 46, 61, 67, 104, 183, 194, 203, 204–7, 232, 236n.36, 243, 244, 245, 248, 249, 253, 257, 263–4, 270 common, commons 37–8, 41, 43–4, 45, 46, 60, 119, 168, 170, 269 Commons’ Petition 46 commonplaces 148 culture 164, 168, 169 land 21, 39, 136, 165–6, 167, 187 people 165–6, 182, 192, 243 rabble 150 rights 21, 163, 165 sense 267 values 107 ‘true commons’ 36, 43 Common Prayer, Book of 49, 168 Commonwealth 38, 41, 51, 66, 88, 90, 106, 117–18, 122, 152n.4, 169 Commonwealth writing 50, 75n.133 communities 231, 257

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324 Index Condell, Henry 146, 147, 148 consumers, consumption 54, 56, 60, 61, 64–6, 82, 83, 151, 180, 231, 260, 262 consumerism 61, 63, 64 Corns, Tom 162, 164 Cornucopia 259 Coryat, Thomas 143 Coss, Peter 32 cottage 258, 279n.61 country 55–7 country house 17 country house poem 176 court, courtiers 55–7, 76n.165, 138, 139–40, 170–1, 174, 183, 187, 191, 219, 220, 238n.85, 246 courtly language 95 courtesy books 48, 52, 215–17 Cowper, William 22, 260–3, 278n.49 Crabbe, George 22, 257–60, 274, 279n.62 Cranmer, Thomas 49 credit 142, 253 Crime, Criminality 209, 211, 235n.26, 236n.35, 260 Cromwell, Oliver 163, 233 Cromwell, Thomas 46 Crowley, Robert 50 cucumber 3, 261–2 Dante, Alighieri 104 Davis, Paul 200n.104 Day, John 49 deference society 45 Defoe, Daniel 11, 21, 67, 203–12, 214, 215, 234, 235n.24, 248, 260 Colonel Jack 211–12 Every-body’s Business, is No-body’s Business 210 The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d 209–10 A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain 203–8 Moll Flanders 208–12, 215 Robinson Crusoe 208 Dekker, Thomas 20, 132–6, 137, 143, 145, 157n.74 Deloney, Thomas 157n.63

democracy, democratic 119, 211, 231 Denham, Sir John 54–5, 164, 183 Dennis, John 244 Dent, Arthur 184 Despenser, Henry, Bishop of Norwich 34 Devereux, Robert, 2nd Earl of Essex 135, 142 Devon 35 Digges, Leonard 146 Diggers, the 21, 36, 162, 164–8, 177, 180 dispossessed 52 Donne, John 11, 126, 145 Drayton, Michael 145, 147, 149 Dryden, John 218 Dublin 284 Duck, Stephen 17, 21–2, 218–30, 232, 233, 238n.85, 247, 261, 262, 264, 274, 279n.62 Dudley, John, earl of Northumberland 50 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 125 Dutch, The 174 Dyer, Christopher 13, 45 Eagleton, Terry 126 East Anglia 39, 49 East India Company 63, 250 economy, economic 32, 38, 45, 46, 54, 64–6, 164, 244, 246 Edinburgh 248, 263 education 7–9, 22, 23, 45, 102, 122, 127, 143–4, 155n.37, 178, 191, 192, 220, 226, 230, 236n.35, 243, 264, 273, 274 Edward II 44 Edward III 33 Edward IV 40, 41, 45 Edward VI 49 Edward VIII 24 Eikon Basilike 169, 192 Eliot, T. S. 11–12 Elizabeth I 117, 141 empire 61, 64, 205, 257, 260, 265, 285 enclosure 21, 22, 39, 49, 50, 136, 165, 167, 187, 200n.101, 206, 235n.14, 249 Engels, Freidrich 9

