Social Thought in England, 1480-1730 [First Edition] 9781317352303, 9781138956865, 9781315665504

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Social Thought in England, 1480–1730

Authorities ranging from philosophers to politicians nowadays question the existence of concepts of society, whether in the present or the past. This book argues that social concepts most definitely existed in late medieval and early modern England, laying the foundations for modern models of society. The book analyzes social paradigms and how they changed in the period. A pervasive medieval model was the “body social,” which imagined a society of three estates—the clergy, the nobility, and the commonalty— conjoined by interdependent functions, arranged in static hierarchies based upon birth, and rejecting wealth and championing poverty. Another model the book describes is “social humanist,” which fundamentally questioned the body social, advancing merit over birth, mobility over stasis, and wealth over poverty. The theory of the body social was vigorously articulated between the 1480s and the 1550s. Parts of the old metaphor actually survived beyond 1550, but alternative models of social humanist thought challenged the body concept in the period, advancing a novel paradigm of merit, mobility, and wealth. The book’s methodology focuses on the intellectual context of a variety of contemporary texts. A.L. Beier is a Professor Emeritus at Illinois State University.

Routledge Research in Early Modern History

In the same series: Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England by Ayesha Mukherjee Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe edited by Susan Broomhall and Sarah Finn India in the Italian Renaissance: Visions of a Contemporary Pagan World 1300–1600 by Meera Juncu Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe edited by Susan Broomhall and Sarah Finn India in the Italian Renaissance: Visions of a Contemporary Pagan World 1300–1600 by Meera Juncu The English Revolution and the Roots of Environmental Change: The Changing Concept of the Land in Early Modern England by George Yerby Honourable Intentions? Violence and Virtue in Australian and Cape Colonies, c. 1750 to 1850 edited by Penny Russell and Nigel Worden Social Thought in England, 1480–1730: From Body Social to Worldly Wealth by A. L. Beier

Social Thought in England, 1480–1730

From Body Social to Worldly Wealth A.L. Beier

First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 A.L. Beier ‘Utter Strangers to Industry, Morality and Religion: John Locke on the Poor,’ originally published in Eighteenth Century Life, vol. 12:3, pps 28–41. Copyright 1988. Republished in Chapter 17 by permission of the publisher and present rightsholder, Duke University Press. The right of A.L. Beier to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Beier, A. L., author. Title: Social thought in England, 1480–1730 : from body social to worldly wealth / by A.L. Beier. Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge research in early modern history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015041765 (print) | LCCN 2015044931 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138956865 (hbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315665504 () Subjects: LCSH: Social problems—Great Britain—History. | Public welfare—Great Britain—History. | Sociology—Great Britain—History. | Great Britain—Social policy—History. Classification: LCC HN385 .B436 2016 (print) | LCC HN385 (ebook) | DDC 306.0941—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041765 ISBN: 978-1-138-95686-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-66550-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For R.J.M.B., J.C.M.B., J.L.M.B., Z.J.M.B.

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Contents

List of Figuresix List of Tablesxi List of Abbreviationsxiii Preface xv Acknowledgmentsxix

PART I The Body Social, 1480–1550 1 The Body Imagined

3

2 Contexts and Conflicts

22

3 The Body Examined: Ancient, Medieval, Modern

49

4 Different Metaphor, Similar Message: Edmund Dudley’s “Tree of Commonwealth,” 1509–1510

63

5 The Body Historicized: Clement Armstrong, 1529–1536

79

6 Defending the Body: “Commonwealth-Men,” c. 1520–c. 1553

94

PART II Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 7 Moving Away From the Body: An Overview

123

8 Poverty, Wealth, and Labor: New Theory, New Practices

140

viii Contents 9 A Radical Reordering: Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)

156

10 Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536

182

11 Rethinking the Three Estates: Thomas Starkey’s “Dialogue Between Lupset and Pole,” 1529–1532

208

12 Virtue Meets Profit: The Brave New World of Sir Thomas Smith, 1549

234

PART III Society as Property, 1550–1697 13 Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600

263

14 Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656

297

15 The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730

325

16 Property Assailed and Defended: Grandees, Levellers, and Diggers, 1647–1649

362

17 Conclusions: The Past Makes the Future

397

Bibliography415 Index443

Figures

  A. Visual Representations of the Three Estates, c. 1140–1488.   3.1  Chronicle, John of Worcester, “Dreams of Henry I,” c. 1140: Ms. 157, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. Ink and tempera, 12¾ × 93⁄8”.   3.2  Cleric, Knight, and Laborer, 13th century French: British Library, Ms. Sloane 2435, fol. 85 (vellum).   3.3  Woodcut of Three Estates by Jacob Meydenbach from Prognosticatio by Johann von Lichtenberg, 1488. B. Visual Representations of Country Houses, c. 1900. 13.1  Bowl, 7.0” × 9.38”, castle-style country house,“Oak Vista.” Mason’s, England (author’s collection). 13.2  Small platter, 8.75” × 10.5”, land and seascape with country house motif and distant hills (author’s collection). 13.3  Decorative plate, 12.75”, family garden gathering with country house and hills (see also 13.2, 13.4). Spode, “Royal Jasmine,” England: Copeland (author’s collection). 13.4  Bowl, 6” × 7.6”, team and plow with family, farmer; livestock on border (author’s collection).

54 55 56

286 286

287 287

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Tables

  2.1    2.2    2.3  13.1  15.1 

Breakout of Tenancies Based on Tawney Data 40 Duration of Tenancies From Tawney Data 40 Breakdown of Entry Fines Based on Tawney Data 40 An Analysis of English Social Structure, c. 1600 288 Social Taxonomies in English County Histories, c. 1600–1714 327

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Abbreviations

Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee. 63 vols. London, 1885–1900. Ec.H.R Economic History Review EEH English Economic History. Select Documents. A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown, and R. H. Tawney, eds. London: G. Bell, 1914. EETS Early English Text Society EHD English Historical Documents C. H. Williams, ed., 1485– 1558. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1967. ESTC English Short-Title Catalog (1473–1800): www.estc.bl.uk MM The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. NA National Archives, London (United Kingdom) O.D.N.B Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. O.E.D Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Past and Present P&P PW The Political Works of James Harrington. J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, ScotS.T.C land, and Ireland, and of English Books PrintedAbroad, 1475– 1640, ed. W. A. Jackson, F. S. Ferguson, Katharine F. Pantzer, 2nd ed., 3 vols. London: The Bibliographical Society, 1986. Tudor Economic Documents. E. Power and R. H. Tawney, eds, T.E.D London: Longmans, 1924, 3 vols. Thomason Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, the Commonwealth, and Restoration, Collected by George Thomason, 1640–1661. 2 vols. London: The British Museum and Longmans, 1908. Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Wing Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, ed. Donald Wing, 2nd ed., 3 vols. New York: Modern Language Association, 1972. D.N.B

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Preface

I. RESEARCHING AND TEACHING THE SUBJECT Two pieces of professional experience shaped the writing of this book, one belonging to the world of research and another to that of pedagogy. Ultimately, these two worlds came together because of the marvelous opportunities afforded by a career in academe. As a researcher, this project arose from an ongoing interest in the history of the poor in early modern England, which began with a paper in Lawrence Stone’s seminar, developed into a Ph.D. dissertation, and culminated in publications, including a book on early modern English vagrants.1 Reflecting on this research today, I find I had witnessed a transformation in the history of social thinking, especially attitudes towards poverty, that extended to perceptions of the social order. This book is the product of the search for an explanation of this shift and of my efforts to teach the subject to students. II. RETHINKING THE POOR The signposts of change were many. In the early thirteenth century, Francis of Assisi preached that wealth was “profit . . . something corrupt.” For him, poverty “shone as an ideal of purity and romance”, and it occupied the first place in his attempt “to follow the life and poverty of Jesus Christ.” He argued that the highest law “was that in obedience to which a man stripped himself of this world’s goods and subjected himself to religious poverty and obedience.” St. Francis did not mean that voluntary poverty was the same as ordinary deprivation, because besides poverty, the monks who took the vows chose a broad-based life of servitude to the faith. Yet Franciscan ideals of poverty were not limited to the regular clergy and were felt in the wider world of the laity. The beliefs of the Franciscans spread widely, making them unique among urban apostolic movements in “their immense success, their universal appeal, their permanence . . .”.2 Contemporary social thought dovetailed with the Franciscan sanctification of poverty. The pervasive model of society in England between c. 1100 and

xvi Preface c. 1550, dubbed here “the body social,” posited a fixed hierarchy of three estates, each with distinct functions and the interdependence of rich and poor in an organic regime of mutual aid, a truly Christian community whose charitable bonds and institutions surpassed in importance feudal and family ties.3 Despite the power of the Franciscan ideal, later centuries challenged it. Humanists in fifteenth-century Italy questioned whether voluntary poverty was a desirable condition and even praised the positive value of wealth.4 This “social humanist” rethinking, which also developed in England, was the beginning of a brave new world fostering, it is suggested here, the rise of capitalism. In the humanistic reappraisal of voluntary poverty, a number of themes emerged. The elites identified destitution as a social problem that was immoral, unproductive, and even criminal. The only positive things about deprivation were the opportunities it presented to escape through productive labor, which was a key force in the development towards modernity. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a significant body of English elite opinion, including John Locke, actually subscribed to a theory of “the utility of poverty” because hardship forced people to work and increased national production and wealth.5 How can we explain the changing attitudes towards wealth and poverty? One school of thought argued that a “Protestant ethic” and “spirit of capitalism” were influential, because they were favorable to wealth and critical of voluntary poverty.6 Medievalists, however, observe that labor was a key social question before the Reformation, that elite attitudes critical of friars and the able-bodied unemployed were already formed in the fourteenth century. For that matter, the relationship between wealth and salvation was debated extensively between 250 CE and 650 CE.7 Another line of thinking proposed that population growth, landlessness, and declining living standards were more significant than religion in the evolving wealth/poverty dichotomy.8 Yet another explanation is the commercialization of land and trade. In this process, there was recurrent elite hostility to voluntary non-workers. Yet, the social policies of the “moral economy” were limited in efforts to aid the poor, who often stood in opposition to wealthy urbanites. But the labor force, contrary to Marx, was not proletarianized, for its main components were the numerous but relatively powerless servants and small landholders.9 This book examines the origins of capitalism from a new perspective; namely, that of perceptions of society. Part I (Chapters 1 through 6) posits that the period between 1480 and 1549 was characterized by a concept of the body social of three estates, which persisted as a model of society into the first half of the sixteenth century. Part II (Chapters 7 through 12) examines social humanist thinking from 1516 to 1549, which challenged the body metaphor without entirely displacing it. Part III (Chapters 13 through 17) finds that the period from 1550 to 1730 saw the development of the social humanist ethic in a wide range of contemporary sources that treated wealth as the organizing principle of society and hardship as its bane.

Preface  xvii The dates chosen for study may need some explanation. There is nothing magical about the dates 1480 and 1730. The starting and terminal dates reflect the author’s aim to include the late medieval and early modern periods and thus, possibly, to capture “changes over time.” It is often observed that social norms and structures change slowly. Over the long term of 250  years, this book suggests, the evolution of English social thinking was gradual, yet dynamic. In addition, the dates 1480 and 1730 represent a conscious attempt to break away from traditional histories of politics, religion, and warfare, to assert that the social has its own chronology, its own historiographical significance, and heuristic value. This book draws upon a variety of sources, which include canonical authorities John of Salisbury (c. 1115–1176), the author of the Policraticus (1159), Sir John Fortescue’s, On the Laws and Governance of England (1468–71), Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1679–81). But an effort is also made to include people and places outside the corridors of power and to include rare but precious manuscript sources as well as published ones. They include the authors of popular allegories, plays, poems, and songs; the writings of a London interior decorator, Clement Armstrong; an impassioned petition by John Bayker, a husbandman opposed to rural depopulation; the defense of the body social by the preachers Thomas Becon, Hugh Latimer, and Thomas Lever in the 1540s; descriptions of county social structures by country gentlemen; and attacks on the property of the aristocracy, the Church, and the Crown by the Levellers and Diggers in the 1640s. Even when the primary sources are well known, I suggest they have rarely been examined from a social perspective. The author is under no illusions that his research is definitive. The first three chapters lean heavily upon secondary sources to provide historical context, or what one scholar has termed “the environment.”10 As the notes for these chapters attest, especially Chapter 2, the late medieval period has in recent decades seen a remarkable flowering of historical research and publication. Foolish would be the non-specialist who claimed to have mastered this burgeoning literature.11 III.  THE POWER OF PEDAGOGY The second piece of history behind the writing of this book concerns the intersection of scholarship and teaching in higher education. University administrators encourage professors to link research and instruction in the courses they teach, but too often, this is an impossible task. The historian may be expected to instruct students in surveys covering several centuries, which require learning timelines and new discourses, but which permit minimal student participation in research. Or, the professor’s research may involve technical skills, such as foreign languages or experience with paleography, which only an advanced graduate student might have. Fortunate

xviii Preface are those university teachers, then, who find themselves in positions to overcome these obstacles. In the 1960s I was offered the opportunity to teach a “special subject” in the history department at the University of Lancaster (U.K.). The “special,” as it was colloquially known, was a two-unit class that accounted for almost a quarter of a student’s final degree. At Lancaster, it ordinarily required the student to master 1,000 to 1,500 pages of primary source materials, as well as the relevant secondary literature. British colleagues and students were quite tolerant of a foreigner wanting to teach “social problems and policies in Tudor England,” which I proceeded to do for nearly two decades. That course brought me into contact with many of the primary sources discussed in this book, as well as with fairly willing partners in their study. Then in the 1980s, when my colleague Austin Woolrych stepped down— “retiring” to write several major monographs!—I had the chance to undertake the daunting, indeed impossible, task of filling his shoes in the midseventeenth century. The result was the chance to engage with the primary sources of that era. Then at Illinois State University, where I taught after leaving Britain in 1990, I had several more opportunities to present the subject matter of this book to students in a master’s program, for which I am most grateful.

Acknowledgments

I have incurred many intellectual and personal debts in the course of writing this book. Fellow scholars have patiently read, listened to, and commented upon various versions of the text. They include Crystal Bartolovich, Robert Bucholz, Craig Dionne, Barbara Hanawalt, Arthur Kinney, Ethan Shagan, and William C. Woodson. I am especially indebted to Professor Woodson, who has spent countless hours attempting to make sense of my sometimes opaque prose. I was fortunate to be elected to the College of Arts and Sciences Lectureship at Illinois State University in 2000, where the audience, including the late Barbara Kurtz and Paul Lindauer, posed informed and thoughtful questions. I am also grateful to Anthony Crubaugh, Alexander Grant, Alison Grant, and Karl Gunther, who provided valuable bibliographical references. Of course, none of these fine scholars is responsible for the inevitable imperfections of the manuscript. Over the years I have been fortunate to receive institutional support for research, including grants and speaking invitations. Those who have generously made grants include the Nuffield Foundation, the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Newberry Library of Chicago, Illinois State University, the Ohio University Press, and the British Consul General of Chicago. Institutions supporting historical and literary research have kindly invited me to speak, including the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris; All Souls College, Oxford; the Social Science History Association; the North American Conference on British Studies (and local affiliates); the American Historical Association; the International Economic History Congress; the World Shakespeare Congress; the Newberry Library Colloquium and Symposium; the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies; the Shakespeare Association of America; the Economic and Social Research Council (U.K.); the Renaissance Society of America; Princeton University; the University of Chicago Renaissance Seminar; the University of Warwick (U.K.); and the University of Illinois Renaissance Colloquium. I owe a great debt to the students I  have taught on both sides of the Atlantic. In Britain, they included Keith Brandwood, Mick Crowther, Kevin Halloran, Jon Holland, David King, John Martin, David Rudd, Amanda Shephard, Jane Shuter, Rogan Taylor, and Nicholas Webb. In the United States, they are Sally Heinzel, Neal Klomp, Edwin Lind, Paul Lindauer, and

xx Acknowledgments Mark Taylor. The book and I have greatly profited from their engagement with the subject. Further, I  wish to recognize the support of friends who have provided hospitality on numerous occasions during research trips. They are Beatrice and Hugo Blake, Alison and Sandy Grant, Sue Joiner and Gordon Sturrock, and Rogan and Sue Taylor. Without their generosity, the research for this book would have been extremely difficult to complete. I must also acknowledge permission to include my previously published work, viz., Duke University Press, for “ ‘Utter Strangers to Industry, Morality and Religion’: John Locke on the Poor,” originally published in English Culture at the end of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin and David F. Morrill, Eighteenth Century Life 12 n.s., no.  3 (November, 1988): 28–41, copyright 1988, republished by permission of the publisher and present rightsholder, Duke University Press; and Ohio University Press for “ ‘A New Serfdom’: Labor Laws, Vagrancy Statutes, and Labor Discipline in England, 1350–1800,” in Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008) ed. A. L. Beier and Paul Ocobock: 35–63; copyright held by the Center for International Studies, Ohio University Global and Comparative Studies series, no. 8; this material is used by permission of Ohio University Press, www.ohioswallow.com. For the photographs of the four plates in Chapter 13, between pages 285 and 287, I  am most grateful to my friend Richard G. Hopkins, who has made Victorian-era tableware representations of country houses come alive as though they were newly thrown and glazed. Regarding the same materials, I am grateful to my son, Zachary James Beier, for introducing me to the vocabulary and practices of historical archaeology. For their professional expertise as lawyers, I am indebted to my sons Jesse C. Beier and Jacob L. Beier, and to my firstborn, Robert J. Beier, for his knowledge of technology and the art of angling. My final acknowledgements are saved for last, but they are the most important of all because they concern people who have provided vital moral support. When life has occasionally been challenging, I have been able to draw upon a reliable and comforting resource—that of four wonderful sons—and my gratitude for their support is reflected in the dedication. In addition, I have enjoyed the partnership of Andrea C. Seese, who has provided critical editorial expertise, but above all an unwavering belief in the author. New Auburn, Wisconsin October 2, 2015 NOTES   1. “Poor Relief in Warwickshire, 1630–1660,” Past and Present, no. 35 (1966), 77–100; “Studies in Poverty and Poor Relief in Warwickshire, 1540–1680,” Princeton University, Ph.D. thesis, 1969; Masterless Men. The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985; paperback edn. 1987).

Acknowledgments  xxi   2. R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 282–3; R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1967; orig. pub. 1953), 107.   3. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 153, 158; Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 289–290.   4. On humanistic disdain for the poor, see Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 255–6, 290–2. Cf. statements quoted ibid. 258, that before humanism, terms meaning poor were not used to denote criminals and outcasts.  5. Edgar S. Furniss, The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920; repr. New York: Sentry Press, 1967), ch. 6. Locke still favored attempts at the moral reform of the poor: see Chapter 17 below.   6. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner’s: 1958), 177–8; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (N.p.: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1926; repr. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), 114, 265 (Tawney observed pre-Reformation hostility to “indiscriminate almsgiving” but said it was given “new emphasis” by Protestant reformers). A  judicious critique of Weber is Richard Whatmore, “The Weber Thesis: ‘unproven yet unrefuted,’ ” in William Lamont, ed., Historical Controversies and Historians (London: Routledge, 1998; repr. 2001, 2003), 106.   7. Chris Given-Wilson, “The Problem of Labor in the Context of English Government,” in James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, W. M. Ormrod, eds., The Problem of Labor in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000), 85; Sarah Rees Jones, “Household, Work and the Problem of Mobile Labor: The Regulation of Labor in Medieval English Towns,” ibid. 153. For early debates, see Peter Brown, The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), ix–xv.   8. Lawrence Stone, “Introduction to the Torchbook Edition,” in R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1912), xi; Jane Whittle, “Introduction: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited,” in Whittle, ed., Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440–1660: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2013), 13.   9. Christopher Dyer, “The Agrarian Problem, 1440–1520,” in Whittle, Landlords and Tenants, 23–30; David Ormrod, “Agrarian Capitalism and Merchant Capitalism: Tawney, Dobb, Brenner and Beyond,” ibid. 200–15; Andy Wood, “The Loss of Athelstan’s Gift,” ibid. 89, 99; Whittle, “Conclusions,” ibid. 219. 10. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), ch. 1. 11. Valuable bibliographies are found in S. H. Rigby, English Society in the Later Middle Ages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Richard Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530: Economy and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Later Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 2005); Christopher Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod, eds. A Social History of England, 1200-1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Christopher Dyer A Country Merchant, 1495–1520: Trading and Farming at the End of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Part I

The Body Social, 1480–1550

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1 The Body Imagined

I. INTRODUCTION The belief in people’s freedom to improve their social positions, based upon personal merit, is an ideological cornerstone of modern American society. Arguably, one reason Barack H. Obama was elected president of the U.S. in 2008 and 2012 was that he articulated, even personified, this ideal of upward progress for the meritorious, no matter what their background. Obama presented himself as the champion of the middle class and of those who aspired to join it through the avenue of equal opportunities. His campaign in 2012 targeted social inequality and downward mobility as threatening the middle class. Generally, when we in the U.S. discuss civil rights, education, gender, and race, these discussions often involve equal opportunities for upward mobility; above all, whether routes are open to improve one’s lot and that of one’s children, ethnic community, and social class. What are the historical origins of the ideals of meritocracy and upward mobility? The question is worth asking, for it was not always so in Europe. For roughly half a millennium, from c. 1100 to c. 1600 CE, as Chapter 1 through 6 show, social norms did not include equal opportunity or social mobility. Quite the contrary: social position was determined by birth. With the exception of the clergy, rank was dictated by your parents’ position. If you were born a lord or a peasant, you inherited your status for life. The system of serfdom forbade changing your physical residence as well as your social status.1 Social position was defined, not by education or merit, but by being born into one of three “estates,” each with its own special functions and a place in a hierarchy: those who prayed (clergy), those who defended society and governed it (nobles, aristocrats), and those who toiled in the fields (peasants or rustici). The estates belonged to a fixed order: the clergy at the top, followed by the nobility, and below them, the most numerous, the commonalty. The ideal was that the estates, despite having differing roles and ranks, worked interdependently and harmoniously with the others. These estates were the constituent members of what is termed here the body social, a model whose half-life extended into the sixteenth century in England and longer in other European states.

4  The Body Social, 1480–1550 This book examines how the English stopped thinking that society should be an unchanging hierarchy, which ultimately led, at least in the U.S., to a worldview that accepted, even reveled in, upward social mobility. When, where, how, and why did the transformation in theories take place? The answers to these questions are not self-evident in the historical literature and are imperfectly captured by abstract statements about “the decline of feudalism,” “the rise of the middle classes,” and “the Protestant ethic.” This book’s premise is that studying social thought in late medieval and early modern England allows us to see how contemporaries defined their evolving culture. Chapters 7 through 17 undertake this task, advancing the thesis that after c. 1500, the theory of a body social of three estates underwent serious questioning, and was ultimately supplanted with a model ranking people based upon their accumulation of worldly wealth and position. II. QUESTIONING THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOCIAL We must begin, however, by noting that some authorities doubt whether social thinking even existed in Europe before c. 1800. That questions linger about the existence of social thought might seem surprising. Already in the early fifteenth century, one distinguished figure, Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444), Chancellor of Florence, confidently asserted that “man is a social animal, as all philosophers agree . . .”.2 Yet, various authorities did question the existence of the concept of society. One historian maintains that society as a collectivity “did not exist before 1600” in England. Scholars who study the period after 1800 may be justified in using the term, but medievalists and early modernists should eschew it, except possibly in reference to small groups. When the term was more widely used in the work of John Locke (1632–1704), its principal application was to civil society rather than to the social.3 Although a “new social history” has flourished since the 1960s, doubts about its validity are no longer uncommon in what now seems to be a crisis of faith among historians. According to critics, the social became a virtual theology because it “came to signify the complex and ultimately unknowable reality of human existence . . .”. It is asserted that society is a slippery concept with a host of meanings—e.g., formal associations such as guilds and trade unions, informal ones as limited as companionship and friendship, or much larger ones embodied in nation-states—that defy generalization. Postmodernists are prepared to treat society as no more than a product of ideology or discourse, “a discursive fact” but not a “self-evident and permanently valid category of the real world.”4 Some historians identify difficulties in adopting the ontology of the social. One is the tendency to treat as “natural” and inevitable the sodalities of the group, rather than as outcomes of processes requiring explanation. A second pitfall is the tendency to stress the synchronic over the diachronic, so that change is considered to be dysfunctional rather than being inherent in groups and processes. Third and fourth, the social limits processes to

The Body Imagined  5 individuals and the structures to which they belong, rather than identifying links between entities.5 In recent times, sociologists, philosophers, and politicians inform us that the concept of society is “all but dead,” and that attempting to find norms of human relations is passé. Social networks have superseded the paradigm of structures and functions. As Simmel put it, “society is merely the name for a number of individuals connected by interaction.” We are governed by “tele-relations” that are “fluid and diverse” and by postmodern “aesthetics, language and singularity” as against the collective, the material, and the social. Besides, the social was always mythical. To Baudrillard, it was a simulation, the “effect of second-order simulacra . . .”.6 Still others have thrown out baby and bathwater alike. The sociologist Michael Mann asserted that he “would abolish the concept of ‘society’ altogether.” Rejection of the social even appeared in the political world, with the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declaring, “[T]here is no such thing as society . . .”.7 If we accept such propositions, however, we risk ignoring the thoughts of past people, treating them as muddle-headed children. We will also consign to the dustbin the work of a long line of distinguished social scientists. What will remain are concepts of ideology and imagined societies, with concessions to the role of dominant classes in the retention and exercise of coherent cultures.8 What possible defenses are there for thinking about the social? Consider the proposition that language, while powerful in supplying semantics and syntax, is also social, because meanings are possible only through preexisting knowledge and relations. It may be that “all social relations are semiotically generated,” including information about quantification and social structures, but it is also the case that “society,” as Bruni asserted, provides the “ontological ground of our common life as humans”, unambiguously representing “interdependence in human relations.”9 Language shapes social perceptions in a number of ways. It is almost impossible to think about society without reference to metaphors and models, whether of structures, orders, classes, body members. Yet we must guard against assuming that legislation prescribing social formations meant that people actually behaved according to “the rules,” because sometimes they did not. In the three-estate model, people sometimes changed positions, as when wealthy merchants were promoted to noble status, even though social mobility was officially discouraged. Reading a social vocabulary was not objectively or universally “true,” because those who wrote it had a purpose in doing so. Despite these caveats, this book contends that it is possible to observe contemporaries ordering their social worlds using language according to precepts held in common, and expressing beliefs that were regularly debated. No doubt these ideas were expressions of one’s affinities, but it is precisely the task of the scholar to identify those interests.10 Recent scholarship is more optimistic about the existence of social thought in England. It suggests the Middle Ages gave birth to a populist culture focused

6  The Body Social, 1480–1550 on the concept of the “commonweal” that shaped England’s constitutional and cultural development into the seventeenth century.11 Another authority finds that the use of the language of “society” and “modern” developed in mid-sixteenth-century England, demarcating the early modern period from the Middle Ages and questioning the notion that modernity only began in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.12 These recent studies are valuable contributions to the historiography. No longer can we believe that notions of “the social” did not exist before 1700. Yet, the story is incomplete, because it leaves out essential developments and questions. It omits discussion of an alternative, pre-existing medieval paradigm, the body social of three estates.13 III. SAVING THE SOCIAL This book examines whether concepts of society existed and how, if they did, they were constructed—according to class, function, moral philosophy, or worldly wealth? What norms did they follow, and what were their institutional manifestations? This study maintains that concepts of society did exist in late medieval and early modern England. As Chapters 1 through 6 show, the paradigm of the body social retained its currency into the sixteenth century in England and beyond, appearing in a variety of texts and contexts. In the twenty-first century, England retains a hereditary monarchy, a titled nobility based upon birth, and an official church, just as it had in the twelfth century. But does that mean nothing has changed in 900 years? In reality, early modern English social thought saw dynamic changes. The transition included a new order ranked by wealth in “sorts” or social classes, rather than functions and birth. Chapters 12 through 17 show how this new paradigm was articulated between 1549 and 1730. How does one explain the demise of the old and the birth of a new social paradigm in England? From the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the theory of a body social began to be challenged by new beliefs. The new model, envisioned a social order based upon novel precepts, which are examined in Chapters 7 through 11. The origins of the change, it argues, lay in a brand of humanist thought best described as “social.” It must be emphasized that this humanist thinking is not the same as “humaneness,” nor “humanitarianism,” nor modern humanist theology. Rather, it sought to improve the moral and intellectual character of its students and practitioners, to contribute to the health and wealth of the state and its subjects, even to improve their table manners! Chapter 7 defines social humanist thought in greater detail.14 New precepts included many of the hallmarks of modern society, especially personal virtue, education, or “merit” as determinants of social position, rather than functions based upon birth. Instead of belief in organic harmony and unity, there was a growing recognition of social divisions based upon conflicting interests, often driven by market forces, now perceived as “natural” phenomena in the social order. There also developed the acknowledgement, even encouragement, of social mobility as opposed

The Body Imagined  7 to a fixed social hierarchy. And, there was a rejection of voluntary poverty and its manifestation in mendicancy and, contrariwise, an affirmation of the value of work and wealth to the person, the family, and the state. Over the long term, the new social ideology possibly fostered real-life economic and social development. In the short and medium terms, the new precepts had policy implications, which established changes in social norms. In some important respects, they advanced the growth of state power, which sought to mitigate social conflict by applying theories of a patriarchal order and a “moral economy.” At the parish level, the rejection of voluntary poverty, common to virtually all Christian sects of the period, stimulated a rethinking of charitable giving and the growth of government welfare, as Chapters 7, 8, and 17 show, based upon the distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy,” means-testing the poor, and the application of make-work schemes.15 The flip side of the rejection of begging was the affirmation of the obligation to labor if one were able, beginning with legislation in the fourteenth century, which lasted into the nineteenth century, and which is discussed in Chapter 8. The new social principles were not always benign in intent and application. The rejection of voluntary poverty led to the criminalizing of the able-bodied unemployed and to harsh institutional regimes of correction and surveillance, with which we still live today.16 Compulsory labor for all (with limited exceptions) may also be seen as the origin of the institution of slavery that flourished in European colonies beginning in the sixteenth century.17 The recognition and acceptance of market forces opened the door to the conversion of common lands into private ownership, which provoked abortive government intervention. The upshot was to recast the structure of the English village for centuries to come, which Chapters 2 and 14 examine. In the midseventeenth century crisis, the political ramifications of the new paradigm of wealth were debated, with the landowning elite opting for the disenfranchisement of the propertyless, as the discussion of the Levellers in Chapter 16 suggests. The explanation of the new social ethic was not self-evidently structural in nature; that is, originating in new economic and political institutions or developments such as the decline of feudalism or the rise of the middle classes. Europe had been urbanizing since the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but the body social model persisted unchallenged until c. 1500. Individual property rights were respected in England since the Middle Ages, but that security did not produce the reshaping of social theories.18 Rather than structures or the “Protestant ethic,” it was a radical cultural rethinking that shaped a new model of society.19 IV. A CASE STUDY OF THE SOCIAL Contrary to doubters, it is possible to discuss the existence of models of “society” before c. 1800. What is more, there are grounds for believing that the foundations of a society in which wealth determined rank were laid before 1700. The proof lies in the propensity of contemporaries to think

8  The Body Social, 1480–1550 socially. This includes the ability to imagine holistic social schema and to identify their constituent parts. To begin, evidence from early periods suggests people were capable of constructing concepts of the social. There were no regular national censuses of society until the late eighteenth century and no scientific opinion polls until the twentieth. But there were local censuses and records of popular beliefs in the medieval and early modern periods. The best-known census is the catasto conducted in 1427 in Tuscany, but others were executed throughout Europe, including England in the 1500s and 1600s.20 Like the ancient Roman “censor,” medieval and early modern towns occasionally surveyed their populations, often for military and taxation purposes. In Tuscany, the catasto was amazing for the detail of its documentation, much of it social in nature. It is significant that the census was conducted while Bruni was chancellor, for he was one of the initiators of the civic brand of humanism, which this book contends was also social in character. Florence experienced the popular uprising of the ciompi or wool workers in 1378, which the elites thought threatened their position. Two decades later, Florence faced the military threat of its neighbor, Milan. The catasto’s immediate purpose was to fend off these menaces, or as later stated, to be “the salvation and preservation of the Florentine republic, of its estate and of its liberty.” While expressed in political terms, Florentine survival was a preeminently social purpose in the eyes of Bruni and his elite contemporaries. Although imperfectly executed, the catasto and other allied measures sought to ensure that everyone was taxed. The principle was social because it covered everyone in the republic—the well off and the poor, city dwellers and rural ones, free and subject populations, women and children, as well as adult males.21 The catasto compiled information that can be used to study Tuscany as a society. The survey’s coverage was impressive, affording information on a host of subjects—demographics, including population distribution and movements, ages (and ages at marriage), baptisms, deaths, life expectancy, household sizes, the impact of plague, the sexes, and, notably, the economy, including the distribution of wealth, taxable wealth, household sizes according to wealth, types of community (urban/rural), and occupations. The object was to achieve a “territorial integration” of the whole of local society. No wonder scholars consider the measure’s sponsors “among the early advocates of modern fiscal methods.”22 On a smaller scale, many of these subjects can be observed two centuries later in Elizabethan Warwick, an English country and shire town that is probably typical of many others.23 Warwick is well documented. It is possible to chart the demographic and economic development of the town, which included a growing population and a sluggish economy, and worsening social problems, including begging and vagrancy.24 In addition, the history of town charities can be written from extensive documentary sources, including probate records, which suggest the Henrician and Edwardian Reformations had negative impacts upon Warwick’s charities and its poor. New foundations did not keep up with price inflation, nor did they make up for the lost institutions.25

The Body Imagined  9 Warwick was sometimes better endowed with information than the catasto, including the history of the poorest of the poor and attitudes towards them. Warwick officials interviewed and arrested itinerants from outside the town in the 1580s, levied taxes for assistance in 1582, regulated the grain trade after a bad harvest in 1586, and conducted a census of its poor residents in 1587. These sources yield surprisingly rich details of life at all levels of society. We can document elite discourse regarding the poor and the town’s economy and politics, because two major players in Elizabethan government and religious life—Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (c. 1532– 1588), and his Puritan protégé Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603)—intervened in the town’s affairs. We can access these elite interventions and the social principles they exhibited because of exceptionally rich corporation records from the 1580s, which include the town burgesses’ disputes over pre-Reformation charities and Church properties. Further, we can examine probate records to document attitudes towards charity to the poor. Judging by bequests, did the community reject begging and eschew “casual” giving to the voluntarily poor in the form of funeral doles, as humanists wished, or did they prefer the creation of ongoing foundations? Warwick grappled with the social in dealing with the problem of the poor. Anyone doubting the impact of demographic and economic forces upon society should examine Warwick’s history in the sixteenth century. Probate records show slow progress in the value of testators’ goods until the 1580s and few new trades: farming remained the leading occupation into the seventeenth century. Yet in the same period, the population of the town was growing, seemingly through natural increase and immigration, rising from about 1,700 in 1544 to 2,500 in 1586. The upshot was hardship, which ultimately involved the entire community by posing the question, “Who pays?”26 The mechanism to determine the answer was a survey in 1582 of the entire population of potential taxpayers and the poor, based upon assessments of ability to contribute. The history of taxation is sorely neglected, yet it provides a potential key to imagining “the social.” It connects with the keen social humanist interest in wealth and poverty discussed in Part II of this book. The catasto instituted comprehensive taxes in order to secure the republic against Milanese incursions and against the rebellions by the poor. In England’s case, there was a multi-pronged state policy dealing with the poor that involved relieving those deemed truly needy, especially the disabled, while punishing and/or employing unemployed “vagabonds.” Invoking public authority, in the form of taxation and criminal law, was the solution. As later chapters show, the policy’s origins lay in late medieval critiques of voluntary poverty, in the reordering of the Church’s property and social role after Henry VIII’s break from Rome, and in Tudor legislation that dealt with a myriad of groups defined according to policy. The upshot was the reorganization of community responsibility for the poor.27 Official efforts to encourage community action took many forms. They included an impressive and lengthy series of Acts of Parliament, which defined a host of destitute and unemployed groups and specified actions to

10  The Body Social, 1480–1550 employ, relieve, or chastise them.28 There were numerous treatises on England’s social ills, from More’s Utopia in 1516 to John Locke’s intervention in 1697. These moves are examined, respectively, in Chapters 9 and 17. In Warwick, depositions were taken from the able-bodied poor suspected to be vagabonds, which provided exceptionally detailed accounts of the lives of this “other” population.29 In addition, censuses of the poor were conducted that were similar to the catasto in their detail.30 Local communities sought through censuses to determine the need for relief and their ability to pay. Censuses have been discovered for two English towns, including Warwick, and five villages. Obviously, this is not a large or randomized sample, but these surviving tax lists represent some of the best evidence we have of local social structures. Based upon their wealth, four groups of the population were ranked in five of the seven places, while in two cases, three groups were noted.31 At Warwick St. Mary’s, the top income group included those “charged towards the relief of the poor and impotent people  .  .  .”. The second highest were “householders in Warwick thought able to maintain their households without help of others’ relief, but upon their own labors.” The third highest were unable to contribute because they were “ready to decay,” while the lowest were “poor inhabitants . . . as be thought mete to be relieved weekly with money by their neighbors more able . . .”.32 At Warwick, varied levels of ability to pay and the need for assistance were reflected in the amounts levied, which were recorded alongside people’s names.33 Ranked gradations similar to Warwick’s were also found in the other communities. In sum, here was a hierarchy based upon wealth, need, income from labor, and hardship, organized on the principle that a community took responsibility for relieving the needy based upon the householder’s ability to pay taxes and the needs of recipients. Here was an example of a local society taking action that reflected national debates and policy-making. At Warwick, the social and its implications were multifaceted. It was not a matter of raising taxes tout court. Some might see a neat division between “indiscriminate” medieval charitable practices and institutions—doles at funerals, mutual aid between neighbors, hospitals for the ill and destitute (often Church foundations)—and modern-looking, discriminatory secular institutions prefiguring a welfare state. Certainly, the Warwick authorities reported that neighborly charity was practiced, including “meat and drink at diverse persons’ [homes] according to every man’s ability . . .”.34 But there was more to Warwick’s story than the binaries of indiscriminate medieval charity and modern discriminatory welfare.35 What appears to be a modest institutional shift turned out to be a thorough rethinking and reorganization. Rhetorical, discordant voices figured large in the Warwick story, and so did the material social world of economic and demographic conditions and institutional upheavals. In Warwick’s move, a cacophony of voices was heard. One player was John Fisher, a principal burgess, sometime M.P., bailiff, and deputy

The Body Imagined  11 recorder. Fisher was a client of the Dudley family, which held the earldom and Recordership in the mid-Tudor and Elizabethan periods. Fisher favored the tax-based system. Another burgess, Richard Brookes, a husbandman and miller, opposed Fisher and his supporters. Like the Italian heretic Menocchio, also a miller, Brookes appears to have had a contentious personality.36 Like Menocchio, Brookes persistently put himself at odds with the authorities. At Warwick, the key issue was the town’s charities and its governors’ alleged failure to allocate them to the poor. Brookes cried malfeasance, disrupted meetings, and denounced the process of taxation.37 Brookes even sought to co-opt the poor. The year before the town instituted taxation, he produced a petition purportedly from the poor entitled Vox Clamantis, claiming they were at risk of starving unless they were allowed to beg, and attacking the corporation for halting begging from door to door. When the new relief system was in place, Brookes and his supporters put in a bill of complaint to the Court of Requests, denouncing Fisher and other magistrates for withholding the town charities, “thereby the whole town [is] greatly charged for the necessary sustenance of the said poor people . . .”. Again, like Menocchio, Brookes was possibly at odds with the established Church: he was accused of failing to attend services.38 Another powerful voice in Warwick was that of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose brother Ambrose actually held the earldom’s title. But despite formal titles, Leicester played a more active role in borough life than his brother. The town was incorporated in 1545, and the Dudley family— long-time favorites of both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I—exercised authority as Recorders, who appointed burgesses and nominated M.P.s, and had a steward and bailiff to represent their interests.39 At the borough’s behest, in 1571, Leicester intervened in Warwick’s social questions. In one sense, the earl’s intervention might be considered “traditional” because he founded a “hospital”—today dubbed “Leicester’s Hospital”—that was formerly the guild of Holy Trinity and St.  George, which housed retired military personnel and servants of the Dudley family. Yet at another level, Leicester’s intercession was forward looking in proposing economic development and employment. In meeting with Fisher, Leicester “asked what good trade there was in the said town whereby men gained, and how the poor were relieved . . .”. To employ the poor, the earl proposed ambitious make-work schemes, which he would help finance. He proposed cloth or cap making and cited the success of the Catholic Sheldons at Beoley in Worcestershire in promoting tapestry making. Such a trade, he said, “should be not only very profitable, but also a means to keep your poor from idleness . . .”. These industries could employ significant numbers, including entire families, and even the disabled: [W]orkmen and women and such may there be employed as in no faculty else, for though they be children they may spin and card; though they be

12  The Body Social, 1480–1550 lame they may pick and fray wool and do such things as shall keep them from idleness, and whereof some commodity may grow . . .”.40 Although Leicester’s hospital resembled medieval foundations, his economic proposals were innovative, endorsing the social humanist principle of compulsory labor, echoing the work regime of London’s Bridewell, founded in 1553, and prefiguring similar proposals by John Locke a century later.41 There were various discursive positions at work in Leicester’s interventions, but all told, a more complete solution to Warwick’s social issues is hard to imagine.42 Leicester’s was not the only elite voice heard at Warwick in the 1580s. In 1586, the earl appointed Cartwright as master of the hospital bearing his name, and Cartwright soon took an active role in humanist-like surveillance of the poor. Cartwright was a leader of the Elizabethan Puritan movement, particularly the presbyterian wing that sought a takeover of the Church from within. In 1575, he asserted that England had great numbers of beggars and rogues because it lacked a presbyterian regime in which deacons suppressed “riot, adultery, covetousness, pride, idleness, etc.” Without diaconal controls, there would be an epidemic of “diseases, beggary, translations of inheritance from the right[ful] heirs, needless dearths, seditions, rebellions (whereof every one is an engine able to pull down the Commonwealth) . . .”.43 Cartwright’s views of the poor echoed those of Juan-Luis Vives in the 1520s, William Marshall in 1536, and the London magistrates of the 1550s who founded Bridewell, and they were strongly shaped by h ­ umanist positions against begging, which Cartwright linked to civic malaise.44 At Warwick, he and a ­layman named John Dafferne made “exclamations and ­complaints  .  .  .  touching the disorder of beggars” and pressured the town magistrates in the spring of 1587 to initiate a census of the poor and taxation to “keep the poor at their own houses without begging.”45 Dafferne and a local magistrate conducted a census of Warwick’s poor in March 1587, in which they listed families, ­including children, lodgers, their ages, whether they begged or worked, and their living conditions. As for the amounts of relief, John Fisher and another burgess, Richard Fisher, together with the remainder of principal burgesses, Dafferne and Cartwright, formed a committee that decided the fates of the poor: they determined their eligibility for relief based on residence, numbers of children, work history, and whether they begged. The result was means-testing in which the authorities discriminated among the poor and within families. Of the 245 surveyed, 22 were “sent away” because they were non-residents. Of the remaining 223, it is possible that only 127 were given relief, or just slightly over half. Support was sometimes allocated to children, but not to their parents. For example, “Thomas Page for three children—6d.” and Isabel Glover, aged 60, who had sons Humfrey, 18, and Thomas, 16, living with her, plus a small child, and possibly another son and his wife, all of them beggars. Isabel was originally granted 12d. a week “for her and her small child,” which was later reduced to 8d., with apparently nothing given to the others.46

The Body Imagined  13 How does one explain the omission of some paupers and the inclusion of others at Warwick? Partly the answer was again ideology. Based on skepticism about what was considered voluntary poverty, the town’s census paid special attention to whether the poor begged or not. The case of Isabel Glover was extreme in that the entire family was apparently begging, but the question was put to virtually all those surveyed. The assumption was that false beggars would be discovered—able-bodied persons to be sure, but, following the principle of compulsory service in the late medieval labor laws and the Earl of Leicester’s logic, the elderly, children, and partially disabled could be employed to earn a living and avoid dependency on the public purse. The disabled, often the elderly, were dubbed “impotent” and “not able to work” and were usually relieved. Others were reported to be “at service” as required by the labor laws; still others were “able to labor,” “idle,” and “commanded to go to service.”47 Here were actual implementations— not just discursive rhetoric—of humanist social ideologies. In regard to Warwick’s poor in the 1580s, one or two cautionary notes should be stated because they break the mold of determinist thinking. For their part, the town authorities were not idle in their responses to social crisis. As noted, they raised public funds beginning in the 1540s, debated and levied taxation in 1582, conducted a census in 1587, and in conjunction with county justices, regulated the grain trade after the bad harvest of 1586. But the elites were not the only players in the social drama. Despite their grinding misery, the prohibitions on begging, expelling of non-residents, and prosecution of vagrants, the poor were not passive victims. On closer examination, it turns out they had strategies for survival. They immigrated, begged, took in lodgers, sought low-rent housing, and placed their children in service and apprenticeships. In some of these actions, at least, they were able to exert their wills. The worst off were unquestionably pauper women, who were twice as numerous as males, often widowed or abandoned by spouses and left to care for children, but even they took action to support themselves by taking in lodgers.48 A final point concerns the trajectory of charity to the poor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Again, contrary to some accounts, this was not a monolithic story in which large foundations displaced doles to the poor. Traditional forms of charity persisted. In the 553 wills surviving for the town of Warwick between 1480 and 1650, doles to the poor were the preeminent form of bequest, numbering between 71 and 92 percent, with little sign of a declining share in the period.49 Judging by Warwick’s example, it is possible to discern contemporary formulations about “society,” but one must be sensitive about oversimplifying complex phenomena. We should not deny agency to the poor or to the elites. The multi-vocality of the Warwick example includes voices that articulated a theory of society, which was the social humanist rejection of begging, the obligation to work if one were able, and community responsibility (through taxation) for the disabled.

14  The Body Social, 1480–1550 V. METHODS The methods used in this book proceed in large measure from its objectives. The first aim is to document how people perceived society, descriptively and prescriptively, which has been only incompletely done. In anthropological terms, this constitutes an attempt to determine the “grid” of social thinking, that is, the assumptions people had about their societies and where they fit in them. The second objective is to show how perceptions of society changed over time. Even if it is true that “a society’s ideas about itself, and its cultural models and images, are always out of step with social realities,” the question remains, what were the forces threatening the “destruction of categories” of the grid?50 The third point of the book is to determine where the changes in social theories stand in relation to broader questions of social evolution. If social perceptions were changing that were half a millennium and more in descent, what light is shed on theories emphasizing continuity over change?51 The methodology of the Cambridge contextualist school of historians of political thought has influenced in some measure the writing of this book. To historians, the contextualizing of past ideas is not a new method, particularly in the history of early modern religious thought.52 The contextualist method differs from the historian’s in the limits it imposes on its vision. It focuses on an author’s political objectives and arguments and eschews, for the most part, reference to economic and social connections.53 The method is particularly concerned with the intentions of authors and the relationship of ideas to intellectual contexts past and present. It attempts to avoid abstract, reductive statements about the relation between ideas and social changes, as well as shunning the assigning of universal and timeless values to ideas.54 To a historian, the greatest strength of the contextualist paradigm is its historicity. Besides eschewing timeless universals and reductive abstractions, it tends to empower ideas, which are perceived as shaping realities. This empowerment is a potent implication of the linguistic turn in new historicist literary criticism. It gives credibility to ideas of the middle range and avoids whiggism— assigning judgments of progress or regression to past thinkers.55 The contextualist method requires that “one must confront one’s language with that of one’s subjects” without adopting the language of the text.56 That does not mean the use of words in what some historians criticize as “language games.”57 Concepts, not words, are the keys; a vocabulary develops from a concept.58 There are several criticisms of the contextualist method. To begin with, one might object that it is designed for the history of political thought rather than social ideas. Yet, it is plausible to observe that a contextualist approach simply constitutes “the application of the methods and values of professional history to the history of ideas,” so that social ideas, and scientific ones, as in the work of Thomas S. Kuhn, may also be subjected to this kind of analysis.59 Histories of social thought have rarely gone beyond abstractions such as feudalism and capitalism, Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, to address the contents and contexts of their subjects. There are general histories of sociological thought, but

The Body Imagined  15 they rarely examine thinking before the eighteenth century and usually begin with the person considered to be the first sociologist, Auguste Comte (1798– 1857).60 Those who have sought to describe major social transformations, such as “the transition from feudalism to capitalism,” have focused upon economic and institutional factors rather than the history of ideas. Too often, this methodology describes what are abstract predictive models of social and political change without examining people’s thoughts about their societies.61 This book seeks to add the dimension of ideas to early modern social change. A commonly expressed criticism of the contextual approach is elitism. The charge is that contextualists, by focusing on leading thinkers, limit themselves to studying the ruling elites and ignore the thoughts of non-elites. As a result, they are unable to generalize about “the spirit of a people” and to represent their experiences in the past. We learn about “history from above” rather than “history from below.”62 This criticism also extends to the contextualists’ focus on texts and ideological contexts to the exclusion of their audiences, about whom little is reported and much is assumed.63 In a number of ways, this book’s methods attempt to head off the charge of elitism. The first is by acknowledging the obvious—that early modern society was dominated by elites, whose thoughts, because of power relationships, were of broad significance, including in reference to non-elites. This is not to approve of the unequal distribution of wealth and power in early modern society, but rather, simply to recognize these realities. Despite—and perhaps because of their elite positions in society—the “better sort” actually expended considerable effort watching over the positions of the “lower sort.” This phenomenon is apparent in the extensive discussions of “idleness” and vagrancy and institutional provision for the poor in early modern England, which we have observed in miniature in Elizabethan Warwick and in the persons of Leicester and Cartwright. A second mitigating factor regarding elitism is that this book is based on a variety of source materials, not all of which issued from the pens of canonical thinkers. The sources include discussions of the “great minds” of More, Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke, but also the relatively obscure Clement Armstrong, Richard Morison, and Edward Waterhouse. A third means of extending the book’s coverage is that Chapter16 discusses the social thinking of the Levellers and Diggers, who articulated non-elite views that challenged the property-based ideology of the gentlemen Grandees of the New Model Army. Fourth, the book examines not only individual thinkers, but also schools of thought whose purview was wider than a single person. A fifth consideration is that some of the writings examined in this book were left in manuscript form; that is, they were not intended for publication and were not published in the authors’ lifetimes. This means their work was not subject to formal censorship, so they were able to speak their minds freely and without fear. The authors of the manuscripts include Edmund Dudley, Clement Armstrong, Thomas Starkey, Edward VI, Thomas Smith, Thomas Wilson, Locke, and Gregory King. Still another group were able to publish

16  The Body Social, 1480–1550 in an era of relaxed censorship between 1640 and 1660, including Robert Filmer, the Levellers and Diggers, Harrington, and Hobbes. A further criticism of the contextualist approach, especially where it rejects social influences, is that it produces a “sterile celebration of intellectual pedigree” and, even worse, antiquarianism.64 Here, the objection is that contextualism fails to pay attention to the diachronic, the historian’s beloved “change over time.” Contextualists are chiefly concerned with the impact of ideologies, which they treat as historical events, upon other ideologies.65 This approach results in a limited attention to historical change, which, one scholar asserts, ultimately leads to the “atomization of history.”66 As indicated above, this book, while examining context as well as text, studies change over time by looking at challenges to the model of the body social in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, by observing the development of a new paradigm of society based on economic and political power, and by examining radical (though abortive) challenges to the property paradigm in the mid-seventeenth century. A final methodological issue concerns the extensive use of quotation in this study. Some readers may find the documentation cumbersome; to others, it may seem self-indulgent, and still others, even somewhat antiquated. But the author feels justified in citing at length the words of the authors studied, because the subject matter they discuss and the interpretations they formulate are potentially controversial. What is more, quotation is still the chosen and accepted method among historians, their students, and their readers. VI. CONCLUSIONS: SUMMING UP THE SOCIAL There is a tendency in recent historical writing to marginalize social subjects in favor of political and cultural ones. This is particularly true in the historiography of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One area of revisionism is the French Revolution of 1789, where Marxist and socialist interpretations are under scrutiny. Questions are raised about whether social “realities” were more significant than revolutionary rhetoric and its “symbolic meanings.” This questioning has even extended in a deconstructionist vein to texts themselves, which, it is asserted, demonstrate a dearth of “clear, normative, and intended meanings . . .”. In this way of thinking, the social, including the material world, may be reduced to “extra-textual” realities.67 A similar disenchantment with materialist and social explanations is evinced in nineteenth-century historiography and, specifically, in the history of the Chartist movement. Here it is asserted that contemporaries overstated the threat of Chartism as a social movement, whose position on property rights was (erroneously) deduced from its social composition. Beginning with Engels, contemporaries and later historians saw class consciousness and a new industrial proletariat in Chartism, while ignoring ideology and political positions. But what if the language of a period or movement failed to match the social interpretations?68

The Body Imagined  17 Do these doubts about the social signify the demise of social interpretations of the past? In all likelihood, the answer is no. Deconstruction may result in texts no longer yielding “clear, normative, and intended meanings” and the unearthing of “discordant,” “ambiguous,” and “murky” ones. But even historians who argue for “the partially suppressed multiplicity of voices that always coexist in a text” are still apparently interested in discovering “each text’s central tendency . . .”. There remains the possibility of unearthing “social determinants” in texts, including extra-textual realities such as iconology, authorial experiences of the emotional, and the existential.69 It may be true that Marxist and socialist historians were sometimes ideological in their social analyses. Should this be surprising considering that some of them, including Albert Soboul and E. P. Thompson, experienced first-hand fascist militarism in World War II?70 It is now argued that text and context are not the same. One can situate texts in realities using the tools of social history, while recognizing that texts can generate realities as well as reflecting them. In other words, we can consider whether “cultural production is a mode of material production,” “text production as action in a social world,” and if authors are “socially situated . . .”.71 That situation can be demographic, economic, political, psychological, religious, semiotic, and iconographic in character, without diminishing the power of the text, so long as we realize these categories are of our creation and avoid reifying them. One of the limitations of deconstructionist history, where the social can be of assistance, is the focus on elite texts and on “those more favored categories who were likely to commit their thoughts to paper and whose papers were more likely to be conserved.” The upshot has been a “drift away from the socially marginal” based upon “doubts about the possibility of knowing or representing the thoughts of the poor.”72 While recognizing the limits of writing a cultural history of the poor, it is possible to adjust the lens through which we view the needy and examine the likely experiences they had and, specifically, the forces that shaped their lives. This is not to say that we should “objectify” the poor and deny them any role in the drama of what were, after all, their lives. By definition, poverty was powerlessness, but our concluding remarks concerning Warwick have suggested there was more to the story than that. To understand that condition is to begin, at least, to recognize the humanity of the destitute, how they attempted to shape their fates, and the ideological context in which they lived.73 NOTES   1. An excellent survey of these subjects remains Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348–1500 (London: Penguin, 1990), esp. chs. 1, 3.   2. Bruni quoted by David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 230.   3. John Bossy, “Some Elementary Forms of Durkheim,” P&P 95 (May 1982) 10, 14–15, 17–18. Locke’s use of the term “society” appeared in Two Treatises of

18  The Body Social, 1480–1550 Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn., 1967), 373.   4. William H. Sewell, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 322–330; 326 (quoting Keith M. Baker).  5. Ibid.   6. See the surely ironically titled collection edited by Nicholas Gane, The Future of Social Theory (New York: Continuum, 2004), 1–5; Peter Burke, History and Social Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2nd edn., 2005), 174.   7. Quoted by Burke, History and Social Theory, 174.   8. Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner, eds. Dominant Ideologies (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 242–5. Cf. the earlier book by the same authors, which was heavily weighted towards structuralist Marxism: The Dominant Ideology Thesis (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1980), 4–5.  9. Sewell, Logics of History, 346, 369. 10. Jeffrey Denton, “Introduction,” in Denton, ed., Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 4; S. H. Rigby, “Approaches to Pre-Industrial Social Structure,” in Denton, op.cit., 8–10; Peter Burke, “The Language of Orders in Early Modern Europe,” in Michael L. Bush, ed., Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500 (London: Longman, 1992), 8–11. 11. David Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), chs. 1–3. 12. Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England: The Vernacular Origins of Some Powerful Ideas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), ch. 4. 13. Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 14. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, revised edn., 2000), 60. 15. For excellent recent studies of these subjects, see Steve Hindle, On the Parish? The Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 2; Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Poor Relief in England, 1350–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 15–25. 16. John M. Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics,” in James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 103. 17. The loci classici are Eric E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944 and later edns.); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), parts I and II. 18. For a contrary view, see Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), 25–38. 19. Kurt Samuelsson, Religion and Economic Action: A Critique of Max Weber (New York: Harper Row, 1964), ch. 2. 20. Roger Mols, Introduction à la démographie historique des villes d’Éurope du XIV e au XVIIIe siècle, 3 vols. (Louvain: Université de Louvain, 1954–1956). A reading list for popular beliefs would require another book. For two loci classici, see K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Scribner’s, 1971); Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985); and more recently, Alexandra

The Body Imagined  19 Shepard and Phil Withington, eds. Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 21. David Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 (London: Yale University Press, 1985), 6, 229–30. 22. Ibid. xi–xvii, 6. 23. This section draws extensively upon A. L. Beier, “The Social Problems of an Elizabethan Country Town: Warwick, 1580–1590,” in Peter Clark, ed., Country Towns in Pre-Industrial England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981), 46–85, and sources cited there. 24. Ibid. 48–54. 25. Ibid. 64–73. 26. Ibid. 48–54. 27. For one instance of this revamping, see Beier, “The Social Problems of an Elizabethan Country Town,” 64–78. 28. A.  L. Beier, The Problem of the Poor in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1983), 39–42, summarizes the statutes. 29. A.  L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), xx–xxii, 157, used these depositions extensively. 30. John Webb, ed., Poor Relief in Elizabethan Ipswich. Suffolk Records Society, vol. 9 (1966), 119–140; John F. Pound, ed. The Norwich Census of the Poor, 1570. Norfolk Record Society, 1970; Paul Slack, ed. Poverty in Early-Stuart Salisbury. Wiltshire Record Society, 1975, 65–82. 31. A. L. Beier, “Poverty and Progress in Early Modern England,” in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honor of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 207–8. 32. Thomas Kemp, ed. The Book of John Fisher, 1580–1588 (Warwick, n.d.), 81–96. 33. Beier, “Poverty and Progress,” 208; Book of John Fisher, 81–96. 34. Thomas Kemp, ed., The Black Book of Warwick (Warwick: H. T. Cooke and Son, 1898), 47. 35. This was the thesis of W. K. Jordan, Philanthropy in England, 1480–1660 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959). For a critique, see Beier, “Social Problems of an Elizabethan Country Town,” 70–3. 36. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a SixteenthCentury Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 37. Thomas Kemp, ed. The Black Book of Warwick (Warwick: H. T. Cooke and Son, 1898), 227ff., 314–15, 371–4. 38. Black Book of Warwick, 218, 322–6 (quotation on p. 322). 39. Ibid. 29–51, 385–399. 40. Ibid. 47–9. E. A. B. Barnard, The Sheldons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). 41. Lee Beier, “Foucault Redux?: The Roles of Humanism, Protestantism, and an Urban Elite in Creating the London Bridewell, 1500–1560” in Louis A. Knafla, ed., Crime, Gender, and Sexuality in Criminal Prosecutions, Criminal Justice History, XVII (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), 39–45. See chapter 17 for Locke’s plan. 42. Black Book, 218–19. 43. Quotations from Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London: Secker and Warburg, 1966 edn.), 280–1; also Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 327; A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1535–1603 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966 repr. orig. pub. 1925), ch. 6, 294–5.

20  The Body Social, 1480–1550 44. Beier, “Foucault Redux,” 40–5; William Marshall, “Preface,” in The Form and Manner of Subvention or Helping for Poor People (London: Thomas Godfray, 1536), A.ii.a-A.iii.a. S.T.C. 26,119. 45. Book of John Fisher, 165–72 (first quotation on 165. Note that the editor’s dating of this document, which he puts at 9 and 10 May, is more likely 9 and 10 March). See the manuscript version of Fisher’s book, Warwick CRO W/19/1: 15 March 1587 (no foliation) for the second quotation. 46. Book of John Fisher, ms. version Warwick CRO W/19/1: 15 March 1587 (no foliation). Residence was variously defined by statutes of the period. See A.L. Beier, Masterless Men, 173. 47. Book of John Fisher, 165–72. 48. Beier, “Social Problems,” 73–8. 49. Ibid. 69–73: Warwick wills in National Archives (U.K.) and Hereford and Worcester RO, Worcester (photocopies in Warwick CRO). 50. For one anthropological theory, see Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Routledge, 1st pub. 1970; new edn. 1996), viii, xvi, cited by Aston, “Huizinga’s Harvest,” Medievalia et Humanistica, 9 (1979), 16. 51. Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), esp. ch.8. 52. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (London: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1926; repr. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962); K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic. 53. David Wootton, “Preface,” Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writings in Stuart England (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986), 13. 54. Ibid. 13–14; Kenneth Minogue, “Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner’s Foundations,” Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 186–7 (orig. pub., Philosophy, 56: 1981, 533–52). 55. Quentin Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” revised, in L. Michaels and C. Ricks, eds., The State of the Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 567–9; Jay M. Smith, “No More Language Games: Words, Beliefs, and the Political Culture of Early-Modern France,” American Historical Review 102 (Dec. 1997): 1414–16. I  wish to thank Dr.  Anthony Crubaugh for the latter reference. Cf. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988; [orig. pub. Glyph 8, 1981]), 50, 52. 56. Charles Taylor, “The Hermeneutics of Conflict,” in Meaning and Context, ed. Tully, 228. 57. Jay M. Smith, “No More Language Games,” 1416; Neal Wood, “A Question of Method,” in John Locke and Agrarian Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 10–11. 58. Skinner, “Language and Social Change,” 563–69. 59. Wootton, “Preface,” Divine Right and Democracy, 11–12. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd edn., 1996), 99. 60. Harry Elmer Barnes, ed., An Introduction to the History of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); Robert Nisbet, The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973); Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds. A History of Sociological Analysis (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Don Martindale, The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2nd edn., 1981; orig. pub. 1960); David Ashley and David M. Orenstein, eds. Sociological Theory: Classical Statements (Boston: Pearson, 2005, 6th edn.; orig. pub. 1985); Jonathan H. Turner, Leonard Beeghley, and Charles H. Powers, eds. The Emergence of

The Body Imagined  21 Sociological Theory (Boston: Wadsworth, 1995). For specific periods, see Nader Saiedi, The Birth of Social Theory: Social Thought in the Enlightenment and Romanticism (New York: University Press of America, 1993). For perhaps the best survey of the earlier centuries, see Enrique Gomez Arboleya, Historia de la estructura y del pensamiento social: vol. I: hasta finales del siglo XVIII (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Politicos, 1957), which deserves translation. 61. Most egregiously in Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge, 1975); see also the essays in The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and latterly, Colin Mooers, The Making of Bourgeois Europe: Absolutism, Revolution and the Rise of Capitalism in England, France and Germany (London: Verso, 1991). Having the advantage of a regional focus is the valuable study by John E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlords in English Agrarian Development (London: Macmillan, 1983). 62. Wood, “A Question of Method,” 2–3. 63. Minogue, “Method in Intellectual History,” 189. 64. Ibid. 187; Wood, “Method,” 10; Joseph V. Femia, “An Historicist Critique of ‘Revisionist’ Methods for Studying the History of Ideas,” in James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, 158 (repr. from History and Theory, 20 [1981]: 112–34). 65. Tully, “Mighty Sword,” 15–16; Femia, “Historicist Critique,” 157. 66. Wood, “Question of Method,” 12. 67. William H. Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and “What Is the Third Estate?” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 22, 30–3, 36. 68. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 90–4. 69. Sewell, Rhetoric, 35–6; Logics, 346. 70. Richard J. Evans, In Defense of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999 ed.), 157–59. See also David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, “Social History and Its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language,” Social History 17 (1992): 165–88. 71. Gabrielle Spiegel, “History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 65 (1990): 75; Sewell, Rhetoric, 36. 72. Sewell, Logic, 52. 73. The most effective and humane study of the early modern poor remains Olwen H. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). See also Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also the works by Hindle and McIntosh cited in n. 15 above.

2 Contexts and Conflicts

I. INTRODUCTION Who inhabited the world that envisaged society as a body? It is worth asking, because that world may provide a context for how people thought. Was the body social made up purely of ideas and ideologies, or were there links with social contexts? Was the world changing in ways that affected social thought? Or, vice versa, was social thinking modifying its context? Is it possible to observe change over time in the social thought of the period? These are some of the questions addressed here. We begin from the premise that there is no obvious contextual matrix or pathway for social ideas. Another thorny question concerns causation. To recreate contexts may foster a belief that the results provide answers to causal issues, but it is not assumed here that context provides an explanation of social thought in the period. While acknowledging multiple voices in texts, it is still possible to find central positions and even “social determinants” that constitute contexts of thought.1 It is important to recognize, however, some limitations of context. For one, a synchronic study will tend to oversimplify. For many years, historians were divided over whether the Renaissance and late Middle Ages were periods of rebirth or decline. Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) was a powerful portrayal of a world of classical revivals leading to profound cultural, social, and political changes; in short, laying the foundations of the modern world.2 Conversely, in The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1926), Johan Huizinga painted a stunning portrait of declining medieval culture and religion; literally, the end of an era.3 Both books were imaginatively researched, bringing together artistic, cultural, political, and religious materials and themes. Despite their brilliance, neither book has entirely stood the test of time. In part, they were too seductive. They were exceptionally well written, even in translation. Ultimately, criticisms were mounted. Their findings were generalized to constitute a Zeitgeist that encompassed the whole of Western civilization when, as the titles show, their coverage was geographically circumscribed. Burckhardt’s book focused on Italy, while Huizinga’s concentrated on northern France and the Low Countries.4 It is therefore

Contexts and Conflicts  23 conceivable that at any one time, one community might have been experiencing rebirth, while the other was characterized by decline, while others combined the traits of both, and still others, none of the above! What, too, of cultures in transition, where transfers between communities were occurring, which a single-country monograph incompletely captured? It is known that the humanist movement had different meanings north and south of the Alps, but also similarities, e.g., in attitudes towards wealth and poverty (see Chapters 7–8 below). To recreate historical contexts is risky. A truly holistic portrait might seem an attractive proposition. To incorporate cultural, economic, political, religious, and social aspects promises productive results, but it also has pitfalls. It may be overly ambitious to generalize about the condition of an entire society. Even within single communities, claims to be holistic may be overstated. Burckhardt’s classic focused upon the elites and largely ignored the populace in Renaissance Italy. Information is lacking for the laboring poor in fourteenth-century England, even though the problem “loomed large” and was “the central item on the agenda of public social concern.”5 The interconnections may be too vast, so that shortcuts are taken, as in Huizinga’s extended focus on the Van Eycks to the near exclusion of the International Gothic style. A  synchronic approach may be productive in teasing out links between themes, but at the cost of losing the diachronic change over time. If structures and contexts yield “moves” or changes in thinking, how does one judge their novelty and permanence? Thomas More radically revamped the social order in Utopia (1516), yet the old theory of the body social continued to be articulated for decades after the book was published. Further, as this chapter suggests, the clerical estate was extremely powerful, holding vast landed resources, wielding a monopoly over the faith and education, and providing much of the institutional and cultural glue holding society together. Yet, that great power did not make the Church invulnerable to change, and it was unable to sustain its authority over the long term. Emphasizing contexts may underestimate the conflicts in ideas in favor of an abstraction such as the “decline of feudalism” and “the Protestant work ethic.” In subsequent chapters, we will observe the dynamic, sometimes conflicted elements in English social thought, e.g., the traditional sanctification of the poor versus de-sanctification, arguments favoring merit over birth in the definition of nobility, discussion of the idea of honest labor as against idle “wasters.” II. ENDURING CONTEXTS

A. Landholding When it comes to wealth and status, the three-estates scheme was broadly correct in stressing the power of the clergy and aristocracy, for members of

24  The Body Social, 1480–1550 both groups enjoyed positions of exceptional wealth and authority. Clerics were usually without the encumbrance of families. The regular clergy are thought to have numbered 9,500 in the early fifteenth century, and the seculars about 30,000, for a total of 39,500. Admittedly, some of the clergy— probably something like a tenth—were supported from urban resources, which would bring the total holding land to about 35,550, so that as little as 1.4 percent of the population might have been in possession of 22.1 percent of England’s landed wealth.6 Compared to some continental states, England did not have a small aristocracy that totally dominated the landowning system, but small numbers still held large slices of the landed pie, raising questions about the coherence of estates and inequalities between them. In 1436, it is estimated that 234 great lay landowners—barons and “greater knights”—received 19 percent of the country’s landed income, while another 28 percent was in the hands of some 6,177 lesser knights, esquires, and gentlemen, whose annual revenues varied greatly between £5 and £100. If the country’s population is assumed to be 2.5 million c. 1450, these figures suggest that lay lords numbered .0026 percent of the population and held 48 percent of its landed wealth. If their numbers were multiplied by a factor of five times to allow for the families of these lords, it would still suggest that 1.2 percent of the population enjoyed nearly half of England’s landed income.7 All told, it seems the clergy and aristocracy between them had 70 percent of the landed cake, although they formed perhaps no more than 2.6 percent of the population. The only group close to rivaling the elite’s holdings were surprisingly those worth less than £5 p.a., whose share was 25 percent, but we can be certain that this middling group, whose actual numbers are unknown, far outstripped in sheer members the first two estates. Their £5 per capita incomes would constitute small fractions of the top two. The Crown held about five percent of landed revenues.8 Evidence for the distribution of landed wealth is less plentiful for the early sixteenth century, but it suggests the pattern had changed little in a century. Subsidy and muster returns for the 1520s show that in Buckinghamshire, the Church held 37 percent of landed wealth, while the peers and gentry had 40 percent. In Rutland, the comparable figures, respectively, were 31 and 38 percent. The remainder was in the hands of the Crown and freeholders, but freeholders’ holdings were “a mere fraction of what belonged to the gentry.”9 The social distribution of land was sharply skewed on the eve of the Reformation, with the first two estates holding the bulk of it, just as a century earlier, although there were great differences among members of the same estate, which is shown below. The importance of landed wealth is underlined when it is compared to the urban sector. England had numerous towns in 1500—anywhere from 500 to 800, depending upon one’s definition—but with few exceptions, they were islands in a great rural sea. Only six places had populations exceeding 8,000, and the majority probably counted fewer than 1,000 souls.10

Contexts and Conflicts  25 Unquestionably, the role of the towns often surpassed their sheer sizes: they were centers for marketing, military, political, and religious activities, which involved people from the countryside as well as townspeople. It has been suggested, based on comparisons of taxation records for 1334 and 1524, that the urban share of the nation’s wealth rose significantly in the late Middle Ages. However, this thesis is disputed on the grounds that the evidence is unreliable, and some historians take the opposite line that towns generally stagnated, even declined, for much of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.11 Whichever side of the debate one selects, perhaps the size of the urban population is still the most telling test of its place in the social order. One authority put them at five percent of England’s population c. 1500, while another estimated them at 10 to 12 percent. None of these totals suggests the urban sector was a significant rival to the dominance of the landed.12

B. The First Estate The clergy’s mantle covered much besides landholding. The faith included a great arcana of rules and rituals governing wide areas of social life. Many of the Church’s precepts, even including the Ten Commandments, may have been ignored. Certainly, some were attacked by the proto-Protestant Lollards. But the institution’s influence was still huge. As Hilton wrote, it “is not that the Church was effective as a guide to behavior, but that what really counted was its rituals, the part played by its sacraments in making men and women fear Hell less, and have better hopes in Heaven than life on earth gave to most of them.”13 Beyond issues of salvation and damnation, the Church provided much of the glue holding society together. The mass articulated “a single social whole,” as did sacraments and rituals. It united the dead and the living, the living with kin and friends, as well as stilling feuds with the pax. The communion ceremony that followed the kiss of peace brought together those at odds. Baptism extended links beyond the nuclear family through the institution of god-parenthood. Marriage had the same effect, but even more so by bringing together families “in a kind of peace-making . . .”. Parish feasts, religious guilds, and churchales for saints’ days and charitable causes also brought parishioners together, if not always with the desired results when partying led to sin. The Church participated in the blessing of the harvest and in beating the bounds of the parish at Rogationtide. Some of these rituals survived the Reformation, but they lost significance, particularly the mass and the sacraments, as Protestants sought to purge the faith of “magical” elements.14 What about the social connections of the first estate? A  distinguishing feature of the pre-Reformation Church, one historian has observed, was its “identification . . . with the whole of organized society . . .”.15 There is a great deal of truth in this statement, although it should not be assumed the clergy were simply honest brokers. As discussed below, they were lords of manors with significant economic and judicial roles. They had important

26  The Body Social, 1480–1550 horizontal links with aristocratic society, as well as having vertical ones with the rest of society. The Church’s identification with lordship encompassed the ideal of knighthood.16 The Christianization of knightly warfare reinforced lordship, while also providing the Church with the opportunity to extend its authority by claiming to control violence. The clergy enmeshed themselves in civil society in their efforts to control internecine warfare. From the early middle ages they sought to “assist in the creation of peace in the feud  .  .  .”. It is uncertain how far down the social scale these efforts extended. At the outset, they were probably mainly directed against the aggrandizements of local potentates, but by the late Middle Ages, they may have affected parish pump conflicts. As indicated, the Church used two liturgical devices to check feuding. First, they made the sacrament of marriage into a symbolic celebration of peacemaking between warring families. Second, during the mass, the pax, or kiss of peace, was treated as a symbol of unity in the community and was celebrated before the communion ceremony. By the fifteenth century, one authority writes, the mass had developed so far along these lines that it risked becoming a private rather than a public ritual.17 The clergy’s links with the lay landed elites went beyond rituals and peacemaking. Between 1350 and 1480, significant numbers of bishops (20 in all) were drawn from the aristocracy, and three scions of noble families— the Arundels, Bourchiers, and Courtenays—were archbishops of Canterbury for 62 out of 105 years from 1381 to 1486. In this period, some lordly clerics aspired to be “king-makers”—for example, an Arundel in the deposition of Richard II, and a Bourchier and George Neville, Bishop of Exeter, who were in the Yorkist camp in the Wars of the Roses (1455–87). Such bishop/aristocrats disappeared from the scene under the Tudors when the Crown and Parliament clipped the clergy’s wings.18 In the late medieval period, the landed elites continued to patronize and populate monasteries and nunneries, although the proportion drawn from elite ranks is uncertain. Many parish priests were often just a step above their husbandmen neighbors in education and wealth, but it is notable that pre-Reformation priests were accorded the prefix “Sir,” indicating descent from or equivalent status to the knightly element.19 The relationship between lords and clergy was not all one way. The Church was so actively involved in government that it is often difficult to distinguish between Church and state. Far from being perpetually at daggers drawn, as whig interpretations suggest, the English clergy and the lay authorities worked closely, if sometimes separately. Not only did lords become bishops: clergymen were preeminent in Royal government. Bishops and mitred abbots sat in the House of Lords, and clerics provide the core of Royal administration. Three quarters (24 of 32) of Lord Chancellors were clergymen between 1367 and 1529, as were almost all the keepers of the Privy Seal (29 of 33) before 1523, and a good one third of the Treasurers (16 of 47). These officers were the ongoing presence on the King’s Council,

Contexts and Conflicts  27 responsible for directing the government from day to day.20 Their influence might not have penetrated to every corner of government—lesser functionaries were ceasing to be clerics on the eve of the break from Rome—but there is no question the clergy were tightly enmeshed in civil society at many levels. Little wonder the Church was seen to be organically connected to other parts of the body social. The Church’s connections with society at large were evident in its system of Church courts. These institutions prosecuted a wide range of offence against canon law, including the economic offenses of usury and bad debts, the moral lapses of adultery and drunkenness, public order matters such as brawling, as well as spiritual matters and anything connected to probate, marriage, Church attendance, the fabric of the Church and the churchyard, tithe and mortuary fees, and, of course, heresy. The courts’ authority extended to both the laity and clergy; punishments included small fines, whippings, penance, and excommunication. At the diocesan level, Church courts mainly dealt with sexual offences by the early sixteenth century, leading one historian to observe that “the minutely severe moral supervision of the Christian populace” was not at all the invention of the Puritans.21 Along with manorial courts, the Church’s courts were the judicial bodies that most people encountered in this period, which did not always enhance the clergy’s popularity, but did understandably increase the impression that the Church was connected to all members of the body social.

C. Lordship and the First and Second Estates Chief among the institutions articulating social relations was lordship, which included clerical as well as lay lords. What was lordship, and how did it work? There were infinite variations to the system, which did not cover the entire country and which varied from region to region, but fundamentally, it was the basis of the power of the first two estates and included authority over both land and men. By 1300, these relationships were no longer feudal, that is, based upon military service, except in the marcher lordships of Wales and the North. Rather, the links were primarily economic and political. The economic system of lordship may have pre-dated the Normans, who codified it in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Manor lords continued to be the lords of great estates, which included demesne lands that could be farmed directly, as on many monastic estates before 1370, or leased to “farmers,” as on many lay estates from about 1300. 22 Lordship over men consisted chiefly of labor services performed on the demesne, which the customary law of the manor required of unfree peasants. In addition, lords exacted from villeins an annual tax called tallage, reliefs or entry fines to secure an unfree holding, heriots granting the inheritance of holdings (usually a dead tenant’s best beast), and a myriad of fines for offenses against manorial custom. The breakdown, income-wise, of lordship over land and over the unfree who inhabited it, was roughly 50–50

28  The Body Social, 1480–1550 c. 1300. In addition, both lay and clerical lords had the authority to administer justice in their lordships. Royal courts extended their authority in the late Middle Ages, but the officials appointed to administer justice were still usually lay lords. At any rate, court appearances for most people usually involved a local manorial court, a court baron, or a view of frankpledge, ordinarily the preserve of lords, although they rarely attended. The authority of these courts was extensive. Views of frankpledge covered up to 55 offenses, ranging from public order issues such as drunkenness and burglary to questions of manorial boundaries and runaway serfs. In addition, many lords had authority over the assize of bread and ale, fairs and markets, and hunting rights. They also had the right of “infangthef,” that is, the authority to hang thieves caught in possession of stolen goods. It is estimated there were 100 private gallows in lordly hands in Gloucestershire and Warwickshire in the late thirteenth century.23 Not all of rural England was subject to lordship, and the institution’s economic role was significantly diminished by 1550. There is some doubt whether the majority of medieval England’s smallholders were subject to lordship. One authority states that most West Midland peasants were covered, another puts the proportion nationally at three “free” to two “unfree”; yet another estimates that only a third of all peasants were subject to villeinage.24 Some shires, such as Kent and Lincolnshire, were largely peopled by freeholders. In still others, lordship was present in an attenuated form, and freeholders were dominant because manor lords were non-resident. In early Tudor Rutland and Suffolk, for example, 80 percent of villages had no resident lord. Further, many clerical and lay lords experienced serious economic challenges after 1370 because of labor shortages and peasant rent strikes. By 1520, villeinage as a labor system was virtually a dead letter, although manorial courts continued to operate.25 In its place, as Chapter 8 shows, Parliament implemented compulsory work for a much larger pool of labor than villeinage had imposed. Lordship cannot be written off as an economic and political force in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Economically, it remained significant. The noblemen who fought the Wars of the Roses, McFarlane found, enjoyed greater landed incomes than the previous two generations of peers, and their “feudal” rights continued to be important sources of revenue into the 1520s. Although lords were non-resident in that decade in four fifths of Rutland and Suffolk villages, the peers and gentry still garnered over 60 percent of lay landed wealth in the counties. While serfdom withered away on most great estates, its replacement by “certain” copyhold tenures permitted the survival of lordship and afforded lords significant leverage over early modern tenants, as shown below.26 The ideal of lordship retained its potency. As one historian observed, fifteenth-century England “was still an aristocratic country. Men and women admired lords, feared them, and aped what they took to be their manners and mode of life.” The Paston letters abound with references to

Contexts and Conflicts  29 “good lords spiritual and temporal” who were perceived to be the natural rulers of society, a notion the “Pilgrims” still supported in the rebellion of 1536 when they assailed Royal councilors of “villein blood” and men “of low birth and small reputation” and demanded the purging of the nobility.27 Traditionally, the basis of aristocratic honor was lineage. It involved looking after blood relations, but also those of one’s “affinity,” including family, but also indentured retainers, servants, and tenants. The theory of lordship presupposed extensive vertical links in society. According to one authority, a set of concentric circles more accurately represents lordship than the pyramid model favored by some historians. As we know, late medieval commentators preferred the organic symbols of bodies, trees, even gardens. Whichever metaphor is employed, it is possible to conclude that “service has some claim to be considered the dominant ethic of the middle ages” for it “could be found at all levels of society.” In general, as another scholar observed, the “bonds of society” and “the irksome rules and tedious gradations of society did not appear, as they did to a later age, as so many strangle-holds on liberty.” Courtesy books of the period minutely ranked people in order of social precedence based upon birth. A social slight could lead to violence and homicide.28 The attachment to the institution of lordship was not purely theoretical. Nor was it nostalgia for a golden age of chivalry and knighthood. Lordship remained a potent political force. It is true that lords and gentlemen were sometimes fickle about their allegiances in the Wars of the Roses, but lordship was still a key element in shaping the upheavals. One authority suggested the Wars resulted from an escalation of local aristocratic feuds, which in turn, through family links and the system of indentures between lords and men or “bastard feudalism,” dragged in other members of the baronage and court factions, ultimately engulfing the monarchy.29 Lords were expected to be fonts of generosity, hence the frequent laments under the Tudors of the— in all probability, exaggerated—“decline of hospitality.”30 The power of lordship slowly declined under the Yorkists and the Tudors. Despite legislation against livery and maintenance, both dynasties regulated rather than repressed the lords’ private armies. This was because the system provided troops to monarchs who could not afford standing armies and because, properly controlled, it strengthened their hand in the localities. The Crown continued to issue licenses to retain when it had to raise armies and suppress rebellions in the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. In personal feuds, too, the Elizabethan aristocracy still commanded the loyalties of liveried retainers, servants, and tenants. Allegiance to one’s lord could take precedence over class solidarity in a popular rebellion. When his Sussex tenants threatened to rebel in 1549, Henry Fitzalan, 14th Earl of Arundel, invited them to Arundel Castle, where he provided them with hospitality and settled their grievances. Such lordly pacifications were probably exceptional by the mid-sixteenth century, but the Arundel case shows lordship could still carry influence.31

30  The Body Social, 1480–1550

D. Charity, Hospitality, and Manorial Custom Lordly charity reinforced social solidarity, although it is unknown how far the elites followed the traditional injunctions to care for orphans and widows. This is one of many intractable questions about the study of charitable giving. Traditionally, Christians were encouraged to be generous in their lifetimes rather than to store up wealth, yet the main source of information about charity is the last will and testament. Historians have been quick to exploit this source, but they have not sufficiently emphasized its limitations. The main problem is that of unrecorded giving. It is very likely, given the values of the age, that many philanthropic acts took place on the spot rather than on the deathbed. Little is known about this ad hoc charity, yet it was probably the norm at all levels of society. Both clothing and money may have been handed out in this manner.32 In contrast, the “middling sort” favored bequests at death, so the impression is formed of exceptional generosity when what was really involved was a different, individualized style of giving. It was not always so. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the body social model was first articulated in England, charity emphasized gifts to the community, which constituted a form of service more significant than family or feudal loyalties.33 Looking after the needy was not limited to the better off. Remarkably, the medieval manorial system provided for the poor, which covered the unfree and which seems to have the wise objective of preventing poverty before it happened. It was concerned mainly with intra-family issues and would have strengthened relations between better off and needy members. We know about this extraordinary institution through the evidence of manorial custom on three Cambridgeshire manors of the Abbey of Crowland, which provided support for widows and their children after the demise of a head of household. Widows at Cottenham, Drayton, and Oakington received “the prior right of succession to land held in villeinage,” a practice that was “always acted upon.” These practices were not limited to Cambridgeshire and appeared on other manors from Hereford to Durham and from Hampshire to the Midlands. Even on rented freehold lands, the widow had the right to one third. If she remarried, the villein property reverted to the children. Where no parent survived, the custom of Borough English was invoked, i.e., the succession of the youngest (and likely the most needy) son.34 In theory, a lord was entitled to dispose of customary land as he wished, but this did not happen except in cases of forfeiture. The son who received the succession still had obligations to his siblings under the custom of the manor, which may have mitigated some of the problems of landless villeins caused by the growth of population before the Black Death. On the Crowland estates in the 1320s, the heirs would let small parcels of their inheritances to family members for payments in cash or in labor services. Another source of family support was the “dower,” which was what both men and women brought to a marriage, which reverted to an incoming tenant when

Contexts and Conflicts  31 the dowager died, married, or forfeited, but the new tenant was obliged to support the dowager until one of those eventualities. What this meant in practice was very likely that the widow or widower continued to receive support from his or her dowry portion.35 If these arrangements were widespread in late medieval England, they constituted a remarkable institutional achievement that must have strengthened social bonds. The late Middle Ages saw changes in the practices of charity, with greater concern with individual souls than with community gifts. About one third of late medieval noble wills bequeathed alms to be distributed after death, often at funerals, and the practice continued to be common in early modern Warwick. Handouts to the needy on such occasions had several levels of meaning. Crudely, they helped to assemble a crowd to mark the passing of a member of the community, and the more prominent the personage, the greater the assembled host. Also, doles to the poor meant prayers for the soul of the departed, whose passage from purgatory to heaven would be eased. This was a matter of vital importance to late medieval Christians, and the aristocracy was no different. They founded chantries, chapels, and monasteries with this aim in view. Although the means was individualized and concerned with the individual soul, the presence of the poor reasserted somewhat the notion of a community of Christians living and dead, for in death, all were equal. In some aristocratic wills, the idea of community was literally articulated. They specified that alms should be given to tenants, or to certain localities under their lordship. It would be misleading, however, to consider charity to specific persons and communities to be “discriminatory” in a modern sense. Noble gifts also included prisoners, bridges, and almshouses, but it is doubtful whether— with the obvious exception of deemed “vagabonds”—their purpose was social welfare or control in a modern sense. One result may have been the reinforcement of social unity, but it would be anachronistic to believe the main intention of testators was not chiefly their personal salvation. The social motive was more clearly expressed in the almoner’s day-to-day philanthropy, which unfortunately cannot be documented.36 Noble hospitality, which probably did reinforce vertical social bonds, had a dual meaning. It included an open house to all-comers, but also the keeping of a great household of family, servants, and retainers. It is not always possible to disentangle the two sorts of hospitality, because commentators were often imprecise in their use of the term, but there is no doubt the aristocracy practiced both. There was a long tradition of lodging and feeding visitors. Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham (1478–1521), regularly fed between 100 and 200 persons in the great hall at Thornbury in 1506–7. Even a new family such as Sir William Petre’s continued the practice in the mid-sixteenth century. On average, 40 strangers received board in the great hall at Ingatestone in the winter months of 1551–2, and the numbers doubled to 80 in the summer and autumn.37

32  The Body Social, 1480–1550

E. Guilds in Town and Country Vertical links in society were also evident in late medieval towns, where church, civic, and guild gatherings emphasized “the wealth and worship of the whole body” of the city, as Coventry officials stated in 1494.38 These events also occurred in late medieval villages, although obviously on a smaller scale. Lordship and chivalry provided few appropriate symbols for towns, but the body did. The discourse of the body recognized the reality of social differences, so glaringly obvious in the face-to-face world of towns, but also stressed the role of social unity. These demonstrations of urban consciousness took many forms. They included elaborate processions in which the trading and craft guilds, civic, and Church authorities participated. In Coventry and York, the Corpus Christi Day celebrations on May 21st were the highlight of the ceremonial year. The festival’s name itself is redolent of organic unity. At Bristol, it was the feasts of St. Clement and St. Katherine in late November. The guilds and officials were usually ranked in processions according to their wealth and political importance, thus affirming the principle of social differentiation. But these events also asserted the unity of the civitas. At Bristol, the St. Clement’s day procession probably took a route that united parishes on opposite banks of the River Frome. The plays held after the parades fostered solidarity by breaking down formal hierarchies through a combination of heavy drinking and general tomfoolery. Similar “drinkings” in Coventry at Midsummer and on St. Peter’s day brought together senior officials and craft officers, masters, and journeymen. A mass was normally celebrated in which, as in the countryside, the pax preceded the communion of the faithful. In times of scarcity, as well as normally after mass, Coventry parishioners gathered to consume Holy Cakes. On other festive occasions, neighbors assembled around bonfires to celebrate. At York, the craft guilds held annual feasts on their respective saints’ days.39 These urban forms of association had practical as well as symbolic importance. Trade and craft guilds regulated entry into the economic and political life of incorporated towns. Guilds and corporations came under mounting pressure from interlopers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it is erroneous to believe their regulatory powers disappeared overnight. In London and York, for instance, some of these institutions held their own into the eighteenth century, maintaining the hierarchies of corporation and guilds, masters, journeymen, and apprentices. This meant serving a sevenyear apprenticeship (or longer) before entry into the “freedom” of the city, and following the rules of the fellowship and the corporation once that hurdle was passed. Judging by London’s example, while guilds were not abolished, they were bypassed by independent tradesmen setting up outside the walls in the suburbs. The sixteenth-century trend was towards regional, even international, economic links, which served to undermine the relatively self-contained and inward-looking urban order, but it seems the old and the new coexisted for several decades in many places.40

Contexts and Conflicts  33 The town guilds were more than economic and political institutions. They also concerned themselves with the souls and welfare of members, while there were also religious fraternities founded for similar purposes. At York, the trade guilds commissioned friars to pray for the souls of deceased members. The city’s carpenters’ company required attendance at two such yearly services, as well as at members’ funerals. Fourteenth-century York guildhalls recognized the “worthiness” of the disabled and able-bodied poor. Fifteenth-century London had between 100 and 160 lay religious fraternities, and at least 80 survived until the Reformation. Most Londoners belonged to a religious guild, or to parish versions of them. Even craft and trading companies were religious in origin, as their formal titles, which persisted in use into the sixteenth century, amply demonstrate. The idea of these institutions was that members, whatever their social position, would live “in charity—with God and man,” as well as looking after the fates of the departed. In this sense, the members’ convivial drinkings and feastings, with the rounds of “healths” wished to one another, were powerful symbols of fellowship and unity, as well as opportunities for socializing.41 The benefits of the guilds were intended to be material as well as spiritual. In London and York, both craft and religious fraternities made provision for weekly doles to members who were unemployed through disability (blindness was specifically cited). The York carpenters’ guild undertook to deal with unemployment by putting out-of-work brethren in contact with potential employers among its members, who were expected to hire them in preference to non-members. London and Westminster religious fraternities provided for the relief of non-members, establishing almshouses, “hospitals” (really hospices for the ill or dying), as well as granting funds to relieve the poor of the parish. Some fifteenth-century London guilds went so far as to provide interest-free loans to members with the aim of stamping out usury.42 There is some evidence the guilds were successful in bringing together the rich and poor, the weak and strong. The historian of pre-Reformation London fraternities concluded from members’ fees that they “might have been open almost to all comers,” apart from the laboring poor. Westminster’s guild of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary “included humbler [members], if not the very humblest” and may have numbered 200 subscribers in a parish of 3,000. These associations even broke with social conventions. In London churches, parishioners were normally seated according to wealth and social position, but that was not the case in the guilds, even though some of the “grander citizens chose grander guilds . . .”. The fraternities also violated sexual mores, for female members were accepted and enjoyed a rough equality with men. In contrast, most contemporary institutions, including many craft guilds, excluded women.43 The traditional historical approach to trade and craft guilds focused upon economic issues, which diminished their cultural and religious significance. If the guild was a key institution in late medieval towns, the same was true in rural England, where the evidence suggests major growth of religious

34  The Body Social, 1480–1550 guilds in the fourteenth through early sixteenth centuries. As in the towns, the rural guilds reflected the social structures of the villages, bringing together the better off and the poor for pious as well as economic, political, and social purposes. In Yorkshire, nearly 400 religious guilds were established from the fourteenth century and reached their zenith in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In Cambridgeshire, 58 percent of guilds were in rural communities, while 42 percent were in towns. Membership was widespread and crossed gender lines as well as economic ones. The rural guilds, too, engaged in charitable giving, including the support of members, and the commemoration of people’s lives after they died. They also enhanced the religious and social lives of the parishes, while at the same time affirming the principle of hierarchy.44 III. DIVISIONS AND CONFLICTS

A. Further Introduction Despite its pervasiveness and coherence, in several respects, the body social model of three estates was deficient as a description of the late medieval social order. The image of three interdependent estates was simplistic because it underestimated divisions within and between the estates. The theory also omitted important groups and institutions. Even in the eleventh century, most parts of Western Europe had towns populated by merchants and artisans, yet these groups fit uneasily in a system that characterized all common folk as rustici. They might be included among the commonalty, but that hardly did justice to those merchants, some as rich as Croesus, who lent money to monarchs and great nobles and were themselves sometimes elevated to the nobility. By 1500, merchants were being distinguished from the urban plebs, but their status was still a long way from the “true nobility” of the books of heraldry and chivalric romances. The body model stressed functions and interdependent roles of estates, which they did not always fulfill, and treated them as virtually unchanging over time. According to the theory, clergy were expected faithfully to lead their flocks and nobles were enjoined to administer justice and care for widows and orphans, but they did not always meet these theoretical obligations. The model also assumed stasis over time in both social relationships and structures, and that did not always occur because European societies were more dynamic than that.45 The populace, as well as including townsmen, numbered many different types of rustici, from landless wage laborers and live-in servants in husbandry or famuli, to poor, middling, and well-off peasants. The tenure by which peasants held land varied enormously, ranging from freeholders to servile villeins owing heavy obligations to lords. England, contrary to the tendency towards slavery on the continent after the “feudal revolution” c. 1000 CE, continued to have large numbers of freeholders and non-villeins, who possibly formed the majority of smallholders after the Conquest.46

Contexts and Conflicts  35

B. First and Second Estates Despite providing social glue, the paradigm of the body underestimated the extent of divisions and conflict in late medieval society. In sum, the model papered over cracks in the social order that were both vertical and horizontal. The clerical order was highly differentiated. Abbots and bishops lived in a different world from that of ordinary parish priests. The princes of the clerical estate administered extensive landholdings, sometimes more ruthlessly than laymen, and spent their time like lay lords in the corridors of power.47 Figures are lacking for the fifteenth-century clergy, but there were very likely great divisions within their ranks. The annual income of a bishop on the eve of the Reformation would be several hundred pounds, and the richer sees took in as much as £4,000 p.a. This total might be still higher for such powerful prelates as Wolsey and Warham, archbishops of York and Canterbury, respectively, who probably received significant sums for serving Henry VIII’s government. By comparison, the average annual income of a parish priest c. 1535 was £10. The fortunes of monks and nuns also varied greatly. A wealthy establishment such as St. Mary’s in York might have a taxable income of £1,650, or £32 per head for its 51 members, whereas a small abbey such as Salley had £147 in income, or just £7 per capita for its 21 members. Clearly, the principle of clerical poverty applied to some more than others in pre-Reformation England.48 Discussions of the “chivalry” often included the higher nobility, knights, and esquires, but left out the large numbers of gentlemen.49 The first two estates held the bulk of landed wealth, but the raw numbers masked great variations in holdings. The nobility, too, were highly graduated in wealth. While 51 lay peers had average incomes of £768 p.a. in 1436, 183 “greater knights” took in less than a third as much at £208 a year. Below them, 6,950 landholders who qualified as “gentle” received revenues ranging from £5 to £100 p.a.50

C. The Third Estate Despite vertical loyalties, there were horizontal, class-based conflicts between estates, especially between the third estate and their overlords. There was a long history of peasant resistance to the lords’ exactions, and a more recent history of agitation by craftsmen in towns over wages and rights of association. Both movements boiled over into revolt in 1381 in which the higher clergy and nobles were targeted in what is arguably the most widespread popular rebellion in the country’s history.51 Inequality was pervasive in late medieval towns. City air might make one free, but it did not make one equal. At York in 1524, just three men owned one eighth of the city’s goods subject to taxation, and overall 10 percent of taxpayers held over 50 percent of the town’s wealth. At Coventry c. 1520, the elite made up two percent of householders, while the poor accounted for 27 percent. Between the very rich and the poorest were two further substantial