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Index 325 Enlightenment, The 243, 246 equality 14, 21, 35, 66, 171, 180, 190 Erasmus, Desiderius 140–1, 168, 169 Essex 33–4, 122, 203 establishment, The 4 estate, estates 54, 66, 82, 90, 98, 149, 176, 204 satire 82 theory of 45, 122 Eton College 232 Evans, James E. 231 everyday life 52, 60, 170, 171, 183, 186, 187 fabliaux 94, 97, 103, 113n.68, 113n.73 Fairer, David 218 family 10, 53, 101 famine 33, 51 farmers, farming 59, 60, 65, 151 feudalism 10, 19, 31–2, 38, 70n.50, 70n.56, 84, 104, 251 feudal oath 40 Fielding, Henry 22, 231–2, 233 Fischer, Ernst 10 fishing 168–71 Fletcher, Anthony 53 Flint, Christopher 213 Ford, John 133, 137 forests 165 Forster, E. M. 4–9 Howard’s End 4–9, 14 Foxe, John 200n.96 Freedman, Paul 32 France 35, 174, 266, 269 French Philosophers 65 French Revolution 22–3, 61, 67, 260, 264, 266–7, 269, 273, 274 French Revolutionary War 266 Friar Daw’s Reply 44 Frye, Northrop 269 gardens 204, 225, 255, 258, 261–2, 279n.62 Gay, John 62, 183, 221–2, 236n.28, 260 Gay, Peter 248 gender 16, 52, 57, 130, 137, 188, 190, 194, 227, 229, 256 genealogies 120

gentility 42, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 130, 131, 150–1, 152, 208–9, 210, 212, 215, 216–17, 227, 231, 252 gentry 12, 35, 39, 42, 47, 49, 50, 56, 58, 59, 60, 81, 101, 118, 120, 124, 203 George II 218 George III 265 George V 24 georgic 175, 261 Gerrard, Christine 218 Gilbey, James 24 Gissing, George 140 globalism 10 Glorious Revolution 192, 201n.123, 204, 205 Godwin, William 284, 286n.10 Golden Age 161n.142 Goldmann, Lucien 198n.72 Goldsmith, Oliver 249, 251, 256–7, 258 Goodridge, John 221 Gower, John 19–20, 33, 104–9, 115n.98 Confessio Amantis 106 Vox Clamantis 104–9 Gray, Thomas 22, 232–4, 249, 260 Great Yarmouth 39 Greece 228 Greene, Robert 125, 126 Grosseteste, Robert 32 Grossmith, George and Weedon 11 Hales, Robert, Lord Treasurer 34 Hammond, Gerald 173 Hammond, Paul 177 Hardy, Thomas Jude the Obscure 7, 9 Harris, Tim 183 harvests 152 Harvey, Gabriel 122 Hatcher, John 31 Heminges, John 146, 147, 148 Henry III 81 Henry VI 40, 41, 42 Henry VII 53 Henry VIII 39, 46, 131 Herbert, George 168 Herbert, Philip, earl of Montgomery 146

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326 Index Herbert, Thomas, eighth earl of Pembroke 204 Herbert, William, earl of Pembroke 145, 146, 147, 148 hereditary rights 119 Herrick, Robert 21, 171–7, 179, 180, 183 Hexter, J. H. 155n.42 Heywood, Thomas 144 Highland Clearances 263 Hill, Christopher 180 Hilton, Rodney 37 Hines, John 113n.68 Hobbes, Thomas 188 Holinshed’s Chronicles 127, 130 Holland, Hugh 145, 146 Hoppit, Julian 61 Homer 63, 220 horses 239n.97 horse racing 254–5 Howard, Thomas 14th Earl of Arundel 24 Hume, David 284 illegitimacy 236n.30 imagination 272–3, 275–6 India 205, 250 individualism 47–9 industry, industrial society, industrialization 10–11, 39, 45, 61 Industrial Revolution 11, 12, 13, 46, 57, 58, 259, 260 inheritance 53, 126 Ireland, Irish 3, 18, 133, 135–6, 138, 139, 163, 284–6 union with England 284–5 Italy 219 Jack Upland 44 James I 20, 47, 52, 120, 136, 172 James II 192 Jews 167 joint-stock company 61 John of Gaunt 33, 70n.44, 91 Johnstone, John 263 Jones, E. L. 231 Jones, Inigo 126 Jones, Owen 15

Jonson, Ben 125, 126, 135, 143, 145, 146, 147, 157n.74 Joyce, Patrick 16 Judas 82 Keegan, Brigit 221 Kent 33–4, 42, 105, 190 Kett, Robert 50 Killigrew, Sir Thomas 201n.118 king, kingship 43, 46, 88, 130, 167, 179–80, 192, 198n.66, 219, 268 King, Gregory 58 Klawitter, George 140 knights, knighthood 32, 36, 83, 93, 118 carpet knights 120, 153n.13 Knowles, Dom David 46 labour 54, 66, 82, 83, 87, 89, 222, 224, 225, 228, 230, 253, 261–3, 270, 273 aristocracy of 157n63 division of 22, 23, 65, 82, 242, 246, 248, 259, 270, 285 women’s 53, 227 labourers 41–2, 43, 53, 59, 121, 122, 132, 151, 187, 224, 225, 229, 233, 257, 263 landless 53 rural 60, 170, 218, 222, 225, 226, 231, 257–9, 263, 264, 276 Laissez faire policies 243 land 46, 194 market for 39, 46, 47, 52–3 ownership 203 landlords 31, 32, 34, 38, 47, 151, 165, 167, 176, 187, 264 landowners 46, 92, 213, 264 Langford, Paul 60, 248 Langland, William 13, 19, 33, 35, 44, 50–1, 80–9, 91, 98, 103, 106, 107, 109, 109n.1, 111n.20, 122, 141, 151 Larsen, Kenneth J. 138 Laslett, Peter 10–12 Laurence, Anne 16 law 83, 109, 185, 187, 208, 209, 212 Leavis, Q. D. 183

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Index 327 Levellers, The 21, 162, 163–4, 166, 167, 177, 180 libertine 187–90 liberty 164, 167, 228, 230, 240n.114, 243, 269, 270 Lipsedge, Karen 213 literacy 12–13, 47–8, 61, 103, 111n.23 literature 61, 62 world literatrue10 11 Liverpool 206 Locke, John 204 Lollardy 81, 91 London 19, 33, 34, 42, 46, 49, 52, 53, 62, 90, 123, 125, 126, 132, 133, 134, 137, 142, 178, 203, 208, 249 Lukacs, Georg 241n.127 Lund, Mary Ann 183 Luther, Martin 135 luxury 54, 60, 62, 63, 151, 250, 259, 260, 262, 265 Lyly, John 126 Machiavelli, Niccolo 119 Mackenzie, Henry 18, 22, 248–51, 277n.21 McPherson, James 247–8, 277n.21 Makdisi, Saree 270 Malory, Thomas 40 Mandeville, Bernard 230–1 Mann, Jill 90 manners 252–3, 255 manorial system 32, 38, 45, 165 Mantuan 257 manufacturing 39, 207, 208 manuscript circulation 200n.104 market, market forces 39, 45, 46, 231 free market 244 Marlowe, Christopher 126, 144 marriage 21, 57, 59, 83, 96, 101, 103, 126, 135, 137–40, 182, 211, 213–17, 250, 256 companionate 215 Marston, John 157n.74 martyrdom 186 Marx, Karl 6, 9–10, 11, 12–13, 18, 66, 180 Massays, Quentin 97