36  The Body Social, 1480–1550 groups. Just below the elite were the “honest commoners” and members of the leading trade guilds, forming 18 percent of households. Below them were the small masters and journeymen, who made up 53 percent. The last group was the backbone of the city and included a wide range of wealth, making some prosperous and some not, and who included the numerous wageworkers (roughly 40 percent of taxpayers) in late medieval towns.52 The urban world was not only divided on the basis of wealth. It has been argued that riches were among the least important criteria of rank. Originally, citizenship was crucial; that is, membership of a guild, of the borough, or “commune.” These qualifications continued to apply in the early modern period, although less and less. Those “free” to live and trade in a town could form a substantial total: in early sixteenth-century Coventry, the “commoners” accounted for 71 percent of households; in York, they numbered half of the adult males.53 The critical determinant of rank was office holding, and there is no doubt that pre-Reformation towns were dominated by oligarchies. At Coventry, two percent of householders ran the city. As a result, conflicts arose between the elites and the commoners, burgesses and non-burgesses, over issues of governance if not real “democracy.” Disputes also involved “consumers against producers and sellers; employers against employees; and merchants against craftsmen.” But grievances were usually political and fiscal in character rather than economic. Whatever the cause, the statement that the town of Beverly was “never free from internal discord” appears to have been true of many urban centers of the period.54 Guilds did not constitute a conflict-free social order. Usury was not the only abuse to concern the fraternities. Their rules stated that commercial malfeasance, quarrelling, and lawsuits between members were offenses for which they could be fined. Guilds were certainly concerned with conflict resolution, even if their chief aim was the salvation of members’ souls.55 The third estate was no less socially differentiated in the countryside. The notion that communities of roughly equal peasants typified rural society in England should be discarded. Broadly speaking, there were three levels of peasant wealth in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—the better off, the middling, and the poor. These divisions had economic, political, and social manifestations, as a number of monographs show. At Halesowen in the West Midlands from 1270 to 1348, the elite 18 percent possessed a yardland (12.5 to 15 acres), whereas 43  percent were quarter yardlanders and cottagers (6.2–7.5 acres). Roughly similar proportions were found on the Ramsey abbey village of Holywell-cum-Needingworth, although the fifteenth century saw a rise in the numbers of the better off. These economic divisions had social results. The better sort had larger families than the poorest at Broughton, another Ramsey village, and at Halesowen. At Broughton, marriages normally took place within one’s group rather than to partners from richer or poorer ones.56 The economic and demographic differences between villagers had political ramifications. The richer peasants usually provided the officeholders of

Contexts and Conflicts  37 the manor court, yet, paradoxically, they committed more trespasses against their neighbors and lords, as well as more crimes of violence. It was more often the daughters of the poorer peasants who were prosecuted in the manor courts for fornication and bastardy, a likely consequence of their parents’ inability to provide them with dowries.57 Less dramatically, but no less significantly, there were social divisions among peasants that were reflected in legal issues. Manor court records do not support the view that medieval villages were harmonious communities. At Broughton in Huntingdonshire, for example, rich peasants rarely took the part of poor ones in legal cases, and the records show a high level of conflict between the two groups. In addition, as the purview of Royal courts was extended from the late twelfth century, the better-off villagers made increasing use of them, as constables and jurors, to police their poorer neighbors.58 In rural society, there is good reason to think the late medieval period was far from a “golden age” for the peasantry. Customary tenures involving labor services disappeared and were replaced by various forms of “copyhold,” that is, “tenure by copy of the court roll according to the custom of the manor . . .”. This freed the land of servile responsibilities, but it did not necessarily spell security for the new copyholder. Ultimately, many lost the security of ancient custom, which as we know assisted the poor at Crowland, for copyholders were liable to eviction and rack-renting.59

D. The Agrarian Question: A Rotten Member? A great deal of attention has been given to the enclosure or privatizing of lands to which common rights had applied, and Chapter 14 examines the denouement of the issue in the seventeenth century. Of greatest concern was the “engrossing” of farms, which is considered to be the chief culprit in the depopulation of villages and which accelerated in the fifteenth century because lords were hit by rising costs and became more cash-conscious, and which accounts for England’s comparatively early move to agricultural selfsufficiency and industrialization. Depopulation was cited in the 1480s. The penultimate draft of Chancellor Russell’s sermon to Parliament in 1483 contained a protest against engrossing and invoked the concept of social unity: “we see daily . . . [en]closures and imparking . . . driving away of tenants and letting down of tenantries . . .”. The result was to tear apart the body social, “that is most to be sorrowed by unlawful assemblies and insurrections, putting not only the people but also the nobles to extreme jeopardy and peril of life, and lands . . . is greatly dispeopled . . .”. The person who perpetrated these acts, “what so ever he be, is but as it were a rotten member of the body . . .”. The problem was selfaggrandizement and that “every man now severally studies to his own singular avail, and to the accomplishing of his own particular affection . . .”.60 Carrying a similar message, but in a different venue, the chantry priest and antiquarian John Rous (?1411–1491) published in 1487 a list of some

38  The Body Social, 1480–1550 60 South Warwickshire villages that he claimed were depopulated in his lifetime. Similar to Russell, Rous issued a clarion call for reform, arguing, “If such destruction as that in Warwickshire took place in other parts of the country, it would be a national danger.” He reported presenting a petition to Parliament as early as 1459 and even researched the population levels of the depopulated sites in the Hundred Rolls of 1279.61 But legislation and opinion did not invariably support an absolute right to tenure. The Statute of Merton of 1236 gave the lord of the manor and his licensees the authority to convert waste or common lands into tillage or pasture as long as sufficient grazing land was secured for the rest of the manor. The Middle Ages had undeniably seen peasants enclosing as a fairly routine matter.62 In the early fifteenth century treatise Dives and Pauper, the wealthy character “Dives” raised the issue: “if a man have let his house or place to hire for a certain time, may he in any case put the farmer out within that time?” “Pauper” replied in the affirmative, citing several conditions under which the owner could break an agreement: if he needed it for a dwelling because his own was consumed by fire; if the property “have need of amendment” because its condition changed after he let it; if the farmer misused the property, for example, by keeping swine in the house; if he broke the agreement in other ways, as “if by his folly and his fault he bring the land out of tillage”; if the lord of the property “fall in great harm and enmity” because of action by the tenant, such as keeping “open thieves or openly lechers or other malefactors” in the house.63 Of significance for the long-term future of the third estate was the changing nature and perception of landholding in late medieval and early modern England. The question posed here is how these changes, which we have already seen provoking comment and state intervention in the 1400s, represented the social order. Did comment and legislation favor a body social of interconnected members, or a social humanist model based upon individual merit? Chapter  14 examines the differing answers to these questions that were offered between 1593 and 1656, which was a high point of the “literature of complaint” about agrarian change, and which may have seen a “regrouping of social forces.”64 As elsewhere in this volume, it is not assumed that the literature provides the last word on the subject; rather, that it yields an account that is worth hearing, because it was contemporary, passionately felt, and forcefully expressed. The agrarian literature debated not only the old chestnuts of landlord v. tenant, enclosing and engrossing, depopulation and deserted villages. It also concerned itself with issues of social ethics, models of social order, and state intervention into the “moral economy” and paternalistic theories and practices. There was a myriad of tenures in the period, and no manor was absolutely typical of the generality. Considering that professional history was in its infancy, it was an extraordinarily bold move by Tawney to publish in 1912 a monograph on The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912).65 It is worth recalling that in this period, most historical publishing focused on biographies and diplomatic and

Contexts and Conflicts  39 military topics. The economic and social ones were only just on the horizon. To call Tawney a pioneer would be no exaggeration, and like all trailblazers, he occasionally lost his way. Yet it also fair to consider Tawney as “toughminded” and his book as “imaginative, spirited and passionate . . .”.66 To show just how seriously historians have taken The Agrarian Problem, two books have been published about it, the most recent one in 2013.67 Scholars recognize there are pros and cons to Tawney’s book. Until recently, critics had focused almost entirely on the question of whether common law courts protected the security of copyholders.68 The strengths of the book included a recognition of regional variations in community histories and structures, with many places in the southwest and southeast having “old enclosures,” while the Midlands had more recent experiences of depopulation and the “engrossing” of farms. Tawney understood this variation in communal experiences, recognizing, for example, that many in the north had “tenant rights” limiting lords and tenants alike.69 Overall, there was obviously a bewildering diversity of tenures, which Tawney only partially recognized, particularly where it involved subtenants. One of the most pungent criticisms of Tawney’s book was his alleged exaggeration of the conflicted relations between lords and tenants, which a new generation of historians questions. Instead of his portrayal of lords evicting or engrossing farms in league with the better-off farmers, they see villages weakened by loss of population through migration, the decay of buildings, and encroachments.70 In Norfolk, landlords actually tried to avoid conflict with tenants, although “Tawney would not have seen it this way.” Of course, the context in which he lived was significant. When he wrote in 1912, almost 90 percent of England was in the hands of great landowners; nowadays, most farms are owner-occupied. Not surprisingly, English tableware often represented country houses c. 1900, as the plates between pages 285 and 287 show.71 Where does England’s agrarian history stand in the longue durée? Is it possible to generalize when the subject is so diverse? The difficulties are apparent when it comes to one of the best-kept secrets in modern historiography: the quantitative research that Tawney published on land tenures in his monograph. Tawney and his researchers studied a total of 6,203 tenancies, which is a significant body of material. How were they selected—randomly? Was there any attempt to select representative cases? What periods do they cover? Do the original research notes survive in the Tawney papers in the archives of the London School of Economics and Political Science? We may be encouraged by the comments from the most recent study of Tawney’s book, which states that it “achieved wide geographical coverage with a carefully directed approach.” For his study of land surveys and court rolls, he consulted manuscript collections in what became the National Archives, in the Oxford University colleges, and in “a wide range of documents already in print . . .”.72 The breakout of the 6,203 tenancies studied by Tawney was as follows:

40  The Body Social, 1480–1550 Table 2.1  Breakout of Tenancies Based on Tawney Data Type of tenancy

Proportion of total (%)

Customary Freehold Leasehold Uncertain

61.1 19.5 12.6 6.773

Not all customary holdings were copyholds, e.g., Ancient Demesne, which was virtually freehold, and some copyholds were not customary, e.g., tenants at will, who could be evicted. It seems most holdings were customary by a substantial margin. A further critical issue was the duration of one’s rights and how entry or re-entry was gained, if at all.74 Here, Tawney’s researches yield some interesting results:

Table 2.2  Duration of Tenancies From Tawney Data Duration of copyhold tenures

No. of manors

Type Inheritance For years with right of renewal For years without right of renewal For life or lives Totals

%

47 19 3 73

33.1 13.4 2.1 51.4

142

100.075

Copyholds of inheritance were virtual freeholds, but they accounted for just a third of the manors studied, while the other two thirds had less than full security in their holdings, especially when it came to re-entry fines, viz.,

Table 2.3  Breakdown of Entry Fines Based on Tawney Data Types of entry fines Certain Uncertain Partly certain; partly uncertain Totals

No. of manors

%

53 93 1

36.1 63.3 00.6

147

100.076

Contexts and Conflicts  41 For copyholds for life or lives, entry fines were arbitrary and at the will of the lord of the manor. It is worth noting, moreover, that Tawney’s data show that entry fines were even arbitrary for half of the copyholds by inheritance, which were among the most secure.77 Tawney’s data showing “copyhold for lives predominated” is at variance with a statement that “recent research suggests that in fact the much more secure copyhold of inheritance was more common.”78 After 1550, the weak economic—not legal—position of copyholds furthered their conversion to leaseholds, a significant step towards a truly free market in the agrarian economy. As seen above, the English peasantry was already highly differentiated in wealth and status before the Black Death. The conversion of villein status to copyhold afforded them less security than serfdom, for rents (read: entry fines) outstripped food prices on many estates during the sixteenth century, which, along with engrossing, served in the long term to diminish peasant holdings and to further fragment the third estate. It is likely the manorial poor relief associated with villeinage was a casualty of these changes, leading in turn to central government intervention in the creation of the “poor laws.”79 As regards long-term social and economic developments, it is difficult to find much difference between Tawney and some critics. Located in the corpus of his work, The Agrarian Problem agrees with the position that the commercialization of agriculture was the greatest change in the sixteenthcentury English economy. Market growth by itself was insufficient as a cause of this development, which in Tawney’s work included religious thought and mercantile capitalism. Whatever the precise balance, a key development was that land was now about money and divorced from military roles, including the formerly pervasive tenant’s rights.80 Even if one no longer believes in the notion of a sixteenth-century “agrarian revolution,” it appears that an interest in how people experienced change in their lives could be transformative because it “offered opportunities and threatened livelihoods,” which is not so far from Tawney.81 If one considers the question of outcomes of these changes, what was the result? Examining the fate of copyholders in the mid-seventeenth century, it appears they were protected by the common law and prerogative courts and took the opportunity to sublet their properties or parts thereof. There was a plethora of cases in the court of Chancery in the mid-seventeenth century. The reason? Bulstrode Whitelocke, a commissioner in Chancery, singled out the security of property as the key, permitting unfettered freedom to dispose of property as one liked: “the freedom of our Nation where everyone has equal right and title to his estate,” and, “as full a propriety, to the meanest as to the greatest person, which causes our countrymen to insist upon their right . . .”. This was not a lawyer’s canard. It reflected concerns on the part of Henry Ireton in his fears about the Levellers, as will be seen in Chapter 16. Similar preoccupations troubled the opponents of Gerard Winstanley and the communitarian Diggers, who were allegedly most stoutly represented by

42  The Body Social, 1480–1550 copyholders. Locke’s later theories about property being a natural right and “the basis of political obligation” are discussed in Chapter 17.82 Such concerns about the security of property reflected conditions in which “sharp terms and conditions [were] associated with tenures . . .”. In reality, divisions ran deep between the better off and the poorer smallholders. There was little “common cause between customary tenants with rights to wood or common ground, and the landless poor who either built dwellings on common and waste, or else depended on it for their livelihoods.”83 IV. CONCLUSIONS Where context is concerned, there is no doubt there were high levels of convergence between ideas and political and social structures. Chapters 1 and 3 show how the body social was performed in a host of late medieval venues—in political poems and treatises, sermons, and works of theology. Chapters 4 through 6 extend this story into the 1520s, 1530s, and 1540s, when discussions expanded into the public sphere as censorship eased. The present chapter has demonstrated several points of convergence between the realms of ideas and structures. The Church, it is widely acknowledged, provided a great deal of the fabric that held together the body social from top to bottom. The principles of fixed social hierarchies were firmly established in the world of lordship. So, too, was the principle of mutual aid, which was apparent in guilds in town and country and in manorial custom. Here were instances of consonance in the worlds of ideas and structures, which reinforced the precept of interdependence favored by theorists of the body social. But there was also dissonance. There were extensive divisions within the estates, especially in levels of wealth and office holding. The distribution of wealth was not an issue per se. What was more significant were issues arising from contexts, which created opportunities for ideological discussions, as in the Richard Brookes case discussed in Chapter 1. There are reasons to question the totalized character of thinking in the period. The power of the Church was immense, and even the Lollard texts appear to endorse the principle of the three estates working in unison. Yet this dissenting group found other grounds upon which to attack clerical authority and, in the process, to prefigure the break with Rome. As regards lay lords, the quasi-official position was that birth was the key to rank. Yet in the 1480s, Medwall’s play Fulgens and Lucrece questioned the authority of bloodlines over virtue, and in the 1530s, Henry VIII’s opponents protested against “low born” councilors. As for the third estate, important developments were taking place in the rural world. Servile labor services were in decline, and parliamentary statutes imposed compulsory labor with a far more extensive mandate than the old system. The new labor laws were an important grievance in the rebellion of 1381. But despite popular protests, support for a universal obligation to

Contexts and Conflicts  43 work existed among the Lollards and social humanists who rejected “voluntary poverty.” The agrarian sector was also a source of upheaval. The conversion to copyhold tenures, as Tawney showed, diminished the security of the peasantry by introducing uncertain entry fines and, thus, market values that favored the landowner. A final issue was the relief of the poor, which was raised by the abolition of religious guilds, hospitals, and manorial customs under the Tudors.84 NOTES  1. Sewell, Rhetoric, 35–6; Logics, 346.   2. London: Penguin Classics, 1990 edn. Trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. Introduction, Peter Burke, 10–11.   3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, transl. by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch.   4. Malcolm Kitch, “Jacob Burckhardt: Romanticism and Cultural History,” in William Lamont, ed., Historical Controversies and Historians (London: Routledge, 1998), 138–143.   5. Chris Given-Wilson, “The Problem of Labor in the Context of English Government, c. 1350–1450,” in James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. M. Ormrod, eds., The Problem of Labor in Fourteenth-Century England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2000), 85; Stephen Knight, “The Voice of Labor in FourteenthCentury English Literature,” in ibid., 122; Sarah Rees Jones, “Household, Work and the Problem of Mobile Labor: The Regulation of Labor in Medieval English Towns,” in ibid. 153.   6. J. P. Cooper, “The Social Distribution of Land and Men in England, 1436– 1700,” Ec.H.R. 2nd ser. 20 (1967): 420–1; J. R. Lander, Conflict and Stability in Fifteenth-Century England (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 123.   7. Cooper, “Social Distribution,” 420–1 (calculations from) 425; G. E. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of A Ruling Class (London : Longman, 1976), 4; C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), I, 143. Population figures from John Hatcher, Plague, Population, and The English Economy, 1348–1530 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 68–71; valuable discussions by Christopher Dyer, An Age of Transition? Economy and Society in England in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 29–32; Richard Britnell, Britain and Ireland, 1050–1530: Economy and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 491–501.  8. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change, I, 143.   9. Julian Cornwall, “The Early Tudor Gentry,” Ec.H.R. 2nd series, 17:3 (1965): 457, 461n. 10. David M. Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth: England under the Later Tudors, 15471603 (London: Longmans, 1983; 2nd edn. 1992) 235–42; 202–5; John Patten, English Towns, 1500–1700 (Folkestone, Kent: Dawson, 1978), 111–14; A.M. Everitt, “The Marketing of Agricultural Produce,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume IV, 1500–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 467. 11. A.  R. Bridbury, Economic Growth: England in the Later Middle Ages (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), 76–80; C. Phythian-Adams, “Urban Decay in Late Medieval England,” in Philip Abrams & E. A. Wrigley, eds., Towns in Societies: Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 159–61; and for a more optimistic assessment

44  The Body Social, 1480–1550 N. R. Goose, “In Search of the Urban Variable: Towns and the English Economy, 1500–1650,” Ec.H.R., 2nd ser., 39 no. 2 (1986): 167–8, 183–4. 12. Peter Clark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 11, 83; Patten, English Towns, 111–12. 13. R. H. Hilton, A Medieval Society: The West Midlands at the End of the Thirteenth Century (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 267. 14. K.  V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, chs. 1–2; Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700,” P&P 100 (1983): 37, 46; John Bossy, “Blood and Baptism: Kinship, Community, and Christianity in Western Europe from the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Century,” in Derek Baker, ed., Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, Studies in Church History (Oxford: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society, B. Blackwell, 1973), 130–41, 143–4. 15. R. W. Southern cited by R. L. Storey, “Episcopal King-Makers in the Fifteenth Century,” in Barry Dobson, ed., The Church, Politics, and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 82. 16. Maurice H. Keen, Chivalry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 44–50. 17. Bossy, “Blood and Baptism, 130–41. 18. J. A. F. Thomson, The Transformation of Medieval England, 1370–1529 (London: Longman, 1983), 308; Storey, “Episcopal King-makers,” loc. cit.; J. R. Lander, Government and Community: England, 1450–1509 (London: Arnold, 1980), 121. 19. Thomson, op.cit., 306, 311. 20. Thomson, 286–7, 392–5; Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation, 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 310–26. 21. Thomson, 325; Lander, Government and Community: England, 1450–1509, 127. 22. T. H. Aston, “The Origins of the Manor in England with A Postscript,” in Aston, P. R. Coss, Christopher Dyer, and Joan Thirsk, eds., Social Relations and Ideas: Essay in Honor of R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; reprinted from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 8 [1958]); Christopher Dyer, Lords and Peasants in a Changing Society: The Estates of the Bishopric of Worcester, 680–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 146ff.; Edmund King, England, 1175–1425 (London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul, 1979), 55–6. For lordship’s importance in an earlier era, see Eric John, “The Age of Edgar,” in James Campbell, ed., The Anglo-Saxons (London: Penguin, 1991; repr. of Phaidon edn., 1982), 168–9: I owe the last reference to Dr. Alexander Grant. 23. King, 1175–1425, 44, 50–1; Hilton, A Medieval Society, 218–19, 223, 230, 232, 235; Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 163, 175. 24. Hilton, Medieval Society, 268; King, 1175–1425, 50; Richard M. Smith, “‘Modernization’ and the Corporate Medieval Village Community in England,” in A. R. H. Baker  & D. Gregory, eds., Explorations in Historical Geography: Interpretative Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 172. 25. King, 1175–1425, 50; Julian Cornwall, “The Early Tudor Gentry,” Ec.H.R. 2nd s, 17:3 (1965): 459. 26. K.  B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 181, 215–17; R. H. Hilton, “A  Crisis of Feudalism,” P&P 80 (1978): 8–10; Cornwall, “Gentry,” 461; R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London: Macmillan, 1969), 48ff.; M. E. James, A Tudor Magnate and the Tudor State: Henry, 5th Earl of Northumberland (York: Borthwick Papers) 30 (1966): 18–20. For copyholds, see section III.C-D. below. 27. F. R. H. Du Boulay, An Age of Ambition: English Society in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 132–4; Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (London: Longmans, 3rd edn., 1983), 105–6.

Contexts and Conflicts  45 28. R. R. Davies, “Lordship or Colony?” Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1984), vol.  84, 148; Rosemary Horrex, “Service,” in Horrex, ed., Fifteenth-Century Attitudes: Perceptions of Society in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61–3; R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1967; orig. pub. 1953), 105. 29. R.  L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1986; orig. pub. 1966), 26–7; K. B. McFarlane, The Wars of the Roses (London: Proceedings of the British Academy) 50 (1964): 112–13. 30. Markham repr. in W. C. Hazlitt, ed. Inedited Tracts: Illustrating the Manners, Opinions, and Occupations of Englishmen during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Printed for the Roxburghe Library [by Whittingham and Wilkins], 1868), 160–7. 31. W. H. Dunham Jr., “Lord Hastings’ Indentured Retainers, 1461–1483,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 39 (1955): 9–10, 107–11; James, A Tudor Magnate, 27n; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 204–17; Lawrence Stone, “Patriarchy and Paternalism in Tudor England: The Earl of Arundel and the Peasants Revolt of 1549” Journal of British Studies 13, no. 2 (May 1974): 21. 32. Joel T. Rosenthal, The Purchase of Paradise: The Social Function of Aristocratic Benevolence, 1307–1485 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 102; R. W. Chambers, ed. A Fifteenth-Century Courtesy Book (London: Early English Text Society, original series, 1914), no. 148: 12–13. 33. Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 289–92, 295, 299. 34. Frances M. Page, “The Customary Poor-Law of Three Cambridgeshire Manors,” Cambridge Historical Journal, 3, no. 2 (1930): 125–6. 35. Ibid. 127–30. 36. Rosenthal, Purchase, 102–11; Stone, Crisis, 575; John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 28–31. For Warwick material, see A. L. Beier, “The Social Problems of an Elizabethan Country Town: Warwick, 1580–90,” in Peter Clark, ed., Country Towns in PreIndustrial England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981), 71–3. 37. Chambers, ed., Courtesy Book, 15–16; S. T. Bindoff, Tudor England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950), 30; F. G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 131; also Felicity Heal, “The Idea of Hospitality in Early Modern England,” P & P 102 (1984): and Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), chs. 1–3. And the characteristically brilliant discussion by R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1912), 232–3. 38. Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 137. 39. M. E. James, “Ritual, Drama, and Body Social in the Late Medieval English Town,” P&P 98 (1983): 4; C. Phythian-Adams, “Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry, 1450–1550,” in Peter Clark & Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge  & Kegan Paul, 1972), 63–5; David H. Sacks, “The Demise of the Martyrs: The Feasts of St. Clement and St. Katherine in Bristol, 1400–1600,” Social History, 11:2 (May 1986): 150–2; David Palliser, “The Trade Guilds of Tudor York,” in Clark & Slack, eds., Crisis and Order, 109–11. 40. Palliser, “Trade Guilds,” 111–12; Sacks, “Demise,” 169; Valerie Pearl, “Change and Stability in Seventeenth-century London,” London Journal, 5 (1978): 8, 13–14; A. L. Beier, “Engine of Manufacture: The Trades of London,” in Beier

46  The Body Social, 1480–1550 and R.A.P. Finlay, London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis (London: Longman, 1986), 157–60. 41. Kate Giles, “Framing Labor: The Archaeology of York’s Medieval Guildhalls,” in James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg, and W. M. Ormrod, ed. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2000), 81–2; Palliser, “Trade Guilds,” 109–10; Susan Brigden, “Religion and Social Obligation in Early Sixteenth-century London, P&P 103 (May 1984): 83, 94, 96; Sacks, “Demise,” 151. 42. Palliser, “Trade Guilds,” 110; Gervase Rosser, “The Essence of Medieval Urban Communities: The Vill of Westminster, 1200–1540,” T.R.H.S., 5th ser., 34 (1984): 107–8; Brigden, “Religion and Social Obligation,” 98–100. Also see Gervase Rosser, Medieval Westminster, 1200–1540 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 310–21. 43. Brigden, “Religion,” 98–9; Rosser, “Essence of Medieval Urban Communities,” 104–5. 44. Virginia R. Bainbridge, Guilds in the Medieval Countryside: Social and Religious Change in Cambridgeshire c. 1350–1558 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1996), 28, 102, 114, 120–1; David J. F. Crouch, Piety, Fraternity, and Power: Religious Guilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire, 1389–1547 (York: York Medieval Press, 2000), 43, 83, 221, 240. 45. Duby, Three Orders, 213; Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962 edn.), ch. 7, esp. 293–7. 46. King, England 1175–1425, 50; Duby, Three Orders, 153; J. L. Bolton, The Medieval English Economy, 1150–1500 (London: J.M. Dent, 1980), 23; Edward Miller  & John Hatcher, Medieval England: Rural Society and Economic Change, 1086–1348 (London: Longmans, 1978), I, 120. 47. Miller & Hatcher, op.cit., I, 16. 48. Felicity Heal, Of Prelates and Princes: A Study of the Economic and Social Position of the Tudor Episcopate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 54–5; Lander, Government and Community, 120; Peter Heath, The English Parish Clergy on the Eve of the Reformation (London: Routledge & K. Paul; 1969), 173; Margaret Bowker, The Secular Clergy in the Diocese of Lincoln, 1495–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 139; R. B. Smith, Land and Politics in the England of Henry VIII: The West Riding of Yorkshire, 1530–1546 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970), 228–9. 49. Nigel Saul, Knights and Esquires: The Gloucestershire Gentry in the Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 14–7. 50. Cooper, “Social Distribution,” 420. 51. R. H. Hilton, “Peasant Movements in England before 1381,” Ec.H.R. 2nd ser., 2:2 (1949): repr. E. M. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History (London: Arnold, 1962), vol. 2, 73–90; Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval English Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Temple Smith, 1973); T. H. Aston  & R. H. Hilton, eds. The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 52. David M. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 137; Phythan-Adams, Desolation of a City, 130–1 (proportions calculated from 131). 53. Susan Reynolds, An Introduction to the History of English Medieval Towns (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1977), chs. 4–5; Phythian-Adams, Desolation, 131; Palliser, Tudor York, 148. 54. Reynolds, op.cit., 136–8, 185; R. B. Dobson, “The Risings in York, Beverley, and Scarborough, 1380–1381,” in R. H. Hilton and T. H. Aston, eds., The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 129. 55. Brigden, “Religion and Social Obligation,” 97–8. 56. George Homans, English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941; repr. Norton, 1975), 242; Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England,

Contexts and Conflicts  47 c. 1200–1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 119, 124; Zvi Razi, Life, Marriage, and Death in a Medieval Parish: Economy, Society, and Demography in Halesowen, 1270–1400 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 8, 86; Edwin B. DeWindt, Land and People in Holywell-cumNeedingworth: Structures of Tenure and Patterns of Social Organization in an East Midlands Village, 1252–1457 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1972), 113; Edward Britton, The Community of the Vill : A Study in theHistory of the Family and Village Life in Fourteenth-Century England (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1977), 14, 18–19. 57. Razi, op.cit. 77; Britton, op.cit., 12, 14, 41; Margaret Spufford, “Puritanism and Social Control?” in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 50–4. 58. Richard M. Smith, “’Modernization’,” 156–7, 167–75. 59. R. H. Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom in Medieval England (London: Macmillan, 1969), 47–9 for definitions. For doubts about the “golden age,” see John Hatcher, “English Serfdom and Villeinage: Towards a Reassessment,” P&P, 90 (1981): 38–9. 60. S.  B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Orig. pub. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936; repr American Scholar Publications, New York, 1966), 180–1. These statements were excised in the third (and final?) draft of the sermon. 61. M.  W. Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (Lutterworth: Lutterworth Press, 1954), 413; W. E. Tate, “Enclosure Acts and Awards Relating to Warwickshire,” Transactions, Birmingham Archaeological Society, 65 (1949), 58–60. The skepticism expressed by J. R. Lander in an otherwise valuable text, Government and Community: England, 1450–1509 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), concerning the Russell and Rous statements, 16–17, does not seem justified. 62. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change, I, 69. 63. Priscilla H. Barnum, ed. Dives and Pauper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) for EETS, o.s, no. 280, seventh precept, ninth chapter, vol. I, pt. ii, 152–3. 64. Keith Wrightson, “Foreword,” in Jane Whittle, ed., Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440–1660: Tawney’s Agrarian Problem Revisited (Woodbridge, Suffolk: the Boydell Press, 2013), xiv. 65. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912. 66. Wrightson, “Foreword,” xiv; Andy Wood, “The Loss of Athelstan’s Gift: The Politics of Popular Memory in Malmesbury, 1607–1633”, in Jane Whittle, ed., Landlords and Tenants, 85. 67. Whittle, op.cit.; E. Kerridge, Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1969). 68. Kerridge, 92–3. Cf. William Lamont, “R. H. Tawney: ‘Who did not write a single work which can be trusted,’ ” in William Lamont, ed., Historical Controversies and Historians (London: Routledge, 2003; 1st pub. UCL Press, 1998), 109–20. 69. Jane Whittle, “Introduction,” 10–11; Christopher Dyer, “The Agrarian Problem, 1440–1520,” in Whittle, 19; William D. Shannon, “Risks and Rewards in Wasteland Enclosure: Lowland Lancashire, c. 1500–1650,” in Whittle, 150. For tenant’s rights, see Jean Morrin, “The Transfer to Leasehold on Durham Cathedral Estate, 1541–1626,” in Whittle, ed., 119; Jennifer S. Holt, “The Financial Rewards of Winning the Battle for Secure Customary Tenures,” in Whittle, 133. 70. Dyer, “The Agrarian Problem,” in Whittle, 32–4. 71. Elizabeth Griffiths “Improving Landlords or Villains of the Piece? A Case Study of Early Seventeenth-Century Norfolk,” in Whittle, 181; cf. the conflicts in the Lune Valley in Holt’s article, 148. 72. Whittle, “Introduction,” 6. 73. Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 25.

48  The Body Social, 1480–1550 74. Kerridge, Agrarian Problems, 86–9. 75. Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 300. 76. Tawney, Agrarian Problem, 300–1. 77. Kerridge, Agrarian Problems, 36–7. 78. Whittle, “Introduction,” 15, cites as forthcoming R. W. Hoyle, “Landlords and Tenants in Tawney’s Century, 1540–1640.” 79. Stone, Crisis, 141–2, 327–334; Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700, I, 85–91; David Ormrod, “Agrarian Capitalism and Merchant Capitalism: Tawney, Dobb, Brenner and Beyond,” in Whittle, ed., 212, for rents. 80. Ormrod, 204, 213ff. 81. Whittle, “Conclusions,” 220–1. 82. Christopher Brooks, “The Agrarian Problem in Revolutionary England,” in Whittle, ed., 186, 195–6. 83. Brooks, 193, 195. 84. See the mixed picture, which relies in part on negative evidence, in Heather Falvey, “The Politics of Enclosure in Elizabethan England: Contesting ‘Neighborship’ in Chinley (Derbyshire),” in Whittle ed. Landlords and Tenants, 74–5.

3 The Body Examined Ancient, Medieval, Modern

I. INTRODUCTION The first section of this book, Chapters 3 through 6, focuses on the principles of what is described here as the concept of the body social, or the organic model of society. For almost half a millennium, from c. 1100 to c. 1550, the idea that society was composed of three estates, each with specialized functions, working interdependently in harmony, and arranged in a fixed hierarchy, provided a matrix for social thinking in England. In some places in continental Europe, this model had even greater perdurability. The German legal historian Otto von Gierke was the first to identify what he termed the “body social.”1 This chapter describes the principles of the body according to von Gierke, the historiography of the concept, and its impact upon social thought in late medieval Europe and, specifically, in English social thought. The argument advanced here is that the organic theory enjoyed wide currency into the mid-sixteenth century in England. It was an idea that straddles the conventional chronological divisions of medieval and modern, or medieval and Renaissance. Ultimately, this story tells significant truths about the development of social ideologies in early modern England—the shift from an image of society as a body to a very different worldview, a transformation that is discussed in Parts II and III of this book. The idea of the body social was selected for study because of its pervasiveness and continuity. Authors articulated the model in a host of forms and contexts. They included private, hortatory manuscripts intended to influence the powers-that-be. Some documents remained unpublished in their authors’ lifetimes. In Chapters 4 and 5, respectively, we find that early and mid-Tudor proponents of an organic order included Edmund Dudley, a leading lawyer and Royal official in the reign of Henry VII, and Clement Armstrong, an entrepreneur and member of the London Grocers’ Company, who sent voluminous treatises on religion and the economy to the government in the 1530s. In other cases, the articulation of the body took the form of published sermons and polemics, especially in the reign of Edward VI (1547–53), a time of diminished censorship and, arguably, heightened religious feeling. In this instance, as Chapter 6 shows, the authors included, among others, the

50  The Body Social, 1480–1550 evangelical “Commonwealth-men” Robert Crowley, John Hales, Hugh Latimer, Thomas Lever, and others. The belief in a body social was not limited to the elites. It had enduring, popular resonance, judging by a protest in the reign of James VI and I (1603–25), which remained in manuscript until the nineteenth century. In 1607, rioters in the Midland Revolt opposed to privatizing common fields invoked the notion of an organic order.2 Yet another reason to focus on the theory of the body is that it was challenged by a number of thinkers from the early sixteenth century, as will be seen in Chapters 7 through 12. II. HISTORIOGRAPHY Von Gierke’s analysis of the body social appeared in a four-volume study of German community law, which was published between 1868 and 1913.3 From the concept of what he also called the “social organism,” he deduced a number of mid-range principles of social and political organization. Membership of an estate was one, or the idea that a person was part of a larger group, which existed independently of alterations in members. The welfare of each member was subordinate to the estate, and the estate to the body of the whole, with the qualifier that the whole only “comes to light” through its members, that every member was valuable to the organism, and that conflict, or amputation, as he termed it, was undesirable. Marsiglio of Padua (c. 1275–c. 1342), rector of the University of Paris, expanded the concept of membership, arguing each part of the whole acted upon the others in a system of interdependence.4 According to this model, estates were ordered not only in function and in interdependence, but also in an immutable hierarchy based upon birth. Hierarchy was inherent in the model, von Gierke maintained, because it involved “a union of like with unlike,” which resulted in differences in rank. Groupings were immune to internal and external changes. Members were seen “not as arithmetically equal units, but as socially grouped and differentiated from each other.” In other words, this was a graduated as well as a functional order, ranging from a “supreme unit” at the top or head on down to an individual person, with different roles for members. The higher ranks controlled the lower, for every “social body needs a governing part,” which was sometimes represented by the head, heart, or soul. The social organism combined parts that were not on equal footings, according to Ptolemy of Lucca (c. 1236–c. 1327). The cosmological analog for this earthly arrangement was the Great Chain of Being.5 Von Gierke’s interpretation of inherent structures was influential, as the rest of this chapter seeks to show, because it was historically based. Concerning the principle of hierarchy in medieval thought, another scholar affirms, “Whatever the image, the orders of society were set unerringly in a hierarchical framework. Social inequalities were not just facts of life. They were essential to social harmony and a prime element in European Christian thinking.”6

The Body Examined  51 Theories of an organic social order have a rich history in sociology, philosophy, and history. There were echoes of von Gierke’s work in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936) distinguished between the organic Gemeinschaft of preindustrial societies, where relationships were based on commitments to the community or the whole rather than to self-interest, and the Gesellschaft in industrialized societies, in which social relations were dictated by rationality and individualism. What determined these structures were different modes of willpower. In the case of Gemeinschaft, it was the “essential will” or Wesenwille that led people, often subconsciously, to serve the greater whole, whereas in Gesellschaft, it was the “arbitrary will” or “rational will” or Kürwille, seen in the work of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), that drove behavior to be self-interested.7 These binary distinctions resonated in twentieth-century thought and provoked dissent. The Viennese philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) took an opposing line on collectivities versus individualism, or as he termed them, “closed” versus “open” societies. Popper equated closed societies with collectivism, state control, and “totalitarianism,” with low levels of individualism, rationality, egalitarianism, personal and intellectual freedom, and social mobility. The open society, by contrast, privileged the individual, had “many members strive to rise socially,” and was characterized by “equalitarianism, faith in reason, and love of freedom.” Popper developed a number of humanistic themes in critiquing, by implication, many of the principles of von Gierke’s organic social order.8 Von Gierke’s oeuvre was a positive, if idealized, statement of the possibility of incorporating individual needs within a corporatist social framework. He was critical of Enlightenment notions of “natural law,” which he thought lacked an historical dimension and roots in legal and communal traditions. But von Gierke did not explain how social functions, organic links, and hierarchies developed; he tended to take them as givens. Moreover, he and his proponents tended to minimize the degree of conflict in real events as opposed to the theory of vertical loyalties. Nor did he solve the problem of the tension between individual rights and the corporatist whole, which was apparent in Bismarckian Germany during von Gierke’s lifetime, and which arguably became the number one issue for nation-states of the twentieth century. Historians still flirt with the body social as accurately representing late medieval and early modern social thinking, while others reject it. One prominent school portrayed the social order as organized along vertical loyalties based on function, locality, mutual aid, and status rather than horizontal economic positions of wealth and social classes, as in Marxism. As with von Gierke, one’s role was based on participation in an “organic whole” in which inequality was multilayered and based on shared values and was not only economic in nature. Rebellions were based on vertical loyalties, with communities organizing with lords and municipal leaders to resist regional or central authorities who were “outsiders.” Horizontal alliances

52  The Body Social, 1480–1550 based upon social class, such as lord against peasant, or urban oligarchs in opposition to artisans, were the exceptions. Vertical affinities were more than matters of local parochialism. The concepts were “actively constitutive of the social hierarchy . . .”. However imperfect as a representation of real social structures, the society of orders was the least inaccurate.9 More critical of the vertical, organic model were the Marxist and corporatist schools of thought. Both believed that a corporate village ethos existed in the Middle Ages, which tended to produce the kinds of “closed” communities described by Popper, emphasizing self-sufficiency, cooperation, and customary manorial laws. Marxists went furthest in questioning vertical affinities, stressing the significance of community solidarities; their focus was the wider of the two, encompassing economic issues such as labor services, rents, and conflicts with their lords. Both schools of thought believed there was a decline in village solidarities, but date it differently, the corporatist school citing the fourteenth and Marxists the fifteenth century. Crucial to the long-term decline were internal forces that included the emergence of village elites that identified with lords rather than peasants, external forces of state building associated with the Reformation, and social changes linked to the decline of serfdom, higher wages, and the extinction of common field systems.10 It is unlikely that any of these representations of an organic community exactly reproduces “reality,” but their mere existence suggests the power of the metaphor. To this author’s mind, the most persuasive interpretation of the body social is that of Georges Duby, who argued that the organic model of society was no beneficent nostrum of a utopian universe. It was an ideology, “a framework for an ideal classification of the kinds of men” and a “justification of certain normative utterances, certain imperatives” about society. Issues of power were seldom expressed ex cathedra in justification, but power is what the model was really about. Rank was determined by functions, which concerned power.11 III. ORGANIC MODELS: ANCIENT, MEDIEVAL, MODERN There is no question that throughout documented history, idealized visions of society have existed. The impassioned dreams of Jesus make the point; so do Paul’s warnings to the Thessalonians and other congregations; so, too, the innumerable mystical projects of prophets in late antiquity.12 In a similar manner, the belief in an organic social order was a potent one in medieval and early modern Europe. In England’s case, the adherence to the model of three interdependent estates was more short-lived than in France. While French authorities still modeled political organization on the three estates as late as 1788, in England, the belief system came under challenge in the first half of the sixteenth century.13 Outside Europe, the model of the social organism has had resonance in recent history. The ideals in traditional Vietnamese society encompassed low levels of individualism and high commitment to family and authority.

The Body Examined  53 Following Confucius, “Equal justice was secondary to social harmony.” The rejection of individualism was reflected in the language: there was no Vietnamese equivalent to the first-person singular pronoun “I.” The only cognate term meant “subject of the king.” When one spoke of oneself, it was in relation to others, as in “your brother.” Moreover, one “did not see himself as a totally independent being, for he did not distinguish himself as acutely as does a Westerner from his society . . .”. He did not regard the self as “formed of immutable traits, eternally loyal to certain principles, but rather as a system of relationships, a function of the society around him.”14 The medieval model of an organic order originated in tenth-century France, but its roots apparently lay deeper in Asian and Indo-European culture. A scholar who studied myths found tripartite representations of society in texts from the Indus to Iceland. The three estates appeared in the Rigveda in Hinduism c. 1500 BCE, in the Popol Vuh, an epic of preColumbian Mexico, and in Anglo-Saxon England in the reign of King Alfred (849–899) and his version of Boethius (c. 480–c. 525). The tripartite body social appeared at the end of the ninth century, first in England, France, and Poland. According to one scholar, the theory “corresponded to a new need” of social and political structures, including monarchies presenting themselves as the “guarantor of the economic order and material prosperity.” The model acted as “a new instrument of social action” and as an “instrument of propaganda . . .”. The theory was not static, because the nobles or milites evolved into “bellatores” as new military techniques developed, and the rustici spun off an elite of “laboratores,” or enterprising peasant farmers and artisans. Leading thinkers of the central and late Middle Ages—Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Marsiglio of Padua, Ptolemy of Lucca, and Nicholas Cusa (1401–1464)—articulated these principles. From the monarchs’ perspective, the greatest threats were rebellions by the estates and class warfare.15 England’s fascination with the three orders developed in the first half of the twelfth century. The context tends to support the notion that the model was linked to representations of power and the threat of conflict. One of the earliest portrayals of the three orders concerned disputes with the king, c.  1141, when Henry I’s (c. 1078–1135) nightmares showed him being attacked by members of the estates—by clerics waving pastoral crooks, knights flourishing lances, and peasants wielding farm implements (see ­Figure 3.1: see pages 54–6). A similar representation and context occurred in 1173, when Henry II (1207–1272), facing rebellion by his wife and sons, commissioned a French monk to compose a vernacular panegyric of the dynasty in which the three-estate model figured.16 In the late Middle Ages, the three estates were a dominant trope in English literature and theology and were sometimes critical of the status quo. A Middle English poem criticized all three orders for the sin of avarice in the reign of Edward II (1284–1327). In a similar vein, John Gower (c. 1325–1408) attacked the estates for failing in their duties in poems in Latin, French, and English, while John Lydgate (c. 1370–c. 1451) continued

Figure 3.1  Chronicle, John of Worcester, “Dreams of Henry I,” c. 1140: Ms. 157, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. Ink and tempera, 12¾ × 93⁄8”. Wikimedia Commons.

The Body Examined  55

Figure 3.2  Cleric, Knight, and Laborer, 13th century French: British Library, Ms. Sloane 2435, fol. 85 (vellum). Wikimedia Commons.

the assault in a translation of Boccaccio entitled The Fall of Princes, which remained a popular text for 150 years.17 The Lollard tract “The Lantern of Light,” dating from between 1409 and 1415, used the language of the three estates in attacking greed. According to John Bale, the Lollard leader Sir John Oldcastle (c. 1378–1417) made a public declaration of faith in 1413, in which he described the “Church militant” on earth as one of the three estates. The clergy were to preach and teach the scriptures and give “wholesome counsels of good living to the other two degrees of men.” The knights were to “preserve God’s people from oppressors, tyrants, and thieves, and to see the clergy supported so long as they teach purely, pray rightly, and minister the sacraments freely.” The common people were to “bear their good minds and true obedience” to

56  The Body Social, 1480–1550

Figure 3.3  Woodcut of Three Estates by Jacob Meydenbach from Prognosticatio by Johann von Lichtenberg, 1488. Wikimedia Commons.

the other orders and to “occupy every man in his faculty, be it merchandise, handicraft, or the tillage of the soil . . .”. All estates were “to be as an helper to another . . .”. Early in the history of printing, there were reproductions of the estates model, including William Caxton’s Game and Play of the Chesse (1476–81), which was a detailed allegory of the different orders, which were represented by the different chess pieces. Alexander Barclay’s “Ship of Fools” (1509) also gave prominence to the theme. Both were works of translation, but Barclay added considerable material concerning the estates that did not appear in the original German or Latin versions.18 What held the estates together besides function and hierarchy, it was asserted, was the principle of mutual obligation. The theory was that each social entity was necessary for the others to survive. The actual raison d’être of each estate was that it performed roles that assisted the other orders and made society as a whole work. The interdependent nature of the social model was expressed through a variety of images. In a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross in 1388, Master Thomas Wimbledon used agricultural analogies in

The Body Examined  57 which the different orders tended the vines. The Church’s job was “to cut away the void branches of sins with the sword of her tongue”; the knights’ was “to keep the land from enemies of other lands”; the laborers’ was “to travail bodily and with their sore sweat gotten out of the earth bodily lifelode [livelihood?] for him and other parties.” The big picture, he asserted, was that “none may well be without other.”19 Architectural imagery was also employed to express interdependence and dates from as early as the tenth century in France, when the estates were compared to three pillars supporting a throne. Other building analogies included ships and the physical architecture of the Church with their respective parts. In the fourteenth-century Summa Predicantium of John Bromyard, members of society were compared to the strings on a harp. As long as each remained in its place the tune would be sweet, but “behold the string out of its place which destroys the whole melody!”20 The most common metaphor for social interdependence was the human body. As anthropologists have observed, the body is “good to think with,” because its organs, fluids, and members can be deployed to represent “natural, supernatural, social, and even spatial relations.”21 The concept of society qua body is as old as the sixth millennium before Christ. In Aesop’s fables, the belly was repudiated for laziness by other parts of the body and was boycotted by the mouth, teeth, and hands, so that the body expired. In the second millennium BCE in the Rigveda in Sanskrit, the clergy was the mouth, the nobility were the arms, the shepherds were the thighs, and the laborers were the feet. The metaphor was reprised in the work of Herodotus (c. 485–425 BC), Aristophanes (c. 448–c. 388 BC), Plato (c. 428–347 BC) in the Republic, Aristotle (384–322 BCE) in The Politics, Cicero (103–46 BC) in De Officiis, and Titus Livius (c. 59 BC–17 CE).22 Paul employed the metaphor of the body in I Corinthians 12 to describe the spirit of Christian belief and the offices of the early Church. He further implied in Romans 12 that society was a mystical body, whose head was Christ and whose headship guaranteed the unity of the body.23 The body metaphor enjoyed wide currency in the medieval and Renaissance eras.24 Drawing upon Paul, medieval theologians developed the notion of Christ having two bodies, one natural, as the son of Mary, and the other as head of a spiritual body. Aquinas and others transformed the mystical body of Christ’s Church into the corpus Ecclesiae mysticum with the Pope as head. Monarchs were also considered to have two bodies, that of the corpus naturale, or person, and the corpus mysticum, or body politic. The former might die, as when Charles I was executed in 1649, but the latter would continue “without affecting seriously or doing irreparable harm to the King’s body politic . . .”. The body metaphor was also used to describe the “common weal” and, more generally, the notion of “the people” or the populace, and a “social community.” Of course, disputes occurred in the Middle Ages over investitures and who represented Christ on earth and exercised suzerainty—the Pope or secular authorities.25

58  The Body Social, 1480–1550 In England, the best-known representative of the language of the body was John of Salisbury (c. 1115–1176), who completed the Policraticus in 1159. Although John’s tract focused on the political, it also contained a social element in which the language of mutual obligation appeared. In describing the “feet” of society as manual workers, including peasants, John specified that “inferiors must serve superiors, who on the other hand ought to provide all necessary protection to their inferiors.” The principle behind this cooperation was the identification of self-interest with that of the community: “each individual may be likened to a part of the others reciprocally”; “each believes what is to his own advantage to be determined by that which he recognizes to be most useful for others.”26 In the later Middle Ages, the language of organic interdependence continued to be invoked. In 1365, a lawyer stated that Parliament represented “the body of the whole realm.” “The Lantern of Light,” while critical of all three estates, still represented society using the organic model and required them to observe their responsibilities to one another. The priests were to “open to the people the way of truth”; the knights, who represented the power of the Father, were to “defend God’s law” and to “sore punish misdoers . . .”. The commonalty or “simple laborers,” who represented the love of the Holy Ghost, were to dread the Lord, to “walk in his ways,” and to labor with their hands. Then they would be blessed and live in peace. The image of mutual obligation also appeared in an anonymous poem of 1418 that distinguished numerous body members in a variety of roles. The head was a king, the neck a judge, the breast the priesthood, the shoulders and backbone were the “lords of the land,” the hands were the esquires, the fingers those who fought with “bent bows,” the ribs the men of law, the thighs the merchants, the legs the artisans, the feet “all true tillers of lands,” and the toes all the servants who labored faithfully in all conditions. The injunction of mutual dependence was evident in one of the final verses: I liken a kingdom in good estate, To stalwart men, mighty in health. While none of his limbs other hate, He is mighty, with another to deal. If each of his limbs with other debate, He waxes sick, for flesh is frail, His enemies wait early and late, In his feebleness, on him to steal.27 Lydgate, while critical of the estates, portrayed them in “a body set” in which were “the estates that govern communities,” but also merchants who sought wealth and craftsmen “which live by their hands.”28 The analogy between the Commonwealth and bodies appeared in the highest councils of state. At the opening of Parliament in 1430 and 1483, two keynote speakers, Master William of Lyndwood and Bishop John Russell, respectively, described the realm in terms of the body.29 And the best-known piece of

The Body Examined  59 English political thought in the fifteenth century by Sir John Fortescue, written between 1468 and 1471, used the language of mutuality to justify a body politic. The people’s intention was “the first living thing” and contained the blood, which it “transmits to the head and all the members of the body, by which the body is nourished and quickened.”30 The mutual obligations of the three estates were replicated in the Caxton translation published between 1476 and 1481: The laborers ought to provide for the clerks and knights such things as were needful for them to live by in the world honestly; and the knights ought to defend the clerks and the laborers that there were no wrong done to them; and the clerks ought to instruct and teach these two manner of people. . . .31 The “governed wholeness” of the body was evident in the rituals of politics and in official Christian teachings, and sometimes, things went beyond the metaphor.32 Most states in Western Europe treated the three estates as legal entities, “each with their privileges and obligations, and within which there was a place for every member of the country.”33 By the fifteenth century, the estates were treated as a “natural” division in society and were incorporated in sermons, sumptuary legislation, administration, reports of Italian envoys, and in diplomatic documents. The estates were included in representations of Parliament from the 1330s. The “estates of Parliament” were cited as sanctioning statutes between 1377 and 1485. The estates, orders, and ranks, not Parliament, provided justifications for Richard II’s overthrow and Henry IV’s accession. Even Richard’s supporters believed in the authority of the estates to establish a monarch in power. The overall impression is that the estates had important constitutional functions outside Parliament, while supporting the belief that they were the basis of Parliament. In Lord Chancellor Russell’s sermon to Richard III’s Parliament, the bishop stated that “in this politic body of England there be three estates as principal members under one head . . . the estate of the lords spiritual, the estate of the lords temporal, and the estate of the commonalty.” The head of the body was the king.34 IV. CONCLUSIONS One authority has hypothesized that in England, vertical affinities really existed in a “society of orders” based upon birth, consensus, and function, and that horizontal links of class and caste were largely absent. According to this scholar, England saw a “slow transition from an order-based to a class-based society” between the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries. In the interim, the landed gentry dominated the country, but they did not constitute an estate with a formal legal and political status, such as the English and French noblesse.35 What this historian missed, as Chapters 7 through 12 demonstrate, is that in England, alternatives to an organic society of

60  The Body Social, 1480–1550 orders developed in the early- and mid-sixteenth century. In the meantime, as Chapters 4 through 6 show, the model of a body of three estates was alive and vigorous in the first half of the sixteenth century. The body’s demise was a protracted process lasting into the seventeenth century, for only then, as Part III seeks to demonstrate, was there a clear displacement of organic theory by a paradigm of wealth. NOTES   1. Otto von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, transl. F. W. Maitland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; 1st pub., 1900), 22–9. Excellent reviews of this literature include S. Rigby, “Approaches to Pre-Industrial Social Structure,” Jeffrey Denton, ed., Orders and Hierarchies in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 6–10; 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, 2006), 6–10.   2. B. L. Harleian ms. 787, art. 11, reprinted in J. O. Halliwell, ed., The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1846), vol. 31, 140–1. See Chapter 14 for details.   3. Otto von Gierke, Das Deutsche Genossenschaftsrecht (Berlin: Weidmann, 1868–1913), 4 vols.; von Gierke, Political Theories; von Gierke, Associations and the Law: Classical and Early Christian Stages, ed. and transl. by George Heiman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977); von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), transl., intro by Ernest Barker.   4. Von Gierke, Political Theories, 22–9, esp. 24–6.   5. Von Gierke, Political Theories, 22–9, esp. 24–6, 27–8.   6. Ibid. Denton, “Introduction,” 4.   7. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Association (orig. pub. 1887; repr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 37–41.   8. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 5th edn., 1966), I, 100–1, 108–9, 173–5, 199. Volume one was completed in October 1942, and volume two in February 1943.   9. Denton, “Introduction,” in Denton, ed., Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 4; Rigby, “Approaches to Pre-Industrial Social Structure,” in ibid. 8–10. 10. Richard M. Smith, “ ‘Modernization’ and the Corporate Medieval Village Community: Some Skeptical Reflections,” in Alan R. H. Baker and Derek Gregory, eds., Explorations in Historical Geography: Interpretative Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 11. G. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, transl. A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 5–6; Ruth Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933; repr. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1962), 11–12. And more recently, Barbara Hanawalt, Of Good and Ill Repute: Gender and Social Control in Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 80–1, and for the body metaphor, ibid. 100ff. 12. Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity: From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), Part I, ch. 2, “Religion.”

The Body Examined  61 13. For its alleged demise, see V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 260. 14. Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York: Vintage, 1972), 28. 15. Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982; orig. ed., 1980): Arthur Goldhammer, translator), 53–7. 16. Duby, Three Orders, 272, 277–8, 288. 17. Mohl, Three Estates, 28, 98, 105–7, 110–12, 123–4, 143–4. 18. Mohl, ibid.; Lilian M. Swinburn, ed., The Lanterne of Light, Early English Text Society, o.s., no. 151 (London: Kegan Paul, 1917; repr. Millwood, NY: Kraus, 1988), 67–70, 117–18; Select Works of John Bale, D.D., ed. Henry Christmas, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849; repr. New York: Johnson, 1968), 21. 19. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, repr., 2nd revised edn., 1966; 1st edn., 1933), 550. 20. Ibid. 552, 558. 21. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (London: Routledge, 1996 edn.; orig. pub., 1970), ch. 5; Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret M. Lock, “The Mindful Body: A  Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, new series, vol.  1, no. 1 (March, 1987), 18–19 (I must thank Dr. Lucinda M. McCray for the latter reference). 22. A.D. Harvey, “The Body Politic: Anatomy of a Metaphor—Body-State Metaphor,” Contemporary Review, August, 1999, 1; Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 64–5; Plato also quoted by John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 66–7, 76. 23. Walter Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought (New York: Peregrine Books, 1975; orig. pub. As A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1965), 43, 123; The New English Bible: The New Testament (Oxford and Cambridge, 1961), 295; for St. Paul’s influence, see William Tyndale in English Historical Documents, 1485–1558, vol. 5 (hereafter E.H.D., 1485–1558) (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967), C. H. Williams, ed., 293; Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas, 180, 185. 24. The best discussion remains Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art, ch. 2. 25. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 15, 23, 197–201, 207– 8, 210–11. 26. Policraticus, 66–7, 126. 27. Swinburn, ed., Lantern of Light, 33–4; “The Descryuyng of Mannes Membres,” in J. Kail, ed., Twenty-Six Political and Other Poems from the Oxford MSS. Digby 101 and Douce 322, Early English Text Society, original series, no. 124 (London: Kegan Paul, 1904), 64–9. 28. Quoted Barkan, Nature’s Work, 84. 29. Ullmann, Medieval Political Thought, 154; Kantorowicz, op.cit., 223–5; John A. F. Thomson, The Transformation of Medieval England, 1370–1529 (London: Longman, 1983), 367; K. Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England,” in Penelope J. Corfield, ed., Language, History and Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 30. 30. Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 20–1; von Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, 22; Cf. Clement Armstrong repr. in Drei volkswirthschaftliche Denkschriften aus der Zeit Heinrichs VIII. Von England (Göttingen, 1878), 52.

62  The Body Social, 1480–1550 1. Quoted J. R. Hale, Renaissance Europe, 1480–1520 (London, 1971), 167. 3 32. Miri Rubin, “The Body, Whole and Vulnerable, in Fifteenth-Century England,” in Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds., Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in Fifteenth-Century England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 21. 33. Bernard Guenée, States and Rulers in Later Medieval Europe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2nd Eng. edn., 1985), 158. 34. S.  B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936; repr. 1965) 98, 101–4, 106–7, 118–19, 122– 3, 180. Note that an early draft for Edward V’s accession cited only two estates (168), and that the same version described nobility in social humanist terms as “virtue joined to possessions and riches” (170). 35. Roland Mousnier, Social Hierarchies 1450 to the Present (Paris: Schocken Books, 1969); English translation, New York: Shocken Books, 1973), pt. 1, p. 41. Cf. Armand Arriaza, “Mousnier and Barber: The Theoretical Underpinning of the ‘Society of Orders’ in Early Modern Europe,” Past and Present 89 (November 1980): 40–50.

4 Different Metaphor, Similar Message Edmund Dudley’s “Tree of Commonwealth,” 1509–1510

I. INTRODUCTION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY Sixteenth-century social thought is of historiographical significance. The existing literature is teleological, too narrow, or too general. In a number of schools of thought, telos results in misunderstanding early and mid-Tudor contemporaries. Two brilliant students of early modern religion and society, Weber and Tawney, were so absorbed in pursuing connections between Protestantism and capitalism that they eschewed examining contemporary thinking in depth, which included leading lights in English humanistic thought and in the break with Rome. Both Weber and Tawney were aware that early Protestants had traditional perspectives on society. Weber noted that Luther thought the pursuit of profit beyond one’s immediate needs was a symptom of a fall from grace.1 Tawney observed that from John of Salisbury to Henry VIII’s chaplain, Thomas Starkey, society was represented as “an organism composed of different members,” whose roles were specialized by function, were interdependent, and fixed.2 Neither scholar picked up the anomaly that progressive religious thinkers adopted the traditional language of hierarchy in their social utterances. As Chapters 4 through 6 demonstrate, contemporaries criticized the status quo on a wide range of economic and social issues, including agrarian change, the consumption of luxury goods, the balance of trade, relations between the estates, the relief of the poor, and the impact of the dissolutions of monastic and guild properties. That they did so from the perspective of the body social fits poorly with a model of long-term development that mainly emphasizes the stimulation of capitalism by Calvinism and Puritanism.3 Linking Calvin’s capitalist economic thinking to his theology is questionable. It is true that Calvin taught that material goods were “instruments of God’s providence” which, along with money, were given by Him to support human society. This did not mean, however, that wealth was to be used for selfish purposes. Calvin saw economic transactions as a sign of human cohesion, of love between rich and poor. They were to serve “a mutual communication of wealth” that would alleviate hardship in society, if not excise

64  The Body Social, 1480–1550 it. The rich were to be the “ministers of the poor” in Calvin’s thinking. If Weber had studied sixteenth-century rather than eighteenth-century Calvinists, he would have found that Calvin should not be held accountable for “the fact that his rehabilitation of work and money later degenerated into men’s making work and money their gods.”4 A second instance of teleology in studying the 1530s and ’40s appeared in the argument that the early Tudor period saw the development of “an economic conception of the state” that prefigured the political economy of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. Neal Wood denied seeing the past from the perspective of the present, but endorsed the value of hindsight to show that “ideas and practices have temporal beginnings” (which are often amendable to causal explanations) . . .”.5 It is true that contemporaries discussed the role of governments in economic and social life, but the assumptions with which they worked were rarely conceived in purely economic or political terms. As often as not, their terms of reference were social and religious; to underrate these considerations is to depart significantly from their concerns. A promising study of Christian humanist social thinking emphasizes the movement’s long-term impact on early modern thought, including education, the family, and the relief of the poor. This humanistic influence, particularly that of Erasmus, has been documented in the sermons and commonplace books of Cambridge and Oxford students in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is thought to form the core of Puritan social thought of the period.6 This is a valuable set of observations, although it may underestimate the impact of social humanist thinking as opposed to the Christian strain. As Part II of this book demonstrates, the agenda of social humanism was a lengthy one that extended beyond education, the family, and the poor. A danger here is the creation of daisy chains of ideas stretching across decades and centuries, when in reality, there were variations in the language in question. As one authority observes, one way of knowing a language was genuine was that it contained “variant acts” and was a subject of debate.7 Scholars have also considered the “Commonwealth” thinking of the 1530s and ’40s that focused on reforms in the economic, political, and social orders. They have examined Armstrong and the “Commonwealthmen” of the 1540s, together with More, Starkey, and Smith, as “articulate citizens” who developed analyses and policies covering a wide range of issues. These included the balance of trade, London’s monopoly on cloth exports versus the outports, the roles of sheep farming, manufacturing versus tillage, the debasement of the coinage, and government regulation of imports and luxuries. They also concerned themselves with the social order. There were extensive discussions of poverty, unemployment, vagrancy, and how individual Christians and governments should address these subjects. An important focus was agrarian change, particularly the alleged depopulation of villages by the extension of grazing, the privatizing of common lands, and the extinction of common rights (“enclosure”). These authorities also wrote extensively about what constituted true nobility, and whether it should be based upon birth, “virtue,” merit, wealth, or physical qualities.

Different Metaphor, Similar Message  65 They also concerned themselves with popular uprisings, and whether they were justified. The scholarship on sixteenth-century social thinking includes many valuable contributions, which extended discussions into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.8 Although there is valuable scholarship on the “common weal,” it presents difficulties for the historian of social thought. One problem is its highly generalized character, which focuses on large numbers of writers and issues over long periods and which tends to crowd many thinkers under quite small umbrellas. While it may be true that a number of writers shared vocabularies or paroles, it is risky to assume they had identical concepts or langues in mind.9 As we shall see in Chapter 10, the humanist Richard Morison employed the metaphor of the body to describe society in the mid-1530s, just as Clement Armstrong did in the same period. But while using the same figure of speech, the two writers had different assumptions and were making very different arguments. An ancillary difficulty with the existing scholarship is the minimal attention actually paid to the social languages used. More than one authority has recognized the importance of the body image and understood that it contained a representation of society, but they did not treat its social implications and tended to view it mainly as a political metaphor.10 Another study attempts to piece together a humanist social theory, but it seems questionable that commitments to a new curriculum, a spiritual family, and poor relief constituted a coherent model, or that these thoughts were unique to any single confession or educational philosophy. It is more likely, as Chapters 7 through 12 suggest, that social humanist thinking challenged the tripartite, static model of society and even the Great Chain of Being.11 II. CONTEXT Edmund Dudley wrote “The Tree of Commonwealth” in 1509–1510 while he was imprisoned in the Tower. After his execution for treason in the latter year, the treatise remained in manuscript, of which four copies survive, for another 350 years.12 The circumstances of its composition have some bearing on its contents. One authority describes Dudley as a “sycophant,” suggesting the manuscript was no more than a desperate attempt to save his neck.13 Even Dudley’s editor admits he was “neither an original nor a profound thinker.”14 But neither comment helps much to understand Dudley, his thinking, and his place in early sixteenth-century thought. The treatise, while addressing comments to the new king, Henry VIII, in what were dire circumstances for the author, actually contains a fairly limited amount of bowing and scraping. Where it does speak of Royal authority, it offers advice to the king and might be located in the “mirror of princes” tradition.15 This chapter seeks to demonstrate that, despite the peculiar circumstances of its composition, Dudley’s treatise should be considered to be in the mainstream of early sixteenth-century thinking about society. The chapter asserts that, while he examined religious and political questions, Dudley worked

66  The Body Social, 1480–1550 from a framework that was social in character. The first section argues that Dudley’s views of society were typical of the school of thought described here as the body social. The later sections of the chapter show that Dudley wrote using the language of the three estates, that he prescribed specific duties for each member of the hierarchy, spelled out the mutual obligations that each had to the others, and commanded them to follow the rule that their social positions were to be unchanging in nature. Dudley’s social language, as Chapters 5 and 6 seek to show, was shared with others in the first half of the sixteenth century. As concerns the originality and depth of thought of Dudley’s treatise, these qualities, often the hallmarks applied to canonical texts, are arguably less important than determining a work’s context and its relation to the period’s normative language.16 In this respect, Dudley might be considered an informed voice that was typical of well-educated, professional laymen of the period. By the time of writing, he had spent 30 years studying, teaching, and practicing law, had served as an under-sheriff of London (1496), been Speaker of the House of Commons (1504), a councilor of Henry VII (from 1504), and, with Sir Richard Empson, part of the king’s notorious “Council Learned,” tracking down violations of regalian rights, for which he is best known.17 We should not gainsay the value of Dudley’s extensive experience. Did his position under arrest in the Tower possibly influence what he had to say? Most assuredly, and there may be significant advantages to the historian to have observers “on the outside, looking in,” who have the opportunity to present their views and tell truth to power in ways they would probably not were they in office. Machiavelli’s exile is well known to have triggered the writing of The Prince (1513), and More’s Utopia (1516) was partly composed in an embassy in the Low Countries as the author and Erasmus debated the wisdom of serving princes, and became a prelude to More’s joining Henry VIII’s service.18 In rather different settings, Dudley, Clement Armstrong, and the “Commonwealth-men”—the subjects of this and the next two chapters—were also more outside than inside when they wrote, although they all sought to influence the authorities. III. DUDLEY AND THE SOCIAL Despite its dramatic beginnings and later obscurity, Dudley’s tract is more mainstream than it might appear at first sight. It encompassed most of the principles that proponents of the body social advanced in the sixteenth century. Dudley’s concept of the “Commonwealth” was much in line with those of Clement Armstrong and others writing in the 1530s and ’40s in combining economic, social, political, and religious concerns. To characterize their work as belonging exclusively to one of the categories, because they did not exist at the time, would be otiose. Nor does it seem a worthwhile enterprise to distinguish priorities or dependent and independent variables, elevating

Different Metaphor, Similar Message  67 the economic or social while downplaying the political or religious. Dudley, given his criticisms of the Church, might be considered the most secular of these writers, but still began his treatise with reference to “the remembrance of God and of the faith of holy church” and specified that “the principal and chief root of this tree in every Christian realm must be the love of God . . .”.19 The treatise considered at some length relations between Church and state, enjoining the monarch—that “Catholic king”—to take special care over the matter. He should only appoint and promote learned, virtuous clerics, avoiding simony, favoritism, and “defamed” candidates. Dudley cited pluralism and absenteeism as evils to be avoided, arguing for senior prelates to be resident in their sees. Both the king and the Church should ensure that scholarship in divinity was promoted in the universities, monasteries, and cathedral schools. Ironically, given later events, Dudley warned the king against appropriating benefices or consolidating monastic houses, which would “by all likelihood destroy the honor of the Church of England.”20 Dudley did not define the word “Commonwealth” except by inference. When closely read, it appears he chiefly used the term in one particular sense in which it was used at the time, i.e., the body of people that constituted society and its political structures. Rather than adopting the more generic usage of Commonwealth to denote public or general good, also current at the time, Dudley employed language that included political institutions as well as social categories, laying special emphasis upon the role of the monarch. He addressed comments to the new king who, Dudley reported, had committed himself to “reform all such things as in times past have been disordered and abused within this his realm,” including the Church.21 Although subjects were expected to obey rulers, the latter were “bound to their subjects by the commandment of God them to maintain and support as far as in him is his power.” To the “fair and mighty tree” that the Commonwealth resembled, Dudley assigned an interventionist role. It gave cover and shade, protecting “all beasts, both fat and lean” from the heat and cold. Similarly, the realm’s subjects were “thereby helped and relieved from the highest degree to the lowest.”22 One of the tree’s five roots was justice, which the monarch was charged to administer. The responsibility was chiefly the ruler’s, even though he had deputies to administer the law. The prince was to punish abusers of livery and maintenance. The monarch was also responsible for restoring the third root of the tree, which was truth and required “a man to be true and faithful in all his promises, covenants, and words . . .”. Respect for truth had declined, endangering trade as well as political relations, but the ruler could put things right if the nobility would follow his lead, and “so every one to follow and take example of an other from the highest to the lowest subjects in his realm.”23 The fourth root of concord also included a role for the ruler, who was to ensure the nobles were “not at variance” with one another and “see that his subjects be not oppressed by their superiors.” For their part, the clergy were to pray for the king and his subjects, to punish sin, to provide

68  The Body Social, 1480–1550 hospitality and charity, and to look after the fabric of the churches.24 The fifth root of the tree of Commonwealth was peace, by which Dudley meant peace between nations. Once again, he identified the monarch as the chief agent in the matter, stating that “this root of peace must needs be rooted in the person of our prince . . . ” who was responsible with his councilors for the conduct of war and alliances. Peace was important, above all, for the conduct of trade, and Dudley appeared to single out the trade in wool and woolen cloth for special notice, as Clement Armstrong would 25 years later, as will be seen in the next chapter. Dudley suggested there was a decline in the quality in both trades and cited the London Merchant Adventurers for their “subtle demeanor” in adulterating these products. The remedy was for the king to order his council to undertake the “reformation” of the problem; otherwise, England ran the risk of losing the trade to foreign competitors.25 Despite the prominence of institutions in Dudley’s treatise, the grid upon which his “Tree” was built was social. Admittedly, his ground plan was complex, encompassing a cosmological overview, the theory of the three estates, and substantial doses of moral imperatives, together with adherence to principles of hierarchy. Late in the tract, Dudley endorsed the cosmology of the Great Chain of Being. He stated, “[L]et us all consider that God has set an order by grace between himself and angel, and between angel and angel; and by reason between the angel and man, and between man and man, man and beast; and by nature only between beast and beast . . .”.26 To understand their significance, the context for these remarks must be examined. They appear in a section discussing tranquility, which he listed among the “fruits” of the tree, but which included a “core” that Dudley labeled “lewd enterprise,” or rebellion by the common people against the nobility. He employed the Great Chain to reinforce the principle of hierarchy, “which order, from the highest point to the lowest, God wills us fervently to keep without any enterprise to the contrary.” Above all, the commoners were instructed to “covet not the prosperity of [the] chivalry [nobility] . . .”.27 Dudley introduced the estates early in the treatise and used them as a matrix as he wrote. His perspective owed a great deal to moral philosophy, for the bulk of his remarks concerned what the three orders should and should not do. It is difficult to put a simple label on Dudley’s moral philosophy, which was a mixture of Aristotle, Christianity, and the Renaissance. Like Aristotle, he tended to treat earthly happiness as a supreme good, which put him at odds with the scholastics’ stress on the hereafter, subjects upon which he rarely touched (except at the very end of the treatise, where he promised immortality to the prince who wisely led his people).28 Also like Aristotle, Dudley’s moral world prescribed lifelong adherence to virtue and a modicum of worldly goods and bodily pleasure. Yet, he agreed with the medieval Christian position that God was the source of all happiness. Yet unlike Aristotle, he did not see the contemplative life as superior to the active or moral one and was more inclined to accept Renaissance humanists’ endorsement of a balance of the two. Certainly, Dudley expected

Different Metaphor, Similar Message  69 positive behavior to result in real-life benefits involving ethics, politics, and the economy. That he would endorse the Renaissance language of fame and honor seems doubtful.29 The three estates provided the grid for the remaining sections of Dudley’s treatise which, continuing the (sometimes tiresome) metaphor of the tree, examined its fruits, parings, and cores. In each part, the three orders were instructed on their obligations and the pitfalls they faced in meeting them. The fruits of the tree included “honorable dignity,” which came from God, which no one was to usurp, and which only the monarch could award.30 The second fruit was “worldly prosperity,” which the chivalry enjoyed, which came from the root of truth, and which was not to be usurped. The third was “good example,” which belonged to the clergy and came from the root of peace, and the fourth was “tranquility,” which was the purview of the commonalty. In turn, Dudley examined the parings and “perilous cores” belonging to each of the three orders, and in a summary of the treatise that described the “sauce” made from the fruits, he reiterated the obligations and potential sins of all three. These remarks repeated those developed earlier, but with an added discussion of the education of the clergy and a denunciation of rebellion.31 III. DUDLEY’S DEPICTION OF THE ORGANIC SOCIETY Besides the moral injunctions just examined, three principles held the estates together in Dudley’s analysis. The first was a hierarchy of specialized functions; the second was interdependence, which included an acceptance of mutual responsibilities between orders, and the third was the fixity of one’s social position. In representations of human society, the principle of hierarchy is a long-established one with wide currency, as seen in the last chapter. Just as “there are no atheists in foxholes,” there were no social democrats in the sixteenth century. We have observed Dudley invoking the Great Chain of Being in the justification of a hierarchical society, and it is notable that the treatise’s very first paragraph invoked the model in saying that his aim was to teach “people of every degree . . .”.32 Dudley varied his ranking of the three estates, sometimes putting the chivalry first (e.g., in discussing “fruits” of the tree), while other times placing the clergy at the top (e.g., in his treatment of the root of concord and the four “parings”). On one occasion, he actually discussed the commonalty before the clergy.33 This confusion may simply reflect what the author felt were the rhetorical requirements of his treatise. In general, however, he tended consistently to discuss the commonalty after the clergy and chivalry, thus confirming the principle of hierarchy.34 In the section on the root of truth, Dudley reported how a greater regard for this quality would affect both the nobility and the commonalty. (He presumably omitted the clergy because they were assumed to be the rule-makers and in some measure, the guardians of this virtue.) For the nobles, the upshot

70  The Body Social, 1480–1550 would be “how glad shall every noble man be of the company of an other, and one will trust and love an other.” The commonalty, too, would be favorably affected: “How kindly and how lovingly will merchants and craftsmen of the realm buy and sell together. . . . How diligently and busily will the artificers and husbandmen occupy their labor and business . . .”. Here, Dudley echoed the rise of a work ethic and legislation enforcing work since the fourteenth century. He also anticipated other early modern social thinking, including More’s Utopia (1516), with the promise that there would be full employment and the expansion of overseas trade. People would “increase their household servants and laborers, whereby all idle people and vagabonds shall be set a work.” In addition, trade would improve because “outward nations” would be delighted “to deal and meddle with the commodities of this realm.”35 The root or virtue of concord was firmly grounded in the functions assigned to the three estates. Dudley began with the Church, observing that “this root of concord is fastened right well in the clergy of this realm.” To attain that condition, as indicated above, he assigned them a number of tasks. Besides saying prayers, he went beyond this traditional injunction and enjoined clerics to live virtuously and to preach God’s word truly. They were also “boldly and straightly” to punish sins according to their established duties and authority, and to maintain all ceremonies as required by their profession. Dudley gave considerable space to advising them on the disposition of their livings. They should use the revenues “as they by their own law are bound to do . . .”. This included “living in good household and hospitality” and giving charity to poor people, especially where they held livings. The third part of their benefices should be bestowed upon repairing their churches and houses. Then he attacked the misappropriation of livings, posing a rhetorical question about what portions they should put aside for marriages of kin, for inheritances, or “to heap treasure.” He replied that he hoped they would eschew such practices. His parting shot concerned clerical apparel, which he implied had been abused, although in what ways is unclear. He counseled them to dress “priestly according to their estate, degree and religion,” although he allowed that their servants might be dressed differently from those of the temporality as long as they maintained “the honesty of their demeanors as in the sadness of their vestures.”36 Dudley’s list of obligations for the nobility and gentry, or “chivalry,” was still longer and focused on issues of law and order, relations with tenants, and education. Despite his famous lines criticizing the education of the nobles, which are cited below, Dudley endorsed their traditional roles in society. He ranked them in conventional descending order in the hierarchy, from dukes, earls, barons, knights, esquires, and on to gentlemen. He urged them to be content with their positions—“to live in a good conformity”— and to be law-abiding. They were to conduct themselves according to their ranks, “not [to] malign or envy his superiors nor disdain or set at naught his inferiors.” Specific crimes to be avoided were murders, the oppression of neighbors and tenants, supporting false quarrels, committing perjury, and

Different Metaphor, Similar Message  71 (foreshadowing More’s objections against private armies in Utopia) retaining fakers or “idle losels . . .”. Instead, the chivalry was to punish murderers and thieves, even when they were their own servants (possibly another reference to maintenance) and to serve the prince by defending the Church and the commonalty.37 Dudley made a significant contribution to the ongoing debate, which was echoed in the 1530s in England, about what constituted the functions of true nobility, or vera nobilitas. He attacked what might be considered traditional qualities of nobility and argued for the elevation of education in the definition of the status and in the upbringing of noble and gentry children. He reported that the conventional wisdom was that honor was based on bloodlines, great wealth, and rich apparel, even when persons were actually dishonorable. Dudley maintained, contrariwise, that nobility should be based on behavior: the richer the blood, “the more noble in conditions ought” someone to be, and the more shameful and dishonorable a person was if behavior did not conform to blood. In an often-quoted phrase, he took the argument about true nobility further by introducing education, which was a threat to their status because “the noble men and gentlemen of England be the worst brought up for the most part of any realm of Christendom . . .”.38 Social mobility disrupted hierarchy, because “the children of poor men and mean folk are promoted to the promotion and authority that the children of noble blood should have if they were mete therefore.” Instead, for the continuation of their families in honor, they should raise their children “to the learning of virtue and cunning, and at the least bring them up in honor and virtue.”39 Dudley’s biography contains no evidence that he moved in humanist circles, but certainly by the time of his death, such networks were well established in England. Erasmus completed Praise of Folly in 1509 while a guest in More’s household and had previously visited the country twice, in 1498 and 1506. More himself had translated the Lyfe of J. Picus Myrandula by the young Italian humanist. Printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1510, the tract rejected the virtues of high rank, instead opting for “the golden mediocrity, the mean estate . . . which shall bear us . . . in hands more easily; which shall obey us and not master us.”40 Dudley defined the commonalty broadly and assigned them a laundry list of functions and obligations. He included in this category merchants, craftsmen, artificers, franklins (or freeholders), graziers (livestock farmers), tillers, “and other generally the people of this realm.” This large, almost residual category, resembling the third estate in pre-Revolutionary France, was important in Dudley’s mind because of demographics, “for there rests the great number.” His first requirement, articulating a work ethic decades before Calvinism, was that they engage in manual labor without complaint: “These folk may not grudge nor murmur to live in labor and pain, and the most part of their time with the sweat of their face.”41

72  The Body Social, 1480–1550 A second charge was that the populace should live within their means, paying their rents and “pinch[ing] their bellies” rather than missing payments. Dudley cited the danger of tradesmen diminishing their stock by allowing “wives’ pleasure” in excessive displays. A third mandate was to avoid costly court cases at quarter sessions, the assizes, or in Westminster hall, which would ruin them financially. The commonalty was further instructed to be honest in business, to eschew usury, deception in trade, and false measures.42 Dudley opted for the metaphor of the tree rather than the body, but the principle of mutual obligation was no less pronounced in his treatise than in John of Salisbury’s or Sir John Fortescue’s. In fact, the language of interdependence is more sustained in Dudley than in these other writers, sometimes painfully as he elaborated the story in turgid discussions of the fruits, cores, and parings of the tree. Subjects and monarchs were “bounden” to one another; the former were to obey, the latter to protect. Interdependence was prominent in his definition of the root of concord, which he said was “none other thing but a good agreement and conformity amongst the people of the inhabitants of a realm, city, town or fellowship . . .”. Emblematic of that agreement, everyone was to “keep good hospitality” which, as so many complained, was “sore decayed”; the king and nobles were to lead the way for the rest, “and then will every man after his degree follow the same.” In return, servants should have good wages, so that “they shall not need to be thieves, bribers, pollers or extortioners.”43 The clergy were to be “Lanterns of Light”—an interesting reflection of the language of the Lollard treatise of c. 1409–1415—by setting good examples for the estates of the temporality. The clergy’s prayers, he wrote, were to help “every man well to prosper and speed in his lawful business” in addition to giving one third of their income to charity.44 The lay elites were to be benevolent lords to their tenants and had a special responsibility to support the poor in “God’s causes,” including widows and orphans. They were encouraged to be peacekeepers, “makers of ends and love days, charitable, between neighbors and neighbors, friends and friends . . .”. They were “to defend the poor people from all wrongs and injuries,” but their duties went still further to include the traditional military role: “ever to be ready to defend your prince, the Church and the realm.” The rotten core of the chivalry’s fruit was “vain delectation,” and Dudley told them, using the language of the dangerous messenger of rebellion, “Arrogancy,” cited below, and the rebels in 1381, that “[a]ll we came of Adam, and which of us, the prince or the poor, is next of kin by grace to the manhood, or which is most noble, it is hard to tell.” In response to the question, what shall we take with us after death, he responded, “Neither regality, pomp, prosperities, nor earthly thing, for naked we came and naked we shall depart hence, even as the poorest soul that ever begged bread.” Moreover, if the commonalty refrained from rebellion, the nobles should demonstrate “the more compassion, mercy and charity” towards them.45 The common people were charged to “remember their rents and payments” to lords. The better off were instructed to be kind to their inferiors,

Different Metaphor, Similar Message  73 not to “covet great lucre of them that be less than they, but be unto their underlings loving and charitable.” Those in their debt they should not throw into prison if they missed or were late with payments, nor should they charge usurious rates of interest. Servants were commanded to be “true and diligent to your masters” and not to overspend on conspicuous consumption and gaming. They should be willing to be learn “lest you be long lewd” and to avoid thinking the grass might be greener because they thought they were badly treated by their masters, “lest you change for a worse.” The observance of mutual obligations among the three estates would encourage strong roots, Dudley wrote, for “this noble tree of Commonwealth.”46 Dudley clearly developed the concept of the fixity of social position. The key to concord, he wrote, was that everyone was content to remain in the social position to which he or she was born: “every man to be content to do his duty in the office, room, or condition that he is set in . . .”.47 The common people, in particular, he warned against being uppity. Besides laboring without complaint, “let not them presume above their own degree, nor any of them pretend or counterfeit the state of his better . . .”. Dudley echoed the sumptuary legislation of the period, which, while honored mainly in the breech, still remained an article of faith to social thinkers. The commonalty should not “in anywise exceed in their apparel or diet” and were especially not to dress above their station and “clothe themselves in livery of lords . . .”. Nor were they to envy or desire “the fruit of worldly prosperity to chivalry belonging . . .”.48 The same injunctions applied to the nobility and clergy and extended to the realm of honor as well as property. Of the tree’s fruit of “honorable dignity,” Dudley wrote that no subject, spiritual or temporal, should “presume to take one piece of this fruit by his own power or authority”; only the “sovereign terrestrial” had that authority. The clergy were to “be content with their fruit of good example, and not covet or desire the fruit of honorable dignity which is all at the discretion of their sovereign.” Dudley expressed special concern about the nobility usurping this quality from the monarch. While it was acceptable for the nobles to wish for honorable dignity when they were ready for it, it was better to receive it freely at the hands of the sovereign: “but in all cases let them not presume to take it of their own authority for then it will surely choke them.”49 Of the second fruit of worldly prosperity, which was the special privilege of the nobles, he wrote that none was to “usurp not [nor?] to take his superior’s part” and that “every man must be content of the fruit of his own property.”50 One of the most potent narratives of Dudley’s treatise concerned the breaking of the bonds of hierarchy. Although he encouraged both the clergy and chivalry to observe the fixity of ranks, judging by the length and detail he devoted to a section on the commonalty, he was most concerned about the latter stepping out of line. He continued the metaphor of the tree and the fruit of tranquility, which belonged to the populace. He warned that at the core of that fruit was something rotten called “lewd enterprise” that “will

74  The Body Social, 1480–1550 not only bring you from tranquility to the disease of grievous thralldom and misery, but also oftentimes to utter desolation.” Dudley related how two messengers would be sent to the people in order to corrupt them.51 The first was named “discontent or murmur,” and would encourage people to neglect their duties: to begrudge paying rents or rendering other services owed for tenancies, to refuse obedience to “superiors or betters.” The second messenger was “Arrogancy,” and came dressed in “a gay, gilded coat, to inveigle your sin with pride, the most perilous spectacle that the commonalty may use.” This false prophet would attack the principle of hierarchy by preaching equality and calling for insurrection against the clergy and nobles, and Dudley related the arguments Arrogancy would make. He would tell people they were “made of the same metal and mold” as the gentry, so why should they “sport and play and you labor and till” and have so much of the “prosperity and treasure of this world and you so little?” After all, both at birth and death, we were all the same, and wealth counted for nothing. This messenger would tell them further that they were the offspring and heirs of Adam, just as the wealthy were. So why then should the rich have “great honors, Royal castles and manors, with so much lands and possessions, and you but poor cottages and tenements?” Christ had shed his blood for you as well as the nobility, so why should you have to do so much crouching and kneeling to them? Dudley played, once again, with the issue of true nobility. He had the messenger say to the populace that they had souls just as the chivalry did, and God created “in you one manner of nobleness” and “your souls be as precious to God as theirs.” So why should they have the authority to judge, punish, and imprison you? Here again was a reprise of the well-known line from John Ball’s sermon during the revolt of 1381, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman,” which was itself reprising a religious poem of the early fourteenth century.52 Arrogancy would encourage the commonalty “to play the men” and rise up against the upper orders. He would promise to “set you on high, and to be lords and governors, and no longer to be churls . . .”. Arrogancy would promise them equality in body, or material conditions, as well as in soul and the way God made them. He would guarantee that some of the nobles and clergy would support them, at least by not resisting, but in the latter’s case, with material aid, even money. In a foreshadowing of a “moral economy,” merchants and farmers would be forced to give up the goods they previously hoarded and bring them into the markets. Widows and wives would ransack their homes and give up girdles, beads, even wedding rings “to the last penny they can find . . .”. Innumerable men would join the uprising.53 Dudley’s arguments against insurrection used several languages of order. First, he promised economic rewards for being content with the fruit of tranquility: “it is for you both profitable and good, and will make you wealthy if wealth may be suffered.” Second, he invoked the language of Christian duty to God and the monarch and the providential power of the former in installing the latter. The populace was told to “covet not the prosperity of [the] Chivalry  .  .  .”. They should not disdain, moreover, the authority of

Different Metaphor, Similar Message  75 the sovereign, “but with a due reverence obey it, for be you sure, the high providence of God is [that] you should so do . . .”. In addition, they should ignore those religious-sounding arguments that said they were made the same as the nobles, that they were all descended from Adam, and that they were all equally saved by Christ’s sacrifice. Dudley turned the tables on the position that equality could be justified, arguing that the glory of our souls was not in gold and silver, nor worldly power or policy, not even in wisdom, beauty, or strength. Rather it was “only in virtue, indifferent to all creatures.” What constituted virtue Dudley did not define, but that this quotation is immediately followed by invoking the Great Chain of Being—“consider that God has set an order”—strongly suggests a very traditional definition involving notions of dutiful observance of social hierarchies sanctioned by official religious doctrine. There was a reward in the afterlife for those who kept the faith with social hierarchy. For conducting faithfully daily labor and business, “you shall have perpetual pleasures and ease . . .”. For maintaining social unity, they would be united with the angels in heaven, and for obeying the prince and their superiors, God would “make you princes and superiors to all men and princes upon the earth . . .”.54 Dudley used the language of social obligation in his refutation of rebellion, citing it to defuse popular discontent and to bolster hierarchy. He promised there would be no harm in the messengers’ views being imprinted on the hearts of the nobles, because it might cause them “to have the more compassion, mercy and charity on the poor commoners.” Not surprisingly given his legal training and government service, Dudley employed the languages of foreign policy and historical precedent in attacking popular revolts. He cited the current condition of France, which enjoyed peace and prosperity, and the threat that that kingdom would pose to England in case of insurrection at home. He supplied a sketchy history of the Jacquerie of 1356–57 in France, the result of which was that the French populace “were subdued and utterly destroyed” and were “put in more subjection and thralldom than ever they were before . . .”. Closer to home, he claimed the English populace had a history of rebellion and had “often times smarted right sore for such lewd enterprise.” He cited the Cornish Rebellion of 1497 led by “their captain the blacksmith” that ended in failure, so that “of these precedents you have enough to eschew this perilous core of your fruit . . .”.55 IV. CONCLUSIONS There was nothing particularly novel about Dudley’s “Tree of Commonwealth.” It did not push the limits of conventional discourse about the body social, and its use of the tree analogy was overdone and tedious. Yet there are good reasons to read the text. It shows that the traditional model of an organic society still had currency in the early sixteenth century, and enough potency for one of the most powerful men in the country to argue its case to the most powerful person. Specifically, the notion of three estates with

76  The Body Social, 1480–1550 special functions, relationships, and structures was very much intact in Dudley. His moral philosophy was perhaps less conventional in that it critiqued all three orders. Moreover, a number of his positions were in line with the tenets of Renaissance social humanist thought—education, merit over birth, the reform of the Church, and the third estate’s obligation to labor. Dudley’s manuscript is important because it was one of several early sixteenth-century writings that retained the traditional model of society. There is no evidence the king ever read Dudley’s paper, nor did later authors mention it. Yet it was clearly not a “one off” production, because four manuscript versions survive, suggesting a wider audience than Henry VIII. That similar ideas appeared in the 1530s and ’40s shows that Dudley’s isolation was never complete. NOTES   1. M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner’s, 1958; orig. pub. 1904–5), Talcott Parsons, transl., foreword by R.H. Tawney, 84.   2. R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962; repr. from 1926 edn.), 22–3. But it should be noted that a close examination of Starkey’s treatise shows that he, as other humanists, envisioned a changing rather than a static social order: see Chapters 10 and 11.  3. Weber, Protestant Ethic, 87ff.; Tawney, Religion, 94.   4. André Biéler, The Social Humanism of Calvin (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1964; Paul T. Fuhrmann, transl., 1961 edn., L’humanisme social de Calvin, Editions Labor et Fides, Geneva), 32–3, 61–2.  5. Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 252.   6. Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 17 and esp. ch. 3.   7. See J. G. A. Pocock, “The Concept of a Language and the métier d’historien: Some considerations on practice,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 26–7.   8. Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965); Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529–1559 (London: The Athlone Press, 1970); Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tree of Commonwealth, 1450–1793 (London: Associated University Presses, 2000); Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order.   9. See Pocock, “The Concept of a Language and the métier d’historien,” 30. For a reading from a political perspective, see Kevin Sharpe, “A Commonwealth of Meanings: Languages, Analogues, Ideas, and Politics,” in Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies (London: Pinter, 1989), 12, 67–8. 10. Ferguson, Articulate Citizen, 365; Jones, Tudor Commonwealth, 13–14. 11. Todd, Christian Humanism, ch. 6, “Conscience and the Great Chain of Being.” 12. See the excellent introduction by D. M. Brodie, ed., The Tree of Commonwealth: A Treatise Written by Edmund Dudley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 1–17 (hereafter Dudley, Tree). 13. Conyers Read, ed., Bibliography of British History: Tudor Period, 1485–1603 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), 118. 14. Brodie, Introduction, Tree, 14.

Different Metaphor, Similar Message  77 15. Wood, Foundations of Political Economy, 72. 16. Cf. Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), I, x–xi, xiii. 17. Brodie, Introduction, Tree, 1–9. 18. J. R. Hale, Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy (London: English Universities Press, 1961), ch. 7; J. H. Hexter, “Utopia and Its Historical Milieu,” in Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, ed., The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), xvi–xvii, xxxiii–xli. 19. Dudley, Tree, 22, 32. 20. Ibid. 24–6, 62–4; Steven Gunn, “Edmund Dudley and the Church,” The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51, no. 3 (July 2000): 509–526. 21. Dudley, Tree, 23–4. 22. Ibid. 31–2. 23. Ibid. 38–9. 24. Ibid. 40–4. 25. Ibid. 49–50. 26. Ibid. 90–1. 27. Ibid. 90–1. 28. Ibid. 102–4. 29. Jill Kraye, “Moral Philosophy,” in Eckhard Kessler, Jill Kraye, Charles B. Schmitt, and Quentin Skinner, eds., The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 316–18, 325, 330, 334–35; Skinner, “Political Philosophy,” Ibid. 413. 30. Dudley, Tree, 53. 31. Ibid. 53–8 (roots and fruits), 60–8 (parings), 68–92 (cores), 62–6 (clerical education), 87–92 (rebellion). See ibid. p. 93 for the “sauce” and 95–6, 98–101 for further use of the three orders model. 32. Ibid. 21. 33. Ibid. 55–6, 62, 66. 34. E.g., ibid. 42–8, 56–8, 62–84. 35. Ibid. 39–40. 36. Ibid. 43–4. 37. Ibid. 44–5; also (on preferring service to gentlemen to independent labor), 67. 38. Ibid. 45. For this discussion in Renaissance Europe, see Quentin Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 135 ff. 39. Dudley, Tree, 45. 40. Douglas Bush, “Tudor Humanists,” in E. M. Nugent, ed., The Thought and Culture of the English Renaissance: An Anthology of Tudor Prose, 1481–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 51, 54–5. For the longer lineage of English humanism, see R. Weiss, Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967: 3rd ed.). 41. Dudley, Tree, 45; also 47–8. 42. Ibid. 46–8. More of Dudley’s instructions are considered later in this essay because they fall under the categories of interdependence and hierarchy in the three estates. See ibid. 68 on wives. 43. Ibid. 31, 40, 42. 44. Ibid. 33, 43. 45. Ibid. 44, 66, 81, 84, 91. 46. Ibid. 46–8. 47. Ibid. 40. 48. Ibid. 45–6, 58. 49. Ibid. 53–4, 56–7. 50. Ibid. 54.

78  The Body Social, 1480–1550 51. The agent was unclear, but was referred to as “he,” and it is reasonable to suppose that the Devil was in question because Dudley invokes his name earlier as “the author and father of all falsehood . . .”: Ibid. 37 (and 87). 52. Ibid. 87–9; Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Temple Smith, 1973), 211. 53. Dudley, Tree, 89–90. 54. Ibid. 90–1, 97. 55. Ibid. 90–2. It must have galled Dudley that a leader of the 1497 rising was a lawyer: S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (London: Methuen, 1977; orig. pub., 1972), 90.