Massinger, Philip 20, 136–7, 140 A New Way To Pay Old Debts 136–7, 150 master-servant relations 17 material culture 47 Maundy Thursday 201n.123 May Day 172 merchants 43, 57, 58, 65, 81, 82, 123, 135, 139 Middleton, Thomas 126 milling 92 Milton, John 21, 167, 177–80, 194, 198n.66, 218, 219, 232–3, 259 mining 259 minstrels 245–6 mobility, social 1, 21, 24, 32, 39, 57, 102, 122, 127, 151, 213, 217 modernity 10–11 money, monetary 38, 46–7, 129, 140–2, 166–7, 182, 194 Monmouth, Geoffrey of 51 monasteries 46, 127, 131 monarch see king moral luck 6 Moffat, Wendy 4 money 32, 38, 245, 252 Moore, George 28 n.68 More, Thomas 165 Morrell, Thomas 218, 219, 220, 238n.84 Mortimer, Edmund, fifth earl of March 41–2 Muggletonians 162 Munster Plantation 125, 137, 138, 158n.90 murder pamphlets 127, 131 Murdoch, Iris 1–4 Muscantine, Charles 94 musicians 82 Nashe, Thomas 126, 144, 159n.95 National Trust 17 nature 10, 22, 170, 172, 204, 205, 258, 262 Neo-Classical Literature 221, 28n.85, 244 Neo-Platonism 189 Neville, Richard (‘Warwick the Kingmaker’) 40, 41

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328 Index New Forest 206 New Model Army 163, 164 Newman, Steve 245 newspapers 48, 162–3 Newgate Prison 211 Nine Years war 125 nobility 12, 37, 41, 56, 109, 118, 120, 185, 191–3, 263 Nonconformism 184, 185, 186 Norwich 50, 127 Norfolk 35, 49, 50 Norman Conquest 21, 24, 165, 167 Norman Yoke 165, 167, 179, 206 North, the 246 novel 17, 47, 59, 190, 208, 212, 213, 214, 216, 231–2, 248–9 nudity 239n.95 O’Brien, Paul 285 occupatio 174 Offley, John 169 Orwell, George 3 Ossian 22, 247–8 Ottoman Empire 228, 240n.115 Ovid, Ovidian 161n.142, 172, 188, 200n.111 Owens, W. R. 180 Paine, Thomas 22, 180, 198n.74, 267–8, 269, 281n.99, 284 paper, manufacture of 47 paradiastole 133 Parliament, Parliamentarian 33, 43–4, 118–19, 162, 163, 164, 169, 171, 173, 266 Parliamentarian 54 Paston family 39 pastoral 124, 161n.142, 168, 170, 175, 219, 220, 221–2, 223, 247, 248 Anti-pastoral 221, 233, 264 patronage 126, 140, 145, 149, 159n.100, 223, 226 Patterson, Lee 113n.65 peasants 13, 31–8, 45, 83, 84, 86–7, 89, 91, 98, 99, 101, 103, 106, 107–8, 245, 264 Peasants’ Revolt 13, 19, 33–8, 42, 44, 46, 68 n.21, 81, 85, 104–5, 108, 165, 244

peerage 47 Pembroke, earls of 204 people, the 177–8, 198n.61, 247, 266 Pepys, Samuel 11 Percy, Thomas 245–7 Peterloo, Massacre 285 Pilgrimage of Grace 46, 49 Pinto, Isaac di 66 plague see Black Death plain style 184 ploughman 35, 56–7, 82, 83, 90, 141, 151, 152, 165, 233 Poet Laureate 148, 232 Pole, William de la, first duke of Suffolk 42 politeness 254–5, 256 political economy 10, 27n.55, 243 poll tax 35 Polybius 153n.12 the poor and poverty 53, 59, 84, 151, 165, 166, 182, 201n.123, 207, 219, 221, 228, 234, 243, 250, 253, 256, 259, 260, 263, 264, 265, 267–8, 271–2, 274, 285 Pope, The 89 Papal Schism (1378) 89 Pope, Alexander 62–3, 218, 220, 221, 260, 278n.49 population 31, 53, 57, 83, 98, 137 popular culture 52, 60, 177, 246–7 populist 42 Porter, Endymion 173–7 Porter, Roy 58, 214 Presbyterians 162 primitive society 243 Prior, Matthew 218 prison 186 privacy 48 production, producers 64–6, 82, 242, 259, 260, 262 means of production 59 mechanised production 270–1 relations of production 13, 38 productivity 83 prophecy 51 property 57, 61, 187, 191, 213, 214, 230, 255, 268–9 prostitution 209 Protectorate 57 Protestant 49, 91, 163, 207, 284

Index 329 pub, the 231 publishing, publishers 140, 162, 177 Purgatory 82 Puritans 172, 173, 187 Puttenham, George 20, 122–4

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Quakers 162 race 15, 191–4, 236n.36 radicals 21 rape 193, 256 Rappaport, Steve 53, 137 rebellion 41–4, 46, 52, 68 n.20, 105, 106, 108, 192, 193 Kett’s Rebellion 50 Prayer Book Rebellion 49 Reddy, William M. 117 Reformation 13, 19, 20, 46, 47, 49, 50, 127, 129, 131, 135 religion 46, 50, 64, 144, 164, 169, 172, 180, 182, 236n.36, 284 republicanism 118–20, 162, 167, 169, 177 Restoration 20, 57–8, 162, 173, 177, 178, 180, 183, 184, 185, 187, 203 Reeve, Clara 17 revolution 10, 38, 168, 179, 180, 183, 260, 265, 268, 269–70 social revolution 131 rich, the 3, 81, 82, 181–2, 234, 262, 267 Rich, Richard 46 Richard II 33, 34–5 Richard, Duke of York 40, 41–2 Richardson, Roger 17 Richardson, Samuel 21, 213–17 Rima, Ingrid H. 244 Robin Hood 244–5, 247 Rollinson, David 37–8 romance 17, 81, 95 romanticism 265 Rome Augustan 220 Republican 118 Rowan, Hamilton 286 Rowley, William 137 Royalism, Royalists 21, 54, 162, 168, 171–2, 173, 177, 178, 202n.130

rural 32, 36, 174–5, 224, 234 Ruskin, John 7–8 Russell, Anna, Countess of Bedford 2 Saint Paul’s Cathedral 126, 127 Sannazaro, Jacopo 148 satire 19, 44, 62–3, 94–5, 97–8, 124, 150–1, 152, 188, 202n.130 Scotland, Scottish 18, 59–60, 203, 206–7, 246, 247–8, 263, 265, 285 Union of 1707 18, 21, 59–60, 206 Selden, John 145 sensibility 248–51, 255 serfdom 31, 33, 35, 36, 45 servants 52, 99, 129, 209–10, 212, 213–17, 231, 254–6 domestic service 208 indentured 212, 236n.43 sex 215 Seymour, Edward, Duke of Somerset 50 Shakespeare, William 11, 53, 125, 126, 127, 135, 144, 145, 146, 147, 152, 154n.28 As You Like It 135 Hamlet 135, 157n.74, 223 Julius Caesar 136 King Henry V 135 King Henry VI, Part Two 41–2 King Lear 249 Measure for Measure 133 Shapiro, James 133 sheep 165 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 284–6 Shrewsbury 206 Sidney, Sir Philip 126, 137, 138–40, 148 Simons, John 90, 97 Skelton, John 151 slavery 10, 21, 167, 179, 191–4, 211, 212, 228, 235n.15, 236n.36, 236n.43, 284 natural slavery 192 Smith, Adam 18, 22, 23, 64–6, 242–5, 246, 248, 259, 270, 273 Smith, Sir Thomas 20, 50, 66, 117–23 social contract 194 ‘Song Against the King’s Taxes’ 44 ‘Song on the Times, A’ 81