5 The Body Historicized Clement Armstrong, 1529–1536

I. INTRODUCTION In the 1530s and ‘40s England saw a revisiting of concepts of the body social, which, it is argued here, was the last occasion for the extended use of this language. Already in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the notion of a body social was under challenge, and after the publication of More’s Utopia (1516) the doubts grew still more serious as English humanists redefined social concepts in the 1530s. Of course, the language of organic hierarchy did not completely disappear after 1550. The metaphor of the body was invoked in later decades, particularly in discussions of the “body politic,” but the focus was no longer on notions of an organic social order. In their place, as Parts II and III maintains, wealth became the guiding principle for determining social position. Despite development towards greater democracy in the twentieth century, social class remains a hardy perennial in England.1 II. HISTORIOGRAPHY2 Studies of Clement Armstrong have sought to link him to particular political and religious positions in the 1530s. One scholar placed Armstrong in a group of writers patronized by Thomas Cromwell and found him wanting. Rather than belonging to the inner circle of humanists like Morison and Starkey, Armstrong was part of a “curious set of simple-minded and exalted autodidacts” in London that included John Rastell and Richard Gibson, who along with Armstrong worked in the Revels Office and favored the Royal Supremacy. Rastell and Armstrong sought Cromwell’s patronage, but there is no evidence they received it. Cromwell preferred humanists to the autodidacts, with the implication that the former were better educated for the kinds of propaganda and policy-papers the secretary sought. Armstrong’s criticisms of Parliament, his “repetitive and flatulent rhapsodies,” and his demands for a coherent theory of reform made his work unappealing to Cromwell.3 It is probably true that Armstrong was not part of the Cromwell coterie. The one-time interior decorator said as much when he lamented in a letter early in 1536 to Cromwell that he had sent two books to him and

80  The Body Social, 1480–1550 offered to be his unpaid servant (“I never . . . asked any worldly promotion nor reward”), but without receiving a reply.4 Nonetheless, to say that Armstrong never entered the magic Cromwellian circle does not tell us much and risks closing historical doors rather than opening them. It suggests the significance of someone’s thoughts is to be defined by the author’s affinity to persons and institutions of power; hence the reference to Armstrong’s offensive remarks about Parliament putting off Cromwell. The comment about simple-mindedness suggests we should judge writers based on something like intellectual snobbery: the voice of the humanist is worth listening to; that of the autodidact is not. By definition, Armstrong’s writings are of marginal significance, and his ideas are likely to be eccentric. This view of Armstrong is surprisingly off target. Far more convincing about his place in sixteenth-century thought were Bindoff’s observations published in 1944. While he doubted the “intrinsic merits” of Armstrong’s work for economic historians and compared him unfavorably to “Commonwealth” writers of the 1540s, Bindoff was correct that “Armstrong had something to say”; that “if he could not say it with More’s art or [Bishop Hugh] Latimer’s verve, that is because he was a more typical Englishman”; and that “in him Everyman was made ungracefully, yet sincerely, articulate.”5 Armstrong’s corpus of writing was far richer than was thought. In addition to well-known treatises on the economy, he left a number of theological tracts: the most substantial numbering 351 folio pages, a smaller one running to 60 folios, and a further four folios on securing livings for London curates.6 Fortunately historians are beginning to tap into Armstrong’s huge output. A recent study comes much closer to placing Armstrong in context. While allowing that he was “eccentric,” a “minor member” of the commonwealth school, and “a fringe member of Thomas Cromwell’s clientage,” another scholar argues convincingly for Armstrong’s importance. He states that Armstrong was “obscure but hardly a nonentity” and observes that he wrote the “most comprehensive and radical justifications for the royal supremacy over the Church ever written in England.”7 Armstrong was a religious extremist who was hard to pigeonhole. As regards the paradigms of magisterial or radical reformations, he fits neither very neatly. While denying priestly authority apart from preaching, a classic radical position, in magisterial mode he elevated the Royal Supremacy and gave the king sacerdotal powers. As for the source of his views, he exhibited influences from both continental and homegrown Lollardy.8 III. THREE ESTATES REPRISED None of Armstrong’s writings were published in his lifetime, and today most remain in manuscript. A German scholar, Reinhold Pauli, published several of Armstrong’s treatises in the 1870s (see n. 3 above), and Tawney and Eileen Power reprinted a pair of Pauli’s transcriptions in their Tudor Economic Documents in 1924. The main thrust of those published was

The Body Historicized  81 economic, but it should be obvious from the list of Armstrong’s writings that religion bulked large in his work as a whole. In reality, it is artificial to isolate the economic from his other concerns, whether they are social, political, or religious. For example, in the midst of his “sermons and declarations against popish ceremonies,” Armstrong broke out into a lengthy tirade against merchants, lawyers, and the balance of trade.9 The point is a well-made one, that Armstrong’s vision was “exotic and deeply spiritualized” and included a range of subjects that surpassed most of his contemporaries. The economy was at the center of his vision,10 which covered a mixed bag of issues concerning the distribution of wealth, the obligation to labor, foreign trade, luxury goods, the growth of London, and agrarian change. But Armstrong’s vision was not limited to the marketplace and was informed by a social language that would have been familiar to Dudley and other proponents of the body social. The tract entitled “How the Common People May Be Set to Work: An Order of a Commonwealth” dealt extensively with the shape of society. Another person may have composed the final section of this work after Armstrong’s death, because it cites a Royal Proclamation of November 1538 regulating printing, and he is thought to have died between January and May  1536. Nonetheless, Bindoff believed in the “strong probability” that Armstrong wrote the bulk of the treatise, and certainly its contents are highly reminiscent of other writings by him.11 The section on printing sounds a great deal like Armstrong, because it railed against two of his favorite themes, foreign imports and immoral economic activity. It called for the banning of imports of books, citing similar action by the French king. Its reasoning involved the protection of employment at home, a common theme in Armstrong’s tracts. It called printing “a commodious science” that should “set many of the King’s subjects to work whereby many should wax rich which now are in manner but beggars.” Reflecting a strong belief in a “moral economy,” which also characterized Armstrong’s opus, it decried the breaking of copyright in the industry at home, calling it “the uncharitable and inordinate fashions” of reprinting without permission whatever sold well.12 Invoking the image of the body, the “Order of a Commonwealth” used the language of hierarchy. It described a “right order” in which “the whole body of a realm is a mystical body, whereof the King’s majesty is head” and so “are all degrees of people within this realm the body and members of the same head . . .”. The reference to a “mystical body” cited Paul in Corinthians 12 and Romans 12 and many subsequent Christian writers, who insisted upon the spiritual nature of society and its institutions, even if they could not agree who its earthly head was. For his part, Armstrong left no doubt that the monarch was the earthly head and frequently denounced clerical rule.13 For Armstrong, the overall shape of the social matrix was close to that of Dudley, although Armstrong, as someone who spent most of his life as a Londoner, not surprisingly had less to say about the nobility than about the clergy and the third estate.14 Armstrong frequently had harsh words for the clergy, but still saw them occupying a key position in English society.

82  The Body Social, 1480–1550 He attacked their pretensions to political power, their wealth, and lack of charity to the poor. He questioned whether they themselves knew what their role in society was: “the spirituality know not themself what should be their help,” he wrote. Instead, they “strive with rigorous means to rule the commonalty,” which causes “malice and enmity.” The clergy’s possessions also caused resentment. Seeing “the spirituality in so great wealth” and “so rigorously to handle them” drove the common people to “grudge against them” and to “think the spirituality hates them . . .”. The remedy was for “all men to live together in charity” and for the clergy to “help all common people in England to live out of need and necessity.”15 Echoing a social humanist line, Armstrong drew the line when it came to the regular clergy who practiced voluntary poverty. He allowed that “there is in a mystical body of king these degrees: man, king, and priest,” but there were “no sects of such feigned holiness . . .”. He argued that “not one friar, monk, canon, nor other cloaked hypocrite [was] to be suffered within the mystical body of a realm . . .”. This was because they refused to work, arguing that they were only to pray, “so that they take to them the office of the mouth in the mystical body,” an office that disappeared when Christ came and said that prayer must be “in heart and mind and not in the mouths of men . . .”.16 Armstrong maintained the traditional roles of the king and the nobility in the social order. In his theological writings, he asserted concerning the “wealth of the body” that “the arms, hands, & fingers have [unclear] offices even like as the kings, lords, knights and esquires” who had a responsibility to “lead all the bodily members to work . . .”.17 Again in the “Order of a Commonwealth,” the author invoked the body metaphor, recommending that the king’s councilors, “that is to say the eyes, the nose, mouth and ears, to be associate with the king, which is reason, and that they altogether should study only for the profit of their whole body out of which body their wealth does spring.” Extending the metaphor, he recommended that councilors or “arms of his mystical body” stretch out into the realm and use their hands and fingers to “keep the body in health and wealth.” He favored sending commissioners into the countryside to determine the causes of unemployment and called upon the king to order all lords to encourage tillage of the land.18 Armstrong was less optimistic about the traditional rulers of England in his tract “How to Reform the Realm in Setting Them to Work and to Restore Tillage” when he observed that “the King being the head of his lords, knights, and esquires are his arms, hands, and fingers, do not minister to all common people bodily members such gifts of grace as God yearly gives to them, which they should work for the common weal of the whole realm.” He appeared, nonetheless, to expect such ministering to be their natural role and lamented in the same tract that “all lords were rich in old time, which kept wealthy households and built substantial houses, not having the riches now able to do such acts” because they were purchasing “rich commodities . . .”.19 The backbone of society, according to Armstrong, was the common people, and like Dudley, he spent the bulk of his social treatises examining their

The Body Historicized  83 lot. Also like Dudley, Armstrong’s views of the commonalty were by no means wholly positive. Economically, he considered them the main source of production and the well being of the common weal, and he spelled out what he thought were the chief types of wealth they produced. He was a strong advocate of full employment and, like Dudley and More before him, saw the lack or loss of work leading to vagrancy and more serious offenses. He was also a strong proponent of state-sponsored relief of the poor and wrote powerful pleas on their behalf. Yet, as this chapter’s final section on social mobility shows, Armstrong was deeply hostile to social change of any kind, particularly for members of the commonalty, and especially for lawyers and merchants who brought in imports. His view of the economy opposed agricultural modernization, and he bitterly criticized overseas trade that did not result in an immediate return of cash. Armstrong was not the first to make the observation that the wealth of the nation arose from the common people. The twelfth chapter of Fortescue’s The Governance of England (undated, but presented to Edward IV in 1471) was entitled “Here is Shown What Harm Would Come to England, if the Commons Thereof were Poor.”20 However repetitiously, probably more than any other writer or preacher of the period, Armstrong put a great deal of time, effort, and ink into analyses of the social and economic situation of the commonalty. This was in large measure because of his keen endorsement of the position set out by Fortescue. Armstrong began his tract on “How to Reform the Realm” by telling the king and lords they “are upholden and borne upon the body.” If they wanted to be rich, “they must first see all common people have riches, that out thereof must rise their riches and all people be out of need.” The practical incentive for the king was that wealth generally provided him with taxation: “A  rich, wealthy body of a realm makes a rich, wealthy king being the head thereof,” while “a poor, feeble, weak body of a realm must needs make a poor, feeble, weak king.” This was because the king “cannot gather abundance of gold and silver out of the hands of common people in the body of his realm without they have it.”21 England’s wealth came partly from foreign trade, especially the gold and silver that Armstrong cited, but the commonalty were the chief producers: “the whole wealth of the body of the realm rises out of the labors and works of the common people.” Their labors were of two kinds —husbandry “to increase plenty of victuals” and “artificiality [including trade and manufacturing] to increase plenty of money . . .”. Showing understanding of the economic concept of elasticity of demand, Armstrong left no doubt that the more essential of the two sectors was the first: “the most part of the common people must be set to husbandry to work for their bodily living, for as much as our bodily living is more needful than our clothing.”22 As will be shown in this chapter’s final section, in both sectors of the economy, he observed problems that posed threats to the social order, and he called for the intervention of the government to put things right.

84  The Body Social, 1480–1550 Armstrong left no doubt that for the commonalty, there was a universal obligation to labor, which he extended to the regular clergy. While attacking the latter, he set out his principle of work for all (although he was sketchy about the nobility’s job): “there is no true member in a mystical body but has an office to labor . . .”. And further, that all true members of a mystical body should work and labor in degree and order, that they are called to, and none to be suffered to do anything, but only that which might be to the wealth of the whole body and members of the same in order as hereafter shall follow.23 He asserted that “God ordained not earthly men to eat but if they work” and paraphrased Paul (2 Thessalonians 3, 10) and the example of Adam (2 Ecclesiastes 24–26): “the first earthly man was put into the image of the lord God . . . that he should work, before God gave him to eat his gifts of grace . . .”. Whoever worked to receive the gifts of grace could not sin. Citing Paul once more, grace was received through faith; everything else, including learning and the “judicial law,” was a distraction and potentially sinful. Christians needed to pray to God to receive the gifts of grace, including the ability to work, which would in turn “increase the common wealth of the body of England to uphold and maintain the wealth of our sovereign.” He who worked diligently would be rewarded; he who did not was a sinner: “Give him meat, if he be able to work. He that works not, eats his own meat against right of faith, for that is sin.”24 A second perspective on Armstrong’s economic and social treatises is less concerned with their veracity as histories than with the language they use to delineate those histories. In analyzing the author’s social theory it is as important to understand what the author was saying as to test its “truth.” Besides subscribing to principles of specialized hierarchies, a key component of Armstrong’s thinking was the idea of mutual obligation. Regarding social interdependence, he employed the metaphor of the body often and at great length. The “Order of a Common Wealth” asserted that “it is a grief to the general and mystical head to have any member sick sore in the mystical body . . .”.25 In citing Paul’s injunction to work, Armstrong actually gave it a new twist, asserting the principle of mutual responsibility by stating that “no man should eat away his neighbor’s meat . . . and that no man for his meat should destroy the works of God  .  .  .”. Such exploitation violated Armstrong’s belief that people “lived in form of Christ, as members of his body should live in a holy church” governed by the Holy Spirit.26 The obligation to others constituted more than observing the commandment against theft. It was virtually a natural right, or as Armstrong termed it, a “head right of every one man.” He asked, “What other right has God put into the head of every one man, but only the right of common weal of all the members in his

The Body Historicized  85 body?” He summed up the principle by posing the challenge of conflict as opposed to cooperation: What man can say by the office of his mouth, feeding all the members in his body, to give to one hand more than to another, or to one finger or to any one member more than to another, whereby one to hurt and destroy another, but that all members should receive meat together to live out of necessity, etc.27 For Armstrong, the most salient responsibility of the wealthy was, as it was for More and Dudley, the relief of the poor. In writing on the effects of depopulation, he concluded that “England for lack of the lively grace of God lives like as a beast” and “so the poor wretched beastly members of the body of the realm . . . complain of the sore grief of need and necessity of victuals, clothing and money. They sensibly feel scarcity, so living in misery.”28 In an emotional letter to Cromwell, Armstrong wrote, “Your mastership knows all my poor desire has been over all things that you should help all people to live out of necessity and scarcity, young and old, sick and whole . . .”. For those who were “not able to work,” £400,000 a year “shall be gathered in the realm to keep them out of necessity . . .”.29 This sounds a great deal like modern welfare, but closer to home, it resembled the “poor laws” that were passed in Tudor parliaments that placed greater and greater responsibility upon parishes for the care of their resident, disabled poor. IV. HIERARCHY AND RESPONSIBILITY Armstrong’s social language was highly reminiscent of the anti-individualistic rhetoric of three-estates theory, but it was also that of a religious radical seeking a more moral and Christian society, as represented by Paul’s words to the Thessalonians. Despite the tensions and conflicts caused by people stepping out of line, Armstrong had a positive vision of what held society together. It was the same sense of mutual obligation that Dudley posited, but with greater emphasis upon the economic and social. The greatest threat was the one also cited by More: the pursuit of the “singular weal” at the expense of the common. Armstrong repeatedly came back to the theme in his writings. In the treatise “Concerning the Staple,” he denounced the “singular lucre” sought by the sheep ranchers to satisfy the demand of the cloth trade dominated by the London-based Merchant Adventurers. He summed up the country’s problems in this regard, writing, “No man in England never seeks for no common weal, but all and every for his singular weal.”30 Armstrong consistently maintained that the social order was under siege from a multitude of directions. He adhered to a principle of fixity in society both in contemporary and historical terms; that is, he condemned change

86  The Body Social, 1480–1550 both in the present and in the past. This double meaning in his concept of stasis provides an interesting chronological dimension that is often missing from social theories in the past. Dudley, for example, was analytical and anecdotal without being very historical. The double-layered character of Armstrong’s commentary creates difficulties in analyzing his thinking, because often the two forms of condemnation are joined at the hip. The result might be simply to dismiss him as a grumpy old man regretting “the good old days,” when in reality, his comments constitute a wide-ranging and perceptive analysis of late medieval and early sixteenth-century English society. Dudley and More were more succinct than Armstrong, but they were not as ambitious or thorough in their surveys of the social landscape. Armstrong’s remarks leave no doubt that he endorsed the principle of statis in society and that he was entirely opposed to the changes he observed in his world and in its recent past. He laid down the principle of fixity of rank in the treatise entitled, “How the Common People May Be Set to Work,” stating that “there may not be any man suffered to live out of right order” because it was harmful “to suffer any member of the said mystical body to live out of order of a common wealth of the said body.” Again, he stated that “all true members of a mystical body should work and labor in degree and order that they are called to . . .”. Armstrong was prepared virtually to name names. As examples of “strange members” who disrupted the whole body, he cited lawyers, who he asserted were “maintainers of strife and debate between members of the mystical body,” merchants, “which of plenty do make scarcity and cause members to be in need,” and the regular clergy, who fostered the belief that “one member of a body can be more holier than another . . .”.31 It is interesting to note the spiritual and ethical aspects of Armstrong’s strictures, which were directed against groups whom he represented as disturbing a moral rather than a purely secular social order. He himself invoked the notion of “living in charity” with the rest of the “mystical body,” which was a commonly held belief in London of the period.32 V. THE BODY SOCIAL HISTORICIZED The complexity of Armstrong’s opus is apparent in examining social asides in the blockbuster series of writings that have been labeled (by him?) “Sermons and Declarations Against Popish Ceremonies.” Here, he laid out his belief in the fixity of the social order in statements that endorsed the sumptuary laws. He complained of the present-day wearing of silk adorned with gold and silver, which in previous centuries—he dated the change to about 1375 or “160 year[s] ago”—was worn only by lords who “for the honor of the realm used certain rich apparel every [man?] after his degree” and who were ordinarily content to wear London russets. Servants previously wore clothes made “sadly and honestly” in England and knew their places in the world: they “might be known from their lords and masters, where now serving men go more like lords.” Servants were “more obedient and ready to do

The Body Historicized  87 better service . . . ”; now, they refused to serve or to groom their own horses for fear of damaging their clothes. The upshot was that “serving people throughout the whole realm are so raised into highness of pride, disdain, and idleness by wearing of such fantastical apparel, made in strange realms and brought into England and worn to the hurt of all people rent to rags daily and yearly . . .”.33 Before concluding that Armstrong’s chief interest was the finding of compliant servants, his opposition to two leading economic changes of the period is worth examining. Armstrong’s observations concerned the growing monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers and its effects upon England’s balance of trade, particularly payments in kind, with continental Europe, and upon the outports that had shared in the trade in woolen cloth. He was also preoccupied with what he perceived to be the agrarian consequences of the monopoly and the terms of trade, which he stated were the depopulation of villages, the “laying down of plows,” and unemployment, vagrancy, and more serious crimes. Although the issues identified by Armstrong were economic ones, he framed them more broadly in social and religious terms. He condemned the Merchant Adventurers and depopulators as much for their social as their other sins, and above all, because they threatened the status quo, particularly the precept of the fixity of ranks. There are broader, methodological points about Armstrong’s reactions to these issues. They show that, far from being the eccentric autodidact, he was very much au fait with the broader theoretical social questions of his day. Dudley, too, cited problems with the wool trade, and of course, More singled out the expansion of sheep farming as a challenge to England’s traditional agrarian system.34 Although a full discussion of the economic conditions to which Armstrong referred is impossible here (see Chapter 2 for this), there is reason to believe that his facts were well grounded, so that his general remarks about the economy were probably as well founded as anyone writing in that period. Just because he used the languages of evangelistic religion and social conservatism should not make us believe Armstrong was ignorant of his world. Armstrong had a theory about England’s social ills, and it focused on the terms of trade with the continent. If not very cogently expressed, it was frequently invoked in his writings, leaving no doubt that it was at the core of his argument. He maintained that up to the end of the fourteenth century—he cited the reign of Edward III as critical—England’s balance of payments was satisfactory, even profitable. This was because the Merchants of the Staple sold raw wool and finished cloth to the continent in return for bullion, which was reinvested at home and benefited England by maintaining high levels of employment and low levels of foreign imports. According to Armstrong, change came in the middle to late fourteenth century and centered on the relationship between London and Calais. Before England secured Calais in the Hundred Years’ War, he asserted, “England lived wealthily in itself, when all people commonly received their livings of God’s gift with their labors in right order before there was any merchants

88  The Body Social, 1480–1550 that adventured before the narrow see was gotten.” The violation of that “right order” he assigned to the Merchant Adventurers, who increasingly dominated the trade in woolen cloth, trading beyond Calais and bringing back imports into England rather than bullion. The economic consequences were dire. Before the switch, there “was no ruin nor scarcity in the whole realm,” “never a merchant therein that adventured over the sea,” and “then was all the whole realm full of wealth and plenty of victuals and money.”35 Foreign imports now multiplied. He cited woad from Spain, alum from Italy, madder and linen from Flanders. There was also increased consumption of imported wines, “which is spent among unchristian people and . . . pisse[d] against the walls,” as well as silk. The linen, wine, and silk each cost 100,000 marks a year.36 The expansion of retail outlets appalled Armstrong. The importation of “strange merchandise and artificial fantasies” caused peddlers and chapmen to abound. They went from fair to fair, market to market, carrying goods in horse packs and baskets. They sat “on holidays and Sundays in Church porches and in abbeys daily to sell such trifles . . .”. The worst of the retailers, he claimed, were the London haberdashers, who proliferated beginning about 1500—“a forty year ago was not four or five shops in London, where now every street is full of them”—who he said sold “fantasies and trifle[s]” and drove out of business domestic makers of pins, points, girdles, and gloves. There was inflation, too, that resulted in higher prices of wool, food, and rural rents and had deleterious effects upon the rural economy.37 To Armstrong, the social consequences of the economic changes were the most disturbing. Specifically, the smaller outports that had previously flourished, trading with Italian, Dutch, Flemish, and Baltic merchants, went into decline. One of the chief causes of the “decay of this realm” was “not making of clothes in good towns . . .”. London, by contrast, took over the provincial traffic, and the metropolis mushroomed possibly three-fold, for “[t]hen was not the fourth part of people in London that now.” The institutional impact was considerable, with the creation of powerful companies such as the Mercers and Grocers (his own company), and the rebuilding of the Guildhall.38 A prominent theme in Armstrong’s treatises was the unemployment resulting from these changes. He was especially worried about the impact upon rural society and traditional open-field farming, stating that “the decay of this realm is chiefly by laying down the plows . . .”. He claimed that in 60 years, one Merchant Adventurer was responsible for the loss of 4,000 to 5,000 jobs in the countryside because of the expansion of sheep farming. This was a transparent exaggeration, and he subsequently lowered the total to between 1,000 and 1,400. The increased unemployment was caused by the demand for wool by “the inordinate number of staplers [Merchant Adventurers],” which in the same period, he more accurately observed, caused the depopulation of 400 or 500 villages in “the middle [Midland] parts of the body of the realm.” Also to blame were the parish clergy, the “lords of the earth” or gentlemen farmers, and their leasehold

The Body Historicized  89 tenants. The clergy failed to protect their parishioners, while the laity sought profits. Again, Armstrong cited Paul’s injunction that everyone should work for a living and admonished the clerics for not fulfilling their obligations.39 The landed, he said, held their properties in stewardship—as was also frequently argued by critics of the monastic orders—and it was unacceptable “that any possessioner may say he is a lord of the earth he has in possession to use and occupy it as he will, but as God by his laws wills.” He rejected the rights of “farmers” to become the lords of the earth “as a lord above the Lord” and accused them of “robbing away the [labors?] and livings from the king’s bodily members, destroying the whole wealth of the king’s body.” Such thieves, he claimed, “must needs destroy the head, arms, hands, fingers; so craftily do farmers, buyers and sellers rob the common weal . . .”.40 The upshot of such exploitation was social disorder, which could incite popular discontent. In describing the impact of agrarian changes, Armstrong said it caused the displaced “to murmur and grudge, ready to do any mischief, if they thought it might be any remedy.” The victims particularly resented the wealthy clergy. The condition of the poor, he wrote, “must needs prick them” and “causes them to have grudge and envy against the spirituality”; they think “the spirituality hates them . . .”.41 Armstrong was in no doubt about what drove these upheavals. It was people stepping out of their assigned social roles and acting against the common weal. He wrote bitterly against the proliferation of merchants and even blamed the poor for their aspirations for upward mobility. “The breeding of so many merchants in London, [a]risen out of poor men’s sons, has been a marvelous destruction to the whole realm,” he stated.42 Further, “all merchants, buyers and sellers in London . . . are commonly poor men’s sons, natural born to labor for their living . . .”. After serving apprenticeships, “all their labor, study and policy is by buying and selling to get singular riches from the commonalty” and not to work in agriculture or handicrafts.43 He said it was mainly in the last 50 years that their numbers grew, principally because of the shortness of the return between London and the mainland. And with further hyperbole, he wrote, “London is now in condition that all the people therein are merchants.” In order to survive, everyone “universally studies daily how to get living one from another by borrowing in way of buying and selling, covetous and falsehood every working one to beguile another.” Even poor people bought and sold wine in cellars and “blind lanes,” kept alehouses, and sold victuals, so the city was “full” of alehouses, victualing houses, “idle riotous people,” and “haunts of harlots . . .”.44 Armstrong’s reactions to economic and social changes since the midfourteenth century can be examined from two perspectives. One approach might take his descriptions of these developments and his statistics and compare them to “real” events to determine their historical accuracy. From even a cursory glance at his numbers, one might well conclude that they look suspiciously round. Yet his geographical information was solid in at least one area when he pinpointed the “middle parts”—Leicestershire,

90  The Body Social, 1480–1550 Northamptonshire, Warwickshire—as ground zero in the late medieval depopulation of villages for livestock farming.45 It is more difficult to evaluate his claims about the long-term developments in the woolen export trade. He certainly exaggerated the differences between Staplers and Merchant Adventurers in their early history, when they were all simply known as “merchants of the realm trading to the parts of Flanders.”46 It is also unclear whether those selling raw wool invariably took bullion in exchange and that the Merchant Adventurers always brought back foreign imports. The social consequences of these developments are even murkier, for despite Armstrong’s tales of gloom and doom, London was (also by his account) growing rapidly in the period. Was all the growth before 1550 made up wholly of the sale of foreign “trifles,” as he claimed? It seems inherently unlikely. Despite these caveats, Armstrong had a firm grasp on a key development in England’s trading relationship with the continent—that the trade in raw wool experienced a long-term decline, while the cloth trade flourished, opening the door to the Merchant Adventurers centered in London’s Mercers’ Hall, who by the mid-sixteenth century held a virtual monopoly in the sale of unfinished cloth to the continent. Unlike the Staplers, the Adventurers were not confined to the port of Calais, did not suffer the burdens of Royal taxation and embargoes, and successfully expanded into Flanders, the Baltic, and the Mediterranean.47 Armstrong proposed a variety of strategies as remedies, but ultimately he relied—in a presciently modern fashion—on the principle of gainful employment. Following again the theory of mutual obligation, he maintained that work should be provided by the wealthy. He treated it as a matter of social responsibility, but also appealed to their enlightened self-interest, arguing that the rich were dependent on the poor, as well as the other way around. The king and lords “if they will be rich, they must first see all common people have riches . . .”. Further, he wrote, “A rich, wealthy body of a realm makes a rich, wealthy king being the head thereof, and a poor, feeble, weak body of a realm must needs make a poor, feeble, weak king.” The monarch could not garner an abundance of silver and gold from the common people “without they have it.”48 Above all, Armstrong called for full employment, assigning responsibility to the king and landed elites. He stated that the lords, knights, and esquires as “possessioners of the earth are bound by God’s laws to lead the people to work the earth . . .”.49 They were also responsible for the encouragement of manufacturing: “It shall be the great wealth to the king and all his lords to set as much people as can be to artificiality . . .”. Armstrong had a trickleupwards theory of economics. The wealth produced by artisans would “run out . . . into the hands of such as occupy husbandry for their meat and drink” and from the husbandmen “into the hands of the king and of his lords of the earth . . .”. Moreover, if they stopped the depopulation of villages by just one sheep farmer, the livings of 1,000 to 1,400 people could be restored. The

The Body Historicized  91 same was true of the “Staplers” who imported foreign goods: put just one of them out of business, and the “labors and living of 4,000 or 5,000 common people” would return. The clergy, too, were to shoulder the responsibility “to help all people to live out of necessity.”50 He argued that if foreign imports were limited and home production increased, the burden of relieving the poor would be eased. The “sick and sore” would still require relief, but the overall effect would “ease all common people of their great charge . . .”.51 For Armstrong, this was most definitely a “moral economy,” whose rule was ordained by God. Self-aggrandizement violated Christian law, because no man’s right measures up to “God’s right, that is the standard right of all common weal[s].” The only right that God gave to one man—the king excepted—was “the right of common weal of all the members in his body.”52 In his lengthy theological treatise, Armstrong consigned individualists to a state of ignorance, writing that “every of them that studies but only for his own singular weal can never think what is the right order of a common weal.” One of the bitter fruits of the sins of Adam and Eve was that their children would “ever more study and work this world’s wisdom how to get singular riches out of the common weal . . .”. His parting shot was that those seeking individual wealth weakened the nation: “they never think to help the realm of England by their occupying of the commodities therein, but for the winning of one penny for their own singularity . . .”.53 VI. CONCLUSIONS Armstrong’s treatises were repetitive and long-winded, but his social theories were neither unrepresentative nor out of touch. Like Dudley and other proponents of the body social, he subscribed to a model that was hierarchical in structure, with obligations to other members, who all had specialized roles that were not to change. Like the other authors, he expressed concern about the potential for popular discontent if the social order was not firmed up. There are also strong echoes in Armstrong of More’s Utopia. It might seem odd to historians of canonical literature such as More’s to compare it to the turgid offerings of a “simple-minded” “autodidact” such as Armstrong, but here we run the risk of intellectual snobbery and the closing of our minds.54 Whatever one makes of the frequently imputed ironical qualities of More’s tract, prima facie, there were considerable overlaps between the two authors. Both focused on the agrarian problem and its social consequences and were critical of the nobility and clergy in their dealings with their tenants. Both also concentrated on the pursuit of “singular weal” as against the commonly voiced concerns about unemployment, hardship, and crime. Unlike these other writers, Armstrong devoted a great deal of attention to bread-and-butter economic and social issues, suggesting they had more than symbolic value for him. Neither he nor his imagined mentor, Thomas Cromwell, proved capable of solving these problems, and in all likelihood,

92  The Body Social, 1480–1550 the two men did not agree about how the issues should be defined and the potential institutional remedies. It may be true that Cromwell should be congratulated on his eschewing of “coherent theories,” but at the same time, it seems worthwhile to examine the theory to which Armstrong subscribed.55 It is not only, moreover, the practicality or effectiveness of his thoughts that is of interest to a history of social theory. Rather, it is what we can learn about the theory itself and its historical context. However impractical Armstrong’s musings might have been, they were linked in his mind to wider social precepts, which he shared with other contemporaries and which is our chief interest in studying him. NOTES   1. Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior (London: Hodden and Stoughton, 2004), 73–83.   2. G. R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 5, 26, 63, 69–70, 112, 160.   3. G. R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1973), 5, 26, 63, 69-70, 112, 160.   4. For the dating of the letter, see S. T. Bindoff, “Clement Armstrong and His Treatises of the Commonweal,” Ec.H.R 14:1 (1944), 67-8, 71; Reinhold Pauli, Drei Volkswirtschaftliche Denkschriften aus zer Zeit Heinrichs VIII. von England (Göttingen, 1878), 49. References to Armstrong’s work will include those in the National Archives (U.K.), as well as Pauli and repr. in Eileen Power & R.H. Tawney, eds. (London: Longman, 1924). Tudor Economic Documents (hereafter TED), vol. III.   5. Bindoff, “Clement Armstrong,” 73.   6. National Archives, London (hereafter “NA”): E36/197; SP1 6/10-11; SP 6/2. My student Edwin Lind has completed an annotated transcription of the first of these documents, together with an historical introduction.   7. Ethan Shagan, “Clement Armstrong and the Godly Commonwealth: Radical Religion in Early Tudor England,” ed. Peter Marshall & Alex Ryrie, The Beginnings of English Protestantism (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2002), 60-1.   8. Shagan, “Clement Armstrong,” 62, 69-70.   9. Pauli, op.cit.; NA E.36/197, fols. 95–121. 10. Shagan, “Clement Armstrong,” 74–5. 11. Bindoff, op.cit., 65–6, 72–3. 12. NA SP1/242/fol.152. 13. The New English Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge and Oxford University Presses, 1961), 295; NA E.36/197/passim. 14. Although he, of course, had plenty to say about the clergy in his theological tracts. The best source for the biography remains Bindoff, “Clement Armstrong.” 15. NA SP1/239/pt. 2/fols. 370–2 (repr. in TED, III, 112–113. 16. NA SP 1/242/fol. 140 (repr. Pauli, op.cit. 53). 17. NA E.36/197/fol. 100. 18. NA SP1/242/fols. 142–6 (repr. in Pauli, Drei Denkschriften, 53–4). 19. NA SP1/242/fols. 173–4, 178–9 (repr. in TED III, 121–3). 20. Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, Ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xix, 108. 21. NA SP1/242/fols. 157–8 (repr. TED, III, 115). 22. NA SP1/242/fols. 158–9 (repr. Pauli, op.cit. 60–1; the TED edition does not provide the full text, but see TED III, 116).

The Body Historicized  93 3. NA SP1/242/fol. 143 (repr. Pauli, op.cit. 53). 2 24. NA SP1/242/fols. 160–1 (repr. Pauli, ocit., 61–2; excised from the TED edn., III, 116). 25. NA SP1/242/fol.142 (repr. Pauli, 52). 26. NA SP1/239/pt. 2/fol. 351 (repr. TED, III, 97). 27. NA SP1/239/pt.2/fol. 375 (repr. TED, III, 114). 28. NA SP1/239/pt.2/fol. 356 (repr. TED, III, 100–1). 29. NA SP1/88/fol. 134a; Pauli 49. 30. NA SP1/239/pt.2/fols. 358, 375 (repr. TED, III, 103, 114). 31. NA SP1/242/fols. 142–3 (repr. Pauli, op.cit., 51–3). 32. Susan Brigden, “Religion and Social Obligation in Early Sixteenth-Century London,” P&P 103 (May 1984), 67; TED III, 113. 33. NA E.36/197/fol. 123 (repr. Pauli, op.cit., 45–6). 34. Dudley, Tree, 49; for Thomas More, see Chapter 9, note 17. 35. NA E36/197/fol. 120; Pauli, 42–3; as well as Edward III’s reign, Armstrong cited periods of 140 and 160 years; cf. Bindoff, “Clement Armstrong,” 66–7. 36. TED 109, 128. A mark was a monetary unit equivalent to 2/3s of a pound sterling: O.E.D. (on line n.2). 37. NA E.36/197/fol. 121 (repr. Pauli, ocit., 43–7); NA SP1/242/fols. 192–3 (repr. TED, III, 128–9); NA SP1/239/pt. 2/fols. 367–9 (repr. TED, III, 109–111.). 38. NA E.36/197/fol. 119 (repr. Pauli, ocit., 43–5). 39. NA SP1/242/fols. 144–5 (repr. Pauli, ocit., 54); NA SP1/239/pt. 2/fols. 350–1, 355–7 (repr. TED, III, 96–7, 100–1). 40. NA E.36/197/fols. 100–1. 41. NA SP1/239/pt.2/fols. 356, 372 (repr. TED, III, 101, 113). 42. NA SP1/239/pt.2/fol. 362. 43. NA SP1/242/fol. 188 (repr. TED, III, 126). 44. NA SP1/239/pt. 2/fol.370 (repr. TED, III, 112). 45. Maurice Beresford and John G. Hurst, eds. Deserted Medieval Villages: Studies (Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1989; first pub., Lutterworth Press, 1971), 12, 37. 46. E.  M. Carus-Wilson, Medieval Merchant Adventurers (London: Methuen, 1967; first pub. 1954), 149. 47. Carus-Wilson, Merchant Venturers, xxiv–v, xxix; Brian Dietz, “Overseas Trade and Metropolitan Growth,” in A. L. Beier and R. A. P. Finlay, eds., The Making of the Metropolis: London, 1500–1700 (London: Longman, 1986), 119; CarusWilson, op.cit., xix–xx; Elton, Reform and Renewal, 113–115; J. D. Gould, The Great Debasement: Currency and the Economy in Mid-Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 125. 48. NA SP1/242/fols. 157–8 (repr. TED, III, 115). 49. NA E.36/197/fol. 100. 50. NA SP1/239/pt.2/fols. 356, 362, 372; (repr. TED, III, 101, 105, 113). 51. NA SP1/242/fol. 150 (repr. Pauli, ed., 57). 52. NA SP1/239/pt.2/fol. 375 (repr. TED, III, 114). 53. NA E.36/197/fols. 102, 117, 120–1. 54. Elton, Reform and Renewal, 63. 55. Cf. Elton, Reform and Renewal, 69–70, 160.

6 Defending the Body “Commonwealth-Men,” c. 1520–c. 1553

I. INTRODUCTION The treatises by Dudley and Armstrong were not published during their lifetimes and remained in manuscript until the nineteenth century. Dudley’s work was reproduced in at least four contemporary manuscript versions, but they appear to have had limited circulation after the sixteenth century. Armstrong’s writings were intended to have a wider audience, because they were sent to Thomas Cromwell, whose ear the author sought to catch and, thus, to influence government policy. But there is no evidence of any great interest in Armstrong’s epistles until they were calendared in the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII in 1876 and Pauli published excerpts in 1878. The same isolation is not true of the authors examined in the main body of this chapter. Through works of theology, sermons, poems, polemical tracts, and even charges to juries, the authors played to far greater audiences than either Dudley or Armstrong, while spreading a similar social creed. Indeed, without the participation of these additional voices, it would be difficult to claim that Dudley and Armstrong were representative of anyone but themselves. They might be considered a couple of eccentric, late-blooming examples of an age-old social ideology whose days were numbered. To the contrary, this chapter seeks to establish that the social language of Dudley and Armstrong was by no means unconventional in their time. It argues that the “Commonwealth-men’s” social theory was widely and vigorously reproduced from the 1520s to the 1550s, reaching the highest levels of government in the reign of Edward VI. Although this group of authors addressed specific social and religious issues, which have often been the subject of historical scholarship, the chapter suggests they articulated theories of the body social, which were more traditional than contemporaries and historians believed, and that were very similar to those of Dudley and Armstrong. What is more, the articulation of the body extended far beyond elite voices to popular songs and doggerel, as the penultimate section of this chapter shows.

Defending the Body  95 II. HISTORIOGRAPHY Historical analyses of social theory from the 1520s to the 1550s have centered on the idea of the common weal and its propagation by numerous voices. The label attached to these authors is “Commonwealth-men,” who are most often identified with the reign of Edward VI and, most specifically, with the Protectorate of Edward Seymour, the Duke of Somerset, from 1547 to 1549. Beginning with the work of A. F. Pollard in the early twentieth century, it was thought that Somerset surrounded himself with a reforming party of activists, most of them Protestant zealots, who set out to solve England’s social and economic problems.1 In the 1970s, two scholars challenged this interpretation. One found no evidence that the Commonwealth-men were organized in a “party,” as Pollard had claimed, nor much indication of an agreed program. A second studied the preachers Hugh Latimer and Thomas Lever, the printer Robert Crowley, and John Hales, an enclosure commissioner for Somerset’s government, and came to similar conclusions.2 Still other historical studies of the Commonwealth-men have chiefly examined them from the perspective of the history of political thought.3 The difficulty with all these accounts is that they focus on the political to the virtual exclusion of the social. Unquestionably, Quentin Skinner had the perspicacity to refer to the mid-century Commonwealth writers as “social theorists,” but apart from individual social issues, such as the effects of rural depopulation, scholars have paid limited attention to the social theory that was the cultural grid for their programs.4 The skeptical paradigm is particularly limiting. It is confined to two years, whereas the common weal was a fixture in the normative social and political language over many decades. This interpretation focused, moreover, on whether the Commonwealth-men formed a “party” that affected policy making in a period when political parties did not exist and the making of policy seems often to have been as much personal as it was policy-driven.5 No authority paid much attention to the social philosophies of the writers except to dismiss them. One dubbed them “laudators of a glorious past that had never been and the lamenters over man’s fallen nature.”6 This chapter proposes to qualify the use of the label “Commonwealthmen” because it tends to mislead more than it informs. Chronologically, the phrase is unhelpful, because it directs attention to a very brief period, when in reality we know from Fortescue, Dudley, Armstrong, and others that the word was employed in late medieval thought and would be again, albeit with very different meanings, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It may be true that the reign of Edward VI represents a peak of agitation by authors of a certain ideological persuasion, but it would be hard to prove without resorting to crude word and title counting what may just be reflections of policies towards censorship and publication.7 In reality, the term “Commonwealth” was so pervasive in the political and social vocabularies

96  The Body Social, 1480–1550 of the early modern period that it risks losing its various meanings if used in a generic sense. For example, John Hales and Sir Thomas Smith both used the word and were contemporaries, even serving the same government, but their theories of society were quite different. While Hales endorsed the traditional model of a body social, Smith developed a novel approach based upon a model of social conflict, as Chapter 12 seeks to demonstrate. Yet, both authorities used the term “Commonwealth.” The path taken here is to pursue the story of those who, along with Dudley and Armstrong, endorsed the theory of the body social. The excuse for further elaborating this theory is to show that their paradigm retained its vigor from the 1510s to the 1550s. Further, the aim is revisionist, because it will be seen that, apart from speaking out vociferously in a time of relaxed press censorship, the authors of Edward VI’s reign were not at all as radical as contemporaries and historians painted them. Quite the contrary, they were promoting a well-established social theory that was essentially conservative. They were admittedly speaking out at a time when theories were changing and popular uprisings were occurring, with which they were—quite unfairly—linked by some. The authors studied here were selected because they endorsed the theory of the body social and because they expressed the theory in very public ways. The chapter’s final section will seek to demonstrate that manuscript sources support the notion that the theory was a vibrant, if challenged, force in the mid-century years. III. THE BODY SOCIAL RE-ARTICULATED

A. The Functioning Body The publicists favoring the body social subscribed to the three principles of a hierarchical specialization of function, the interdependence of the estates, and the fixity of social roles. A  few years before Armstrong wrote, William Tyndale published “The Parable of the Wicked Mammon,” an attack upon the doctrine of good works that produced a fevered reaction from the English authorities when it was smuggled into the country in 1527.8 While critiquing the value of good works for salvation, Tyndale spelled out how social relations should ideally operate and indicated his adherence to the theory of the body. He described how the clergy preached the gospel in the parishes and received “an honest living for them and their households”; how “lords and officers minister peace in the Commonwealth, punish murderers, thieves, and evil-doers; and how the commons minister to them again rent, tribute, toll, and custom to maintain their order and estate . . .”.9 Although less explicitly, A Supplication of the Poor Commons, published in 1546, embraced the theory of the three estates. Possibly written by Henry Brinklow, an ex-friar and mercer of London, it was a virulent attack both on the monks and the new owners of monastic properties for their failure to relieve the poor. Despite Brinklow’s radical religious positions, the social

Defending the Body  97 matrix of his story was a traditional one. He cited the clergy, the king and his nobles, and the commons, who were “the inferior members of the body to their head.” God had ordained that the nobles would not “disdain their consciences with this most ungodly oppression.” If the king would redress matters, God would ensure “to prosper all them that seek his glory and the wealth of his poor members in this Church militant.”10 The publicists of the late 1540s and early ’50s supported the same social system as Tyndale and Brinklow. Hales, although accused of sedition, expressed the conventional view of hierarchy and interdependence when he gave charges to juries looking into depopulation in 1548: [So] has it pleased God to make the body of divers parts and members, and every part and member has his distinct and proper office . . . ; so has it pleased God also to ordain in the Commonwealth divers degrees of people; some to be governors, rulers, and defenders of it, as the King’s majesty, his Council, and nobility and gentlemen, and others, to be his victuallers and purveyors of things necessary for the use and sustenance of man, as craftsmen and husbandmen.11 Hales left out the estate of the clergy, which may reflect a position that they should stay out of government. Another evangelical, Robert Crowley, a printer who was ordained by Bishop Nicholas Ridley in 1551, published in 1549 or 1550 an “Information” addressed to Parliament in which he attacked targets similar to those of Brinklow. Rejecting allegations that he favored the community of goods, he stated his adherence to organic social unity: Remember (most Christian councilors) that you are not only naturally members of one body with the poor creatures of this realm, but also by religion you are members of the same mystical body of Christ, who is the head of us all (his members) . . .12 Regarding the nobles’ role in society, Hales wrote a conventional account in his “Defense” against accusations that his enclosure commission of 1548 had caused popular rebellions. He observed, “I  know the nobility is the ordinance of God and a state ordained under the King’s Majesty to aid and assist his Highness in his great charge of government . . .”.13 Thomas Lever spoke the same social language of specialized hierarchies. In his “Sermon in the Shrouds of St. Paul’s” in February 1550, he stated that people were “diverse members of one mystical body of Christ” and that “one member ought as well to be provided for, as another,” but he did not mean that all should be equal: “as there be diverse members in diverse places, having diverse duties, so to have diverse provision in feeding and clothing.”14 Martin Bucer (1491–1551), the religious leader who tutored Edward VI, endorsed this traditional social matrix of organic hierarchy in his treatise on almsgiving c. 1557: “Yea, they be most certain, that as there be in man’s

98  The Body Social, 1480–1550 body diverse members, not all of one sort, but some more profitable, than some, and yet all requisite, and necessary to make a perfect body . . .”.15 The proponents of the body social, while chastising the elites, left no doubt that the duties of the commonalty were extensive and non-negotiable. In part, rhetorically addressing the responsibilities of the populace was a response to charges of sedition that were leveled against the “Commonwealth-men” after the rebellions of 1549.16 But it is also possible to conclude that the heavy didactic tone of these writers was not only the result of circumstances, but also of a long-standing tradition. We know that forty years earlier, Dudley laid special emphasis on the obligations of the commonalty. In reality, the “Commonwealth-men” came out strongly against voluntary poverty—a position they shared with social humanists—and in favor of full employment. Again rejecting the allegation that he favored the community of goods, Crowley paraphrased the well-known Pauline message: “I would wish that no man were suffered to eat but such as would labor in their vocation and calling . . .”.17 Latimer quoted the same lines from Thessalonians in his sixth sermon before Edward VI in 1549, saying that Paul “put an order how every man should work in his vocation” and that “it were a good ordinance in a commonweal, that every man should be set on work, every man in his vocation.” Latimer cited the fact that Jesus, before becoming a preacher, “lived of his occupation; he was a carpenter, and got his living with great labor. Therefore let no man disdain or think scorn to follow him in a mean living, a mean vocation, or a common calling and occupation.” Christ, the preacher stated, “abhors all idleness.”18 Another sermon Lever preached to Edward VI in March  1550 carried the same message: “He that does not labor, should not eat. He that does no work, should take no wages: he that does no duties, should take no fees.”19 The Primer, a book of private prayer issued by the Edwardian authorities in 1549 and 1552, was just as adamant in its condemnation of the idle: “As the bird is born to fly, so is man born to labor: for thou, O Lord, has commended by thy holy word, that man shall eat his bread in the labor of his hands and in the sweat of his face . . .”. Not only should the idle not eat, they should be banished: “we withdraw ourselves from every brother that walks inordinately, and gives not his mind unto labor . . .”.20 Edward VI’s “Discourse” of 1551 mandated that everybody would work: “And as there is no part admitted in the body that does not work and take pain, so ought there no part of the Commonwealth to be but labor-some.”21 Bucer took a similarly hard line: “For those that may get their living by their labor and travail, and will not, ought to be put out of the church.” This was because “all such as mind fully to receive the kingdom of Christ, ought to labor earnestly”; if they did not, they were actually “consuming the sustenance, that is due to the needy and poor of Christ.”22 Although the “Commonwealth-men” rejected voluntary poverty, it is noteworthy they sought to avoid criminalizing the involuntarily poor, lest they discouraged charitable giving.

Defending the Body  99

B. Interdependent Members As with Dudley and Armstrong, what held the body social together was the principle of mutual obligation. In “The Parable of the Wicked Mammon” (1528), Tyndale wrote—reprising the question of property—that “among Christian men love makes all things common: every man is other’s debtors, and every man is bound to minister to his neighbor, and to supply his neighbor’s lack, of that wherewith God hath endowed him.” Further, he stated, “If the whole world were thine, yet has every brother his right in thy goods; and is heir with thee, as we are all heirs of Christ.” All members should think first what would benefit the whole rather than looking for what profit could be made: “Let every man, of whatsoever craft or occupation he be of, whether brewer, baker, tailor, victualler, merchant, or husbandman, refer his craft and occupation unto the Commonwealth, and serve his brethren as he would do Christ himself.” The reasoning was simple, referring back to the precept of social interdependence: “Remember that we are members of one body, and ought to minister one another mercifully: and remember that whatsoever we have, it is given us of God, to bestow it on our brethren.” The responsibility to one another included conventional forms of charity, but also the obligation on the part of the wealthy to employ the poor who could work. The rich “must see the poor set a-work, that as many as are able may feed themselves with the labor of their own hands, according to the scripture and commandment of God.”23 Brinklow’s historical precedent for the principle of mutual assistance was the early Church. Once the faith was established in congregations, he wrote, “they thought good to provide for the poor impotent creatures” and appointed deacons to collect a tenth of everyone’s income and to distribute alms to the needy and to ministers.24 One of the most striking instances of the language of social interdependence appeared in the writings of Hales when he was a commissioner for depopulation in 1548–9. Hales was a layman, but he used his charges to juries and official correspondence as bully pulpits to denounce economic exploitation. His touchstone was invariably the body social. He told a jury in 1548 that if they did their duty honestly and fairly, “ye shall show yourselves good members of the body and the Commonwealth of the realm, that covet and desire as much the wealth and commodity of your Christian brethren and neighbors, as ye do your own.” The source for his charge was God’s word, which declares us to be members of one body, and bids us to love together like brother and brother: it teaches the magistrates their offices towards their inferiors, and commands all people to be obedient to their superiors: it shows how God rewards well-doers both here and with everlasting felicity, and punishes malefactors both in this world and with eternal damnation.25

100  The Body Social, 1480–1550 In a letter to Protector Somerset in July 1548, Hales reiterated his ideal of social harmony. He reported that although some “worldlings” thought the commission was but a money matter, yet am I fully persuaded, and certainly do believe in your Grace’s sayings, that, maugre the Devil, private profit, self-love, money, and such like the Devil’s instruments, it shall go forward, and set such a stay in the body of the Commonwealth, that all the members shall live in a due temperament and harmony, without one having too much, and a great many nothing at all, as at this present it appears plainly they have.26 Hales used similar language in his “Defense” against charges of sedition, writing, “The commons and poor people be members of that body, that the nobles and rich men be.” Anyone who supported the monarch and the common weal would attempt to maintain the king’s subjects “every one in his degree, and not to go about to diminish and weaken them. It is no perfect body that lacks any member. It is a monster that has arms, and lacks feet.” The loyal subjects were to “see justice ministered, to help, succor, preserve, and defend the good from oppressions and injuries of the evil, like as the shepherd is ordained under the master to keep the sheep from ravening wolves.”27 In a similar vein, while criticizing some gentlemen as “very caterpillars of the commonweal,” Thomas Becon in “The Fortress of the Faithful” (1550) made exceptions for the “true” gentlemen, without whom, he argued, society would collapse: “Without the true gentleman the commonweal can no more safely be than the body without eyes. For as the eyes are the principal comfort of an whole body, so likewise are the true gentlemen of the commonweal.” They were “fathers of the country, maintainers of the poor, defenders of the widows and fatherless, succourers of the needy, comforters of the comfortless, and upholders of the commonweal . . .”. In short, they were “pearls and jewels to a realm, and as necessary for the conservation of a public weal as fire, water, and heat is for the health of man’s body.”28 Crowley’s “Information and Petition against the Oppressors of the Poor Commons” (1549–50) described the nature of the relationship between the rich and poor in traditional, organic terms. Using the body metaphor, he asked “Christian councilors” “what discommodity is it to the head, shoulders, the arms, and other the upper members of the body,” who were well clothed, to give the legs and feet hose and shoes “to defend them also from the injuries of the weather, and other hurts . . . ?” In his opinion, “that body is far unworthy to have either legs or feet that will let them go bare, having wherewith to cover them.” The councilors “being the chief members of this noble realm, and having in your hands the wonderful and incomparable riches of the same,” should find it no grief to them to part with a portion of their wealth and give it to the “inferior members . . .”. A body without the latter parts “is but lame and as a block unwieldy, and must, if it will remove

Defending the Body  101 from place to place, creep upon the hands; even so you, if ye had not the poor members of this realm to till the ground and do your other drudgery, no remedy, you must needs do it yourselves.” The inferior members were “necessary members of the mystical body of this most noble realm,” Crowley wrote. Christian councilors should remember, he stated, that they were not only natural members of one body, but also members of the same mystical body of Christ, who is the head of all members. If anyone forsook the poor, Christ would forsake them.29 Along similar lines, the young Edward VI wrote in his “Discourse on Reform” (1551) that harmony between the estates was required for the body social to function, and he listed the roles they fulfilled. In a “Discourse on the Reform of Abuses in Church and State” (1551), he said the clergy were to engage in “setting forth of the word of God, continuing the people in prayer, and the discipline.” The gentry were to provide the defense of the country, “even as the arm does many times bear great stresses for defense of the head and body . . .”. The commons were to “send nourishment to the arms and legs” by the artificers producing goods, the merchants trading them, and the husbandmen paying rents and selling their produce.30 These relations had to be balanced, like the limbs of a body. Of gentlemen he observed that they should not be so wealthy that they impoverish the peasantry, as in France, because “no member in a well-fashioned and whole body is too big for the proportion of the body. So must there be in a wellordered Commonwealth no person that shall have more than the proportion of the country will bear.”31 The Primer, the official book of private prayer of Edward’s church, contained extensive instructions to different members, mandating the performance of mutual obligations. It appealed to the “true nobility” to show themselves in all their doings gentle, courteous, loving, pitiful, and liberal unto their inferiors; living among them as natural fathers among their children, not polling, pilling, and oppressing them, but favoring, helping, and cherishing them: not destroyers, but fathers of the commonalty: not enemies to the poor, but aiders, helpers, and comforters of them. . . . Landlords, it stated, were given their possessions by God and should not rack rents and entry fines, but should let them at rates tenants could afford so they could live honestly, support their families, help the poor, and pay their rents. Masters were asked to treat servants gently, without threatening them, because we are all the servants of God and “all brethren, having one Father . . .”. Laborers and “men of occupations” were to do their jobs, “every man labor according to his vocation and calling . . .”. Servants were to obey their masters “in fear and trembling,” and were not to steal from them.32 Lever also accepted the principle of social interdependence and quoted Paul, Corinthians 9. The comments directed at the wealthy were

102  The Body Social, 1480–1550 barbed: “learn that the more gorgeous you yourselves be in silks and velvets, the more shame it is for you to see other poor and needy, being members of the same body, in rags and cloth, yea bare and naked.” He chided the rich, do you “not think them to be members of the same body that thou art? Then thou are not a member of Christ.”33 Like The Primer, Lever listed the duties of members. The rich man “must dispose relief and comfort unto the poor and needy.” Merchants and craftsmen “must provide unto the Commonwealth of necessary wares, sufficient plenty.” The landlord was to provide his tenants with land to till, and the husbandman would do the tilling, pay rents, and provide food. As evidence, he cited the Apostles’ teaching of “all Christian ministers, landlords, officers, and rulers, first to minister unto the people, every one the duty of his own vocation, afore they gather of the people, rents, tithes, or fees, by the name and authority of that vocation.”34 When Bucer examined the issue of almsgiving in the mid-1550s, the grid upon which he worked was the concept of mutual obligation: “Yea, they be most certain, that as there be in man’s body diverse members, not all of one sort, but some more profitable, than some, and yet all requisite, and necessary to make a perfect body . . .”. It was the obligation, moreover, of those with “the goods of the world” to have compassion; if they did not, “the love of God does not dwell in them, and so also neither the Kingdom of Christ is in them.”35

C. Hierarchy Reaffirmed The proponents of the body social maintained that the hierarchy should be static, but, with occasional exceptions, based on the intervention of God, not man. In the “Parable of the Wicked Mammon” (1527), Tyndale transformed his discussion of good works into one about laboring in one’s place in the world. God, he stated, cared not what work you did as long as you performed it in good faith: “he looks with what heart thou work, and not what thou work; how thou accept the degree that he has put thee in, and not of what degree thou art, whether thou be an apostle or a shoemaker.” If you were a kitchen page, “know that God has put thee in that office; submit thyself to his will; and serves thy master not as a man, but as Christ himself, with a pure heart . . .”. Remain content with your lot: “Let every man therefore wait on the office wherein Christ has put him, and therein serve his brethren.” There were chances of promotion, but only God should decide who rose and who fell: “If he be of low degree, let him patiently therein abide, till God promote him, and exalt him higher.”36 Proponents of the body social were prepared to reject changes in the social order on a broad front, including economic and political ones. In “The Obedience of a Christian Man,” Tyndale turned to a topic that his arch enemy Thomas More had already touched upon in Utopia (1516) and

Defending the Body  103 to which many believers in the body social would turn in the 1540s and ’50s: the agrarian problem and its threats to social order. Tyndale wrote: Let Christian landlords be content with their rent and old customs; not raising the rent or fines, and bringing up new customs to oppress their tenants; neither letting two or three tenantries unto one man. Let them not take in their commons, neither make parks nor pastures of whole parishes; for God gave the earth to man to inhabit; and not unto sheep and wild deer.37 Crowley’s “The Last Trumpet” (1550) included a poem entitled “The Beggar’s Lesson,” which, throughout its 92 lines, prescribed passive obedience for the unfortunate. The first rule was to “walk in thy vocation, and do not seek thy lot to change . . .”. Beggars were told they should trust in God, continue patiently, and he would feed them. They should call on his “merciful providence,” and he would move the hearts of neighbors to provide for them. He cited biblical examples, including Daniel, Elias, and David, who were fed by godly miracles. God sent so much plenty that the beggars should notice “thou hast many things misspent.” Again citing Scripture, Crowley advised: Yea though thou should perish for food, Yet bear thou thy cross patiently; For the end shall turn thee to good, Though thou lie in the streets and die. Citing Lazarus dying at the gate, here was resignation to the ultimate degree. If you lived in misery, moreover, you had no right to complain: “Neither shall thou grudge, or repine, that thy poverty is so great; but shall thyself ever incline to God’s will, who doth thee visit.” Even if someone refused to give you charity, you were not allowed to complain, because it was God’s job to teach him his duty. If you completed all these tasks, “doubtless at thy last ending though shall be crowned at God’s hand.”38 Edward VI’s “Discourse” (1551) took an exceptionally hard line against social and occupational mobility. He specified, “no one part of the body does serve for two occupations” nor more than “one kind of . . . art to live by.” Gentlemen ought not to be farmers, nor should merchants be artisans, “but [each] to have his art particularly.” The orders of society should be fixed in their shares of wealth as well as their jobs: “no member in a well-fashioned and whole body is too big for the proportion of the body. So must there be in a well-ordered Commonwealth no person that shall have more than the proportion of the country will bear.” This should not be permitted to occur, because it was “hurtful immoderately to enrich any one part.” Edward prescribed strict levels of income. No merchant should possess more than a limited amount of land, no farmer’s income should surpass £100–£200, no artificers more than 100 marks, and “no laborer much more than he spends.” No one should have more than two farms, a

104  The Body Social, 1480–1550 single benefice, or 2,000 sheep. Here was a rigid position that would result in social stasis.39 IV. RADICAL OR CONSERVATIVE?

A.  The Obedient Body Latimer has been seen as the standard-bearer of the “Commonwealth-men,” even occupying a “place of primacy as a champion of the poor . . .”.40 In a number of fiery sermons in 1549 and 1550, Latimer denounced the debasement of the coinage, rural depopulation by enclosing landlords, and the neglect of the poor. His sermons on these subjects are too well known to require repeating. But it is less well known that Latimer also preached social quietism, obedience, and resignation in remarks directed specifically at the poor. In his third sermon before the king in March 1549, he addressed the charge that he was spreading sedition. He defended himself by stating that he believed it possible for the king, his council, and Parliament—“both the high and low”—to err, but called for passivity in response: “It becomes us, whatsoever they decree, to stand unto it, and receive it obediently, as far forth as it is not manifest wicked, and directly against the word of God.”41 In a sermon at Grimsthorpe in 1552, Latimer again examined the issue of obedience, particularly the “duties to the magistrates,” telling his audience they “must bear willingly those burdens which are laid upon us, considering that God commanded us so to do . . .”. If they obeyed, then “they shall be blessed in all things . . .”. Even though some complained about poverty and the debasement of money, considering “the great benefits which God has done unto us: then we must be content with all our hearts to bear such crosses as he shall lay upon us . . .”. Latimer cited the example of Mary, mother of Jesus, who he reported probably had no midwife to assist her during the birth of the savior, even though she experienced real labor pains, and who, along with her husband, was homeless, and who had to stay in a stable: “Let us follow their example. We read not that they grudge or murmured against God . . .”. Even the shepherds in the nearby fields confirmed the principle of submission. They remained with their sheep throughout the night: “they run not hither and thither, spending the time in vain, and neglecting their office and calling.”42 In yet another sermon preached in February the same year, Latimer defended the possession of riches and honors by saying that as long as they were not held covetously, they were acceptable. He decried the ambitions of those, including the poor, who envied the rich man. Rather he urged, “[T]he best service that any man can do unto God, is to apply his business in such state and order, as God has appointed and ordered them.” Far from being a social revolutionary, Latimer justified a rigid hierarchy in which the poor were to remain in their places unless God advanced them. He also critiqued the concept of the community of goods, as will be shown below.43

Defending the Body  105 Roger Hutchinson took a similar position on the issue of obedience in “The First Sermon of Oppression, Affliction and Patience,” preached between 1550 and 1555. The sermon most likely dates from the reign of Mary I, because it cites religious persecution as one form of subjugation, but he also mentioned the suffering of those “also which are oppressed, and kept under, and bare, and needy, of mighty and rich men” and laid the blame at the doors of enclosing landlords. Despite their afflictions, he said that the victims must endure them without complaint or reaction.44 The advocates of the body social targeted many groups and problems that in their view, endangered it. We have seen Tyndale attacking landlords for raising rents in the 1520s, while in the mid-1530s, Armstrong took on the Merchant Adventurers for importing foreign goods. In the 1540s and ’50s, the range of enemies and issues was considerably expanded, although social themes remained preponderant. Several writers focused on the threat of popular rebellions, class conflict, and the community of goods to the body social. In turn, they examined what they considered to be the causes of these developments, which included the pursuit of “singular” weal as against the common, particularly on the part of rural landlords, the government’s manipulation of the coinage in a series of debasements from 1544 to 1551, and the neglect of the poor and their needs by the sale of monastic and chantry lands. Scholars have emphasized the idealism of “Commonwealth-men” in raising these issues, and certainly, proponents of the body social spoke and wrote fervently and voluminously against the abuses they discerned in the body. Idealists perhaps, but the contention of this book is that these writers were chiefly driven by a commitment to a specific concept of a social order rather than by positions on particular issues. This point should be kept in mind when examining individual problems in the following section.

B. Restless Bodies? The fixed-nature membership in the body social dictated that its adherents denounced resistance and rebellion, class conflict, and the community of goods. Admittedly, the renunciation of opposition and revolt was not entirely wholehearted in England or on the continent. From the late 1520s, Lutheran ministers and jurists developed a theory of resistance against religious persecution, arguing that “inferior magistrates” could and should oppose a ruler in such instances. In turn, Calvin and his followers adopted in the 1550s and ’60s what was substantially the earlier Lutheran position.45 English commentators were not wholly consistent on the issue of resistance, but in general, they opposed it. Citing Paul, Tyndale stated in “The Obedience of a Christian Man” (1527) that everyone had to submit to the authorities because God ordained rulers and that whoever resisted was opposing the rule of God and would suffer damnation. He declared, “Neither may the inferior person avenge himself upon the superior, or violently

106  The Body Social, 1480–1550 resist him, for whatsoever wrong it be.” The result would be condemnation, for “he takes upon him that which belongs to God only . . .”.46 The waters were somewhat muddied, however, in A Supplication of the Poor Commons (1546), which denounced the Pilgrimage of Grace, but which still allowed latitude for resistance. Revolt and opposition were not clearly distinguished in the tract, and while one instance of rebellion was condemned, the principle of resistance was maintained and even strengthened compared to the continental Lutherans. On the one hand, referring to the Pilgrimage and echoing Tyndale, it stated that “we are fully persuaded, that all such as resist the powers, whom God has ordained and appointed to rule and govern the multitude of this world, do not resist man, but God.” On the other hand, the author hectored Henry VIII, to whom the treatise was addressed, about the fate of monastic lands and the failure to deploy them for the care of the poor. Citing John and Peter, Acts 4, whether it be better to obey God or man, the writer said he was not thinking “we may rebel against you, our natural Prince,” but then came very close to saying rebellion might be justified more boldly than the continental Lutherans: “that if your highness would enforce us by a law to do anything contrary to that God has commanded us, that then we ought manfully to cleave to the truth of God’s word, boldly confessing the truth thereof, fearing nothing the death of this body . . .”.47 In 1549, Hales raised the question of what the poor should do for relief when they were oppressed and found no remedy: “ye will say they ought to be obedient to the king and his laws, they ought in no wise to rebel, they may make no insurrections.” He said he agreed with this position: “this be they commanded by God’s word, and for no cause rich nor poor may at any time resist or rebel against their king.”48 Other commentators of the period evinced less ambivalence than Hales. In the wake of widespread popular rebellions in 1549, a number of voices were raised in denunciation. Becon in “The Fortress of the Faithful” (1550) criticized “greedy gripes and hungry horse-leeches” among the gentry for exploiting the poor, but he left no doubt about his views on rebellion. He wrote that if the justices of the peace would not listen to the complaints of the needy, they should appeal directly to the king and his council. But by no means should they attempt to take the law into their own hands and use violence, and he made an indirect references to the recent risings: “whoso leaves godly means and attempts wicked ways, both he and his enterprise must needs come to naught, as we have seen of late days.” He paraphrased Matthew 26, saying, “All they that are private men, and go about with force and violence to avenge their own cause, and to redress their own matters, shall surely come unto destruction.” To do so was to be “orderbreakers and despisers of God’s holy ordinance, which has appointed magistrates and head rulers justly to judge between man and man in all matters of controversy, that peace and quietness may be maintained in a commonweal.”49

Defending the Body  107 Writing about the same uprisings, Crowley in “The Way to Wealth” (1550) examined the causes of sedition, which he said must be eliminated. He blamed chiefly the rich and powerful: “Cormorants, greedy gulls; yea, men that would eat up men, women, and children, are the causes of Sedition!” Yet, in words akin to Dudley’s forty years earlier, Crowley rejected rebellion as a means to correct wrongs, which was the king’s job because he was God’s representative: The devil should never have persuaded thee that thou might revenge thine own wrong! The false prophets should never have caused thee to believe that thou should prevail against them with the sword, under whose governance God hath appoint thee to be. If they wanted relief from “tyranny,” they should confess their sins and try to amend their lives. Above all, if they kept themselves in obedience and “suffer all this oppression patiently,” not crediting false prophecies “that tell they of victory,” but instead listened to God’s word, they would be delivered from their pain. God could even turn the hearts of their oppressors from stone to flesh.50 Lever also censured rebellion in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cross in December 1550. Like many others, he spent a great deal of time condemning the wealthy for being the servants of Mammon rather than Christ. But the sermon’s premise was to inform the citizens of London that they were in “great danger of heinous treason towards God and the king’s majesty . . . which be by you spoiled, and robbed: God of his glory, the king of his honors, and realm of his wealth.” He claimed the king had sent him to offer a general pardon to save those who acted out of ignorance, but also to inform all citizens that the king would “destroy all other that continue in willful stubbornness and rebellious treason.” Lever left no doubt where the greater fault lay in causing the uprisings. The “common sort” showed “stiff-necked stubbornness, devilish disobedience, and greedy covetousness” in revolting. When, he asked, did “any officers in authority show such rebellious proud minds, as was of late plainly perceived in very many of the commonalty?” He claimed they were going to destroy the whole country: “if you had had powers unto your wills, you had devoured whole countries, houses and goods, men and beasts, corn and cattle, as ye did begin.”51 Historians consider Latimer the most vociferous of preachers on social issues, who was possibly cited by a Kentish magistrate as “that Commonwealth called Latimer” and accused of causing sedition.52 Yet it is not difficult to find this alleged firebrand denouncing resistance and rebellion. In his third sermon before the king in 1549, he warned “Christian subjects” they should not “take upon  .  .  .  to judge the judgments of judges.” The authorities, he said, were capable of error, but it becomes subjects “whatsoever they decree, to stand unto it, and receive it obediently,” although he added the qualifier “as far forth as it is not manifest wicked, and directly

108  The Body Social, 1480–1550 against the word of God.” In his last sermon before Edward VI, Latimer, like so many others, targeted covetousness, which he blamed for causing recent rebellions. Both the gentry and the commonalty were at fault for the recent uprisings, Latimer said, because “both parties had covetousness, and both parties did rebel.” In the Grimsthorpe sermon in 1552 he spoke of obedience, again citing the example of Mary and Joseph. God willed and commanded Christians “to bear, with a good will, such little burdens as the magistrates shall lay upon us.” He promised that “whosoever bears with a good will the common burden of this realm, they shall be blessed in all things . . .”. We are not permitted either to rebel outwardly or in our hearts, and he cited Paul’s commandment that we should obey magistrates, “ ‘Not for fear of their punishment, but rather for conscience sake, for God’s sake, in respect of God, of whom we have all things, who wills us to do so.’ ”53

C. Members in Conflict Proponents of the body social criticized conflict between different parts of the body, especially between the commonalty and the landed elites. Brinklow’s “Complaint of Roderick Mors” (c. 1542) described how the “inordinate rich . . . eat out their neighbors . . . ” and pinpointed as the chief culprits landlords charging high rents. The “honest poor farmer” was forced to charge more for wool, which the merchants passed on in sales of cloth, while the spinner and carder “scant can get a house . . .”. Parliament did little about the matter, because those elected to the House of Commons were “rich, or bear some office in the country . . .”.54 In the “Supplication” of 1546, Brinklow again described the oppression of the poor by the rich. He begged Henry VIII to leave his son “a commonweal to govern, and not an island of brute beasts, amongst whom the strongest devour the weaker.” The nobles should not stain “their consciences with this most ungodly oppression”; the king should let the poor “be unto your highness, as the inferior members of the body to their head.”55 In his charge to juries in 1548, Hales took much the same line as Brinklow and denounced the depopulators “that be so much given to their own private profit” that they did not care a fig for the Commonwealth: “they love themselves so much, that they forget their neighbors and Christian brethren: they remember not that we be members of one body, and that if every member should pull and snatch from the other as much as he could, all the whole body must needs perish.” God made society like a body, but “if my hand, or any other member of the body, could by his craft or policy . . . find the means to get the blood of all the rest of the members . . . it should be an occasion that all the whole body, should shortly perish . . .”.56 In his “Defense” of 1549, Hales claimed he was accused of attempting to “stir and encourage with my words the commonalty against the nobility,” but he rejected the charge as slanderous. Like others before and after him, he pointed the finger at the landlords, asserted his belief in the principle of

Defending the Body  109 the body social, and rejected egalitarianism: “Marry we see that as nature has not ordained that the foot should have so much blood as the arm, so all men may not be like, nor of like substance in a Commonwealth.” Further, he reprised the Sermon on the Mount: “God has ordained both rich men and poor men, and says, that we shall have always poor men among us, but he that so says, commands the rich not to starve the poor, but to feed them: not to take away the little that he has, but to give them more if they lack.”57 Crowley, too, observed conflict in society. He put fighting words in the mouths of the landlords: “The peasant knaves be too wealthy. . . . They know not themselves, they know no obedience, they regard no laws, they would have no gentlemen, they would have all men like themselves . . .”. To the offending parties, he replied they should “think not to prosper the better in your insatiable desire, for that you triumph so lord-like over the poor caitiffs . . . the greater shall your plague be when it comes.”58 In his final sermon before Edward VI in 1550, Latimer described a similar polarization in society and condemned both sides: “The commons would have had from the gentlemen such things as they desired: the gentlemen would none of it; and so was there covetousness on both sides.” The conflict even extended to the House of Commons, where the gentlemen members sought to legalize privatizing common lands and engrossing farms against the wishes of the commonalty. The solution, he argued, was to let sleeping dogs lie. To the lords, he said, “They in Christ are equal with you”; to the common folk, “Peers of the realm must needs be.” Everyone should have the right to have sufficient to maintain themselves.59 Edward VI’s “Discourse” of 1551 concurred with much that Latimer and the others expressed. The young king wrote that in a well-proportioned Commonwealth, “all parts of the body obey the head, [and] agree among themselves, and one not eat another up through greediness  .  .  .”. In a laundry list of ills in the common weal, he included the sins of both lords and commons: “enhancing of rents . . . keeping of many sheep and many farms . . . disobedience of the lower sort . . . turning till-ground to pasture . . . enclosing of commons, casting of ill and seditious bills.”60

D. The Community of Goods Denied The result of conflicts between members of the body over resources, it was feared by the gentry, was the community of goods. Dudley raised the issue in 1510, and awareness was further stimulated by the Rhineland Anabaptists’ sharing of property at Münster in 1534.61 The events of 1549 triggered charges and counter-charges that the rebels sought to take property from the gentry who, according to Crowley, complained the commonalty “would have all things common!”62 He rejected the charge that he favored the community of goods: “Take me not here that I should go about by these words to persuade men to make all things common . . .”. He wished that “the possessioners would consider who gave them their possessions, and how they

110  The Body Social, 1480–1550 ought to bestow them.” He invoked the concept of stewardship, in which lords distributed their wealth as needed. Would servants in a household have any need “to have their master’s goods common” if “the steward ministers unto every man the thing that is needful for him?”63 Lever took a much tougher line in his sermon at St. Paul’s in February 1550. He endorsed the concept of stewardship and the responsibility of the rich to distribute a fair share to everyone according to one’s need. But he rejected “the wresting of the Scripture to pull themselves from due obedience” on the grounds that the apostles held things in common. He admitted the apostles “had all things common,” but rebutted the notion that “idle lubbers” and “greedy catchers [cadgers?]” might live from honest men’s labor. We could not have everything we wanted or expect complete equality. This would destroy society and the diversity of its membership: “they that would have like quantity of every things to be given to every man, intending thereby to make all alike, do utterly destroy the congregation, the mystical body of Christ, whereas there must needs be divers members in divers places, having divers duties.” Quoting Paul, he ridiculed the result. If the entire body was an eye, how would it hear? If it was only an ear, how would it smell things? It would be a denial of the principle of the body social: “if all be of one sort, estate, and room in the Commonwealth, how can then divers duties of divers necessary offices be done?” In the same sermon, Lever carefully qualified his statement that all members should be equally provided for: “I do not say that one ought to have as costly provision as another”; “as there be diverse members in diverse places, having diverse duties, so to have diverse provision in feeding and clothing.”64 Becon denounced egalitarianism with a heavy dose of vitriol: he argued that Paul would have died of hunger, like Lazarus, rather than Trouble an whole commonweal, make uproars, raise up commotions, come armed in the field, assemble a sort of idle brains and brainless people together, rob men’s houses, spoil their goods, break up their hedges, make several pastures common to all men, hunt carnal liberty, make a communion, yea, confusion of all things, and all for the belly?65 In his fifth sermon on the Lord’s Prayer (1552), Latimer spoke at length on the issue of property and, as others had, rejected the principle of equality of possessions. He denied ever saying “that all things should be common.” Rather, he argued, “Certain it is, that God has ordained proprieties of things, so that that which is mine is not thine; and what thou has I cannot take from thee.” If there were community of goods, the commandment against theft would be meaningless. In reality, the laws of the country established the existence of “mine and thine.” It is true that early Christians such as Barnabas sold their properties and possessions and gave the money to the apostles, but Latimer argued this was for the specific purpose of helping the early Church, which had many poor members who had lost their goods because (he implied) of persecution. The preacher was at pains, however, to ensure that because he opposed the community of goods, it was not

Defending the Body  111 concluded that people were allowed to keep everything they had. Instead, quoting Paul, he invoked the principle of stewardship: “Our good is not so ours that we may do with what us list; but we ought to distribute it unto them which have need.” Again citing Paul and echoing the social humanists, charity did not extend to “lubbers, which will not labor,” who ought to be punished as prescribed by “the king’s most godly statutes.” Indeed, one of the chief objects of labor was to earn sufficiently to help the poor.66

V. Beyond the Commonwealth-Men “Commonwealth” ideas extended temporally and in breadth and depth far beyond the four men that one scholar studied. In addition to the prominent authors just examined, others called for the preservation of a body social. They expressed themselves with a variety of voices, from manuscript petitions to ballads, doggerel, and Royal proclamations, between the late fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries.67 These articulations focused on themes that we have seen among the “Commonwealth-men” of the mid-sixteenth century—a traditional social order of interdependent hierarchies of the three estates, mutual aid, especially from rich to poor, and opposition to the myriad forces perceived to be threatening the old order: economic individualism, profit-seeking, the undermining of smallholders’ common rights, and a rejection of social conflict, rebellion, and the community of goods. In popular songs, the model of three estates working in harmony was still a potent image in the early and mid-sixteenth century. The ballad “Nowadays” from c. 1520 used the estates as its framework, albeit with criticisms of all three. It cited historical examples, including nobles “among us many a year” who had built and defended churches, but who now “be almost gone” so their serving men had to beg or steal. The song also singled out the clergy who, it charged, set bad examples: priests were having sex with women, and priors and abbots were becoming “great graziers . . .”. Even the commonalty learned “crafts and subtlety, their neighbors to beguile . . .”.68 One finds similar statements in some unlikely places, as in the epitaph for Sir Thomas Wyatt published in 1542. Innocently and vaguely subtitled, “The Mirror or Glass of Fortune,” the poem and a ditty accompanying it launched into a defense of the old social order, with sympathetic remarks about the armed retainers so roundly condemned in Utopia (1516). To those serving great lords, it warned, When thou art down, farewell, adieu No more service, thou hast at all When broken is thy retinue On thy name then no man will call Disdainful words on the go hall Foes thou shall have, many a one Which will rejoice, at thy great fall Of all thy friends, then has thou none.69

112  The Body Social, 1480–1550 The ditty attached to the epitaph sang nostalgically of the ideal of the old social system while pointing out the poisonous ingredients of the new: “Then lived man well and held them content, with meat, drink and cloth without any rent.” There were no clergy with “possessions nor rent” whereas now “money makes all  .  .  .”. Gold changed the world “from virtue to vice” which “makes among us much mischief to reign.” But the “covetous folk” would not be allowed to enter heaven any more than the camel could pass through the eye of the needle, and the song warned that the rich would not rest easy in this life: “Their sleeps be unsound for fear of the thief. The loss of a little does work them much grief.” This was because they had alienated the destitute: “The poor does them curse as oft as they want, in having so much to make it so scant.”70 The ballad “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” 1547–48, innovated by going beyond the tripartite division of society, noting, as would Sir Thomas Smith in 1549, that the third estate included a variety of occupations—laborers, husbandmen, plowmen, handicraftsmen, victuallers, yeomen, and merchants. The ballad discussed the poor at length and cited officials, by title but not by name, who it alleged were profiteering from the debasement of the coinage. Despite these advances, the paradigm of the body social remained potent in “Vox”; the anonymous author presented an extensive analysis of lordship and a discussion of the clergy’s social position, which in typical “Commonwealth” mode in the 1540s asserted that the dissolutions had not improved matters. The ideal remained a hierarchy of estates.71 Traditional models of society also appeared in doggerel poetry that remained in manuscript until the late nineteenth century. William Forrest, a priest who seemed to vault effortlessly through confessional hoops under Cardinal Wolsey, Edward VI, and Mary I, wrote “The Pleasant Poesy of Princely Practice” in 1548, in which he opposed the disturbing new social changes of his day.72 Forrest was convinced the old order was under threat. The “high nobility” should be “first in degree . . .”. Yet, he observed, “the world is changed from that it has been, not to the better but to the worse far . . .”. He was against those who “inordinately . . . toil for treasure,” which alienated God and their neighbors. He wanted an order in which yeomen were “the major part” of rural society, in which everyone had a house and a garden, and where their lords would cease charging inflated rents. When “every degree observes his due” there would be “quietness.” Idleness, “the mother of all mischiefs,” violated notions of the old order, because beggars and “rovers” lived outside of it. Unemployment would be abolished by putting youths in free schools from the age of four and by an ambitious program of economic development reminiscent of Armstrong’s, Starkey’s proposals in the 1530s, and Locke’s in 1697.73 Like the leading Commonwealth figures of the 1540s and ’50s, its less notorious proponents stood for mutual aid among the three estates. An undated, anonymous dialogue of the period issued the usual calls to the rich to dispense charity. First, they should give thanks to God for their wealth, then, “help the poor, in their necessity” including widows, prisoners, orphans, and the homeless and “suffer not the poor, in the street to

Defending the Body  113 die . . .”. To blame were those, like Cain, who allegedly practiced usury and charged “unreasonable” rents. It was unacceptable for them to destroy the plow, substituting pastures for tillage, and shrinking villages to two or three families. For the rich to tell the uprooted to “go and beg, or else drive a cart” was unacceptable: “These do the Commonwealth, falsely subvert . . .”.74 Forrest maintained a traditional role for the nobility, which was to look after “the weal publique,” to punish vice, and promote virtue. The nobles were to eschew self-aggrandizement and maintain social harmony, ensuring “that one private person in use of things does not annoy or harm a multitude,” as in enclosing or imparking lands, hoarding grain to profit from high prices, raising rents and entry fines, and monopolizing trade. God did not send his gifts to just one person, “but that a multitude, one with other, the same should participate mutually.”75 Similarly, an anonymous dialog c. 1550 between an elder and a young gentleman taught social cooperation. The answer was to be content with the estate to which God appointed him, to forego covetousness, remain in the country, and to succor the poor: “pity the poverty, and never shut thine ears, at the cry of the needy,” which would store up “a treasure in heaven . . .”.76 The threats to a harmonious body social were voiced in a variety of formats and covered many of the points of Crowley, Hales, Latimer, and Lever. The common thread concerned “covetousness,” which most sources targeted. The title of the pamphlet The Praise and Commendation of Such as Sought Commonwealths: and to the Contrary, the End and Discommendation of such as Sought Private Wealth, probably dating from Edward VI’s reign, posed the question nicely. It cited four things that resulted from greed: “insatiableness,” “scarceness of all things among the commons,” “deceit among the people,” and “the desire of worldly honor . . .”. It was “insatiable covetousness” that “we see in these days” among people “procuring their own private wealths, [so] that the Commonwealth decays . . .”.77 Similar defenses of the common good—and attempts at regulation— occur in the public record before the 1540s. In 1517, Cardinal Wolsey issued decrees from the Chancery calling for the restoration of privatized common lands since 1485 and stipulating heavy fines for anyone who resisted, but with the interesting exceptions that legal privatizing in enclosures was acceptable, including ones that were “more beneficial for the Commonwealth of this realm than the pulling down thereof . . .”. Yet the commitment to social justice persisted and arguably accelerated. In a proclamation issued in May 1528, the king’s subjects were commanded to report anyone in possession of more than one farm and those who “enclose any grounds or pastures, to the hurt of the Commonwealth . . .”.78 That a genuinely popular voice could be raised about agrarian issues is indicated in a remarkable letter from one John Bayker to Henry VIII, c. 1538, which survives in the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. A self-styled “poor artificer or craftsman,” Bayker had traveled through the realm to earn a living and wrote to honor God, but also “for the common and public weal” of the realm and “the common weal of your people . . .”. He called first for the punishment “of all vagabonds and valiant beggars,” but his analysis went deeper

114  The Body Social, 1480–1550 than that. He observed, as John Rous had 50 years earlier, that many homes were now just “bare walls,” which forced the unemployed, as More’s Utopia also suggested, to engage in highway robbery and murder. Forced by what and by whom? By those lords who held the land of the king and who demanded excessively high rents and entry fines, Bayker asserted. They were engaging in self-aggrandizement at the public expense: “O good lord, how much do these men regard more their own peculiar and proper [ad]vantage than your grace his honor, or having respect where that your people should inhabit, that so lets your grace his habitations decay . . .”. Where there had been 20 to 30 homes, there were half as many. There was also a demographic dimension to the story, for Bayker observed that the population was growing too fast to house people: “I think there was never more people and fewer habitations . . .”. His ideal society looked back in time. Every family should have just one small house or cottage and a garden, from which their labors would give them a living.79 Like the “Commonwealth-men,” popular voices framed social dysfunction in terms of upward mobility by the unworthy, social divisions, rebellion, and the community of goods. The ballad “Nowadays” attacked the phenomenon of the social climber with a barely veiled allusion to Cardinal Wolsey. It charged that social changes were actually bringing about a new “estate”: A little man, great possession Much sin and small devotion, Low born and high promotion, This has been seen of late: Much cunning and small regard, Good service and small reward, Light brains and over charged: This is the new estate!80 “Vox Populi” targeted merchants for their incursions into the landed elites. The author maintained, echoing Armstrong, that merchants who formerly traded overseas in Flanders and France now stayed at home, making fortunes by mortgages and the purchase of land. This development threatened Royal power because it weakened the military capabilities of the Crown, a point that both Hales and Latimer also made. In the old order, gentlemen would “serve always your grace with horse and men . . .”. The remedy was to limit merchants to the purchase of no more than £40–£50 of land; if they bought more, it should be liable to forfeiture. This proposal might seem retrograde and draconian, but a similar measure was actually proposed in Parliament early in Elizabeth I’s reign. The song cast its net more widely than merchants. It cited “upstart gentlemen; these are they that devour all the goods of the poor . . .”. Even the most powerful, those on the Privy Council, were chided for their ambition, which “swells . . . among the greatest sort . . . ”, and who wanted to be “rich, rich, and rich . . .”.81

Defending the Body  115 The upshot of these changes was social tension and division, the threat of sedition, and the community of goods. “Vox Populi” claimed there was never so much misery and usury, which set “one against another . . . ” and warned “my lords, take heed” and commended them to curb agrarian changes causing hardship and government corruption in the debasement of the coinage.82 That such sentiments were not unique is shown in the remarkable “Exhortation unto the King’s Majesty, King Edward the Sixth . . . ” that was written c. 1553 and was also presented to Mary I. The document remains in ­manuscript; it was signed by the presumed author, Philip Gerrard, about whom we know little, and consists of 12 folios describing social divisions in the mid-century years. It began by denouncing “such as have shamefully defiled the good estate of the commonalty”; then, it focused on the agrarian question and those who “cruelly do oppress their tenants with enhancing of rents . . .”. Gerrard called on the monarchs to “defend your poor, miserable and succourless subjects” from the “cruelty of the rich[er?] sort that is wonderful great and daily increases . . .”. Gerrard went further than other commentators in discussing sympathetically the uprising of 1549 in East Anglia. He argued that social “division” caused Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk, for which he blamed the local gentry: “did not the great cruelties, extortion, and [?] desire to have all, of certain gentlemen, cause your subjects to stir . . . ?” The raising of rents was the key complaint; the remedy was for gentlemen to let their lands at the rates their fathers did, so “the public wealth might be observed . . .”. Otherwise, “the people [will] detest them, their name and progeny and will do forever . . .”. The country “can never be restored unto its . . . wealth and commodity” until rents were reformed and the gentry and yeomen reconciled. Corrupt officials in league with local gentlemen—“the confederate fellowship betwixt the rich men and the justices”—had to be dismissed. While condemning the “ravenous” rich men who provoked the rebellion, like others in the period, Gerrard disapproved of the rebels’ breaking “their obedience due unto your Majesty . . .”.83 Again, like Latimer and others, popular voices condemned the notion of the community of goods. Piers Plowman’s Exhortation denounced idlers who “would have all things in common . . .”. It was “madness” to think along these lines, because taking away property would “extinguish all industry to all manner of good arts and qualities and reduce us to a beastly trade of life . . .”. The seditious would take away what “good men” had earned “by their prowess, virtue, and industry” and would undermine the possibility of having a government. The author claimed proponents of equality had pulled a few untypical examples from the Bible, when in reality the poor would become poorer without property. When the monasteries existed, a third of the population was idle. Echoing the contemporary Sir Thomas Smith (see Chapter 12), to put people to work now required freeing the grain trade and allowing exports, the curbing of foreign imports, and boosting English manufactures, as well as halting conversion from tillage to pasture and taking wastelands into production.84

116  The Body Social, 1480–1550 VI. CONCLUSIONS “Commonwealth” attitudes were not peculiar to four men whose attitudes and influence were limited to the mid-century period. It may be true that the authors did not constitute an organized “party” with a coherent program, but those criteria are of dubious relevance to the Tudor period. In sum, there is no denying there were numerous writers committed to a traditional theory of society, and that they were articulate, insightful, and courageous, bringing, as they intended, great moral pressure on their contemporaries, including governments. Their influence was certainly not limited to the rule of Protector Somerset. To judge by the dates of their statements, their concern about economic changes and social justice dated from as early as the 1480s. They reappear in ballads in the 1520s and in the writings of Armstrong and Bayker in the 1530s. In the 1540s and ’50s, a virtual crush of commentators joined well-known figures such as Latimer to articulate traditional social principles. Apart from their specifically doctrinal beliefs as Christians, it is difficult to see how the “Commonwealth-men” could be classified as radical or even particularly forward-looking in their social stances. In their statements about the body social, they were as conventional as their medieval forbears and, if anything, were more vociferous than their predecessors. Partly, their rhetoric may have been high pitched because of the accusations of sedition and community of goods thrown at them by the opponents of Protector Somerset’s policy of pardoning the East Anglian rebels in 1549. Partly, too, their criticisms of greedy landowners were ill timed and likely to produce charges of sedition. But when their actual statements are examined, it seems they were staunch supporters of the three-estate model and its principles, were opposed to the community of goods, and were keen supporters of the monarchy. Nevertheless, their articulation of these positions, together with the rebellions of the mid-century years, may have caused a turning of the tide in elite opinion about the best social order. Certainly, with the publication of More’s Utopia (1516), new social formations were under discussion, and in the 1530s and ’40s, these debates were accelerated with humanistic alternatives to the body social. NOTES   1. A. F. Pollard, England Under Protector Somerset (London: Kegan Paul, 1900), 215–17. Cf. the historiographical discussion in G. R. Elton, “Reform and the ‘Commonwealth-men’ of Edward VI’s Reign,” in Peter Clark, Alan G. R. Smith, and Nicholas Tyacke, eds., The English Commonwealth, 1547–1640: Essays in Politics and Society (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), 23–4.   2. M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), 61ff.; Elton, “Reform and the ‘Commonwealth-men’,” 23–5.  3. Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965); W. R. D. Jones, The Tudor

Defending the Body  117 Commonwealth, 1529–1559 (London: Athlone Press, 1970); Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Vol. I: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tree of Commonwealth, 1450–1793 (London: Associated University Presses, 2000).  4. Skinner, Foundations, I, 227.   5. David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London: George Philip, 1985), 121: the case of Richard Morison (infra, Chapter 9).   6. Elton, “Reform and the ‘Commonwealth-men,’ ” 37.   7. For an example of word counting, see Elton, “Reform and the ‘Commonwealthmen,’ ” 24–5.   8. David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 170–2.  9. Doctrinal Treatises . . . by William Tyndale, ed. Henry Walter, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848; repr. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968), 95–6. 10. Four Supplications, 1529–1553 A.D., ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, extra series, vol. 13 (London, 1871), xiv–xv, 81. 11. “The Charge of Mr. John Hales, one of the Commissioners, at their Assembly for the Execution for Redress of Enclosures,” in J. Strype, ed., Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), II, ii, 358 (undated, but presumed to be 1548 because other documents were reprinted and were from that date). 12. The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M. Cowper, Early English Text Society, extra series, vol. 15 (London, 1872), 169. 13. Elizabeth Lamond, ed. A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893; repr. 1954), lviii. 14. Thomas Lever, Sermon: 1550, ed. Edward Arber (London: English Reprints, 1870), 46–7. 15. Anon. (Martin Bucer?), A Treatise How by the Word of God, Christian Men’s Alms Ought to be Distributed (1557?; S.T.C. 3965 [2nd edn.]); repr. Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum & Norwood, NJ: W. J. Johnson, The English Experience, no. 779 (1976), 27. 16. For the sedition charge, see Elton, “Reform and the ‘Commonwealth-men,’ ” 28; cf. Hales, ed. Lamond, op.cit., lviii. 17. Select Works of Robert Crowley, 156–7. 18. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. G. E. Corrie, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844–5), 214. 19. Lever, Sermons, 84. 20. The Primer: Or Book of Private Prayer, ed. J. Ketley, The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549 and A.D. 1552, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 457–63; also EHD 336–7. 21. Edward VI, “Discourse on the Reform of Abuses in Church and State (April? 1551),” in W. K. Jordan, ed., The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 162. 22. Bucer, Treatise, 6, 10. 23. Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, 95, 99, 102–3; E.H.D. 293–4. 24. “Supplication of the Poor Commons,” Four Supplications, 72–3. 25. “Instructions to the Enclosure Commissioners Appointed June, 1548, and Hales’ Charge to the Juries Impanelled to Present Enclosures,” TED I, 42, 44. 26. Repr. in P. F. Tytler, England Under the Reigns of Edward VI and Mary . . . (London, 1839), I, 115–116. “Maugre” means “ill will towards”: OED.

118  The Body Social, 1480–1550 27. Elizabeth Lamond, ed. A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1893; repr. 1954), lviii, lx (order of quotations reversed). 28. The Catechism of Thomas Becon with Other Pieces Written by Him in the Reign of King Edward the Sixth, ed. John Ayre, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 599. 29. Crowley, Select Works, 168–9. 30. Edward VI, “Discourse,” in W. K. Jordan, ed., The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 159–61. 31. “Discourse,” ed. Jordan, 161. 32. EHD 336–7: The Primer: Or Book of Private Prayer, in J. Ketley, ed., The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549 AND A.D. 1552, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 457–463. 33. Lever, Sermons, quoted by Malcolm Hardman, A Kingdom in Two Parishes: Lancashire Religious Writers and the English Monarchy (1521–1689) (Madison NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1998): 44. 34. Lever, Sermons, 84, 106 (quotations). 35. Bucer, A Treatise How by the Word of God, Christian Men’s Alms Ought to be Distributed, 6, 27. 36. Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, 101–2. 37. Ibid. 201–2. 38. Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, E.E.T.S. (London: Kegan Paul, 1872), extra series, XV, 57–9. 39. Edward VI, “Discourse,” ed. Jordan, 161–2. Merchants’ land varied between $100 and $30,000 in value as alterations were made to the manuscript. A mark was 13s. 4d. 40. Elton, “Reform and the ‘Commonwealth-men’,” 26. 41. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, ed. G.E. Corrie, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), I, 148. 42. Sermons and Remains of Hugh Latimer, ed. G. E. Corrie, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1845), II, 111–113, 115, 120. 43. Ibid. II, 215. 44. Roger Hutchinson, Works, ed. John Bruce, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1842), 301–2. 45. Skinner, Foundations, II, 206–9. 46. Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises, 173–6; see also Skinner, Foundations, II, 66–70. 47. A Supplication of the Poor Commons (1546 A.D.), ed. J. M. Cowper, E.E.T.S. (London: N. Trübner & Co., 1871), extra series, XIII, 63, 83. 48. “Defense,” ed. Lamond, lix–lx. 49. Becon, The Catechism and Other Pieces, ed. John Ayre, Parker Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1844), 600, 602. 50. Crowley, “The Way to Wealth,” Select Works, 132, 134, 137. 51. Lever, Sermons, 101, 127; repr. in part in TED III, 47. 52. Elton, “Reform and the ‘Commonwealth-men’,” 24–5; cf. Barrett L. Beer and Ronald J. Nash, “Hugh Latimer and the Lusty Knave of Kent: The Commonwealth Movement of 1549,” Bulletin, Institute of Historical Research, 52, no. 126 (1979): 175–8; J. D. Alsop, “Latimer, the ‘Commonwealth of Kent’ and the 1549 Rebellions,” Historical Journal, 28, no. 2 (1985): 379–383. 53. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, I, 148, 247–8; ibid. II, 111–112. 54. Henry Brinklow’s Complaynt of Roderyck Mors, ed. J. M. Cowper, EETS (London: Kegan Paul, 1874), extra series, XXII, 11–13. 55. Four Supplications, ed. Cowper, 81–2. 56. “The Charge of Mr.  John Hales,” ed. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials, II, ii, 352, 358.

Defending the Body  119 7. “Defense,” ed. Lamond, liii, lvi, lx–lxi. 5 58. Crowley, Select Works, 142–4, 146. 59. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, I, 247–9. 60. Chronicle and Political Papers, ed. W. K. Jordan, 162, 165. 61. Skinner, Foundations, II, 80–1. 62. Crowley, Select Works, 142. 63. Ibid. 156–7. 64. Lever, Sermons, 27–8, 47. 65. Becon, Catechism, 601. 66. Sermons by Hugh Latimer, I, 406–8. 67. David Starkey “Which Age of Reform?” in Revolution Reassessed: Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 23–5. 68. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. Ballads from Manuscripts (London: The Ballad Society, 1868–72), I, 93, 95 (not reprinted in TED III, 18–20). 69. An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyat . . . (London: John Kerford for Robert Toye, 1542; S.T.C. 26054; Huntington Library no. 32080), A. 2.b. 70. Ibid. A.3.b-A.4.a. Cf. Hobbes’ concern with thieves in Chapter 15. 71. Furnivall, ed., Ballads, I, 126–9, 142–3; ibid. 138–46 not repr. in TED III, 26, 29–39. 72. William Forrest, “The Pleasant Poesy of Princely Practice,” in Sidney J. Herrtage, ed., England in the Reign of King Henry VIII, EETS, extra series, no. 32 (London: N. Trübner, 1878), part 1, lxxix. 73. Ibid. lxxxvi, xc-xcv, xcvii–xcix (this edition contains duplicate page numbers at xcvii and xcviii, while the pages contain different contents; in both instances, the first of the duplicates is the one cited here); in abridged form in TED III, 39–46. 74. Anon. [Miles Hogarde], A New Treatise in Manner of a Dialog . . . (London [Charing Cross]: Robert Wyer, n.d. [1550]), B.4.b, C.1.a-C.2.a. The Ann Arbor microfilm lists the original as being in the British Museum. The attribution to Hogarde and the dating are in the “Integrated Catalogue” of the British Library, which does not list an S.T.C. number. 75. “The Pleasant Poesy of Princely Practice,” Herrtage, ed., lxxxv–lxxxviii. 76. Valentine Leigh?, The Pleasant and Pithy Pathway Leading to a Virtuous and Honest Life, No Less Profitable, than Delectable (N.p., 1550?), S.T.C. 15421, 15113.5, Huntington Library no. 61100, A.2.a-A.3.a, B.1.b. 77. Anon, The Praise and Commendation of Such as Sought Commonwealths (London: Anthony Scoloker, n.d., 1548?), S.T.C. 20182, Huntington Library #59434, A.1.b, A.3.a. 78. I. S. Leadam, ed. The Domesday of Inclosures, 1517–1518 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), II, 477; Paul L. Hughes and James J. Larkin, eds. Tudor Royal Proclamations: I: The Early Tudors, 1485–1553 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 174–5. 79. TED II, 302–5. Complaints about rents and entry fines were not wholly rhetorical: see the discussion of “gressums” or entry fines in Scott M. Harrison, The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, 1536–7 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1981), 47–60; Christopher Dyer, “The Agrarian Problem, 1440–1520,” in Whittle ed., Landlords and Tenants, 1440–1660, 24–6, on the complicated character of rents. 80. “Now a Days,” repr. in Ballads from Manuscripts, Furnivall, ed., 98. 81. TED III, 31–3; I, 326; Ballads from Manuscripts, 139. 82. Ballads from Manuscripts, 139–42. 83. British Library, Royal MS. 17.B.XL, fols. 2a-11b. I am grateful to Karl Gunther and Ethan Shagan for this valuable reference.