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330 Index ‘South Sea Bubble’ 61–2 Southey, Robert 218 Spain 174 Spargo, Tamsin 180 speech 183–4 Spence, Joseph 218, 220 Spencer, Lady Diana 24 Spencer, Robert Lord 24 Spenser, Edmund 20, 24, 122, 125, 126, 137–40, 148, 150, 151, 154n.24, 221, 247 sports 254 Standish, Ralph 34 Statute of Labourers 34 Stedman Jones, Gareth 1 Stillingfleet, Edward 184 Stone, Laurence 47 Straw, Jack 106 Sudbury, Simon, Bishop of London 34 Surrey 205 Sussex 226 Sutherland, Luke 81 Sweet, R. H. 59 Swift, Jonathan 218, 221, 285 taste 61, 253, 255 taxation 33–4, 37, 42, 66, 267 Taylor, John 20, 142–52 tea 3, 64 afternoon tea 2, 3 technology 48, 57, 60, 102, 204, 259, 262 tenants 31, 38, 45, 47, 99 tenant farmers 57, 263, 264 Tennyson, Alfred 11 Thames, River 142, 144 theatre 53, 126, 127, 132, 142, 250 Wars of the Theatres 135 Theocritus 261 Third Estate, the 266, 281n.93 Thirsk, Joan 165 Thompson, E. P. 19, 59, 180, 186 Thomson, James 224–5, 228, 278n.49 Tityrus 257 Tories 58, 162 Tour, Grand 134, 204, 219 towns 39–40, 45 Tracey, Larissa 114n.78

trade 39, 45, 61, 63, 132, 135, 139–40, 203, 204–7, 215 free trade 66, 206, 207, 210 trade guilds 32, 39, 53, 132, 142, 150 tragedy domestic tragedy 131 Transportation Act (1718) 212 treason 185 petty treason 131 trespass 186–7, 200n.101 Trotsky, Leon 23 Turner, Marion 103 Tyler, Wat 34, 106, 108 tyrant, tyranny 123, 130, 168, 179, 206, 265, 267, 268, 269 Underdown, David 55, 58 Unionism 266 university 9 Unwin, Mary and Newton 262 Urban, Malte 115n.101 urban society 19, 21, 32, 35, 40, 58, 107, 122, 178, 204, 233 usury play 136 vassalage 40 Venice 7 Victoria 24 villeinage 33, 68n.26 villages, village life 12, 33, 39, 60–1, 103, 206, 233, 250, 256–7, 260 Virgil 154n.24, 219–20, 230, 257, 261 Virginia 211–12 wages 31, 52–3, 83 wage-earners 57 Wainwright, John 219, 220, 238n.78 Wales 18, 203, 285 Walpole, Robert 62 Walsingham, Thomas 35, 36, 37, 81 Walton, Isaac 168–71, 177, 180, 183 Walworth, William, Lord Mayor of London 34 Walton, Isaac 21 wars Hundred Years War 40 Of the Roses 40–1 Washington, George 265

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Index 331 Watts, Isaac 272 Watts, John 42, 43 Webster, John 126 Wentworth, Thomas, earl of Strafford 173 Whigs 58, 162, 202n.130, 204, 212 Whole Duty of a Woman, A 216 William I 206 William and Mary 201n.123, 205 Williams, Nicholas M. 270 Wilmot, John, earl of Rochester 21, 187–9, 200n.104 Wilton House 204, 205, 215 Wiltshire 218 Windsor family 24 Winner and Waster 83 Winstanley, Gerard 21, 36, 164–8, 179, 183, 187, 190, 206 Witch of Edmonton, The 137 witchcraft 137 Wittenberg 135 Wolf, Eric 38

Wollstencraft, Mary 22, 268–9 Wood, Andy 49, 52 Wood, Ellen Meiksins 38, 165 Woolf, Virginia 154n.28 Worden, Blair 57 Wordsworth, William 23, 273–6, 285 work 87, 132–3, 172, 175–7, 211–12, 227, 228, 261, 276, 285 workers see labourers Working Men’s College 7 Wotton, Sir Henry 170 Wrightson, Keith 12, 57, 124 Wroth, Lady Mary 145, 148 Wylye, River 204 yeoman 43, 45, 49, 50, 57, 100–1, 102, 119, 121, 122, 123, 151, 152, 246 Young, Arthur 225 zeugma 64