120  The Body Social, 1480–1550 84. Piers Plowman’s Exhortation unto the Lords, Knights and Burgesses of the Parliament House (London: Anthony Scoloker, n.d., 1550?), S.T.C. 19905, A.2.bA.4.a, A.7.a- A.9.b; (repr., Amsterdam: Walter J. Johnson, 1976. The English Experience, no. 821). I am indebted for information about this treatise to my former student Michael G. Crowther and his dissertation and modernized text (Lancaster University, 1988).

Part II

Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549

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7 Moving Away From the Body An Overview

I. INTRODUCTION In the first half of the sixteenth century, several writers challenged the theory of the body social. At times, they cast aside the image of three estates and developed alternative models of social organization. In the case of More’s Utopia (1516), the rethinking was so thorough that the old theory was obliterated and a new one envisioned. As Chapter  9 shows, Utopia redefined property relations and wealth so radically that the nobility were eliminated and an alternative patriarchal system was imagined. Some authorities offered more piecemeal changes, which were nevertheless radical, because they redefined the concept of nobility so completely that, if the aristocracy survived, it would be as servants of the state. Others proposed to reform the clerical estate, improving its education and its ability to care for its flocks. Still other authorities sought to reform the third estate, its morals and its responsibility to labor. Some writers questioned other precepts of the body social, e.g., the language of mutual obligation, which represented no less momentous challenges. The body social posited that stability resulted from the interdependence of the estates, so that social conflicts were against God’s design, but the new thinking adopted a conflict-based model. Its proponents made the case that, given contemporary structures and relationships, competition, conflict, and even disorder, however disturbing, were natural and inevitable. Some of the same thinkers rejected the idea of voluntary poverty, affirmed the value of wealth, and developed institutional cures for the crime and hardship they believed came from unemployment. The two models also took different positions on the role of government in the economy and society. Regarding agrarian change, education, and the poor, the new thinking was more interventionist than the old, whose adherents believed in a self-regulating body social. These disjunctions set the stage for policies advocating theories of patriarchy and a “moral economy” in which state intervention regulated economy and society. These challenging moves were chiefly the work of social humanist thinking by a number of scholars, propagandists, and officials. I have adopted the

124  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 tagline “social humanist” to describe their thought, because they addressed subjects that extended to the general shape of society and because they used humanistic methods, drawn from ancient texts, history, and rhetoric. II. HUMANISM’S HISTORIOGRAPHY: A SOCIAL VARIANT? Humanist thinking is of such vital importance in this book that it merits extended discussion. Some historians would prefer to excise the term “humanism” from the historical lexicon. This is because undergraduates and the general public confuse the word with “humanitarianism,” “humaneness,” and even modern humanist positions on religion. These terms are not the same as humanism, as used here, which is a nineteenth-century designation derived from the colloquial Italian Renaissance term umanista, or teacher of the humanities, and from the humanist’s curriculum, studia humanitatis, a “cycle of disciplines” that included Latin grammar, history, moral philosophy, poetry, and rhetoric.1 To confuse matters further, historians have distinguished a number of Renaissance humanisms. If there is any consensus, it is found in the work of Paul O. Kristeller, who maintained the movement was above all a literary one, concerned with recovering ancient texts and imitating them in various classical modes. He denied that humanism had a coherent philosophy or cosmology, stressed the significance of medieval precedents, argued against humanism marking a sharp break between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and rejected the belief that it was an “ism” or ideological movement. In this light, one might consider eschewing the term “humanism” and instead refer to “humanist thought” or thinking.2 A great strength of Kristeller’s work was its comprehensiveness. He captured the wide range of humanist thought, most notably in his analysis of its moral philosophy, including political thought and the contemplative life versus the active, and republicanism versus monarchy, treatises on morals and manners with special attention to virtue over expediency, school reforms and a quest for excellence in the education of princes, the elites, and middle classes, the value of earthly wealth versus poverty and the acceptance of avarice as a social good, raising at least the possibility of religious toleration and social reforms in relieving the poor. Some of these themes had social implications, but for Kristeller, Italian Renaissance humanism was above all a literary movement.3 North of the Alps, some historians distinguish a Christian or northern humanism, which is defined as “devotion to a biblical reformation of Christendom,” which flourished in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and whose purview extended beyond the devotional to the social—to education, the family, and the reform and relief of the poor.4 In addition, Elias argued that northern humanism included the reform of personal manners, leading to a new transformative ethos and behaviors we associate with modernity. The most graphic

Moving Away From the Body  125 manifestation was the injunction in Erasmus’s handbook for young boys to use knives and forks at table rather than their fingers, which he condemned as “rustic.” Although Erasmus had medieval and Italian antecedents, few rivaled his book’s publishing record, which, after first appearing in 1530, ran to 130 editions, 30 of them in the first six years, and numerous translations.5 Hans Baron identified a third branch of humanist thought when he first employed the concept of civic humanism in 1925. In subsequent booklength publications, he described the movement in Italy. His work was “possibly the most important monograph in Renaissance history since the Second World War  .  .  .”.6 Broadly, Baron reconceptualized the history of humanism, moving it from the academy, as in Kristeller, into the council chamber. Baron asserted that a growing military threat in 1402 to Florence from Milan stimulated the rethinking. In the process, Florentine leaders articulated a revival of classical republican models of government, favoring this-worldly secularism over other-worldly asceticism, and the triumph of the active versus the contemplative life. Successive chancellors of Florence, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Bruni, employed the tools of the humanist in defense of the republic—in diplomacy, histories, speeches, and treatises. Baron found a limited social element in civic humanist thinking, although he admitted that humanists praised the family as the basis of a good society, created a positive vision of wealth, and rejected “voluntary poverty.” But according to Baron, the origins of the Florentine crisis were not economic and social, for between the Ciompi uprisings of 1378 and Savonarola’s of the 1490s, there were no popular rebellions in Florence.7 A significant offshoot of the Baron thesis came in 1975 with the publication of J. G. A. Pocock’s book on what he called “classical republicanism,” its origins in the Renaissance, its development in early modern Europe, and later significance in the American colonies. Pocock assigned limited importance to the Florentine republicans of the early 1400s and gave greater play to the thinking of Machiavelli and the period from 1495 to 1530. Pocock accepted the criticisms of Baron that the notions of the active life did not originate with the civic humanists and that focusing on the crisis of 1402 was too limiting. Republican civic rhetoric existed before that date and would reappear later in Florentine history. States did not require humanists to express their aspirations, fears, and histories, even if there was no denying that humanists added rhetorical skills to the larger picture.8 Recent historical research has raised questions regarding the Baron and Pocock positions. Regarding the latter, it is doubted whether there was a single classical republican tradition or possibly many, some overlapping with proto-liberal positions. It is also thought that many Renaissance humanists favored “negative liberty” aimed at curbing abuses of power rather than a positive liberty that was liberating and democratic. Some question whether Machiavelli was a true republican, arguing he was a “realist constitutionalist” who was hostile to civic humanism and even republicanism. In a similar vein, it is suggested the movement could—and did—support oligarchies,

126  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 that Bruni was not really a dedicated republican, that he used the rhetoric of virtue to capture an audience, that he also favored negative liberty.9 III. TRIUMPH OF THE INDIVIDUAL OR THE SOCIAL? Humanist thinking took its inspiration from the ancient world’s concept of virtus, a powerful trope in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian thought and, ultimately, in English social thinking. To date, definitions of virtus have focused on its political and religious components. Pocock suggested virtus comprised three elements in the political realm—“the power by which an individual or group acted effectively in a civic context,” “the essential property which made a personality or element what it was,” and “the moral goodness which made a man, in city or cosmos, what he ought to be.”10 Skinner argued that the Renaissance concept of virtus conformed to Aristotelian and Christian values. It included the qualities of fairness, intelligence, moderation, and courage that Aristotle specified as prerequisites of life in communities. To these, Christianity added that believers could not rest content about attaining virtues, because God alone bestowed them. Nor could someone be said to pursue a life of virtue unless he or she did so with the purpose of seeking constantly to please the divinity.11 The Renaissance belief in virtus went further than some Christian ethical norms by questioning the Augustinian position that humanity was in a fallen condition. From Petrarch onwards, Italian commentators, culminating in della Mirandola’s oration on the dignity of man in 1484, wrote and spoke of “the vir virtutis as a creative social force, able to shape his own destiny and make his social world to fit his own desires.”12 Pushing this part of the Renaissance envelope, Burckhardt famously opened it to include “the perfecting of the individual.” The Renaissance, he argued, released selfawareness both of the objective and the subjective worlds and led to the rise of “the modern idea of fame”: In the Middle Ages both sides of human consciousness—that which was turned within as that which was turned without—lay dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil. The veil was woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hues. Man was conscious of himself only as member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air. . . . 13 Kristeller, too, thought the Renaissance was “fundamentally individualistic in its outlook” and pointed to the humanist curriculum as well designed to hone a person’s communication skills.14 It is now questioned whether the Renaissance discovered “the self.” “Individualism” was a nineteenth-century term, first used by de Tocqueville and

Moving Away From the Body  127 de Maistre. Instead, it is argued that personal identities were uncertain and that there was no purely subjective, autonomous, and demarcated self. Selves were “relational” and were still linked to the institutions of church, state, and society.15 In short, historians now question whether Western Europe was uniquely placed to advance individualism, as Burckhardt maintained. In fact, the Far East produced documentation of “self-hood” beginning in the eleventh century. Already in the twelfth century, medieval Europe produced a growing literature about individuals. What is more, Burckhardt’s evidence for Renaissance uniqueness largely concerned Italian males of the upper classes.16 Nevertheless, there is no doubting that “ego-documents became more common and more personal” c. 1500. These included a proliferation of forms, some new and some old—autobiographies, biographies, diaries, journals, letters, memoirs, and material representations in funeral effigies, portraits, self-portraits, and sculptures. These developments cut across lines of religion, gender, and class, but the reasons for this expanded production of “ipseity” remain obscure, apart from the reproduction of classical revivals.17 IV.  A SOCIAL HUMANIST AGENDA On closer reading, Burckhardt’s analysis actually went beyond the self to discuss the wider social implications of the Renaissance. He wrote that it diminished membership in “some general category” and broke with the medieval past of “courtly and aristocratic manners and etiquette . . .”. In the new world of humanism, there was an “equalization of classes” so that “social intercourse in its highest and most perfect form now ignored all distinctions of caste, and was based simply on the existence of an educated class . . .”. Further, “birth and origin were without influence, unless combined with leisure and inherited wealth.” The position of the nobility was redefined. It became a commonplace in the poetry and rhetoric of humanists that “nobility does not depend on birth, but only upon virtue.” In Petrarch’s words, “Verus nobilis non nascitur, sed fit”; in Poggio’s, “there is no other nobility than that of personal merit”; in Vives’s: What else is nobility nowadays but a chance birth into this or that gentle blood, and a reputation induced by the foolishness of an unlearned people whose opinion of nobility itself often is acquired by hypocrisy or other unjust measures? True and great nobility originates in virtue. Hence, it is a great madness for you to boast about your parents, if you are evil yourself and dishonor their noble acts with baseness.18 Burckhardt’s proposition that the Renaissance brought social equality is questionable, because it reflects his own mid-nineteenth century context when the middle classes really were rising, but at least he put the question of the social on the table. Later discussions of humanist thought examined

128  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 their audiences and social background. In terms of power relations, it is thought that humanist thinking was a “program for ruling classes” that “spoke for and to the dominant social groups.” Who were the humanists? In-depth studies of Italian humanists found that few were “humbly born”; most were from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Besides favoring virtue over noble birth, they were “avidly ambitious, socially mobile” and deployed their communication skills for “practical worldliness,” while scorning uneducated common folk. They were an urban movement that served to heighten unity in their communities by the use of eloquence: as Petrarch observed, it was “a thing of cities” and “for throngs, governments, and worldly ends.”19 Kristeller said humanists wrote about morality for their social peers, students, and “an elite of businessmen and of urbanized noblemen” and, from the sixteenth century, “ever wider circles of the middle class . . .”. In England, this literature was intended for the nobility, but also “the middle class of merchants and professionals . . .”.20 Studies of humanist thought have extended coverage of social questions. Baron himself expanded the discussion in a seminal article published in 1937, which was expanded into three chapters in a book of his essays in 1988. In these publications, he argued the period saw a fundamental reorientation of attitudes among humanists towards wealth and poverty, including a rejection of the Franciscan concept of “voluntary poverty,” and the creation of a new work ethic.21 Baron’s discussion of the social is highly compelling. He produced a substantial body of evidence concerned with Western Europe and not only Italy. He also provided extensive coverage over time, beginning with the Franciscans, the Church’s condemnation in 1323 of the fraticelli or “little brothers” and their doctrine of the purity of poverty, and the ensuing debate from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century.22 Baron’s temporal range might have been even greater, given that mendicant orders undermined their own raison d’être by recognizing the validity of economic activity by merchants and moneylenders.23 Admittedly, criticisms of Baron’s thesis focus on his claims about the uniqueness of Florentine wealth and power. In the late thirteenth century, Bonvesin da la Riva wrote “On the Marvels of Milan,” in which he lauded the architecture, artisans, and professionals of the city. The rejection of luxury and wealth that preceded Baron’s humanism was not only the product of “Christian spirituality,” as he asserted. It was also the result of Stoic thinking, especially Sallust’s account of the decline of the Roman Republic into despotism. For that matter, the humanists’ position that the public interest was superior to the private was not without precedent and was voiced in the early fourteenth century, again by Bonvesin.24 These points of criticism, while well informed, do not address the main thrust of Baron’s arguments—that fourteenth-century humanists, led by Petrarch, seriously debated the issue of poverty versus wealth. In the early fifteenth century the debate continued, but with the rejection of voluntary poverty prevailing, as Baron’s documentation shows. There were

Moving Away From the Body  129 fifteenth-century exceptions, such as the Stoic position taken by Leon Battista Alberti, but he appears to be untypical. Moreover, the early Bonsevin example, while predating the humanists, is just one case, recalling the adage that one swallow’s appearance does not mean summer is nigh.25 It is true that Baron ignored other elements in discussions favoring wealth and the obligation to labor. In England’s case, as shown in the next chapter, the context included, besides humanism, two further sources of support. Lollardy, a heretical movement in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, blasted the friars and their voluntary poverty for duplicity, gross materialism, and hypocrisy. In the same period, Parliament passed labor legislation limiting voluntary poverty and making work compulsory for vast (and unprecedented) numbers of the population. Nor was questioning of voluntary poverty limited to Italian Renaissance humanist thought. In his Colloquies, the northern humanist Erasmus rejected begging: “Many think what is given to public beggars is not well spent.” He proposed, as did the Spanish humanist Vives, that each city should look after its own beggars, putting the able-bodied to work. They were “not to tolerate vagabonds roaming hither and yon—particularly the able-bodied ones, who, I imagine, need a job rather than a dole.” To make the point that beggars were marginal and “other,” Erasmus gave examples of their slang or “cant.”26 Recent scholarship on Renaissance humanist thinking has opened the door to a greater exploration of the social. Baron had nudged it ajar in 1925 when he referred to civic humanism as Bürgerhumanismus because, while denoting political positions—“citizen, townsman, burgess, burgher”— Bürger also signifies social position, “one of the middle class, bourgeois, commoner”.27 Despite his early interest in social questions, Baron’s emphasis on the political culture of the early fifteenth century eventually outweighed his publications on poverty and wealth. Recent studies of humanism and political thought now contain a decidedly social dimension, which justifies using the phrase and concept of “social humanist.” These studies find that a key problem facing humanists was the objective of fusing Christian society with ancient (and pagan) values. Unlike St. Augustine, they adopted the position that humans and society were mutable and capable of improvement. More’s Utopia examined how society would need to change to meet the demands of Christian and humanistic values. In addressing these issues, Utopia went so far as to denigrate the landed elites and to laud the working poor. Utopia was unquestionably a satire that contained fantasies and tomfoolery, but as Chapter 9 shows, it actually did raise serious questions of a social nature.28 A recent study of Florentine politics casts further light on humanist social positions. The author questions whether Bruni was truly a republican and whether civic humanism was a replay of popular, guild-based, republicanism of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In this reading, we see a different Bruni from the semi-heroic figure of Baron’s account. In Bruni’s eyes, the greatest threat to the republic was not Milan, but guild republicanism and class conflict. The ciompi agitation and rebellion of 1378 set the populace

130  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 against the Florentine elites. Bruni represented the popolo as threatening to plunder the rich by unleashing the poor and the criminal. His objective was to trim the influence of the guilds by co-opting elite guildsmen such as Gregorio Dati into a mythical “active life,” which actually meant supporting Florence’s elites. The civic humanist emphasis on “personal virtue” was to be a counter to the electoral power of the guilds. Bruni also promoted the institution of the family as a core principle to oppose class and guild interests. He favored government in which popular dissent was suppressed. Politically and socially, civic humanism “served as the intellectual foundation for a regime of conformity and surveillance.”29 These currents of thought were not confined to Italy. North and south of the Alps, the most ambitious humanist social position was that individuals and societies could be reformed and Christianity and pagan civic values reconciled. This belief is seen in Utopia and in the early thought of John Calvin. The key, following the humanist agenda, was to promote “virtue,” which was a powerful means of reforming individuals and society. Utopia will be discussed in Chapter  9, but it is worth briefly noting that Calvin incorporated both Christianity and the pagan values of the Italian Renaissance, leading one authority to consider him a “social humanist.” Although ultimately he favored the Christian over the pagan, Calvin is described as “a humanist of the highest degree” who combined the “revealed knowledge” of man from God and the “natural self-knowledge” of the Italians. Biéler considered Calvin’s humanism to be “primarily a social humanism” because “by nature man is truly man only in proportion to his living in company of other men.” He was a “creature of fellowship,” which took the forms of marriage in a “family community” and in a “working union or corporation . . .”. Because of the Fall, no social order was perfect: “all natural hierarchies are corrupted . . .”. All that could be achieved was the “restoration of social bonds,” including “the relation between rich and poor” through Jesus Christ, political order, and strict moral law.30 Calvin’s social humanism and his reconciliation of rich and poor contained a substantial element of social criticism. Like the humanist position, he rejected voluntary poverty and favored work for all. Idleness, he stated, was “against nature” and a “form of human alienation . . .”. The refusal to undertake a vocation was “an offense to God” and unemployment was “a social scourge which must be fought and denounced with extreme vigor.” To deny someone work was “truly a crime”; one must treat employees with humanity. Under his regime in Geneva vagrancy was forbidden, and everyone was “ordered to have a trade and to make a living.”31 V. SOCIAL HUMANIST THINKING: SUMMING UP It is true that humanist thinking did not speak with one voice. Nor did it take logically consistent positions. Rhetorical statements were the norm in this brand of discourse. Dudley cast aspersions upon the Church hierarchy,

Moving Away From the Body  131 and yet he endorsed the hierarchy of the Great Chain of Being that placed the high clergy near the top. Erasmus was critical of voluntary poverty, and yet he invoked the metaphor of the body social that assumed mutual aid to be the norm. Thomas Elyot and Richard Morison employed the body image in the 1530s, while advancing new concepts of service based upon ability and merit rather than birth and lineage.32 However inconsistent and rhetorical, it seems that the new positions were persuasive enough to have several results. The rejection of voluntary poverty consistently appeared in statutes and sermons, from the mid-fourteenthcentury labor laws to a paper by John Locke in 1696–97 for the Board of Trade, which is discussed in the Conclusions. In this rhetorical discourse, serious, material social issues were at stake. They involved key institutions, such as the universities, the Church, nobility, merchants, and the poor and laboring classes. For too long, humanism has been considered a course of study, while paying insufficient attention to its subjects and the impact of its rhetoric. In light of the foregoing discussion, employing the neologism “social humanist” would not, it seems, be an absurd invention. The examples thus far adduced suggest that humanist thinking addressed a great array of social questions. There was the issue of the social distribution of power, whether the lower and middling sort should share authority with the elites. There was the rejection of voluntary poverty and the affirmation of the positive value of wealth. A corollary of this move was that the able-bodied had an obligation to labor and governments had the authority to enforce that duty. In addition, there was the move to exercise surveillance over the poor and laboring classes, because it was assumed that social conflict was the norm and that these groups threatened the public order and elite dominance. It was the willingness of English humanists to push the goal of virtus beyond the individual that entitles them to a special place in the history of Renaissance humanism. Thomas More, Thomas Starkey, Thomas Elyot, Richard Morison, and Thomas Smith moved past the body social in their thinking, addressing new issues and proposing a reordering that encompassed all three estates. Chapter 9 will show that More’s positions on a number of issues placed him firmly in the camp of the social humanists, including reforms of the estates and his views on moral philosophy, education, patriarchy and the position of women, and on poverty and labor. Later chapters show these themes being reprised by other authors, albeit with different emphases. Proponents of the body social and social humanist positions did not engage in direct debates. On some key issues, e.g., the welfare of the “common weal,” they were sometimes in agreement, even when they were confessional adversaries. The two groups were not in a dialectical relationship in a Hegelian sense of thesis and antithesis; rather, their discourse dealt in Kuhnian paradigms resulting from dialogues between scholars working with similar academic training.33 What differed in their hypotheses about social order was not their diagnoses, but their views of the desirable outcomes.

132  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 Social humanist thought was at the core of new thinking, and virtually all these authors, whatever their theory of society, were educated in the classics in the manner of the umanista. John Hales, who did not apparently attend university, taught himself as many as five languages and had translated a medical treatise by Plutarch.34 There is evidence of religious solidarity among proponents of the body social, who tended—with the exception of Dudley— to be evangelical Protestants. Yet, among those influenced by social humanist thinking, I have included the Catholic More together with the reputed Calvinist Richard Morison and the fence sitters Elyot and Starkey. The major religious difference is that proponents of the body social were more likely to quote Scripture, while the humanists chiefly cited classical sources. Yet, it is likely the social humanist thinkers knew their Bibles as well as the others, making the emphasis on the ancients all the remarkable for this reason. VI. CHANGING CONTEXTS

A. Clerics The late medieval and early modern eras witnessed developments that posed difficulties for the theory of an organic hierarchy of three estates.35 The concept of a clerical estate is a case in point. In the late fourteenth century, the heretical Lollard movement questioned the main tenets of the theology of the Church, its wealth, and the principle of voluntary poverty, affirming the obligation of all the able-bodied to labor. In England’s break from Rome in the 1530s, the Church lost its monopoly of matters spiritual, a great deal of its wealth, and the authority to govern itself. The clergy’s position was transformed almost beyond recognition. In 1534, Parliament made Henry VIII head of the Church, and he appointed Thomas Cromwell as his vicegerent. Pushing the clergy aside, the king and his minister asserted their responsibility for the cure of souls, which fundamentally questioned the role of the clerical estate. Then the king, Cromwell, and Parliament dissolved the monasteries in 1536 and 1539 and took their lands, which accounted for as much as a quarter of the landed wealth of the country, which also removed the mitered abbots from the House of Lords. These were major losses of power and prestige. While one cannot separate the clerical and Royal shares of landed wealth, it is likely that both institutions lost considerably, dropping from 25–35 p.c. of cultivated lands to 5–10 p.c. between 1436 and 1688. The 25 p.c. excising of the dissolutions of monasteries cost the clerics dearly. But that was only part of the story, for all the Tudors apart from Henry VII raided the bishops’ lands as well, amounting to “an unknown but certainly large proportion of their estates.” One authority observed of Church lands that by the later years of Elizabeth I’s reign, “at least two thirds of what it had owned before the Reformation had been seized by the crown.” In the reign of Edward VI, the Crown and Parliament abolished the chantries, hospitals,

Moving Away From the Body  133 and religious guilds. The very office of bishop came under attack at this time. All told, millions of acres passed from institutional to private ownership starting in the 1530s.36 To gauge the broader social significance of the looting of the Church, one should compare its wealth with that of other social groups. By 1688, the “middling and lesser gentry” had 45–50 p.c. of the cultivated land and “yeomen, family farmers and other small owners” another 25–33 p.c. These numbers take no account of other significant changes. One was the growing gentry practice after c. 1600 of placing younger sons in the Church, which became a virtual preserve of the gentry class. A potent mechanism undermining clerical authority was the control of advowsons, or the right to appoint vicars, which descended along with the monastic lands to the new owners, most commonly the gentlemen who bought up lands. In Essex by the end of Mary I’s reign, laymen appointed clergy to upwards of two thirds of livings, which represented roughly a doubling of their share since the pre-Reformation era.37 Sir Thomas Smith (Chapters  12 and 13) and Thomas Wilson (Chapter 13) were not slow to notice the diminution in Church wealth and power. Although Harrington (Chapter 15) discussed the effects of shifts in landed wealth in the period, he focused upon aristocratic losses, ignoring those of the Church and Crown and the comparatively massive gains of the gentry. The reordering was important and suggests the debate over the “rise of the gentry” was prematurely concluded. These changes made the gentry a greater stakeholder in the Church and, therefore, the state.38 In sum, as an estate of the realm, the Church was severely diminished. The Toleration Act of 1689 piled insult upon injury. Now the Church had to contend with legalized, rival versions of the faith.

B. The Second Estate The nature of aristocracy was redefined in the period to follow the tenets of social humanist thought, especially the principles of virtue, service, and upward mobility for loyal servants of the state. These issues were raised as early as the 1490s in the play Fulgens and Lucrece when the playwright Henry Medwall (c. 1462–1502) had the audacity to suggest a commoner was just as “noble” as a blue blood. Now the elevation of commoners to positions of distinction and authority was at least thinkable. Medwall’s play was based on an Italian novella entitled De vera nobilitate, which was written c. 1428 and later translated by John Tiptoft, 1st Earl of Worcester (1427–70), who had studied Latin and law in Italy. It focused on the choice of a husband for Lucrece, a patrician’s daughter whose father gave her the choice between a suitor of “noble blood” who was a “gentleman born” as against a “churl” of “poor stock.” Both the Senate and Lucrece decided the poor man was “more noble” because he “ruled the common weal to his great honor . . .”. In making the decision,

134  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 “only to his virtue they did therein attend . . .”. The arguments deployed by the suitors were interesting because they prefigured later debates about “true nobility.” The gentleman offered Lucrece “ease and pleasant idleness” as well as riches, while the commoner promised only “virtue and goodly manner,” including the eschewing of idleness—“the causer of sin”—and (echoing Petrarch) “moderate riches . . .”. The gentleman attacked the plebian’s lowly origins. The commoner responded that his opponent had done nothing but live a life “so voluptuous and so bestial” as to be useless to the common weal. The plebian even invoked a paraphrase of the words of the revolutionary priest John Ball in 1381, pointing out to his rival that, despite their different parentage, “both he and I came of Adam and Eve . . .”.39 The early Tudor redefinition of “true nobility” was conducted along lines similar to Medwall’s, with service and loyalty the key criteria, as we see in the work of Elyot, Starkey, and Morison in Chapters 10 and 11. It has been persuasively argued that the concept of honor also changed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Traditionally, blood and lineage defined reputation. According to Lord Darcy, when he led the Pilgrimage of Grace of 1536, the traditional honor code still had precedence over loyalty to the monarch. Of some symbolic significance, Tudor governments took charge of heraldry, whereas previously it was the preserve of those with lordly status. The new College of Heralds may have been corrupt, but it represented the state’s monopoly over honor.40 The chief criterion of nobility was now to be “virtue.” Elyot’s book The Governor, also discussed in Chapter 10, sought to redefine nobility in humanistic terms. High on the agenda was the transformation of members of the “honor community” into literate magistrates, moving their loyalty from the servant and master relationship to that of subject and sovereign. Obedience to the monarch and the government supplanted honor as the code for aristocratic culture. The advantages were two-fold. The switch provided a practical morality for survival by limiting “the terrifying capriciousness of Fortune” and by making people subject to Providence, which provided divine favor and security.41 The other criterion used to redefine nobility was, as in Fulgens, the concept of virtue, based upon education and service to the prince. The Tudor redefinition “gave parity, or even priority, to virtue over lineage, learning over arms, and ‘nobility dative’ conferred by the state over hereditary nobility.” The program of social humanist thought was a key in this redefinition, particularly the ideas about education and leadership articulated by More, Elyot, Morison, and Starkey.42

C. The Third Estate The rethinking of social categories was no less marked in the third estate. One issue was social mobility, especially the question of entry into the “chivalry”

Moving Away From the Body  135 by the non-gentle, which generated handwringing, ambivalence, and selfcontradiction. This uncertainty posed a more general question: how could one maintain a system of hierarchy and special functions based upon birth when people, including the powers that be, winked at this requirement for a working social model? Another group whom it was increasingly difficult to include in the third estate were the poor. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the increasing isolation of elements of the poor from the rest of society. How could one sustain a theory of a body social if some members were lopped off? What lay behind the alienation of the better-off classes from the poor? A new theory of labor, and a new work ethic? Were there changes in the nature and representation of poverty, as Langland and others suggested? The ambivalence about social mobility began, predictably, in towns, but eventually seeped into Royal documents. In urban communities in the central Middle Ages, there was a long-standing ethos stressing harmony, based upon birth, which in the sixteenth century turned to an emphasis on preserving law and order.43 The same was no less true in late medieval England and in London in particular. As one scholar noted, “Resistance to social ascent . . . gained emotional force from feelings that clustered about the idea of good birth. . . . Belief in the superiority of people born into landed families that had been able to maintain their position for several generations was very deeply rooted.” In romances and eulogies of the nobility, there was hedging on how to define virtue, “but the compromise was always one that left belief in the superiority of men of birth intact.” To alter the orders was unacceptable and better not discussed. Far better to stress the importance of continuity: “The idea of social stability, approved by all authority, was the most natural and the simplest guide that chivalric and popular moral thought could have accepted. Change was something fortuitous that by definition could not be reduced to order. Unless it should assume disturbing proportions, why, then, discuss it?”44 Yet mobility there surely was, if only on account of the frequent failure to produce a male heir, but also because commentators such as Medwall condoned it. The old social paradigm “upheld the virtues of meekness and contentment and tried to minimize the competitive spirit but did not try to smother social ambition entirely.” There was a kind of social schizophrenia in which mobility was disapproved of in principle, but allowed in practice. As Thrupp observed, despite an obsession with birth, in practice, “it was only the social categories that were fixed, the estates and their component ranks. Human stock could move up and down through the ranks and from one estate to the other.” People were not permanently commoners or gentle. One could fall from nobility as well as rise into it. A new development of the mid-fifteenth century confirms the point. The policy was to grant gentle status based upon merit, but with a whiff of birth thrown in as a compromise. As a Royal grant of 1460 stated, “Equity requires and reason ordains that men virtuous and of noble courage be rewarded for their merits by

136  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 renown,” so that their progeny “may be in all places of great honor perpetually shining before others by certain signs and shows of gentility . . .”.45 VII. CONCLUSIONS Humanist thought promoted positions that in several respects had social as well as religious and political components. One precept was that the three estates of the old model needed reform to varying degrees. How much reform varied from author to author, but they left little doubt that changes resulting in “virtuous” behavior were required. A second position included the obligation of all members of the community to undertake worldly activities, whether as clerics attending to their flocks, gentlemen performing military service and governing, and laborers and artisans in laboring. Even the voluntarily poor were expected to engage in productive labor. This engagement was necessarily social in its repercussions because it departed from the old model of function-based roles of the three estates. The third social element in social humanist thought was a commitment to rule by the educated and the virtuous. This meant that birth, titles, and the assigned functions of estates were no longer the key criteria for attaining power. In Utopia, Chapter 9 shows, education and office holding were extended to women, as was also true in social humanist thought, although government remained a predominantly male role. A  fourth component in social humanist thought was a rethinking of the definition of wealth: whether it was ethical, who should have it, how much, and in what forms. A key development was that wealth was defined as making a positive contribution to the civitas and its economy. Further, wealth was, in part, laborbased: work was theoretically—and only in theory—a universal obligation. The fifth element in social humanist thought was the flip side of the fourth, which laid down that voluntary poverty was unacceptable, the remedy of which was employment or punishment for the willfully idle. The sixth social position was that the involuntarily poor were entitled to institutional assistance, if necessary, through state as well as Church bodies. In 1500, there were forces of continuity in the upholding of longstanding models of the three estates, above all in the vast wealth and power of the Church and the lay landed elites. Yet there were also elements of dysfunction, discontinuity, and change, including the vast disparities in power and wealth between members of putatively homogenous estates. Further, who would have predicted that within 50 years, the perceptions and positions of the two top estates would be transformed by a state takeover of the Church and by cultural and political changes redefining the nobility? Who would have known that state-sponsored welfare would become the law of the land and that the authorities would attempt to reform the voluntary poor through a new instrument of surveillance and penology called Bridewell that was social humanist in inspiration?

Moving Away From the Body  137 NOTES  1. Skinner, Foundations, I, xxiii; and discussions by Paul O. Kristeller, “Humanist Learning in the Italian Renaissance,” in Renaissance Thought: Papers on Humanism and the Arts, vol. II, 3; Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964), 3.  2. Skinner, Foundations, I, 102–4.   3. Kristeller, “The Moral Thought of Humanism,” in Renaissance Thought, vol. 2, 41–65.   4. Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 23.   5. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 47, 60–2, 77.   6. James Hankins, “Introduction,” in Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1.   7. Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 7–8.   8. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 57–9.   9. Hankins, “Introduction,” Renaissance Civic Humanism, 1–13. 10. Pocock, MM, 37. 11. Skinner, Foundations, I, 92. 12. Ibid. I, 93–4. (itals. added). 13. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: George G. Harrap, 1929; translation by S.G.C. Middlemore), 143, 147, 151. 14. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II: Papers on Humanism and the Arts (New York: Harper, 1965), 65; also Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic and Humanist Strains (New York: Harper, 1961), 10, 13. 15. John Jeffries Martin, Myths of Renaissance Individualism (New York: Macmillan, 2004), x, 13–19. For more general treatments, see A. J. Krailsheimer, Studies in Self-Interest from Descartes to La Bruyère (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962); Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery, Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997); Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 16. Peter Burke, “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” ed., Porter, Rewriting the Self, 17–18, 28. 17. Burke op.cit. 28, is weak on explanation but strong on description. His caveat (18) that we should remember, that “there is no lack of evidence of identification with family, guild, faction or city,” is valid, but leaves out the possibility of wider identities. 18. Burckhardt, 353–5; Vives’ Introduction to Wisdom: A Renaissance Textbook, ed. Marian Leona Tobriner (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968), 90. 19. Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New York: Knopf, 1979; Harmondsworth: Peregrine edn. 1983), 262–3, 268, 282–5, 293, 296. 20. Kristeller, Renaissance Thought II, 30, 50. 21. “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth as Factors in the Rise of Humanistic Thought,” Speculum, vol. 13, no. 1 (January 1938); “Franciscan Poverty and

138  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 Civic Wealth in the Shaping of Trecento Humanistic Thought: The Role of Petrarch,” chapter  7 in his collection of essays, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Chapter 8 is entitled “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth in the Shaping of Trecento Humanistic Thought: The Role of Florence”; chapter 9, “Civil Wealth and the New Values of the Renaissance: The Spirit of the Quattrocento.” 22. R.  W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1970), 44, 281–2, 288. 23. Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1978), 99–112. 24. Skinner, Foundations, I, 43–4. 25. Baron, “Leon Battista Alberti as an Heir and Critic of Florentine Civic Humanism,” in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism, 262–4. 26. Craig R. Thompson, ed. and transl., The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 71, 248ff.; For Vives and the 1520s see A. L. Beier, “Foucault Redux?: The Roles of Humanism, Protestantism, and an Urban Elite in Creating the London Bridewell, 1500–1560,” in Louis A. Knafla ed., Crime, Gender, and Sexuality in Criminal Prosecutions, Criminal Justice History: An International Annual, vol. 17 (2002), 33–60. 27. Harold T. Betteridge, The New Cassell’s German Dictionary (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1958), 95. 28. James Hankins, “Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought,” in Jill Kraye, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 127–40. 29. John M. Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics,” in James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 75–103, esp. 103. 30. André Biéler, The Social Humanism of Calvin, transl. Paul T. Fuhrmann (Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1964), 10–12, 17–23; orig. pub. as L’humanisme social de Calvin (Geneva: Éditions Labor et Fides, 1961). 31. Social Humanism, 45–6. 32. For Dudley, see Chapter 4 above. The Enchiridion of Erasmus, transl. and ed. Raymond Himelick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 146–54. Cf. his reference to the “unbridled masses” on 65. Elyot and Morison are discussed in Chapter 10. 33. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd edn., 1996), 99–100. 34. D.N.B. says Hales knew French, German, Greek, and Latin; the O.D.N.B. lists Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. 35. The best survey is found in John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Atheneum, 1994), ch. 7, “Civility,” esp. 355–7. 36. Clay, Economic Expansion, I, 143–5. 37. Ibid. 143–5; Michael Hawkins, “Ambiguity and Contradiction in ‘the Rise of Professionalism’: The English Clergy, 1570–1730,” in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 267–8; J. E. Oxley, The Reformation in Essex to the Death of Mary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), 263–4; Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the Church: From Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 54. 38. Harrington opposed clerical rule, but said little about Church property: J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 36–7, 77ff., 110.

Moving Away From the Body  139 39. Peter Meredith, ed. Fulgens and Lucrece by Master Henry Medwall (Leeds: Studies in English, The University of Leeds: School of English, 1981), i, 3–4, 58–60, 63–6. 40. M.  E. James, English Politics and the Concept of Honor, 1485–1642 (Past and Present Supplement, no. 3, 1978), 2–3, 18, 25. 41. Ibid. 27, 44–7, esp. 47. 42. Ibid. 59–62. For an excellent case study, see G. W. Bernard, The Power of the Early Tudor Nobility: A Study of the 4th and 5th Earls of Shrewsbury (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), 185–8. 43. Susan Reynolds, Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 153–6. 44. Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London [1300–1500] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962; repr. of 1948 edn.), 301–2, 310. 45. Ibid. 300, 305, 308 (italics added). The 1460 formula was repeated in 1510 in a grant of arms to John Mundy by Thomas Wriothesley, Garter King: C. H. Williams, ed. EHD, 1485–1558, 255–6.

8 Poverty, Wealth, and Labor New Theory, New Practices

I. INTRODUCTION The coherence of the body social was significantly undermined by attitudes towards the third estate, whose flimsy unity was bifurcated by new attitudes about voluntary poverty, wealth, and the obligation to labor. There were three elements in the rise of a more critical stance towards the able-bodied. The first involved changing ideas about poverty originating from critiques of the “voluntarily” poor, which stressed the positive value of wealth and the dangers of deprivation. A  second element involved changing views of charitable giving that examined the worthiness of the recipients of relief, especially as regards work ethic and morality, which led to discrimination among the poor. A third factor was the change in attitude towards labor and the willingness of the poor to undertake it. After visitations of bubonic plague and the resulting labor shortages, many European states created legislation designed to force the able-bodied to work. For its part, England’s Parliament legislated that all persons under the age of 60, including women, were obliged to work at statutory wage rates. The statutes seemed to bring full circle the discussions of poverty and wealth, for the legislation included clauses restricting voluntary poverty in the form of begging and outlawed masterlessness, or what in modern times is called voluntary unemployment, even malingering. II. POSITIVE POVERTY The tendency to distinguish groups within the third estate owed something to changing notions of charity. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Church had promoted a doctrine of charity that succeeded in creating and reinforcing bonds within communities. It was done through the promotion of a code of service to fellow Christians that “far transcended the preexisting norms of family and feudal loyalties.” In their stead were promoted principles that included, first, “an artificial yet intimate link between members of the Christian community” and, second, “an ethos of duty and cooperation in which the common weal became a cherished value . . .”. This spirit

Poverty, Wealth, and Labor  141 of mutual aid paralleled and strengthened the theory of the body social. It was visible among the urban elites and even the better-off villagers. For the elites, the attractions of such charity included spiritual benefits leading to salvation and a conspicuous display as “a test of status and prosperity as well as a reflection of moral health and virtue.”1 In this context, the theory and practice of voluntary poverty and the denunciation of worldly wealth flourished. The most visible and powerful representatives of voluntary poverty were the Franciscans, whose success as an order resulted from the pervasive piety of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but their influence was wider than the order and attracted the laity, including the leading minds of the age, such as Petrarch (1304–1374 CE).2 Petrarch and others of the literate classes saw voluntary poverty as a remedy for the challenges of urban life and commercialization. For him, living in the Vaucluse as a virtual hermit, wealthy display was “distracting” and “troublesome”; riches were for petty minds, and it was “imbecilic” to desire them. It was most Christian to praise poverty and to despise wealth. He found that mediocritas was an alternative to oppressive hardship and great wealth, because it offered frugality, health, harmony, poetry, and virtue. Petrarch’s successors followed his lead for another generation and beyond. Antonio da Romagno in the early fifteenth century affirmed that poverty was evil only to the myopic and advised that its conquest could arise from “education in the love of paupertas.” Contempt for riches required courage and constituted true wisdom. Sancto de’ Pellegrini took the Stoic side of the argument in stating that his own material success was due to following the principles of that school. Poverty was “fruitful”; need brought about virtue. To Petrarch’s acolyte Boccaccio (1313–1375 CE), poverty was a stimulant to the mind that unburdened the soul of lust and frivolity. It was more difficult for real political virtus to exist against a background of great wealth; it was far easier against a backdrop of poverty.3 Ptolemy of Lucca (c. 1227–c. 1327 CE) also affirmed the principle of voluntary poverty, which he said increased virtue and probity in government. Salutati, an early humanist chancellor of Florence, took up similar themes and maintained, like many others, that poverty was noble. Trade was necessary for a city-state, but so was voluntary poverty, he wrote. During his chancellorship, the Spiritual Franciscans and their radical brethren the fraticelli held sway in Florence, calling for complete clerical poverty, and they seemingly exerted influence over Salutati. Above all, poverty provided a general moral standard, a principle that humanists interested in moral philosophy found compelling, especially the notion that the poor were the truly wealthy.4 The proponents of voluntary poverty cited historical precedents, above all and interestingly, that of ancient Rome. While citing Augustine’s dictum that spiritual “goods” were higher in value than material ones, thirteenthand fourteenth-century thinkers were prepared to go beyond Christian texts. A pamphlet written c. 1320 by someone in the entourage of King Robert of Naples, while citing biblical and Christian writers on poverty,

142  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 had observed that the rejection of riches was a pre-Christian position. The favorite example was republican Rome. Boccaccio, Ptolemy, and others asserted that Roman military and political might was based upon honesty, humility, poverty, and simple living. Imperial Rome—and later the Christian Church—declined when poverty was rejected and when wealth corrupted political and public mores. They asserted that the survival of the common weal and the republic (and, by implication, Italy’s city-states during the Renaissance) was most likely to occur where citizens were committed to a social and political model of incorruptible paupertas.5 III. POVERTY QUESTIONED, WEALTH AFFIRMED After c. 1400, a contrary development critiqued poverty and legitimated wealth. Students of social history believed for a long time that the west developed a special ethic fostered by the Protestant Reformation, which over the long term, boosted western economic development compared with the rest of the world by promoting thrift, saving, and investment. The “Protestant ethic” was also thought to be behind attempts to control morality, idleness and vagrancy, and activism leading to the “Puritan Revolution” of the seventeenth century. Recent generations of Reformation scholars have moved the spotlight from the economy to stress the special contributions of the Protestant reformers to the realms of religious and political activism.6 In addition, they have questioned whether the Puritan movement in England was unique in attempting to police morals, especially those of the poor and the work shy. They point to previous waves of social puritanism in thirteenth-century manor courts, to efforts to establish a national poor law, and to attempts to control labor in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.7 This chapter cannot review the entire historiography of the Protestant ethic, except to question the theory’s chronology.8 Developments previously thought to have begun in the early modern period are now considered to have started earlier where the critique of voluntary poverty is concerned. One authority connected the changing representation of labor in the body social to a form of individualism: “Partly because of [the] transposition of the value of labor from a mere function in a closed and rigid social system to a means of personal aggrandizement, idleness is one of the social ills most persistently attacked in the sixteenth century.” This scholar saw the challenge that free labor posed to the organic social system, but his chronology was suspect because rethinking poverty began earlier, c. 1300. As another authority noted, “The evidence suggests that in the thirteenth century acedia was held to be a temptation of the devil and that in the following century it became a temptation of the flesh . . . ” and “a vice of the body pure and simple.”9 Thinking critically about the poor began in earnest in the fourteenth century and was linked to the rejection of voluntary poverty and attempts to control the unemployed and groups designated as “wastrels.” Local

Poverty, Wealth, and Labor  143 initiatives had previously sought to police labor, but from the mid-fourteenth century, it became a national campaign led by Parliament as well as local elites.10 Late medieval Europe saw the development of new ideas about poverty that laid the foundations for early modern policies.11 A corollary of rejecting voluntary poverty was a growing acceptance of the positive qualities of wealth, resulting in a reconfiguration of the social paradigm, which broke with the three estates and offered a new theory privileging the possession of property. The process of change is seen in Italy and England, where leading thinkers at the popular and elite levels broke with the traditional language of social obligation. In its place they took up a novel line of thinking from social humanists, who praised wealth and critiqued poverty. Among the elites, Cicero (106–43 BCE) was a key source in the rethinking of riches and destitution because of his trenchant views, which were accessible and influential in the early Renaissance. Ironically, he sometime embraced elements of organic social theory, citing “ ‘the concord of the orders’ ” and the “ideal of unity between the orders . . .”. But for Cicero, after “nature” and “fortune,” wealth counted most in one’s rank in the hierarchy: “Men had a positive duty to make money, and although they were urged to be beneficent, they must not go so far as to dissipate their patrimony.”12 Cicero left no doubt that the rich profited from government: “the safety of the state is to the advantage of all good men, but most clearly benefits men of fortune.” For him, the main job of government was to protect the wealthy from the destitute, of which Rome had many thousands, some of whom were tenants of Cicero, a slum landlord. Through the execution of the law, everyone kept his own: “ ‘while the weaker should not be ruined on account of their lowly status the rich should not be prevented by envy from keeping or recovering what was theirs . . . ’ ”.13 The problem was that the poor had little substance to keep. Cicero despised them and those he dubbed “ ‘the wretched half-starved populace which attends mass meetings and sucks the blood of the treasury . . . ’ ”. He associated the “ ‘egentes’ ” or the destitute with the “ ‘perditi’ ” (nearly criminal) and “came near regarding poverty as a crime.” He opposed democracy because demagogues could use the “ ‘unrestrained freedom and license of assemblies’ ” to incite “ ‘artisans and shopkeepers and all that kind of scum . . . ’ ”. Manual labor was “mean and sordid, unfitting people for a share in political decisions.”14 Beginning in the thirteenth century, preachers began to argue that, contrary to the example of the mendicant orders, the poor must work because poverty was a greater curse than laboring. From the 1250s, the Sorbonne suggested that poverty was actually a sin and that the poor should work to atone for their failings.15 Rethinking wealth and poverty developed in the Renaissance with the seminal figure of Petrarch. He was originally imbued with Franciscan and Stoic philosophies that rejected riches and privileged poverty, but ultimately he questioned these positions, probably because of the influence of Ciceronian ideas. Petrarch admitted in 1342–43 that the

144  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 “paupertas” he favored was not that of the miserable beggar, but that of a “mediocritas” between wealth and destitution. He stated later in life that riches were preferable over “sordid poverty.”16 Despite Petrarch’s doubts, the Franciscan ideal of voluntary poverty remained a powerful movement right into the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, but attitudes towards wealth were changing. The Dominican Aquinas had accepted the Aristotelian view that material things were not only necessary to sustain life, but were the true test of a moral life, e.g., in the dispensing of charity. Such positions were not peculiar to theologians. A north Italian jurist writing in 1238 praised the gaining of wealth, which he said would prevent poverty, and which was a learning process worth passing on to one’s children.17 Ptolemy of Lucca, following Aristotle and Cicero, thought involuntary poverty was a threat to governments because the poor could be bought, and that voluntary poverty was preferable because it fostered virtue and honesty. On the whole, it was better to have the rich take charge, who had the resources to ensure honest administration.18 Theologians were not the only sources of positive stances on wealth. Fourteenth-century lawyers in Italy maintained that trade and merchants were essential to the survival of city-states, and one jurist protested against Dante’s exclusion of wealth from his definition of nobility.19 Petrarch’s questioning of the Stoic/Franciscan paradigm was taken up a generation after his death. In both Florence and Venice, humanists recognized the positive value of work and possessions “as the foundation of morality and the greatness of their city.” The ideal of paupertas was supplanted “by the voices of citizens who felt at home in the active life and with worldly goods.”20 The Venetian nobleman Francesco Barbaro (1390–1454) argued in Concerning Marriage (1415) that many virtues—charity, the education of children, gratitude, the pleasure of giving—are impossible unless one has the substance to perform them. The same message was taken up and widely propagated by Bruni (c. 1370–1444), chancellor of the Florentine republic, who elevated the argument to the political sphere. He discovered in the Aristotleian tract Economics the assertion that only the possession of material wealth “ ‘give[s] them the capacity to exercise their virtue.’ ” Moreover, echoing his hero Cicero, it was a philosopher’s job to study government, but also to champion the family’s substance, to increase its wealth, and to pass one’s substance on to one’s heirs. Wealth made it possible to exercise virtue as well as to maintain the state and social order. While not the work of Aristotle himself, the Economics was from his school and was widely circulated in humanistic circles in Italy and beyond the Alps.21 Further benefits accrued from the acquisition of wealth and property, according to humanists. Gianozzo Manetti, a friend of Bruni’s, observed that poverty was inimical to upward social mobility, a subject dear to the hearts of the often low-paid humanists. Stefano Porcari, a capitano del popolo in

Poverty, Wealth, and Labor  145 Florence, publicly cited in 1427 the benefits of wealth—houses and palaces, clothing, church building, education for children, bridges, and streets. Others recited the benefits of charity and patronage that flowed from the wealthy. Still others cited the “inner freedom” that riches brought, the honor, fame, and reputation that “industrious acquisition” produced. Here was a “new realization that there is no happiness in life without possessions.”22 Are we witnessing the emergence of an ideal of the bourgeois man?23 The flip side of the acceptance of the social humanists’ role of wealth in society and government was their critique of poverty. In the 1430s, Lapo da Castiglionchio the Younger (1405–35), another protégé of Bruni and a papal secretary, thought it worthwhile to justify papal wealth. He first sought to eliminate the traditional Stoic charge of covetousness, which he did by a clever opposition to poverty and its effects. Riches might lead to corruption, luxury, and laziness, but poverty was even worse because it produced thieves, robbers, traitors, and murderers.24 In England, rethinking poverty began in the fourteenth century. In Piers Plowman, Langland added a fourth estate of beggars, petty crooks, and wage laborers because they did not fit the traditional model.25 The problem of where to locate the poor had possibly developed with the growth of mendicant orders, because in their model, they and the poor were expected to beg rather than passively receive the charity of the rich. “Piers” was ambivalent about the mendicant clergy and generally encouraged the gentry to use the law against “wasters,” or false beggars.26 As Gower remarked in the late fourteenth century, the friars did not belong to any of the three estates. Yet, an organic society required both rich and poor to coexist and be interdependent, so that the rich could get “eternal sustenance” by giving alms, while the poor could redeem their sins by receiving them.27 In England, ideologically, it was the heresy of Lollardy that led the way to a rejection of voluntary poverty. As in Italy, perceptions of the mendicant orders forced the issue. In England, the attack was all the more potent because it was pursued by a homegrown heresy led by elite members of the clergy and laity.28 John Wycliffe, an Oxford don and Doctor of Divinity (D. D.), was the group’s theological leader, and he roundly critiqued the friars’ alleged wealth and hypocrisy. Disparagement of the mendicants was “nearly as old as the orders themselves,” but it seems criticism grew shriller from the 1380s under Wycliffe’s leadership. Mendicant priests were now associated with Cain and his misdeeds. The friar, like Cain, was accused of “false possession” of his brother’s goods, and was represented as “ ‘a fugitive and a vagabond’ ” as “the vagrant friar,” the “initiator of injustice”; in short, a heretic in league with the devil. These condemnations were “still very alive” in the fifteenth century, in part because the argument favoring the disendowment of the Church retained its potency into the 1450s, even after the movement was forced underground after the abortive Oldcastle rising of 1414.29 Lollards endorsed the principle in the Act of Parliament of 1388 that forbade giving alms to anyone but the disabled. The Lollards contrasted

146  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 the humble homes of the truly poor with the grand residences of the friars, which they said were built with “misappropriated alms  .  .  .”. The friars were worse than the monks and bishops because they took more from the poor. The theological basis for these critiques was Luke 14, which, it was claimed, limited alms to the “ ‘lame and crooked and blind who are weak or lying paralyzed . . . ’ ”. Giving to the friars is misguided, for it “ ‘serves the devil . . . ’ ”.30 In the orthodox scholastic theology of the 1380s, there were distinguished three kinds of begging—the “innuitive,” as when Christ simply received without asking, the “insinuative,” which involved requesting alms, and the “clamorous,” which could mean pleading for assistance. All three were in some measure legitimate, except if the “clamorous” was habitual and voluntary, which was illegal and, according to the Lollards, included the friars, who were deemed “strong men” and “strong beggars . . .”. It was unclear whether these Lollard positions on begging were heretical, because there was an “accepted canonical distinction between true poor and strong beggars.”31 Where Wycliffe and his followers stepped over the line was in their positions on clerical wealth, which they linked to the issue of alms. He argued it was revocable, that tithes were alms that could (and should) be withheld by the laity. He asserted that tithes should be considered “the goods of the poor . . .”. In Lollard thinking, “concern for the poor . . . powered the anti-mendicant case,” and the relief of poverty was and remained an “entrenched” and continuous theme in the movement. Moves to disendow the Church gave bite to the Lollard bark, because they included new institutional arrangements for the poor, including 100 new almshouses, as well as enriching the lay landed elites. In real life (and death), Lollard wills reflected these positions, as they made no provision for prayers for their souls and all worldly possessions were passed on to the local poor. Here was a change from the eleventh century, when there had been a virtual cult of poverty. Now, “far too much of it seemed to be the result of the most unholy misappropriation and neglect.”32 In their attitudes towards wealth, the Lollards did not overtly champion it as some social humanists did, and they retained the model of three, function-based estates. But in their disendowment campaigns from the 1350s to the 1450s, they were prepared to champion social needs over all others if the health of the realm demanded it.33 The rejection of voluntary poverty was well established in England in the mid-fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Reginald Pecock was the key transitional figure between voluntary poverty and the revival of the Aristotelian position on wealth. Where in Italy, it was the Spiritual Franciscan movement that triggered a rethinking, in England, it was the Lollards who stimulated debate about the Stoic and Franciscan positions. Pecock, a strong critic of the Lollards, argued in his Repressor c. 1449 that “riches” were “instruments of virtue” and that poverty presented a greater threat than wealth. Erasmus (1466–1536), who visited England with some frequency, also questioned the Stoic position c. 1519, arguing that anyone advocating

Poverty, Wealth, and Labor  147 the loss of freedom, hardship, and illness that went with poverty would have the message fall on deaf ears. “Possibly more people have been corrupted by poverty than by moderate wealth,” he stated. It is possible to condemn the greed for material things, but if you sought to reform the rich and powerful, you had to educate them not to reject wealth, but to make it an “ ‘organ’ ” of virtus.’ ” The virtuous wealthy person would become “ ‘still better qualified for the exercise of virtue.’ ”34 As will be seen in later chapters, these novel positions on wealth and poverty became orthodoxy in early modern England. We have already seen the rejection of voluntary poverty in discussing the interventions of the Earl of Leicester and Thomas Cartwright in Warwick in the 1570s and ’80s. These views were strongly echoed in More’s Utopia, in the writings of Richard Morison and Thomas Starkey in the 1530s, in Sir Thomas Smith’s in 1549, in Thomas Hobbes’s in the 1640s, and John Locke’s in the 1690s. These writers embraced the value of wealth, questioned that of voluntary poverty, and proposed ways to make the poor more virtuous and productive. IV. REDEFINING THE POOR The position of the poor, including wage earners and the unemployed, was redefined in the social humanist canon. Partly, no doubt, this was the result of structural demographic, economic, and social changes. The institution of serfdom was eclipsed because of the scarcity of laborers and popular resistance after the Black Death. In place of villeinage, Parliament passed legislation constituting a “new serfdom” that dovetailed with notions of compulsory labor and rejected voluntary poverty. For the first time in English history, statutes made work an obligation for all men and women without independent means, whether free of servile bonds or not. A new work ethic was articulated; those who refused to labor were categorized as “vagabonds” who were ostracized and criminalized. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw important changes in perceptions and treatment of the poor. New conditions came into play as population levels dropped, urban economies declined, and the scarcity of labor meant higher wages for the previously low paid and underemployed. Patterns of giving also changed, including a “shift from communal and cooperative forms of charitable organization towards a more personal and individual search for religious and social benefits.” For many reasons, the poor became less obviously and visibly part of the community, and some of them were marginalized as sinners and criminals. In this new situation, “security and trust vanished . . .”. In their place, a work ethic was developed to police the work-shy. The new “perception of the poor developed into a general denunciation of those members of society who were not fully productive” and who now included friars, journeymen, servants, and widows, who were dubbed “wastrels,” who were blamed for the economic malaise of the period and were treated as menaces to society.35

148  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 New developments in charitable giving affected and reflected a shattered unity of the third estate. Bequests included the position that “poverty came to be seen more as a choice than an affliction.” Accordingly, the hospitals established in the late Middle Ages were typically secular creations “with a pronounced punitive and corrective side, providing a regulated and controlled relief of parish poverty.” The alienation from the poor resulted in greater use of middlemen to control and manage bequests. The period also saw greater religious focus on the self and the donor’s membership of groups (chantries, guilds) as opposed to the previous “involvement with the fortunes of the weaker members of society” which “declined dramatically in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.” Henceforth, the poor were “appended” to great social occasions rather than being communally involved. By the 1520s, such feelings developed into revulsion at the sight and presence of the poor in public spaces.36 Disgust regarding the poor spilled over into perceptions of the working classes. One of the most striking qualities of European three-estate theories is their ambivalence about the place of manual labor, about those who performed it, and about the poor. To begin with, the estates had vastly different responsibilities, the third estate shouldering the main burdens of production and the other two actually shunning manual labor. In medieval thought, working with one’s hands was equated with dolor or physical suffering and pain, which was considered a form of humiliation. According to St. Benedict’s rules, “work meant voluntarily to renounce liberty and nobility, to lower oneself to earth, to the condition of the slave, to humiliate oneself.” The only value of labor was that it might lead to redemption in the next world. The concept of interdependent estates, including the production of goods and services by the third estate, was a myth that “served in the name of ‘charity,’ in the name of reciprocity of services, to justify seigniorial exploitation.”37 In late medieval England, the rule was that “a family lost the quality of nobility if its members fell to poverty or took to ‘artes viles’.” Any “manual labor or menial service” was considered “vile” unless it was in the household of a potentate.38 Admittedly, there were positive spins on manual labor and a growing tendency towards a work ethic, although, paradoxically, these moves tended to isolate the unemployed and the “voluntary poor.” Late medieval sermons commonly praised manual labor, while leaving no doubt that it was the responsibility of the poorest of the third estate, who were commonly represented as the feet of the body. Work was a means to avoid sin, and it redeemed the sinful. When the workday was over, Christians did good works, e.g., giving alms. The slothful had no place in the body social. The man with no laudable status in the community, who was “masterless” and shunned work, forfeited his birthright. For the poor, membership of the whole was achieved through manual labor. Anyone who practiced no vocation was doomed to end up in Hell. From these beliefs, “it follows naturally that each man’s first duty . . . is to learn and labor truly in the things of his own particular calling, resting content therewith  .  .  .”. The

Poverty, Wealth, and Labor  149 anonymous early fifteenth-century Lollard tract “The Lantern of Light” took this stance, asserting that “simple labor” represented love of the Holy Ghost. The good Christian, the author opined, should labor with his or her hands and dread the Lord.39 Frequently cited, too, was the idea of honest or “worthy” labor.40 The freeing of a substantial part of the labor force with the decline of serfdom produced bifurcations in representations of the third estate. Among the poor, a multitude of groups were now distinguished, and some were excluded. Langland idealized Piers Plowman as the perfect peasant— hardworking, honest, thrifty, and religious. The author contrasted Piers with a group of the poor for whom he had no sympathy and whom he classed as being outside the body social. As stated, they were members of an underclass whom Piers sought to employ, but who were dismal failures. They quit before completing their tasks, demanded high wages, the best victuals, and gourmandized. He condemned those who refused to labor and lived on begging, whether lay or clerical in status. All in all, Langland opposed the consequences of the new freedom and bargaining power of the poor. In so doing, he shattered any semblance of unity among the third estate.41 Langland’s portrait of the poor, despite its negative stance on the ablebodied, was remarkably perspicacious. He identified the social and economic sources of hardship as large families, high rents, and low pay. He also noticed many groups later deemed “worthy” of relief under the Tudor poor laws and many of whom would be familiar to modern social workers: “the old and infirm, expectant mothers, the maimed and disabled, the incurables, those who have suffered accidental misfortune, captives and homeless men, victims of robbery or unjust litigation, those who lost all in fire or flood . . .”.42 Here was some recognition, taken up later in More’s Utopia, of real causes of destitution as opposed simply to imputing sinful behavior. V. LEGISLATING SOCIAL THOUGHT The extent to which social theory could become real is evident from changes in labor regulations and welfare institutions from the mid-fourteenth century. Recent scholarship shows governments making vigorous efforts to create and enforce legislation regulating labor. An attempt at centralized control of labor occurred in the second half of the fourteenth century, beginning with the Ordinance (1349) and the Statute of Laborers (1351).43 The action resulted from the shortage of hands following the first waves of the Black Death, but it also involved a redefinition of the obligation to labor. In the process, the legislation established new principles. The main provisions were first, that work was compulsory for a large segment of the population, second, that conditions of service, particularly the length of contract, were regulated, third, that wage levels were controlled. The Ordinance stipulated that all persons without independent means from land or a trade, whether male or female, unfree or free, and aged under 60 years, could be compelled to

150  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 work. Refusal was a criminal matter and could result in imprisonment, which was also true for leaving employment before completing one’s contract.44 The Statute of 1351 specified that laborers were required to serve for a full year or “the usual terms,” but not by the day.45 As to wages, the Ordinance required they be set at the level of 1346 “or common years thereabouts,” but the Statute, complaining that laborers still demanded double or treble the pre-plague levels, laid down specific rates of pay for different tasks.46 Such provisions were re-enacted and elaborated upon over the next 100  years, resulting in eight separate sets of regulations from 1349 to 1445.47 The links with vagrancy legislation were sometimes explicit, for the new labor laws were directed against able-bodied beggars. The Ordinance of 1349 stipulated that alms should be refused any beggar who was able to work, while the Statute of Laborers of 1351 prescribed “punishment and imprisonment of their bodies.”48 The Statute of Cambridge (1388) made able-bodied beggars liable to a spell in the stocks, and an Act of 1445 directed that no one be excused from service by the year “upon pain to be justified as a vagabond.”49 The Year Books included cases in which the link between vagabondage and compulsory labor was spelled out.50 Although the evidence of wage rates is ambiguous, there is little question the late medieval labor laws were an ambitious attempt at forced labor, which in the process redefined the nature of poverty.51 One authority believes the labor laws were possibly “the most zealously enforced ordinance in medieval English history.”52 Single women were especially targeted.53 The effort lasted over a century, and all aspects of the legislation were to some degree implemented. Over a third of the 77 Parliaments held between 1351 and 1430 passed labor laws, and further legislation was approved in the 1440s and 1490s. These were not simple reissues of previous statutes, for they were “debated and modified . . .”. Parliaments received significant numbers of petitions calling for the revision and enforcement of laws.54 The most commonly prosecuted offences involved the law on “excessive wages,” which Dyer and Penn estimate “was broken each year by hundreds of thousands of workers” in the 1350s.55 But refusals to work were also significant, accounting for 12 percent of the labor presentments heard by justices of the peace between 1361 and 1396.56 Justices were more reluctant to follow up allegations of breach of contract, because these were complicated and time-consuming, but the numbers of such cases were not insignificant, with 299 known prosecutions in the years 1349–59 alone.57 The unpopularity of the laws also suggests they had an impact. Even clerics voiced their doubts.58 Harding thinks the clergy’s ambiguous status in the statutes and their role among the “more substantial rebels” may have prompted them to join the resistance in 1381.59 The populace hated the legislation and the local justices who enforced it. The justices’ activities are cited as “one of the most important causes of the revolts of 1381.” It is probably no coincidence that the rebellion was strongest in southeastern England, where the most thorough implementation of the laws occurred.60 When the rebels confronted Richard II at Mile End, one of their complaints was that

Poverty, Wealth, and Labor  151 they wanted contracts “freely agreed,” very likely a reference to the compulsory labor clauses of the Statute of Laborers. His infamous, yet prescient, response threatened them with worse conditions than traditional bondage: Rustics you were, and rustics you are. And in bondage you shall remain, not as of old but incomparably harsher.61 The popular hostility to the legislation persisted beyond 1400 and cropped up in Cade’s Rebellion of 1450, when the rebels castigated the Statute of Laborers, re-enacted in 1445, for fixing maximum wages and limiting labor mobility.62 The continuing unpopularity of the laws probably reflected ongoing efforts to implement them after the 1350s, when, where records survive, “a few hundred offenders in each county” were prosecuted each year.63 As late as the 1420s, in a Worcestershire Justice of the Peace’s (J.P.’s) collection of precedents, more than one fifth (16 out of 78) of documented offenses were against the Statute of Laborers. Putnam found that evidence of enforcement was abundant through the late fifteenth century.64 How innovative were late medieval English labor regulations in redefining the poor? They certainly had precedents both in town and country. Urban authorities had imposed wage rates before 1349 and continued to do so afterwards.65 Some villages had by-laws that made harvest work compulsory, controlled migration during the harvest, and set wage rates for reapers.66 It is tempting, given such precedents, to minimize the novelty of the labor laws, but that would be mistaken. It is worth reiterating that this legislation attempted to regulate a type of person who was previously unfettered by restrictions upon their work and movements—that is, the free laborer. According to Putnam, before 1349, no court had placed restrictions on his freedom, whether in town or country, “or on his right to be an idle vagrant if he chose,” as long as he did not break a contract.67 Harding concluded that the labor laws constituted “a much more general social obligation than villeinage” because they gave landlords a “new public jurisdiction which allowed them to enforce service far more general than the obligations of villein tenure . . .”. Ironically, one method of resistance was to claim villein status.68 VI. CONCLUSIONS All in all, the argument that the labor laws constituted England’s first national social policy is highly persuasive. The enforcement of compulsory labor was part of a broader policy that attempted to maintain social order through legislation and local governing in ways that seem to anticipate Tudor social policies and a “moral economy.” These policies included “constructive” elements, such as an implied right to poor relief in the Statute of Cambridge of 1388, but also more coercive controls over dress and food, gaming, and potential conspiracies, as well as labor. There was even possibly a new moral ethic in national legislation and local enforcement, which, in line with the laws,

152  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 disapproved of idleness and treated offenders as vagrants. It was at this time, not under the Stuarts, that “ordinary people” got behind the enforcement of these positions, and that the binaries of deserving versus undeserving, settled and rootless, productive and unproductive, were developed. Henceforth, there was a steady increase in the proportion of “moral” offenses in local courts, from 15 p.c. in the late fourteenth century to 40 p.c. in the late fifteenth, and 60 p.c. c. 1600.69 Throughout these policies, voluntary poverty was the touchstone, perhaps because it was a soft target, but also probably because the economic interests of the first two estates were so seriously engaged.

NOTES  1. Miri Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 289–90.   2. Baron, “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth in the Shaping of Trecento Humanistic Thought: The Role of Petrarch,” in his collection of essays, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanist Thought, I, 158. Note that three of the chapters in this collection represent major revisions of his paper entitled “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth as Factors in the Rise of Humanistic Thought,” Speculum 13, no. 1 (January 1938): 1–37.   3. Ibid. I, 162, 167–9, 174, 178, 195–7, 203.   4. Ibid. I, 204–6, 209–13, 217, 219, 225.   5. Ibid. I, 198–201, 206–12.   6. Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966), 13–16, 306; Skinner, Foundations, II, chs. 7–9.   7. M. Spufford, “Puritanism and Social Control?” in Anthony Fletcher and John Steenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 47–57; C. Given-Wilson, “Service, Serfdom and English Labor Legislation, 1350–1500,” in Anne Curry and Elizabeth Matthew, eds., Concepts and Patterns of Service in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000), 31–5; Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. ch. 3.   8. For recent thoughts on the “Weber thesis,” see Paul Marshall, A Kind of Life Imposed on Man: Vocation and Social Order from Tyndale to Locke (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), esp. ch. 8; Richard Whatmore, “The Weber Thesis: ‘Unproven yet Unrefuted,’ ” in William Lamont, ed., Historical Controversies and Historians (London: Routledge, 1998), 103–5.   9. W. G. Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 213–14; Siegfried Wenzel, The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967) 168, 170. 10. E. Clark, “Medieval Labor Law and English Local Courts,” American Journal of Legal History 27, no. 4 (1983); Given-Wilson, “Service, Serfdom, and English Labor Legislation, 1350–1500,” 22. 11. Two excellent surveys are Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Paul A. Fideler, Social Welfare in Pre-Industrial England (New York: Palgrave, 2006). The latter is stronger on the late medieval period.

Poverty, Wealth, and Labor  153 12. P.  A. Brunt, Social Conflicts in the Roman Republic (London: Chatto & Windus, 1971), 124–5. 13. Quoted ibid. 125, 129 (slum rents paid for the education of Cicero’s son in Athens). 14. Ibid. 125, 128. 15. Maria A. Moisa, “Fourteenth-Century Preachers’ Views of the Poor,” in Rahael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones, ed., Culture, Ideology and Politics: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 166–9. 16. Baron, “Franciscan Poverty and Civil Wealth,” 7, 11. 17. Ibid., 7, 11; Cf. Baron, In Search, I, 159–161; Skinner, Foundations, I, 43. 18. Baron, In Search, I, 205. 19. Ibid. I, 224. 20. Ibid. I, 226. 21. Baron, “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth,” 7, 11, 18–21; In Search, I, 228– 30, esp. 229. 22. Baron, In Search, I, 232–8, 241. 23. James Hankins, “Introduction,” in Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanist Thought: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. 24. Quoted Baron, “Franciscan Poverty,” 29–30. 25. Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain (London: Yale University Press, 2002), 281. 26. Derek Pearsall, “Piers Plowman and the Problem of Labor,” in Bothwell, Goldberg, & Ormrod, eds. The Problem of Labor, 123–5, 130–1. 27. Moisa, “Fourteenth-Century Preachers’ Views of the Poor,” 166, 168–9. 28. K.  B. McFarlane, John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London: English Universities Press, 1952), 101–5, 145–7. There is more information on the laity in K. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), esp. Part II, “Lollard Knights.” 29. Margaret Aston, “ ‘Caim’s Castles’: Poverty, Politics, and Disendowment,” in Barrie Dobson, ed., The Church, Politics, and Patronage in the Fifteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 45–6, 49–52. 30. Ibid. 48–9, 63. 31. Ibid. 57–9. 32. Ibid. 61–2, 66. 33. Ibid. 49ff. 34. Quoted Baron, “Franciscan Poverty,” 29–30, 36–7 (italics in original). 35. Rubin, Charity and Community, 293, 295, 298. 36. Ibid. 293–99. For the 1520s see A. L. Beier, “Foucault Redux?: The Roles of Humanism, Protestantism, and an Urban Elite in Creating the London Bridewell, 1500–1560,” in Louis A. Knafla, ed., Crime, Gender, and Sexuality in Criminal Prosecutions, Criminal Justice History: An International Annual (London: Greenwood Press, 2002), vol. 17, 33–60. 37. Duby, The Three Orders, 160. 38. Thrupp, Merchant Class, 306. 39. G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1961), 550, 554–7. Anon., The Lantern of Light (1409–1415), ed. Lilian M. Swinburn (EETS; Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 1999), 33. 40. Stephen Knight, “The Voice of Labor in Fourteenth-Century English Literature,” in Bothwell et al, The Problem of Labor, 105–6. 41. Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–1520 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 281–3; William Langland,

154  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 Piers Plowman (c. 137. 1386) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) 77–8; Thrupp, Merchant Class, 305–6. 42. Quoted Geoffrey Shepherd, “Poverty in Piers Plowman” in T. H. Aston, P. R. Coss, Christopher Dyer, and Joan Thirsk, eds., Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honor of R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 171, 174. Langland also produced a taxonomy of false beggars and criminals that prefigures similar Elizabethan ones (ibid. 173). 43. E. Clark, “Medieval Labor Law and English Local Courts,” American Journal of Legal History, 27, no. 4 (1983): 338–49; L. R. Poos, “The Social Context of Statute of Laborers Enforcement,” Law and History Review, 1, no. 1 (1983): 27–52. For a recent overview with a valuable bibliography, Judith M. Bennett, “Compulsory Service in Late Medieval England,” P&P 209 (November 2010). I am grateful to Dr. Alison Grant and Dr. Alexander Grant for bringing this article to my attention. The discussion here draws upon materials previously published in A. L. Beier, “ ‘A New Serfdom’: Labor Laws, Vagrancy Statutes, and Labor Discipline in England, 1350–1800,” in Cast Out: Vagrancy and Homelessness in Global and Historical Perspective (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). 44. B. H. Putnam, The Enforcement of the Statutes of Laborers During the First Decade After the Black Death, 1349–1359 (New York: Columbia University, 1908), 179–81; Poos, op.cit., 29, provides a convenient summary of the Ordinance; also, Alan Harding, “The Revolt against the Justices,” in The English Rising of 1381 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 185. Harding supplies the title “a new serfdom,” 187. 45. Great Britain, Rotuli Parliamentorum ut et petitiones et placita in Parliaments, 6 vols. (London: n.p. l783), 2: 234. 46. Ibid. 2:233–4. 47. Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 232. 48. Clark, “Medieval Labor Law,” 349; Rotuli Parliamentorum, 2:233. 49. Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991, 35–6 (I am grateful to Dr. Richard J. Soderlund for this reference); Rotuli Parliamentorum, 2:338–9; 586. 50. Cited by Steinfeld, op.cit., 36–7. 51. M. Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348–1500 (London: Penguin 1990), 34; Dyer, Standards of Living, 218–19; cf. Nigel R. Goose, “Wage Labor on a Kentish Manor: Meopham, 1307–75,” Archaeologia Cantiana, 92 (1976), 217. 52. Quotation from E. B. Fryde, “Peasant Rebellion and Peasant Discontents,” in E. Miller, ed., Agrarian History of England & Wales, 1348–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), vol. 3, 755; cf. M. Keen, English Society, 39; Miri Rubin, The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages (New York: Penguin, 2005), 69, who observes that the Statute of Laborers “was usually ignored, but when expedient it was applied.” 53. Bennett, “Compulsory Service in Late Medieval England,” 46. 54. Given-Wilson, “Service, Serfdom, and English Labour Legislation, 1350–1500,” in Concepts and Patterns of Service, 21, 23–5. 55. C. Dyer and Simon A. C. Penn, “Wages and Earnings in Late Medieval England: Evidence from the Enforcement of the Labor Laws,” Ec.H.R new ser., 43 no.3 (August, 1990), 359. 56. Fryde, op.cit., 756; Clark, “Medieval Labor Law,” 338–49. 57. Fryde, 756; numbers from Clark, “Medieval Labor Law,” 338; Putnam, Enforcement, 179–81.

Poverty, Wealth, and Labor  155 58. Rubin, The Hollow Crown, 69. 59. Harding, “Revolt against the Justices,” 186 and n.90. 60. Fryde, “Peasant Rebellion,” 759–60. 61. Christopher Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–1520 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 289. Richard II quoted by C. Given-Wilson, “Service, Serfdom, and English Labor Legislation,” 21. 62. R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of Henry VI (London: Ernest Benn, 1981), 638. 63. Dyer and Penn, “Wages and Earnings,” 359. 64. B. H. Putnam, Early Treatises on the Practice of the Justices of the Peace in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. 91–2; Ellen A. McArthur, “A 15th-century Assessment of Wages,” English Historical Review, 13, no.  50 (1898): 299–302. Cf. Donald Woodward, Men at Work: Laborers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450– 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 182 n. 30. 65. Dyer, Standards of Living, 219. 66. Poos, “Social Context,” 36. 67. Putnam, Enforcement, 157. 68. Harding, “Revolt against the Justices,” 187. 69. Given-Wilson, “Service, Serfdom, and English Labor Legislation,” 29–30, 34–6, esp. 36. For examples of prosecution for vagrancy of those who refused to work, see Dyer and Penn, “Wages and Earnings,” 366; R. B. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 72–4.

9 A Radical Reordering Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)

I. INTRODUCTION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY The scholarship on More’s Utopia is immense, yet it is surprisingly meager when it comes to his thinking about society and Utopia’s relation to contemporary discussions of the subject.1 One problem is that scholars have approached the book from perspectives that uproot it from its context. Kautsky and Ames sought anachronistically to place the book in a socialist tradition that did not exist until the nineteenth century. Chambers argued that Utopia belonged to a medieval perspective, that it looked backward to uncover and reform the deficiencies of contemporary Christian Europe. Hexter, while emphasizing the significance of Christian humanism in the book, could not resist the temptation anachronistically to connect Utopia to modern radicalism, including Enlightenment principles of humanitarianism, rationalism, the rule of law, and environmentalism.2 Recent scholarship has been more respectful of Utopia’s historical context. Bradshaw shrewdly pointed out that, contrary to some interpretations, Utopia does not belong to “a fantasy world of idyllic perfection, remote from and indifferent to the world of historical reality.” It may not have existed in the real world, but it certainly was real in the world of ideas.3 Utopia was not backward looking, because it did not resemble the medieval utopias such as the Land of Cockaigne, where people satiated their physical needs, especially food and drink, in feasting and gluttony. Utopia better fits the modern tradition of creating an ideal society whose members had overcome their failings and built a rationally organized state.4 Most saliently, rather than an exercise in futility or an escapist fantasy, More’s book belongs to a tradition going as far back as Socrates that sought the “best form of Commonwealth.”5 In a powerfully argued paper published in 1987, Skinner made the point that while the book was full of puzzles, ironies, and ambivalence, we should not see only “doubts and equivocations” in it. Rather, we should consider that More wished to challenge his readers to consider what might be the best Commonwealth and whether Utopia might fit the bill.6 There were ongoing discussions here with social implications. One was the debate about the contemplative versus the active life and whether it

A Radical Reordering  157 was better to be involved in politics or not. Plato favored otium, or withdrawal from political activity, until philosophers were kings and vice versa. Cicero opposed this position and took the side of negotium, or an active citizenry, which was a key influence in civic humanism. Early sixteenthcentury humanists—including Erasmus, More, and Starkey—were divided on the issue of whether men of their ilk should serve governments, and the issue was considered at length in Book I of Utopia. A second contentious point that was social in character was what constituted vera nobilitas, or “true nobility,” which was the subject of arguments from the early fifteenth century in Italy and later in England. Going back to Aristotle and then the scholastics, one view was that “high lineage and ancient wealth” or “blood and riches” were the foundations of nobility, whereas involvement in trade was likely to corrupt people. Another position, noted earlier, frequently heard among humanists of the early sixteenth century was that “virtue” should be considered more highly than birth or wealth in defining nobility. A third question debated in the period concerned, as observed in Chapter 6, was whether the community of goods could be contemplated in society. Plato praised an equal distribution of wealth, but Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas all accepted the principle of inherited wealth, even though they and the humanists doubted whether wealth alone ensured noble status.7 These are all important subjects, but they do not tell very much about the location of Utopia in English social thought in the first half of the sixteenth century. The scholarship on these questions has tended to focus on Utopia as a canonical work and to ignore its relationship to contemporaries. There is no question that, contrary to one authority’s assertions, Utopia was a breathtakingly original piece of writing. In a characteristically rambunctious paper on humanism in England, the late Regius Professor of History at Cambridge damned the book with faint praise, saying it “certainly deserves some of its fame: it lovingly presents a splendid invention, swiftly and elegantly worked out with spirit and manifest delight.”8 It secured a reputation for More with continental humanists, where it went into several editions. But in England, the professor contended, it had little impact until the Robinson translation of 1551, and by then, More was more famous as a Catholic martyr than as the author of Utopia.9 Far too much, according to this scholar, has been made of the book’s “supposedly penetrating and original analysis of contemporary life especially in England,” which, he claimed, “unoriginally concentrated on the standard complaints of the day, regularly mentioned . . . in the preambles to acts of Parliament.” Moreover, “social critics from William Langland to Edmund Dudley had thought as deeply on these matters as Thomas More” who was “but a modestly interesting thinker.” Other writers had not come up with solutions, but those proposed in Utopia were authoritarian and “involved putting mankind into universal straightjackets” because the whole system lacked “genuine liberty” and personal privacy. The professor granted that Utopians reduced the length of the workday and abolished serfdom, but claimed this

158  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 was because “every restrictive regime has always paraded such minor bonuses as sprats which draw the mackerel of independence into the net.”10 This scholar put his finger on some important questions. Just how representative of the social thinking of More’s time was Utopia? What were the original contributions in the book? What a pity, given his formidable knowledge and research skills, that this authority himself did not tackle these issues. Instead, he was content to make gratuitous and anachronistic snipes about the “totalitarian” qualities of Utopia, as well as to pick away at More’s reputation in anti-Catholic remarks about “the popish message” and “his last transformation into a budding saint.”11 An even more serious failing for a scholar of his reputation is that the professor failed to document the statements he made about More’s social analysis. With reference to Book I’s description of rural depopulation, he mentioned “the acts against depopulating enclosure” without citing a specific statute. Further, he provided no citations at all to passages in Langland or Dudley that might have supported his argument about them anticipating material in Utopia. In the case of Dudley, he was simply wrong about the facts. As we have observed in Chapter 4, Dudley wrote extensively about relations between the nobility and the commonalty, but apart from urging tenants to pay their rents, he said almost nothing about the agrarian problem and did not mention the hot issue of rural depopulation.12 Throughout his career, the Regius Professor sought to minimize the achievements of More, so that those of Thomas Cromwell, whose cause he championed as England’s first prime minister and a great statesman, would appear all the more significant. But to run a horse race between historical figures is of limited value to the cause of scholarship. When it comes to assessing the contributions of Utopia, it is positively unhelpful and misleading.13 The Regius professor was not alone in granting More a posture of splendid isolation and ignoring the social thought of his contemporaries. The standard histories of utopias and surveys of early Tudor thought pay insufficient attention to the context in which he operated. The temptation to write a gloss of how Utopian society operated has proved overwhelming.14 Yet without reference to these other, perhaps relatively minor voices, we have little idea of where More’s work stands in relation to his contemporaries. Yet we know, from Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being (1936) and from new historicism in literary criticism, that non-canonical works may provide insights not found in the canonical ones, that “second string” authors may actually be more representative of than the recognized high flyers, and that examining those on the margins may help to define what the center was.15 II. THE TEXT CONTEXTUALIZED This chapter suggests that Utopia had historical precedents and contemporary parallels, but that More’s greatest strength was to explore the

A Radical Reordering  159 ramifications of the issues he addressed and to pose more imaginative (if sometimes contrived or impractical) solutions. Others had discussed the question of vera nobilitas: we observed how Dudley criticized England’s nobility. But as Skinner suggests, no one made the connection that More did between the failings of the nobles and the question of property. In one fell swoop, by abolishing private property, the Utopians solved the problem of an irresponsible hereditary elite and made possible “the best state of a Commonwealth.”16 Similar leaps of imagination by More can be found in his treatment of the agrarian problem, voluntary poverty and labor, criminal justice, and caring for the poor. Many discussed rural depopulation, and Elton was correct to state that the Royal government took action on the matter before Utopia was published. But More was arguably the first to analyze the problem. His claims to originality on the subjects of voluntary poverty, manual labor, and criminal justice are equally strong. Unquestionably, More’s thinking about society in Utopia shares several similarities with the authors examined in Chapters 4 through 6. This should not diminish in any respect the author’s achievements. Rather, it suggests that, despite its elevated status among “great books,” Utopia raised issues that were highly contemporary. In this sense, Utopia was perhaps not wholly utopian. More began from some of the same assumptions that proponents of the body social had.17 For example, he denounced selfish individualism, which must be tempered by charity, as in the body social. He confronted the issue, as Starkey would a decade later, of whether following nature might not lead to a pursuit of personal pleasure, which, if it were a good thing, then “why not first of all ourselves, to whom we owe no less charity than to anyone else?” The answer was that charity did not begin or end at home, that it was more virtuous first to look after others: “nothing is more humane (and humanity is the virtue most proper to human beings) than to relieve the misery of others, assuage their griefs, and by removing all sadness from their lives, to restore them to enjoyment, that is, pleasure.” It was incumbent upon Utopians to avoid injury to others in pursuing self-interest: “nature repeatedly warns you not to seek your own advantage in ways that cause misfortune to others.” This injunction extended into the realm of law, because when legislation was passed by a “good king” and freely ratified by the people, it should be obeyed (quite an irony, given More’s later fatal stance on the Royal Supremacy). There was no inherent conflict between private and public interests unless the first was promoted at the expense of the second: “to pursue your own interests is prudence; to pursue the public interest as well is piety; but to pursue your own pleasure by depriving others of theirs is injustice.”18 Theorists of the body social would have found much to agree with here. They would also have concurred with the assertion in Book I’s discussion of monarchies and their revenues that rulers should not impoverish their subjects. The assertion, echoed by Armstrong, was that a country’s wealth, including the monarch’s, was its people’s prosperity. “Raphael,” the Persian visitor and arguably More’s mouthpiece in the book, quoted Cicero’s

160  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 remarks about Crassus, a member of the first Triumvirate, who maintained that a king who kept an army could never have too much gold. Because all the country’s wealth belonged to the king, he could take everything the citizens had; indeed, it was in his self-interest to do so: “riches and liberty make men less patient to endure harsh and unjust commands, whereas meager poverty blunts their spirits, makes them docile, and grinds out of the oppressed the lofty spirit of rebellion.” “Raphael” dissented from this argument and queried whether “these counsels are both dishonorable and ruinous to the king?” and asked whether the monarch’s “honor and safety alike rest on the people’s resources, rather than his own?” He affirmed, “[I]t is the king’s duty to take more care of his people’s welfare than of his own, just as it is the duty of a shepherd who cares about his job to feed the sheep rather than himself.” Contrary to Crassus, poverty did not guarantee public tranquility; the opposite was true, because “where will you find more squabbling than among beggars?” People without substance or hope were inclined to rebel rather than to submit: “who is more eager for revolution than the man who is most discontented with his present position? Who is more reckless about creating disorder than the man who knows he has nothing to lose and thinks he may have something to gain?” “Raphael” summed up by saying that “a king has no dignity when he exercises authority over beggars, only when he rules over prosperous and happy subjects.” If he could only rule by mistreatment and expropriation, he should abdicate. Anticipating the outcry in Edward VI’s reign about the debasement of the coinage, “Raphael” quoted with disapproval a French Royal councilor’s proposal that to pay for wars, the monarch should raise the value of money when he paid his debts, but then devalue it when collecting taxes: “Thus he can discharge a huge debt with a small payment, and collect a large sum when only a small one is due him.”19 In contrast, in Utopian society, there were neither taxes nor coinage, because no one paid for anything. When it came to the structure of society, Utopia, again like proponents of the body social, made extensive criticisms of the wealthy and powerful, together with strong words about the condition of the poor. More argued that the wealthy were unproductive and exploited the poor. “Raphael” was once again the vehicle for these statements, but given their currency among other writers of the period, we should not be surprised to find them in Utopia. Book II concluded with an excoriating attack upon the rich and perhaps one of the most empathetic passages about the poor in the whole of Western literature.20 “Raphael” lambasted the “so-called justice” among nonUtopians, “among whom let me perish if I can discover the slightest scrap of justice or fairness.” What justice was it, he queried, that nobles, goldsmiths, and moneylenders produced nothing “or something completely useless to the Commonwealth” and lived in luxury? He posed the rhetorical question, “Now isn’t this an unjust and ungrateful Commonwealth?” It heaped great rewards “on so-called gentry, loan sharks, and the rest of that crew, who don’t work at all or are mere parasites, purveyors of empty pleasures.” And

A Radical Reordering  161 yet, the wealthy “constantly try to grind out of the poor part of their meager pittance,” which he clamed was perpetrated “not only by private swindling but by public laws.”21 The rich not only use “sharp practice” to cling to what they have, they “oppress the poor by buying up their toil and labor as cheaply as possible.” They added insult to injury by hoarding grain in times of poor harvests, which caused thousands to die of starvation. “Raphael” reprised the widely shared suspicion of the period that if the barns of the wealthy were opened up when the famine ended, they would find sufficient supplies to have fed all those who were in need, “if only it had been divided equally among them.” Even the rich, he claimed, realized that if money were abolished, such problems would cease, that it is preferable to have enough to live rather than “an abundance of superfluities” and “to be burdened with great masses of wealth.” Enlightened self-interest, along with the blessing of Christ, would bring everyone to recognize that the Utopian way was the best. The only barrier, as preachers had declared for centuries and would continue to do so, was “one single monster, the prime plague and begetter of all others—I mean Pride.”22 Utopia shared with many others in the period—Dudley, Armstrong, Starkey—a strong antipathy to luxury, although as with other issues, the book went further in linking it to the property question. Book I’s discussion of the nobles’ bleeding of their tenants reported this was the sole example of their “tightfistedness, because they are prodigal in everything else, ready to spend their way to the poorhouse.” Further, “Raphael’s” discussion of depopulation pointed out the paradox that great poverty existed parallel with “wanton luxury.” Members of all social ranks, from noblemen’s servants to tradespeople to farmers, were “given to ostentatious dress and gluttonous eating.” They frequented alehouses, bawdy houses, cook shops, and taverns; gambled at dice, cards, and a host of other games with terrible social consequences, because “don’t all these pastimes lead their addicts straight to robbery?”23 The Utopians, by contrast, in social humanist mode, eschewed “false pleasures” and valued the life of the mind and virtue over private possessions. They poked fun at people “who are mad for jewelry and gems,” which in their society, were used as toys for children. They derided those who “think themselves finer folk because they wear finer clothes,” who were doubly wrong in believing, first, that their clothes were better than other people’s and second, in thinking that superior garments made them better than others: “Yet they act as if they were set apart by nature herself, rather than their own fantasies; they strut about and put on airs.” Wearing a “fancy suit, they think themselves entitled to honors they would never have expected if they were plainly dressed, and grow indignant if someone passes them by without showing special respect.” The Utopians held that cosmetics were “a detestable affectation.” One should not disregard “one’s natural beauty,” for they had discovered that “no physical attractions recommend a wife to her husband so effectually as truthfulness and honor.” Men might

162  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 be captivated by physical beauty, but “none are held except by virtue and compliance.” Utopians wore work clothes made of leather, and when they were not working, uncolored cloaks.24 Although their views of society differed, Dudley, Armstrong, and Smith were also critical of either the moral or the economic consequences of luxury goods, especially foreign imports and the balance of trade. In Utopia, internal trade was regulated in a kind of “moral economy” in which surpluses and shortages were ironed out by central planning and distribution. Proponents of the body social would likely have concurred with many of these ideas. In Utopia, annual meetings were held in the capital with three representatives from each city who reported to the authorities, who in turn “promptly satisfy one district’s shortage with another’s surplus.” When supplies were equalized, no one got anything in return for what were considered gifts, “and thus the whole island is like a single family.”25 The Utopians engaged in overseas trade that enriched them and was the source of their great military prowess. They exported dyestuffs, flax, grain, hides, honey, leather, livestock, tallow, timber, and wax. They again employed central planning by piling up two years of surplus before trading abroad. Even foreign trade was informed by a moral philosophy, because they rewarded the poor of the importing place with one seventh of the goods. The same spirit informed the profits of the materials exported. In return, the Utopians accepted promissory notes, which they rarely cashed, from the governments of the importers. They held on to the notes because “the Utopians think it is hardly right to take what they don’t need away from people who do need it.” When they did accept specie, it was always in previous metals, usually gold and silver, which they used to hire mercenaries in times of war, as chamber pots and “their humblest vessels,” and as jewelry to denote slave status. Here again, we have a moral perspective with which theorists of a body social could agree.26 If contemporary English social commentary provided a context for Utopia, so did contemporary Europe. We have already observed how the issue of the community of goods dated from the time of Plato and was debated by Aristotle and Aquinas. Utopia strongly argued in favor of this system, as we will see. Whether or not it was a blueprint for England and Europe, it provided a powerful rhetorical device to attack a multitude of contemporary social issues, including the power of the Church and the nobility, economic disparities, the exploitation of the working poor, and how wealth should be distributed.27 Another subject of pan-European interest was the mercenary army. In The Prince (1513), Machiavelli is well known to have rejected the use of mercenaries as likely to lead to the subjugation of states to mercenary leaders, “who in their time were the masters of Italy.” In The Discourses (1531), he elaborated on the point, adding that non-native “auxiliaries” sent to a community, often by a friendly power, ended up occupying and dominating the place, which lost its independence as a result. Far preferable in virtually all circumstances was the use of native, volunteer troops.28 Sebastian Franck

A Radical Reordering  163 made similar complaints about the Landsknechte or German mercenaries in 1531, calling them a “plague and pestilence on the entire world” and a “useless tribe, no better than monks and priests.” He too preferred the native born who fought for love of country rather than cash.29 More was just as excoriating about mercenaries as Machiavelli and Franck, observing how there were throngs of foreign ones in France, which were even more disruptive than bands of retainers, and so the country “learned to her cost how pernicious it is to feed such beasts.”30 The nobility also came in for criticisms that paralleled More’s in Utopia. Machiavelli observed sharp social differences between the nobles and the common people and was convinced the former were the more dangerous to a prince. He pointed out the dilemma of the ruler caught between the two: [I]t is impossible to satisfy the nobles honorably, without doing violence to the interests of others. . . . The people are more honest in their intentions than the nobles are, because the latter want to oppress the people, whereas they want only not to be oppressed. A prince could never resist “a hostile people: there are too many of them.” But he could “make himself safe against the nobles, who are few.” The worst that could happen with a hostile populace was that they would desert him. As for the nobles, they would actively oppose him because they “have more foresight and are more astute, they always act in time to safeguard their interests, and they take sides with the one whom they expect to win.” There were three kinds of nobles: those that become dependent and must be cherished, although their rewards must not become rapacious, those who remain independent, some of whom can be used for counsel, and others of whom “for reasons of ambition” must be safeguarded against.31 A final piece of European context for Utopia was patriarchalism, which burgeoned as a model for society and government during the sixteenth century. Utopian society was organized along the lines of the patriarchal household, much like More’s own, but with significant participation by women.32 This was apparently a heartfelt position for More. He expressed his “ardent desire” to see his wife and children, from whom he had been separated for four months on ambassadorial business, during which he had written Utopia. Participation in family life was also a management issue. In an introductory letter to fellow humanist Peter Giles, More described how when he returned home he talked with his wife, children, and servants: “all these matters I consider part of my business, since they have to be done unless a man wants to be a stranger in his own house.” But the master had to be somewhat aloof and must not “spoil them with familiarity, or by overindulgence turn the servants into his masters.”33 Patriarchy also involved educational responsibilities and opportunities for a humanist such as More. The institution was also common among the myriad groups and authors who led the “radical Reformation” on the continent, to whom More was hostile.

164  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 Although radicals called for numerous institutional reforms in both Church and state, with few exceptions, their “central social assumption . . . was of a male-dominated polity composed of modestly propertied householders— the ‘common man’ as the term was then used.” Women and those without property were outside even the most radically reformed systems.34 III. THE BODY OF THE THREE ESTATES ANATOMIZED Utopia targeted all three orders with criticisms, especially the nobility. Seemingly, the book went easier on the clergy, which may be a pointer to the author’s real loyalties, and which set him apart from Armstrong and the “Commonwealth-men,” who tended to be evangelical critics of the priesthood regarding monastic vows, celibacy, and clerical wealth. More’s critique of the Church focused less on theology than on civic matters, but in Book II, even he broke with celibacy, Church wealth, and voluntary poverty. In the discussion of rural depopulation, Utopia laid the chief blame at the door of the nobility and gentry, but the passage also alluded to the involvement of “some abbots” of monasteries, while adding that they were “otherwise holy men . . .”. Following the line of social humanists, Utopia attacked the principle of voluntary poverty among clerics, although he retained the principle of monasticism. In discussing the labor system in Utopia, Book II chided the idle in contemporary Europe, who, it stated, included “a great lazy gang of priests and so-called religious men.” One of the guests at the Morton dinner party told a mendicant priest, “[Y]ou friars are the greatest vagabonds of all.”35 In Utopian society, the priesthood played prominent roles, although their authority was stripped down compared to the early sixteenth-century Church. There were two kinds of clerics who roughly correspond to the regular and secular; the latter’s right to marry was the key difference. Sir Thomas observed with irony that priests in Utopia were “of great holiness and therefore very few.” They led communities in worship, legislated religious practices, censored public morals, and taught the young. They had the authority of excommunication, although the ruler and magistrates were in charge of punishment. In Utopian society, there was a single high priest, but More made no mention of a hierarchy of bishops and cardinals. Again breaking radically with contemporary practices, priests were elected by popular vote.36 Most revolutionary of all, Utopia had no official faith, and people were free to worship the planets or a historical personage notable for “virtue or glory . . .”. The only common element in their religions was monotheism, although more and more of them were inclining towards Christianity. As in social humanist thought, where religions were concerned, the authorities’ chief concern was to maintain public order. In one example, a Christian who was overly zealous in propagating the faith was arrested and exiled for condemning non-Christians as profane and sacrilegious. The charge against him was “creating a public disorder . . .”. In similar vein, the original King

A Radical Reordering  165 Utopus conquered the island because its inhabitants were divided over religion. Once victorious, he decreed complete toleration “for the sake of peace, which he saw was being destroyed by constant quarrels and implacable hatreds . . .”.37 Of course, it is ironic that just twenty years after Utopia’s publication, the regular clergy were abolished in England, and that by the 1540s, evangelicals themselves were having to defend their estates against the assaults of predatory politicians. Sir Thomas might have wanted fewer and holier clergy, but not in the manner that Henrician and Edwardian governments would conduct business after his execution.38 Utopia targeted the nobility and gentry for abusing their economic positions. A number of authorities cite More’s low opinion of the nobility. Manuel wrote that “Utopia is pointedly anti-feudal—there are no great baronial estates or manors”; Logan added that “as a result of poor economic and educational arrangements, the European ruling class is corrupt” and incapable of following the advice of political philosophers.39 Utopia was certainly not alone in adopting a critical posture regarding noble status. Machiavelli’s criticisms were more political than social, although the opposition of the nobles and commonalty certainly had a social dimension. In the English context, one has no difficulty finding harsh intonations against the landed classes by the “Commonwealth-men”—Latimer’s rant against “steppe lords” springs to mind40—but what distinguished Utopia was a myriad of things. It was one of the earliest attacks, it was a bestseller, it used language whose vehemence was quite rare, and it proposed an imaginative and radical solution. The first blandishments began in Book I  during a dinner with Cardinal Morton, when “Raphael” debated a lawyer about the merits of capital punishment and turned the discussion to the question of noble rank and its social and economic ramifications. The lawyer took the line that the execution of felons for theft was a good policy, while “Raphael” dissented, arguing that most thieves were unemployed or disabled soldiers who were starving. The origins of the problem, he argued, lay in the unequal relationship between the landed elites and their subordinates, including both tenants and retainers. “Raphael” critiqued the idleness of the landed elites as setting a bad example and for operating a system that was inherently flawed. He cited “a great many noblemen who live idly like drones off the labor of others, their tenants whom they bleed white by constantly raising their rents.” He observed gentlemen who “drag around with them a great train of idle servants, who have never learned any trade by which they could make a living.” When the master died or servants became ill, the retainers were let go, “for lords would rather support idlers than invalids”; moreover, the heir of a deceased lord would be “unable to maintain as big a household as his father had, at least at first.” “Raphael” also pilloried the landed for depopulating villages through the expansion of sheep farming, the raising of rents, and the privatizing of common fields. He adduced a geographical and economic argument, asserting that “in whatever parts of the land sheep yield the finest and thus the most expensive wool, there the nobility and gentry . . . are not content with the old rents . . .”. The upshot

166  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 was that “they leave no land free for the plough: they enclose every acre for pasture; they destroy houses and abolish towns [read villages], keeping only the churches—and those for sheep-barns.” These “worthy men” also possessed game parks and forests, so that they “turn all human habitations and cultivated fields back to wilderness.” Just “one greedy, insatiable glutton, a frightful plague to his native country, may enclose many thousands of acres within a single hedge,” with dreadful social consequences for tenants. Another result was the inflation of the prices of foodstuffs, wool, and cattle, because the “rich men” raised lambs in preference to calves.41 Book II questioned the very concept of hereditary noble status. The assault began in the discussion of the work regime in Utopia, which included six hours of labor a day, which might have been expected to cause shortages. Not so, “Raphael” reported, because unlike other places, no one was idle. Elsewhere (surely referring to Europe), those who did not work included “all the rich, especially the landlords, who are commonly called gentlemen and nobility.” In addition, there were “their retainers, that mob of swaggering bullies.” In a later discussion of “false pleasures,” Book II derided the ceremonies and honors associated with noble rank and blood. What pleasure can one derive, it asked, “from someone’s bent knee or bared head? Will the creaks in your own knees be eased thereby, or the madness in your head?” It poked fun at noble preoccupation with bloodlines, the ignorant bliss of “men who run mad with delight over their own blue blood, flatter themselves on their nobility, and gloat over all their rich ancestors . . . and all their ancient family estates.”42 Book II’s final comments again mocked ancestry. It contrasted the Utopian achievement of true equality: “in Utopia no men are poor, no men are beggars, and though no man owns anything, everyone is rich.” As a result, people could feel secure about themselves and their families, even including “that whole long line of descendants that the gentry are so fond of contemplating.”43 The Utopians’ rejection of the concept of noble ranks and titles must stand as one of the most radical of their positions, and it places Utopia at the forefront of discussions of true nobility in the first half of the sixteenth century. Although many advocates of the body social were critical of the nobility, none questioned the principle of hereditary rank; most actually endorsed it, however regretfully, as part and parcel of the world after the Fall. Dudley would have reformed the aristocracy through education, but he did not question their existence. Armstrong made jibes at the nobles for not fulfilling their traditional duties of mutual obligation and urged them to encourage tillage of the land, but generally endorsed their right to positions of privilege. The “Commonwealth-men” of the 1540s and ’50s, while deprecating the aristocracy as landlords and misers, maintained the principle of nobility and hotly denied questioning it. No proponent of the body social could begin to rival the ferocity of Utopia’s assault on the institution of hereditary position. Utopia gave less space to criticisms of the third estate. The sole exceptions were civic life, probably inspired by More’s London background,44

A Radical Reordering  167 and the criminal and the poor. It is true that goldsmiths and moneylenders briefly featured in the book’s attacks, but merchants got off lightly compared to the critiques by Armstrong and the “Commonwealth-men.” But lawyers, who were frequent targets in the Commonwealth literature, came in for a lambasting in Utopia. It was a hard-nosed lawyer at the start of Book I who began the debate with “Raphael” concerning capital punishment for thieves, which then led to the discussion of the nobility and its failings. Utopia portrayed the lawyer in a negative light for praising the “rigid execution of justice” and for defending the retainers of great noblemen, however idle and criminal, on the grounds they were needed to fight wars. After “Raphael” replied to him and made a case against a social system that required nobles and retainers, the lawyer began to answer, “choosing the solemn style of disputants who are better at summing up than replying, and who like to show off their memory.” But before the pedant could launch into this point, Cardinal Morton shushed him and postponed the debate, which was in fact never rejoined.45 In Utopia, there were no lawyers, because they had few laws. In other countries, laws were “too many to be read or too obscure for anyone to understand,” and in any case, lawyers “manipulate cases and multiply quibbles,” but in Utopia, all people pleaded their own cases because the laws were minimal and simple so that everyone could understand them. Because there was no legislation, “which can be interpreted only by devious minds after endless disputes,” there was no need for “tricky instructions from a lawyer” or other “legal chicanery . . .”.46 There is an irony here, of course, because More the author was a lawyer and undersheriff of London, but the abolition of the legal profession in Utopia was entirely consistent with the rest of its social system. In Book I, “Raphael” developed a causal analysis of crime, which he argued resulted from the unstable relationship between lords and retainers. The same instability characterized lord-tenant relations, leading to hardship and, ultimately, more crimes. He described tenants who were “dismissed and compelled, by trickery or brute force or constant harassment, to sell their belongings” for a pittance because they had to depart immediately. When their money was gone, “what remains for them but to steal, and so be hanged—justly, you’d say [a shot at the unsympathetic lawyer]—or to wander and beg? And yet if they go tramping, they are jailed as idle vagrants.” They would gladly work, but can find none because there was “no need for farm labor, in which they have been trained, when there is no land left to be ploughed.” The author saw that there were significant savings in overheads, especially labor costs, when pastoral farming replaced tillage: a single “herdsman or shepherd can look after a flock of beasts large enough to stock an area that would require many hands if it were to be ploughed and sowed.”47 In the section on the poor that concludes Book II, the author developed an analysis of the world of labor that included the conditions in which people worked, their wages, and the problems of illness and old age. In contrast to the rich, “Raphael” questioned the justice of artisans, laborers,

168  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 and farmers working “so hard and so constantly that even beasts of burden would scarcely endure it; and this work of theirs is so necessary that no Commonwealth could survive for a year without it?” They had “so meager a living and lead such miserable lives that beasts would really seem to be better off.” Animals did not have to work unremittingly and probably enjoyed better food. In fact, they were better off because they did not have to be concerned about the future. Working people, by contrast, had daily wages that were “inadequate even for present needs,” allowing “no possible chance of their saving for their declining years.” Society made no provision for the welfare of workers, “without whom the common-wealth would simply cease to exist.” After their labors have worn them out “by age, sickness and utter destitution, then the thankless Commonwealth, forgetting all their pains and services, throws them out to die a miserable death.” Getting rid of money and property, as in Utopia, would eliminate crime and “fear, anxiety, worry, toil and sleepless nights. Poverty, which seems to need money more than anything else, would vanish if money were entirely done away with.”48 Despite its understanding of the causes of hardship, we should not assume that Utopia was simply another version of what advocates of the body social would later say. Unlike those authors, More questioned the assumption inherent in the principle of mutual obligation that the different estates would, or even could, look after one another. According to “Raphael,” there was no permanent fix for poverty if private property ruled. Even legislation governing the amount of wealth any one person could hold was unlikely to work. All the law could do was keep a chronically sick patient alive without curing him or her. The social ills would remain even though they could be mitigated for a time, because “so long as private property remains, there is no hope at all of effecting a cure and restoring society to good health.” Invoking the body image so dear to the organic school, “Raphael” turned it on its head and maintained it was dysfunctional because “while you try to cure one part, you aggravate the disease in other parts” and that “suppressing one symptom causes another to break out, since you cannot give something to one man without taking it away from someone else.” Society did not naturally hang together, and the reason was the sickness of private property: “the one and only path to the welfare of all lies through equality of possessions.” Once property belonged to individuals, however abundant, “every man tries to get as much as he can for his own exclusive use, a handful of men end up sharing the whole pile, and the rest are left in poverty.” The result was a polarization of society into two groups “whose fortunes ought to be interchanged: the rich are rapacious, wicked and useless, while the poor are unassuming, modest men, who work hard more for the benefit of the public than of themselves.”49 Here, in one fell swoop, Utopia destroyed the notion of organic unity in society and replaced it with social divisions and injustices. The “Thomas More” character protested against the community of goods, arguing that no one would work if there were no prospect of gain, that there would be perpetual conflict if no

A Radical Reordering  169 one could claim the right to property. Yet, “More” did not produce an alternative social scheme, even though the body social was available, whereas Thomas More the author did offer a new model of society.50 IV. A NEW MODEL OF SOCIETY?

A.  The Triumph of Virtue and Education What held society together, according to Utopia, was something quite different from functions, mutual obligations, and hierarchy. It was the social humanist’s moral philosophy, which centered on the concept of virtue, which the book applied to all levels of society, even to the criminal and the poor. In the dinner party conversations about crime and punishment with Cardinal Morton, “Raphael” cited examples of the moral improvement of convicts. They were treated so well that “they necessarily become good, and they have the rest of their lives to atone for the wrong they have done.” If a prisoner accepted punishment “in a spirit of patient obedience, and gives promise of future good conduct,” he could be pardoned as a reward. The implication was that if criminals could be saved, so certainly could the wealthy.51 In Book II, More extended the injunctions to pursue virtue to the entire population, as the Utopians already had. He described how they took the Epicurean position that happiness arose from “good and honest pleasure” and that it was virtue or “living according to nature” that provided the guidelines. The first rule of nature was to worship a supreme being. The second was “to lead a life as free of anxiety and as full of joy as possible, and to help all one’s fellow men towards that end.” Charity derived from subscribing to such principles rather than to the interdependent relations of three estates. This was because “nothing is more humane (and humanity is the virtue most proper to human beings) than to relieve the misery of others, assuage their griefs, and by removing all sadness from their lives, to restore them to enjoyment, that is, pleasure.” The negative side of the seeking of pleasure was selfishness, and so the author “warns you not to seek your own advantage in ways that cause misfortune to others.”52 The key to achieving virtue and virtuous relationships was education. Utopia’s constitution was built upon the principle that the life of the mind was a priority. Where work was concerned, when “public needs permit, all citizens should be free to withdraw as much time as possible from the service of the body and devote themselves to the freedom and culture of the mind.” Utopians rejected worshiping wealth “partly from instruction and the reading of good books.” Some of the Utopians were exempted from manual labor “so that they may devote themselves to study” with the recommendation of their priests and local officials. Upward social mobility was possible for all through education. Laborers could pursue studies during leisure time and qualify for exemption from laboring and be “promoted to the order of learned men” and become ambassadors, priests, and other officials. In

170  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 Utopia, “every child gets an introduction to good literature, and throughout their lives many people, men and women alike, spend their free time in reading.” Every lunch and supper began with a reading “on a moral topic,” and the elders led discussions of topics, while encouraging the young to participate, as was supposedly the practice in More’s Chelsea household. The reason was that the Utopians stressed the value of “pleasures of the mind” and “knowledge and the delight that arises from contemplating the truth . . .”.53 Utopia went beyond moral and pedagogical precepts to describe the social and economic organization of the country. Education held out two promises, the book suggested. One was that the common weal would be improved if governments took the advice of the best educated and most experienced, such as “Raphael”; that is, the discussion of the best form of rule. Second, serving princes held out the prospect of self-advancement. The “Peter Giles” character encouraged “Raphael” to counsel governments because “thus you might advance your own interest agreeably and be of great use at the same time to all your relatives and friends” and also please yourself. “Raphael” demurred, but the idea of upward social mobility for the educated servants of governments was a common theme of social humanist literature, as will be seen in the next two chapters. More himself, of course, overcame the objections of “Raphael” and Erasmus to government service and joined Henry VIII’s government within months of Utopia’s publication.54

B. Patriarchy and the Family Utopian society was patriarchal, but women shared responsibilities and authority with men. Rural households contained at minimum 40 men and women and were headed by a master and a mistress, who were “serious and mature persons.” In the dining halls, the household head and his wife sat at the middle of the first table in the highest places. Power was also shared in a system of passports, which were required of anyone wishing to travel around the district where he lived. He had to have a letter from the government, but must also receive permission from his father and his wife. Otherwise, he was liable to punishment as a runaway for a first offense, enslavement in the case of a second. Women worked in both agriculture and trades, although “as the weaker sex” they were said to practice the “lighter crafts . . .”.55 Women could also serve as priests when they were widowed and elderly, although it rarely happened. The wives of priests were stated to be “the most important women in the whole country” because the priesthood was held in such high regard. Women could even serve in war. Like the men, they participated in “vigorous military training” on appointed days and had the option to take part in battles. No one was forced to fight in a foreign war, but women were allowed to “stand shoulder to shoulder in the line of battle” along with children and blood and marriage relatives. The reasoning was that “those who by nature have most reason to help one another may be closest at hand for mutual support.”56

A Radical Reordering  171 There were further provisions for women involving literacy, childcare, and marital regulations. Women were expected to be able to read. They planned, prepared, and cooked meals, although slaves “do all the particularly dirty and heavy chores.” There were special provisions for pregnant women in the dining halls, who were seated away from the walls so they could leave without disturbing others if they experienced “a sudden qualm or pain . . .”. Those unable to nurse their babies were given official assistance to find a replacement. The rule was that young women left their families upon marriage and moved into their husbands’ domiciles. Women were allowed to marry from the age of 18, and men from 22. Premarital sex was severely punished by a prohibition of marriage unless the offender was pardoned. Under the supervision of respectable parties, potential partners were allowed to see the other naked to avoid “deception.” Divorce was permitted for both parties in the case of adultery “or for intolerably offensive behavior.” Adulterers were enslaved.57 Obviously, women were not placed in positions of absolute equality in Utopia, but their empowerment, such as it was, reflected a humanist position favoring equal access to education for both sexes that originated with Bruni in Florence and in which More evidently shared.58 There were also provisions governing children in Utopia. Females left the household upon marriage, while male children remained and were subject to the rule of the eldest male “unless his mind has started to fail, in which case the next oldest takes his place.” Infants and children under the age of five had separate dining halls where nursemaids cared for them “with a plentiful supply of cradles, clean water and a warm fire.” Those over five and the unmarried waited on tables, or if too young for the job, “stand by in absolute silence.” In the halls, the masters and mistresses were seated among the young to inhibit “improper freedom of words or gestures . . .”.59

C. Poverty and Wealth Utopia broke with the traditional language of social obligation and took up a novel line of thinking from the social humanism of the Florentine Renaissance, which praised wealth and critiqued poverty, as indicated in Chapter 8.60 Championing the role of wealth in civic life might seem to contradict many of the positions taken in Utopia concerning the proud arrogance of noble power, its abuses in regard to tenants and servants, and its wallowing in idleness and luxury. But it is not that there was no wealth in the Utopian Commonwealth. Rather it was that, unlike contemporary Europe, it was equally distributed or shared, e.g., in the responsibility to labor. Moreover, the important feature of this arrangement was that it produced a social and political system that enjoyed low levels of crime, conflict, and instability, and high levels of civic participation, education, religious worship, and virtuous behavior. In the Utopian scheme, the key to these achievements was the equal distribution of wealth and work. Without them, “Raphael”

172  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 argued, we would be back in early sixteenth Europe.61 That More placed the issue of wealth at the forefront of the discussion put him in a position that was close to those of the civic and social humanists, as well as to his mid-fifteenth century compatriot Pecock and to his contemporary and friend Erasmus, both of whom argued that one must teach the wealthy, not to scorn wealth, but to make it a vehicle for virtue. Utopia, it seems, was doing no less.62

D. Obligatory Labor In the context of the Utopian economy, it is worth noticing the place of manual labor, which, with only a few exceptions, all members of society were expected to perform. As observed in Chapter 8, legislation in the fourteenth century had created a universal obligation to labor, at least for those without independent means. Dovetailing with this injunction, humanists critiqued voluntary poverty. Thomas More extended the responsibility to work to everyone, even including priests, nobles, retainers, women, and children. In his colorful words, those conscripted included “a great lazy gang of priests and so-called religious men”; “the rich, especially the landlords, who are commonly called gentlemen and nobility”; “their retainers, that mob of swaggering bullies”; and “the sturdy and lusty beggars who go about feigning some disease as an excuse for their idleness.” Utopia was a productive society because everyone worked. The only exemptions were given to scholars, which could be revoked if they underperformed, and to the ruling elites, who nevertheless labored in order to “set a good example to their fellow citizens.”63 With the abolition of private property, the new basis of wealth in Utopia was human labor, which meant that “the behavior of all free citizens in Utopia has been ennobled. There are no feudal lords who live by the sword and there is no riffraff.”64 For anyone seeking to find evidence of a work ethic in European history, Utopia appears to provide a prototype. Everyone was required to work in the agricultural sector, including women. Children were taught farming in schools and through field trips, where they not only observed but actually participated in the work. In addition, everyone learned a craft, including woolen and linen production, masonry, metalwork, and carpentry. Two thirds of all workers alternated every two years between town and country, so that no one was performing the heavy labor of farming all the time.65 The flip side of the acceptance of the humanists’ role of wealth in society and government was their critique of voluntary poverty. We should be clear from the outset that criticisms of poverty were not limited to those who saw positive virtue in wealth. Early anti-clericals and evangelicals in England reviled what they considered to be the false poverty of the clergy. Simon Fish’s vituperative tract of 1529 called them “strong, puissant, and counterfeit holy, and idle, beggars and vagabonds, which, since the time of their first entry by all the craft and wiliness of Satan, are now increased under your sight, not only into a great number, but also into a kingdom.”66

A Radical Reordering  173

E. The Criminal and Poor Beginning in the second half of the fifteenth century in England, numerous Royal Proclamations were issued and Acts of Parliament passed that denounced and legislated against idle “vagabonds” and false beggars.67 Virtually at the same moment that More was writing his book, the City of London was conducting an overhaul of its policing of vagrants and its provision for the “true” or involuntary poor.68 In the 1540s, the City of London took the initiative to re-establish its medieval hospitals and created the new institution of Bridewell, which was designed to reform criminals (mainly vagabonds and prostitutes). The ideas behind Bridewell were distinctly social and humanist—to reform the city’s criminals through punishment and training—while those who carried out the foundation were City magistrates with evangelical leanings.69 Despite the precedents and parallels, Utopia still undeniably had something unique to say about the criminal and the pauper. Book I began with a consideration of serving princes and “Raphael’s” criticisms of their bellicose policies, but soon turned to the debate with the lawyer about the capital punishment of thieves. The lawyer expressed amazement, given the high numbers of executions, “how so many thieves sprang up everywhere when so few of them escaped hanging.” “Raphael” riposted that hanging “goes beyond the call of justice, and is not in any case for the public good.” The penalty was too rigorous, and yet it did not deter thieves because if their crimes were caused by need, “no punishment however severe can restrain men from robbery when they have no other way to eat.” It was absurd to put thieves to death, because if the penalty was the same as for murder, “the thief will be encouraged to kill the victim whom otherwise he would only have robbed.” The punishment being the same, “murder is safer, since one conceals both crimes by killing the witness.” As regards castoff retainers of the nobility, their crimes, too, arose from need. When they fell ill or the master died, “those who are turned out soon set about starving, unless they set about stealing. What else can they do?” When a vagrant life eroded their health, pinching their faces and wrecking their apparel, what lord would engage them? Farmers could not employ them, because retainers were “raised softly to idle pleasures . . . used to swaggering about like a bully with sword and buckler,” and likely to lord it over the neighborhood. As noted earlier, “Raphael” reported that even honest tenants dismissed because of rural depopulation were likely to turn to crime.70 The Utopian remedies for crime and poverty involved the social humanists’ pursuit of virtue through the reform of property rights, employment, and education. The Utopians abolished “not only money but with it greed!” and swept away problems of crime and poverty: What a mass of trouble was cut away by that one step! What a thicket of crime was uprooted! Everyone knows that if money were abolished, fraud, theft, robbery, quarrels, brawls, seditions, murders, treasons,

174  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 poisonings and a whole set of crimes which are avenged but not prevented by the hangman would at once die out. If money disappeared, so would fear, anxiety, worry, toil and sleepless nights. Even poverty, which seems to need money more than anything else, would vanish if money were entirely done away with.71 This was the summary of the Utopian social system at the end of Book II. Book I also proposed solutions to crime and poverty that involved rehabilitation through employment. The crux of the issue, it stated, was that working would diminish theft and obviate the need to hang thieves: “Severe and terrible punishments are enacted for theft, when it would be much better to enable every man to earn his own living, instead of being driven to the awful necessity of stealing and then dying for it.” The gentry’s armed retainers would actually be “weakened if they were taught practical crafts to earn their living and trained to manly labor,” and then would not terrorize their fellow citizens. To solve poverty, the answer was to “[l]et fewer people be brought up in idleness. Let agriculture be restored, and the wool-manufacture revived, so there will be useful work for those now idle,” including the poor, who are already thieves or vagabonds likely to offend in the future.72 Utopia went well beyond these generalities in discussing the questions of crime and the poor. This was true of Book II, where the author described the systems used in Utopia, but also in several pages in the middle of Book I that scholars have largely ignored. In the latter section, the author discussed possible provisions in a criminal justice system for thieves and vagrants and in a relief system for the old and sick. In the context of Utopia, these passages were connected to larger issues of “true nobility” and the issue of private property. The wider contemporary context was one in which judicial and welfare systems were discussed since the fourteenth century, particularly where poverty was claimed as the cause of crime, but also as an issue of false begging, that is, mendicancy by the able-bodied, friars, and ex-military personnel. These questions in turn fed wider issues of “good works,” the definition of charity, the nature of Christian and social obligation, and the behavior that was expected of believers and citizens. Utopian writers, theologians, city-states, and Royal governments were all preoccupied with these issues and were starting to take action on them.73 One scholar alleged that Utopia just served up standard fare in its social analysis, but where criminal justice and the poor were concerned, nothing could be further from the truth.74 In Book I, the author laid out a plan that would have obviated the need for capital punishment for thieves and would have reformed perpetrators in a new kind of penal system. The same passage contained a suggestion favoring government welfare for the sick and elderly. Although they had roots in previous centuries, such ideas were still novel in the Europe of 1516. The section on thieves was set in “Raphael’s” narrative in a place in Persia, where thieves had to make restitution to their victims and then serve terms of hard labor. They were virtual slaves during their

A Radical Reordering  175 terms, but they were released after they “become good” and were “pardoned as a reward for submissive behavior.” They were not imprisoned except at night, nor were they shackled, but they were whipped if they were dilatory. They worked on “public projects” and were “workers for the Commonwealth,” were well fed and supported either by alms or taxation, but private persons could hire them at a slightly lower rate than for a free laborer, and any profits went into the public purse. So that they could be identified and never escape, they wore uniforms with badges, had their hair trimmed, and a tip of an ear cut off. As a result, the slaves were free to move about the country, because their appearance made them easily identified. They were also forbidden to meet or speak with one another. This Persian state did use the death penalty against anyone who plotted to escape or who threw away their badge or took up weapons. The ultimate goal was the humanist’s fondest dream: “the aim of the punishment is to destroy vices and save men.” The fictional “Cardinal Morton” in Utopia said he thought it was a good idea to try the system in England, possibly through a temporary Royal reprieve for the condemned and “thus see how the plan worked.” If it did, it could be legislated into law; if it did not, offenders could still be executed. The Cardinal even thought the plan should be extended to cover vagabonds who, despite legislation, were proving an intractable problem.75 The Persian penal system had some obvious limitations. By putting the recalcitrant to death, it contradicted “Raphael’s” position that it was possible to get rid of capital punishment. Other ideas, such as allowing them to roam freely except at night and forbidding them from communing with one another, seem, to a modern eye, absurdly unrealistic. The Utopian judicial system had similar quirks. Slavery, which was illegal in England, was also the penalty for serious crime, including running away and traveling without a passport. A second offense for adultery brought the death penalty—again in contradiction of “Raphael’s” observations—and rebellious slaves were to be “put instantly to death, like savage beasts which neither bars nor chains can tame.” The armies of defeated enemies were also enslaved. Idleness, jewelry, cosmetics, prostitution, alcohol, hunting, and gambling were all banned in Utopia. The regulation of behavior began and extended beyond the grave. If anyone denied that in the afterlife, “vices will be punished and virtue rewarded,” their souls would be considered to have sunk “to the base level of a beast’s wretched body” and they would be banned from civil society.76 Despite their eccentricities, the Persian and Utopian judicial systems should not be dismissed out of hand. Their systems of forced labor and attempted reform of convicts found their way into sixteenth-century legislation and institutions. An Act of Parliament of 1547 specified temporary slavery for vagabonds, and even though it was apparently never enforced, it was one of several laws that required the convicts to do hard labor.77 As noted, a regime of forced labor was actually instituted in a revolutionary institution in London just thirty-six years after Utopia was published: Bridewell. Inmates, as in the Persian example, were sometimes employed

176  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 on public works, and Bridewell became the model for similar institutions, called bridewells and later workhouses, that proliferated in the British Isles and ultimately spread abroad to British colonies right up to the nineteenth century.78 Clipping inmates’ hair, disfiguring their bodies, and making the poor wear badges were practiced in London’s Bridewell.79 It is not germane or necessary to look for direct links between Utopia and the planning and execution of such institutional developments, but it is worth noting that the book was probably the first in England to articulate these ideas, which shows that the humanistic belief in “education” extended far beyond the library and study to encompass the reform of people’s characters, whether they were a noble or a thief, hence the appropriateness of the term “social humanist”.

F. Relieving the Poor Both books of Utopia contained suggestions for the relief of the poor that had previously not been articulated and that set the stage for statutory provision. After the discussion of criminal justice in Book I, one of the assembled company remarked, “ ‘Well, Raphael has taken care of the thieves, and the Cardinal of the vagabonds, so now all we have to do is take care of the poor, whom sickness or old age has kept from earning a living.’ ” This sparked a dialogue between a friar and someone referred to as both a fool and a parasite, in which the latter proposed placing beggars in Benedictine monasteries as lay brothers, to which the friar replied that his branch of the regular clergy would also have to be considered. The fool/parasite riposted that the Cardinal had already taken care of friars “when he said vagabonds should be arrested and put to work, for you friars are the greatest vagabonds of all.”80 The rhetoric in this jocular but barbed interchange should not detract from the fact that the anonymous member of the group had actually put a serious proposition on the table, which entailed official action to establish statutory welfare, a development that actually took place within two decades with the sponsorship of Henry VIII himself.81 The Utopians, too, provided for the needy. Of course, because there existed a community of goods and no inequality, that provision did not need to be extensive. There was a considerable network of hospitals for the sickly. Each city had four hospitals (a reference, perhaps, to London’s medieval institutions), which were built outside the walls and were so large they resembled “little towns.” They were so sizeable in order to avoid causing discomfort by packing people together, but also to avoid contagion. The physicians were well trained and constantly present, so none in a city “would not rather be treated for an illness at the hospital than at home.”82 The elderly were treated with great respect in Utopia, for in the communal dining halls, they were served first and were given the best food, although many of them would share the less plentiful “delicacies” with others.83

A Radical Reordering  177 V. CONCLUSIONS The character “Thomas More” mused at the end of Book II about the Utopian system that his “chief objection was to the basis of their whole system, that is, their communal living and their moneyless economy. This one thing alone subverts all the nobility, magnificence, splendor and majesty which (in the popular view) are the true ornaments and glory of any Commonwealth.” This statement by the author More might seem ambiguous, but Skinner has provided an elegantly simple resolution. Instead of reading it as a rejection of the Utopian order, Skinner argues that the passage says nothing of the kind; rather, that it simply challenges “the popular view” of how society is or should be ordered. Should we be surprised that the elite humanist More might express skepticism about the “popular view”? Not at all, and Skinner points out that such doubting was the norm among humanists, who pretty universally believed that the concept of nobility should be redefined to be based upon virtue rather than heredity and broad acres, a point that will be analyzed in the following chapters on Elyot, Morison, and Starkey.84 This does not mean that the author More was endorsing Utopian communism; just that his character in the book was prepared, if only for rhetorical purposes, to entertain challenges to the conventional view of society. It is also worth noticing the final sentence in the book by the “Thomas More” character, which really is ambiguous: Meanwhile, while I can hardly agree with everything he said (though he is a man of unquestionable learning and enormous experience of human affairs), yet I freely confess that in the Utopian Commonwealth there are many features that in our own societies I would like rather than expect to see.85 This statement appears to say that the character “Thomas More” would accept some of the reforms of the Utopians, so one might see here a “middle way” in which educational, labor, and social reforms were acceptable to the “real” More, without the institution of communism. But this is perhaps an exceptionally coy interpretation, considering that the book clearly and extensively indicates that public ownership is the core organizing principle of the Utopian order. Where the abolition of property is concerned, it is inherently unlikely, as the saying goes, that one can ever be just a little bit pregnant. The systems of criminal justice and welfare discussed in Utopia should not be considered oddball blueprints considering the actual institutional developments of the sixteenth century. There were too many other voices articulating the same thoughts in the period to claim a unique position for the book. It is possible, however, to see in Utopia a rethinking of the theory of a body social held together by mutual obligation. In the case of the nobility and their retainers, it was assumed the relationship was low on loyalty,

178  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 inherently unstable, and likely to produce crime.86 Wealthy landowners were represented in exploitative roles, rather than cooperative ones, in relations with retainers and with the third estate. The aristocracy and the poor were not represented using the language of class conflict, as in some measure Dudley had done, but their interests were shown to be diametrically opposed and requiring institutional and “educational” intervention by social humanists to smooth the rough edges. For its part, the unity of the third estate was fractured just as elsewhere in Europe, with the unworthy and idle poor being marginalized. As regards such “vagabonds” and the worthy poor, the book presented them both as the casualties of economic exploitation and expropriation, whom the nobility and gentry had abandoned, and people whose fate could not be rescued through traditional institutions of mutual aid and charity. Government intervention was required to employ the unemployed and to relieve the worthy.

NOTES   1. A beginning can be made through Edward L. Surtz, “Interpretations of Utopia,” Catholic Historical Review, 38 (1952), 156–74; R. S. Silvester and G.P. Marc’hadour, eds., Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977); Skinner, I, 257 n.1.   2. See Skinner’s excellent discussion of these authors in Foundations, I, 257; J. H. Hexter, “Utopia and Its Historical Milieu,” in Thomas More ed., Utopia, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), cxviii, cxx.   3. Brendan Bradshaw, “More on Utopia,” Historical Journal, 24, no. 1 (1981), 20.   4. F. Graus, “Social Utopias in the Middle Ages,” P&P 38 (December 1967), 6–7.   5. Bradshaw, “More on Utopia,” 20–1; cf. George M. Logan, The Meaning of More’s “Utopia” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 125–6; D. B. Fenlon, “England and Europe: Utopia and its Aftermath,” Transactions, Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., vol. 25 (1975), 118, 126.   6. Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in EarlyModern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987; pbk. edn., 1990), 123–4.   7. Ibid. 126–31, 135–40, 154–5; cf. Logan, Meaning of More’s “Utopia,” 125–6.   8. G. R. Elton, “Humanism in England,” in Anthony Goodman and Angus MacKay eds., The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe (London: Longman, 1990), 265–6.   9. To cite (Ibid. 266) the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe’s comment that Utopia was no more than poetry seems a little disingenuous considering that the two men were on opposite sides of the confessional aisle. 10. Ibid. 266. 11. Ibid. 261, 263. It is worth recalling that Elton’s essay was published at the high tide of Thatcherism in Britain. 12. Dudley, Tree of Commonwealth, 39, 48–50, 90. 13. Elton, “Humanism,” 265 n. 26.

A Radical Reordering  179 14. Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), ch. 4; J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch. 2; A. B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), ch. 8. 15. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936; new edn., New York: Harper, 1960), 14–15, 19 (note Lovejoy’s interest in language, discussed on p. 15 and his interest in the non-canonical on p. 19 of ibid.). 16. Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia,” 143–7. 17. I begin with the assumption that the “real” Thomas More was the actual speaker in the book, even though other voices were present, especially that of the fictional traveler “Raphael” Hythloday and the character “Thomas More.” But it is worth recalling that the title pages of both Books I and II stated that their contents were “recorded” and “recounted” by More: Thomas More, Utopia, eds. George M. Logan & Robert M. Adams, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, eds. Raymond Geuss & Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 8, 42. This translation by Robert M. Adams was originally published by W.W. Norton & Co., 1975, which I have chosen to cite rather than the Yale University Press edition (n.6 above), because the latter, according to Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia” (133, n. 61; 149, n. 156), contains translations of questionable quality. 18. Ibid. 69–70. In quoting from the Adams text, I have Americanized the spelling. 19. Ibid. 31, 33–4. Note on ibid. p.  35 that the character “Thomas More” tells “Raphael” that giving such advice to Royal councilors is a waste of time, but that in his own Epigrams, More took a similar line to the shepherd analogy. 20. I agree with Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia,” 156 n. 188, that there is little reason to see the final passages of the book as “broken off” (Bradshaw, “More on Utopia,” 26). Far from being a whimper, these concluding remarks resemble a very big bang. 21. The reference to law may be citing the revival of labor laws, which excised penalties for employers: Utopia, 107–108 n. 114 and the sources cited there. 22. Utopia, 107–8. 23. Ibid. 16–17, 20. 24. Ibid. 16–17, 20–1, 54, 71–2, 84. 25. Ibid. 61. 26. Ibid. 61–3. 27. Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 121. 28. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, transl. & ed. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 77–85; Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa, eds. The Portable Machiavelli (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 323. It appears The Discourses were written between 1515 and 1517: ibid. 167. 29. Gerald Strauss, ed. Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation (London: Indiana University Press, 1971), 215–17. 30. Utopia, 17–18. Yet the Utopians hired mercenaries in order to relieve their citizens of direct participation in warfare: ibid. 62. 31. Machiavelli, The Prince, 68–9. 32. Fenlon, “England and Europe,” 120–4. 33. Ibid. 4, 9. 34. Michael G. Baylor, ed. The Radical Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), xx–xxi. 35. Ibid. 19, 26, 52. 36. Ibid. 101.

180  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 37. Ibid. 95–7. 38. E.g., A Supplication of the Poor Commons, 1546, ed. J. M. Cowper, E.E.T.S., extra series, vol. XIII (London, 1871), 79 (probably written by Henry Brinklow). It appears that priests in Utopia, like all their fellow citizens, were propertyless. 39. Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 124; Logan, Meaning of More’s “Utopia,” 246. 40. Latimer, The Works of Hugh Latimer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Society, 1844), I, 98–9. 41. Utopia, 16–17, 19–20. 42. Ibid. 51–2, 72. 43. Ibid. 107. 44. Sarah Rees Jones, “Thomas More’s Utopia and Medieval London,” in Rosemary Horrox and Sarah Rees Jones, eds., Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 117–119, 127. 45. Utopia, 15, 17, 21. 46. Ibid. 85. 47. Ibid. 19. 48. Ibid. 108–9. 49. Ibid. 38–40. 50. Ibid. 40. 51. Ibid. 24–5. 52. Ibid. 68–70; also 98. 53. Ibid. 53, 55, 59, 65–66, 74. 54. Ibid. 13, 28–9. 55. Ibid. 44, 50, 59–60. Note that on p. 56, the book specified that in Utopia’s 54 cities, the heads of households were the eldest. 56. Ibid. 87, 92–3, 102. 57. Ibid. 55–6, 58–60, 66, 81–3. 58. Ibid. 51 n. 30; “The Tractate of Lionardo Bruni d’Arrezo: De Studiis et Literis,” in William H. Woodward, ed., Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (New York: Teachers College Press, 1963; repr. of 1897 edn.), 119–133. William H. Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance, 1400–1600 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1967; orig. pub. 1906), 205–7; Marian L. Tobriner, ed. Vives’ Introduction to Wisdom (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968) 68–71; Juan Luis Vives, The Instruction of a Christian Woman (orig. pub. 1529; ed. Elizabeth M. Nugent, The Thought and Culture of the English Renaissance: An Anthology of Tudor Prose, 1481–1555 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956)), 72–9. 59. Utopia, 55, 58–9. 60. See Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), “On Avarice,” in Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, eds., The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on Government and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 257–65. Note that Poggio spent several years in England in the entourage of Henry, Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester (ibid. 233). 61. Here I follow Skinner (“Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, 154), but push the argument a little further by focusing on the issue of wealth. 62. Baron, “Franciscan Poverty,” 36–7. There were, of course, “vulgar” kinds of materialism (Ibid. 28–9). 63. Utopia, 52–3. 64. Manuel and Manuel, Utopian Thought, 127. 65. Utopia, 44, 50. 66. Four Supplications, ed. J. M. Cowper, 1.

A Radical Reordering  181 67. Paul A. Fideler, Social Welfare in Pre-Industrial England (London: Palgrave, 2006), 45. 68. Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 6–7, 14–15. 69. Lee Beier, “Foucault Redux?: The Roles of Humanism, Protestantism, and an Urban Elite in Creating the London Bridewell, 1500–1560,” in Louis A. Knafla, ed., Crime, Gender, and Sexuality in Criminal Prosecutions, Criminal Justice History (London: Greenwood, 2002), vol. 17, 39–50. 70. Utopia, 15–19, 23. 71. Ibid. 109. 72. Ibid. 16, 18, 21. 73. Lee Palmer Wandel, Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 357–8. 74. Elton, “Humanism in England,” 266. 75. Utopia, 23–6. 76. Ibid. 52–4, 60, 73, 83, 95, 98. 77. C. S. L. Davies, “Slavery and Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of 1547,” Ec.H.R 2nd ser., 19 (1966), 543–4. 78. Beier, “Foucault Redux,” 39–40. 79. Beier, Masterless Men, 154, 160. 80. Utopia, 26–7. 81. Elton, Reform and Renewal, 123–4 (though the 1536 draft bill was eviscerated in Parliament and gave a limited mandate to statutory relief). 82. Utopia, 57–8. 83. Ibid. 57–59. 84. Skinner, “Sir Thomas More’s Utopia,” 153–4. See Tobriner, ed., Vives’ Introduction to Wisdom,” [1540], 90. 85. Utopia, 110–11. 86. For a defense of the institution of retaining, see Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London: Longman, 1995), chs. 5–7.

10 Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536

I. INTRODUCTION Despite Utopia’s canonical status, it was not alone in questioning theories of the body social. In abolishing property, More’s book represented a thoroughgoing destruction of the body social, especially where the clerical and noble estates were concerned. But other contemporary critics, while not as radical, also undermined the theory’s validity. In the play Of Gentleness and Nobility (c. 1523–25), John Heywood cast doubts on definitions of gentility based upon landowning and inheritance. For his part, Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor, first published in 1531 and a leading piece of English humanist writing, pushed the envelope further and opened alternatives to birth and blue blood as qualifications for government service. In 1536, Richard Morison, a humanist propagandist hired by Cromwell, published a pamphlet arguing that merit or wealth, rather than birth, should be the basis of aristocratic position. All three authors backed social mobility based on education as an alternative to inherited position and title. Admittedly, these authors did, at times, employ the rhetoric of the body. Elyot and Morison used the metaphor in apparent attempts—because their work was published—to have it both ways. They were not alone, judging by the example of Thomas Starkey—another Cromwell protégé—who also employed the rhetoric of the body social. But his “Dialogue between Lupset and Pole,” written between 1529 and 1532, which remained in manuscript until the nineteenth century, left little doubt that the body social was dysfunctional because of conflicts among the main social players, and he explored in depth the sources of friction. While not explicitly rejecting birth as a determinant of social position, Starkey put forward alternative definitions of what constituted virtue that excluded inheritance and introduced proposals for sweeping reforms of the clergy and the nobility. Because of its greater detail than the work of Heywood, Elyot, and Morison, Starkey’s treatise is considered here in greater depth towards the end of this chapter and in the next.

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  183 II. QUESTIONING THE BODY: HEYWOOD, ELYOT, AND MORISON, C. 1523/5–1536

A. Conflict Over Gentility and Virtue Heywood’s Of Gentleness is remarkable for raising doubts about the traditional membership of the body social, for it eschewed the model of three estates, completely ignored the clergy, and questioned whether the old order was viable. There were four characters in the play—a “Merchant,” “Knight,” “Plowman,” and “Philosopher.” The first three spent most of the play debating the claims of each to nobility. At two junctures, the “Knight” and the “Plowman” nearly came to blows.1 In the remarks concluding the play, the “Philosopher,” who may represent the author’s position, advanced his own definitions of nobility and gentility. The play was filled with confrontations between classes. The “Merchant” began by telling the “Knight” that making money was ennobling. The latter rejected this position as a “presumption” because the “Merchant” had no land, was the son of a blacksmith, and had worked for the “Knight.” In reply, the “Merchant” developed an argument resembling a labor theory of value, saying, “[H]ow can lords and estates have aught in store, except the artificers did get it before?” The “Merchant’s” ancestors had built the grand houses of the gentry and nobility, made the tools to build them, mined the minerals to make the tools, and made the clothing the elites wore. He claimed, “I say the common weal of every land, in fete of merchandise does principally stand.” The “Knight” riposted that he and his progenitors had ruled and defended the country as members of the “chivalry” and sat at quarter sessions to administer “correction” upon merchants uttering false wares.2 The most contentious confrontation was between the “Knight” and the “Plowman.” To both the “Merchant” and “Knight,” the “Plowman” asserted, “I am better than . . . you both,” because he produced the food they ate. Blood should count for nothing, and nor should inheritance, except under special circumstances. Reprising John Ball’s sermon in 1381, the “Plowman” asked, “[W]hen Adam delved and Eve span, who was than a gentleman?” Further, he stated, “[W]e came all of Adam and Eve. Then, to speak by reason, great possessions make no gentlemen but gentle conditions.” What the “Plowman” meant by gentle conditions was that the truly noble would eschew “gear so costly” and “houses gilt gloriously” and would not covet “goods, lands, and rent . . .”. Only if the “chivalry” defended the country were they entitled to land, but its inheritance should be denied to those who lived idly, “for each man is born to labor truly, as a bird is to fly naturally.”3 The “Knight” did not agree, “for I say it becomes a noble man to have rich apparel and clothing and goodly houses of costly building . . .”. The purpose was that “each man according to his degree be known from other

184  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 and what they be.” His model was based on what another era has called “trickle down economics”: “for if such costly things were not made, work for poor people would never be had, and many folks then should fall to idleness, which is the mother of vice and wretchedness.” Blood should enjoy precedence over “conditions” because the gentle were inherently superior: put 20 carters together and you had “chiding, quarreling or fighting,” whereas 20 gentlemen would “study who can show to other most courtesy  .  .  .”. The “Merchant” and “Knight” eventually took the same side against the “Plowman,” saying, as in Cicero, that the ruling classes needed possessions to keep the masses in fear and avoid democracy.4 The play concluded with a lengthy speech by the “Philosopher,” who took the same line as the “Plowman” and asserted that virtue was the main criterion for nobility, which, as in Fulgens and Lucrece, could be found in the poor as well as the powerful: The thing that makes a gentleman to be Is but virtue and gentle conditions, Which as well in poor men oft times we see As in men of great birth or high degree. And also vicious and churlish conditions May be in men born to great possessions. “[V]irtue is ever the thing principal . . . ” and should be so regarded by those who rule, which should produce justice; if it did not, then the law would need to be changed “to have sharp correction.”5

B. Defining Nobility and Social Mobility Elyot’s book took up similar themes and advocated upward mobility for the virtuous. It was subsequently republished in many editions, and served as a model for a further half-dozen publications on education in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As one editor observed, the book covered a wide swath of territory. Based on classical and Renaissance sources, it was a treatise on education for the elites, a guide for the training of orators, a courtesy book similar to Castiglione’s, an example of the “mirror of princes” tradition for the advising of monarchs, a political treatise like More’s Utopia, and a guidebook for moral philosophy.6 Elyot’s Governor employed the metaphor of the body while at the same time undermining it. From the outset, indeed in the first chapter of the first of three books, Elyot set out his positions on hierarchy in society. As had Dudley, Elyot invoked the Great Chain of Being and laid out his adherence to this divine pecking order: “the order that God has put generally in all his creatures, beginning at the most inferior or base, and ascending upward . . .”. For Elyot, the great attraction of this system was that it promoted an ordered universe: “so that every kind of trees, herbs, birds, beasts, and fishes . . . have [sic] . . . a peculiar disposition appropriated unto them

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  185 by God their Creator  .  .  .”. The result was an ordered world according to God’s rankings and the avoidance of disorder: “so that in everything is order, and without order may be nothing stable or permanent; and it may not be called order, except it do contain in it degrees, high and base, according to the merit or estimation of the thing that is ordered.”7 Elyot’s commitment to hierarchy extended beyond the flora and fauna of the Great Chain to the social world. As had the “Commonwealth-men,” Elyot rejected democracy and the community of goods, thus his well-known discarding of the term “commonweal” and preference for “public weal.” He dismissed the first because “everything should be to all men in common, without discrepancy of any estate or condition, be thereto moved more by sensuality than by any good reason or inclination to humanity.” He added the threat of economic equality to the disappearance of elite rankings for nobles and gentlemen in a Commonwealth: “if there should be a common weal, either the commoners only must be wealthy, and the gentle and noblemen needy and miserable, or else excluding gentility, all men must be of one degree and sort, and a new name provided.” The upshot, he left no doubt, was disorder: “take away order from all things what should then remain? Certes nothing finally, except . . . Chaos . . .” and “perpetual conflict . . .”.8 Elyot also lent support to the body social’s principle of fixity of social position. Just as the beasts and flora were divinely appointed to their rank on the Chain, so were human beings assigned to their social stations. In support of specialized social roles, Elyot drew a homely parallel with the manner in which households were organized: “for the pots and pans garnish well the kitchen, and yet should they be to the chamber none ornament.” Similarly, “the beds, testers [bed canopies], and pillows beseem not the hall, no more than the carpets and cushions become the stable.” Then he extended the argument to the world of work: “the potter and tinker, only perfect in their craft, shall little do in the ministration of justice.” A “ploughman or carter shall make but a feeble answer to an ambassador.” And, “a weaver or fuller should be an unmeet captain of an army, or in any other office of a governor.”9 Despite statements subscribing to a fixed hierarchy, both in the same chapter just cited from Book I and in Book II’s discussion of nobility, Elyot actually broke from a regime of hard and fast ranks. Just after citing the rankings of the Great Chain, he observed that in human society, “God gives not to every man like gifts of grace, or of nature, but to some more, some less, as it likes his divine majesty.” The different gifts may have justified a rigid hierarchy, as expressed in Elyot’s diatribe against the “potter and tinker,” but the possession of reason was sufficient cause for some to be advanced more than others: [F]or as much as understanding is the most excellent gift that man can receive in his creation, whereby he does approach most nigh unto the similitude of God; which understanding is the principal part of the soul: it is therefore congruent, and according that as one excels another

186  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 in that influence, as thereby being next to the similitude of his maker, so should the estate of his person be advanced in degree or place where understanding may profit. . . .10 In line with Italian social humanists, Elyot favored “careers open to talent” and spelled out the political consequences, which would have created a new ruling class: [T]hey which excel other in this influence of understanding, and do employ it to the detaining of other within the bounds of reason, and show them how to provide for their necessary living; such ought to be set in a more high place than the residue where they may see and also be seen; that by the beams of their excellent wit, showed through the glass of authority, other of inferior understanding may be directed to the way of virtue and commodious living.11 This ruling elite, Elyot specified, should be honored by the rest of society and supported by them. The basis of relationships was not the principle of interdependence, as in the body social. Rather, there was to be a meritocracy, in which “men of such virtue” should “by other men’s labors . . . be maintained according to their merits.” The basis of the relationship was that the elite, “excelling in knowledge whereby other[s] be governed, be ministers for the only profit and commodity of them which have not equal understanding . . .”.12 Instead of the body’s interdependence, Elyot’s model centered on relationships involving productive labor, which resonated also in the work of Heywood, Morison, Starkey, and Sir Thomas Smith: “So the husbandman feeds himself and the clothmaker: the clothmaker apparels himself and the husband[man]; they both succor other artificers: other artificers, them: they and other artificers them that be governors.” The conclusion, Elyot maintained, was that “the estate of the person in preeminence of living should be esteemed with his understanding, labor, and policy: where unto must be added an augmentation of honor and substance . . .”.13 The consequence of creating new ruling elites based upon merit was a condemnation of the unproductive, but with a promise of upward mobility, even for them. The reason for supporting and honoring a ruling class was that they were productive and “do employ all the powers of their wits, and their diligence, to the only preservation of other their inferiors . . .”. The elites needed sustenance from inferiors who must be diligent, else they would be characterized as “the slothful or idle person [that] do not participate with him that is industrious ands takes pain[s] . . .”. Then, “the fruits of his labors should be diminished” and he would suffer “dissolution for lack of provision.”14 Once again, we see reprised the fourteenth century’s premium on labor. The advancement of the talented to positions of authority, honor, and wealth would act as a spark that “inflames men naturally inclined to idleness or sensual appetite to covet like fortune, and for that cause to dispose them

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  187 to study or occupation.”15 Here was a proposal with multiple benefits—to advance the meritorious in government and society and to solve the evils of the idle, dissolute, and unemployed that so troubled Tudor commentators like Elyot, a question to which he returned in Book II.16 Elyot provided a definition of nobility, and in common with More, Morison, and Starkey, gave a mixed message in which lineage was only one component. The original relationship was based upon the “labor and industry” of leaders who were given “private possessions and dignity” by the people’s consent, who originally held property in common. When the properties and dignities continued in a family through inheritance and children sought to equal their ancestors’ honor and authority “by imitation of virtue,” “there nobility is most showed, and these noble men be most to be honored . . .”.17 But titles and birth were not enough: “nobility may in no wise be but only where men can avaunt [advance?] them of ancient lineage, an ancient robe, or great possessions, at this day very noble men do suppose to be much error and folly.” Elyot cited ancient Roman examples where the people elected kings and dictators from the commoners based upon dignity and valor. Even after these leaders left the political scene, if they had “valiant courage and martial policy,” they never lost their nobility, “which is the commendation, and as it were, the surname of virtue.”18 Like coins, the value of nobility was in the worth of the metal; a counterfeit “or other vile metal” lost its value. Again questioning lineage, the quality of a good horse or greyhound was in the animal itself, “not the beauty or goodness of their progeny.” Nobility was “not after the vulgar opinion of men, but is only the praise and surname of virtue,” although “the longer it continues in a name or lineage, the more is nobility extolled and marveled at.”19 Thus, in ways also found in Richard Morison, Thomas Starkey, and Thomas Smith, who are examined in the following pages, Elyot redefined the nature of nobility to include qualities besides birth, focusing especially on that quality called virtue.

C. The Power of Education and Wealth Morison’s views on hierarchies and social mobility were similar to Elyot’s, but Morison’s ideas about the social order, particularly those expressed in A Remedy for Sedition (1536), carry exceptional significance because they were officially sponsored propaganda for the regime of Henry VIII. One authority refers to Morison as the man who “wielded far and away the best propagandist pen in Henrician England.”20 Of course, we cannot assume that Morison’s views exactly replicated those of his masters, Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Yet it seems inherently unlikely the government would have employed someone and published his work (the publisher of A Remedy was the official printer of the Crown, Thomas Berthelet) unless the parties were in substantial agreement about official policy. In reality, as will be seen below, Morison’s tract was sufficiently murky in its rhetoric and ambiguous on some social questions actually to permit a couple of different

188  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 readings. Nevertheless, there is good reason to believe he was close to official thinking, because the entire thrust of his pamphlet was the defense of the government against the rebels of 1536.21 In the event, although not without precedent, Morison’s statements were a powerful redefinition of what made someone noble. Morison’s Remedy, like the body social, contained passages that subscribed to the principles of fixed hierarchy and interdependence in society. When it came to social ranks, he stated that a Commonwealth was “wealthy and worth his name when everyone is content with his degree, glad to do that that he many [sic] do, gladder to do that which he sees shall be for the quietness of the realm, albeit his private profit bids him do the contrary.” Invoking the body image, Morison described how the different members should have a fixed function and should not usurp the roles of others: Now, were it not by your faith a mad hearing if the foot should say, I will wear a cap with an ouch as the head does? If the knees should say, we will carry the eyes another while? If the shoulders should claim each of them an ear? If the heels would now go before and the toes behind? This were undoubted a mad hearing; every man would say the feet, the knees, the shoulders, the heels make unlawful requests and very mad petitions. The passage concluded that “if it were so indeed, if the foot had a cap, the knees eyes, the shoulders ears, what a monstrous body should this be!”22 If there seemed any doubt about his commitment to hierarchy, Morison next affirmed, citing Socrates and conjuring up the body symbol, that “every man does well in his office [when] every thing stands well in his place”; “the hands are content the feet go; the teeth pleased that the tongue tell the whole tale; the ear does not desire to see nor the eye to hear . . .”. Obviously enjoying the power of his rhetoric, Morison next employed a clothing metaphor to restate the significance of specialized social roles: “a pair of shoes of eight pence does better service to the feet than a cap of five shillings though ye put thereon a feather of forty pence; a pair of gloves of lambskin does much better fit the hands than a pair of breeches of right satin; a frieze coat does better on his back that has to do at the cart or at the plow than a gown of velvet furred with sables.” Lest we be in any doubt, he reiterated that hierarchy was absolute as a binding social principle: “lords must be lords, commons must be commons, every man accepting his degree, every man content to have that that he lawfully may come by.”23 Did the last remark open the door to a degree of social mobility? The answer is seen below. In another clever rhetorical flourish and in a further defense of hierarchy, Morison equated rebellion with leveling and social dysfunction (as had Dudley and Elyot previously): When every man will rule, who shall obey? How can there be any Commonwealth where he that is wealthiest is most like to come to woe?

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  189 Who can there be rich where he that is richest is in most danger of poverty? No, no, take wealth by the hand and say farewell wealth where lust is liked and law refused, where up is set down and down set up.24 He asserted that “we imagine a certain Commonwealth in word and in outward appearance which . . . we must needs call a common woe.” People yearned for equality because “we think it is very evil that so many of us be poor; we think it were a good world if we were all rich.” Imagine, he said, that the world were so: “the maid as proud as her dame, who milks the cow? The farmer having no more cause to toil than he that looks for the rents, who shall till the ground?”25 The danger of rebellion, he argued, was that it would destroy all wealth as well as order in society, and even the poor would suffer: He knows not the way to quench fire that pours oil into it. Cheese is no medicine to drive away rats; neither [is] sedition a means to make men wealthy. What end of misery shall there be where no man waxes rich but another is made a beggar, where no man is merry but two or three be sad for it? What end of robbing and spoiling shall there be if the poor may evermore rob the rich? If the stronger may pull from the weaker? Must not you abide the same law that you make yourself? Must not you, when you have spoiled them that are rich and so made yourselves wealthy, suffer that they, now being poor, spoil you [who are] rich? And then must not ye be poor again?26 These hardline statements against equality were a red herring, because there were few, if any, egalitarian feelings expressed in the Pilgrimage of Grace. Quite the contrary, the utterances of the rebels mainly evinced a desire to bolster the authority of the traditional Catholic aristocracy.27 No doubt, in part, Morison was seeking to discredit the uprising by linking it to leveling and to divert attention from his patrons’ promotion of “persons as be of low birth and small reputation,” such as himself, as the pilgrims at York had charged.28 Yet, it is also impossible to accept Zeeveld’s assertions that Morison and other humanists in the employ of Cromwell were social egalitarians, because for the old hierarchy of birth they substituted a new one based on “virtue.”29 The principles that should govern social and political rank, according to Morison, were virtue, which he opposed to birthright, and competition. Referring to the rebels in 1536, he stated that “they be angry that virtue should be rewarded when she comes to men that had no lords to their fathers. They will that none rule but noblemen born.” He cited purported statements by the king “who has evermore well declared that true nobility is never but where virtue is” and who “well testified that he will all his subjects to contend who may obtain most qualities, most wit, most virtue; and this only to be the way to promotion and here nobility to consist.” The concept of competition Morison likened to athleticism, invoking the body, but in

190  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 quite a different sense from the body social metaphor of interdependence. Rather, he compared the body to a humanist ideal of healthy aggression: “In all other things it little avails whose son a man be,” so that in running or wrestling, simply because a father excelled does not mean that the son would. Morison also deployed equestrian and martial analogies, which must have grated on aristocratic ears. He quoted an anonymous source that “princes and noblemen were much more bound to their horses than to many of their friends.” But Morison objected that “a horse, if the lord ride not well, lays him in the dust and tells him plainly he must learn to ride better if he will take no fall.” Similarly, if a bow were not held straight, an arrow launched from it would go astray. Even if a lord was the erring party, he should be told the truth, because “it is small loss if a lord shoot not well, or, at the least, the loss hurts but himself.”30 Morison’s segue stressed how important government was compared to archery: “give the government of Commonwealths into their hands that cannot skill thereof, how many must needs go to wrack?” He contrasted those without ability and those who possessed it, those ranked by birth and those not, and emphasized the dangers of idleness, a theme also developed regarding the poor: Again, what desire shall good wits have to employ themselves to the knowledge of things, and to pass the other whom sloth will not let grow any higher, when good and evil be equally esteemed? What shall we need to endeavor ourselves unto, when whatsoever we do we must be tried by our birth and not by our qualities? That Commonwealth cannot long stand, says Plato, that virtue is not most honored in.31 Morison went on to define what constituted that elusive quality of virtue. Still citing Plato, a city that hoped to prosper and be secure had to dispense two things well—honor and shame—and, echoing Elyot, they were most effectively distributed “when the chief and prime honor is given unto qualities of the mind; the second to the body; the third to e[x]ternal things, as nobility, possessions, and riches.” If this ranking were broken or rearranged, “here can be no wealth. This city cannot long continue, says Plato.”32 Morison went into further detail about the three kinds of virtue, which he insisted were different, and “so must we put also a difference in men that are endowed with them . . .”. In describing the first rank of “gifts of the mind,” he specified as the requisite qualities “they that do excel in wisdom, justice, temperancy, and such other virtues.” The second level included “gifts of the body,” which were stated to be “health, strength, quickness, beauty.” In discussing the third standard, Morison included “riches and possessions,” but wholly ignored birth, which he had previously cited in his overview.33 Morison not only ranked birth a distant third place in the hierarchy; like others, he called for the radical reform of the nobility. As Starkey had a few years earlier, Morison proposed formal schooling for the landed upper

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  191 classes. He wrote, “I think all the lords’ sons, and also the better part of gentlemen, might be as well brought up (as it is necessary they be) if they had such teachers as ought to instruct the nobles of a realm.” As Dudley and Starkey observed, Morison averred, “I long have supposed that as the bringing up of the nobles is the safeguard of a Commonwealth, so their evil education is the ruin thereof.” He observed that nobles had great influence over their underlings, “for as the noblemen be, so their servants are.” Echoing More and others on the perils of servingmen, Morison asserted that if the master was “given to riot, the servant must needs think that there is no thriving for him except he show himself a ruffler.” Where religion was concerned, with which the rising of 1536 was preoccupied, “if the nobles be evil taught in points concerning religion, as if they be popish . . . how can their servants choose but be so too? How can their tenants, who must have the lords’ favor, be of another religion than their lord is?” The nobility, he later stated, must all be of one faith, because “it is not possible, men to agree long that dissent in religion.” And, once the lords agreed, “the gentlemen will follow; the commons cannot tarry long behind.”34 It looks as though the re-education of the nobility was a matter of statecraft as much as for religion per se. Morison differed in this respect from Starkey, who, as will be seen below, appeared to believe strongly in a moral reformation of the elites. Like More and Starkey, Morison believed in the necessity and possibility of reforming the poor. As had Dudley, he accepted that rebellion arose from poverty and blamed voluntary idleness as the cause. The solution was training in manufacturing and full employment. As concerns the roots of rebellion, Morison paraphrased a rebel statement that “we evermore cry we be poor” and stated that “I admit it be so,” while at the same time rejecting the idea that destitution was a justifiable reason for the overthrow of governments. Rather, the solution was that “there be handicrafts, there be honest occupations, whereby poverty may be driven away.”35 But unemployment was not the product of impersonal market forces; rather, it was the result of personal choices that led to moral failings, even crime. Echoing social humanist ideas and labor legislation, Morison cited numerous classical and contemporary examples. Reminiscent of Starkey’s call for the appointment of censors, Morison cited an ancient Egyptian king in whose reign “every man was commanded yearly to put his name in the common book and at the year’s end to show the governor of the place where his abiding was [and] by what means he got his living.” The upshot was that idleness was banished, wrongdoers were punished, and full employment achieved. The Athenians had similar legislation and, following Socrates and Plato, “will no drone bees amongst them,” especially the “young and lusty [that] neither have nor yet will learn any honest occupation to get their living in truth, but continuing in idleness fall to stealing, robbing, murder, and many other mischiefs.” He also cited the Jewish populations of contemporary German and Italian cities that had no beggars, idlers, thieves, or murderers. He estimated that one third of England’s population lived idly, which he

192  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 claimed was twice as much as any other Christian nation. England’s problem was that the land was too fertile, and, once again echoing his friend Starkey, too often left fallow. Summing up, Morison added that the sick poor should not “lack cherishing,” but reaffirmed his rejection of voluntary idleness: all good ordered Commonwealths in time past abhorred these bellies that have no hands; these flies that feed upon other men’s labors; these that being idle without any occupation, without lands, fees, wages, do nothing but complain of fortune, complain of them that be governors of the realm, and thus either sow sedition among the people or else be the fields themselves apt to bring forth such fruits.36 Having affirmed the power of poverty to cause rebellion, Morison modified the statement four pages later on the grounds that other places experienced greater poverty than England, and yet had no uprisings. His point was to suggest that “the root is lower; dig deeper, you may perchance find it.” Education, “evil education, is a great cause of these and all other mischiefs that grow in a Commonwealth.” As observed in his discussions of the nobility, where he included them as fit subjects for re-education, the poor also came in for notice. As Starkey and others, Morison emphasized practical education for the poor, especially work, “for where so many lack honest occupations . . . how can we lack any kind of mischief?” He believed that “the lack of honest crafts and the abundancy of idleness, albeit they be not the whole cause of sedition, yet as they breed thieves, murderers, and beggars, so not a little they provoke men or things like men to rebellion.” He had the wisdom, moreover, to realize that “no man is born a craftsmen; youth must be better brought up . . .”. Even then, he argued that it was possible for people “either to do much good or contrary to do much hurt” and so they “must be so taught that there be no rebellion within ourselves.”37 This position closely resembled that of More and Starkey and many seventeenthcentury authorities on the possibility of social reform through education. III. STARKEY’S “DIALOGUE BETWEEN LUPSET AND POLE”: HISTORIOGRAPHY Starkey’s “Dialogue” is an important text because, like Elyot and Morison, its ambiguities underline early Tudor tensions between the body social and social humanist positions. Starkey’s manuscript, however, engages in much greater detail than the other authors in providing an analysis of the social ills of the period. Of course, the “Dialogue” has long been highly regarded in the history of political thought, but, like many of the texts examined in this book, its social significance has been underrated. J. W. Allen observed in 1928 that it was “by far the most remarkable piece of writing concerned with politics” in the reign of Henry VIII, and that it proposed a “series of

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  193 sweeping and far-reaching practical proposals for reform.” Allen further noted that in the “Dialogue,” “society is regarded mainly as an association for economic purposes,” but he eschewed analysis of what Starkey’s social theory might have been.38 Zeeveld’s valuable study of the humanists who worked for Cromwell in the 1530s included an extensive discussion of Starkey, but paid little attention to the “Dialogue.”39 Studies by Ferguson and Jones, in 1965 and 1970, respectively, showed that Starkey’s treatise examined a number of social and economic issues and prescribed specific remedies, but neither historian discussed the author’s social framework.40 Elton analyzed Starkey’s connections with Cromwell and the “Dialogue” ’s specific proposals for social and legal reform, but without examining the author’s social ideas.41 Recent historiography has taken a more social turn without entirely shedding the preoccupation with politics and policy. In considering the “Dialogue” ’s classical and medieval origins, T. F. Mayer suggests that it combined the tradition of English medieval, aristocratic constitutionalism with that of Italian civic humanist thinking. For his part, Alistair Fox critiqued Mayer’s efforts to “disprove the prevailing view of Starkey as a liberal,” stating that “the optimistic tone and homocentric bias of the ‘Dialogue’ seem the very opposite of medieval conservatism.”42 Liberal and conservative, however, are modern political ideologies that bear little resemblance to the issues Starkey was addressing in the “Dialogue.” From a social perspective, the most prescient commentary on Starkey is Skinner’s, who, although writing about political thought, identified some of the key social questions raised in the treatise. Skinner associated Starkey with More and the position that “the gravest danger to political health arises when the people ignore the good of the community as a whole, and concerns themselves only with their own individual or factional interests.” The “growing individualism” that Skinner cites as the core problem these writers addressed cannot be limited to the political sphere, because so many of them, as previously shown, focused on issues of social pathology and used a varied set of social models.43 In this respect, it is possible to associate Starkey with other commentators, from Dudley to the “Commonwealth-men” of the 1540s and 1550s. It would be misleading, however, to lump Starkey together with theorists of the body social, who saw society as self-regulating, while Starkey, like More and other social humanists, no longer believed in the body social and instead sought to tame the beast of individualism in highly interventionist ways. Without adopting the wholesale revamping of society outlined by More, Starkey proposed reforms of all three estates that would have radically changed their characters and behaviors. The principal methods of effectuating these changes were new regimes of labor and education. Starkey evidently thought it was possible to reform one person at a time until entire social orders were transformed. To describe such a program as conservative or liberal would miss the point; one thinks rather of “ambitious” and maybe “proto-modern.”

194  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 IV. STARKEY’S “IN PRAISE OF WEALTH”

A. The Body Re-Examined Starkey (c. 1498–1538) was Oxford-educated (1516–21) in the humanities and between 1522 and 1536 received patronage from three of the most powerful figures in the reign of Henry VIII: Thomas Wolsey, Reginald Pole, and Thomas Cromwell. Starkey’s longest period of service was as secretary to Pole from 1529 to 1534, much of which was spent in Italy, above all at Padua, where he moved in English and Italian humanist circles. From 1535, he entered the service of Cromwell, handling correspondence with Italy and writing propaganda at home in support of the Henrician takeover of the Church, while still—in all likelihood—receiving patronage from the Pole family. Henry and Cromwell hoped that Starkey might persuade Pole to support their attack on the Church, but in the end, despite writing a treatise in their support and encouraging Pole to do the same, he had the rug pulled from underneath him by Pole’s famous hostile response in 1536. Thereafter, Starkey’s career was in the doldrums with Cromwell, whose clutches he was probably lucky to escape by dying at the time of the Exeter conspiracy in 1538.44 One of the grounds for seeing Starkey as a conservative was that he used the metaphor of the body in its application to society and politics, which might superficially place him in the body social school.45 There is no question that Starkey used the body metaphor. As in the language of the body social, he cited the importance of the principles of a functionalist hierarchy, of interdependence, and of fixity of social position, each doing his duty. Sometimes Starkey described society in terms of three estates, at others in four rankings. He came close to the first definition in referring to “laborers and tillers of the ground,” “[p]riests {and ministers of God’s word},” and “gentlemen {to the governance of the rest},” although he listed the latter’s servants as a possible fourth group.46 When Starkey described his socio-political model in detail, he analyzed its components in four hierarchically arranged organs: “this has his parts which resemble also the parts of the body of man . . .”. The heart were “the princes and rulers of the state”; the head, including the eyes, ears, and other senses, the officials appointed by princes; the hands, craftsmen and warriors; the feet, ploughmen.47 In creating a four-fold division, Starkey’s model obviously departed from the three estates grid. Other significant departures were his focus on the political roles of the heart and head and the fact that his schema largely ignored the clergy. The division of society into four estates was not uncommon in early modern Europe, including late sixteenth-century France, where Montaigne referred to the noblesse de la robe as a fourth estate.48 Moreover, the head of the body can be interpreted as representing the “chivalry,” or nobles and gentry that Dudley described, while the hands and feet resemble the “commons” of the body social school. In addition, simply because he

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  195 did not cite the clergy in this passage does not mean they were left out of the discussion. In fact, they, the nobility, and the commonalty all figured significantly later in his text, just as they did in the body social. Starkey’s text cited the principle of mutual obligation of the body. No matter the sect, whether Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, any reference to “the dignity of man” would agree that they were all ruled by God and that “all judge one bound to aid and succor [one] another “and, further, to “help them which have need ‘and be in misery’ . . .”.49 He stipulated, moreover, that harmony was necessary for a city or a country to enjoy civility: “in a country, city, or town there is perfect civility, there is the true common weal, where as all the parts as members of one body be knit together in perfect love and unity, every one doing his office or duty . . .”. Where no harmony existed, there was unlikely to be a viable community: “if all the parts {of the city} with love be not knot together {in unity} as members of one body, there can be no civility . . .”.50 Starkey also suggested that social roles were specialized and fixed in nature. For harmony to be maintained, “matters of the commonweal are ever referred to this end and purpose, that the whole body of the commonalty may live in quietness {and tranquility}, every part doing his office and duty . . .”.51 Further, Starkey stipulated that the different parts of the body had to keep to themselves and not to usurp the roles or the wealth of the other: [To] keep this body knit together {in unity} provision would be made by common law and authority that every part may exercise his office and duty; that is to say, every man in his craft and faculty to meddle with such thing as pertains thereto and intermeddle not with other. . . .52 Anyone who interfered with another’s position because he was unhappy with his own or jealous of another’s wealth would be banished or put to death as “a corrupt member of the body, and so to be cut off for fear lest it should infect the rest, {corrupting the whole} . . .”.53 Despite similarities to the body social grid, it would not do justice to the imaginative radicalism of Starkey’s text to limit his interest to the traditional scheme of things. This chapter argues that the most important part of Starkey’s relationship with the body social was not about which estate was present or absent, nor about whether he at times endorsed the principles of that model. Rather, we must consider his entire text and consider that he saw the estates and their social norms as dysfunctional, making the notion of an interdependent social body, as More had hinted, a dubious proposition. In reality, Starkey described contradictions and conflicts in the model that made it virtually inoperative. As Skinner’s comments suggest, Starkey identified individualism and selfinterest as the key problems facing society, which was a position that he shared with More and the body social. These problems, Starkey found, were manifested in the behavior of the nobility, the clergy, and the commonalty,

196  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 again in ways reminiscent of proponents of the body social. But, unlike the latter, Starkey identified remedies that were sweeping in breadth and detailed in character and that were consistent with social humanist ideas and programs, because they concerned individual virtue and the reformative power of labor and education. Ultimately, these were individual rather than programmatic solutions and, as such, they risked being extraneous object lessons directed at recalcitrant subjects. Their success depended upon the social capital that individuals brought to the process and, where that capital did not exist, upon governments’ willingness to impose solutions in various forms of intervention to create the ideal, social humanist society.

B. The Dysfunctional Body, Individualism, and Property The extent of Starkey’s departures from the body social is evident in the failings he described and in the sweeping changes he proposed to put them right. About two thirds of his “Dialogue” is actually addressed to these issues. An introduction that addressed similar questions to Utopia’s “Dialogue of Counsel” occupies the first 16 pages or so in the latest edition, and the next 30 pages delineated what the true commonweal should be. Then, the section from page 47 to 95 described what was wrong with England, and from 96 to 142, a series of remedies were proposed.54 The author left no doubt that the body social was dysfunctional. Near the outset of the third section, Starkey stated that England was suffering a “bodily disease” so that its organs were at war. The “parts of this body agree not together,” he wrote. “{The head agrees not to the feet nor feet to the hands} . . . the temporalty grudges against the spirituality, the commons against the nobles {and subjects against the rulers}, one has envy at another, one bears malice against another, one complains of another . . .”. In sum, the body social was so “dissevered asunder as they were in no case parts of one body: this is so manifest it needs no proof . . .”. “Pole” compared the discord in the common weal to a pestilence, which, in short order, “destroys all good order and civility . . .”. He declared that the body had lost its coherence or “beauty”; that is, “the parts of this body be not proportional one to another; one part is too great, another too little; one part has in it over many people, another over few  .  .  .”.55 Starkey then proceeded to analyze each of the parts and how they had come to be out of proportion. Broadly, and similar to the body social school and Utopia, Starkey diagnosed the ills of society as originating in individualism. In attempting to define the “true commonweal,” Starkey raised the question of what caused dysfunctions in society—“we will devise of the cause of this same decay . . . ”—and asked whether it was out of human ignorance of what a good order was, as Socrates claimed, or whether according to Aristotle, it was a choice based upon knowledge versus “inordinate affect” or emotion.56

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  197 “Pole”observed that, given the Aristotelian premise that men had “free will and liberty thereof,” it followed that some might choose to pursue personal interests as opposed to those of the commonweal. It was “pleasure and profit” that blinded reason and ruined Commonwealths: “hard it is to pluck out this pestilent persuasion, which is the cause of all errors in man’s life; this is the cause of the destruction of all commonweals . . .”. “Pole” disagreed with the “Lupset” character’s endorsement of the Socratic explanation, which said that if men actually knew what the true commonweal was, “they would not so highly esteem their own private pleasure and weal.” Individualism—“this thing,” he stated—“ever shall be the destruction of all true commonweals, and so consequently the destruction also of them which blindly esteem so much their own profit {and pleasure} . . .”.57 Whatever caused the blight of individual interest, the issue was not unproblematic in the “Dialogue,” which actually included strong, if possibly rhetorical statements in support of self-interest. Immediately following the previous quotation condemning individualism, the “Pole” character asserted that according to Aristotle, individual wealth was the basis of society: “for as much as the wealth and substance ever of the whole rises of the wealth of every {particular} part, wherefore if we can first find out that thing which is the wealth of every particular man, we shall then consequently find out also, what thing it is that in any city of country we call the very true commonweal.” Starkey backed up this assertion with some potent rhetoric. He observed of Aristotle that he was “the ancient and most wise philosopher,” that the proposition was “to all men by {common} reason evident,” and that “this let us take as a ground to the rest of our communication  .  .  .”.58 “Lupset,” however, saw the contradicion, declaring, “[H]erein me seems lies a doubt”: [F]or if it be thus that the commonweal rise of the particular weal of every one, then every man ought to study to maintain the particular weal to the setting forward of the common, and so that thing which you noted before to be the destruction of every commonweal, now by this reason {and ground} should maintain the same.59 “Pole” demurred at this objection, treating it as only an apparent contradiction, because self-interest was only a threat if there was “over much regard of private and particular weal” and a lack of “mean [moderate] and convenient regard thereof . . .”.60 In one of the most significant passages in Starkey’s text, “Pole” then invoked the role of government, which will be treated in greater detail below. Briefly stated, he declared that in order to ensure that private interests did not get out of hand, “it is necessary by politic persons having regard of the commonweal to correct and amend such blindness and oversight grown in too many men’s minds by that inordinate love of themselves . . .”, just as physicians were required to curb overconsumption in cities.61 In another

198  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 important passage, which follows from his asserting the importance of selfinterest and which lies at the heart of this chapter’s argument, “Pole” proceeded to enumerate the ideal qualities of “this particular weal {of every private man} . . .”.62

C. The Ideal Social Humanist: Health, Wealth, Virtue, and the Poor The three personal traits that Starkey analyzed were health, wealth, and virtue, which cut across the specific qualities of the estates that concerned Dudley, Armstrong, and other proponents of the body social; that is, hierarchy, mutual obligation, and fixity of social position. It is interesting that these characteristics do not include birth, which was important in the body social hierarchy in society, especially the nobility, and which for centuries was essential to the position of an aristocracy. Authorities on the history of aristocracies have observed that, despite promotion from plebian ranks, without a concept of birthright, these elites had little social standing. Rank at this level of society was “imparted by inheritance rather than performance.” Because of the emphasis on birth, aristocracy was a “natural enemy of democracy” and in direct contradiction of a “bourgeois ethic” that emphasized upward social mobility through labor, even professional work.63 Although Starkey gave prominence to a reformed aristocracy in his model, the principle of birth was at most murky and, as considered below, was arguably less significant than education in determining rank. Moreover, as noted above, the personal traits that Starkey discussed were echoed in the work of his fellow Cromwellian, Morison, in his Remedy for Sedition, which redefined the nobility, as seen above. The foundation of the “weal of every private man” was health, to which were connected strength and beauty. All three qualities were in turn linked to the notion of virtue, which in this context appears to mean virtù. Health was important because it was more pleasant than illness, making one more desirous of living than dying, and no burden to oneself or one’s friends. But fitness was also significant because without it, a person “lies then unprofitable to his country and can to no man do good, for he is thereby excluded also from the use and outward exercise almost of all virtue . . .”.64 There is an assumption here that virtue encompassed the notion of productive labor as the result of good health, but still more prominently, it seems, of service to one’s country. Strength was directly related to good health, but the role of beauty was more interesting because it was again connected to virtue. If a body was “deformed, if the parts be not proportional, one agreeing to another according to the order of nature, they be not so acceptable nor pleasant, nor the body has not his perfect state and virtue . . .”.65 It is evident from Starkey’s discussion that Renaissance thinkers were interested in individual bodies as well as the metaphor of the body. As Vives’s tract on the poor and Bosch’s paintings showed, contemporaries

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  199 were hostile to diseased and deformed bodies, which were seen to represent a lack of virtue and morality—especially in instances of syphilitics, hypocrisy among fraudulent beggars who pretended to be ill, and even threats to the community in the case of diseases considered to be communicable, especially the plague. The sensitivity to the condition of bodies was possibly connected to a newfound interest in the regulation of bodies that was connected to notions of civility.66 More positive evidence about the importance of health appeared in Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor (1531), in which several chapters treated a variety of exercises. Richard Mulcaster’s Positions Concerning the Training Up of Children (1581) spent over half of its 45 chapters on physical exercise, several of which were concerned with health.67 For his part, Starkey was less interested in health per se than in its relationship to “virtue” and, above all, to service to the commonweal. The second ideal quality of a person was “riches and convenient abundance of all worldly things, mete to the maintenance of every man’s state according to his degree . . .”. We know from discussions in the chapter on More’s Utopia that wealth—its uses, abuses, and distribution—was a contentious topic in the early sixteenth century, and that opinion was by no means united in adopting traditional Stoic and Franciscan condemnations of riches. Erasmus and More, echoing Italian social humanists, thought there were positive purposes to which wealth could be put. Starkey, too, took the line that affluence, properly employed, had its uses. If someone were without wealth, or at least sufficient wealth to maintain himself, “he shall be troubled in mind with infinite cares and miserable thoughts, because he sees well that without them this bodily weal will soon fade and vanish away . . .”. Further, “the lack of necessaries for the nourishing and clothing of the body, is the sure and certain cause of infinite miseries and manifold wretchedness . . .”.68 Poverty and penury led to sickness and disability, which made it impossible for people to maximize their abilities and achievements, because wealth “well used is the occasion of putting in exercise many honest and virtuous affects [effects?] of men’s mind, which else should be covered and cloaked and never come to light . . .”. Without “exterior and worldly things in convenient abundance . . . no man {can} have his most prosperous state,” Starkey asserted.69 For him, wealth was not simply a matter of income. It was linked to “virtue” in both senses of the term. The lack of it made one miserable and, the implication was, more likely to sin and break from conventional morality and “virtue.” Poverty also tended to minimize one’s ability to limit the “virtuous effects” of the mind, which could in turn limit one’s virtù. The third quality required by people was “{natural} honesty and virtue of the mind,” which was a sine qua non of the person. These virtues “pass and excel all virtues {and powers} of their body, and all other riches and worldly treasure  .  .  .”, even though these latter qualities might be more highly regarded by some. It was no use to have health and wealth if one did not have the wisdom to use them “to his own wealth and to the profit of other[s] . . .”. The “liberty and pleasure” of health would lead only to “vain

200  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 joys and pastimes”; it needed the “virtuous exercise of the mind” to enhance “the commodity of yourself and also of your friends and country . . .”. Likewise, personal wealth would bring only “vain and transitory pleasures” and would not result in satisfying one’s own necessities, nor in succoring “them which have need {and be in misery} . . .”. Rather, virtue would teach one honest deportment towards both God and man, “religiously to honor and worship God as maker, governor, and ruler of this word [sic], and brotherly to love every man . . .”. Accordingly, virtue was “the chief point of all these three” qualities of the individual. Without it, the other two traits would “rather hinder and hurt than aid and set forth the weal and prosperous state of every {private} man . . .”.70 Here, Starkey appears to take a conventional Christian line on what constitutes “virtue,” stressing the love of God and one’s neighbors, although there was still a hint of virtù in the reference to increasing the “commodity” of the country. “Lupset” ’s reply showed an acute understanding of the link between prosperity and virtue that “Pole” had made. “Lupset” questioned the connection, pointing out that if “the weal and felicity of every particular man” lay in these three qualities, then “few there be that have weal, few which be in prosperous {state} and felicity; the most part of mankind is excluded . . .”. In a passage concerning the poor that is reminiscent of Langland and the concluding section of Book II of Utopia, “Lupset” enumerated the causes of misfortune that caused many to lack wealth: “if a man be fallen into any great sickness or feebleness of body, or by any injury of fortune be cast into great poverty, or if his children or friends have any mischance  .  .  .” then “be he as perfect as ever was St. Paul, yet he is not in weal nor in prosperous state . . .”.71 In contradistinction to “Pole” ’s position, “Lupset” cited the Franciscan position on poverty and “the opinion of many great wise men . . . ”, which held that one could be poor and still be virtuous. He cited “the doctrine of our master Christ, which calls them blessed which be ever in worldly adversity, patiently suffering it for his sake  .  .  .” and also the examples of the apostles and disciples, who were “simple and poor having no worldly prosperity, and yet I think you will not say that they were in misery, but contrary that they were in high felicity  .  .  .”. By contrast, those “which be in worldly prosperity he [Christ] notes to be miserable and wretched . . .”.72 “Pole” ’s reply was a telling defense of the link between virtue and worldly success. He first casuistically stated that if man were no more than a soul that was full of virtue, then he could not be affected by adversity, so that by definition, “virtue had ever coupled with her high high [sic] felicity . . .”. “Pole” took the argument further, saying that it was not only the lack of hardship that went with a condition of virtuousness. He asserted that man “is not in the most perfect state, it is not in the highest degree, except there to be coupled worldly prosperity . . .”. When those two conditions were joined, he stated, the sky was the limit for the exercise of all kinds of virtues— and virtù: “this is certain that the mind of man {then} more flourishes, more

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  201 rejoices and has more weal, when freely without any impediment, either of body or injury of fortune, it exercises virtues, acts and spreads her beams to the light and comfort of many other . . .”.73 There would be room in heaven for both poor and rich. Although one was “troubled with all worldly adversity,” one could still find salvation if one “patiently suffer it for the love {of} God . . .”. Likewise, mundane material success “excludes not man from the most high felicity of the life to come”; in fact, if a person “use it well, it is also a means whereby he the better {may} attain to the same . . .”. This was because “worldly prosperity is so full of manifold perils and dangers, by the which a negligent mind is soon oppressed . . .”. In fact, “Pole” argued, “it is of many wise men judged much harder to be, well to use worldly prosperity, than patiently to suffer and bear all worldly adversity . . .”. As a result, Christ chose his disciples from among the poor because they were not subject to such great temptation as the wealthy. Yet he would exclude from heaven “neither they which have their hearts fixed in the love of riches of this world, neither they which have their minds drowned in the vain pleasures of this life . . .”.74 This was because the wealthy “can bear their minds upright in the straight use of the same, and for because the thing is of so great hardness and difficulty . . .”. “Pole” argued that such men submitted themselves to greater temptation than many others, including those “which for fear of the same dangers run into a religious house . . .”. He drew a contrast between “a good and expert mariner” who would sail from port, despite the threat of storms, to those who were “fearful” and stayed put: he, which in dangerous prosperity so full of {so} many occasions of errors and doing amiss governs his mind well and keeps it upright, is justly to be called most perfect and wise man, yea and much more deserves and of more praise is worthy than he, which for fear of the same dangers runs into a religious house . . .”.75 No man, “Pole” concluded, should be excluded from wealth just because only a minority could attain it. A stronger defense of wealth would be hard to discover, a position very much at odds with theorists of the body social who, while stoutly denying the accusations that they attacked property rights, were at the very least prepared to treat property as a matter of stewardship. “Lupset” disagreed with “Pole” ’s contentions, returning to his point that the soul alone was sufficient to achieve virtue, but “Pole” seemed to have the better of the argument because he had the last word, after which “Lupset” appeared to give up.76 Starkey’s model for the “true Commonwealth” lies in the foregoing discussion of personal qualities. The premise, as noted above, was in Starkey’s reading of Aristotle—“the {very} same thing wherein stands the wealth and prosperous state of every particular man by himself rests also of every city or country the very and true Commonwealth . . .”.77 Taking the discussion

202  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 further, Starkey drew a parallel between the personal body and the “politic body.” This was more than a simple analogy or parallel universe of correspondences of body politic and microcosm so beloved of those who painted the “Elizabethan World Picture.”78 Starkey actually tied the individual man to the body politic, even using the same basic qualities to describe the two. He observed that “like as the weal of every man sunderly by himself rises of the three principal things before declared, so the commonweal of every country, city, or town semblably rises of other three things proportionable and like to the same . . .”.79 Not surprisingly, the ideal qualities of the body politic are very similar to those of the individual human—health, wealth, and policy. Admittedly, the third quality of policy might be considered a break from the “virtue” of individual men, but in some respects the two are comparable because, as Starkey later observed, policy was actually designed “to induce the multitude to virtuous living . . .”.80 V. STARKEY AS PROTO-MALTHUS, PROTO-MARX, AND PROTO-HOBBES Starkey’s description of the body politic, while calling upon the body social’s theory of interdependence, was above all informed by demographic and economic phenomena and material facts. In some respects, Starkey might be considered a proto-Malthusian. The discussion of “health” turns out to be a consideration of the importance of population. Like Malthus, Starkey thought there was an optimum number of people, and he prefigured Malthus in listing as “positive checks” the scarcity of food supplies, sickness and contagious diseases, warfare, and foreign invasions. Starkey was certain that it was the “multitude of people wherein rests the ground and as it were the foundation of the commonweal . . .”. However wealthy and fertile the country might be, “if there be of people either too few or too many . . . there can be no image nor shadow of any commonweal . . .”.81 Again prefiguring Malthus, he stated regarding food supplies that if “the country by no diligence nor labor of man {may} be sufficient to nourish them and minister them food there without doubt can be no commonweal, but ever miserable penury and wretched poverty  .  .  .”. Equally, if there were too few to till the land and provide crafts, then “there shall also spring thereof great penury and scarceness of all things necessary for man’s life, and so then civil life and true commonweal can in no case be {there} maintained . . .”.82 Starkey’s second requirement for the health of the body politic was wealth. In a section that seems to echo Clement Armstrong and to prefigure Marx, the author warned that without prosperity, a commonweal would succumb to poverty and, ultimately, to internal divisions. He observed that, however well supplied with people a country might be, “yet if there be lack of necessaries {it cannot long prosper}, [and] there will shortly grow in all {kind of} misery, for great poverty in any country {has ever coupled great

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  203 misery she} is the mother of envy and malice, dissension and debate, and many other mischiefs ensuing . . .”. Starkey added that a successful Commonwealth had to make sure it was not encircled, attacked, and robbed by enemy neighbors.83 The third requirement of a successful body politic, prefiguring Hobbes, was policy, according to Starkey. Before there was policy, he suggested, everyone lived in a state of nature “like wild beasts” and “wandered abroad in the wild fields and woods . . .”. The forms of government were unimportant, whether monarchy, a “common council,” or the “whole body and multitude of people . . .”. What was vital was the existence of laws that would lead to an orderly society and “virtuous living . . .”.84 To achieve these ends, policy was essential, for “without such civil order and politic rule there can never in any country, city, or town be seen any shadow of the true commonweal . . .”. Without such policy, there could never be the right numbers of people (“health”), nor great riches. Frequently invoking the theory of mutual obligation, Starkey stated that without “politic rule,” unity would be impossible.85 The benefits were both spiritual and material, with an especially heavy dose of the latter. If rulers “both spiritual and temporal” did their duty, the people would be instructed in Christianity. They would also “quietly labor, {both} without outward impediment and hurt of enemies and also without inward injury among themselves, one oppressing another with wrongs {and injury}, but diligently to labor procuring food and things necessary for the whole politic body . . .”. Reprising Dudley, the rulers were to provide justice for the entire commonalty and in return would live in “pomp and pleasure and in quiet life” because they were “{maintained} by the labor and travail of the poor commonalty . . .”.86 The latter would in “quietness apply themselves to their labors {and pains} for the sustaining of the whole body . . . giving {also reverently} to their princes and lords all humble service and meek obedience . . .”. The upshot would be “perfect love and amity one to another, one glad to succor and aid another as members and parts of one body . . . ”, but still more besides.87 The promise made throughout this section of the “Dialogue” was the promise of plenty, of material success. The terms “abundance” and “prosperity” and “profit” litter the text, even though Starkey also, as we saw above, identified “private weal” as the source of most problems facing the Commonwealth. The “perfect state” was when the commonweal was “plentuously nourished with abundance of all things necessary and pleasant for the sustentation and quietness of man’s life,” a virtual Garden of Eden. Again, “when all these parts [of the body] thus coupled together, exercise with diligence their office and duty . . . ever looking to the profit of the whole body, then that common weal must needs flourish, then that country must needs be in the most prosperous state, {for} that you shall see riches and convenient abundance of all things necessary . . .”. Cities, towns, castles, and the population at large would grow.88 For his part, “Lupset” protested that prosperity was subject to the whims of fortune, but “Pole,” while admitting

204  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 the vicissitudes of fate, brushed aside objections with the statement that “virtue” gave man “felicity” and allowed every country the opportunity of using good policy to right matters. The alternative, he averred, was “great poverty and lack of all things necessary . . .”.89 After celebrating the power and benefits of wealth and in a turnaround that takes one’s breath away, the “Pole” character stated that the greatest threat to the true commonweal was not poverty, but “over much regard of private weal, pleasure and profit [which] is the manifest destruction of all good public and {just} common policy . . .”. In the “perfect state,” men “would not so much regard the private weal as they do; they would {not} so study their own destruction . . .”.90 But men were “so blinded with singular profit and vain pleasure, that they never consider this commonweal . . .”. Rather, “by corrupt judgment [they] esteem ill to be good and good to be ill” with the result that “it {over}runs whole nations and people, utterly destroys all civil life and politic rule, {for} there can reign no good policy where the judgment of the people is corrupt[ed] by false opinion, whereby they judge that every man does well when he only regards his own pleasure and profit . . .”.91 Good rule or policy was impossible in such a condition, and the results were plain to see in countries and cities where sedition broke out and order was “turned up so down, therewith by and by perishes the private weal of every man . . .”. This was because “no one can long enjoy pleasure or quietness where the whole is disturbed and put out of order, therefore this is evident as the shining of the sun . . .” and because “every man under the pretense color of the commonweal regards the singular . . .”.92 VI. CONCLUSIONS It is evident from the foregoing that Starkey’s “Dialogue” sends mixed social messages. He placed a premium on personal wealth and virtue, which he argued were the basis of the “true commonweal.” But he also articulated the body social’s theory of mutual obligation and its repudiation of selfinterest. Which did he believe in? It is possible to interpret the document as an exercise in rhetoric that “cannot wear the anachronistic strait-jacket of consistency and coherence.”93 But it is also worth considering the document in its entirety before declaring inconsistency to be its chief consistent quality. First, what do Starkey’s analyses of the dysfunctional elements of English society suggest about his place in early Tudor social thought? Was there more to his diagnoses than appeared in his thinking about the body social? At what points were there overlaps? Second, what policy-based solutions did he envisage, and how did they compare to the body social and Thomas More? Thirdly, what do they suggest about Starkey’s social philosophy and where he fits in the context of the thinking of his time? In sum, that philosophy appears to bear greater similarity to the social humanist line than to that of the body social, as the next chapter seeks to show.

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  205 NOTES   1. Richard Axton, ed., Three Rastell [sic] Plays . . . Gentleness and Nobility (Cambridge, MA: D. S. Brewer, 1979), 102–3, 114. For attempts to date the play, see Janette Dillon, “The Ploughman’s Voice: Language and Class in ‘Of Gentleness and Nobility,’ ” in Ton Hoenselaars and Marius Buning, eds., English Literature and the Other Languages (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 1999), 13, n.1–2.   2. Axton, ed., Three Rastell Plays, 99, 101, 103.   3. Ibid. 109–110, 116, 118.   4. Ibid. 117, 119, 120, 122.   5. Ibid. 123–4.   6. John M. Major, “Preface,” Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor (orig. pub. 1531; New York: Teachers College Press, 1969), ix–xi.   7. H. H. S. Croft, ed., The Book Named the Governor. Devised by Sir Thomas Elyot, Knight. Edited from the First Edition of 1531, 2 vols. (London, 1883; repr. New York, 1967), I, 4–5.   8. Ibid. I, 1–3 (italics in original).   9. Ibid. I, 7. 10. Ibid. I, 5–6 (italics added). 11. Ibid. I, 6 (italics added). 12. Ibid. loc.cit. 13. Ibid. 6–7. 14. Ibid. 7. 15. Ibid. loc.cit. 16. Ibid. II, 81–6 (citing on 85–6 “the continual increase of vagabonds into infinite numbers” and the ineffectiveness of legislation and proclamations). 17. Ibid. II, 27–9. 18. Ibid. II, 29–30, 33–5. 19. Ibid. II, 36–8. 20. Jonathan Woolfson, “Morison, Sir Richard (c. 1510–1556), humanist and diplomat,” ODNB (Oxford, 2004), 2; G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972), 199; and for a more extensive discussion, Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1973), 58–9. 21. For the publishing history and Berthelet, see David S. Berkowitz, ed. Humanist Scholarship and Public Order: Two Tracts against the Pilgrimage of Grace by Sir Richard Morison (London and Toronto, 1984), 25, 34 n. 19, 37–60. 22. Ibid. 112, 117–18 (an ouch is a brooch: ibid. 118 n.). 23. Ibid. 118–19. 24. Ibid. 110. 25. Ibid. 111–112. 26. Ibid. 119. 27. Michael Bush, The Pilgrimage of Grace: A Study of the Rebel Armies of October 1536 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 412–13. Also Scott M. Harrison, The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake Counties, 1536–7 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1981), 47–66. R. B. Smith, Land and Politics in the England of Henry VIII: The West Riding of Yorkshire, 1530–1546 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) focused on the upper ranks of society. 28. Berkowitz, Two Tracts, 167. 29. W. Gordon Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 191. 30. Berkowitz, ed., Two Tracts, 115. 31. Ibid. 116.

206  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 32. Ibid. loc.cit. 33. Ibid. loc.cit. 34. Ibid. 128–130. 35. Ibid. 124. 36. Ibid. 124–5, 131, 136–7. 37. Ibid. 128. 38. J.  W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1928; repr., 1964), 143, 151–2. 39. Zeeveld, Foundations of Tudor Policy, 127, 142–4. 40. A.  B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965), 228–43, 320–33; W. R. D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529–1559 (London: The Athlone Press, 1970), chs. 6–9. 41. G. R. Elton, “Reform by Statute: Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue and Thomas Cromwell’s Policy,” Raleigh Lecture on History, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol.  54 (London, 1968), 173–80; G. R. Elton, Reform and Renewal: Thomas Cromwell and the Common Weal (Cambridge, 1972), 50–55. 42. T.  F. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal: Humanist Politics and Religion in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 139, 156–8; Alistair Fox, “English Humanism and the Body Politic,” in Alistair Fox and John Guy, eds., Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform, 1500–1550 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 48. 43. Skinner, Foundations, I, 222. 44. T. Mayer, “Starkey, Thomas,” ODNB (Oxford University Press, 2004). But see Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485– 1603 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 94–5, who questions Mayer’s chronology of Starkey’s Italian years and whether he imbibed Italian “social humanist thinking” during that period. 45. Mayer, Starkey and the Commonweal, 128. 46. Mayer, ed., Starkey: A Dialogue, 53. Text modernized; “{}” in quotations indicate author’s insertions above the line: Ibid. xxi. 47. Ibid. 33. 48. Peter Burke, “The Language of Orders in Early Modern Europe,” Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification, M. L. Bush, ed. (London, 1992), 5–6. 49. Mayer, ed. Dialogue, 13, 26. 50. Ibid. 37. 51. Ibid. 4 (also 33). 52. Ibid. 104. 53. Ibid. 105. 54. Ibid. Obviously, these divisions are somewhat arbitrary, because the original text did not contain clear demarcations, but they do correspond to distinct bodies of subject matter and are better founded than those in the Burton edition: Kathleen M. Burton, ed. A Dialogue between Reginald “Pole” and Thomas “Lupset” by Thomas Starkey (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948), who divided the text into five parts. 55. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 56. 56. Ibid. 18–21. 57. Ibid. 21–2. 58. Ibid. 22. 59. Ibid. 22. 60. Ibid. 22–23. 61. Ibid. 23. 62. Ibid. 23. 63. M.  L. Bush, The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 4, 11, 13, 40, 73, 75; Jonathan K. Powis,

Social Humanist Thought Redefines the Social, c. 1523/5–1536  207 Aristocracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 14. For the subject of mobility, see Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (New York: Teachers College Press, 1968; orig. pub. University of Chicago Press, 1954), 269–74. 64. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 23. 65. Ibid. 24. 66. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. I, The History of Manners (Basel, 1939; Eng. Transl., New York: Urizen, 1978; repr. New York: Pantheon,1982), 58–9; for Vives on beggars’ diseases, see Beier, “Foucault Redux?” 41–2. 67. Elyot, The Governor (London, 1883), ed. H. H. S. Croft, I, Book I, chs. 16–22; R. Mulcaster, Positions (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), William Barker, ed. xxii, 60, chs. 6–9, 16–34. 68. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 24. 69. Ibid. 24–5. 70. Ibid. 25–6. 71. Ibid. 27. 72. Ibid. 27. 73. Ibid. 28. 74. Ibid. 28–9. 75. Ibid. 29. 76. Ibid. 30–1. 77. Ibid. 22. 78. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943; repr. 1968), ch. 7; W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricism and Politics: Two Traditions of English Political Thought, 1500–1700 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 21–2. 79. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 31. 80. Ibid. 36. 81. Ibid. 31. 82. Ibid. 32. 83. Ibid. 34. 84. Ibid. 35–6. 85. Ibid. 37–9. 86. Ibid. 37. 87. Ibid. 37–8. 88. Ibid. 39–40. 89. Ibid. 44. 90. Ibid. 44. 91. Ibid. 45. 92. Ibid. 45–6. 93. Mayer, Thomas Starkey and the Commonweal, 107.

11 Rethinking the Three Estates Thomas Starkey’s “Dialogue Between Lupset and Pole,” 1529–1532

I. INTRODUCTION In identifying the ills of the commonweal in England, Starkey presented a mixed bag of political, economic, and social issues. Although the “Dialogue” has mainly attracted the interest of historians of political thought, it covered a wide range of subjects of interest to the social historian—reforming the three estates, population levels, rural depopulation, labor and unemployment, poverty, crime, inheritance among the landed upper classes, overseas trade, luxury and morality, and education. Because of the significant social element in these topics, it is probable the author examined this subject to a greater degree than any other. There is no denying, nevertheless, that Starkey had a great deal to say on the political front. The discussion began with a call upon “councils” and parliaments “to seek out with diligence and by reason {to} try such faults and misorders as appear to let {the setting forth of} this commonweal . . .”. The “Dialogue” further proposed the election of the monarch and raised questions about military preparedness, while the final section advocated sweeping institutional changes that would affect multifarious aspects of English political and social life.1 The case can be made that Starkey ventured far beyond the body social towards a system of “social environmentalism” that would have produced a society as regimented as that described in Utopia.2 II. DEPOPULATION, THE CLERGY, AND THE ARISTOCRACY Starkey’s analysis of England’s failures as a commonweal went beyond those articulated by proponents of the body social, despite some themes they held in common. Like many of those writers, he discussed the question of rural depopulation at length: [I]f you look to the villages of the country . . . of them you shall find no small number utterly decayed, and there where as before time has been nourished much {good and Christian} people, now you shall find

Rethinking the Three Estates  209 nothing maintained but {wild and brute} beasts, and there where has been {many} houses and churches, {to the honor of God} now you shall find nothing but sheepcotes and stables {to the ruin of man}.3 One of Starkey’s original points on rural depopulation is that he contextualized the phenomenon to a greater extent than others, including Armstrong, but also More. Starkey discussed depopulation in relation to the “scarceness of men” or shortage of population, to which he gave top priority in his analysis and which followed, as seen in the last chapter, from his previous discussion of the “health” and “wealth” needed for a true commonweal. He linked depopulation to the larger economy, observing that the conversion to pasture was the cause of the decline of tillage, of high food prices, and the inflation of rents. He observed there to be extensive wastelands—including “heaths, forests, parks, and plains”—which he urged “{should be} brought to some profit and use . . . and “diligently labored . . .”.4 In addition, depopulation and wastelands caused unemployment or “idleness,” that bugbear of the civic humanists, which further diminished the common weal. “Pole” stated that “we have here in our country much idle people, and as I think in no country of the world such a multitude . . . ”, which he compared to a disease in a body, such as consumption. He estimated that “the third part of our people [are] living in idleness as persons to the commonweal utterly unprofitable . . .”. The affliction hit all ranks in society, “Pole” said, “which I call idle and unprofitable persons, of whom you shall find a great number if you will a little consider all statuses, orders, and degrees in our country . . .”. “Lupset” objected that it was not necessary that everyone labor at farming or a craft. “Pole” replied that man “is born to labor and travail . . . none otherwise than a bird to fly . . . ” and seemingly won the argument, for “Lupset” agreed.5 In discussing the obligation to labor, “Pole” retained elements of the body social. He inserted Elyot’s qualifier that some could rule and govern, while others provided manual labor: “for man is born to be {as a} governor, ruler, and tiller and inhabitant of this earth, {as} some by labor of body to procure things necessary for the maintenance of man’s life, some by wisdom {and policy} to keep the {rest of the} multitude in good order and civility . . . ”; “it is nothing necessary all to be laborers and tillers of the ground, but some to be priests {and ministers of God’s word}, some {to be} gentlemen {to the governance of the rest} and some servants to the same . . .”. The object was that none be “drone bees” and “that none be born to this idleness and vanity, to the which the most part of our people is much given {and bent}, but all to exercise themselves in some fashion of life convenient to the dignity and nature of man . . .”.6 Starkey’s vision of full employment encompassed criticisms of the status quo in society. The upshot, seen below, was proposals for reforms in society and government that resembled similar ideas in Utopia but that actually went beyond them in their detail. In discussing the issue of idleness, Starkey first focused on the clergy and nobility, their excessively large numbers of retainers

210  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 and servants, and their wealth, in the case of clerics. Starkey excoriated the clergy: bishops and prelates acted like the noblemen in keeping great trains and “in nourishing such an idle sort, spending their possessions and goods, which were to them given to be distributed among them which were oppressed with poverty and necessity . . .”. Look too, he said, at “priests, monks, friars, and canons with all their adherents {and idle train} and you shall find {also} among them no small number [of] idle and unprofitable {which be nothing but burdens to the earth} . . .”. The aristocracy fared no better when Starkey described “what an idle route our noble men keep {and nourish in their houses}, which do nothing else but carry dishes to the table . . . giving themselves to hunting, hawking, dicing, carding, and all other idle pastimes and vain, {as though they were borne to nothing else at all} . . .”.7 A general fault that characterized the ruling classes, according to “Pole,” was greed. The deficiency was “general almost to them all, both [sic] princes, lords, bishops, and prelates, that everyone of them looks chiefly to their own profit, pleasure, and commodity, and few there be which regard the wealth of the commonalty . . .”. In a passage once again recalling Utopia, Starkey stated, “[E]very one of them procures the private and the singular weal; princes and lords seldom look to the good order and wealth of their subjects . . .”. Rather, they “look {to} the receiving of their rents and revenues of their lands, with great study of enhancing thereof, to the further maintaining of their pompous state . . .”. As long as their tenants paid their rents on time, the ruler and nobility did not care whether their subordinates “sink or swim . . .”. The higher clergy were just as hard-hearted: “you see how little regard they have of their flock, so that they may have the wool, they little care for the simple sheep, but let them wander in wild forests in danger of wolves daily to be devoured.”8 The result was “a great misorder as touching the beauty {of this same body}” because its parts were out of proportion to one another, particularly the clergy: “priests are too many and yet good clerics too few {deformity in the body}; monks, friars, and canons are too many and yet good religious men too few  .  .  .”.9 Starkey’s attack on the Church covered issues that in number and substance went beyond his criticisms of the nobility and commonalty. He attacked the Church hierarchy, especially abbots and priors, for tolerating laziness, waste, and luxury. “Pole” was particularly damning about the Church’s permitting “of a great sort of idle abbey lubbers . . . which are apt to nothing, but as the bishops and abbots be, only to eat and drink . . .”. Thus, “all the possessions of the Church are spent as ill as the possessions of temporal men, contrary to the institution of the law and all good civility,” “Lupset” said.10 “Pole” extended his criticisms to the clergy: “we have over many, which {all together} make our politic body unwieldy and heavy, and as it were to be grieved with gross humors,” which he compared to the illness dropsy. The effect was to enervate and corrupt the entire body, including the production of goods. The “gross humors” made the body “lie idle and unprofitable

Rethinking the Three Estates  211 to all outward labor,” and because of the “negligent and idle,” there was “nothing quick in the exercise of arts and crafts . . .”. From idleness, there “boils out . . . vice, mischief, {and misery}”; it was “the mother of many other sicknesses and grievous diseases in our politic body, and the greatest destruction of the commonweal therein, that may be devised.”11 The “Dialogue” also raised questions about the institutional character of the Church. “Pole” queried whether the custom of the selection of bishops, abbots, and priors by the monarch “or some other great man’s {authority}” was a good idea, and “Lupset” replied that it was “unreasonable and [a] great destruction of the good order in the church.”12 Next, they discussed the education of the clergy, with “Pole” reporting that “they are not brought up in virtue and learning,” so they were unable to “preach the word of God and teach the people the laws of religion, of the which commonly they are most ignorant themselves . . .”. Instead, “they can nothing do but patter up their matin and mass, mumbling up a certain number of words nothing understand.” As a result of poor education, clerics were morally corrupt: “to that ignorance is joined all kind of vice, all mischief and vanity, in so much that they are examples of all vicious life to the lay people,” when instead, they “should induce the rude people {to} the train of virtue . . .”.13 Starkey’s protagonists developed a number of points about the Church, many of which were subjects of contemporary debate. They discussed the issue of absentee clergy: “priests be not resident upon their benefices, but either be in the court or in great men’s houses there taking their pleasure by the reason whereof the people lack their pastors, which gather the wool daily . . . without regard of the profit of their sheep.”14 They discussed the service in the vernacular, “Pole” objecting that Latin was said “in a strange tongue, nothing of the people understand, by the reason whereof the people take not that fruit that they might and ought to receive if it were rehearsed in our vulgar tongue . . .”. He protested against singing the mass in “a fashion more convenient to minstrels than to devout ministers of the divine service,” which would have caused the early Church fathers to “drive them out of churches to taverns, comedies, and common plays . . .”. “Lupset” objected that this might lead to Lutheran heresies, but “Pole” responded that one could adopt some of the Lutheran doctrine without buying into all of it.15 Citing ancient precedents, they discussed whether the laws, including canon law as well as the common law, should be in English, which they agreed that they should be.16 The dialogists further examined clerical institutions that were under scrutiny at the time—the benefit of clergy, the legal relationship of monasteries to Rome, and the right of sanctuary. “Pole” attacked the benefit of clergy by questioning whether clerics “should never for no offence be called before a secular judge and punished temporally if he offend in such faults as . . . robbery, murder, and theft . . .”. “Lupset” was concerned about preserving the “dignity of priesthood,” but “Pole” replied that the clergy should be held to a higher standard, because “every lewd fellow nowadays {and idle lubber} that can {either} read or sing makes himself priest, not for love of religion,

212  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 but for [sic] because under the pretense thereof they may abuse themselves in all vain lusts and vanity without punishment or reproof . . .”. “Lupset” agreed, “I cannot but confess this privilege to be pernicious, especially in such a multitude of ribalds as be nowadays in the order of priesthood . . .”.17 The two also discussed the exemption of monasteries and colleges from the legal authority of bishops and their right to be judged in Rome. “Pole” queried whether the privilege was “reasonable,” and “Lupset” averred that since bishops did not maintain the law, it would be a poor idea to give them authority over these institutions. The right of sanctuary, they agreed, was highly suspect. “Pole” questioned whether “it is well, a man when he has committed willful murder or outrageous robbery or of purpose deceived his creditors, to run to the sanctuary with all his goods, and there to live quietly, enjoying all quietness and pleasure . . .”. He denounced the institution as “a plain occasion of all mischief {and misery} and causes much murder in our country {and nation}, for who will be afraid to kill his enemy if he may be saved by the privilege of sanctuary.” “Lupset” agreed with this critique.18 Even after justifying a relatively privileged status for the clergy and nobility by exempting them from manual labor, “Pole”still maintained that excessive numbers of “servants,” which I  take to include armed retainers, and too many clergy produced a misshapen social and political body. He described the “over great number of them {without due proportion to the other parts of the body},” which he stated was “superfluous” and far exceeded the numbers in other places: “here in our country of those sorts be over many, and especially of them which we call serving men . . . to gentlemen lords. . . . If you look throughout the world, as I think, you shall not find in any one country proportionate to ours, like number of that sort.”19 “Lupset” took exception to these statements about serving men, citing the great military value of the “yeomanry of England . . . for in them stands the chief defense of England.” “Pole” disagreed, conflating the yeomanry with “serving-men” and arguing that they were so poorly trained that “in time of war it is necessary for our ploughmen and laborers of the country to take weapon in hand” or the country would be invaded.20 The defense question and the nobility were central to the social issue, “Pole” stated. He and “Lupset” developed an argument based on a positive historical perception of England’s past glories, which they negatively compared to the current state of affairs. “Pole” commented that “we are now at this time neither so able to defend ourselves from injuries of enemies, neither of other by feats of arms to recover our right again,” the latter possibly a reference to England’s loss of its French territories in 1450. The problem was the nobility: “there was never so few good captains here in our country as there be now, nor as I think never so small number of them which be exercised in deeds and feats or arms, in whom chiefly stands the strength of every country.”21 Starkey raised further issues about the nobility, including their “over sumptuous” building projects, the systems of primogeniture and wardship, and their education. “Lupset” queried whether the gentry and nobility were

Rethinking the Three Estates  213 not extravagant in building “above their degree . . .”. “Pole” responded that as long as they built out of timber and stone produced in England and did not go overboard with decorations, it was “a great ornament to the country” and put a lot of people to work. “Lupset”, in contrast, stated that many were building beyond the means of their heirs, so that the buildings would fall to ruin, and “Pole” cited the “consuming of gold upon posts and walls,” a recent fashion that he termed “a vain pomp . . .”.22 Primogeniture was a key issue in Starkey’s discussion of the nobility and gentry. “Pole” argued that the exclusion of all but the eldest sons from inheritances was against “reason and nature,” and that at least second sons should receive property. To treat them as being not the children of their father and as though they “had commit[ted] some great offense {and crime against their parents}” was questionable in the extreme. “Lupset” protested that in removing primogeniture, “you are about to take utterly away our policy and whole order of {this} realm” because if the commonalty “had not in every place some heads and governors to temper their affects {rude and unruly} there would among them be no order at all”; in sum, primogeniture helped to “contain the rudeness of the people . . .”.23 In actuality, “Lupset” suggested, the end of primogeniture would spell the end of the nobility: “you {shall} take away the foundation and ground of all our civility, and beside this you shall therewith bring in the ruin of all nobility and ancient stocks, for if you from nobles {once take} their {great} possessions . . . you shall in process of years confound the nobles and the commons together . . .”.24 In his reply “Pole” held to his position, but modified it somewhat to secure inheritances for second sons and, while maintaining the position of the eldest among the aristocracy, would seemingly exclude “gentlemen of mean sort” because primogeniture caused “among the multitude over great inequality, which is the occasion of dissension and debate . . .”. Similar considerations were raised concerning the entailing of properties to eldest sons which, “Lupset” stated, “makes many reckless heirs, causes them little to regard neither learning nor virtue, in as much as they are sure to be inheritors to a great portion of entailed land, and so by this assurance they give themselves to all vanity and pleasure . . .”. Among “base families,” the system engendered “great inequality and so much hate and malice among the commonalty” that the law should be altered to avoid the practice.25 “Pole” was critical of the system of wardship. He protested that to have one’s estates and persons transferred to someone who was neither kin nor an ally was “against reason.” He queried, too, whether the holder of the wardship really concerned himself with the education of the minor, whether the holder was liable to give any account of the property, and whether they should have the authority to marry off the ward to whom they pleased. “Lupset” justified the system on historical grounds and linked it to the exigencies of ensuring inheritances at the time of the Conquest of 1066, but “Pole” rejected this rationale, calling William I a “tyrant” and stating that historical explanations were not the point of their discussions, whereas the

214  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 perfect commonweal was. In sum, he found “this bondage to be unreasonable among civil people . . .”.26 The critiques of the nobles included their education, which “Pole” asserted involved being “brought up in hunting and hawking, dicing and carding, eating and drinking, and in conclusion in all vain pleasure, pastime {and vanity} . . .”. “Lupset” disagreed, questioning whether “Pole” expected them to “go to plough and to cart or to learn some other craft to get their living by,” but “Pole” responded (echoing Dudley a generation earlier) that the poor education of the aristocracy “is no small destruction of our commonweal” and that “of this point hangs a great part of the very wealth of the whole commonalty.”27 As in Utopia, “Pole” attacked the nobles’ customs of keeping large households with bands of retainers and servants: “that ever one of them will keep a court like a prince, {keeping of over great houses}, every one will have a great idle rout to wait upon him, to keep him company and pastime  .  .  .”. It suggested the great lord “has in himself no comfort {at all, nor} within his mind {heart and breast, no cause of inward rejoicing but hangs only of outward vanity}  .  .  .”. This pretense was expressed in ways that caused “the beggary of England”: excess in diet and apparel that included 20 dishes and the wearing of silks and velvets, which they thought enhanced their honor but which in reality caused “much poverty . . .”. In a piece of comparative ethnology, Starkey and “Pole” agreed that no other countries had such large bands of retainers and servants. A knight or “mean gentleman” in England had as many “idle men” as any great lord in France, Italy, or Spain.28 III. THE COMMONALTY CRITIQUED Starkey’s discussion of the commonalty focused on more straightforwardly social questions. That his “true commonweal” was part of a moral universe— that of “virtue” in one sense—was apparent in the order and contents of the dialogue. He began it with condemnations of luxury, overindulgence, and imports of “trifles,” expanded it into sections on unemployment, poverty, and the rural economy, and concluded with institutional questions, including urban life and the crimes of theft and treason. Some of these topics were front and center in contemporary discourse, e.g., economic and social issues for the body social of Armstrong and the “Commonwealth-men” and theft in Utopia, but Starkey considered a wider range of questions than the others. What is more, as the concluding section of this chapter suggests, he devised a greater variety of remedies, even if they were not as radical as More’s. The attack upon luxury re-emphasized the author’s point about the significance of virtue for the health of the person and the body social. Among those whom “Pole” described as “ill occupied” were those who “busy themselves in making and procuring things for the vain pastime and pleasure of other[s]  .  .  .”. They included people inventing ways to decorate men’s

Rethinking the Three Estates  215 apparel, those creating “manifold and diverse new kinds of meats and drinks and ever be occupied in curious devis[ing] of new fangled things,” “all such as be called singing men, curious descanters and devisers of new songs {which tend only to vanity},” and merchants who exported English domestic necessities and imported “vain trifles and conceits only for the foolish pastime and pleasure of man . . .”. Of such people and “many other, I note as persons ill occupied and to the commonweal unprofitable,” “Pole” indicated he would banish them “and utterly cast out all vain pleasure and vain ornaments . . .”. When “Lupset” objected that this was taking all pleasure from people, “Pole” responded that the “true ornaments of the {very} commonweal” were “neither in the gay apparel of the citizens, neither {yet} in delicate meats and drinks,” but only in “the health of the body and virtues of the mind . . .”. The result of overindulgence was palsy in the body politic, in which certain parts were unable to function.29 The point was further developed in discussions of foreign trade and the social problems it allegedly caused among the commonalty. “Lupset” cited the export of cattle, grain, wool, tin, “and other metals,” which he argued were needed at home, and the import of French cloth, “delicate wines, fine cloths, says and silks, beads, combs, girdles and knives and a thousand such trifling things . . .”.30 The results included unemployment for the English, corruption caused by “idleness and sloth,” and “a great hurt to the clothiers of England . . .”. Wine imports, “Lupset” stated, purportedly impoverished gentlemen who filled their cellars at great cost, but “it causes also much drunkenness and idleness among our {common people and} craftsmen in cities and towns,” and so he would limit consumption to the nobility [!].31 “Lupset” also complained of gluttony, especially among the populace: “was never so great feasting and banqueting with so many and diverse kinds of meats as there is now in our days {commonly used}, and especially in mean men’s houses . . .”. The results of “nourishing many idle gluttons” included sickness, food shortages, and high prices. Self-indulgence even included building among the common people, for “a mean man will have a house mete for a prince . . .”.32 Starkey’s discussion of unemployment among the populace combined economics and moral philosophy. If the feet and the hands represented ploughmen and craftsmen, “Pole” stated, both organs “are negligent and slow”: “ploughmen do not diligently labor and till the ground for the bringing forth of fruit necessary for the food and sustenance of man; craftsmen also and all artificers show no less negligence in the use of their crafts {by the reason whereof here is in our country much thereof and penury}.” As a consequence, there was extensive uncultivated wasteland, and victuals were scarce and expensive. English ploughmen and artisans were less diligent than those in France, Italy, and Spain. The reason was that “the people of England is more given to idle gluttony than any people of the world”; as a result, the feet and hands suffered from gout, “for like as in a gout the hands and feet lie unprofitable to the body . . .”.33 “Lupset” initially disagreed with “Pole” ’s analysis, declaring that England was one of the richest countries in Christendom, citing its mineral

216  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 wealth in gold, iron, lead, silver, tin, and wool. Whereas “Pole” developed a diachronic analysis, “Lupset” presented a synchronic and comparative one. The latter argued that the English people were “most rich and wealthy of any commons about us, for in France, Italy and Spain, the commons without fail are more miserable and poor . . .”. “Pole” did not dispute the comparison, but avowed that times had changed: “you shall find for great riches and liberality in time past, now great wretchedness and poverty”; he cited “the great multitude of beggars here in our country” and asserted that “in no country of Christendom for the number of people, you shall find so many beggars as be here in England and more now than have been before time, which argues plain great poverty . . .”. He continued that “it cannot be doubted but that there is here among us great poverty,” which was shown by the scarcity and high prices of foodstuffs and the shortage of money, of which all social groups complained. For his part, “Lupset” blamed hardship on “idleness and ill policy,” and again took a proto-Malthusian stance on people’s voluntary idleness, “for it is their own cause and negligence that they so beg  .  .  .”. In reality, he claimed, the country possessed sufficient food; many of the poor “feign poverty,” and people always complain about not having enough, but never admit it when they are rich. At the end, the dialogists agreed to disagree, but with “Lupset” admitting “there is greater poverty than need to be, if there were among us good policy . . .”.34 Another economic and social issue affecting chiefly the commonalty was agrarian change. The discussion is among the earliest in a debate that, as is well known, would resound for a century and more in England. At issue, as “Lupset” ’s opening remarks indicate, was land use on a broad array of fronts. He cited seven leading issues—the enclosing of arable land, its conversion from tillage to pasture, high food prices, the “engrossing” or consolidation of farms, the raising of rents, the depopulation of villages, and the concentration of landed wealth in fewer and fewer hands. A seventh question, which neither dialogist cited, was the extinguishing of common rights such as grazing and gleaning once the land was privatized and farmed in severalty, which will be discussed in depth in Chapter 14. “Lupset” summed up agrarian abuses by asserting that “there is no man but he sees the great enclosing in every part of arable land, and whereas was corn and fruitful tillage, now no things but pastures and plains, by the reason whereof many villages and towns are in few days ruined and decayed.” “Pole” replied that the impact of agrarian change was exaggerated—“it is not so great as it {appears and so is} judged by the common sort”—and argued that livestock (he cited the value of More’s sheep as wool producers) were necessary to feed the population as well as crops, so that enclosing was therefore justified. “Lupset” responded by pointing to the vulnerability of livestock, especially sheep, to disease and to the lack of attention to breeding practices. More generally, he pointed to the deleterious economic and social consequences of these agrarian changes. First, he suggested, from the conversion of arable to pasture “rises a part of this great dearth both of

Rethinking the Three Estates  217 victual and corn . . .”. Second, he described the process of the amassing of land by the better off, who were profiting from market forces: “the farms of all such pastures nowadays for the most part are brought to the hands of {a} few and richer men {engrossing of farms}, which will give either greatest rent or fine . . .”. The result was that “poor men are excluded from their living, and beside that, the ground also worse tilled and occupied . . .”.35 Unlike Armstrong, despite “Pole” ’s praise of sheep, Starkey did not directly connect the conversion of land to the market for wool. Otherwise, it was a thorough and perspicacious analysis. The “Dialogue” raised further issues affecting the commonalty, including their relations with other parts of the body social, the positions of legal professions and institutions, and the quality of urban life. In discussing why the parts of the body did not work well with one another, Starkey raised the specter of class conflict, and the subject was again alluded to in the section on poverty, which observed that great differences of wealth could engender dysfunction: “every man may see that some have too much, some too little, and some never a whit, wherefore without fail a misorder there is whereby rises this poverty.”36 As in Dudley and other writers, a leading source of social tension was the division between the commonalty and the landed elites. Just as universal was the opprobrium directed at the legal profession. The broken parts of the body included “proctors and brokers of both laws [spiritual and temporal], which rather trouble men’s causes than finish them justly . . . ”, and this point was expanded considerably in subsequent pages. A leading complaint was the removal of cases to the central courts in Westminster. The implication was that, to secure a fair judgment, appellants sought to avoid local prejudice, but “Pole” pointed out that removing cases to London was vexatious to some parties, and “Lupset” admitted that “this is undoubtedly a great fault in the order of our law and causes many poor men to be wrongfully oppressed . . .”. The problem, “Pole” claimed, lay in the fact that “hungry advocates {and cormorants of the court} study much to delay causes for their lucre and profit” and cited the lawyers involved in the cases.37 The “Dialogue” called for major legal reforms. We have already observed that it called for all laws to be in the vernacular, and Starkey discussed lessening punishments for theft and treason. These laws potentially affected the whole of society, but most of all concerned the commonalty, who were the most common offenders, sometimes out of all proportion to their share of the population. That the populace was affected as well as the elites is shown by the thousands of Royal pardons issued in the period.38 Very much in the mold of Utopia, Starkey raised doubts about penalties for theft. “Pole” thought “the punishment of theft is over strait . . . for with us for every little theft a man is by and by hanged without mercy or pity, which me seems is against nature {and humanity}, especially when they steal for necessity without murder or manslaughter,” and particularly in cases of first offenses. “Pole” also argued that harsh sentences did not have a deterrent effect: “it avails not also {to the repressing of the fault} as by long time and many years

218  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 we have had proof {sufficient}.” “Lupset” did not entirely agree, but both characters thought it should be possible to find “a way to temper and refrain their malice by other means than by death . . .”.39 They extended their critiques of the law to punishment for treason, which did not just affect the upper classes. “Pole” objected on the grounds that not only the heir and family lost all their lands, “but also the creditors wholly are faulted of their debt . . .”. When “Lupset” replied that treason was a most heinous crime deserving of the harshest penalty, “Pole” responded that accusations were sometimes a matter of “light suspicion,” and “Lupset” agreed that penalties for false accusers should be increased.40 A final point of criticism concerned the allegedly inferior quality of urban life in England. “Pole” cited as matters of concern in “outward things” the conditions of cities and towns. Their buildings and cleanliness were in poor shape because of individualism: “there is no cure nor regard of them, but every man for his time only lives and looks to his pleasure {without regard of the posterity}.” “Lupset” agreed, pointing out that in Flanders and France, “the cities and towns appeared so goodly, so well built and so clean kept” that he thought he was “translated as it {had} been into another world . . .”. Cities and towns there seemed to compete with one another to see which “should be more beautiful and strong, better built and cleaner kept,” whereas in England, people “seem to study to find means how they may quickest {let} fall into ruin and decay all their cities, castles and towns . . .”. England’s urban blight, “Lupset” claimed, meant that “few that inhabit cities or towns, few that {have} any regard of them,” even “every gentleman flies into the country . . .”. As a result, he asserted that (obviously drawing upon Italian models of civic humanism) in cities and towns, “you shall find no policy, no civil order, almost nor [sic] rule . . .”.41 IV. SOCIETY AND ECONOMY ANALYZED

A. Favoring Propagation Historians of politics and political thought have understandably focused on Starkey’s discussions of government and its institutions. Admittedly, the “Dialogue” is a rich source for such matters, and it contains novel proposals, most notably an elective monarchy and enhanced roles for Parliament and conciliar forms of government.42 But it should by now be obvious that the document is also a fount of material for social and economic questions, which the final section of this chapter will examine. Of course, as stated earlier, it is sometimes a fine line between the “political” and the “social,” but the contention here is that while the Church and the nobility obviously had significant political roles, they were also leading social and economic players. In addition to the multifaceted character of roles, the “Dialogue” contained numerous straightforward social discussions and proposals. They included the institution of marriage and the idea of making it compulsory for all, how one should define wealth and its relationship to “virtue,” the question of class

Rethinking the Three Estates  219 conflict and cures for sedition, whether education should be universal and in what forms it should be delivered, and the nature of the labor force and whether work should be required of all. In addition, the members of the three estates were analyzed, with specific proposals being developed about each. The first problem that Starkey addressed in his final section was England’s “great lack of people, the multitude whereof is as it were the ground and foundation of this our commonweal” and which “Pole” reported as causing “a consumption of the politic body  .  .  .”. He first examined the causes of population loss, citing war, pestilence, and starvation, but dismissed all three and focused on natural increase as the chief factor. He and “Lupset” identified three groups that required regulation, even using “fear of punishment” as a constraint.43 To avoid their “imbecility” and to “allure the gross and rude people” to procreate through marriage, “we must both by privilege and pain induce men thereto  .  .  .”. “Lupset” pointed to the law of chastity of the Church, which he proposed to change because the clergy were “no small number” and because Christ himself did not require celibacy. “Pole” agreed to the proposal, but limited it to the secular clergy because he thought there should still be some place where people could go to escape “the busyness and vanity of the world” to pray and contemplate.44 The second group who were to be encouraged to wed was the ubiquitous “serving men,” who seldom married “because of poverty and lack of art and craft to live” and who as a result, “live always as common corrupters of chastity . . .”. The “Dialogue” proposed that nobles and gentlemen keep no more servants than they were able to set up in honest positions so they could marry, and that they should build them houses on waste grounds and in forests and parks, which they would cultivate. This solution delighted both “Pole” and “Lupset,” who saw in it a multi-purpose resolution of the problem of troublesome single serving men, as well as the extension of cultivation and the increase of the birthrate.45 The third group to be encouraged to marry and propagate was bachelors, who would be penalized through taxation. They would have a shilling in every pound of wages or land taxed, while anyone with £5 in goods would pay 4d. in the pound. The revenues that accrued would be spent on people with more children than they could support and on dowries for poor “demoiselles and virgins . . .”. Anyone who died without marrying would be required to leave half of their goods to the same fund, and in the case of priests, the whole of their estates. Persons with five or more children would pay no taxes unless they had more than 100 marks in goods; nor would they have to serve in the military in times of war. The result, “Pole” said, was that “I think in few years the people should increase to a notable number . . .”.46

B. Labor, Idleness, and Luxury Labor and the issues of “idleness” and luxury affected all three estates. The root of the problem was “the ill and idle bringing up of youth” who lived in service with clerics and nobles. The solution was to pass a law that when

220  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 children reached the age of seven, they should either be sent to school or to a craft, depending upon their abilities, and priests in the parishes should be responsible for enforcing the legislation. Anyone in a “science or craft, noble and excellent,” should be rewarded by the monarch, which “would encourage base stomachs to endeavor themselves {diligently} to attain in all arts and craft great singularity  .  .  .”. Citing the example of Athens, anyone who lived “as a drone bee does in a hive [and] sucks up the honey” was to be banished “as a person unprofitable to all good civility . . .”. No one would be allowed to settle in a place “except he professed some honest craft or could make a lawful reckoning how he lived in their commonalty . . .”.47 To enforce this labor system, Starkey cited the ancient Roman institution of the censors, who looked after the size, wealth, and education of the population and suppressed idleness. They were “judges of the manners of all other,” and “Lupset” proposed calling them “conservators of the commonweal . . .”. Again citing Roman examples, the conservators would have authority over other officers, who would include “overseers” who looked after the health and fabric of cities.48 Closely related in Starkey’s mind to idleness was luxury, because he felt strongly that some occupations produced nothing but frivolities and therefore did not perform real work at all. “Pole” listed among them craftsmen and merchants who made or sold trifles, “singers and players upon instruments . . . also a great number of these which we call religious men, and be not indeed . . . ”, who would receive “correction.” Those guilty of “ill occupying” would vanish as soon as their trades disappeared, which were mainly supported by the idle. One remedy, once again, was the education of youth and supervision by officials to ensure the “good education of youth in virtuous exercise” and, as in the human body, the “correction of corrupt and indigest humors  .  .  .”.49 A second cure was to legislate about trade. Foreign merchants would be forbidden to import anything “as shall allure our people to vain pleasure” and especially wine, the consumption of which should be limited to nobles “and them which be of power . . .”. Further, merchants could only export commodities that were in abundance at home; they could import only goods that gave “honest pleasure” and that could not be made by the English. Taking up “Pole” ’s list of the “ill occupied,” “Lupset” pointed out that the problem was not confined to the populace, for the other half of the problem lay in “these religious persons in monasteries and abbeys.” “Pole” would not shut the monasteries, but would reform them by not allowing youths to enter until they had a real religious vocation.50

C. Inequality Another systemic issue was social disharmony arising from disproportionate levels of wealth. Starkey’s solutions were hardly less radical than Utopia’s. In analyzing the sources of dysfunction, “Pole” cited “lack of {common}

Rethinking the Three Estates  221 justice {and equity}, that one part has too much and another too little of all such thing as equally should be distributed according to the dignity of all the citizens . . .”. The prince and his officials should “see that all such thing may be distribute[d] with a certain equality,” but with each part of the body still doing its job and receiving appropriate income according to the law. As things were, there was social conflict: “one is not content with his own {profession}, craft and manner of living, but ever when he sees another, more rich than he {and live at more pleasure}, then {he} despises his own . . .”. In such cases, penalties should be applied; “all seditious persons” who questioned the social order should suffer perpetual banishment or death. To ensure harmony, “Pole” proposed the “compelling of every man to do his office and duty, with distributing to every man according to his virtue and dignity such things as be divided among the citizens {with equity} shall conserve {much} this body in unity and concord . . .”. Unlike the organic body social model, there was nothing self-regulating about the social order in Starkey’s scheme. Laws and punishment were the matrixes upon which the social fabric was tailored.51

D. Remedies The dialogists identified as an urgent task the getting of the body out of its “deformity” and into its correct proportions. There were “too few ploughmen {and tillers of the ground}, and too many courtiers {and idle servants}, too few artisans {of good occupation} and too many priests {and religious full of vain superstition} . . .”. The remedy was to have some “expert” officers in charge of admission to every craft and to ensure that only those with “wit” (and presumably wisdom) became lawyers and clerics.52 If Utopia looks “totalitarian,” what should one make of Starkey’s willingness to institute a progressive income tax, force all males to marry, and give authority to technocrats to reshape society? In their speculations about the possibility of finding a perfect ruler, “Pole” and “Lupset” touched upon the wider issues of reason versus emotion and the role of education in shaping humans and their institutions. They considered first what they saw as Plato’s call for rulers who were so excellent in their wisdom that they would make laws unnecessary. “Lupset” rejected the theory, observing that “Plato imagined only and dreamed upon such a commonweal as never yet was found nor never I think shall be, except God would send down his angels and of them make a city, for man by nature is so frail {and corrupt} . . .”. “Pole” differed somewhat in his analysis, arguing that a good prince could be “the ground of all felicity in the civil life,” but “Lupset” maintained that only God had the power to find a perfect ruler. Taking a more existential line, “Pole” argued that God gave humans choices. On the one hand, God gave humanity the “sparkle of reason,” but on the other, “many affects {and vicious desires},” and people had to resist the latter through “cure, diligence, and labor . . .”.53

222  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 “Pole” admitted, like Elyot, that God’s gift of reason was not equally distributed among humans, but explained that the propensities towards rationality or vice could be influenced by education: “to some man this {light} is more communed, to some man less, according to {the} nature of his body and {according} to his education and good instruction in the Commonwealth . . .”. The result was that some were more suited to positions of power than others, which “Pole” then used as a justification for an elective monarchy. But his position on individual abilities was generalized to justify differentiated levels of political power among people and even nations: “this is the cause {as it appears to me} that one man is more wise than another, {yea and} one nation more prudent and politic than another  .  .  .”. Nevertheless, he suggested, following a path of reason was possible for all of humanity: “I think none there is so rude and beastly that with cure and diligence, by that same sparkle of reason given of God they may subdue their affections and follow the life to the which they be institute and ordained of God . . .”.54 Of course, how in the humanist model one makes the leap from individual gifts, or the lack thereof, to an entire society or polity is problematic. The lack of a hard-core social matrix, as the three estate model had supplied, means that in practice, the humanist’s dream was shapeless and, ultimately, ineffective as a decidedly social model. A cynic could argue that, despite modern mass education, we are still a long way from that sparkle of reason and rational decision-making in modern politics and government. V. REFORMING THE THREE ESTATES The “Dialogue” ’s recommendations concerning the three estates addressed the critiques that were outlined earlier. The proposals developed, however, were more radical than anything imagined by proponents of the body social, and the authority of government was significantly enhanced in a number of areas. The results included the reconfiguring of the roles of the Church and the nobility and increased demands upon the third estate’s economic potential.

A. Clerics Critiqued We have seen that the “Dialogue” was critical of what it considered to be excess numbers of clerics and was especially damning of their celibate state, which, it was argued, hindered the increase of England’s population. The possibility of abolishing celibacy was raised, as well as the banning of youth from religious houses. But the manuscript went still further, attacking papal judicial authority, critiquing the system of clerical incomes, calling for the reform of both the regular and secular clergy, and lifting the ban on translating the Bible into English. If the document was written between 1529 and 1532, these were radical, even prophetic, proposals for the time. They questioned the papal right of receiving appeals on English Church law.

Rethinking the Three Estates  223 Except in cases of heresy, the cases “should be defined at home {in our own country} . . .”. Such appeals were “a great destruction to our realm” and “{one of} the greatest ruins that ever has come to the realm of England . . .”. “Pole” described the papal right of dispensation of all laws passed by general councils of the Church as “usurping a certain cloaked tyranny under the pretext of religion” and called for an “ordinance” that no cases could be sued out of the country, i.e., to Rome.55 Archbishops should be instituted in Rome, “Pole” argued, but bishops should be installed at home, and the first fruits and tenths usually paid to the pope “should be distributed among the poor {men} of the diocese {here in our own nation} . . .”. “Lupset” replied that if the monies were spent at home, it would just be “among whores and harlots and idle lubbers,” but “Pole” demurred and took the proposals for financial reforms still further. Bishops should be expected to expend one quarter of their income on the fabric of their diocese’s churches, and a second quarter “to find himself and his household,” but the other two quarters should be given “to maintain the poor youth in study” and “to the poor maids and other poverty . . . ” and to support parish priests. Bishops should be resident in their dioceses unless called upon to serve the monarch; so should priests, who were to be “constrained . . . there to preach and teach the gospel of Christ . . .”. Abbots and priors should be elected every four years, be required to give an accounting of their service, and should also be resident in their houses. The objective, it seems, was to avoid abuses that flowed from the great wealth enjoyed by the top clerics, whom “Pole” compared to the great temporal lords, but he would have the same rule extended to parsons and curates. He was cynical about the willingness of any clerical stakeholders to part with any of their substance—“they which have great possessions will not of their free will liberally spend them according to reason”—and so restrictions were necessary. He proposed that it would be necessary “by order of law to constrain them thereto . . .”. Even the parish priests were to be “bounded to distribute that which they have superfluous among the poverty of their parish . . .”.56 These institutional upheavals chimed with advanced “Protestant” calls for reform, and they would have radically changed the character of the Church. Starkey called for equally sweeping transformations in the education of the clergy. Bishops would be expected to vet candidates for the priesthood, whose “learning and wisdom” would be checked and who were to have spent “their youth {virtuously} in letters and not in hunting, nor hawking and such other idle pastimes . . .”. No one under the age of 30 would be admitted to either the secular or regular clergy, “for this admitting of frail youth without convenient proof of their virtue and learning is the {ground and mother} of all misorder in the Church {and religion} . . .”. The result would be “a great occasion of the remedy of the whole body  . .  .”. The same end would be furthered by the reform of education. There should be schools in every town with “prudent masters” and priests to instruct them, “no less in virtue than in learning” and who would choose those fit “to be instruct[ed] in the liberal

224  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 science and so to be made preachers of the doctrine of Christ” and to attend a university. The principle behind these reforms was that “learning without virtue is pernicious and pestilent,” and so universities, as well as schools, had to be changed, but the manuscript was vague about precise changes in the curriculum, which it left to the monarch to lead.57 The final challenge to the clergy was to have the Bible translated into English, which was even more important than having the laws of the land in the vernacular, because the Scripture promised “everlasting life and perpetual joy,” while the laws offered “civil concord in this life and politic justice {and unity} . . .”.58 These were not pie-in-the-sky speculations. Starkey cited as his model Erasmus’s Institution of a Christian Man, which was possibly a translation of John Colet’s Cathecyzon, a religious guidebook written for the pupils at St. Paul’s School.59

B. The Aristocracy Anatomized The nobility were addressed, once again, in a section on defense that was far from flattering about their martial prowess. England, “Pole” asserted, was not well able to defend itself, and the chief cause was that “the nobility with their servants and adherents are not exercised in feat of arms {and chivalry} but give themselves to idle games as dicing and carding . . .”. He proposed a ban on “unprofitable games” and argued that “the nobility must be constrained {by lawful punishment} to exercise themselves in all such things {and} feats {of arms} as shall be for the defense of our realm . . .”. Besides the threat of punishment, the plan was a special affront to the nobles because, in demanding their “diligence,” it contrasted them to ploughmen who labored “for the common food . . .”. Based upon Roman and Swiss models, “Pole” added that every town should have a “common place” for the training of youths in the use of arms, which would be the work of experts who were “prescribed” to provide the service. He lamented the decline of military experience in England, which he blamed on “idleness and vanity,” and suggested that to remedy the situation, it was possible that, without having an actual war to fight, the “civil law” might be required to enact such a system. The nobles’ role was unclear, and the proposal begins to look like the later development of the Elizabethan militia, one of whose consequences was to diminish the traditional “bastard feudal,” private armies of the aristocracy.60 As noticed above, Starkey’s dialogists were critical of the quality of English towns, comparing them unfavorably to continental ones in their buildings and cleanliness, which discouraged the gentry from living in them. To remedy the situation, he proposed to begin the process by reintegrating gentlemen, who “{must be caused} to retire to cities and towns and to build them houses in the same” and to take part in governance there. The argument was that “they may not continually dwell in the country as they do [for] this is a great rudeness and {a} barbarous custom” because they acted

Rethinking the Three Estates  225 “as they did before there was any civil life known or established among us, the which surely is a great ground of the lack of all civil order {and humanity} . . .”. This move was not optional: “this must be amended” and “this must be remedied” were how “Pole” phrased it. The idea was “to compel them at the least to build them their houses and sometime there to be resident there,” instead of following the Court if they did not hold offices. Instead, they should “return and inhabit the cities of their countries,” which would have the overall effect of improving urban life in the provinces.61 One might speculate about the viability of such a proposal, particularly as it lacked indications of how it might be effected. But it seems to demonstrate a desire to change the aristocracy, which, coupled with other ideas, involved a substantial remodeling that would turn them into something resembling neo-Ciceronian, Italianate urban magistrates. Starkey’s discussion of noble education and office holding shows that while they remained key political players in the new commonweal, their roles were redefined and altered. Whether the result would be a strengthening or weakening of the nobility is difficult to say, but it is clear that the proposed changes tilted their status towards a service-type aristocracy.62 The idea was to fix a system in which, as “Pole” stated, “gentlemen study more to bring up good hounds than wise heirs . . .”. The first proposal checked abuses of wardship by abolishing the old system and creating one that ultimately included all children (at least males) of the aristocracy. Those holding wardships would have to make an accounting of the rents and revenues of the inheritance before a judge. An “ordinance” would attempt to join a system of formal education with “feats of chivalry” in which “the nobles should be compelled to set forward their children and heirs . . .”. A group of “the most virtuous and wise men in the realm” would be put in charge, who would “instruct this youth to whom should come the governance after of this our commonweal”; the monasteries of St. Alban’s and Westminster would be converted to virtual military academies. The result would be “the most noble institution that ever was yet devised in any commonweal”; the task must urgently be implemented because “it will never be possible to institute our commonweal without this ordinance brought to pass {and put into effect} . . .”. The curriculum would reflect that the nobility’s position was in the commonweal. They would be trained for specific jobs in government, which would include administering justice and military training in times of war. As a consequence, then, they would “be nobles in deed; {then they should be true lords and masters}; then the people would be glad to {be} governed by them . . .”. Perhaps, “Lupset” speculated, in a few years, England might develop into a replica of Plato’s republic.63 One of the benefits of the education of the aristocracy would be to limit the removal of law cases from the provinces to London, because now the gentry and nobility would see to it that justice was executed in the localities. They would also clamp down on vexatious and perjured lawsuits. The aristocracy was given an enhanced role in administering justice in a

226  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 proposal that they and they alone should be admitted to study the law. This concluded a section that complained bitterly about covetous lawyers, and because the idea of the nobles’ exclusive right to practice the law was not developed much further—apart from a statement that the noble youths should study Roman civil law—it is difficult to know how seriously to take it.64 The dialogists reiterated that in the entailing of lands, there had to be provision for younger sons, because “it is against reason and the order of nature” that the eldest should inherit everything.65 There is some question whether the aristocracy would have a monopoly of power in Starkey’s ideal society.66 The constable who was to head a reformed Royal council would be a titled noble; the most recent, albeit an ill-fated example, was the 2nd Duke of Buckingham.67 Four “of the greatest and ancient lords {of the temporalty}” would represent the interests of the landed elites. Of the four judges learned in the law, two in the civil branch and two in canon law, some might have aristocratic family connections, especially if the nobility had the sole authority to enter the legal profession. But would experts in canon law not be clerics rather than titled aristocrats? The bishops of London and Canterbury were also designated as members of the council, and despite extensive family links with the aristocracy among the episcopate, would not themselves possess titles. The four “most wise citizens of London” would not have been isolated from the world of the landed, especially as holders of their loans and of daughters that nobles sought to marry, but they would also be likely to represent urban rather than rural interests.68 As regards the role of Parliament, we know that the aristocracy exerted influence over elections and would continue to do so for centuries, but that does not mean their domination was complete.69

C. The Immoral, the Idle, the Poor One of the chief results that “Pole” saw accruing from the strengthening of government was a top-down attack upon idleness and immorality among the third estate. The new Royal council was to ensure that lower authorities— “inferior lords, knights and gentlemen” were cited—“to beware and diligent to do their duty,” which would cure the “gout” that the feet and hands were suffering. The reason, he asserted, why “the ground lies so untilled and crafts {be} so ill occupied” was “the negligence of the people {or vain occupation} . . .”. Echoing late medieval labor laws, the remedy was for officials to take them to court and, it seems, to force them to work or at least threaten them with punishment: “by certain pain forfeited prescribing the same you should have both crafts better occupied and also the ground more diligently tilled,” especially if the anti-enclosure statutes were also enforced. He concluded that if “people may be compelled to diligent exercise of their office and duty, thereto follows forth withal abundance of things {necessary} . . .”.70 Before that was possible, however, there had to be a campaign to clean up people’s morals through another “ordinance” that would punish

Rethinking the Three Estates  227 drunkenness and related crimes that should be enforced by the underofficers. “Pole” pinpointed craftsmen, “which are drunkards given to the belly {and pleasure thereof}, carders and dicers, and all other {given to} idle games,” which he considered as serious as robbery and adultery, because overconsumption led to the latter offenses. Regulating drinking and punishing offenders would remove the causes of these related misdeeds and reduce a related disease, that is “{penury}, for even like as one disease comes of another in this politic body, so the cure of one also follows another . . .”.71 Much of the rationale of Starkey’s proposals for economic reforms ultimately came back to the problem of the poor. As shown above, he called for the restriction of exports to things England did not require and generally limiting imports to essentials. The country should not export tin and lead and then import the manufactured versions of the minerals. Nor should merchants be permitted to import wine, velvets, and silks, and to discourage the practice, the sumptuary laws should be enforced and the taverns closed. Like Armstrong, Starkey called for the termination of the export of raw wool through the Staple, which he called “a great hurt to the people of England . . .”. He claimed the practice caused the domestic cloth industry to be in “{utter} decay” and went further than Armstrong to propose the development of England’s cloth industry with Royal patronage. Although it might take some years to get the industry up to speed compared with foreign production, it was worth the effort because “it should be the greatest benefit to increase the riches of England that might be devised” and because “whereby should be occupied infinite people which now live in idleness, wretched and poor . . .”.72 As regards external trade, the “Dialogue” thought that a reduction in customs rates would stimulate trade, which, prefiguring the Navigation Acts of the mid-seventeenth century, should be limited to English vessels. The rationale for the last point was once again social, because it would solve the problem that “our own mariners oft times lie idle . . .”. The main problem in internal trade was the rising cost of doing business. As with Sir Thomas Smith a generation later, Starkey saw a medley of variables at work, and once again, the chief consequence was social: hardship. Ploughmen and farmers were to be constrained to raise more livestock, even though that would appear to abridge the extent of tillage. The “enhancing of rents” was also to blame for the dearth, and they should be returned by “ordinance” and “set to the old stint of that time when the people of England flourished . . .”. Dear food caused craftsmen to raise the prices of their work because “it costs him more in nourishing his family and artificers . . .”. If all these problems were solved and serving men eradicated, social problems would be mitigated: “we should have this miserable poverty taken away, for as for beggars lusty and strong, yea and thieves also, should be but few or none at all of that sort . . .”. As regards the poor with disabilities, they should “be but few and easily should be nourished” if they were hospitalized in an institution like that established in Flanders, which England should try to emulate. But to have some disabled

228  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 poor “go about to provoke men to {mercy and} pity” would be a good thing, because it “prove and tempt their loving charity . . .”.73 Like other Renaissance humanists, Starkey did not consider poverty to be a holy condition, as the Franciscans had, but thought that it had its uses in encouraging the better off to exercise virtue through charitable giving. Similar, however, to his contemporaries, he was hostile to the able-bodied poor and in concluding the discussion, promised that if his economic and social proposals were implemented, “this great number of sturdy beggars {thereby} should utterly be taken away,” as well as “the great poverty of the laborers of the ground . . .”.74 The “Dialogue” made concrete proposals about the crimes of theft and treason. Like More, the dialogists sought the causes of the phenomena, attributing thievery to “the idle rout” and “ill education of youth,” which they had previously corrected. Echoing Utopia, “Pole” proposed putting ordinary felons “to labor in building the walls of cities . . . which should be more grievous to them than death . . . and so by their life {yet} the Commonwealth should take some profit . . .”. Exceptions to hard labor would be highway robbery, manslaughter, and murder.75 Starkey again proposed mitigating the punishments for treason, which “Pole” described as “over hard” by punishing the traitor’s children by confiscating the entire family estate. Instead, some allowance of some of the offender’s wealth should be left to heirs. False accusations of treason should be punished with the same penalties as actual treason, “for it is no small matter to accuse a man of . . .”.76 VI. DEBATING THE FUTURE The “Dialogue” concluded with a debate between “Pole” and “Lupset” on the power of free will versus divine intervention. The discussion tells us a great deal about the potential effectiveness of Starkey’s reforms, because it evaluated the influence of government action, the power of Providence, and the role of self-improvement through humanistic study. “Pole” summed up earlier discussions by stating that the “good education” of the nobles and clergy would produce “a very true commonweal” in which England would enjoy something like an ideal social order—“a multitude of people,” “abundance of exterior things required to the bodily wealth of man,” “living together in civil life governed by politic order,” in which people “should conspire together in amity and love, every one glad to help another . . .”. These were the outcomes of passing so many laws, “Pole” said. But “Lupset” questioned whether laws alone could bring humanity to perfection because, although people aspired to “reason and virtue,” they had to make real choices, using “free will and liberty with prudent knowledge and perfect love . . .”. This choosing could not be forced by ordinances legislating fear and punishment, so, “Lupset” queried, what would guide the decision?77 “Pole” admitted the law alone was insufficient to give people “perfect reason and virtue,” but “for as much as it is a mean to bring man thereto,

Rethinking the Three Estates  229 it is not utterly to be despised . . .”. In addition, he invoked divine intervention, citing the teaching of Christ, which “prepares man’s mind to the receiving of virtue by profit and pleasure, pain and punishment . . .”. Yet in true humanist mode, virtue was a “celestial remedy” that was important to study in order to achieve perfection. Without God, all human endeavor was worthless, but at the same time, “man shall have nothing that is good, nothing perfect, without his own labor, diligence, and cure . . .”. So it came down, not to law, nor to the hand of God, but to individual virtue. In a well-established humanist mold, “Pole” stressed the possibility of worldly success through individual self-discipline and self–improvement: who is he that can attain . . . of worldly things, either riches or honor, except he with great diligence apply his mind thereto; who can keep his body in health except he put diligent {cure} thereto; who can attain to any excellence in any manner of art of craft, yea or come to any high philosophy except he with much cure, labor, and diligence exercise himself in the studies thereof. . . .78 The same qualities were required to understand “celestial doctrine, which is not inspired into negligent hearts,” which required extensive study and the purging of one’s mind of earthly cares and “never given to idle and sleeping minds . . .”.79 It was possible for a person to “make himself mete to receive this heavenly doctrine,” which could be done by listening to the teachings of learned preachers (and humanists, no doubt!) and by putting “the law of the gospel into our mother tongue,” i.e., the Bible. Moreover, the training of preachers and translating Scripture were matters of public policy, because Starkey recommended that “ordinances” be made implementing these developments.80 In sum, policy was joined at the hip with the effort to remodel the person, and reshaping the person was the key to a perfect Commonwealth. VII. CONCLUSIONS Starkey’s “Dialogue” is a weighty document and represents a serious attempt to resuscitate the body social. Superficially, as Tawney noticed, Starkey employed the organic metaphor as much as other advocates of the body. Closer reading, however, shows that Starkey proposed major surgery on all three estates, especially the Church and the aristocracy, which would have left them almost unrecognizable. The radicalism of the “Dialogue” becomes apparent when we examine what Starkey actually wrote. He developed demographic and economic analyses of the causes of England’s woes, which, for their detail, rigor, and sophistication, were unsurpassed until Sir Thomas Smith’s in 1549. Starkey connected rural depopulation with unemployment in far greater detail than More, Armstrong, or the “Commonwealth-men.” Starkey was wrong to assume the country’s population was in decline in the short term, because it was actually in recovery mode by the 1520s, but

230  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 he was correct to observe long-term decline dating from the second half of the fourteenth century.81 Starkey was prescient, moreover, to observe that the Crown’s military needs required numbers in order to survive in an age of “military revolution.” His proposals to increase the population were probably impractical. They would have required massive state intervention to tax bachelors, to force servants to settle down and have families, and to allow the secular clergy to marry. His proposals on foreign trade would probably have been economically ruinous. Starkey’s proposals for the body social would have revamped it. Like other adherents of the body theory, he questioned whether the clergy, aristocracy, and commonalty were fulfilling their functions. But he additionally offered radical reforms in their status and behaviors. The basic grids of society might have remained, but they would have been almost unrecognizable. To reprise, the Church would lose its right of judicial appeals to Rome. The monarch would appoint bishops, with the Pope keeping the right to name archbishops. The first fruits and tenths of newly appointed bishops would be reserved for the poor, and half of the bishops’ incomes would be paid to support and educate the young and the poor. Bishops would be required to vet the education of new priests, who would not be allowed to take up livings until the age of 30. Clerics would lose the rights of sanctuary and the benefit of clergy if they committed crimes. It would be legal to translate the Bible, thus ending the Church’s monopoly. The aristocracy would be forced to cease frivolous games, to eschew private armies, and to live in towns. They would be obliged to participate in a government militia and to attend military academies for training in former monasteries, including Westminster Abbey. In return, the aristocracy would reap considerable benefits. It would no longer be possible for the holders of wardships to exploit their wards’ estates, and entails would cover the next eldest son, thus mitigating somewhat the effects of primogeniture. The aristocracy would receive a monopoly of membership in the legal profession. As for the third estate, Starkey’s proposals were no less innovative and verge on the oppressive and elitist. He restated the principle of forced labor that dated from the fourteenth century, which still informed Tudor poor laws and vagrancy statutes, and Starkey extended the penal and enforcement elements. The third estate had to work or be banished from the country. Censors, a Roman institution, would make invasive surveys of the population to ensure they were healthy and productive. Starkey did propose progressive programs for the third estate. Hospitals would be built for the disabled poor, who would not be penalized for begging. By regulating foreign trade, full employment would be achieved at home. The young would be educated in schools or be trained in a trade from the age of seven, a proposal that Locke repeated in 1697. The law would be in English, which the Levellers were still demanding 120 years after Starkey wrote.

Rethinking the Three Estates  231 Yet, the approaches to reform adopted in the Starkey “Dialogue” left some important questions unanswered, especially where the humanistic methods were concerned. Above all, was the humanist agenda as developed by Starkey and the others a real blueprint for a society in the sense the body social was? Unless one was prepared to take the high road of Utopia, abolishing the nobility and private property, it seems the answer is no: there was a minimal humanist grid to replace the body social. Admittedly, there were major reforms to apply to the estates, but there was no redefinition of them, which would require a rethinking and reordering of social ranks, functions, and duties. This question Starkey was unable or unwilling to tackle, which was also true of Elyot and Morison. That Starkey did not fill this lacuna is evident from the mechanism he proposed— individualized learning—but without mass education, that would be an impossible task. He provided for the training of youth from the age of seven, but how many would be educated in humanistic terms and how many in trades? Would all fit the bill of the new kind of citizen, as Starkey wished? Of course, it is fair to ask, have modern societies achieved the goal of an educated citizenry? NOTES   1. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 47 (quotation); 66–8, 72 (election); 53, 57 (military).  2. Wood, Foundations, 151–2.   3. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 49, 65–6.   4. Ibid. 49, 65–6 (the author admitted the value of livestock but sought a balance with tillage).   5. Ibid. 51–3.   6. Ibid. 52–3.   7. Ibid. 52.   8. Ibid. 57–8.   9. Ibid. 56. 10. Ibid. 87. “Lubber” is defined by the OED as a stupid person who lives in idleness. 11. Mayer, ed. Dialogue, 54. 12. Ibid. 87. 13. Ibid. 88. 14. Ibid. 88–9. 15. Ibid. 89–91. 16. Ibid. 91–2. 17. Ibid. 92–3. 18. Ibid. 93–4. 19. Ibid. 53. 20. Ibid. 53–4. 21. Ibid. 57. 22. Ibid. 64–5. 23. Ibid. 73–4. 24. Ibid. 74. 25. Ibid. 75–6. 26. Ibid. 77–8.

232  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 27. Ibid. 86. By “commonalty,” here Starkey appears to mean something like “community,” but without the Church and nobility, i.e., the third estate. 28. Ibid. 86–7. 29. Ibid. 54–6. 30. Ibid. 63; he later added the importing of chamlet or angora, fustians, and silks (64). 31. Ibid. 63. 32. Ibid. 64. 33. Ibid. 58–9. 34. Ibid. 59–62. 35. Ibid. 65–6. 36. Ibid. 56: “the commons against the nobles . . .”, etc.; 62. 37. Ibid. 79–80. 38. K.  J. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 3. 39. Mayer ed. Dialogue, 80–1. 40. Ibid. 81–2. 41. Ibid. 62. 42. Ibid. 47, 95–6, 121 (Parliament and councils); 111–12, 120, 123 (monarchy). 43. Ibid. 96–7. 44. Ibid. 98–9. 45. Ibid. 99–100. 46. Ibid. 100. 47. Ibid. 101. 48. Ibid. 103, 136. 49. Ibid. 102. 50. Ibid. 103–4. 51. Ibid. 104–5. 52. Ibid. 105–6. 53. Ibid. 108–9. 54. Ibid. 110. 55. Ibid. 132–3. 56. Ibid. 133–4. 57. Ibid. 133–4, 139–140: in both places, Starkey observes that space did not permit a full consideration of curriculum reform; in the latter, he cited the need for learned preachers and informed audiences. 58. Ibid. 90–1; also 141. 59. Ibid. 139–40; John B. Gleason, John Colet (London: University of California Press, 1989), 231; W. H. Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (repr. New York: Teachers College, 1964; orig. pub. 1904), 21. 60. Ibid. 106–107. See Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy (1965 edn.), 234–240. 61. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 117–18. 62. M. L. Bush, “An Anatomy of Nobility,” Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500, Bush ed., 36, 41, who distinguished four bases of nobility: landownership, membership in representative bodies, Royal office, and military service. Cf. Mayer, Starkey and the Commonweal, 130, 139, 160. 63. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 124–6. 64. Ibid. 127–8. 65. Ibid. 130. 66. Mayer, Starkey and the Commonweal, 128–33. 67. Ibid. 103–4. 68. Mayer, ed. Dialogue, 112–13, 122–3.

Rethinking the Three Estates  233 69. Cf. K. B. McFarlane, England in the Fifteenth Century: Collected Essays (London: The Hambledon Press, 1981), ch. 1, “Parliament and ‘Bastard Feudalism’,” 20; Maurice Keen, England in the Later Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1973), 348. 70. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 113–14. 71. Ibid. 114. See Chapter 17 for similar positions taken by John Locke in 1697. 72. Starkey ibid. 115. 73. Ibid. 116–17. 74. Ibid. 117; Hans Baron, “Franciscan Poverty and Civil Wealth,” Speculum, 13, no. 1 (January, 1938), 20. 75. Mayer, ed., Dialogue, 131. 76. Ibid. 131. 77. Ibid. 137. 78. Ibid. 136–7. 79. Ibid. 138–9. 80. Ibid. 139–41. 81. John Hatcher, Plague, Population, and the English Economy, 1348–1530 (London: Macmillan, 1977), 71.

12 Virtue Meets Profit The Brave New World of Sir Thomas Smith, 1549

I. INTRODUCTION It is judged that “A Discourse of the Commonweal of this Realm of England,” which was written in 1549 and first published in 1581, is “the most impressive piece of economic analysis produced in the sixteenth century.” The author was most likely Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577), who was vice chancellor of the University of Cambridge (1543), clerk of the Privy Council (1547), secretary of state (1548), knighted (1549), ambassador to France (1562–7), and once again a privy councilor and secretary of state (1571–2).1 One authority is prepared to extend still further the encomiums of Smith’s “Discourse”, calling him “the first political economist” who “launched a remarkable and even revolutionary mode of analysis, that of political economy.”2 Whether, as that author contends, Smith was chiefly interested in economics and political economy, subjects that did not exist at the time, is examined in this chapter. The argument advanced here is that Smith’s interests were as much social as they were political and economic in character and, in this light, set out a quite different social humanist paradigm from that of the body social. Besides the introduction, this chapter consists of five parts. The next section examines the “Discourse” in the context of the tradition of dialogical discourse, which suggests that Smith’s treatise, however innovative in content, was an established form of expression and well suited to social analysis. The following two parts of this chapter (III and IV) seek to demonstrate that Smith’s examination of English society in 1549 was fundamentally and thoroughly grounded in economic modes of analysis that examined both long and short-term developments. The next two sections (V and VI) spell out the social implications of conflicting economic interests. The first examines the historiography of class awareness in early modern England, suggesting that while scholarly debate surrounds the subject, there is a growing consensus that contemporaries analyzed social relations based upon notions of class that were grounded in the possession of wealth, especially landed property. The succeeding section documents this consciousness through the lens of the “Discourse.”

Virtue Meets Profit  235 II. SMITH AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES Smith’s “Discourse” described a society in conflict over fundamental issues with serious social ramifications. His analysis of the clerical estate was critical of the Church from a secularist, institutional perspective that was in advance of its times, while for the other two estates his viewpoint, while informed by humanist moral philosophy, focused upon conflicting economic interests. While Smith did not present these divisions as an ideal situation, neither did they provoke the moral outrage in him that they did among his contemporaries, such as Armstrong and the “Commonwealth-men.” Nor did he think that social divisions were incapable of resolution; nor that the only way to resolve them seemingly required an attempt to revive the three-estate model. The “Discourse” was not wholly novel in its structure and contents, for it had elements in common with Smith’s forbears and peers. Like Utopia and Starkey’s “Dialogue,” it was conducted in dialogue form, which, following Plato, was highly suitable, even fashionable for someone who supported the humanist methodology. What is more, this format was a useful one for conducting a debate, providing numerous openings for the use of rhetoric, a subject in the humanist curriculum that Smith recommended in the document.3 The dialogic structure provided the opportunity for a multiplicity of speakers, so that a wide range of social actors could participate. The characters were a “Doctor” and theologian, a “Knight,” a “Merchant,” a “Capper,” and a “Husbandman,” each representing their group’s interests. The actual contents of the document bore a number of similarities to other writings of the period. Like others, Smith highlighted conflicts in society and proposed reforming the clergy and aristocracy, while among the commonalty, he proposed curing problems of unemployment and destitution. As, moreover, Armstrong, More, the “Commonwealth-men”, and Starkey, Smith focused on “the agrarian problem” as a source of social dysfunction, and particularly the problem of tillage versus pastoral farming. In related matters connected with the economy, he discussed the wisdom of the export of raw wool against finished cloth, the question of the coinage, the cost of imported goods, and how to secure full employment at home by encouraging English manufacturing. Despite the similarities to other authors, the “Discourse” was an exceptionally materialistic representation of society, which affirmed wealth and markets as organizing principles, although with judicious state intervention to maintain stability. III. “[T]HE UNIVERSAL MARKET OF ALL THE WORLD” Smith’s “Discourse” departed from the traditional three-estate theory and substituted a model based on economic roles. He represented social conflicts as arising naturally from divergent economic interests and class positions, which sets him apart from the theory of a naturally harmonious body social. Unlike

236  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 most of his contemporaries, Smith recognized that markets drove economic activity, which reflected and affected real-life conditions, and that competition and profit were acceptable realities. Following Aristotle and social humanists and making a virtue of necessity, he accepted that avarice was a natural phenomenon and that the consumption of luxuries could be a positive force.4 Like others, Smith observed that there was a significant, if limited, role for government in the economy. That function could have negative consequences, as in the mid-Tudor debasement of the coinage, or it could have positive ones, as in Smith’s proposals to regulate imports and to expand industries and employment at home. The upshot, far from later laissez-faire theories, was a system much closer to the views of Armstrong and Starkey and based on principles not unlike those enshrined a century later in the Navigation Acts. Yet in other respects, Smith was an outlier, the closest thing to a secular thinker in sixteenth-century England. He discussed the reform of the Church as an institution, but his chief concern was the economy, which he treated as fundamental to social life, including a significant role for money, markets and foreign trade, and profits. He had the character the “Doctor” quote Aristotle that money was “the common measure of all things.”5 The “Knight” dissented, saying he had heard “divers learned men of your sort” (More and the “Commonwealth-men”?) protest against those who first vested gold and silver with such great value, because “they were occasion of much murders, felonies, and mischiefs; for it is lucre that drives men to all kind of mischief.” The “Doctor” agreed, extending the argument to the inventors of iron and steel, “the instruments of much murder and slaughter among men.” But he would not completely ban these metals, because if other nations did not follow suit, “we should make ourselves naked of all defense and be subject to their spoil .  .  .”. In an addendum, moreover, he extended the argument favoring a money economy beyond the question of defense to a more global view: “That that is universally esteemed must not be rejected of any commonweal that must have traffic with other.” He mocked those who rejected money, drawing a caustic parallel with the possibility of universal celibacy. Although it was admirable for some “for contemplation’s sake” to ignore riches, it was unnecessary “for the commonweal that all men should do so, no more than for all men to be virgins though privately in some it is very commendable.”6 Here was a direct endorsement of the role of wealth in human relations. A few pages later, moreover, the “Doctor” was even more explicit. While blaming “avarice” as the “principal cause” of agrarian dislocations, he posed the question, “[C]an we devise that all covetousness may be taken from men?” The answer was unequivocally, “No, no more than we can make men to be without ire, without gladness, without fear, and without all affections.” The only answer was to manage greed and, in this instance, to limit the profitability of pastoralism.7 What distinguishes Smith’s “Discourse” from other writers of the period is his acute sense of the role of the market in shaping economic and social

Virtue Meets Profit  237 life. In the midst of discussions of coinage, the “Doctor” made a generalization about the relationship between government policy and the world at large, in which the irresistible significance of the market was noted: “we must frame our things not after our own fantasies but to follow the common market of all the world, and we may not set the price of things at our pleasure but follow the price of the universal market of all the world.”8 More specifically, based on the principle of individual economic freedom in the marketplace, the “Knight” justified a system of “severalty” in farming, which often extinguished common rights. But Smith took the argument still further to describe the roles of markets and the profit motive. A particularly daring example of his willingness to endorse market forces was his proposal to free the grain trade in order to augment tillage and diminish pastoral farming. Yet he drew the line against government intervention in financial markets in his rejection of the debasement of the coinage in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, which is discussed below. Smith was not, however, a free marketer tout court. The “Doctor” favored the regulation of wool exports, as will be seen later, and the freeing of the grain trade would still have required state controls. Highly critical of the importing of “trifles” or luxury goods that were not made in England, he was prepared to see government intervention to halt the influx of imports and to sponsor domestic industries that would replace them. While critical of imported luxuries, he was aware of the necessity of foreign trade, having the “Doctor” state that “we could not live without the commodities of others.” England had insufficient supplies of iron, oil, pitch, rosin, salt, steel, and tar, all of which were required in the agricultural sector. In addition, the country imported luxuries that included cloth, collars, linen, silk, spices, and wine, which “though we might live so-so without them, yet far from any civility should it be.”9 What was needed, Smith suggested through the “Doctor,” was a favorable balance of trade in which “we must always take heed that we buy no more of strangers than we do sell them; for so we should impoverish ourselves and enrich them.” He provided a laundry list of imported goods “that we might either clean spare or else make them within our realm”: balls, bells (for hawks’ legs), brooches, buttons (“of silk and silver”), caps, [playing?] cards, dials [for clocks?], earthen pots, girdles, glasses (mirrors, windows, drinking), gloves, inkhorns, knives, paper (both white and brown), pens made from horn, pins, points (gloves), and puppets. Echoing Armstrong, he targeted the haberdashers who “from the Tower to Westminster along, every street is full of them; their shops glitter and shine of glasses” and the “gay daggers, knives, swords . . . that is able [to] make any temperate man to gaze on them and to buy somewhat though it serve to no purposes necessary.”10 The “Doctor” castigated England’s export of raw materials, particularly wool, which were then imported at great cost because of the customs paid as well as added foreign labor and materials. It was “grossness of wit” to “suffer such a continual spoil to be made of our goods and treasure by such

238  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 means.”11 The assumptions that consistently informed these moves were the positive value of the market, which, properly regulated, would produce wealth and mitigate social conflicts. In response to the “Knight” ’s assertion of the landowner’s right to practice free enterprise, the “Doctor” said that as long as “men may not abuse their own things to the damage of the commonweal,” profit was justifiable. True, when “barren years” came and grain prices rose, the result would be “an undoing of the poor commons” because of food shortages. But at this point, the language of the “Discourse” is replete with references to “profit,” “gains,” “advantage,” and “rewards” as the engines driving the economy. The problem, the “Doctor” said, was that “every man will seek where most advantage is, and they see there is more advantage in grazing and breeding than in husbandry and tillage by a great deal.” The solution was “to make the profit of the plow to be as good . . . as the profit of the grazier and sheepmaster is.”12 “What,” the “Doctor” queried, “makes men to multiply pastures and enclosures gladly?” The “Knight” answered, “[T]he profit that grows thereby.” They proposed two changes in the markets that would solve the problem: “either make as little gains to grow by the pasture as there grows by the tillage or else make that there may grow as much profit by tillage as did before by the pasture.” Specifically, he proposed to give “free liberty” to the grain trade, the exports of which were currently limited by government order, and to limit wool exports, which, as with the later Corn Laws, would only be sent abroad when their price fell below a level set by the government. Another suggestion was to cut exports of raw wool by hiking custom levies, which breeders would have to pay. The aim was that “the enhancing of the price of corn to be as equivalent to the husbandman as wool should be.”13 The “Merchant” protested that Royal revenues would shrink if less wool were exported, and both he and the “Capper” said that higher grain prices would hurt many. But the “Doctor” pointed out they had hiked up the prices of their goods, so why should husbandmen alone be restrained from receiving higher returns through exports? “What reason is it you should be at large and I to be restrained? Either let us all be restrained together or else let us all be at like liberty,” he challenged.14 In further discussion, the “Doctor” ’s reply went beyond issues of equitable treatment to a reasoned, principled social humanist defense of individual labor. He began with a Latin phrase, “Honos alit artes,” which he translated as “profit or advancement nourishes every faculty  .  .  .”. What this meant in practice was that governments could do a limited amount to stimulate the economy and that the reward of individual effort was the key: “all things that should be done in a commonweal be not to be forced, or to be constrained by the straight penalties of the law, but some so and some other by allurement and rewards rather.” He questioned, “[W]hat law can compel men to be industrious in travail and labor of his body or studious to learn any science or knowledge of the mind?” They would be attracted to such achievements “if they that be industrious and painful be rewarded

Virtue Meets Profit  239 well for their pains and be suffered to take gains and wealth as reward of their labors.” If “they that be learned be advanced and honored according to their forwardness in learning, every man will then study either to be industrious in bodily labor or studious in things that pertain to knowledge.” Here, it seems, was the perfect commonweal in which the learned elite set examples for those who worked with their hands and in which both were diligent workers. If there were no profits to be gained, men would not labor or, above all, take risks as entrepreneurs. The “Doctor” asked, Take these rewards from them and go about to compel them by laws thereto, what man will plow or dig the ground or exercise any manual art where is any pain? Or who will adventure overseas for any merchandise? Or use any faculty wherein any peril or danger should be, seeing his reward shall be no more than his that sits still?15 This is the social humanist’s theory of labor writ large and one of the strongest statements of the period in support of the value of individual achievement. Admittedly, the commonweal was not only made up of rewards. Quoting Solon and taking a proto-Benthamite line, the “Doctor” stressed how “a commonweal was held up by two things, that is by reward and pain.” Men “should be provoked to good deeds by rewards and presents and to abstain from ill doings by pains,” he stated. But the “Knight” still wondered how men would be driven to the plow rather than pasture, and if there was any doubt, the “Doctor” went over the main points again: “to let them have more profit by it [the plow] than they have and liberty to sell it at all times and to all places as freely as men may do other things.” The keys were that “every man will the gladder follow that where they see more gains,” “every man naturally will follow that wherein he sees profit,” and “men being provoked with lucre will keep the more corn . . .”.16 IV. ACCOUNTING FOR THE COINAGE, INFLATION, AND CONFLICT Smith was able to analyze the economy using a multi-causal approach, which reflected extensive subject matter in the mid-Tudor period, which experienced rampant price inflation, a crisis in the clothing industry and trade, and popular protests.17 Part of the reason for the price inflation, the “Merchant” admitted, was the high cost of imported goods, and he provided a lengthy list of items that he alleged had risen by a third in price in just seven years: silks, wines, oil, wood, madder, iron, steel, wax, flax, linen cloth, fustians,worsteds, coverlets, carpets, arrases and tapestry, spices of all sorts, and all haberdashery wares, as paper both white and brown, glasses as well drinking and looking as for glazing of windows, pins, needles, knives, daggers, hats, caps, brooches, buttons, and lace.18

240  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 Setting the scene for discussing the role of England’s coinage in causing price inflation and aggravating social polarization, he observed, “[T]hey of beyond the sea will not receive our money for their wares as they were glad in times past to do . . .”. When questioned by the “Doctor” about enhanced costs of imports, the “Merchant” reported that England’s debased coinage was to blame. Foreign merchants “demanded more pieces of our coin for the same than they were wont to do, that was not their fault, they said, but ours that made our pieces less or less worth than there were in times past.” Upping the ante, he reported further imports that were inflated: a yard of cloth that cost 4s.8d. a decade earlier might now go for 8s. In addition, like the “Capper,” he cited the elasticity of demand for the imports, which were more difficult to sell when prices were inflated: “we have not so good vent of them again here as we have had beforetime by reason there be not so many buyers for lack of power . . .”.19 Conflicts arose among the dialogists over who was responsible for inflation and its relationship to the coinage. At odds were the “Merchant” and the “Doctor,” with the latter implying that the first had profited from recent debasements of the coinage, a charge he also leveled against the minters. The “Doctor” said, “[F]or what odds so ever there happen to be in exchange of things, you that be merchants can espy it anon.” So when they observed the debasement, they gathered up the old coin and spent it overseas, which caused a shortage at home and “is a great cause of this dearth that we have now of all things.”20 The “Merchant” and “Doctor” also disagreed about the wisdom of freeing the grain trade, with the “Merchant” believing that “the price of corn should be much enhanced wherewith men would be much grieved.” The “Doctor” allowed this might be true in the short term, but maintained that in the longer term, tillage would be stimulated so that supply would meet demand.21 Smith’s hostile stance towards government intervention is most obviously apparent in his discussions of the debasement of the coinage. His opposition to the policy pursued by the governments of Henry VIII and Edward VI was possibly the most controversial of his ideas in the “Discourse,” and at one point, he alluded to the fact that his opinions might put him at risk. In response to the “Knight” ’s offer to raise the matter in Parliament, the “Doctor” replied, “[I]t is dangerous to meddle in the King’s matters and specially if it may have any likelihood to diminish his profit.”22 At the time of writing the “Discourse,” Smith was at odds over debasement with the very government in which he was a secretary of state. As a result, he experienced a period of enforced rustication at Eton from June to September  1549, during which time he is thought to have composed the “Discourse” and when the government was continuing to debase the nation’s currency.23 In this document, he spelled out in detail his opposition to debasement because of its social and economic effects. Smith began from an Aristotelian premise that coinage was “the common measure of all things” and central to the operation of an economy.

Virtue Meets Profit  241 He believed that the value of the coinage in gold and silver content was a real consideration in economic transactions; anyone who did not believe the same belonged in More’s nowhere land. Someone might change the name of something, but he could not change the value “except we were in such a country as Utopia was imagined to be that had no traffic with any other outward country.”24 According to the “Doctor,” debasement was the critical component in the inflation that England was experiencing, which was resulting in “the manifest impoverishment of this realm, and might in brief time be the destruction of the same . . .”. The “Knight” asked him whether “you think plainly that this alteration of the coin is the chief and principal cause of this universal dearth?” The “Doctor” ’s response was, “Yea, no doubt, and of many of the said griefs that we have talked of by means it being the original of all.” He summed it up as follows: And thus to conclude, I think this alteration of the coin to be the first original cause; that strangers first sell their wares dearer to us and that makes all farmers and tenants that rear any commodity again to sell the same dearer, the dearth thereof makes the gentlemen to sell their rents and to take farms to their hands for their better provision and consequently to enclose more ground.25 In a revised version published in 1581, Smith grappled with the fact that although the coinage had been reformed, there was still inflation. He singled out “the racking and hoisting up of rents,” which forced the “Husbandman” “to sell his victuals dearer and to continue the dearth of them” and which caused artificers to raise their prices. In addition, he cited the impact of New World bullion, or “the great store and plenty of treasure which is walking in these parts of the world, far more in these our days than ever our forefathers have seen in times past.”26 A serious consequence of the policy of debasement was the rejection by foreigners of the new coinage, so the terms of trade deteriorated. The “Doctor” toyed with the idea that kings and emperors might alter the precious contents of coins and expect that their value would be unchanged. But he rejected this position on the grounds that foreign merchants noticed the alteration: “Do you not see that our coin is discredited already, especially amongst strangers which before desired to serve us before all other nations at our needs for the goodness of our coin?” They would no longer accept English currency, but insisted that payments be made in kind, including lead, tin, and wool. Whereas previously, they would pay in silver and gold now— presumably because English coins were worth so much less—they would just give worthless “trifles”—“glasses, galley pots, tennis balls, papers, girdles, brooches, owches, buttons, dials, or such like wares  .  .  .”. Imports were more expensive, which made everything in England dearer. Because of debasement, foreign merchants “demanded more pieces of our coin for the

242  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 same than they were wont to do, that was not their fault, they said, but ours that made our pieces less or less worth than they were in times past.”27 Smith once again developed social and economic perspectives in describing who won and who lost as a consequence of debasement. Then in his proposals for reform, he sought a fundamental transformation of the English economy. Those who gained most from the re-coinage, Smith argued, were merchants “that live by buying and selling; for as they buy dear so they sell thereafter.” The “Doctor” hinted that some traders had inside knowledge that made speculation possible, while he suggested that minters were blocking reform out of self-interest.28 Husbandmen holding leases for which they were paying old, pre-inflation rents could also do well, because “they pay for their land good cheap and sell all things growing thereof dear.” The losers were nobles, gentlemen, and anyone “that live either by a stinted rent or stipend, or do not manner [cultivate] the ground, or do occupy no buying or selling.”29 This statement led to lengthy consideration of the financial plight of the landed upper classes. The monarch gained in the short term, but lost in the long. The “Knight” asserted that “the King’s Highness father [Henry VIII] did win inestimable great sums by the alteration of the coin.” But the “Doctor” dissented, saying the monarch’s situation was like that of people who sold land who would receive “the greater sum at one time and ever after to lose the continual increase that should grow thereof.” A further consequence for the Crown was to weaken it militarily, because it would lack “coins and treasure,” which were the nervi bellorum, or sinews of war, needed to pay for armor, etc. There was also great danger in being short of coin in times of food shortage.30 The remedies for the ills caused by debasement and inflation were twofold and involved revaluing the coinage and a substantial reordering of trade and the labor force. First, the policy would be to have “the coin thoroughly restored to the old rate, goodness, and value.” For two or three years, it might be necessary to return to a barter economy, but eventually, the new coinage would replace the old. Parliament and the king’s council would have to implement the scheme.31 Second, there would be major changes in trade and labor policies. England should forbid the import of “trifles” and stipulate that “nothing made beyond the sea of our commodities should be sold here,” and no English goods should be exported unless they were “wrought here and sold over, [which] should being in infinite treasure in short time.”32 This set of changes would have profound implications for the labor force. Responding to the “Knight” ’s fears about riots by unemployed cloth workers, the “Doctor” said the solution was to foster more rather than less employment in cloth making and cited the instance of Venice, where skilled craftsmen were highly valued and rewarded. He observed: I think it meter that we did not only increase the feat of clothing but also invent divers other more feats and occupations whereby our people might be set at work rather than take away any occupation from them,

Virtue Meets Profit  243 specially such as clothing is that [sic] sets so many thousands at work and enriches both town and country where it is occupied.33 The “Doctor” then proceeded to an analysis and restructuring of the labor force in which he rejected the “Knight” ’s vision of a predominantly landed society and favored manufacturing. He asserted that the reason for the recent riots was actually an attempt to curb the cloth industry by the doubling of customs on exports and charging new taxes on cloth, which had caused unemployment. As regards artificers, he distinguished three kinds: those that took money out of the country, those that neither took out nor brought in treasure, and those that improved the trade balance by bringing in cash. The first group included grocers, haberdashers, mercers, milliners, vintners, “and such as do sell wares growing beyond the seas and do fetch out our treasure,” whom he dubbed “tolerable and yet not necessary in a commonweal . . .”. If the third group did not bring in money, “we should be great losers by them,” he wrote of these trades. The second cluster of occupations included bakers, brewers, butchers, carpenters, masons, shoemakers, tailors, and victuallers, “which, like as they get their living in the country, so they spend it, but they bring in no treasure unto us.” The third, whom the “Doctor” said “we must cherish well,” were cappers, clothiers, tanners, and worsted makers.34 Smith appeared to share Starkey’s vision favoring population growth and cities, for he rejected the “Knight” ’s model of an agrarian society. If England only had producers of butter, cheese, fells, lead, tin, and wool, it would employ too few people and “so should our realm be but like a grange, better furnished with beasts than with men . . .”. But if other trades were pursued, “towns and cities would be replenished with all kind of artificers, not only clothiers which is at it were our natural occupation,” but a host of others: blacksmiths, cappers, coverlet makers, glaziers, glovers, goldsmiths, needlemakers, papermakers, and pinners. The result would be to cut the importation of such products and to export them “to be sold over, whereby we should fetch again other necessary commodities or treasures.” This would “both replenish the realm of people able to defend it and also save and win much treasure to the same.”35 V. A HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SOCIAL CLASS How did Smith and others arrive at a position that social classes existed? Informing the answer is a number of possible models of economic and social development. One approach is that political and economic changes brought on this development.36 Some scholars think that England’s institutional history, especially its development of exceptionally strong individual property rights, paved the way towards capitalism and its economic preeminence by 1700 and, ultimately, to the Industrial Revolution and modern class society.37

244  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 Another authority posits that the trajectory of English social history was shaped by traditions and institutions of individualism that originated in the remote past of pre-medieval central Europe. These conditions meant that England was prematurely modern, that it never had a peasantry, and that “economic man” and “market society had been present in England for centuries” before Adam Smith wrote about them.38 Yet another scholar believes that England’s path to capitalism was driven, not by politico/legal factors or by demographic conditions, but by class struggles that opposed lords and peasants. The result was that agrarian capitalism flourished in England, whereas in France, economic development languished.39 Class-based theories of social organization have a long and distinguished scholarly pedigree, which asserts that unequal shares of production lead inevitably to class tensions. As one authority put it, “every society of a certain size does have its strata, categories, perhaps castes and classes . . .”. The reason is because any society in which a share of production is withdrawn from consumption and accumulated “must harbor ‘a class conflict’.”40 Nevertheless, recent scholarship has questioned whether class awareness and conflict were much in evidence before the mid-1800s. According to one authority “modernity” did not make an appearance and there were no clear class divisions in the sixteenth century. To another, even the concept of the social was absent until c. 1700.41 We observed earlier how historians question whether working-class consciousness had developed in the Chartist movement. A great deal of effort has been expended on dating the appearance of class consciousness. Some would agree that the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were the critical time.42 A contrary view argues that a sense of being middle class did not occur until the 1820s. The reasoning here is that the old regime of dominance by the first two estates persisted into the 1830s, including a belief in the hierarchy of landed wealth and status,43 a reaffirmation of the body social,44 which was sanctioned by the official state religion,45 the minimal impact of industrialism and urbanization,46 and low levels of individualism.47 The same scholar sees England’s “long eighteenth century” from 1688 to 1832 as breaking with the historiography that treated the period as “essentially modern” and notable for the “rise of the middle classes,” entrepreneurship, industrialism, and radical politics. If we accept this interpretation, belief in the body social lasted until the age of the railways. Historians from varied schools play down the significance of the middling sort in eighteenth-century society, assigning greater influence to the landed upper classes. They appear to agree that society in this period was mainly a story of two groups—patricians and plebs, in E. P. Thompson’s words—although they differ about the dating of challenges to the hegemony of the landed elites.48 Thompson and J. C. D. Clark concurred that paternalism was a vital force in society, but their interpretations of this phenomenon differed. Clark

Virtue Meets Profit  245 believed that paternalistic landowners provided the social glue, softening conflicts between landed and moneyed elites and bridging the gap between the rural rich and rural poor.49 From another perspective, Hobsbawm and Rudé still observed a situation of counterpoise in the early nineteenth century. Landlords “advocated an economy which implied mutually antagonistic classes, but did not want it to disrupt a society of ordered ranks.”50 Thompson located the rise of middle-class consciousness in the 1790s and argued that the concept of paternalism “is a description of social relations as they may be seen from above,” but which tells little about paternalism’s limits, the plebian view from below, and conflicts between patricians and plebians.51 There are difficulties with recent writing about the development of class consciousness and its role in historical change. One is that in most cases, ideas tend to be assigned positions of second or third rank in importance, if they come into play at all. This situation derives from the perceived, inherent character of a structure, which is by definition usually something solid and significant, whether providing the foundations of a politico/legal system or the framing for the “free market” in an economic and social system.52 There is also a tendency to assume that to be historically significant, class feelings must include a popular element, when in practice, it is difficult to document those feelings. In the early modern period, it was arguably the middling and upper elements that articulated class feelings most vigorously, as Chapters 13 to 17 suggest. This state of affairs should not be surprising, because the better off had the power and position to express their views relatively freely.53 The are also difficulties with the concept of a patriarchal “one-class society” which, while handy as a shorthand description, may be as rhetorical and simplistic as abstract statements about “the decline of feudalism” and “the rise of the middle classes.” Patriarchy and, for that matter, hierarchy were not always simple givens. Patriarchalism was a prominent trope in seventeenth-century thought, but the concept was contested. It is well known that Locke critiqued it at length as a political institution in the Two Treatises of Government.54 Or, take the concept of hierarchy, which scholars have tended to regard as a constant, when concepts actually changed over time. Hereditary nobility of blood was not established in medieval Europe until the High Middle Ages, while serfdom was already being transmitted by birth and blood.55 Further, the “one-class” society of the landed classes was porous to tradesmen and the professions, who formed a “pseudo-gentry” who advanced themselves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The “one-class” rule tends to minimize the significance of the radical positions taken by More’s Utopia, Smith, the Levellers, and the Diggers, who questioned, albeit in different ways, the dominance of the landed elites.56 A difficulty with histories of class has been their tendency to telescope data in pursuit of the elusive phenomenon of class consciousness. Focusing on the “long eighteenth century” has the shortcoming of losing sight of the

246  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 still longer longue durée, so that one has a limited sense of the diachronic. To understand the significance of Gregory King’s work in the 1690s, which is discussed in Chapter 17, it is germane to know what Edmund Dudley and Smith wrote in the sixteenth century.57 At the far, modern end of the story, Lark Rise to Candleford recorded life in the rural Midlands of the 1880s. It portrayed communities still dominated by the Church and the squirearchy, but also observed how that supremacy was challenged by rising urbanization and the emergence of a lower-middle class.58 Subsequent chapters in this book document class consciousness and conceptualize conflict between classes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among the most promising treatments of social classifications in early modern England are recent studies that are often “cultural” in bent.59 Scholars have observed a transition in perceptions from one based on orders or estates in the body social to one characterized by “sorts” and classes. They define class as “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 . . .”. The term “class” was infrequently employed at the time, with contemporaries preferring the word “sort,” as in the middling sort, etc. Wrightson did an excellent job of documenting the language of sorts, which was well established by 1700 and included, typically, the rich or “better sort,” the “middle sort,” who in Defoe’s words, “live well,” and the “poorest sort,” who did not. The Elizabethan period is sometimes regarded as a watershed when there developed “a perception of the social order which was concerned less with function than with places, less with vocational and occupational differentials than with the bald facts of relative wealth, status, and power.”60 But it is also argued that the perception of a society of estates persisted into the seventeenth century, when “[i]t was, indeed, the ghost of the Tudor regime, sitting enthroned upon the grave thereof.”61 What were the origins of a class-based analysis? Partly, it was challenges to the medieval theory of the body social. New models arose from the fluidity of status labels and forms of address and from allowances for upward and downward social mobility. Broader social categorizations tended to reflect the views—and social positions—of authors rather than a consensus about numbers of orders, their positions, and duties.62 Perhaps the only point of agreement about social position was the preeminence of property, especially landholding, which Laslett maintained was so pungent as to justify calling seventeenth-century England “a one-class society.”63 Chapters 14 and 16 on the land issue make the point. In the latter chapter, the thinking of the Grandees, Levellers, and Diggers in the 1640s confirms the significance of wealth, especially landowning, in political and social discourse, and shows that property issues were contested, sparking radical thinking. In sum, is social class a useful category when discussing the ways people thought about the social before 1700? While class was developing as a descriptive category, classes seldom acted as historical agents, because levels

Virtue Meets Profit  247 of consciousness outside the upper classes were low. But the issue of “class or no class?” is obscured by a tendency to see class awareness as a uniquely late modern phenomenon linked to industrialization and the identification of a proletariat or working class. Contrariwise, there are convincing refutations of treating social class as a recent phenomenon arising from Marxism, because class consciousness was a much older phenomenon. As one authority put it, “Marx is or should be completely beside the point here. The perception of class, its conceptual use in historical analysis, is found centuries before Marx, in the works of Botero, Guicciardini, and Machiavelli, as well as in some of the leading chroniclers of the fourteenth century. These authorities had no sophisticated view of class, no refined grasp of it; but their formulations have meaning and utility.”64 The issue of class is also complicated by alternative social theories, especially versions of Max Weber’s theory of status—meaning “opinion,” “esteem,” and “honor” and not just wealth—determining social position.65 This book maintains that the orientation of social thought changed in early modern England, as values diverged, vertical loyalties weakened, and the perception and articulation of class conflict sharpened. VI. A MODEL BASED ON WEALTH AND SOCIAL CONFLICT Smith’s identification of the major social players was uniquely well informed; his analysis of conflicts in society was more detailed and grounded in economic conditions than other writers. In common with social humanists, he critiqued the theory of the body social. What is more, like Starkey, he developed proposals that included government intervention in a variety of areas in the economy. Smith eschewed the image of society as an organic entity and began the “Discourse” with a description of the participants that went beyond the traditional three estates. The justification was that in order to consider “the manifold complaints of men touching the decay of this commonweal,” it would be beneficial to have as much input as possible; “as many heads, so many wits” as he put it. People’s abilities varied greatly, but everyone had special knowledge that could be brought to the table. In addition to “learned men” whose judgment would be most valued, he would also listen to “merchantmen, husbandmen, and artificers (which in their calling are taken wise) . . . for some points in their feats they may disclose that the wisest in a realm could not [gainsay].” In the end, the group included “members of every estate that find themselves grieved nowadays . . .”.66 As we know, this company included a wide range of players—members of working professions and trades—and was a major departure from the three-estate model. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Smith’s analysis was its thorough grounding in the economic interests of the dialogists. Smith’s protagonists, in declaring their positions, made it appear obvious that the members of the old body social were so at odds with one another so that the model was no

248  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 longer viable. Admittedly, nowhere did the author question the status quo in society. The “Knight” commented that the king’s “chief strength in time of need” was “his nobles and gentlemen . . .”. And the elite participants, the “Doctor” and the “Knight,” were overwhelmingly the most frequent and dominating speakers, especially in the second and third dialogues. Yet, listening to theirs and the larger group’s statements suggests a body at war with itself rather than one in harmony.67 The “Discourse” dwelled comparatively slightly on the economic position of the clergy, but did pay considerable attention to its professional and political roles. The “Doctor” associated himself and the clergy with those with fixed incomes who were suffering the effects of inflation, stating that a cap previously costing 14d. was now 2s.6d., a pair of shoes 12d. instead of 6d.68 But the passages about clerical positions more broadly were striking in raising the specter of anti-clericalism, while also echoing the “dialogue of counsel” in Book I of Utopia and the opening sections of Starkey’s “Dialogue.” It is possible Smith himself was a secularist;69 certainly “he had a reputation for religious lukewarmness” and was criticized by Bishop Latimer for amassing positions in the Church despite being a layman.70 It might be concluded that Smith had a very personal interest in the wealth of the Church. The “Discourse” made no bones about pointing the finger at the clergy for the religious divisions England was experiencing, while still seeming to support the role of learning in government. The first to mount an attack on the clergy was the “Capper,” who rejected the “Doctor” ’s statement that everyone had reason to complain about the economy, to which the “Capper” answered, “[E]xcept it be you men of the Church which travail nothing for your living and yet have enough to live on and have no charge on your hands as we have.” The “Doctor” allowed that clerics had the “least cause to complain,” but added they were still paying first fruits and tenths and labored with their minds, if not their bodies. Moreover, the clergy were losing status because people like the “Capper” placed no value on learning apart from reading and writing. The clergy’s path was one of downward mobility: “they see no preferment ordained for learned men, nor yet any honor or estimation given them, like as has been in times past, but rather the contrary; the more learned the more troubles, losses, and vexations they come unto.”71 The “Capper” would not let the clerics off so lightly, and blamed them for religious dissension in the country, which was a strong theme here and elsewhere in the “Discourse.” He declared, “I would set you to the plow and cart for the devil the good you do with your studies but set men together by the ears, some with this opinion and some with that . . .”. He blamed the clergy for the recent riots, arguing “this contention is also not the least cause of these wild uproars of the people. . . . In my mind it made no matter though there were no learned men at all in this realm.” The “Knight” rushed to the “Doctor” ’s defense, asserting that without the clergy, the king would have no counselors, the Christian faith would not be taught, and nothing would be known about other countries.72

Virtue Meets Profit  249 This debate, in turn, set up a lengthy replay of More’s “dialogue of counsel,” in which the value of learning for government was confirmed by the “Doctor” and “Knight” characters: “tell me what counsel can be perfect, what commonweal can be well ordered or saved upright, where none of the rulers or counselors have studied any philosophy, specially the part that teaches of manners.” Reprising Starkey, the dialogists singled out moral philosophy: “Does it not teach first how every man should guide himself honestly? Secondly, how he should guide his family wisely and prophetically, and thirdly it shows how a city or a realm or any other commonweal should be well ordered and governed . . .”.73 As for social humanists, the building blocks of society were individuals, and the glue that held them together, beside wealth, was their capacity to learn to be virtuous. To achieve these ends, Smith was prepared to see institutional reforms through government intervention. This was true in the case of economic policy and in the case of the clergy. Like Starkey in the “Dialogue,” Smith’s “Doctor” proposed sweeping reforms in the Church. If, as many claim, the “Doctor” represented the author’s views, then he had two aims in mind: to change the institutional culture and character of the Church, and to heal the schism between Protestants and Catholics. The “Doctor” opened the discussion with the statement that the clergy were guilty of “all kind of carnality” that, compared to laymen, made them “far inferior unto them in pride, covetousness, and fleshly lusts.” It was this fall from grace that opened the door to attacks by the laity and, ultimately, to the present schism. The split was a most serious issue, “as there is no division more dangerous than that which grows of matters of religion,” the “Doctor” concluded. The solution was a general council that would include both secular and spiritual authorities, but which would not necessarily include the papacy.74 In the meantime, further reforms were needed. The “Knight” responded to the “Doctor” that he thought the clergy had been “meetly well disciplined and corrected already” by losing possessions and having to pay taxes on what remained to them. But the “Doctor” dissented, arguing there had been no improvement in the problems of non-resident clergy, pluralism, diocesan oversight of clergy, the quality of teaching, or hospitality. Of the bishops, he asked, “Do they not lurk in their mansions and manor places far from their cathedral churches as they were wont, and scant once in a year will see their principal Church where they ought to be continually resident?” The clergy’s reaction, he reported, was to be in denial and to blame others—greedy laymen, the Pope—when they really needed to justify their own conduct and receipt of tithes. He denounced the sale of masses for the dead and the taking of fees for marriages, christenings, and confessions. He even called for the end of Easter collections: “Better it is a small loss of money than of one soul that might be offended therewith, which would perhaps think that he could not receive the communion except he paid for it.”75 The “Doctor” enumerated the reforms the Church still needed to effect. Many were long-standing complaints that John Colet had attacked 40 years

250  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 before, such as non-residence, pluralism, and regular visitations. Deacons should visit their “precincts” every year; bishops, their dioceses every three years. Bishops should hold a yearly synod of all ecclesiastics in the diocese, and archbishops should do the same every three years in their provinces. In such venues, the needed reforms could be discussed and implemented. There were already statutes on the books governing residence and pluralism, but they needed to be put into execution. The problem had a material dimension. The present situation, the “Doctor” reported, was that the wealthiest benefices paradoxically had the highest levels of non-residence, which meant that the poorer benefices actually “keep better hospitality” than the richer ones.76 In matters religious, the “Doctor” was not uncritical of the laity. Paraphrasing Cicero and reprising comments by Starkey, he stated that young men should be discouraged from commenting on the faith until they were well trained—a period of seven years was cited—in theology. At present, he reported, “[D]o you not see many young men, before they have taken either long time or any good diligence in the consideration or study of Scripture, take upon them to judge of high matters . . . ?” The same was true in the study of the law, grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The “Doctor” took the Ciceronian position that we should not assume things were known that were not known and that we should not study “obscure and hard things and nothing necessary.”77 Smith appears to develop in this concluding section of the “Discourse” a position favoring toleration, to which other European humanists were moving at the time. The French humanist Guillaume Postel (1510–81) took this line in 1544, arguing that all religions had underlying veracities that should bring them together rather than divide them. Working along similar lines was Sebastian Castellio (1515–63), a former follower of Calvin, who after the execution of Servetus in Geneva, took the line that confessional conflicts had no place in a truly Christian world and that religious toleration was an ideal to be pursued. During the French religious wars, Jean Bodin (1530–96) came to similar conclusions, and another school of thought, the politiques, pushed the case further by arguing that persecution could endanger the very existence of civil society.78 Smith’s “Doctor” was taking similar positions in 1549. “Since we contend but for the knowledge of the truth,” he wrote, “what should we divide ourselves into faction and parties?” He called for calm discussion by those qualified to make such judgments and proposed “that neither party do use any violence against the other to bring them by force to this or that side until the whole or most part of them . . . freely consent and determine the matter.” The alternative was a “dangerous schism” such as that of the Arians, which he reported had perpetually divided Asia and Africa from Christianity.79 In 1549, of course, the idea of a non-persecuting Church would have been revolutionary, since it was not a reality in England until the 1830s. The second estate, too, came under attack in the “Discourse.” The “Knight” vigorously defended his interests and those of his class. He pointed out that while prices were high, there was no scarcity of grain, which had

Virtue Meets Profit  251 actually been cheap for three years. Privatizing common lands, therefore, could not be blamed for high prices; nor could it account for the high cost of cattle, whose market should have been flooded by the process. In fact, “all men of my sort feel most grief . . . which have no wares to sell or occupation to live by but only our land.” In contrast, the “Husbandman,” “Merchant,” and “Capper” “may better live after your degree than we” because they could raise the prices of their products. He claimed that only a third of his rents could be raised in his lifetime because of leases and copyholds that were renewed before inflation began and claimed that the proportion might be as high as one half when Church lands were included in the reckoning.80 The “Knight” justified higher rents on the basis of economic conditions and the principle of profit. As indicated, he maintained that, despite inflation, there were bountiful supplies of grain and cattle. Moreover, he boasted that “experience should seem to prove plainly that enclosures should be profitable and not hurtful to the commonweal” and cited the evidence of enclosed counties, naming Devon, Essex, and Kent, that tended to be among the wealthiest, a point discussed later in Chapter 14. The “Knight” explicitly critiqued the institution of common fields, quoting a maxim that “ ‘that which is possessed of many in common is neglected of all’ ” and asserting that “experience shows that tenants in common be not so good husbands [husbandmen] as when every man has his part in severalty” i.e., farms on his own. In most overseas countries, they had never heard of common field practices.81 The “Knight” went on to articulate an argument that is an early example of what is now termed “trickle-down economics.” The “Doctor” objected that privatizing all common lands would be disastrous for many and a threat to the social order, “for thereby many a thousand cottagers in England, which having no lands to live of their own but their handy labors and some refreshing upon the said commons, if they were suddenly thrust out from that commodity, might make a great tumult and disorder in the commonweal.” Instead, the “Doctor” proposed enclosure by agreement in which the tenants were part of the process, which became common in the next century, but he still saw the danger of massive conversions of tillage to pasture. The “Knight” ’s response was basically, “so what?”: “if they find more profit thereby than otherwise, why should they not?” to which the “Doctor” replied, “[T]hey may not purchase themselves profit by that that may be harmful to others.” But the “Knight” was unconvinced and cited the principle “that that is profitable to one and so to another may be profitable to all and so to the whole commonweal”; in other words, from the trickle-down effect, the entire society would benefit if privatizers were profiting. Again the “Doctor” demurred, pointing out that not everyone gained from enclosure, because “where it is profitable to one man it is prejudicial to many.” The consequences of unlimited privatizing were Utopia-like— “a mere solitude and utter desolation of the whole realm, furnished only with sheep and shepherds instead of good men . . .”. The country would be unable to defend itself against invaders. The “Knight” ’s final defense was a

252  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 statement about economic freedom that would appeal to modern conservatives: “Who can let [i.e., hinder] men to make their most advantage of that which is their own?”82 Consistent with favoring pastoral farming, the “Knight” defended the continued export of raw wool and opposed the expansion of the cloth industry. Cloth workers were socially dangerous, he asserted, “for when our clothiers lack vent oversea, there is a great multitude of these clothiers idle, and when they be idle, they then assemble in companies and murmur for lack of living and so pick one quarrel or other to stir the poor commons, that be as idle as they, to a commotion.” Instead, they should be “set to the plow and husbandry . . .”. He was wary, however, of great numbers of artificers, whatever their trades, and, echoing the concerns of Starkey for defense, thought highly of France’s standing army, which could be used to quell riots at home: “they have divers bands of men of arms in divers places of the realm to repress such tumults quickly if any should arise.”83 The “Knight” presented his class as under threat from economic and social changes. Already their social position was in the process of transformation, forcing them to leave the countryside, reduce the size of their households, and move to London to seek favor at Court. Driven “to give over our houses and to keep either a chamber in London or to wait on the Court,” they went accompanied by just a servant and a lackey, whereas previously, they had had ten serving men and a further 24 persons “every day in the week” in their homes. The “Doctor” later paraphrased these statements, adding that gentlemen like the “Knight” had played a significant political role in the provinces, because they “do good in the country in keeping good order and rule among his neighbors.” Financially, because of inflation, their incomes were reduced by a third in the past 16 years, so they were forced to raise rents, to return to demesne farming, or to convert land to pasture. The “Doctor” admitted the “Knight” had higher overheads than the others and that even with expenditures of £300 a year, he could “keep no better port” than his father had with £200 a year. While acknowledging that husbandmen required basic necessities, the “Doctor” observed (tongue-in-cheek?) that “the gentleman must buy wines, spices, silk, armor, glass to glaze his house” besides iron for tools and weapons. Otherwise, “we could live but grossly and barbarously, as without wines, spices, and silks.”84 The “Knight” ’s complaints led to the consideration of the recurring theme of unemployed serving men and retainers of the aristocracy, which, compared to More and Starkey, Smith painted in ambiguous tones. Related to this question was another favorite problem, that of luxury. On the one hand, the “Doctor” lamented the retainer’s loss of security, citing “yeomen, servingmen, and men of war that having but their old stinted wages cannot find themselves therewith as they might beforetime without rapine or spoil.” He stated that “where 40s. a year was good honest man’s wages for a yeoman before this time and 20d. a week board wages sufficient, now double as much scant will bear their charges.”85

Virtue Meets Profit  253 On the other hand, the “Knight” and the “Doctor” denounced the overindulgence of servants in both apparel and diet. Their wages were insufficient in part, he claimed, because of “excess as well in apparel as in fare; for nowadays servingmen go more costly in apparel and look to fare more daintily than their masters were wont to do in times past.” Whereas they were previously happy to wear plain clothing and to eat boiled meat, now they demanded the finest kersey dyed in France or Flanders and trimmings for their coats and hosiery. Their masters were complicit in this lack of moderation, “one striving with another who may be most proud and whose retinue may go most lavish” and serving excessive amounts of food at certain times so they were forced to cut back on households during the rest of the year. The “Doctor” regretted the old days, when England was feared by her enemies because gentlemen and servingmen “went plainly . . . bearing their heavy sword and buckler on their thighs instead of cuts and gardes and light dancing swords”; then they “rode carrying good spears in their hands instead of white rods which they carry now more like ladies or gentlewomen than men, all which delicacies make our men clean effeminate and without strength.” Recalling Starkey on the lack of military readiness, the “Doctor” stated that soldiers need to be mustered and trained in times of peace as well as war, or they would become soft. The “Knight” agreed, saying that “men are so tenderly used in the time of peace that they cannot away with any heavy armor in time of war . . .”. He also raised the question of whether building at home was “far more excessive than at any time heretofore . . . ”, but the “Doctor” replied that “these things be tokens of ornaments of peace” and created a good deal of employment.86 The “Knight” was anxious about internal enemies as well as external ones. Noted earlier was his concern about the dangers of expanding a labor force engaged in manufacturing, together with his envy of the French standing army. He worried, too, about other kinds of internal unrest. In response to the “Doctor” ’s lament about the frailty of the country’s defenders, the “Knight” made apparent reference to earlier periods of internal turbulence in England, saying, “[I]t was a troubled world, as well within the realm as without, when men went and rode as you speak.”87 Towards the end of the “Discourse,” the “Knight” also raised the question of internal religious discord. He wanted to know “how this diversity of opinions may be taken away which troubles the people very sore and makes great sedition and division among them and  .  .  .  makes debate between neighbor and neighbor, father and the son, man and his wife, which is to be feared yet than all other the foresaid losses of worldly goods . . .”. The “Doctor” addressed the sources of this dissension in his concluding remarks.88 The third estate also had its say in Smith’s dialogue. The “Husbandman” began by attacking enclosures for pastoral farming and the conversion of the land from tillage, which he reported caused riots, high prices, and unemployment, because “many too many do lack livings and be idle.” The “Husbandman” mounted a frontal attack on the “Knight” for gouging

254  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 his tenants with high rents: “Yes, you raise the price of your lands, take farms also and pastures to your hands which was wont to be poor men’s livings  .  .  .”. Agreeing with More, Armstrong, and Starkey, he protested that “sheep are the cause of all these mischiefs,” then composed and sang a ditty that went, “And now altogether sheep, sheep, sheep.” The “Knight” defended himself, but the “Husbandman,” while admitting that he, too, found it more profitable to farm livestock than to plow, persisted with the charge that “you and your sort, men of lands, are the first cause” of price inflation “by reason you enhance your rents to such a height as men that live thereon must needs sell dear again or else they were never able to make their rent.” When the “Knight” proposed returning rents and prices to those of twenty years past, the “Husbandman” agreed, but pointed out that the reduction would have to encompass a host of commodities that he had to purchase: “iron for my plows, harrows, and carts, tar for my sheep, shoes, caps, linen and woolen cloth . . .”.89 The “Husbandman,” like many of the protagonists in the “Discourse,” had a wider social and political awareness that went beyond his economic interests. When the “Knight” provocatively suggested that in order to repress riots by artisans, England could use a standing army like the French, the “Husbandman” protested, “God forbid that ever we had any such tyrants come amongst us,” because in France, they “take poor men’s hens, chickens, pigs, and other provision and pay nothing for it except it be an ill turn as to ravish his wife or his daughter for it.”90 The “Capper” articulated the position of the artisan as well as criticizing the clergy. His city was “fallen to great desolation and poverty,” he stated, because of unemployment, which was triggered by high prices. He was prepared to pay his journeymen 2d. a day more than previously, but they could not live on their income and could put nothing aside for a rainy day. He and other masters were able to keep “few or no apprentices like as we were wont to do.”91 Early in the discussions, the “Capper” joined the “Merchant” in injecting class hostility into the discussion when they agreed, “it was never merry with poor craftsmen since gentlemen became graziers” and began converting tillage to pasture. Despite the “Knight” ’s denials and the “Doctor” ’s attempts to mediate, the “Capper” agreed with the “Husbandman” that “these enclosures and great pastures are a great cause of the same [dearth] . . .”. The problem was that “men do turn the arable land, being a living for divers poor men beforetime, now [to one man’s hand. And where both corn of all sorts and also cattle of all kind were reared beforetimes], now there is nothing but only sheep.” Where previously 100–200 people had lived, “now be there but three or four shepherds and the master only that have a living thereof.”92 Through the “Capper,” Smith again articulated the economic principle of “elasticity of demand.” After the “Doctor” proposed freeing the export of grain in order to stimulate tillage and lower prices, the “Capper” saw that

Virtue Meets Profit  255 his trade might well suffer if grain prices rose. The principle of elasticity pertained because people paying more for food would then reduce their purchases of caps. When times were hard, they were better able to do without the latter but not the former: “yet I say that every man had need of corn and so they not of other wares.”93 The “Merchant” painted a similarly grim picture of his business and the country. He described a decay of infrastructure in most cities apart from London, with streets, walls, bridges, and buildings in disrepair. He alluded to a decline in popular festivities, which was a mixed blessing. The financial burden on towns was eased by the disappearance of “stage plays, interludes, May games, wakes, revels, wagers at shooting, wrestling, running, and throwing the stone or bar, and besides that pardons, pilgrimages, offerings, and many such other things”; at the same time, he averred, “I perceive we be never the wealthier but rather the poorer.”94 The “Merchant” agreed with the “Knight” that the past three years had seen bountiful harvests, grass, and cattle, and yet he said, “[A]ll kinds of victuals are as dear or dearer again”; if enclosures were the cause, they should be removed.95 He claimed that the social effects of the inflation were severe, affecting his ability to leave adequate bequests for his family and other charitable contributions. He cited the example of a hospital founded by members of his trade that was now in disrepair because of a shortage of funds. Apprentices and servants cost roughly double what they previously had. He and other merchants had formerly died wealthy men and were able “to leave honestly behind them for their wives and children and besides that leave some notable bequest for some good deed,” such as a bridge, a highway, or a chantry. But now, “we are scant able to live without debt or to keep any servants at all except it be an apprentice or two.” Another result was social unrest on the part of journeymen, especially cloth workers, who “being forced to be without work are the most part of these rude people that make these uproars abroad, to the great disquiet not only of the King’s Highness but also of his people.”96 But the “Merchant” would not join the “Knight” in favoring a standing army to quell “tumults” at home, instead taking the side of the “Husbandman.” The “Merchant” thought such a force would be counterproductive: it “would rather be occasion of commotions to be stirred than to be quenched; for, as he said, the stomachs of Englishmen would never bear that—to suffer such injury and reproaches as he heard that such used to do to the subjects of France which in reproach they call peasants.”97 VII. CONCLUSIONS Smith’s “Discourse” was a far cry from the body social, which he would have thoroughly refashioned. It is interesting to observe the main lines of the kind of society that he envisioned. When the three estates were stripped from the body social, what remained was the power of markets and property.

256  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 Whatever the precise mix between land and trade, there is no question that society would be based on individual enterprise, the profit motive, and “virtue.” Although he recognized the power of the landed elites, especially in ruling the country, he apparently did not accept, as the “Knight” did, the preeminence of landed society. Smith’s fostering of productive trades, i.e., ones that would be successful in promoting English exports, would produce a very different society and one in which trade and traders would play enhanced roles. Here, perhaps, was the kernel of the “nation of shopkeepers.” Although he heartily approved of making profits, they were limited by a principle of social utility that declared that whatever destabilized society was unacceptable. It is true that Smith favored freeing the export trade in grain, but again, a proto-utilitarian concept was applied. The aim was to encourage tillage, so that pastoralism would not cause rural depopulation and riots. It is also worth recalling that the Corn Laws that Parliament passed after 1660 were a similar form of regulation, which only permitted exports when domestic prices were below a certain level established by governments. What is more, the further regulations that Smith suggested were by no means non-interventionist. The reform of the coinage required a huge program of recalling old coins and minting new ones, and these reforms took several years to implement (as Smith had said they would).98 To increase the participation of the labor force in the old and new trades as the “Doctor” proposed would almost certainly presuppose government involvement, and as Joan Thirsk has shown, several early modern governments took action along these lines, not without some impact.99 The halting of imports of “trifles” and luxury goods, too, would almost certainly have needed legislation and Royal proclamations to effectuate, even if in the longer term the expansion of domestic trades to replace imported goods actually transpired, because the latter development could not happen overnight. Despite these reservations, it appears Smith’s proposals would have set England on course to become a great commercial power in the world.

NOTES   1. Ian S. Archer, “Sir Thomas Smith (1513–1577), Scholar, Diplomat, and Political Theorist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).  2. Wood, Foundations of Political Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 191, 203–4.   3. Mary Dewar, ed. A “Discourse of the Commonweal of This Realm of England” (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1969), 30.  4. Wood, Foundations, 206–7. I intend to elaborate this point in greater detail.   5. Dewar, ed., “Discourse”, 105.   6. Ibid. 111–12.   7. Ibid. 118.

Virtue Meets Profit  257   8. Ibid. 86.   9. Ibid. 62. 10. Ibid. 63–4. 11. Ibid. 64–5. 12. Ibid. 53–4 (italics added). 13. Ibid. 55–6 (italics added). 14. Ibid. 56–7. 15. Ibid. 58–9 (italics added). 16. Ibid. 60–1 (italics added). 17. Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 18. Smith, Discourse, 18. 19. Ibid. 33, 99. 20. Ibid. 33–4, 113–14. 21. Ibid. 56. 22. Ibid. 108. 23. Archer, “Sir Thomas Smith,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004); C. E. Challis, “The Circulating Medium and the Movement of Prices in MidTudor England,” in Peter H. Ramsey, ed., The Price Revolution in SixteenthCentury England (London: Methuen, 1971), 118; J. D. Gould, “The Price Revolution Reconsidered,” in ibid., 99; David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 90; Andrea Finkelstein, The Grammar of Profit: The Price Revolution in Intellectual Context (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 217. 24. Dewar, ed., “Discourse,” 105. 25. Ibid. 69, 101–2. 26. Ibid. 144–5. 27. Ibid. 77–9, 99. 28. Ibid. 80, 113–14. 29. Ibid. 80. 30. Ibid. 85–6, 106, 110. 31. Ibid. 102, 109. 32. Ibid. 87. 33. Ibid. 88. 34. Ibid. 90. 35. Ibid. 90–1. 36. For some of the issues, see William H. Sewell Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), ch. 4. 37. Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 98, 155. See also Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999), 30–8. 38. Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 199. 39. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin, eds. The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 40. Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th18th Century (London: Collins, 1982), II, 461, 463 (italics in original). 41. Patrick Collinson in Collinson, ed. The Sixteenth Century, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 238; Bossy, “Some Elementary Forms of Durkheim,” P&P 95 (May 1982): 10, 14–15, 17–18.

258  Social Humanist Challenges to the Body Social, 1516–1549 42. Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17. 43. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 44, 70, 78, 94, 100, 106, 112, 117. 44. Ibid. 79. 45. Ibid. 43–4, 77, 87, 89. 46. Ibid. 64–5, 69. 47. Ibid. 89–90. 48. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832, 43, 68, 87; E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993), 33, 85, 87. 49. Clark, op.cit., 68, 70. 50. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973; orig. pub. Lawrence and Wishart, 1969), 27. 51. Thompson, op.cit., 20–24, 83. 52. Sewell, Logics of History, 125. 53. Rollison, A Commonwealth of the People, 252–6, 285–6. 54. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 1967), 162–3. 55. R. W. Southern, “The Bonds of Society,” The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Hutchinson, 1967; 1st published, 1953), 107–8. 56. Alan Everitt, “Social Mobility in Early Modern England,” P&P 33 (April 1966): 70–2. 57. See the comments by my late colleague G. S. Holmes regarding a possible ­“lineal descent” from Smith through Wilson, to Massie and Colquhoun: “Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England,” Transactions, Royal ­Historical Society, 5th ser. 27 (1977), 65. 58. Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (London: Penguin, 1973; orig. pub., Oxford University Press, 1939–43), 155, 171, 179, 194, 197, 212, 221, 246–7, 289–92, 517, 525–7. 59. For issues regarding cultural approaches, see Sewell, Logics of History, ch. 5. 60. Keith Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees and Sorts in Tudor and Stuart England,” History Today, 37 (1987), 17–20; Keith Wrightson, “The Social Order of Early Modern England: Three Approaches,” in L. Bonfield, Richard M. Smith, and Wrightson, eds., The World We Have Gained. Histories of Population and Social Structure. Essays presented to Peter Lastlett on his 70th Birthday (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 196–8; K. Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees, and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England,” in Penelope J. Corfield, ed., Language, History, and Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 42–3. 61. K. Wrightson, “Estates, Degrees, and Sorts: Changing Perceptions of Society in Tudor and Stuart England,” in P. J. Corfield, ed., Language, History and Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 45–52. 62. Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London [1300–1500] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962; repr. of 1948 edn.), 305, 310; Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 42–52. 63. David Cressy, “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England,” Literature and History, 2 no. 3 (March 1976), 29. Laslett cited by Wrightson, “Social Order,” 178. 64. Lauro Martines, “Introduction: The Historical Approach to Violence,” in Martines, ed., Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities, 1200–1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 14–15. 65. Richard E. Beringer, Historical Analysis: Contemporary Approaches to Clio’s Craft (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Krieger Publishing, 1978), 177–84.

Virtue Meets Profit  259 66. Smith, “Discourse,” 11–13. Wood, Foundations, 205–6, identifies the “Doctor” as a “highly respected theologian.” 67. Wood, 219; cf. “Discourse”, 22–3 (“Capper” attacks “Doctor” as clergyman); 106 (quotation order reversed). 68. Ibid. 34–5. 69. Wood, Foundations, 199, 217. 70. Archer, “Sir Thomas Smith,” Oxford DNB. 71. Dewar, ed., “Discourse,” 23, 32. 72. Ibid. 23. 73. Ibid. 23–32, esp. 29. 74. Ibid. 127, 136. 75. Ibid. 128–30. 76. Ibid. 131–33. 77. Ibid. 133–34. 78. Skinner, Foundations, II, 244–50. 79. Dewar, ed., “Discourse,” 135. 80. Ibid. 19, 21–2, 39–40. 81. Ibid. 50. 82. Ibid. 50–3. 83. Ibid. 87–8, 92. 84. Ibid. 21–2, 43, 80–1: “port” refers to “external deportment”: The Concise Oxford Dictionary, eds. H. W.  & F. G. Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 5th edn., 1964). 85. Dewar, ed., “Discourse,” 81. 86. Ibid. 81–4. The quotations about arms apparently refer to the increased use of the rapier in aristocratic circles: Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy, 242–50. A “garde” is part of the hilt of a sword that protects the hand: OED. 87. Dewar, ed., “Discourse,” 83. 88. Ibid. 126. 89. “Discourse,” 17, 19, 22, 39–40, 57–8. 90. Ibid. 92–3. 91. Ibid. 17–18. 92. Ibid. 20, 49. 93. Ibid. 58. 94. Ibid. 18. The “Merchant” took up the question again in the third dialogue: ibid. 121. The meaning of to throw at the bar or stone is unclear: OED. 95. Ibid. 18–19. 96. Ibid. 20. 97. Ibid. 92–3. 98. Challis, “Circulating Medium,” 142. 99. J. Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1978), 24–50.

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Part III

Society as Property, 1550–1697

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13 Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600

I. INTRODUCTION Social thought was dynamic in late medieval and early modern England. In Part I, we saw that the medieval model of the body social retained its power into the sixteenth century. In Part II, however, beginning with Fulgens and Lucrece and More’s Utopia, several writers challenged the traditional schema. At some point, humanist thinking moved beyond seeking the “best Commonwealth” in purely political terms. New thinking redefined the roles of the clergy and nobility, placed merit ahead of birth in social rankings, and broke with established norms of social interdependence by championing wealth over voluntary poverty and in prescribing state intervention—as opposed to traditional charity—to relieve or punish the poor. Several authors, using varied methods from learned treatises to poetry and songs, addressed the social in novel ways: in Utopia’s proposed abolition of private property, in Starkey’s remodeling of the three estates, and in Smith’s contention that social relations included competition and struggles between economic blocs, and in asserting the role of government in effecting social changes. Part III describes the directions that social thinking took between 1550 and 1697. The present chapter examines the persistence of organic representations of society beyond 1549, but also the proliferating contestation of those ideas. The next chapter discusses new directions taken in the 1600s. It is perhaps too commonly assumed that the appearance of alternatives to an existing paradigm leads automatically to the demise of the old and triumph of the new. Rather, as a leading authority on epistemology once observed, the introduction of new ideas, rather than producing immediate changes, tends to lead to “a more or less extended exploration of the area of anomaly.”1 In the meantime, in the coexistence of the old and the new, it is possible to observe different models in their development and to answer the question, what happens when a paradigm is challenged by a new theory? When does the old paradigm become anomalous? The theory of the body social was rather like Newtonian physics faced with Einstein’s theory of relativity— never entirely outmoded: “in so far as Newtonian theory was ever a truly scientific theory supported by valid evidence, it still is.” Put another way, it is

264  Society as Property, 1550–1697 perfectly appropriate for an automobile driver in the twenty-first century to behave “as though he lived in a Newtonian universe” rather than in Einstein’s.2 Some parts of a theory may survive more than others. The discredited phlogiston theory, which preceded the oxygen paradigm, still explained why different materials burned differently, in varied atmospheres, and with divergent results.3 Yet there is no denying that new thinking about society developed in the sixteenth century. The present chapter shows that Smith was not alone in observing conflicts between economic groups in society, that his rethinking of social relations in the “Discourse of the Common Weal,” although unpublished until the 1580s, was reproduced by others from the mid-sixteenth century and, specifically, in representations of Elizabethan society by Smith himself, by William Harrison, and by Thomas Wilson. These writers gave new prominence to the possession of wealth as the basic stuff of social relations, rather than function, interdependency, and fixed hierarchy in the body social. In Wilson’s case, this new theory was expressed in detailed, numerical terms that were unprecedented in previous social commentary and that anticipated the age of Political Arithmetic. Chapter  14 takes the story into the seventeenth century, when a wide range of authorities defended selective principles of the body social against the anomalous new ideas. These positions included the affirmation of social hierarchy in the form of patriarchalism and in dependency relations that focused on the household rather than on the relationship of lord and tenant or retainer. The theory of the body was also evident in the assertion of belief in a “moral economy” as against market relations free of moral constraints. This new variant of the body opposed excessive profits, especially in times of dearth, and the same thinking favored state control to regulate economic behavior in the interests of morality. This perception and its policies confronted the issue of privatizing common lands, which sparked parliamentary debates and pamphleteering for 60 years, from the 1590s to the 1650s. There were continued discussions about the care of the poor—whether through traditional charity or by public taxation—and the state itself and its finances, armed forces, and overseas ambitions became subjects of debate. Chapter  15 delineates fundamental challenges to the body social in five venues. One site of new social thought was the county chorographies published between 1576 and 1730. These publications tended to focus on the “histories” of the landed elites, but with a difference. As in other texts, the clergy were not prominently represented. The landed were often discussed in social humanist terms, in which birth counted for less than merit. There were positive representations of upward social mobility, a rejection of voluntary poverty, and critiques of cultures of the poor or “baser sort.” A second location for rethinking is found in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (1608), which redrew the representation of the body, reversed the flow of wealth, focused on economic and social conflicts versus harmony, took up the institution of patriarchalism as a form of social cement, and raised questions about martial as against civic virtue. A third locus of new thinking was Hobbes’s Leviathan

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  265 (1651), which attacked the theory of the body social from methodological and philosophical perspectives, which was unprecedented in English social thinking. Like Smith, Hobbes represented social relations to be based on conflict and individualism rather than cooperation, but Hobbes took things further. He bluntly advocated the value of property versus poverty, thus wholly rejecting the Franciscan model. A  fourth venue was James Harrington’s Oceana (1656), which took up new positions of its own. It was based upon diachronic, materialist, and political explanations of social changes that he held led to England’s civil wars of the seventeenth century. Harrington rejected the metaphor of the body in political form and jettisoned the aristocracy, the Church, and the monarchy in favor of a gentry ruling class. A fifth contribution was the work of Edward Waterhouse, published in 1665, which delineated a transformation in the definition of society’s elites, stressing the reality of social mobility and the importance of trade and the professions for the economic success (and therefore social standing) of the traditional elites.4 Chapter  16, like Harrington, confirms that the possession of wealth, especially land, was the central issue in debates about political participation in the mid-seventeenth century. The Levellers actually anticipated Harrington in calling for the nationalizing of Church and Crown lands, while the Diggers sought to revolutionize society by taking over private property and dividing it among the population. The ideas of these groups aroused opposition by the “Grandee” generals of the New Model Army, who suppressed both movements. II. HISTORIOGRAPHY It has been commonplace to consider many of these changes to have sprung from the rise of individualism. One authority, rejecting the conventional location of the phenomenon in the early modern period, has moved the origins of individualism in England’s case back to the medieval period.5 This scholar takes the line that socially, England changed very little between 1000 CE and 1800 CE, and the thesis has been extended to include thinking about society.6 A Marxist history of political theory has seen “possessive individualism” as the key to the beginnings of bourgeois society.7 Another perspective has been to see the discovery of the self through the lens of “self-fashioning.”8 What rising individualism contributed, if anything, as a social model remains to be seen. Social humanist thought was slight on developing the kind of holistic theory that characterized the body social. By its lights, humanism critiqued the old order and developed, even perfected, individual human beings, but what they constituted as a group remains obscure. Once the destruction of the old order was complete, what remained was social position based upon wealth. One of the most promising suggestions was Greenblatt’s statement in Renaissance Self-Fashioning that hypothesized an “essential relationship between private property and private selves,” but

266  Society as Property, 1550–1697 which then disappointingly made the self “a place of domestic retreat” (i.e., patriarchalism?) rather than connecting it to broader social theories.9 This task is undertaken in Part III of this book, in which it is argued that the connecting thread between individuals was the perception that the possession of wealth (or the lack thereof) located people in social positions. III. PERSISTENCE OF THE BODY SOCIAL The theory of the body social did not disappear overnight, despite the enhanced position of property in the perception of social ranks. In the eighteenth century, some authorities still cited the metaphor of the Great Chain of Being and some, less macrocosmically, favored the “Commonwealth” model of social cooperation. Despite the growth of class-based social categories, some Anglicans wanted a return to a society of interdependent orders.10 Moreover, although the laissez-faire principles of “Political Economy” were pervasive in the nineteenth century, the ideal of mutual aid retained a powerful appeal.11 The same period saw the revival of theories of the body social in the work of conservatives who opposed the French Revolution.12 In the nineteenth century, the ideal of a body social came to inform various movements—Fabians, New Liberals, even anti-collectivist Conservatives.13 Given that the theory was remarkably durable for centuries, even millennia, it should not be surprising that it survived into the Elizabethan period and beyond. The metaphor of the body persisted in a host of Elizabethan and early Stuart texts and, as the next chapter shows, sprang offshoots of patriarchalism, belief in “moral economics,” and government control. Early in Elizabeth I’s reign, Lawrence Humfrey, the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, published an English translation of a lengthy treatise entitled The Nobles or Of Nobility, which at the outset used the model of the body social. Humfrey’s edition included function-based, organic, and hierarchical imagery, but ultimately abandoned the body social to endorse the social humanist model. To the aristocracy, the Humfrey translation assigned most of the vital functions of the body social. It stated, “they be the heads, they the stomachs and hearts of commonweals”; further, “they, be both the eyes, and ears of princes, to see, hear, and foresee such things, as be not only profitable to themselves, but also commodious and wholesome to others.” The nobles were “to rule the other orderly, lovingly, and uprightly”; “the one to point and foreshow the way; the other to follow it foretold.”14 The Nobles cast the aristocracy in its traditional roles as warriors and magistrates. They were the keys to good governance, because it was their job to be subjects of the monarch and to rule the people, or “to learn to serve the first politicly, lowly and honorably . . .”.15 Humfrey’s translation said the basis for noble rule was the body social and the principle of hierarchy, for there “ought to be differences of degrees. Some being nobles in the higher room, other meaner in the lower place.”16

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  267 The promise of aristocratic rule was well-being, and the mechanism was mutual support. The result was the avoidance of “great discord in one civil body. Wherein, all the members linked, the highest with the lowest, the lowest with the highest, and coupled with the lovely knot of friendship and charity, [might] yield most plenteous profit both privately to every one, and universally to all.”17 The Nobles encouraged the lords to “minister to the other limbs what they want: to purvey for the body of the whole state, that it fall not in[to an] uncurable malady.” The commonalty, it said, should “win the nobles with service; the nobles the commons with benevolence.”18 The aristocracy had to retain the support of the common sort, or there would be sedition and social upheaval. The nobles should love the people “as the greatest, and best part of the Commonwealth”; if they did not, as Augustine had warned, “many little worms may slay.” Further, quoting Aesop, the common people were the producers, “the hands of the nobles” who “labor and sweat for them,” because the elites were handless.19 Yet, as shown later in this chapter, The Nobles concluded that contention between the aristocracy and the commonalty was so manifest that it required the reform of the aristocracy and the abandonment of the traditional body social. The ideal of social interdependence was retained in Philip Stubbes’s The Second Part of the Anatomy of Abuses, published in 1583, in which the author occasionally dropped his turgid and prissy attacks against long hair and “daintiness in food” to address larger issues. The agrarian issues he raised were not new ones, because they harked back to Utopia and the Commonwealth-men. Stubbes protested against landlords’ self-aggrandizement for profit-sake and urged them to be generous to tenants: “They count that good policy, and I have heard them say: is it not lawful for me to live upon mine own, and to get as much for it as I  can?” Instead, he argued that “the earth is the Lord’s,” that those who possessed it “ought to lay it forth to the support of the poor, that all may live jointly together, and maintain the state of the Commonwealth to God’s glory.” The alternative was depressing. If the rich monopolized the land and the poor were dispossessed, then “the state of the Commonwealth would soon decay and come to confusion,” including the threat that the plebs would “cut off their necks . . .”. No one should exploit his brother: “whosoever does not this, eschewing all kind of exaction, polling, pilling and shaving of his poor tenants, he is no perfect member of Christ, nor does not as he would be done by.”20 Another example of the body social in late Elizabethan thinking was John Norden, a sometime surveyor, cartographer, and lay religious commentator. In 1596 or 1597 he published “A Progress of Piety,” in which he took the traditional social position, mixed with observations on government, patriarchalism, Royal charity, and a denunciation of rebellion. Socially and politically, he stated, “there are in every body many members, and every member has his several place, office, and function.” More specifically, a kingdom was a body in which a governor ruled, magistrates were “the principal members

268  Society as Property, 1550–1697 of that body,” and “there are inferior members, preserved and defended by the more glorious.”21 Norden was also at pains to decry rebellion against the Queen, who, he boasted, personally administered her own proto-welfare state: she “lovingly entertains every member of this body, that she suffers not the least, the weakest, the poorest, nor the basest to be distressed, wronged, or abused, but she extends present relief, comfort, and assistance.” The contrast with would-be rebels was sharply drawn, again using the body metaphor: What an unnatural member is it then, that will raise itself up to offend this so sacred a head! Nay, what member is it, unless he be overmuch infected with the poison of envy, that will not strive by all possible strength to perform the duty of a true subject, in whatsoever office, calling, or authority he be placed? Although very dangerous members have been found in this body; but they were withered and dried up with the scorching sun of vain-glory, so that they in their callings could bring forth no fruit, but very rottenness of heart, wherein lurked nothing but the eating worms of envy, the viperous affection of hatred unto the truth, and, consequently, devilish desires to disturb, nay, to subvert and confound the whole body.22 One of the last lengthy articulations of the body social in early modern thought came from the pen of Edward Forset in 1606, who frequently invoked the image. His most striking contribution was perhaps his distinction between “bodies natural and politique,” in which he treated the body social as the natural one and government—“the state”—as the other. The body politic was Forset’s chief concern, as the book’s subtitle indicated: “out of the principles of nature, is set forth the true form of a commonweal, with the duty of subjects, and the right of sovereign: together with many good points of political learning . . .”.23 Nevertheless, the underpinning of government was social, and Forset subscribed to the notions of specialized social hierarchies and interdependence. He specified a traditional tripartite division in which “the nobility is so to be maintained, as that the commons be not wronged; and the clergy so to be cherished . . .”. There was to be interdependence between the estates: “each part must be fed competently with a proportionable partition of the profits, allotting the same with such indifference, as the plenty of some be not the cause of penury unto others, nor that the ever-sucking veins of some do draw dry the poorer that be in want.” Forset rejected, though, “any parity or equality” and shook up the traditional ranking of the estates. As other writers would do, Forset dethroned the clergy from the top of society, indicating that “the laity [should] be not overlaid” and gave the nobility and gentry pride of place. To justify this hierarchy, he cited the significance of government and used the images of the human heart and circulation of the blood, as well as of clothing. As for Morison, this boiled down to something

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  269 like “reason of state.” The rationale was, “why should any body envy at the glory of some selected persons, in and by whom the sovereign does more manifestly discover his purposes, make show of his force, and express his affections?”24 Here, Forset took a social humanist position on careers open to talent. He invoked the monarch’s right to choose whom he or she might and cited, echoing Morison in an earlier age, the criterion of the worthiness of the candidates. “Why should it be disliked,” he queries, “that honors and favors, riches, and preferments be bestowed, or rather fitted (regardingly unto the merits of the virtuous) of their good service and honorable deservings?” Further to justify mobility among the top people, Forset used a surgical metaphor that suggests the “natural body” was not always to be left alone. He asserted that “as in the body it is a great mischief not to nourish and sustain the sound and serviceable parts, then not to cut off the diseased and corrupted: so in the common weal, not to reward and advance the worthy, is more pernicious and of more dangerous consequence, than not to afflict, punish, or pare away the hurtful and infectious . . .”.25 The upshot of such surgery would be “wise distribution and distinguishment of the parts, in sorting them so orderly to their several functions . . .”. The alternatives were chaos and anarchy brought on by “the loathed imps of tumult and disorder . . .”.26 Conflict and rebellion were still sites for the reiteration of the paradigm of the body social. One example is Fulke Greville’s statement in 1593 to the House of Commons concerning the common people that “if the feet knew their strength as we know their oppression, they would not bear as they do  .  .  .”.27 In conflicts over agrarian issues beginning in the 1590s and lasting into the 1650s, the body image was frequently invoked, as the next chapter will demonstrate. In the heat of the discursive moment, it was convenient to have the body image at hand, and contemporaries continued to invoke Aesop’s belly metaphor far into the seventeenth century, with 20 editions of the fable being published between 1600 and 1660 and another by L’Estrange in 1692.28 Milton defended the Parliamentary cause in 1641 using the traditional imagery, but after two civil wars and the Regicide, he employed contract theory instead for justification and ultimately denied an organic order.29 His social views dovetailed with the political ones. Milton scorned titles of nobility and saw the origins of true nobility to reside in “personal worth, godliness, and goodness in the service of the state” and to exist mainly among the “middle sort” in society because they were “the great fountain head of that virtue from which true nobility proceeds.”30 Conflict still gave rise to corporeal images in the mid-1600s, when England had what is considered its last debate over issues of plenty and poverty in the agrarian sphere. In 1648, John Cooke published Unum necessarium, which argued for government intervention to control the grain trade so that the poor would not starve. His position was that “governors must of necessity and in all reason provide for the preservation and sustenance of the

270  Society as Property, 1550–1697 meanest members, he that is but as the little toe of the body politique.” But in matters of economic and social thinking, Cooke, who was a barrister and solicitor for the Rump Parliament in the trial of Charles I, is thought to have been out of touch with his times. This was allegedly a period of “the moral economy in retreat,” when price controls over grain exports were lifted through the institution of the Corn Laws, but the next chapter suggests Cooke was not alone in defending a “moral economy” in the midseventeenth century.31 The concern about social dysfunction also characterized lengthier and slightly less rhetorical works of the period. Davies of Hereford described in 1602 a society featuring the body social, but made references echoing Smith and more analytical commentators of the period: Yet in this lesser world, as well we try, Be sundry sorts of people: some there are That be as heads, some rulers are so high, Some common citizens; and some, less rare, Those rural be that still [are] out of square. The heads are those above-recited three, The under-rulers thoughts and fancies are, The citizens the outward senses be, The rurals be the bodies rare  . . .  The concern about disorder was not far from the poet’s thoughts: For when these riff-raffs [“rurals”] in commotion rise, And all will have their will, or naught will spare, The soul, poor soul, they then in rage surprise, And rob her of her wealth and blind her of her eyes.32 In 1607, Nicholas Breton developed a similar line of thought, possibly drawing upon the absolutist paternalism being bruited in the court of James VI and I. The argument began from the premise that “God made all the parts of the body for the soul and with the soul to serve him, and all the subjects in a kingdom to serve their king and with their king to serve him.” Stressing the significance of dysfunction in the Commonwealth, Breton went on to pose the rhetorical question whether, “If the head of the body ache, will not the heart be greatly grieved, and every part feel his part of the pain of it?” Or, “Can the eye of the body be hurt or grieved, and neither the head [sic] heart, nor any other member be touched with the pain of it?” Breton interestingly expanded the social range of the story beyond the three estates. He treated the king’s council as “the eye of the Commonwealth,” but in addition, included the “hand, the artificer” and “the laborer, the foot,” saying that if the latter were wounded, “the body of the state will feel it . . .”. So was it not necessary that “the head be careful, the eye searchful and the

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  271 hand be painful in the cure of it?” If “the body be diseased,” to save the Commonwealth the monarch, the council and “every true subject” must “put to his hand for the help of it . . .”.33 IV. ANOMALIES AND THE BODY SOCIAL Smith’s “Discourse of the Common Weal” (1549) represented a striking change from the body social, but how far was his thinking followed in subsequent decades? There is broad agreement that the second half of the sixteenth century saw the erosion of the body social in English cosmological and social thought. As concerns the macrocosm of the Great Chain of Being, Tillyard thought its existence was “precarious” because medieval cosmology and ethics faced challenges from Copernicus, Machiavelli, and a “new commercialism [that] was hostile to medieval stability.”34 In Elizabethan social and economic discussions, Allen observed a fundamental change: the “Commonwealth-mens’ ” “earlier vision of a harmonized economic and religious co-operation from which waste and mere profit-mongering should have been eliminated, seems to have faded quickly  .  .  .”.35 According to Pocock, the transformation of political thought had a social dimension. Those who “discoursed of the common weal” had “turned back in favor of the static and medieval ideal of maintaining the realm as a hierarchy of degree, a frame of order which must not be shaken; there was only one order and chaos lay outside it.” By the end of the sixteenth century, however, an ideological shift was occurring. The discourse of the “Commonwealth-men” who had pushed governments to legislate to advance the common good was being supplanted by that of the gentry who, “as social creatures,” were developing a new frame of reference focusing on Parliament as the defender of liberties, including the preservation of property rights and social structure as defined by custom and the common law.36 Literary scholars have observed the same shift in the use of the body metaphor. Hale found that while the body image never disappeared, it fossilized, even coming under attack, because it was increasingly replaced by contract theories of society and politics. Further, the rise of new ideas of natural philosophy, which eschewed reference to macrocosmic theories such as the Great Chain or the social or politic body, dealt a blow to the metaphor.37 Of course, the body metaphor had never been static in quality, and its social manifestation had itself been a medieval innovation. Barkan observed that one of the first transformations of the Pauline idea of the mystical body of the Church occurred in the twelfth century, when a shift took place “from a sacramental to a social concept . . . when ideas of corporation were influencing medieval political thought.” Henry VIII dealt a further blow to the concept through his takeover of the Church, because “the confusion of bodies politic and mystical caused the integrity of the anthropomorphic image to break down completely.” The decisive dismemberment of the body

272  Society as Property, 1550–1697 metaphor, as will be seen in Chapter 15, was in Coriolanus, when the different social members—the plebs, senators, even the belly—acted as separate entities in conflict with one another, so that “the basic image of the body . . . is of multiplicity and fragmentation.”38 What succeeded the Great Chain of Being? Lovejoy noted that, while the Great Chain’s cosmos began life as “an absolutely rigid and static state of things,” from the mid-seventeenth century, this inflexibility was replaced by “the conception of the destiny of man as an unending progress . . .”. This reversal seemingly drew inspiration from the social humanist view of social mobility, which entailed “an endless prospect of bettering one’s position in the universe,” in which the chain became “a ladder, with an infinite number of rungs, up which individual souls forever climb.”39 Hobbes went further in renouncing the use of body metaphors, as Chapter 15 shows. V. CONFLICTS INHERENT TO THE BODY An important source of the fear of “all coherence gone” in the social order was the perception that the different estates did not get along, and this view was center stage in the mid-sixteenth century. It was not a new idea, because conflict was a common theme in Tudor social commentary, as we have seen. Dudley, Starkey, More, and several of the “Commonwealth-men” observed hostility between the common people and the landed elites. Smith went still further, his “Discourse” depicting a society almost at war with itself, with the “Capper” opposed to the “Merchant”, the “Husbandman” to the “Gentleman”, and so on. Smith was not alone in drawing a picture of social conflict. Sir John Cheke, tutor to Edward VI, a friend of Smith’s, and, like Smith, a principal secretary of state under Edward, penned The Hurt of Sedition How Grievous It Is to a Commonwealth (1549), a virulent critique of the popular uprisings of the period.40 Cheke’s objective was to discredit the rebels, and to do so he pursued several lines of attack. He rejected their claims to be acting for God and the common weal, whether in defense of the Catholic Church in the West Country or against the gentry’s enclosures in East Anglia.41 Cheke’s social philosophy, like much thinking in this transitional period, contained mixed conceptual language, partly organic and partly social humanist. He referred to the “natural body” following the “head” and “members of the political body” obeying the king. Invoking patriarchalism, he drew analogies with servants being dutiful to masters, and children to fathers.42 Cheke described how the “politic body” was joined together through love. Despite their attacks on the gentry, the rebels had more to gain from obedience than resistance, whereas gentlemen got comparatively little in return. The operative principle was that “living in a Commonwealth together, one kind has need of an other  .  .  .”. But in reality, the gentry had more to give because “a great sort of you [have] more need of one gentleman, than one gentleman of a great sort of you.” This was because of differences in

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  273 wealth: “though all be parts of one Commonwealth, yet all be not like worthy parts” because “you be less able by money and liberality to deserve good will than others be” so “your only kind of desert is to show good will . . .”.43 Cheke also used organic metaphors when he maintained that “order must be kept in the Commonwealth like health in the body . . . ” and used the metaphor of sickness in the body to describe lawlessness.44 Cheke’s attacks, despite invoking body metaphors, owed a greater debt to the social humanist positions of Morison and Starkey. One of Cheke’s principal charges against both the western and eastern movements was their alleged social leveling. Both groups challenged the magistrates appointed by God. The western rebels, he contended, thought they were superior to the bishops and Parliament.45 The eastern ones, whom he described as the “rabble of Norfolk rebels,” were out to overthrow the gentry—“by killing of gentlemen, by spoiling of gentlemen, by imprisoning of gentlemen  .  .  .”. In his imagined statement from “the true subject to the rebel,” Cheke charged that “you pretend a Commonwealth” of equals and were driven by envy: If riches offend you, because you wish the like, then think that to be no Commonwealth, but envy to the Commonwealth. Envy it is to impair another man’s estate, without the amendment of your own. And to have no gentlemen, because you be none yourselves, is to bring down an estate, and to mend none. Would you have all alike rich?46 The upshot of rebellion would be the alienation of the gentry, who would seek retribution because it would “breed in their stomachs great grudge of displeasure toward you, and engender such an hatred as the weaker and the sufferer must needs bear the smart thereof.”47 In social humanist mode, Cheke put the possession of wealth center stage. He claimed the rebels posed a larger threat that went beyond the gentry. They endangered the basis of society by attacking property in general, of the poor as well as the rich. The law was that “every man should safely keep his own,” but Cheke claimed the rebels “robbed every honest house, and spoiled them unjustly, and piteously wronged poor men being no offenders, to their utter undoing . . .”.48 The consequences went beyond social rankings and property to undermine social relationships, including the principles of service and obedience. By capturing and imprisoning gentlemen, the rebels had “restrained them of their service” to the king so that “diligence of service is hindered . . .”. The servant was expected to obey the master, the child its father, and everyone was to respect “the Commonwealth’s father . . .”. The rebels’ disobedience would be contagious, producing “unthriftiness . . . in ill servants, wickedness in unnatural children, sturdiness in unruly subjects . . .”.49 Adopting, again, social humanist precepts, Cheke maintained that social leveling would destroy the value of labor, diminish the common people’s prospects for upward social mobility, and foster vagabondage and crime. If all were

274  Society as Property, 1550–1697 equal, he asserted, “that is the overthrow of labor, and utter decay of work in this realm.” Who would work “if when he has gotten more, the idle shall by lust without right take what him lust from him, under pretense of equality with him. This is the bringing in of idleness, which destroys the Commonwealth; and not the amendment of labor, that maintains the Commonwealth.”50 If the value of labor were diminished, people’s prospects for improving themselves and their families would be wrecked: If there should be such equality, then you take away all hope from yours to come to any better estate than you now leave them. And as many mean men’s children do come honestly up, and are great succor to all their stock: so should none be hereafter helped by you, but because you seek equality, whereby all cannot be rich. Here was the social humanist’s promise of mobility. Cheke sprang from a modest background—his father was a university administrator and his mother a vintner—but he garnered great wealth under Edward VI, so he knew something about the subject.51 As regards the poor, Cheke, like social humanists, treated them as a separate social rank. The rebels might want everyone to be poor, but God alone was in charge of wealth and poverty: “God has made the poor, and has made them to be poor that he might show his might”; he could, contrariwise, “pluck down the rich to this state of poverty by his power, as he disposes to order them.” The job of the poor was to “bear it wisely, rather than by lust seek riches unjustly” and “unprofitably strive . . .”.52 Cheke’s admonitions to the poor to accept their lot are found, ironically, in the same paragraph that promises people upward mobility if they eschewed leveling. Again, as for social humanists, his worst-case scenario was that the rebels would recruit vagrants and the unemployed. He warned that “like a bile in a body, nay like a sink in a town, [they] have gathered together all the nasty vagabonds and idle loiterers . . .”.53 When the rebellion was put down, he predicted vagrants would “swarm in every corner of the realm and not only lie loitering under hedges, but also stand sturdily in cities, and beg boldly at every door, leaving labor which they like not, and following idleness . . .”. They would linger and beg in the highways and streets, lurk in alehouses, intimidate passers-by into giving, robbing them if they refused. In a lengthy, hyperbolic passage on the menace of the unemployed, he defined a “loiterer” as a sucker of honey, a spoiler of corn, a destroyer of fruit, a waster of money, a spoiler of victuals, a sucker of blood [sic], a breaker of orders, a seeker of breakes [sic], a queller [sic] of life, a basilica of the commonwealth, which by company and sight does poison the whole country, and stains honest minds with the infection of his venom, and so draws the Commonwealth to death and destruction.54

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  275 The consequences of rebellion were also economic, according to Cheke. Crops, including hay and grain, were destroyed, and homes were plundered. The results would include price inflation and a decline in hospitality. The Norfolk rebels attacked their landlords for depopulating the countryside, but the rioter was just as guilty: “shall we not count him, not only an enemy, but also a murderer of his country, who by harebrained unruliness causes utter ruin and pestilent destruction of so many thousand men?” Now smallholders could not pay their rents and, because of the rebellion, risked “losing their holds [holdings], at their lords’ hands,” unless the latter took pity on them and showed more mercy than was required by law.55 Despite occasionally invoking the body social, in other respects, Cheke was firmly wedded to the social humanist paradigm. His endorsement of the principle of upward social mobility has been noted. He also backed the humanist position that the educated and the wealthy should rule. He mocked the western rebels for presuming to speak about religion: “dare you commons take upon you more learning, than the chosen bishops and clerks of this realm have?” Was the rebels’ learning of greater authority than that which “the king, the Parliament, the learned, the wise have justly approved?” Learned men of means should rule, Cheke stated in words very close to those of Elyot: “in countries some must rule, some must obey, every man may not bear like stroke: for every man is not like wise. And they that have seen most, and be best able to bear it [i.e., the costs], and of just dealing beside, be most fit to rule.”56 In critiquing the rebels’ alleged egalitarianism, Cheke defended social differences based upon education and wealth. He posed the questions of whether “if one have better utterance than another, will you pull out his tongue to save your equality? And if one be richer than another, will you [de]spoil him to maintain an equality?”57 He also criticized the rebels for imprisoning the gentry, reprising Morison’s position that strength of body should be a criterion in gaining political power. Cheke argued that “men’s bodies ought to be free from all men’s bondage and cruelty” because they contained the font of intelligence, “the true vessel of the mind, to be measurably kept of every man for all exercises and services of the mind . . .”.58 A similar account of social conflict in Edward VI’s reign appears in the work of William Thomas, a clerk of the privy council between 1550 and 1553, who wrote a series of discourses for the education of the king. The second of his treatises addressed the issue of “whether it be better for a Commonwealth, that the power be in the nobility or in the commonalty.” Thomas made several replies, which maintained that nobles and the commons were inherently at odds, although the nobles should be trusted more than the common people. He began from the premise that “the people of every monarchy, or realm, is divided in two parts: th’one nobility, and the other commonalty. In whom be two repugnant desires: the one to rule, and other not to be ruled.”59

276  Society as Property, 1550–1697 Thomas stated, “[T]he party of the commons [is] the more dangerous, for three especial causes, that is to wit, their inconstancy, peril, and ignorance.” His reasoning on the first point was “that the multitude is most inconstant, it is evident: for among many men are many opinions; which breeds confusion.” As regards the danger they presented, “none is to be compared to the frenzy of the people: for like as if a mad man get the sword in his hand, he is like not only to mischief other, but also himself; even so fares it by the commons.” Citing Froissart on the French Jacquerie of 1358, he contended that the populace would destroy the entire social order: “If they once attain the power, they destroy both the nobility and themselves.” As for their ignorance, “the multitude utterly knows nothing”; where there were exceptions, they “never proceeded of wisdom, but of necessity,” and cases of popular rule such as Athens, Florence, and the Swiss did not endure. His conclusion was that “it is impossible any estate should long prosper, where the power is in the commonalty.” The parallel would be for a man to be governed by a woman or a master by a servant.60 Thomas attempted to deal with possible objections to these positions, admitting there was an economic cause of the polarization, because “through the covetousness of the nobility the commons have been oppressed; so that for the disordinate [sic] appetites of a few, the multitude has suffered: which seems a greater evil than that the few should suffer for the multitude.” But he dismissed the argument of the “Commonwealth-men” that if the commons had authority, “the magistrates would always be the more careful to bridle the excesses of the nobility, and to advance the public wealth . . .”. His response was historical as well as rhetorical: “what popular estate can be read that has thirty years together eschewed sects, sedition, and commotions, in such sort as once within thirty years the whole estate has not been in danger of subversion?” His conclusion was that “these faults of the nobility are nothing comparable to those of the commons” because “if the multitude prevail once in power, all goes to confusion: the estate is subverted, every man’s property, his possession and goods are altered, and they themselves never return to order, but by necessity.” Better to suffer domination by the aristocracy or a monarch than to endure popular rule: a “tyranny of the nobility” was “more tolerable than th’insolence of the multitude,” and “much more tolerable then is the prince’s tyranny than the commons’ power.”61 This was heady stuff from someone of obscure origins who was a confessed embezzler, but arguably a sign of the times.62 John Ponet, too, reported social conflicts in the mid-sixteenth century, although he mainly blamed the government of Mary I. In his “Short Treatise of Politic Power” (1556) in which he called for Mary’s assassination, he argued that the Queen, her church, and government were the cause of social upheavals. Using the image of the misshapen child to symbolize England’s plight, he contended that Mary and her supporters pursued a policy of divide and rule by keeping the nobility and commons at odds: “the natural body of England shall be weak, the chief members (the arms and legs)

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  277 which is the nobility, so clogged with chains of gold, and bags of money, that the hand shall not be able to draw out the sword, nor the heels to spur the horse to help and defend the body, that is, the commons.” The head, or the government, was so large “wherefore it must pull from the other members to comfort it” and “so shall the governors and heads of England suck out the wealth and substance of the people (the politic body) and keep it bare . . .”.63 Ponet blamed the government for England’s internal divisions over religion, but also for social divisions in which “there is inward grudge, and secret malice between the members, that is, the nobility and commons” so that “the one hates and condemns the other . . .”. Based on historical examples, he concluded that self-destruction was England’s course, because “there can be no arm, where there is no body: and it is a feeble body that lacks the arms and legs. Yea it is a most miserable body where the arms and legs beat the body, and the body goes about to shake off the arms and legs.”64 Similarly dire prognostications about social divisions were voiced at the start of Elizabeth I’s reign in a manuscript that was probably the work of another clerk to the Privy Council, Armagil Waad.65 The themes were similar to earlier ones, targeting conflict between the nobles and commons. The memorandum began from the premise that “the common weal [was] diseased, by reason of . . . ”, and there followed seven items that included “the penury of noblemen,” which he proposed to remedy by appointing worthy members and by supplying them with suitable incomes, although without charge to the Queen. The latter suggestion seems unrealistic, but a possible solution appeared on the very next page, where Waad addressed the question of class consciousness and conflict. He cited “the wealth of the meaner sort” as “the very fount of rebellion, the occasion of their insolence, of the contempt of the nobility, and of the hatred they have conceived against them.” The solution was in two parts. The first was “keeping them in awe through the severity of justice . . .”. The second was economic, which would operate “by providing as it were of some sewers or channels to draw and suck from them their money by subtle and indirect means . . .”. Waad summed up his proposals dealing with “the hatred conceived between the meaner sort and the gentlemen . . . ”, which would be amended “by good policy, but execution of justice, by giving reasonable courage [?] to the gentleman, and by keeping of the mean man in awe.” Unlike Ponet’s religious and political causes for social dysfunction, Waad offered economic and agrarian explanations of why “the people [are] out of order.” The coinage needed to be fixed. Harking back to issues raised by Starkey, Armstrong, the “Commonwealth-men”, and Smith, he cited what he claimed were extensive waste grounds “being now barbarous and barren for want of culture . . .”. Cultivating the wastelands concerned the poor and crime, because Waad claimed his proposal could “maintain a great number of people that now for fault of living be forced to steal, wander idly abroad, or lie in the streets of every good town, and die miserably.”66

278  Society as Property, 1550–1697 About the same time as Waad, Humfrey’s edition of The Nobles (1563) also highlighted the importance of social divisions and counseled the reform of the nobility. Despite endorsing the concept of mutual aid, The Nobles observed a society in conflict, with the common people pitted against the nobility. Humfrey’s edition warned the common people against hating and attacking the nobles, as he asserted Anabaptists counseled them to do. Although the nobility might not be perfect and had odious members who “despise their inferiors,” he counseled against those who contended the nobles “have no place in a right and Christian Commonwealth” and were “unprofitable members to be cut off” or “banished.”67 The Nobles defended the mighty on the grounds that they “in their power not only hurt but help,” particularly as warriors and officials. Rather than “extinguish” the nobility, one should “cleanse it.” To engage in rebellion against the aristocracy “murders the body of the Commonwealth” and “who lives not content with his own estate shall rue to worse.”68 To avoid internal conflicts required the reform of the nobility. The Nobles cautioned against “great discord in one civil body” that would threaten the existence of civil society, the salvation of which was his first aim, and the means was the reform of the nobility.69 The latter would mean that “both civil societies are maintained, and the common life of man supported,” the tract stated.70 In governing, they would succeed if they ensured that their “labors and sweats,” if they applied their efforts “to the government of the Commonwealth,” and if they be disposed to civil society . . .”.71 If they did not rule gently, there would be civil strife, as in Rome at the time of Julius Caesar and recently in England in Edward VI’s reign. Justice, The Nobles maintained, “chiefly pertains to man’s society,” and nobles were bound to obey the laws just as slaves were. Even monarchs had to follow the rule of law; if they did not, vice would spread “into the whole state . . .”.72 The key to good government was to avoid ignorance among magistrates and nobles, which was the “head cause of all evils, both in the state and religion.”73 Faced with dysfunction, The Nobles turned to the humanist model of education of the elites. The way to achieve this objective was to reform the nobles, and Humfrey’s edition provided a detailed program. As Dudley, Starkey, and Morison had done, The Nobles questioned the value of birth alone and instead put a premium on virtue, for “only the soul’s divine excellence earns the praise of perfect nobility”; the “true nobles” were “good, godly, wise, and learned.”74 There might be bad nobles, but they could be “chastened, taught, and corrected” rather than abolishing the estate altogether, as in Utopia. Of the different types of aristocrats, those claiming it by birth were the least valued. “Vain therefore is this vaunt of ancient nobility,” because “of an ill crow comes an ill egg.”75 Instead, the treatise favored “new sprung nobility” on the grounds that “though it be great to descend of great house: yet greater is it to be great himself”; that “neither are these new nobles any less praiseworthy than the ancientist.”76 Humfrey’s translation specified a lengthy list of virtues that nobles

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  279 should emulate: temperance, humility, sexual continence, avoiding excessive hospitality, apparel, numbers of idle serving men, and housing, practicing physical sports as opposed to dancing, dicing, and attending the theater, prudence and wisdom, learning and looking after the instruction of one’s children.77 VI. THE PROPERTIED, THE POWERLESS, AND THE POOR The transition from the body social to a propertied order is apparent in the writings of three Elizabethan commentators—Sir Thomas Smith (1513– 1577), William Harrison (1534–1593), and Thomas Wilson (c. 1560–1629). They represent implicit rejections of the model of the three estates, “implicit” because the authors ignored the traditional order and quietly replaced it with alternatives. This new thinking included attempts at something like comprehensive social descriptions, which went beyond the three estates, which resembled the schema first outlined in Smith’s “Discourse” of 1549, and which included entirely new groups—in Smith’s case, even “bondmen,” women, and children. These authors still believed in the principle of hierarchy, but now its basis was personal merit and, above all, wealth rather than birth and function. They exhibited a heightened acceptance of the principle of mutability in social positions and a willingness, no doubt owing something to the influence of publications by Cheke and Ponet, to describe social divisions. The reverse side was a diminished sense of mutual responsibility—between laity and clergy, yeomen and gentry. This was especially the case regarding the poor, who the “virtuous” now assumed were chiefly the responsibility of governments and who perceived criminalized “vagabonds” to be threats to the social order.

A. The Body Social Ignored Body metaphors are noticeably absent in the descriptions of society by Smith, Harrison, and Wilson. There is a pale imitation of “membership” in Smith’s reference to the “parts” and “parties” of a Commonwealth, which he defined as “a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord and covenants among themselves, for the conservation of themselves as well in peace as in war.” But a “society” or “common doing” was a far cry from three interdependent estates of Dudley, Armstrong, and the “Commonwealth-men”; so was the notion of agreement among free men through a covenant.78 All told, this society sounds rather more like a joint stock company or a modern corporation than an organic body social.

B. Comprehensive Descriptions The descriptions of society by Harrison, Smith, and Wilson were not wholly new. They were preceded by late medieval examples and by Smith’s

280  Society as Property, 1550–1697 dialogues of 1549, which had included a knight, a doctor of theology, a merchant, a cap maker, and a husbandman. Harrison’s account contained elements that were both old and new. He created a quadripartite division of social “sorts”—gentlemen, burgesses or citizens, yeomen, and laborers or artificers.79 Much of his chapter on “Degrees of People in the Commonwealth of England” was devoted to the nobility. At the end, he appeared to endorse the importance of birth in a table or “rehearsal of the temporal nobility of England according to the anciency [sic] of their creations or first calling to their degrees, as they are to be found at this present.” But he also endorsed the principle of promotion based upon merit.80 Harrison described members of the third estate at some length. His comments on the citizens of towns were terse, and his remarks about merchants were controversial—he blamed them for the inflation of prices of foreign commodities—which is surprising if, as is thought, his father was a Merchant Adventurer. Taking a line that was hackneyed, if customary, he took pot shots at merchants and lawyers and called for their numbers to be limited.81 Nevertheless, Harrison did show an acute awareness of the expansion of England’s overseas trade, remarking that whereas its commerce was previously limited to northwest and western Europe, it now extended to the East and West Indies, China, and Russia.82 Harrison was also perceptive in his comments about the lower elements of the third estate. Although he ignored servants and apprentices, he described a varied group of the “fourth sort” of people—“day laborers, poor husbandmen, and some retailers (which have no free land), copyholders, and all artificers, as tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, brickmakers, masons, etc.”—a list which, although not strong on detail about each occupation, was more comprehensive than previous accounts of the body social. Although he praised the skills of England’s artificers, Harrison, unlike Smith, did not see the productive possibilities of their trades. Instead, he exclaimed, “how many trades and handicrafts are now in England whereof the Commonwealth has no need!” He cited the manufacture of glass and iron, which he alleged destroyed England’s forests and should instead be imported.83 Smith’s De Republica Anglorum was first published in 1583 with the subtitle “The Manner of Government of Policy of the Realm of England.” In fact, the subject matter was not limited to government; nor was the work entirely Smith’s; nor was it all apparently written in the 1580s.84 There was considerable overlap with Harrison’s “Description of England” that had been published in 1577 in Holinshed’s Chronicles. Smith’s chapters 17 to 24 included a discussion of the social order that was at least partly penned by his neighbor and likely acquaintance Harrison, who had probably written the material in the 1560s.85 It is not surprising, then, to find duplications in their remarks. Smith used the same basic social categories, cited the same instances of mobility between sorts, including merchants and gentlemen, yeomen and gentry, and described the relatively disenfranchised position of artificers,

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  281 while accepting the qualifier that they held local offices. But Smith’s model of society in chapter 16, which he alone may have penned, took as its title “The Division of the Parts and Persons of the Commonwealth,” which suggests, as did his “Discourse” of 1549, a divided order rather than one characterized by interdependence. Notably absent, moreover, were the usual moral blandishments one finds in Commonwealth writers concerning the fair treatment of tenants and references to caring for widows and orphans. In addition, Smith almost wholly excluded the clergy, traditionally the first estate. His final chapter discussed the judicial authority of the Church, and it contained a pointed reference to the history of praemunire proceedings. Based on this text, there is good reason to consider Smith anti-clerical, but also because of statements in the “Discourse.”86 Smith’s discussions went far beyond the three estates to include the aristocracy, knights, esquires, gentlemen, citizens and burgesses, yeomen, and those “which do not rule . . .”. In their detail, his analysis resembles late medieval social distinctions in sumptuary laws, records of taxation, and The Canterbury Tales.87 Drawing upon Harrison, Smith divided society into “four sorts, gentlemen, citizens or burgesses, yeomen artificers, and laborers.” He further subdivided gentlemen into the monarch, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, barons, who made up the nobility, knights or “nobilitas minor,” esquires, and “simple gentlemen.”88 As Harrison had, Smith wrote extensively about the historical origins of the landed elites, their relation to Royalty, and the processes by which they came to their positions, including knighthood. Besides the material in Smith’s book that was taken from Harrison, there were chapters, which are often ignored, on women, children, and the unfree. Harrison denied that England had bondmen, while Smith devoted an entire chapter to them.89 “The State of England, 1600” by the civil lawyer Thomas Wilson was similar to Harrison and Smith in seeking to provide a comprehensive analysis of English society. Wilson, however, went beyond the others in important ways. F. J. Fisher thought that Wilson’s discussion of the incomes of different social groups showed qualities of “modernity” and “realism” that mark “the gulf that separates medieval from modern economic thought . . .”. The backdrop to society for Wilson was invariably economic in nature; his preoccupation with pounds, shillings, and pennies was remarkably consistent.90 Wilson expanded the taxonomy of Harrison and Smith, dividing English society into five groups: the nobles, townspeople or “cives,” yeomen, artisans, and “opfices rusticorum,” or farmers. In his analysis, considered below, Wilson went into greater detail about the numbers and income of 11 groups and eight subgroups. As with Harrison and Smith, the body social of the three estates was a thing of the past, and the first estate’s position was greatly attenuated. Wilson also broke new ground in describing society in terms of their numbers and income.

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C. Social Mobility Harrison, Smith, and Wilson acknowledged that social mobility occurred, even if they sometimes disapproved of it. Despite endorsing birth as the basis of traditional noble society, Harrison’s chapter was novel in citing mobility among the gentry and yeomanry. As regards entrance into the gentry, he noted that burgesses and lawyers were sometimes called to knighthood by the monarch and that these ascensions were based on merit rather than birth. He cited the precedent of ancient Rome, where novi homines were allowed to become gentlemen “for their virtues newly seen and showed than the old smell of ancient race  .  .  .  ”, although Harrison did not follow up on this observation, as Smith would, to generalize about the significance of new faces. Harrison did observe regarding mobility between the gentry and merchants that the latter “often change estate with gentlemen, as gentlemen do with them, by a mutual conversion of the one into the other . . .”.91 Harrison’s best-known description of entry into the gentry will be examined below. Harrison noted changes in the status of the clergy, which he described as severely degraded, a view that Smith and Wilson shared. Like the others, Harrison, although himself a clergyman, gave comparatively little space to the Church, which is indirect evidence of the perception that its position was diminished.92 Harrison related how, together with lay lords, bishops sat in the House of Lords, but “whose countenances in time past were much more glorious than at this present it is, because those lusty prelates sought after earthly estimation and authority with far more diligence than after the lost sheep of Christ . . .”. He asserted that their “estate remains no less reverend than before,” at least when they are virtuous. They kept the old title of lord, but some impugned their rights and called for their abolition and all civil jurisdiction to be removed from them.93 Harrison cited the phenomenon of upward social mobility among yeomen. He reported that the better off were able to “come to great wealth, insomuch that many of them are able and do buy the lands of unthrifty gentlemen . . .”. He noted that the reason lay in their success as tenant farmers to the gentry. Unlike the latter, they avoided keeping idle servants and used them for productive purposes, bought land from the thriftless gentry, sent their sons to schools, universities, and the Inns of Court, and garnered sufficient lands “whereupon they may live without labor, do make them by those means to become gentlemen . . .”.94 Instead of an elite whose membership was fixed and based upon birth, Smith embraced mutability based on virtus as the norm. In a passage in chapter  20, which is rarely cited—only part of it previously appeared in Harrison—Smith used Harrison’s example of the Romans, but went on to state that promotion based on merit should be the norm: “as other Commonwealths were fain to do, so must all princes necessarily follow, where virtue is to honor it . . .”. “Virtue of ancient race” was easier to achieve,

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  283 but difficult to maintain, “so the world is subject to mutability, that it does many times fail . . .”. When it did, the prince and Commonwealth have the same power that their predecessors had, and as the husbandman has to plant a new tree where the old fails, to honor virtue where he does find it, to make gentlemen, esquires, knights, barons, earls, marquises, and dukes, where he sees virtue able to bear that honor or merits, to deserve it, and so it has always been used among us.95 But where Harrison gave the usual ritual denunciations of “idle servingmen,” Smith seemed resigned to the fact that if someone aspired to gentle status, he could “be called to the wars” and “show a more manly courage and tokens of better education, higher courage and more liberality than others, and keep about him idle men who shall do nothing but wait upon him.”96 Wilson was an acute observer of social change and mobility. In further analyzing five groupings, Wilson divided nobles between “laica” and “clera” and described the decline of the clerical first estate. He subdivided the lay aristocracy in minute detail, including the family names of barons, but provided no further information about the clergy except to register its loss of wealth and position and to excoriate its past behavior.97 Citing policies that he argued benefited the country, Wilson highlighted “the keeping low of the clergy from being over rich, for that order of men have most damnified England by their profuse spending upon their pleasures, and upon idle serving-men and other moth-worms which depended upon them and eat the fat of the land and were no way profitable  .  .  .”. Repeating Harrison’s blandishments, he reported that until recently, one could not avoid seeing in both town and country “such troops of these priests’ retinue [sic] as exceeded 100 or 200 of these caterpillars, neither fit for war nor other service, attending upon this pontifical crew, furnished and appointed in the best manner that might be  .  .  .”. Now, however, “since their wings were clipped shorter . . . England has flourished more.” In sum, the clerical nobility had been “trodden down . . .”.98 Wilson also observed mobility in the second and third estates. Although some of the greater yeomanry had declined, they still aspired to gentle status. They had been “the glory of the country and good neighborhood and hospitality,” but were now “decayed and become servants to gentlemen . . .”. But they still sought to rise socially, “not contented with their states of their fathers to be counted yeoman and called John or Robert . . . but must skip into his velvet breeches and silken doublet and, getting admitted into some Inn of Court or Chancery, must ever after think scorn to be called any other than gentlemen . . .”. Wilson mocked the better off yeomen “who did no other good but maintain beef and brews for such idle persons as would come and eat it” and reported they still sought advantageous matches for

284  Society as Property, 1550–1697 their daughters—“a fine daughter or two to be married after with £10,000 to some covetous mongrel gentleman.” While Wilson might disapprove of such strivings, he also reported them as facts of real-life society.99 Wilson also cited mutability and social dysfunction among the aristocracy and higher clergy. Of the earls, he observed that “some daily decay, some increase according to the course of the world . . .”. Of the knights, he noted the anomaly that “many of them equal the best barons and come not much behind many earls” in their incomes.100 Wilson explained these changes, linking them to the historical workings of estate policies and markets. He attributed the higher clergy’s decline to their policies on leasing and contrasted them to the practices of lay landlords: “they never raise nor rack their rents nor put out tenants as the noblemen and gentlemen do to the uttermost penny; but do let their lands as they were let 100 years since . . .”.101

D. Social Conflict Described Harrison and Wilson highlighted the significance of social conflict, as Smith had earlier in the “Discourse of the Common Weal” in 1549. Harrison defended the bishops against those “that covet to pluck and snatch at the loose ends of their best commodities,” a likely reference to lay attempts, past and present, to take away their lands. But Harrison admitted the high clergy had lorded it over the lay lords: “in time past every bishop, abbot, and pelting [paltry] prior were [sic] placed before the earls and barons in most statutes, charters, and records made by the prince,” but now, “a number of their odious comparisons and ambitious titles are now decayed and worthily shrunk,” so they had to “preach the Word and hold their livings to their sees . . . from the hands of such as endeavor for their own preferment to fleece and diminish the same.”102 Wilson analyzed conflict and mobility in England, demonstrating the demise of the three-estate model. He was attuned to the phenomenon of struggles over landholding and the working of the market mechanism in landed society. The clergy took in low rents at a time of price inflation. In addition, the aristocracy feasted on Church lands because Elizabeth I forced bishops into unfavorable exchanges with her favorites. The upshot for clerics was that “their wings are well clipped of late by courtiers and noblemen and some quite cut away, both feather, flesh, and bone.”103 According to Fisher, Wilson documented class consciousness that constituted “a definite clash of interests” between the gentry and yeomanry.104 Estate policies and markets affected the fortunes of the common people, including yeomen, who, according to Wilson, were “very rich, albeit they be much decayed from the [e]states they were wont to have . . .”. The reason was that the gentry had become more business-like: “the gentlemen, which were wont to addict themselves to the wars, are now for the most part

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  285 grown to become good husbands [husbandmen] and know as well how to improve their lands to the uttermost as the farmer or countryman, so that they take their farms into their hands as the leases expire, and either till themselves or else let them out to those who will give most . . .”.105 Wilson’s analyses of changes in estate management were historical and market-based. He argued that previously, at a time of war, the “yeomanry and mean people” had pleaded with landlords that they “could not be at so great charges to manure and enclose and improve their grounds” unless they were granted favorable leases. The result was that “the gentlemen, improvident of what should come after, and glad to have money in hands,” granted leases of 30, 40, 50, and sometimes 100 years at low rents. But when food prices rose dramatically from the 1540s, the gentry found themselves on the short end of the bargain, because “the gentleman who is generally inclined to great and vain expense had no more than would keep his house and some small rent . . .”. Once long leases expired, the gentry were much more careful about renewals and eventually got the upper hand.106

E. Virtus Affirmed Harrison’s well-known description of how one became a gentleman suggested that merit based upon education or service to the Crown were the main criteria. Birth was not even mentioned, whereas money was. The study of the law, medicine, and liberal arts were cited first, then Royal service, then the avoidance of manual labor; next was the ability to bear the expense, including the purchase of a coat of arms: Whosoever studies the laws of the realm, whoso abides in the university giving his mind to his book, or professes physic and the liberal sciences, or, beside his service in the room of a captain in the wars or good counsel given at home, whereby his Commonwealth is benefited, can live without manual labor, and thereto is able and will bear the port, charge, and countenance of a gentlemen, he shall for money have a coat of arms bestowed upon him by heralds . . . and thereunto being made so good cheap, be called master, which is the title that men give to esquires and gentlemen, and reputed for a gentleman ever after.107 For his part, as noted, Smith also emphasized the power of “virtue” in securing entry into the gentry.108 All three authors, to varying degrees, accepted that economic success was another key to upward social mobility. In the seventeenth century, wealth, particularly landed property, was the foundation of social position, and among the elites, it became the standard entrance requirement for access to political power, which the next several chapters show in detail, with the country house (see plates 13.1–4) the dominant venue.

Figure 13.1  Bowl, 7.0” × 9.38”, castle-style country house,“Oak Vista.” Mason’s, England (author’s collection). Photographer: Richard G. Hopkins

Figure 13.2  Small platter, 8.75” × 10.5”, land and seascape with country house motif and distant hills (author’s collection). Photographer: Richard G. Hopkins

Figure 13.3  Decorative plate, 12.75”, family garden gathering with country house and hills (see also 13.2, 13.4). Spode, “Royal Jasmine,” England: Copeland (author’s collection). Photographer: Richard G. Hopkins

Figure 13.4  Bowl, 6” × 7.6”, team and plow with family, farmer, livestock on border (author’s collection). Photographer: Richard G. Hopkins

288  Society as Property, 1550–1697

F. Property and Power Harrison, Smith, and Wilson left no doubt that property and power were closely linked. Harrison argued that property was the crux of the higher clergy’s problems when he cited those who “covet to pluck and snatch at the loose ends of their best commodities . . .”.109 He also described yeomen in economic terms. He said they “have a certain preeminence and more estimation than laborers and the common sort of artificers” because “these commonly live wealthily, keep good houses, and travail to get riches.”110 Harrison analyzed the fourth “sort of people” in economic terms when he compared them to yeomen, although he also described them in political terms. At first, he said they “have neither voice nor authority in the Commonwealth, but are to be ruled and not to rule other; yet they are not altogether neglected”: in towns they sat on inquests and juries; in villages, they served as churchwardens, constables, headboroughs, and aleconners, which were not negligible positions.111 Historians have been concerned with whether Wilson’s statistics provide an accurate depiction of English social structure in 1600. From a broader perspective, it is remarkable to have society depicted in graphically economic terms.112 Wilson’s calculations produced a taxonomy, which, in tabular form, looks as follows: Table 13.1  An Analysis of English Social Structure, c. 1600113 Group (Wilson’s order & designations)

Nos.

Income

Great yeomanry Ditto. Of meaner ability; also “freeholders” Copyholders and cottagers Norwich merchants Ditto. London merchants Ditto. Earls Barons and viscounts Bishops (Canterbury, Winchester, Ely) Ditto. Deans of cathedrals Knights Ditto. (Peter, Harington, Bacon) Esquires (gentlemen and elder brothers) Ditto. (“northward and far off”) Common lawyers: chief judges Ditto: sergeants Ditto: “counsellers”

10,000 80,000 uncertain top 24 Better sort “some” unknown 19 39 and 2 three Rest unknown 500 three 16,000 unknown 12 30 2000

£300–£500* £300–£500 unknown £20,000 £10,000 £100,000 £50,000** £5,000*** £3,000 £2,000–£3,000 £500–£1,000 £100–300**** £1,000–£2,000 £5,000–£7,000 £500–£1,000 £300–£400 £20,000–£30,000 Ditto. unknown

* “Some twice and some thrice as much” ** “Not accounted rich that cannot reach” *** “Plus one marquis” **** “Many less”

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  289 Whatever its accuracy, what is remarkable about this breakdown is its analytical detail and, more broadly, the author’s way of thinking about society. In discussing the numbers and incomes of groups, Wilson distinguished within groups as well as between them. One expects specifics where the aristocracy was concerned, but not lower down the social scale. Among yeomen, he demarcated the “greater” and “meaner”; merchants, knights, and gentlemen were painted with similar shadings. Wilson also provided rankings of people’s wealth, distinguishing between London and Norwich merchants, the bishoprics of Canterbury, Ely, and Winchester and less prosperous sees, and between esquires who lived “northward and far off” as against (one imagines) southern ones. Remarkably, too, Wilson consulted documentation and came clean when he lacked information or made guesses. He reported having seen “sheriffs’ books” in enumerating the numbers and wealth of the lesser yeomen, but admitted he had no solid information about copyholders and cottagers “because there is no books or records kept of them, unless it be in private stewards’ hands which is impossible to be gathered together  .  .  .”. Instead, he made educated guesses based on his own borrowing of official information “by reason of an office which for seven years together I exercised, wherein I had occasion to take the names of all the inhabitants of five shires.” For the wealth and numbers of the aristocracy, he cited “divers books” collected by his uncle, Dr. Thomas Wilson, who was a secretary of state from 1577, and which “did exactly show the several revenues of every nobleman, knights [sic], and gentlemen through the realm . . .”. For the gentry, he reported consulting “the book of musters of every several shire . . . ” to determine their numbers.114 Smith’s Commonwealth was similarly original in analyzing groups that were hitherto largely unnoticed because they were powerless. They included those in “temporal [sic] servitude” and women and children. These groups were powerless because they held no property of their own. Smith devoted a separate chapter to the subject “Of Bondage and Bondmen.” He began from the premise that those in bondage “can bear no role nor jurisdiction over freemen, as they who be taken but as instruments and of the goods and possessions of others.”115 He reported that villeinage had largely disappeared in England, although—taking aim once again at the Church—elite clerics had kept serfs in bondage far longer than the laity and had only given them up with the dissolution of the monasteries.116 Smith analyzed two forms of temporary servitude that persisted in England and would continue to be a significant part of the labor system until the nineteenth century. The first was apprenticeship, which he called “another kind of servitude” and whose terms he described in detail, including the covenants made between masters and apprentices. It was Smith’s view that within the terms of the contract, apprenticeship was still a form of vera servitus, and he specified that anything the apprentice produced became the property of the master and that “he must do all servile offices about the house, and be obedient to all his master’s commandments . . .”.117

290  Society as Property, 1550–1697 It is a further strength of Smith’s account that he included an extensive discussion of service by the year, which he also considered a form of temporary bondage. He made it clear, as did John Locke a century later, that all able-bodied persons were liable to be servants unless they were economically independent: “if any young man unmarried be without service, he shall be compelled to get him a master whom he must service for that year”; the same was true for females: “that which is spoken of men servants, the same is also spoken of women servants.” The law also applied to married and single men “not having rent or living sufficient to maintain himself . . .”. A quarter’s notice was required if one wished to depart before the end of the term; anyone who broke the agreement could be forced to serve another year. Someone who refused to serve who “live so idly, he is enquired of, and sometime sent to the jail, sometime otherwise punished as a sturdy vagabond: so much our policy does abhor idleness.”118 Smith, trained in the civil law, considered the rights of women and children, especially where inheritance was concerned. In tune with the times, with the exception of Royalty, his view of women’s status was bleak. They had no authority over freemen because “we do reject women, as those whom nature has made to keep home and to nourish their family and children, and not to meddle with matters abroad, nor to bear office in a city or Commonwealth no more than children and infants . . .”. The only exceptions for both women and children were cases of Royalty or those directly inheriting (but not through marriage) the title of duchess or countess.119 The rights of women in marriage were severely limited, Smith stated. Basically, whatever they possessed before marriage became the property of their husbands, as was true of anything gained during the marriage. A wife was not permitted to give or sell anything belonging to her or her husband; if he predeceased her, her only rights over movables were those stated in his will, although in London and other cities, there were customs granting wives a third share of the total. English law also excepted a woman’s lands brought to marriage, which went to her eldest son on her death or equally among daughters; a husband could not sell or grant away his wife’s lands.120 As for children, their inheritance rights are well known: the eldest son inherited, and all other children received nothing according to the common law unless their father made some provision during his lifetime in what amounted to a trust. A father without male issue divided his estate equally among his daughters, if he had any. The commonly acknowledged exception to partible inheritance was the institution of gavelkind in Kent, which divided estates equally among male heirs and sometimes awarded land to the youngest male.121

G. The Poor Harrison completed his analysis of the third estate by writing a separate chapter about the poor. This was in many respects a milestone, not least because it separated the poor from the rest of the third estate and treated a significant

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  291 portion of them as pariahs. The poor were not a new issue in Tudor social theory; More, Armstrong, and several “Commonwealth-men” had raised the question of their condition and, in particular, the responsibility of the better off and the government to relieve or police them. Harrison shrewdly observed that the poor were not only an English problem: “there is no Commonwealth at this day in Europe wherein there is not great store of poor people . . .”. However, he provided the first detailed analysis of England’s destitute, whom he divided into three groups: the “poor by impotency,” such as orphans, the elderly, the blind, lame, and the incurably sick; the “poor by casualty,” including wounded veterans, poor householders, and those with bad diseases; and the “thriftless,” including rogues, vagabonds, and strumpets. He reported that the first two groups of “true poor” were “relieved by the wealthier sort,” but also by statutory weekly collections in parishes. If anyone refused to accept relief and wandered about and used “idle trades,” then they could be prosecuted and “so, instead of courteous refreshing at home, are often corrected with sharp execution and whip of justice abroad.”122 Of the “thriftless” he distinguished two further groups, including one that was voluntarily poor and inflicted wounds upon themselves in order to gather alms, and a second that dressed up like laborers and servants and sailors, who “are all thieves and caterpillars in the Commonwealth and by the Word of God not permitted to eat, since they do but lick the sweat from the true laborers’ brows” and deprive the true poor of assistance. For “documentation,” Harrison cited at length the pamphlet by Thomas Harman, “A Caveat for Common Cursitors” (1566) and the 24 categories of vagabonds, examples of which Harman claimed to have interviewed. Harrison completed his discussion of the poor with a description of the penalties for vagabondage, but added yet a third group of thriftless with a list of vagrant professions under the law that included, among others, fortune tellers, unlicensed actors, peddlers, and jugglers.123 As Harrison had, Wilson saw the poorest as a special case connected to the rest of society through statutory provisions and special institutions rather than through the old notions of “living in charity” and social interdependence. Wilson linked the very poor to the larger society through institutionalized labor. In his discussion of towns and cities, he described a remedy for poverty which Fisher characterized as “his own cool, amoral, appreciation of thrift and child labor . . .”.124 England, he suggested, was unique in that the poorest were “not suffered to be idle in their cities as they be in other parts of Christendom”; instead, every child from the age of six or seven “is forced to some art whereby he gains his own living and something besides to help to enrich his parents or master.” As usual, Wilson cited facts and figures. At Norwich, he reported, they kept accounts that showed that children aged between six and ten who knit “fine jersey stockings” had produced £12,000 worth, each of them earning 4s. a week, and local merchants sold the goods in London and even abroad in France.125

292  Society as Property, 1550–1697 Harrison and Wilson were not alone in developing these kinds of taxonomies and policies. Parliamentary statutes also distinguished between ablebodied and “impotent” poor, between children and adults, and criminalized several occupations as “vagabonds.”126 Locke would reprise many of these points in proposals to the Board of Trade in 1697, which summed up the social humanist’s rejection of Franciscan poverty, and which are discussed in Chapter 17. VI. CONCLUSIONS The division of society into four or five “sorts” or classes, with numerous subsets arranged according to wealth, mobility, and virtus, was a striking development in sixteenth-century social thinking. It spelled a challenge, despite survivals, later revivals, and yearnings for a “corporatist” society, to the theory of the body social. The new paradigm gives the appearance of fracturing the old model into many unconnected parts, and there is some truth to this impression of breakage. Certainly, the scaling back of clerical wealth and power was a remarkable development; so, too, the theoretical opening of access to the gentry, even the aristocracy, to virtus and wealth. The statements that some were powerless and directly subject to the will of others put paid to the notion that everyone played a significant role, however lowly their position, in the organic body social. The quantification of people’s incomes and ranking them according to wealth looks very modern and provided a powerful precedent that several others followed, as later chapters suggest. Despite its splintering effect, the new model of society encompassed some important new principles. The principle of hierarchy was maintained, but now it was based upon wealth and political power. Social mobility was approved, but limited in large measure to the educated and better off. Functions in society, moreover, were based upon one’s relation to patriarchal power. Thus, new foundations of social classification were laid at this juncture. They might not have been built upon and extended into the realms of culture and language, as they eventually would, but they were no less impressive in design.127 NOTES   1. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd edn., 1996), 53.   2. Ibid. 99, 102.   3. Ibid. 99–100.   4. Edward Waterhouse, The Gentleman’s Monitor; Or, a Sober Inspection into the Vertues, Vices, and Ordinary Means, Of the Rise and Decay of Men and Families . . . (London: R. Royston, 1665) Wing W1047.   5. Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), chs. 3, 5, 8.   6. Dietrich Gerhard, Old Europe: A Study of Continuity, 1000–1800 (New York: Academic Press, 1981), esp. 46–50.

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  293   7. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press), Pt. I.   8. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), Introduction.   9. Greenblatt quoted (without page references) by Jonathan Sawday, “Self and Selfhood in the Seventeenth Century,” in Roy Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1997), 30–31. 10. Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers, Eighteenth-Century English Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17, 25, 178, 191, 195. 11. Eric J. Evans, The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783– 1870 (London: Longman, 3rd edn., 2001), 352. 12. Robert Nisbet, “Conservatism,” A History of Sociological Analysis, ed. Tom Bottomore and Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 90; H. S. Jones, Victorian Political Thought (London: Macmillan, 2000), ch. 3, “The Discovery of Society.” 13. Jones, Victorian Political Thought, 74–76. 14. L. Humfrey, The Nobles or of Nobility. The Original, Nature, Duties, Right and Christian Institution Thereof (London: Thomas Marshe, 1563; S.T.C. 13964), A.2.b—A.3.a. 15. Humfrey, The Nobles, First Book, A.3.a. 16. Ibid. B.7.a. 17. Ibid. C.3.b. 18. Ibid. D.1.a—D.3.a. 19. Ibid. N.6.b—N.7.b. 20. Quotations from Phillip Stubbes, The Second Part of the Anatomy of Abuses . . . (London: William Wright, 1583; repr. and ed., F. J. Furnivall (London: New Shakspere Society: N. Trübner, 1877–9), 30–31. See also the later edition by Margaret J. Kidnie: Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 152–155, 169–170. 21. John Norden, A Progress of Piety . . . (Cambridge: Parker Society, Cambridge University Press, 1847), 165. 22. Ibid. 168. 23. Edward Forset, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (London: John Bill, 1606; S.T.C. 11188; ESTC S102531), title page, 47. 24. Ibid. 45–6. 25. Ibid. 46. 26. Ibid. 49, 51. 27. Simonds D’Ewes, The Journals of all the Parliaments during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London: P. Bowes, 1693 ed.), 490. Cited, Christopher Hill, “Political Discourse in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” in Colin Jones, Malyn Newit, and Stephen Roberts, eds., Politics and People in Revolutionary England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 56; Wing D1250 (1682 ed. “For John Starkey”). 28. David G. Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), 119, 132. 29. Ibid. 121–6, 128–9. 30. Z.  S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1945; 2nd edn., 1962), 96. 31. Cooke quoted, J. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenthcentury England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 56–7. See also Margaret James, Social Problems and Policy During the Puritan Revolution, 1640–1660 (London: G. Routledge, 1930; repr. 1966), 273–5. 32. Davies of Hereford, Mirum in Modum: Works, ed. Grosart (1878) I, 24, quoted Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture, 117.

294  Society as Property, 1550–1697 33. Nicholas Breton, A Murmurer (London: Robert Ravvorth, 1607) in Works, ed. Grosart, 1879, II, 10, cited Tillyard, 117–118. 34. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, 16–17. 35. Allen, Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century, 153, who adds that the body social “had been essentially but a protest; and it perished in the triumph of that against which it had protested in vain.” Cf. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen, 203. 36. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn., 2003), 339–341. 37. David G. Hale, The Body Politic, 108–131. 38. Leonard Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 70–71, 76, 100. 39. A. E. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936; repr. New York: Harper, 1960), 242, 246–8. 40. John Cheke, The Hurt of Sedition (1549): repr., Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London: J. Johnson et al, 1808; repr. AMS Press, 1965), III (1577; augmented to 1586), 987–1011. 41. Ibid. 988–989 cites religion, but the enclosure issue is tardily and superficially examined in ibid., 1004–1005, where he assigned responsibility (ibid. 1001) to the rebels rather than their lords for depopulating villages. 42. Ibid. 991. 43. Ibid. 1006. 44. Ibid. 1003–5. 45. Ibid. 988–989. 46. Ibid. 987, 989–990. 47. Ibid. 1006. 48. Ibid. 994. 49. Ibid. 991–92, 994–995. 50. Ibid. 990. 51. Ibid. 990; see the Oxford D.N.B. entry by Alan Bryson. 52. Hurt of Sedition, 990. 53. Ibid. 990. 54. Ibid. 1002. For “corn,” read grain. 55. Ibid. 1001. Cheke’s claim that the rebels caused inflation was disingenuous, because many other reasons could be (and were—see Chapter 12) adduced for rising prices, including the government’s debasement of the coinage, as his friend Thomas Smith was writing in 1549. See C. E. Challis, “The Debasement of the Coinage, 1542–1551,” Ec.H.R new s. 20, no. 3 (Dec., 1967): 441–466. 56. Cheke, Hurt of Sedition, 989. 57. Ibid. 990. Cheke also mentioned physical strength, “favor,” and age as creating distinctions between people. 58. Ibid. 995. 59. William Thomas, “A Second Discourse . . .”, BL Cotton MS, Vespasian D.xviii, repr. J. Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1822), vol. 2, pt. ii, 372 (italics in original). 60. Ibid. 373–5 (italics in original). 61. Ibid. 375–376. 62. Oxford D.N.B., “William Thomas.” 63. John Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politic Power (Strasbourg, 1556; S.T.C. 20178; ESTC S115045), K.iv.b—K.v.a. For Ponet’s debt to “Commonwealth-men,” see Winthrop S. Hudson, John Ponet (1516?–1556): Advocate of Limited Monarchy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), 146, 150 (and quotations cited there).

Redrawing the Social Picture, 1550–1600  295 4. Ponet, op.cit. K.v.b—L.i.b. 6 65. Conyers Read, Mr. Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), 124, 480 n. 17. For the attribution of this manuscript to Waad, see J. E. Neale, “The Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity,” English Historical Review 65:256 (July 1950), 305. Neither of these authorities discussed the social questions addressed in the paper. 66. National Archives (U.K.) SP 12/1/fols. 148–153. 67. Humfrey, The Nobles, First Book, B.6.a-b. 68. Ibid. B.7.a-C.4.b. 69. Ibid. B.7.b, C.3.b. 70. Humfrey, The Nobles, Dedication, A.6.a. 71. Ibid., Second Book, N.3.a-b. 72. Ibid. 0.3.B, Q.1.b ; Third Book, Q.8.b. 73. Ibid., Third Book, X.2.b. 74. Ibid. Introductory poem, A.4.a; First Book, A.5.b, A.7.b. 75. Ibid. First Book, C.3.a, F.8.b. 76. Ibid. E.4.b. 77. Ibid. Third Book, R.2.b-Y.5.b. 78. Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 57, 64–65. 1st pub. (London: Henry Midleton, 1583). 79. William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (New York: Dover, repr. 1994; orig. pub. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library and Cornell University Press, 1968), 94. 80. Ibid. 95–112, 121–2; esp. 113–5. 81. Glyn Parry, “Harrison, William (1535–1593), historian and topographer,” Oxford D. N. B.; Harrison, Description, 116. 82. Harrison, Description, 116–117. 83. Ibid. 117–120. 84. Dewar, De Republica. See the discussion in same of the plagiarism, 157–162. 85. Ibid. 158. 86. Ibid. 64, 142–144; Discourse of the Common Weal, ed. Lamond, 20–21, 131– 133, 139. Smith’s religious position was lukewarm, according to Ian Archer, though he had profited considerably from Church offices and lands: Oxford D. N. B. Cf. Harrison, Description, 97–98. 87. Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages, 1348–1500 (London: Penguin, 1990), 7–11. 88. De Republica, 64–72. 89. Harrison, Description, 118; Smith, De Republica, 130–142. 90. The State of England, 1600, by Sir Thomas Wilson, ed. F.J. Fisher, Camden Society, 3rd series, LII (1936), vi–vii. This edition is supplemented here with the slightly different one reprinted in Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, ed. Joan Thirsk  & J. P. Cooper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 751–757. I have also consulted the manuscript versions in the National Archives (U.K.): SP12/280. 91. Ibid. 102, 114–15, 118. 92. Parry, Oxford D. N. B. 93. Ibid. 97–9; Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the Church (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1956; repr. 1963), esp. ch. 2, “The Plunder of the Church.” 94. Harrison, Description, 118. 95. Smith, De Republica, 71. 96. Ibid. 73; cf. Harrison, Description, 117–19. 97. Economic Documents, 751–2, 754–5. 98. State of England, ed. Fisher, 38; Economic Documents, ed. Thirsk & Cooper, 756. 99. Economic Documents, ed. Thirsk & Cooper, 752–753.

296  Society as Property, 1550–1697 100. Ibid. 754–755. 101. Ibid. 755; see Hill, Economic Problems of the Church, ch. 2. 102. Harrison, Description, 99–100. 103. Economic Documents, 755; Hill, Economic Problems, ch. 2. 104. State of England, Fisher ed., vi–vii. 105. Economic Documents, ed. Thirsk & Cooper, 752. 106. State of England, ed. Fisher, 38–9. 107. Harrison, Description, 102, 114–15, 118. 108. Smith, De Republica, 71. 109. Harrison, Description, 97–9. 110. Ibid. 117. 111. Ibid. 118. 112. J. P. Cooper, “The Social Distribution of Land and Men in England, 1436– 1700,” Ec.H.R., 2nd series, 20:3 (December, 1967), 422, 425–427; repr. in Land, Men and Beliefs: Studies in Early Modern History, eds. G. E. Aylmer and J. S. Morrill (London: Hambledon Press, 1983), 20, 24–28. 113. Economic Documents, ed. Thirsk & Cooper, 753–7. 114. Ibid. 753–5. 115. Smith, De Republica, 64, 142. 116. Ibid. 136–7. 117. Ibid. 140. 118. Ibid. 141. 119. Ibid. 64–65. 120. Ibid. 132–133. 121. Ibid. 134–135. 122. Ibid. 180–181. 123. Ibid. 183–186. 124. State of England, ed. Fisher, vii. 125. Ibid. 20. 126. For examples, see R. H. Tawney and Eileen Power, eds. TED II, sect. 4, esp. 419, 444–47. 127. For long-term developments, see the chapters by Keith Wrightson, Penelope J. Corfield, and Geoffrey Crossick in Language, History and Class, ed. Corfield (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). For a recent popular account, see Kate Fox, Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior (London: Hodder, 2004).

14 Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656

I. INTRODUCTION Following groundbreaking Elizabethan social analyses, the seventeenth century saw the affirmation of the power of landed wealth in various guises. Some indications that a language was “genuine,” according to one scholar’s criteria, is its appearance in a variety of formats and from the fact that it was debated.1 Property and its possession seem perfectly to fit this definition, for they became key elements in definitions of social relations in the period. Yet wealth was not uniquely significant in seventeenth-century discourse, because the model of the body social did not simply wither and die. Rather, it developed in new forms. Several authorities advanced theories of patriarchalism, which they generalized from the monarchy down the social scale to the authority of men over women, children, and servants. This model of social relations owed a lot to organic theory with its emphases on hierarchy and interdependence (e.g., service, dependency, mutual aid). Sir Robert Filmer is commonly identified with a political theory of patriarchalism, but those who believed in a “moral economy” extended the concept to government, which they expected to intervene to ensure harmonious economic and social relations. Yet wealth as an organizing principle often burst through patriarchal constructs in seventeenth-century thought. Allowing the free play of market forces in rural society was debated from the 1590s to the 1650s, especially where properties subject to common rights and the needs of the poor were concerned. A larger, related question was whether paternalistic governments should continue to pursue a long-standing policy of regulating agrarian life. For the first time, some authorities, including parliamentarians, came out in favor of unrestricted agricultural exploitation or “Improvement,” which set the scene for lifting restrictions on privatizing common lands and moving towards officially sanctioned enclosure. These positions were based on new economic and social theories that drew strength from legitimizing private property. These moves met with resistance from traditionalist social thinkers, but the new ideas were articulated with conviction and force, and they ultimately prevailed.

298  Society as Property, 1550–1697 II.  PATRIARCHY AND ITS LIMITS Patriarchy was a prominent theme in Stuart social and political thought, but it was not always so. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and Aquinas traced the origin of civil society to the family and household, but the theory of patriarchalism was little developed under the Tudors. The medieval period seems to have been comparatively lacking in patriarchal thought, and the English version was a late development, appearing in More’s Utopia, which was later articulated by an Elizabethan of Flemish background, the naturalized Saravia, who argued that “fatherly power was kingly  .  .  .”. Sir Thomas Smith pointed to the importance of the household as the origin of the Commonwealth, which he suggested was a private aristocracy, which in turn was extended to be a monarchy “through sheer expansion . . .”.2 The position that regal authority was patriarchal was left to early Stuart writers.3 We should not be surprised, then, to find contemporaries equating the patriarchal household with society. Invoking the organic image, Norden wrote in 1596–7 that “[e]very family is a body, where there is a father, and where commonly are children; where are masters, and there are servants.” Prefiguring the early Stuarts, he widened his definition to encompass government in general: “All these, having several offices and places in this standing house of our common weal, must every one proceed to the performance of his calling in such sort, as there be not any disorder, or any complaining in our streets.” The Puritans Cleaver and Dod in 1598 granted wide authority to the pater familias, who was to govern and care for servants as well as immediate family members.4 Sometimes, the patriarchal body was compared to the human body, e.g., “the stomach [being] as it were a kitchen” (1605); other times, the household was represented as a body (1609), with a male as head of a “little domestical body (1656),” or the Commonwealth was conceived as a household (1643), as well as the more familiar depiction of a state or kingdom as a body (1682).5 The archetype of patriarchalism was Filmer’s Patriarcha, probably written in the 1630s, which drew somewhat on organic functionalism and was long on denunciations of democracy. Filmer cited the monarch as the “head” with the authority to correct “members,” but referred derogatorily to Parliament as “only members and a part of the body, whereof the king is the head and ruler.” In The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy (1648), he made similarly dismissive assertions about the House of Commons, which he stated “represent a part of the lower or inferior part of the body of the people,” while the Lords were “the nobler and higher part of the body of the realm . . .”.6 For Filmer, patriarchalism was a justification for oligarchy and a “one-class society” of gentlemen, because he would exclude “the meanest artificer” and the “vulgus” who favored custom over laws: “Nowhere can so common an usage be found, as among the vulgar, who are still the far greatest part of every multitude.”7

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  299 There are several difficulties with patriarchalism as a social theory. The first is its limited purview. The household, upon which patriarchalism was premised, was conceptualized as a universal social institution, with norms governing members—masters, mistresses, children, and servants. The household might be considered the epitome of the true “one-class society” because it was universal and governed relations between a wide range of groups that included the sexes, age groups, and domestic workers (including apprentices as well as servants) at almost all levels of society except the most marginal or “masterless men.” But there are limits to the value of the social concept of patriarchalism. One is that it ignores economic divisions based upon wealth. Contemporaries, as we have frequently seen, were acutely aware of the differences between rich and poor, as Filmer’s own comments indicated, and continued to be so in the period. The reasons might change—a perceived decline of charity in the early sixteenth century, the high cost of relieving the poor in the late seventeenth—but the issue remained significant and, despite calls for charity and actual foundations, was not apparently erased through the paternalism of the patriarchal household. In actuality, as this book’s Conclusions show, Locke found that patriarchalism did not work among the poor in the 1690s because fathers and husbands were improvident and women were disempowered. A second issue concerned the assumed stability of the household as a lynchpin of society. In reality, the extensive guidelines for household relations that writers like William Gouge prescribed can be read “against the grain” to suggest that violations of the rules were extensive, inherent, and ineradicable. Certainly this possibility is suggested by the high levels of turnover by servants and apprentices, by the frequent appearance of these groups among those arrested as vagrants, and by cases of explosive labor and sexual relations that ended up in the courts.8 A third difficulty with patriarchalism as a social theory is that it ignores class tensions. Even if these were mainly felt on the part of the “better sort,” such consciousness was very real, because they ruled the country. It may well have shaped how they interacted with the “meaner sort” and with the trappings of the traditional festive culture and the adherence to custom described by Filmer. Although the policing of neighbors regarding sex and drinking and other forms of disorder may have been limited, it certainly still took place.9 A fourth limitation of the theory of patriarchalism is that it made no provision for social change. Stasis was perhaps one of its attractions, because models of harmony appear to have allayed fears before this time and after it. But concepts of society such as this—and the body social—should be seen as reactions against change both at the real and theoretical levels. A final point is that patriarchalism made little or no allowance for occupational differences, when contemporaries were increasingly aware of people’s jobs, including the professions, and paid attention to such matters in their conceptualization of society.

300  Society as Property, 1550–1697 III. MORAL ECONOMICS AND STATE PATERNALISM: THE AGRARIAN QUESTION Discussions of agrarian issues in the first half of the seventeenth century have existed for many years. New groundbreaking research, based on archival work, which is summarized in Chapter 2, has exposed the many-layered complexity of land tenures, but with few exceptions, the broader social import of agrarian questions remains unchartered territory.10 Scholars refer to the “literature of complaint” that decried depopulation and the “enclosure” of common fields.11 In particular, contemporaries keenly debated the privatization of common fields, but discussions were not one-sidedly about complaint. Proponents of enclosure found their voices, and theories of the social order were part of the discussions. There were no obvious “winners” in the debates, but they did articulate positions on the preeminence of wealth and the freedom to privatize “common” property. In the long term, legal, private enclosures did become the norm, including ones by agreement of landholders and by Acts of Parliament. In discussing enclosure by agreement, M.W. Beresford allowed—appropriately in an essay honoring R. H. Tawney—that the debate over “habitation versus improvement” was partly at least “one stage in the triumph of self-love over [the] social . . .”. Beresford went on to observe that enclosure agreements were the products of several conditions, including “faith in the market mechanism and distrust of regulation . . .”.12 In the realm of policy, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw opposing developments. First came a paternalistic prohibition of the conversion of land from tillage to pasture in the interests of avoiding depopulation, vagabondage, and social unrest, which dated from Henry VII’s reign and which stressed the importance of manpower for the defense of the realm. Second, there developed a wider acceptance of the conversion of common lands to individual holdings through enclosure by agreement.13 The period saw ongoing clashes between proponents of what has been dubbed a “moral economy” based on social cooperation, enforced through state intervention, and maintaining a remnant of the body social. This line of thought opposed converting common fields to private ownership, which proponents justified based on the right to dispose of landed property as one wished, the positive value of market forces, and the beneficial results of pursuing individual interest. These debates were not wholly resolved in the period, although they may have diminished in virulence after 1650.14 They still figured prominently in British political and social discourse in the 1830s and again in the 1980s— but actions ultimately spoke louder than words, so that enclosure by agreement and by Acts of Parliament were becoming the norm by 1700.15

A. The Body Social on Life Support In the agrarian realm, there was a persistence of theories of the body social, which supported state paternalist policies, but supporters of the absolute

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  301 right to property and its “improvement” challenged both positions. Francis Trigge (1547–1606?), rector of Welbourn, Lincs., stoutly defended traditional social relations in a pamphlet dating from 1604, in which he observed that England had long had three estates, “lords spiritual, temporal, and the commons . . .”. He employed the body metaphor to denounce the debilitating effects of privatizing common rights, “as the body cannot consist [sic] without legs and arms, so neither the Commonwealth without husbandmen, laborers, and soldiers . . .”. Trigge’s chief objections to enclosures were the tried and true ones, that they went against Christian charity by causing covetousness and dearth. He was unquestionably a social conservative, for he argued that everyone should be content with their “ancient apparel,” the housing and diet of their ancestors.16 In 1607, the sometime surveyor, map maker, and social theorist Norden (1548–1625?) justified the wealth of the few based upon the old social model of mutual aid: “the largeness of revenues . . . are the means to enable the honorable, to shelter the virtuous distressed  .  .  .”. Rural society consisted of lords and their tenants, who were brought together by a “mutual concurrence of love and obedience . . . and of aid and protection . . .”.17 Similarly backward looking were the Diggers of Warwickshire—“poor delvers and day-laborers, for the good of the Commonwealth till death”— who rioted and threw down hedges in the Midland Revolt of 1607. They endorsed the principles of the body social in attacking alleged depopulators, who they argued had betrayed their responsibilities to the rest of society: “we, as members of the whole, do feel the smart of these encroaching tyrants, which would grind our flesh upon the whetstone of poverty,” they wrote.18 John Moore (d. 1619), the minister of Knaptoft, Leics., took a similarly traditional social position in a pamphlet written in 1611. When opposing depopulators and “decayers of tillage,” he invoked the body social as his model: “there is the head and the body, and there be many members; yet every one has his peculiar place, every one his office and order for the common good of the whole.”19 These traditionalist statements continued into the reign of Charles I. Robert Powell of Wells who flourished between 1636 and 1652 and was possibly a barrister in the New Inn, published a pamphlet attacking depopulation in which he endorsed the old model of society, saying that “if the head be grieved, the whole body will sympathize,” because “the common weal of England is a society or common doing of freemen, collected together, and united by common accord  .  .  .”. For good measure, he added, “the depopulator strikes at the very structure and frame of a common weal, by dispeopling of societies . . .”.20 John Cooke (d. 1660), another barrister, wrote against the social disintegration caused by numerous, unregulated alehouses and brewing in 1648. His first social principle assumed the inherent, traditional relationship of the wealthy and the impoverished, affirming, “God suffers some to be poor, that rich men may have occasion to do good.” Cooke’s social conservatism ran

302  Society as Property, 1550–1697 deep. He thought the social hierarchy of rich and poor was ordained by God and that social equality was a “utopian fiction . . .”. Courageous nobles were “the walls of a kingdom . . .”. As regards upward social mobility for the middling sort, it was “neither warrantable in religion nor policy” for “merchants and tradesmen and usurers to gain such vast estates, as many have done[.]”21

B. Patriarchalism and Moral Economics Commentators left no doubt that society should be organized along patriarchal lines. Joseph Bentham (1594–1671?), rector of Broughton, Northamptonshire, set down the duties of the Christian household in 1635, including “parents in their stations and standings,” “children in theirs, reverencing, obeying, and gratifying their parents . . . ”, “husbands in theirs, loving their wives, giving them due benevolence, giving them honor, and wisely guiding of them, how, and why,” “wives in their reverencing their husbands, being subject unto, as also helpers . . . ”, “servants in theirs, reverencing their masters, persuading them to good, obeying of them . . . ”, and “masters in theirs, in well choosing, and well using their servants and why.” These responsibilities had economic ramifications, including concerns about those who violated patriarchal principles, for Bentham railed against a lengthy list of alleged economic and social miscreants—enclosers, depopulators, engrossers of foodstuffs, persons without lawful callings, usurers, and “changers of callings unwarrantably . . .”.22 Taking a similar line in The Crying Sin of England, Of Not Caring for the Poor . . ., another John Moore (1595–1657?) and a Knaptoft vicar, used the model of God the Father to invoke social solidarity. “All the household of the faithful are all one. One body, even fellow members of that mystical, whereof Jesus Christ is the head . . .”. This was because “the faithful are all children of the same father . . .”.23 The historical study of a “moral economy” is well developed in eighteenthcentury studies, with a rich historiography.24 Although Dr. McRae has made an excellent start,25 the theoretical and practical foundations of the concept in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are not fully explored. Tawney’s study of The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912) is still the best guide to contemporary conceptions of moral economics. He cited a number of the main principles that guided contemporary thinking and action, viz., 1 Riots over agrarian issues were not purely destructive; they were well organized, and rioters rarely committed massacres. 2 The motives of peasant rioters were conservative, usually calling for government intervention to maintain the old social order. 3 Governments favored the smallholder because they feared riots and wanted men on the land with the capacity to arm themselves and to serve in the military. 4 Governments wanted a prosperous peasantry for a tax base.

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  303 5 England’s elites were socially conservative and endorsed the organicist principle that no class should encroach upon another’s livelihood. 6 Generally, many opposed excessive profits by traders, moneylenders or “usurers,” and landlords. 7 Following on from these positions, governments were prepared to intervene in economic questions to exert “state control” and paternalism.26 These ideas of a moral economy were not only the concern of rioters, nor of government white papers, for they clearly resonated within the ruling elites. Trigge railed against “the root of all evil, covetousness,” which was a “noisome plague,” and said its expression in the form of enclosure and depopulation was against the Church, Christian charity, England’s ancient liberties, and was a sin. Those who carried out agrarian changes were only concerned with “their own commodities . . .”.27 The Knaptoft vicar John Moore (the elder of the two) took a similar stance in 1612, saying depopulators “do good to none, no not to themselves, nothing at all regarding the private or public good . . .”. They lived from the labors of others, and their actions threatened to “bring the whole world to confusion” like (citing Exodus 10.14–15) the grasshoppers of Egypt. This “viperous brood and wicked generation” had conspired against “our dear Commonwealth” and were “enemies to the state . . .”.28 Invocations of the Bible’s moral messages were not confined to members of the clergy, although as collectors of tithes, they had a direct, material interest. In a virtual catalog of the principles of state paternalism, the barrister Powell called upon the attorney general not to “fear the face of any greedy and grinding Achabs or Nimrods of the times” and to “tell those people how injurious they are to his Highness’s Royal state” in several areas, including: 1 A pro-population one: “in the diminution of his people, in the multitude of whom consists the honor of a prince”; 2 A fiscal one: in “also in the lessening of his revenues”; 3 The moral and clerical: “how sacrilegious they are to the Church and painful ministry”; 4 And socially: “how pernicious they are to the common weal, and what wretched starvers they are of all sorts of poor . . .”.29 Bentham, another clergyman, was no less adamant in his denunciations of depopulators in 1635. His objections were again moral because the perpetrators were dishonorable to God, the Church, and the sovereign, even causing “whoredom and uncleanness, for people multiplying, and habitations decaying, diverse people who would cannot live in lawful wedlock, and so the land is polluted with sin” and peopled with the “base and bastardly  .  .  .”. These “enemies of mankind” debased the common weal to which they were “a plague and pest” and caused “dearth and penury,”

304  Society as Property, 1550–1697 “racking and raising of rents,” “much beggary and want,” and “depriving inhabitants of employment . . .”.30 The old economic code was still respected in the work of Cooke in 1648. Writing against brewing and alehouses, he called for magistrates to provide bread in that year of dearth “to every poor man . . .”. He maintained a traditional view of charity, which he said should impact the marketplace because it “consists as much in lending and selling to the poor at a moderate price, as in giving . . .”. Cooke developed a religious rationale for these positions. Perhaps the most powerful was that the rich man who did not relieve the poor, “for whom Christ died, goes seldom unpunished to his grave . . .”.31 These proponents of moral economics singled out the pursuit of selfinterest as a chief threat to the social order. In the aftermath of the Midland Revolt, the Northamptonshire minister Robert Wilkinson’s sermon attacked the “excessive covetousness of some [which] has caused extreme want to other” and targeted “these devourers of men under a name of right and property . . .”. He urged that, as in the Christian communion, “let every man endeavor, not that himself may live alone, but that mankind may live, and do that good which shall be good to all.”32 In the inflationary years of the late 1640s, Cooke opposed the community of goods that was currently bruited about by Winstanley and the Diggers. He was certain that property was “by the law of God and nature” a legitimate institution and, more broadly, that the social hierarchy of rich and poor was appointed by God. But he warned against starving others in pursuit of profit and cited the Romans and early Christians as examples of groups fixing prices or sharing.33

C. State Paternalism The logical conclusion of moral economics was government intervention to right the perceived wrongs of social change. There was a substantial body of history and opinion among England’s elites, which held that governments were obligated to intervene in matters economic and social. The reasons were spelled out in the discussion of Tawney, and now it is time to examine examples. The period chosen here for study begins in the 1590s, when, for practically the first time, we begin to have records of parliamentary debates about the privatizing of common lands. During discussions of a new Act regarding depopulation in 1597, Sir Anthony Cope, an M.P., wrote to Lord Burghley about his concerns. Sir Anthony raised questions about the bill’s social consequences, e.g., not controlling rents and allowing six years to elapse before the poor were restored to holdings. To deal with such displacements, he called for weekly taxes to be levied “out of these decayed and enclosed parts for the present relief of the poor . . .”. He also urged local intervention by the central and local authorities. He would have the judges of assizes be given the authority to require “a true inquiry and certificate” of the enforcement of the laws and

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  305 the (county) clerk of the peace to keep a record of “defaults and restitutions, and to certify the same twice in the year upon oath into the Chancery that the Lord Keeper may take true knowledge and certify her Majesty and your Lordships of the [Privy] Council what is done therein.”34 An anonymous statement favoring bills regarding housing and depopulation in the same Parliament survives in the Cecil papers and spelled out the reasons for state paternalism and was quite possibly written by a proponent, Sir Robert Cecil. It cited “reasons of state” for enacting the legislation, including “the great decay of people,” “the engrossing wealth into few hands,” “setting people to work in husbandry, whereby idleness, drunkenness, and vice are avoided,” the “swarms of poor, loose, and wandering people bred by these decays, miserable to themselves, dangerous to the state,” “subjecting the realm to the discretion of foreign states,” and the “danger of famine.”35 In his speech to the Commons on November  5th, Sir Francis Bacon rehearsed the rationale for banning depopulation, citing many of the same arguments as the Cecil document, viz., “idleness,” “decay of tillage,” “subversion of houses and decrease of charity,” “charges to the poor’s maintenance,” and “the impoverishing the state of the realm.” Although the law might not catch past offenders, it might still, Sir Francis maintained, have a deterrent effect.36 Another forceful speaker in favor of reviving agrarian legislation in 1597, who remains anonymous, knew well the principles of moral economics. He cited the “swelling pride” and “deceitful covetousness” of the privatizers. He cast aspersions on those who prized “the law of property, whereby men could say, ‘This is mine’,” and denounced the supplanting of neighbors for the love of money, themselves, and pleasure. The same author also knew well the ins and outs of the statutes, providing exceptions for the new leyfarming or “up and down husbandry” and the various ploys that landowners used to avoid prosecution. He maintained that tillage was essential to social and political stability: “no realm, rich or populous  .  .  .  can either long have joy in the streets or continuance in the state, where there grows cleanness of teeth through scarcity of bread . . .”. It was the staff of life, to governments as well as the people, because it brought “ ‘profit even to the prince and is without limitation, breaking forth as the sun from whose beams every particular person receives comfort . . . ’ ”. The alternative, referencing More’s Utopia, was that “ ‘sheep shall devour men.’ ”37 The next opportunity for articulating state paternalism in matters agrarian came in the debates of the renewal of the 1597 statutes in the Parliament of 1601. Here Bacon and Cecil were forced to come clean about their belief in state control because new voices were raised, as will shortly be seen, favoring repeal and the freeing of agriculture. Bacon stood by the principle that governments needed tillers of the soil, not pastoralists: “it stands not with the policy of the state that the wealth of the kingdom should be engrossed into a few graziers’ hands.” The military needs of the state should be preeminent,

306  Society as Property, 1550–1697 he said, because “the husbandman is a strong and hardy man, the good footman.” Cecil agreed, claiming that “when warrants go from the [Privy] Council for levying of men in the countries [counties] . . . we find the greatest part of them to be ploughmen.” Ignoring the needs of those following the plough would “not only bring a general, but a particular damage to every man . . .”. If the government did not favor the husbandman, the depopulator would be encouraged, and the poor would be made homeless and would fall foul of the vagrancy laws. Only a “feigned Commonwealth,” like More’s Utopia, Cecil asserted, could survive without plowmen.38

D. New Social Theory These paternalistic positions did not go unchallenged. We observed in the last chapter how Smith, Harrison, and Wilson represented the social order in ways that moved beyond the three functionally linked estates, depicting it in terms of wealth and conflict. These changes were also reflected in debates about privatizing common lands and rights, which took place both outside and inside the halls of Parliament. In the process, the voices favoring privatization were increasingly articulated, taking positions that 50  years earlier were virtually unheard. Even those opposing enclosure, who endorsed the old model of the three estates, went beyond the old paradigm. For example, Trigge specified that the third estate included gentlemen, yeomen, and husbandmen, and like Wilson, he noted conflict between the first two, observing that “gentlemen which are enclosers, overthrowing the yeomanry, and decaying the commonalty, do blot out the ancient glory of England . . .”. That glory was historical and military because, he claimed, the “poor husbandman, cottager, and common soldier” formed the backbone of the armies of Edward III as foot soldiers. These commoners were essential to the social order: “As the body cannot consist [sic] without legs and arms, so neither the Commonwealth without husbandmen, laborers, and soldiers.” Here Trigge mixed the old metaphor with the newer social analysis.39 So did John Moore in A Target for Tillage, which endorsed an organic hierarchy but engaged in deeper social analysis, including in his model of “painful plowmen, tradesmen, and poor laborers . . .”. Even kings “have need of the poor husbandman’s travail and toil in tilling of the ground” because “the king himself has need of the rustic carter and clown . . . to till the ground.”40 Powell divided society, not into the traditional three estates, but into the “nobleman, citizen, or plebian . . .”. “Silvanus Taylor,” writing in 1652 in favor of “improvement” in a tirade against tippling described four orders in society—the gentry, “the country-husbandman (in whose labor consists the welfare of a Commonwealth),” tradesmen, and poor laborers, whose positions were defined based upon wealth.41 Adam Moore, the title page of whose pamphlet listed him as a gentleman and who apparently lived in Somerset, specifically rejected the old

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  307 functionalist three-estate model and left no doubt in a tract published in 1653 that the social order would be advanced by privatizing commons. Rejecting the body metaphor, he argued that in a system of common fields, “you are all incorporate, and become one body,” and then cited the marriage bond and infidelity, an interesting invocation of patriarchalism, to make the point. The commons were “an inseparable spouse, to be your helper: why are you then so cuckolded by foreigners and strangers, and your common used before your face, even as commonly as by yourselves . . . while you make it a common prostitute to every lust . . . ?” Would it not be better “to take her home to your chamber, and keep her with a guard where she cannot be abused? Which you may do by distinguishing each one’s part property to himself.”42 Moore’s analysis of the consequences of privatization was based on his social model of four groups. The first were “lords of the wastes,” who should receive a proportionate share of the carve-up to add to their demesne lands. The second were “able tenants” with enough to live on, who would receive “an addition to their estates”; the third, poor cottagers, were to get a “competent quantity” of land to lift them out of penury, which might be £40–£50 and “a good man’s estate.” The fourth were the “impotent poor,” who would gain “a more comfortable sustentation to them, than the former coldness of their overseers’ charity (God wot) could afford by way of rates . . .”. But there was a social humanist promise, too, of selfimprovement by improving their resources and character: “we may make them zealous to the work, and restless to improve their new land to the best profit for the common and their own good . . .”.43 John Moore (the second of two, but apparently no relation), vicar of Knaptoft, Leics., in 1653 published a sermon preached at Lutterworth in which he accused enclosers of being sinful, covetous “make-beggars . . .”. While Moore used the language of moral economics, he too engaged in a social analysis that went beyond the three estates paradigm when examining the effects of privatization upon different groups of the poor. He cited four in all, which he then boiled down to two—first, tenants; second, cottiers or cottagers, plus their children (again, an implied inclusion of the patriarchal household). The tenants were “discharged of tillage” when enclosure occurred and were reduced to gathering in marketplaces to ask, “Can you help me to a farm, or a little land to employ my team?” Previously, they had provided “multitudes of hard men, and horses for the service of the Commonwealth” (shades of Latimer’s remembering his father’s service to the king against the rebels in 1497). Now they were reduced to selling their horses and cattle. In some villages, between 14 and 20 tenants were dismissed and became cottagers.44 For their parts, the cottiers had produced bread grains; now they were put out of work and forced to migrate to the surviving open field villages, where their numbers doubled and the poor rates soared. The children of both tenants and cottagers were also casualties of privatizing the commons

308  Society as Property, 1550–1697 because they had traditionally worked as servants to husbandmen, but now their numbers were shrunk from 30 to 50 in a village to three or four in the enclosed community. The upshot was “droves of poor children”; the enclosers claimed the problem pre-dated privatization, asserting the numbers were increasing “like fleas, and lice, and these vermin will eat us up unless we enclose . . .”.45 Although their positions on privatizing differed, opponents often shared common assumptions about the character of the social order. Joseph Lee, a minister at Cotesbach, which had been a flash point for riots in 1607, wrote against John Moore’s positions but shared his social framework.46 He cited the important role of tenants and asserted they could be “oppressed and beggared” by exorbitant rents in common field villages as well as enclosed ones. Now, after privatizing the commons, some tenants were wealthier than their lords, he claimed.47 Moreover, cottagers were numerous and poor in openfield communities—twice as many as in enclosed villages—but the latter saw new building and experienced a shortage of hands, not unemployment, after privatization. As regards servants and children, too many young people were “inured to idleness” and “will not easily be brought to take any good pains anywhere.” As concerns the poor, they were “not the follower, but the forerunner of enclosure” because “care was not taken to prevent their poverty, whilst the fields lying open were used in common . . .”. Enclosure did not cause famine or the “uncorning of fields,” but “rather the contrary.”48 In his pamphlet two years hence, Lee added a traditional player, the clergy, to his analysis, spelling out the increasingly “profitable” livings, which rose post-enclosure from £40–£60 p.a. to £80 p.a. The poor would now have 14 acres of land dedicated to their support, which would be put in trust for their use forever. Cottagers would see the value of their common lands rise from 8s. or 9s. p.a. to 35s. Tenants would be left to negotiate with their landlords, but if rents were exorbitant, “it is not the fault of the enclosure, but the enclosers, and that not as enclosers, but as unmerciful landlords  .  .  .”. If the poor were still pinched by their circumstances, the parish owed them support by law, including housing. In fact, their 14 acres would be worth £14 p.a., which would support the few poor in the village. In any event, enclosure provided work—the cutting of hedges, threshing of corn, and “keep of grounds as shepherds . . .”. Further, there was always the possibility of working in the woolen cloth industry.49 Lee provided a social analysis of those who opposed enclosure. They included “the ruder sort” of a “profane and leveling spirit” who lived “upon rapine and spoil of others” by abusing the common field system. Also in opposition were graziers, that is, those who relied solely upon grazing livestock for a living, because with enclosure, other farmers would be able to compete with them because they gained pastures as well as tillage. Then there were the “truly godly” and “brethren of another judgment” whose commitment to the moral economy Lee was apparently willing to tolerate, but which might also have been an ironic swipe at religious radicals.50

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  309

E. Privatizing the Commons Lee was not the first to encourage the privatizing of common lands. There were precedents in the expert testimony of surveyors dating from the 1530s. Opinion favoring free markets seems to accelerate in the seventeenth century both in the private and public spheres. John Fitzherbert’s (d. 1531) Book of Surveying, first published in 1526, contained statements in the 1539 edition calling for conversion to “severalty,” or individual farming, which he claimed would increase the value of village lands from 20 marks, or 13s. 4d., to £20 p.a., based on increased production. An acre of land worth 6d. before enclosure would be worth 8d. in severalty, “by reason of the composting and dunging of the cattle” and by the use of ley-farming in which tillage was halted so the land recovered heart.51 A survey of the Somerset manors of Mudford and Hinton in 1554 assumed that pursuing self-interest through individual farming and abolishing communal farming would augment productivity, “for when the fields are enclosed every man will use a further travail and diligence with his land to convert it to the best use and purpose, which before they could not, for no man was master of his own, but to use the same as pleased his neighbor . . .”.52 Even the opponents of privatizing the commons realized they had a battle on their hands against proponents. Trigge noted in 1604 the opposition to statutes maintaining tillage, which “some will say they must needs maintain their estates,” when in reality, “they impair the Lord’s inheritance to maintain their estates, even they whom the Lord himself has advanced.” In any case, he argued, the Act ordering the restoration of plowing was “slack in the execution,” whereas those punishing the poor were diligently executed.53 Certainly the surveyor Norden saw nothing wrong with the pursuit of greater and greater incomes. In a tract dedicated to Sir Robert Cecil, he described how men were made “princes of the earth” so they should have “just means of the preservation and increase of their earthly revenues”; the “increase of land revenues” in turn provided “the means of the increase and preservation of their greatness . . .”.54 Among many other Jacobean “projectors”—would-be entrepreneurs seeking state sponsorship—Arthur Standish (fl. 1611–1613) ran a brief campaign in 1612 and 1613 in which he called for the planting of trees, which he linked with improved agriculture and the prevention of riots such as those of 1607. His rationale in his address to readers was interesting because it included “the general good of the Commonwealth for all posterity” but also the “profits” it would bring. “No wood, no kingdom,” seemingly paraphrasing the king’s statement about bishops, was his absurd parting shot.55 Another proponent of arboreal expansion was “S.T.,” by “Silvanus Taylor,” who in 1652 called for “the improvement of commons, forests, and chases, by enclosure,” which he promised would be to “the advantage of

310  Society as Property, 1550–1697 the poor, the common plenty of all, and the increase and preservation of timber.” The premise was that the pursuit of profits through private landowning was a positive step. It was “natural for all men to love propriety [property] . . . and men do delight rather to say this is mine, than this is ours” because the “mine” option offered its owner the condition of “sole lord . . . and so has it at his own disposing.” The underlying assumption in Taylor’s argument was that enclosed lands would be more productive and profitable. He cited the case of low-lying commons and their possible improvement: “have I seen little that might not be made more profitable to each man’s particular . . . by enclosing.” On common lands that kept 60 sheep, the number would increase to 100, plus “six beasts, and a horse.” If 21 acres were plowed for two or three years and then put to grass, the land would produce more cattle and sheep than 66 acres held in common, and the same—“it is verily believed by good experienced men”—was true of 14 acres of straw and 20 acres of grass. Taylor additionally promised greater acreages overall to those holding common rights, which would allow a freeholder to have “a full employment for his many children, which now in most parts are brought up very idly, having little to do but to look after a few sheep scattering on the common.”56 The anonymous Waste Land’s Improvement (1653) offered even more sweeping improvements and introduced a new word to describe the opposite of profitability—“disprofit.” Wastes, forests, and common lands were a bane with an ethnic twist whose remedy would increase production. They were a “reproach unto Irish, and other like lazy people, so much more is it a shame to us English, because we bear the name and reputation of an ingenious and industrious people . . .”. They were “to our discredit and disprofit” and should be improved by “enclosing, tiling, and planting, and all other ways of manuring, necessary unto increase . . .”. The state, trade, and “general profits of the Commonwealth” would be enriched.57 The mid-1650s saw an articulate onslaught on common lands in which profit and individual ownership were center stage. Adam Moore contrasted a position where “this is mine, I can let, sell, or dispose it at my pleasure” versus common ownership, saying the first represented “fields and vales of plenty,” while the second was “confused common fruitless, naked, and desolate . . .”. The answer to crime and abuses in the common field system was “enclosure, and distribution of the lands to private owners,” which would lead to increased fodder, grains, and fuel production on the 2,000,000 acres at stake, and which would augment the population being fed by 750,000. The result would be “beneficial for private and common wealth.”58 John Moore, minister of Knaptoft, held a contrary position in the 1650s, rejecting the notion that property was for profit, even for enhanced production. Restating the patriarchal model, he specified a two-part—patriarchal and charitable—“use of our estates: a first, a natural use, as to provide for ourselves, wives, children, families . . . ” and a “spiritual use” “to relieve Christ’s members . . . which stand in need of our help . . .”.59

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  311 If they had ever carried much weight in the real world—and surveyors’ remarks going back 100 years make one wonder—these cogent, though simple, positions did not go unchallenged by the mid-seventeenth century. Joseph Lee’s two pamphlets of the period directly and vigorously assailed John Moore’s opposition to privatization. Besides analyzing the various social players, Lee conducted an examination of the pros and cons of enclosure. His assumption was proto-social Darwinist: people are basically greedy and will take advantage of one another whenever the opportunity presents itself. He asserted that people took advantage of lax titles in common fields to overgraze them, to trespass, and to remove landmarks, which caused lawsuits and poverty. He also did a cost-benefit analysis in which privatization came out on top. The farming practices used in the unenclosed system were inferior, and taxation was unfair. For example, cattle were allowed to wander. More grain could be produced on enclosed lands because the farmer could rest and manure the soil and alter crop rotations to enrich it. Harvesting and grazing in the common field system of strips was inconvenient, whereas hedges produced fuel and more effective manuring. Lee rejected the belief that enclosure always brought depopulation, rebuffed the claims of beggars as victims of the process, and argued that the poor were also present in open field villages. For that matter, he maintained, rents could be oppressive in either system. And, as concerns sin and disorder, they needed to be suppressed not only in enclosed parishes, but in common field ones too. Lee summed up by following the principle that the world is the sum of individual interests: “enclosure without depopulating is profitable to the Commonwealth. If injurious to no private person, and profitable to them all, it must needs be beneficial to the Commonwealth, which is but the summa totalis of sundry persons as several figures.”60 Lee continued the assault on Moore and anti-enclosers three years later, looking at the social consequences, but also producing a more detailed analysis than was previously available. He named some 20 Leicestershire communities where he claimed no depopulation occurred after privatization, gave extensive attention to the fate of the poor in both systems, and provided a well-argued rationale for free enterprise in farming. While apologetic for allowing economic issues to intrude on the work of a cleric, Lee used the language of economics without moral overlays quite extensively. He employed the term “business,” for example, more than once to justify the shrinking of labor costs, asking, “[I]s a man bound to keep servants . . . ”? He questioned whether the plough would be cast aside and a return made to digging with spades in order to employ more men. Instead, he proposed the positions of modern liberal economics, extending the principle to trade as well as farming, that anyone should be permitted to seek an advantage if he or she did no harm to others: May not every one lawfully put his commodity to the best advantage, provided he do it without prejudice to others? Do not all tradesmen cast

312  Society as Property, 1550–1697 to lay out their money upon such wares, as will be most advantageous to themselves? Have not landholders as much reason, and may they not with as good conscience put their lands to the best advantage?61

F. Parliamentary Debates on Privatization The debate over privatizing common lands also reverberated in the halls of Parliament, where proponents of a moral economy and state paternalism encountered growing challenges from the 1590s. It was not so much that there was direct opposition to Christian social principles and the “nanny state” of Bacon and Cecil. Rather, the debates were bypassing the old social models, precepts, and policies. Discussions were not completed in the 1590s, or even in the 1600s, because they were rekindled again with John Moore and Joseph Lee in the 1650s. Nevertheless, the 1590s and early 1600s saw a sharpening of positions that questioned the old paradigms in new areas—the regional variety of English agriculture, which made generalizations about enclosures and legislation more complex than previously expressed and, perhaps, understood; a new, compelling interest in economic freedom and private enterprise, which steadily gained currency; and new thought about the role of government in social issues, including recognition of the state’s own special interests and broader definitions of its military, fiscal, and “imperial” roles. The identification of regionalism in the agrarian economy was a doubleedged sword in the debates of the 1590s, even dividing M.P.s from the same county. Hayward Townshend represented Bishop’s Castle (Salop.) in the 1597 Parliament and kept a journal of its proceedings, probably because it was his first experience as an M.P. He was assiduous about noting the agrarian debates affecting his shire, which showed a deep schism among its representatives. Robert Berry, a veteran of many Elizabethan Parliaments sitting for Ludlow, favored including the county in the tillage bill because he thought it would increase grain production, but his views were “utterly disliked by all the burgesses of that country [county] and the knights of that shire, and he greatly frowned at for it.” The dispute was not personal; it concerned the specialized character of the economies of Shropshire and its neighbors. Sir Thomas Coningsby, a knight of the shire for Herefordshire, protested against including Shropshire in the prohibition of enclosure. He stated that Shropshire was mostly woodland and that cattle-rearing and dairies dominated its economy, which, if they were curtailed, would “breed a great[er] scarcity amongst the people there, than the scarcity of corn now is . . .”. On a single day, he estimated £10,000 worth of cheese and butter was sold at a fair in the town of Bridgnorth. This thriving trade was made possible because of regional specialization that extended beyond Shropshire’s borders to its neighbors: “as Herefordshire and the other countries [counties] adjoining, were the barns for the corn, so this shire might and

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  313 would be the dairy house to the whole realm . . . ”, and so in subsequent proceedings, the county was excluded from the bill.62 The specialized character of English agriculture was also argued in an anonymous manuscript circulated in the House of Lords in the wake of the Midland Revolt of June 1607. The document contained, besides a justification for individual economic freedom that is discussed below, a detailed comparison of the counties of Northampton and Somerset, which left no doubt that privatized common fields (or no commons at all) were the more productive of the two systems. Subtitled the “increase of wealth and people proved,” it maintained that Northamptonshire was “most[ly] champion [i.e., open fields], more ground, little waste . . . ”, whereas Somerset was “all enclosed but inferior in quantity and quality, yet by advantage of severalty and choice of employment exceeding far in” two categories: the numbers of troops and the taxes they could raise. The author broke down both categories in an exercise prefiguring “Political Arithmetic” and produced some startling statistics. Northampton was listed as providing 600 trained and 600 untrained infantry, while Somerset mustered 4,000 and 12,000, respectively. The imputed differences in revenues raised in a subsidy were staggering, Northampton finding £976 1s. 4d., while Somerset raised £3,832 12s. 10d. There were added economic benefits in enclosed counties, which had fuel from hedges—“which they want in the champion”—and where laborers found more work in hedging and ditching the enclosures. As was so often the case, the differences between field systems were social as well. Open field villages drew the poor but not the wealthy: “the nurseries of beggars are commons as appears by fens and forests, of wealthy people the enclosed counties, as Essex, Somerset, Devon etc.”63 Commentators on enclosure in the period also noted regional differences. Trigge observed that Essex, Hertfordshire, and Devon were old, enclosed, woodland counties to which he was not objecting, adding the wrinkle, though, that “there, every lordship is charitably divided among the tenants, and tillage also in most of their closes is maintained, and towns nothing dispeopled . . .”. It was the conversion of arable to pasture that bothered him.64 Using similar evidence of regionalism, Lee came to opposing conclusions. He noted that Essex, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, and Devonshire were “wholly enclosed” and yet had not suffered depopulation: “are any of the godly in those parts offended at it?” he taunted. If not, why were they so perturbed in Leicestershire?65 The questioning of state paternalism went beyond regional specialization to include secular principles of economic behavior. Henry Jackman, a London merchant, son of a City alderman, and possibly a barrister, spoke against the tillage bill in 1597 from the perspective of “cool rationalism” and as a prototypical “disciple of Adam Smith” while representing a Wiltshire seat that linked him with “sheep, not grain.”66 Jackman identified natural forces, not the conversion of arable, as the keys to recent high grain prices,

314  Society as Property, 1550–1697 in particular, the weather. Market forces were also important. Inflated grain prices had actually stimulated plowing, so a shortage of arable could not possibly be the reason for the dearth. He cited a number of examples suggesting that conversion to pasture was not at fault: tilled lands overseas and at home that had still suffered from high prices, Parliament’s relaxing of the statute law governing depopulation in 1593 after a time of abundant harvests, a year in Henry III’s reign when enclosures did not exist, but grain prices rose 12-fold. If a new law restricted pasture farming, the result would be a shortage of livestock, especially sheep, which would throw the cloth industry into a depression, causing more unemployment and the proliferation of beggars. In the next year, grain would be abundant and cheap, and because of the low prices, farmers would be hard-pressed to meet rents. His conclusions placed his views squarely in the camp that favored the free play of market forces: “Men . . . are not to be compelled by penalties, but allured by profit, to any good exercise.”67 Similar positions cropped up in debates in the 1601 Parliament and in an anonymous report to the House of Lords in 1607. Obviously, this was not a tidal wave of support for “laissez-faire economics,” because the theory did not exist at the time and would be much debated when it did develop down the road. But given the pervasiveness of moral economics and state paternalism in official circles and popular opinion c. 1600, it is surprising and at least symbolically significant that contrary opinions were being voiced. The 1601 Parliament considered the repeal of the tillage law passed in 1597–8 that regulated converting arable lands to pasture. The effort failed, but not before arguments were advanced in favor of abolition. A “Mr.  Johnson” took up many of the positions earlier favored by Jackman, arguing that when the Act was passed in 1597–8 it was “in the time of dearth” and it was thought “that the hand of God was upon us . . .”. Now grain was abundant again and at the point of bankrupting those who tilled the land: “if too cheap, the husbandman is undone, whom we must provide for, for he is the staple man of the kingdom.” Even more characteristically forceful was Sir Walter Raleigh, whose arguments centered on the domestic and international markets and the principle of economic freedom. He argued that at home, the poor were unable to get seed to sow as many acres as the law required. In addition, the international situation was favorable because “all nations abound with corn”: France was offering England cheap imports for the provisioning of Ireland; the Low Countries were so productive in other sectors they did not sow grain at all; the enemy Spain, though chronically short of grain, would “not be beholding to the Englishman for it . . .”. The answer was to free individuals to follow their self-interest in economic questions: “I think the best course is to set it at liberty and leave every man free, which is the desire of a true Englishman.”68 The most comprehensive and rigorous examination of policy on common rights came in the “Consideration  .  .  .  Touching Depopulation” of 1607. The anonymous author argued to the House of Lords against

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  315 legislation regulating the conversion of arable to pasture, maintaining that the “engrossing [of farms] [is] truly the disease and not converting  .  .  .”. Forcing inland shires like Northampton and Leicester to grow grain hurt the farmers because of their high transport costs. Grain prices had outstripped wool since the reign of Henry VIII, but local markets in the landlocked Midlands counties had to be factored into the question. The author’s fundamental principle was that profits would—and should—drive economic practices, meaning that economic freedom should be the rule and state intervention should not inhibit individual efforts to maximize profits: “The good individual is the good general . . . ” the author pungently opined. If grain was higher in price than meat or cloth, “the husbandman will plough, since his only end is profit; if equal or under, no reason to constrain him, for that law which divides labor from profit (as the Act of Tillage) is what causes the great difference of the wealths [sic] and abilities of several shires as they are oppressed with that Statute.”69

G. Reasons of State Skinner observed that in the early seventeenth century, the concept of the state had arrived as “the most important object of analysis in European political thought.”70 In concluding this chapter, it is worth noting that there was considerable seepage of this preoccupation with the state into the social thinking of the period. This concern with matters of state went beyond the traditional focus on military security, which was still a prominent subject of discussion, to include the paternalistic state, as already seen, but also extended to practical questions of governance, including mathematical analyses, migration, and England’s imperial future. One of the many justifications for opposing privatizing the country’s common fields was to retain a “sturdy yeomanry” who could go off to war. This was Trigge’s reasoning, as we have seen in his reference to the foot soldiers in Edward III’s reign, but his thinking went beyond that historical example. Citing Proverbs, he believed “the multitude of people is the honor of a king . . . and for want of people comes the destruction of the prince.” This was because of migration, since, he implied, “the cities and towns corporate are maintained by the country” and because “the plow maintains all trades . . .”. These he proceeded to list, which he argued were essential to the economy as consumers as well as producers. Enclosure was obnoxious because it “diminishes the number of God’s people, kills their hearts, and abridges both their mirth and maintenance . . .”.71 A contrary view about common lands was that of the anonymous “Consideration” delivered to the House of Lords during the Midland Revolt. Central to its argument was a two-sided concern for the stability of governments—the “security of the state from  .  .  .  foreign invaders who cannot so easily march, spoil and foray in an enclosed country as a champion,” and “domestic commotions which will be prevented when their

316  Society as Property, 1550–1697 false pretences (enclosures) which they use to stir up the mob are taken away.” Taking the line that there was “no defense” for depopulation, the document’s author sought to erect new statutory provisions to keep farmers on the land. A new law would provide that no more than a quarter of a manor should be held as demesne lands, and the remaining three quarters would be reserved for farms, but none would exceed 100 acres in size. Any who had engrossed holdings and put down houses would be required to restore “half as many every manor as they had decayed . . .”. In addition, a survey would be made, following the procedure of the Hundred Rolls of Edward I’s reign, of all demesne lands, the number of houses, and the lands attached to them in every parish in the land, and a law would be passed to maintain the numbers of holdings, which the assizes judges would enforce. Thus, social peace would be maintained: “by redressing the fault of Depopulation and leaving enclosing and converting arbitrable as in other shires, the poor man shall be satisfied in his end—habitation, and the gentleman not hindered in his desire—improvement.” There should not, however, be unlimited expansion of new holdings that would “over burden” the country. The state would have to send the excess population to the military or the colonies, because population growth would cause social tensions: “it cannot be but that in this state, as in a full body, there must break out yearly tumors and impostures as did of late.”72 Here was yet another reference to the recent riots of 1607. John Moore also left no doubt that husbandmen were essential to government: those who abhorred the plow were “enemies to the state.” This was because, as Trigge also claimed, so many relied upon tillers of the soil for their livelihoods: “even kings themselves and the greatest potentates of the earth have need of the poor husbandman’s travail and toil in tilling of the ground  .  .  .  ”, the fruits of which were more valuable than gold and silver because “neither king nor state” could be maintained without tillage. The alternative was rebellion—“to bring the whole world to confusion” and “break out into fearful clamors against the tyrannous dealing of unjust enclosers and needless overthrowers of tillage . . . ” another reference to the riots of 1607, which had occurred in Moore’s backyard. His parting shot at the Court was even more pungent: “let not the courtier . . . condemn the carter, by whose toil and tillage of the earth, both king and state consists [sic].”73 Returning to the defense theme, Standish pushed for the planting of trees in 1613 partly, at least, based on the putative military needs of the Crown: “the kingdom thereby may be the better defended from foreign enemies by the navigation, the banks of the seas, and ebbing and flowing rivers defended, stays maintained; all which cannot be maintained but by wood . . .”.74 For his part, the barrister Powell cited ancient examples, including Cato the Elder, to bolster his case against privatizing common fields, with the usual emphasis on defending the homeland. He added a barb about those who failed to enforce the laws preserving tillage, who, he declaimed, were “themselves a grievance to the country, and enemies to the king and state,” which

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  317 are the kinds of words one associates with the Personal Rule of Charles I. Powell went on to praise the king for “so much tender care of tillage . . . ” and extended the objectives still further to include “the honor of his imperial state . . .”.75 The issues of overseas colonies and empires were brought up by other commentators of the period.76 A recurring theme relating to the state was the mathematical measurement of resources through censuses, which the “Consideration” had broached in 1607. Henry Halhead again raised the question in 1650: “where are the soldiers in those decayed towns [read villages], the men that should do their country service, and stand in the face of any enemy coming to invade?” Where were the horses they would have bred for the military? To answer these questions, he propose the authorities should do a series of censuses rather like the Domesday Book to “take some pains to let the state know, how many men, women, and children; horse, beast, swine, and pullen, have been usually maintained upon such villages, and towns, and houses of husbandry now decayed” and how many acres were affected, so that Parliament could take action.77 Taylor, another proponent of privatizing commons, took a position similar to virtually all the other writers in using the country’s defense as a reason, but with a unique twist that was again creatively mathematical. He estimated that enclosed lands would increase demand for employment by 20 percent and several hundred thousand laborers, who now tended to go overseas “to other plantations” which “would in few years be added to our gallant soldiery an auxiliary of 20,000 men, able and ready to oppose any foreign enemy, either by sea or land.” Enclosure would also increase the wood supply for the navy and shipbuilding.78 The anonymous author of Waste Land’s Improvement (1653) raised even more issues that he asserted were relevant to government. Planting the wastes with hemp, among other crops, “means the state would be sufficiently supplied with hemp for cordage for their shipping . . .”. The conquest of “vast, wild, wide forests” would diminish “robberies, thefts, burglaries, rapes and murders, which do much annoy this Commonwealth . . .”. Letting the wastes, even if they were at half the “ordinary value,” would “very much enrich and replenish the public purse” to the tune of £100,000 a month. The experience of Essex suggested that £80,000 a year might be generated from such leases, and the result would be the lifting of the national tax burden. Combined with customs revenues, the revenues of the Commonwealth would be sufficient, having been transformed, Cinderella-like. The new revenues “would so defray the charge of armies and navies, as to banish Excise and assessments out of the nation as a superfluous overplus, thereby discharging the malcontented people from those ponderous and discontentful impositions.” Once again, the security of the state was paramount, both externally and internally. The income from wastelands “would not only be the profit but the glory of the nation, that a military force at land, and a naval force at sea, should be perpetually maintained” without taxes and the

318  Society as Property, 1550–1697 Excise. The new tenancies would secure the loyalties of the tenants to the government out of respect to their landlords and their own self-interest as tenants. The upshot was the survival of the state on all fronts, because “in case of domestic insurrections against authority, or foreign invasions against the nation, the state would doubtless have a considerable army out of the numbers of their own tenants to defend the Parliament’s authority, and to preserve therein their own proprieties [properties].”79 Lee reinforced the notion that the state’s income was of paramount importance and would be best served by the privatizing of common lands; once again, it was a numbers game. He asserted that “monies are the sinews of war” and “the sum of money that is paid in all taxes out of enclosures is double to that which paid out of the common fields of the same quantity.” He even rejected the claim that more horses were raised for the military on common lands: “few horses kept in common fields [were] fit for service, one well kept will be more serviceable to the state than three that are jaded and tired . . .”.80 As the book’s Conclusions will demonstrate, Locke and others made similar calculations in the second half of the century.

H. The Fate of the Poor To round out this discussion, it is worth examining the positions of these authors on the question of the poor, which was a recurrent theme in discussions of the agrarian problem, and which continued to show the polarization of old and new social philosophies. The languages had changed somewhat from the “Commonwealth-men”, but the messages had not. Notions of a functionalist organic (and Christian society) persisted. Trigge saw the customary sharing of the commons as bringing about solidarity because, together with lords and freeholders, “the poor might inter-common with them . . .”. But now, there was privatization—“a mighty thorn sprung up of late . . . which does not only go about to impoverish your Majesty’s subjects, but quite to root them out” because “lords of manors and freeholders will have all their lands which have heretofore lain [been?] open, and in common . . . [are] now laid together in several.” As a result, “the poor cannot enjoy their ancient commons and liberties.”81 Although a surveyor by profession, Norden was a proponent of organic paternalism and urged the high and mighty to take responsibility for others, including the lower sort, without whose regard, their own prominence was nullified. Besides looking after their own families and serving the monarch, they should “show love and diligent regard, to aid their inferiors, in respect of whom they have the imputation of their greatness.”82 In the midst of the Midland Revolt, Wilkinson still found time, where the poor were concerned, to sermonize about mutual obligations in society. He favored swift justice for the rebels, but called upon the authorities “to promote the cause and complaints of the expelled, half pined, and distressed poor, that they rebel no more.” He called for everyone “according to the

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  319 proportion of their state and power to do works of mercy and justice . . .”. The judges and magistrates were encouraged “gently to answer the cries, petitions and just complaints of the poor” because God created the world for men, not sheep. He urged “all [e]states generally, not to grind the faces of the poor . . .”. The master should pay the servant “that he may live”; the landlord was “not to rack, but so to rate his tenant that he may live . . .”. In turn, the lower sort should “labor for his living” and “conspire not in mutinies, but conspire in mutual prayers; root not up harmless hedges . . . but look up to heaven from whence you shall have bread . . .”.83 The theme of social solidarity continued to be debated into the 1650s. Cooke’s Unum necessarium, while focused on the suppression of alehouses, laid down principles in this vein in 1648. His premise was one of organic solidarity: “God suffers some to be poor, [so] that rich men may have occasion to do good.” He listed more than a dozen ways the better sort could relieve the poor, beginning from the position that “alms this dear year are the best sermon-notes, and he that is not now charitable, cannot be a Christian.” He proposed the poor should pay no interest on pawned items; that “men of estates” should give one of their daily meals to the poor; that winnings from gambling should go to the needy; items lost, found, and mined should go the poor men’s box; that physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries should provide their services pro bono; that lawyers should hand over every tenth fee to the poor. Pointing out that the rich were not the most liberal, Cooke called on them to bestow alms for the “honor of the gospel”; after all, the social hierarchy of rich and poor was appointed by God.84 John Moore drove home similar points in his pamphlets. Citing a “merciless miser” and others who ask, “What poor?” in 1653, he cited Matthew, who listed as objects of charity “the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, sick, imprisoned”; “such as are destitute of substance, of friends, of health, of help, of limbs, of house, of harbor”; “the widow, and fatherless . . .”. But must one give to beggars? Yes, we must, “question-less,” Moore riposted. Lazarus was a beggar at the rich man’s gate; the latter was now in hell for having denied Lazarus the scraps and crumbs from his table. Moore cataloged the various beggars and how they were dispossessed by “makebeggars” in what sinful acts as well as social betrayal.85 In a restatement of many of these positions in 1656, he questioned whether individual interests might not be preeminent. “May I not improve mine own estate to my best advantage?” was asked. The answer was a resounding “no”: “thou must have a care of thy brothers . . . even that they may thrive as thyself.”86 The contrary position on the poor emphasized privatizing commons and institutionalizing the dispossessed, who, as in the social humanist credo, were linked with idleness and crime. Taylor the arborist began from the standard conservative nostrum, “That that which is every man’s, is no man’s,” but government intervention would put 80,000 “that now are both idle and chargeable” to work building and operating fishing boats. Yet his reasoning redefined the “greater good,” which was the privatizing

320  Society as Property, 1550–1697 of the commons. Where 60 sheep were now maintained, there would be 100, plus “six beasts, and a horse.” As things were, the commons gave “great encouragement to a thievish heart to fall to stealing” and to let their “many children [go] wandering from door to door begging their bread . . .”. Further, the sheep on enclosed forests and wastes would produce greater wool, so that the poor would have “full employment” in winter, carding, spinning, and knitting. One quarter of the commons should be reserved for the poor and cottagers. Those who could not live from their shares should be given employment in workhouses—a common theme that also comes up in Hobbes and Locke—and the same was prescribed for those who “are fit for nothing but to uphold drunkenness, idleness, roguery, whoredom, and increase beggary . . .”. In another creative exercise in Political Arithmetic, Taylor estimated there were 200,000 idle poor in the country, who cost the country £2,500 a day, or £912,500 per annum, half of whom would be employed through enclosures. These savings involved manpower as well as cash. Population growth was fueling emigration to plantations overseas. Now, with privatizing common and wastelands, they could be kept at home and add 20,000 men to “our gallant soldiery . . . able and ready to oppose any foreign enemy, either by sea or land.”87 IV. CONCLUSIONS This chapter sought to show that the theory of the body social persisted into the seventeenth century in a variety of forms—e.g., in the assertion of patriarchal power over the family and in state power over a “moral economy.” But there was a counterflow of ideas about the economic and social order and their regulation, including ongoing, often sharp debates about the privatizing of common lands. The extensive publications on these subjects suggest they had huge symbolic significance in communicating differing social models. These interchanges included the recognition of differing regional histories and markets where private “enclosure” was concerned, which asserted an enhanced understanding of geographic factors in determining the issue. In some instances, the agrarian debate was generalized, as in the cases of Raleigh in 1601 and the House of Lords document of 1607, and advanced new principles of economic and social behavior—all Englishmen should be free!—that broke with the body social. The divergence over principles was also apparent in discussions of the poor, which saw the persistence of traditional notions of charity, but which were challenged by proposals to criminalize and institutionalize certain groups of the needy. The next two chapters show that issues of property continued to inform thinking about society in the period up to the 1660s. Chapter  15 contends that these issues figured in a great variety of texts in the period, including Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Hobbes’s Leviathan. Although diverse in objective and form, these sources tend to confirm the emerging power of a new paradigm in social thinking. The force of this new

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  321 thinking is confirmed in Chapter  16, which argues that in the 1640s, the Levellers and Diggers issued sharp challenges to the old order, calling for the dissolution of clerical and Royal landholdings and the curbing of noble power, which in the eyes of the leadership of the New Model Army threatened the emerging order of a society organized around wealth. NOTES   1. See J. G. A. Pocock, “The Concept of a Language and the métier d’historien: some considerations on practice,” in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 26–7.   2. J. H. Sommerville, “Absolutism and Royalism,” The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 358–61.   3. Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes, Especially in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 50–1.   4. Cited Schochet, op.cit., 67.   5. Cited Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 34, 42–3, 64, 68, 73.   6. Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 56, 145; the reference on 211 is almost pure rhetoric.  7. Filmer, Patriarcha, 4; The Free-holders Grand Inquest Touching Our Soveraigne Lord the King and His Parliament (1679), ed. Sommerville, 116.  8. Beier, Masterless Men, 22–5.   9. David Levine & Keith Wrightson, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (London: Academic Press, 1979), chs. 5, 7; David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), ch. 3. 10. Jane Whittle, ed. Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440–1660; Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 11. Keith Wrightson, “Foreword,” in Whittle ed. xv; Briony McDonagh, “Negotiating Enclosure in Sixteenth Century Yorkshire,” in ibid. 54. 12. The locus classicus is M. W. Beresford, “Habitation versus Improvement: The Debate on Enclosure by Agreement,” in F. J. Fisher, ed., Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England in Honor of R. H. Tawney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), 41. 13. Whittle, “Conclusions,” in Whittle, ed., Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440–1660, 216–21. 14. David Ormrod, “Agrarian Capitalism and Merchant Capitalism,” in Whittle, ed. 214. 15. For the 1830s, see E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence  & Wishart, 1969; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973 edn.), 27; Rosa Congost, “Property Rights and Historical Analysis: What Rights? What History?” P&P 181 (November 2003): 77, emphasizes property as a reflection of social relationships. 16. Francis Trigge, The Humble Petition of Two Sisters; the Church and Commonwealth: For the Restoring of Their Ancient Commons and Liberties; which late Enclosure with Depopulation, Uncharitably Has Taken Away (London: George

322  Society as Property, 1550–1697 Bishop, 1604; S.T.C. 24280.5), C.4.a, D.4.a, F.2.a. For Trigge’s earlier work, see McRae, God Speed the Plough 71–2. 17. I [John]. N[orden]., The Surveyor’s Dialogue . . . Very Profitable for All Men to Peruse (London: Hugh Astley, 1607; S.T.C. 18639), A.3.b, A.5.b. 18. B.L. MS. Harl. 787, art. 11, reprinted in J. O. Halliwell, ed., The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom (London: The Shakespeare Society, 1846), vol. 31, 140–1. 19. John Moore, A Target for Tillage .  .  . (London: William Jones, 1612; S.T.C. 18058), 25. 20. Robert Powell, Depopulation Arraigned, Convicted and Condemned, by the Laws of God and Man . . . (London: R.B., 1636; S.T.C. 20160), 65 (itals. orig.). 21. John Cooke, Unum Necessarium: Or, the Poor Man’s Case . . . (London: Matthew Walbancke, 1648; Wing, 2nd edn. 1994: C6027; Thomason E.425[1]), A.2.a., 36–7 (quotation order reversed). 22. Joseph Bentham, The Christian Conflict: A  Treatise .  .  . (London: G[eorge] M[iller]., 1635; S.T.C. 1887; ESTC S113626), A.9.a-b, 317–26, 360–1. 23. John Moore, The Crying Sin of England, Of Not Caring for the Poor . . . (London: T.M. for Antony Williamson, 1653; Wing, 2nd edn., M2558; Thomason 110: E.713 [7]), 5. 24. E.  P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993), chs. 4 and 5 (the first being a reprint of Thompson’s seminal article on the moral economy in P&P 50 1971). 25. In God Speed the Plough, ch. 2. 26. R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912; repr. with new introduction by Lawrence Stone (New York: Harper, 1967), 330–349. And latterly, Lawrence Stone, “State Control in Sixteenth-Century England,” Ec.H.R. (no. 2, 1947), 103–20, who stressed the significance of military preoccupations. 27. Trigge, Humble Petition, A.7.b, A.8.b, D.2.b, D.7.b, G.1.b. 28. John Moore, A Target for Tillage, A.4.b, A.5.a. 29. Powell, Depopulation Arraigned, A.3.a-b. 30. Joseph Bentham, The Christian Conflict: A Treatise . . . The Case of Usury and Depopulation . . . (London: G. M[iller], 1635; S.T.C. 1887; ESTC S113626), 318–19. 31. Cooke, Unum, A.2.a, 5. 32. Robert Wilkinson, A Sermon preached at Northampton the 21 of June Last Past . . . (London: John Flaske, 1607. S.T.C. 25662), A.3.b, D.1.a. 33. Cooke, Unum, 6–7, 12, 14, 36. 34. Tawney & Power, eds. TED I, 87–8. See also J. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584–1601 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), II, 347. 35. TED, I, 89. 36. A. F. Pollard and Marjorie Blatcher, eds., “Hayward Townshend’s Journals,” Bulletin, Institute of Historical Research, 12 (June, 1934), 10, 14–15. 37. Quoted Neale, op.cit., II, 340; this section of the document does not appear in a reprint in A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown, and R. H. Tawney, eds. English Economic History: Select Documents (London: G. Bell  & Sons, 1914), 270–4 (hereafter EEH). 38. EEH, 274–5. 39. Trigge, Humble Petition, D.4.a-b, E.9.b, F.2.a. 40. Moore, Target, A.5.a-b, A.8.a, 4, 24. 41. Powell, Depopulation Arraigned, 48; S[ilas] or [Silvanus] T[aylor], CommonGood: Or, the Improvement of Commons, Forests, and Chases, by Enclosures . . . (London: Francis Tyton, 1652; Wing, 2nd edn., T552; Thomason E.663 [6]), 54–5.

Property, Patriarchy, and the Agrarian Problem, 1593–1656  323 42. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor . . . by Enclosure of the Wastes and Common Grounds . . . (London: R & W. Leybourn, 1653; Wing M2529) A.2.a. 43. Ibid. 33–6. 44. John Moore, The Crying Sin of England, 9–11. 45. Ibid. 11. For further concern about families, see John Moore, A Scripture Word against Enclosure . . . (London: Anthony Williamson, 1656; Wing M2559), 7–8, and for analysis of the social results, ibid. 10–11. 46. L. A. Parker, “The Agrarian Revolution at Cotesbach, 1501–1612,” in W. G. Hoskins, ed., Studies in Leicestershire Agrarian History (Leicester: Leicestershire Archaeological Society, 1949), 73. 47. Pseudomismus [Joseph Lee?], Considerations Concerning Common Fields and Enclosures . . . (London: Abel Roper, 1654; Wing 2nd edn., L843; Thomason E.719 [9]), which lists as Nov. 18, 1653), 22, 30. 48. Ibid. 23, 25–6. 49. Joseph Lee . . .  A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure (London: E.C., 1656; Wing 2nd edn., L843A), 2–5. 50. Ibid. 29–31. 51. John Fitzherbert, The Book of Surveying, repr. TED III, 22–5; commonly attributed to Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, Justice of the Common Pleas, but there is reason to believe it was written by his brother, John Fitzherbert of Norbury. See R. H. C. Fitzherbert, “The Authorship of the ‘Book of Husbandry’ and the ‘Book of Surveying,’ ” English Historical Review, XII, no. 46 (April 1897): 225. 52. TED I, 60–2. 53. Trigge, Humble Petition, C.3.a. 54. Norden, Surveyor’s Dialogue, A.3.a-b, A.5.b. 55. Arthur Standish, The Commons’ Complaint . . . (London: William Stansby, 1612; S.T.C. 23200.5), B.1.a, B.3.a-b, C.1.b. 56. S[ilas] T[aylor], Common-Good, 5, 17, 25–6 (ital. orig.). 57. Anon., Wast Land’s Improvement . . . (London, October 31, 1653 in a handwritten note; Wing 2nd edn. G17; Thomason E.715 [18]), 1–7 (itals. org.). 58. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor, B.1.b, 13–16. 59. John Moore, Crying Sin, 17–18. 60. Pseudomismus, Considerations Concerning Common Fields, 3–7, 10–20, 22, 39. 61. Joseph Lee . . .  Or a Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, A.2.a, B.2.a, 7, 9, 20–1. 62. A. F. Pollard & Marjorie Blatcher, eds. “Hayward Townshend’s Journals,” Bulletin, Institute of Historical Research, 12 (June 1934), 1–3, 15–16; Cumberland and Westmorland were also omitted for military reasons spelled out by Cecil: Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, II, 344–5. 63. Eric Kerridge, ed. Agrarian Problems in the Sixteenth Century and After (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1969), 200 (italics in original), reprint of BL, Cottonian Manuscripts, Titus F. iv, fols. 322–3. Of course, the figures for Northampton and Somerset left out an important question: the population levels of the two counties, differences that might alone explain the disparities in troop and tax capacities. For another example of regionalized economies, in this instance relating to markets, see T. S. Cogswell, ed. “Reasons against a General Sending of Corn to the Markets in the Champion Part of Norfolk,” Norfolk Archaeology, 20 (1917–19), 10–21. 64. Trigge, Humble Petition, B.1.b. 65. Lee, Vindication, 31. 66. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, II, 339, 341–3. 67. Ibid. 343.

324  Society as Property, 1550–1697 68. EEH, 274; Simonds D’Ewes, The Journals of all the Parliaments During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, revised P. Bowes (London: P. Bowes, 1682; 1693), 674. 69. Kerridge, Agrarian Problems, 201 (italics in original). 70. Skinner, Foundations, II, 349. 71. Trigge, Humble Petition, A.4.a-b, A.6.a, E.9.b (itals. in orig.). 72. “A Consideration of the Cause in Question before the Lords touching Depopulation,” repr. in Kerridge, Agrarian Problems, 200–3 (itals. in orig.). 73. Moore, A Target for Tillage, A.4.b, A.5.a-b, A.7.b, A.8.b, 4, 30–1, 59. 74. Arthur Standish, New Directions of Experience to the Commons Complaint (London: Nicholas Okes, 1613; STC 23204.5), 16. 75. Robert Powell, Depopulation Arraigned, 20, 32, 60, 107, 116 (itals. orig.). 76. Adam Moore, Bread for the Poor), 2–4, also uses imperial language at some length with historical examples. 77. Henry Halhead, Enclosure Thrown Open (London: James Cottrel, 1650). Wing 2nd edn. H284; Thomason E.619[2]), 9, 17. Pullen were poultry: O.E.D. 78. S[ilas or Silvanus] T[aylor], Common-Good, 33 [read 31], 42. 79. Anon., Wast Land’s Improvement, 2, 3, 4, 6. 80. Joseph Lee, . . . Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, 16. 81. Trigge, Humble Petition, A.3.b. 82. Norden, Surveyor’s Dialogue, A.5.a. 83. Wilkinson, Sermon Preached at Northampton, A.4.a, B.3.b, D.1.b, D.2.a-b, E.3.b (itals. orig.). 84. Cooke, Unum necessarium, A.2.a, 2–3, 34–6, 45–6. 85. John Moore, Crying Sin, B.1.a-b, B.2.a, 6, 13–15, 26. 86. John Moore, A Scripture Word, 7. 87. S[ilvanus or Silas] T[aylor], Common-Good, 23–5, 33 [correct 31], 36–7, 58–9. Note that “free schools” were also projected (39).

15 The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730

I. INTRODUCTION Beside issues of patriarchy, common land, and state control, the period witnessed robust assertions of new social positions. This chapter locates these redefinitions in five places. The first lies in county histories published between 1576 and 1730, which provide micro-histories of communities whose representations of society broke with the three-estate model and bear closer resemblances to those of Smith, Harrison, and Wilson. The county histories echoed these writers in emphasizing wealth and economic roles, in discussions of definitions of noble and gentle status, and in their views of the populace and the poor. The second part of the chapter examines Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which dramatized issues of class difference, the body as metaphor, patriarchy, and “virtue.” Like Smith and others, the play treated social conflict as a natural phenomenon. Further, it redefined the body as a producer of wealth to something like trickle-down economics, and it advanced patriarchy and martial virtue as effective social institutions. Third, Thomas Hobbes took original positions on social questions. He rejected the metaphor of the body social, particularly the concept of interdependence, and declared competition, individualism, and property to be keys to social order. He denounced poverty as socially undesirable. Fourth, James Harrington added an historical dimension that was lacking in Hobbes, arguing that the English civil wars were the result of shifts in landholding since the break with Rome, so that the aristocracy, the Church, and the monarchy would not survive in the new order that he imagined. Harrington favored rule by the gentry elites, but—in another break with a fixed hierarchy—allowed for upward social mobility into the gentle classes. Fifth, in 1665, Edward Waterhouse added new dimensions to discussions of wealth and social position. It is argued here that Waterhouse introduced the first bourgeois man in English social thinking by altering definitions of gentility two-fold—from its martial and magisterial traditions to concerns about moral and material survival, and from a mainly landed economy to one incorporating the professions and trade.

326  Society as Property, 1550–1697 II. MICRO-STUDIES OF THE LANDED, THE MERCANTILE, AND THE POOR The early modern period saw a remarkable proliferation of county histories, which by 1800 probably numbered in the hundreds.1 Some larger counties drew the attention of more than one author. Lambarde’s A Perambulation of Kent (1576) was followed by Philipot’s Villare Cantianum or Kent Surveyed and Illustrated (London, 1658 and later editions).2 In 1630, Westcote wrote A View of Devonshire, which was succeeded in 1714 by Risdon’s Chorographical Description of Devon and Exeter.3 Even the small counties of Rutland and Westmorland had their historians.4 One writer, John Norden, a surveyor, cartographer, and sometime religious and social critic, apparently sought (unsuccessfully) to make a living by writing county histories.5 This study limits itself to county histories published between 1576 and 1730, which is roughly the period covered in this book. These were not histories as we know them. Lambarde’s Perambulation was perhaps the most truly historical, relating local to national events.6 Some authors, such as Robert Plot, focused on “natural history,” the flora and fauna of the shire.7 Many traced the histories of major landowners, while also including accounts of towns and cities. In these ways, the histories were usually topographical or “chorographical” in character. While many documented landholding, proceeding hundred by hundred, others incorporated material on chorography, the economy, flora and fauna, office holders, members of Parliament, genealogies and gravestones of prominent families, and buildings (castles, manor houses, churches, monasteries). From this book’s perspective, the histories’ most significant contents were the proto-sociologies of their communities, which confirm many of the observations of more generalist contemporaries. There were a number of points of confluence between county histories and the writers examined earlier. One was the overwhelming dominance of landed elites in their subject matter, which is understandable given the importance of topos in their narratives. Among the most comprehensive accounts of landholdings was William Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656), which traced their descents from the Conquest and Domesday Book (1086). Dugdale must have conducted extensive research in the London archives, which was not always the case. Robert Thoroton’s Antiquities of Nottinghamshire (1677) was dedicated to Dugdale and sought to emulate him, but Thoroton’s medical practice apparently kept him from visiting London collections. In place of archival sources, he supplied lavish plates depicting country houses, coats of arms, and genealogies.8 The content of these volumes was skewed. Given the extensive coverage of landed society, one would never suspect that within a century or so of 1730, England would be experiencing the birth pangs of industrialization.

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  327 Nevertheless, county histories overlap in subject matter with the primary sources cited here, especially those putting the landed elites center stage. Given the prominence assigned to the landed elites, it is remarkable that other groups receive attention at all. There is also something of a geographical bias. The examples examined here include materials for Kent, Cornwall (two cases), Devon (two instances), Wiltshire, and Suffolk. The southwest is overrepresented, but this bias is offset by no less valuable examples from the southeast, the Midlands, and the north from the 1570s through the 1720s. Those figuring in the table below are the most socially comprehensive in their descriptions, but they cannot be considered typical of county histories as a genre. Besides Dugdale and Thoroton, many focused almost exclusively on the landed elites. Where social taxonomies were more inclusive, they varied in contents, but had a ring of predictability about them, as the following table indicates (categories are presented in the order in which they appear in the texts): Here we are a long way from the body social of the three estates and have entered the proto-sociological world of Smith, Harrison, and Wilson. There were some survivors from the old model. The nobility and gentry

Table 15.1 Social Taxonomies in English County Histories, c. 1600–1714 Norden, Cornwall, c. 16009

Carew, Cornwall, 160210

Reyce, Suffolk, 161911

tin workers gentlemen dukes and earls fishermen merchants yeomen husbandmen “the baser sort”

landlords husbandmen tenants cottagers lawyers and physicians nobles gentlemen townsmen yeomen the poor

the poor husbandmen yeomen townsmen gentlemen knights barons

Aubrey, Wiltshire, 169013

Risdon, Devon, 171414

pastoralists v. tillers “worthies” the learned “mechanical arts” husbandmen attorneys eminent clothiers

merchants yeomen artificers nobles gentlemen

Westcote, Devon, 163012 gentlemen yeomen and husbandmen merchants (“third degree”) day laborers

328  Society as Property, 1550–1697 represented the second estate or “chivalry,” as Dudley had described them. Fleming’s description of Westmorland sounds a little like the body social, for he reported that local people “count it much for their credit” that the county had “dignified” barons, earls, and dukes, whom he listed.15 There is a hint, moreover, of the three estates when Westcote called the merchants the “third degree,” but then he proceeded to list four social categories, including one for day laborers! The county histories also departed from Wilson in not supplying the extensive statistics that he had, but in 1600, he was still an exceptional precursor of Political Arithmetic.16 The most glaring omission is that of the clergy, who are largely ignored apart from their buildings and high office holders. This may have been because the Church’s property was rarely transmitted through inheritance and because as an institution, it lost a great deal after the break from Rome. When county historians visited churches, it was often to transcribe the inscriptions on gravestones of local worthies rather than to chart the history of the clerical estate.17 One can speculate that some of the inattention to the clergy duplicated the politique attitudes of Smith, although it is true that even he included a cleric, the “Doctor,” as one of his dialogists. Aubrey’s “Worthies” included a half page on a saint and a post-Reformation bishop, but the remaining list ran to six pages and covered a host of other professions in much greater detail, e.g., soldiers, writers (Hobbes, Christopher Wren), physicians (including the scandalous astrologer Simon Forman), musicians, and William Penn, the founder of the American colony bearing his name. A further chapter listed “learned men that had pensions granted to them by the earls of Pembroke” and included John Donne, dean of St. Paul’s, but physicians and chemists outnumbered the poet. If Aubrey were believed, the most numerous profession was the law, which drove him to near apoplexy. He cited a Gloucestershire attorney who claimed the shire had just four attorneys in the late sixteenth century, whose numbers grew to 300 by 1689. In Somerset there had been just one attorney, who “was so poor that he went a’foot to London; and now they swarm there like locusts.” In the early seventeenth century, Worcestershire had just two lawyers, but “they be now in every market town, and go to markets” and number 100. Aubrey reported England had 3,000 attorneys in his lifetime, and his Victorian editor stated that by George III’s reign, London alone had such numbers.18 Whether there is any truth to these suspiciously round numbers remains to be seen, but as will be shown below, Aubrey was not alone in complaining about the litigiousness of contemporaries. From reading county histories, one would never doubt who were the most prominent, wealthy, and powerful members of these communities. Reyce’s Breviary gave valuable information about Suffolk’s chorography and social structures, but the bulk of the book was devoted to gentry office holding and genealogies.19 The histories were completely candid about their principal subject. It was no coincidence that Dugdale’s Antiquities of

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  329 Warwickshire was dedicated “to my honored friends the gentry of Warwickshire,” because they and their ilk were the book’s principal subject.20 Sir Henry Chauncy’s Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire (1700) said its mission was to document the “Honors, Manors, Castles, Seats and Parks of the Nobility and Gentry . . . ” and he transcribed extensive entries from Domesday.21 Risdon’s study of Devon described itself as “a catalogue of all such noble persons  .  .  .  of this province,” included the “names and arms of the gentry of Devonshire,” and depicted “the particular places, with the most eminent families of the county . . .”. His sections on the gentry and nobility covered 390 pages; that on husbandmen and mechanics, six pages.22 While extensive in their coverage of the landed elites, the histories did not present their status as unproblematic. The humanists’ questioning of birth versus money and virtue was revisited in Lambarde’s Perambulation, which reported how previous generations were careful in bestowing promotions, valuing wealth and virtue more than bloodlines: [W]hereas all nobility and gentry come either by descent, or by purchase, where if the first, if it be not accompanied with virtue, is but an empty sign, and none other thing. . . . But the latter [i.e., riches] (being both the maker and maintainer of the first) as it ought by all reason to be rewarded with due ensigns of honor, to the end that virtue may be the more desirously embraced. Lambarde seemed to rule out birth altogether, stating regarding nobility that there were “appointed three several pathways to lead men straight unto it, that is to say, service, riches, and learning, or . . . virtue and riches: which two (as Aristotle confesses) all the old nobility [consisted?] . . .”.23 Reyce’s definition of gentility included “gentlemen of ancestry,” but also incorporated some humanist categories among the criteria: “learning, valor, virtue,” wealth or “large livelihoods, patrimonies, and ample revenues,” and “learning, wisdom, heroical valor, upright justice, approved government  .  .  .”.24 Westcote, too, endorsed the social humanist’s rethinking of gentility, although perhaps not as rigorously as Lambarde. Westcote stated that nobility was achieved “not only such as by descent from ancient and worthy parentage are so, but those also as by their own proper virtues, valiant actions, travels, learning, and other good deserts, have been, and daily are, by their sovereign, advanced thereunto.”25 Lambarde defined clear economic roles for the gentry and for entrance into their ranks, which included both agriculture and trade. He declared that “out of all those trades of life, which be, that is to say, conversant in gain, they admitted to the estate of gentry such only as increased by honest husbandry, and plentiful merchandize.” He quoted Cicero to the effect that “there is nothing meter for a freeborn man” than to practice farming. As regards merchants and gentility, it was acceptable “if at the length, being satisfied with gain, as it has often come from the sea to the haven, so it change

330  Society as Property, 1550–1697 from the haven into lands and possessions.” But there were lines one did not cross. It was unacceptable to engage in “common buying and selling,” “to exercise mercery,” and “to play the chapman.” Lambarde reported it was considered a “disparagement” for a noble ward to be married to someone living in a borough, and he would exclude from a noble match anyone “as professed handicrafts, or those baser arts of buying and selling.”26 Endorsements of upward social mobility appeared in several shires. Erdeswicke’s Survey of Staffordshire (c. 1603), while focusing on the descents of landholding since the Conquest, cited without disapproval the case of one James Collier of Darlaston, whose grandfather was a tailor, then a draper, then a wool buyer, and who purchased the manor and other nearby lands.27 Westcote, as will be shown, allowed that trade was honorable, but denounced merchants who “by unworthy and unlawful means have amassed up abundance of riches, and being wealthy . . . take on them the attribute of esquires, (before they are gentlemen) . . .”.28 Risdon’s study of Devon, while praising a landed family for being “of good antiquity,” cited favorably the merchants who “become great adventurers and travelers into other countries where profit is to be gotten, which nowadays for the most part they do employ in purchasing of lands, and attain to great estates . . . climbing up daily to the degree of gentlemen, and do bring up their children accordingly . . .”.29 Norden’s survey of Cornwall took a line similar to Lambarde’s on the qualities of a gentleman, endorsing the importance of humanistic civility. Among the gentry, those who “have tasted civil education, are very kind, affable, full of humanity and courteous entertainment . . .”. Some, however, exhibited excessive pride in ancestry and overindulgence, which clashed with a life of virtue: [M]any of them which have lineally descended of chiefest parents, and to good patrimonies, have hereby diminished their livelihoods, and have only the glory of being the son of a famous and generous father, whose commendation and grace is more in the name than in the nature of virtuous ancestors. Offsetting this “consuming vanity” were those “very many virtuous, religious, and staid gentlemen, whose examples might stir up virtuous imitation in the rest . . .”.30 While rarely supplying as much detail about the non-gentle, county histories do provide fascinating information about groups within the old third estate. In some instances, one is given something like an anthropology of local inhabitants. As regards merchants (and unlike lawyers), the county histories were often positive in their portrayals, singling out the wealth they generated and noting, often with approbation, their migration into gentle status. Norden described how the merchants of Cornwall and London traded pickled pilchards to France, which were then re-imported into inland

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  331 towns, while dried and smoked versions of the fish were sent to Spain and Italy.31 Fleming waxed lyrical about the industriousness of Kendal’s inhabitants: “the trade of the town makes it populous, and the people seem to be shaped out for trade, improving themselves not only in their old manufactures of cottons, but of late of making of drugget, serges, hats, worsted stockings, etc.”32 Westcote described how Devon’s trade was “much greater than in former ages” and included cloth, lead, and tin and imports of “what is most needful for the common weal; (or profitable for themselves) . . .”. Traders met the bourgeois ideal in their character—“careful, frugal, and industrious; attaining thereby great wealth, worthy of their endeavors.” Many were the younger sons of gentlemen and esquires, and Westcote rejected the view held in some countries that “a gentleman ceases to be generous and noble as soon as he begins trade in merchandising . . .”. He cited Cicero to the effect that wealth determines all: “poor merchandising is base and contemptible: but plentiful and rich abundantly, bring home from all places necessary commodities, liberally imparting the same: it is not utterly to be despised.” Westcote considered honest (and successful) merchants “among the benefactors of the Commonwealth, and worth of praise and preferment . . .”.33 Hobbes, as will shortly be seen, took similar positions on wealth and poverty, arguing that what counted above all was success. Hard work brought increased production and the upward social mobility that social humanists cherished. Aubrey exuberantly boasted that Salisbury produced “the best white cloths in England” and that Malmesbury, where William Stump’s operation was established in the former abbey buildings, produced 3,000 cloths a year. Such success blurred the lines between traders and gentlemen. Aubrey declared that Paul Methwin of Bradford was “the greatest clothier of his time” (in the reign of Charles II) and “a worthy gentleman”; that a “Mr. Brewer of Trowbridge drives the greatest trade for medleys of any clothier in England.”34 When it came to representations of the lower half of the old third estate, county historians went beyond descriptions and made judgments based upon wealth, deportment, education, civility, apparel, beliefs, and popular culture. Even though these folk practiced a great variety of trades, the historians tended to treat them as a class and, often, a class apart. Rarely, unlike the clothiers, were individual persons or examples mentioned. What historians and anthropologists today call popular culture was a common source of commentary. In Cornwall, based on incomes and deportment, Norden lumped together “mechanics and rustics” as “the baser sort of people, that live by inferior means,” and among the rustics, listed yeomen, husbandmen, and tin workers. He applied the humanist credo of civility, saying, “[M]any of them are of harsh, hard, and of no such civil disposition, very litigious, much inclined to law-quarrels for small causes  .  .  .”. They employed lawyers to fight their cases, who cheated them by settling out of court. The cause of disputes was that “their envious hearts breed these

332  Society as Property, 1550–1697 idle quarrels, and these quarrels their poverty, in divine judgment, which though they feel not, being in so hot an humor of revenge, they weaken their own estates, and strengthen and increase the caterpillars that devour their purses.”35 Westcote devoted a chapter to what he termed “the last degree,” including “day-laborers in tin-works, and hirelings in husbandry,” and said both were “of a strong constitution of body to undertake any painful action, by their rustic, un-nice, and laborious education.” Their lack of niceness and education meant their exercises on holidays were “toilsome and violent”— including dancing, football, hurling, leaping, running, and wrestling—and as “the most inferior,” they were not called to serve in local offices. Many of their “un-nice” sports, Westcote reported, had been “forced out of the country” as the gentry took up bowling, hawking, and hunting. Yet, despite the diverging cultures, Westcote cited an anonymous source confirming remarks by Utopia and Clement Armstrong that “ ‘without these [people] cannot a city be inhabited nor occupied . . . ’ ”.36 References to popular culture included religious inclinations and even styles of dress. King’s Vale Royal said the people of Cheshire were “very gentle and courteous” and “ready to help” in harvest time, but “very zealous” and “addicted to superstition, which comes through want of preaching.”37 Fleming made positive noises about Kendal’s cloth industry, as we have seen. He also felt called upon to comment on the comportment and dress of the inhabitants, who he reported were “generally addicted to sobriety and temperance, and express a thriftiness in their apparel, the women using a plain though decent and handsome dress, above most of their neighbors.”38 The most extraordinary case of ad hominem history was Aubrey’s account of regional differences in Wiltshire. He split the county between north and south based on their economies—and much more! The north was pastoral with “little, tillage or hard labor, they only milk the cows and make cheese; they feed chiefly on milk meats, which cools their brains too much, and hurts their inventions.” This economy and diet affected the personalities and deportment of the denizens. As a result, “the indigense, or aborigines, speak drawling; they are phlegmatic, skins pale and livid, slow and dull, heavy of spirit . . .”. These conditions produced strange, difficult personalities, bad citizens, even witches—“melancholy, contemplative, and malicious”—resulting in twice as many lawsuits as in the south, people “more apt to be fanatics,” and with rumors of witchcraft in Malmesbury hundred (which, however, did not appear to hinder the town’s cloth production, nor overachieving by a favorite son, Hobbes, according to Aubrey). If the problem was not alimentary, it was arboreal, because the north had “sour and austere plants . . . which makes their humors sour and fixes their spirits.” In contrast, the south of the county was mainly in tillage, with shepherds who worked diligently but did not read or think over much: “their flesh is hard, their bodies strong: being weary after hard labor, they have not leisure to

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  333 read and contemplate of religion, but go to bed to their rest, to rise betime the next morning to their labor.”39 Not all county histories were so judgmental and generalized. Many provided detailed representations that were possibly informative about the lower levels of rural society, artisans, and the poor. Yeomen were ranked higher than husbandmen, but the two were also lumped together, presumably because their economic positions were similar. Risden said the “yeomanry consists of husbandmen, freeholders, and farmers, men of free nature and good condition . . .”.40 It was assumed that yeomen had larger holdings. Carew said little about them, but drew a brilliant portrait of husbandmen, including descriptions of their common fields, furnishings, housing, livestock, and victuals.41 Reyce agreed with Wilson that yeomen were prosperous, with “such strong, sure, and deep foundations” that members even rose to become “noble and worthy families.” But even Reyce affirmed that yeomen families were likely to suffer from “the costly charge of these unfaithful times” and experience economic decline.42 Westcote referred to yeomen and husbandmen as “the second degree” in society, below the gentry and aristocracy. He thought highly of yeomen because many of them were descended from the younger sons of gentlemen and so were “gentlemen’s equals by estate, and are saluted with suitable terms of master . . .”. They spoke to their servants “as a prince to his subjects” and directed farming operations, which were “the liver-veins of the Commonwealth, yielding both good juice and nourishment to all other parts thereof.” In Devon, the husbandman was “of much inferior degree, employing himself wholly in labor and holding the plough,” and yet, “these do maintain the state of the world, and their whole desire is knowledge in their work and occupation.”43 Writing of Nottinghamshire—and here we reprise the debates discussed in Chapter 14—Thoroton thought as highly of the husbandman as Westcote. Thoroton called agriculture “the great root and measure of all . . . which necessarily employs, supports, and multiplies people,” “so that the king in his political capacity, as well as his natural, is fed by the husbandman . . .”. For these reasons, the author denounced converting tillage to pasture, which he described as a “devouring pestilence” that caused “loss to the Commonwealth” of people and production. The lord doubled his profits in converting land, but this “prevailing mischief . . . has taken away and destroyed more private families of good account, than time itself within the compass of my observations . . .”.44 Because of the perceived significance of agriculture, the county histories gave rather less space to artisanal labor, and when they did, it was often in negative terms. Norden, like Aubrey, argued for regional diversity. In Cornwall, Norden reported, tin-mining parishes and ones in tillage had differing fortunes. The places dominated by miners were “for the most part of meanest estate; and they that stand upon tillage are in best estate . . .”. Economic

334  Society as Property, 1550–1697 geography had moral and cultural dimensions, for Norden claimed the split “argues in the first [mining] either ill success in their minerals, or idleness or riot; and in the second, industry and diligence.”45 Reyce, too, observed economic divergence in Suffolk trades, reporting “that in those parts of this shire, where the clothiers do dwell or have dwelled, there are found the greatest number of poor  .  .  .”. He had no explanation for the phenomenon, but found a countervailing one “in the other parts where the meaner sort do practice spinning of thread, linen, and other such like women’s employments are nothing so poor.” It is conceivable that Reyce was observing that women’s employment mitigated hardship by increasing a family’s income.46 Certainly that was part of Leicester’s thinking in the 1570s and John Locke’s in the 1690s. Westcote included both husbandmen and miners in his chapter, but discussed the two separately. Unlike Norden, Westcote’s was a sensitive, almost emotional account of the tin miner “than whom (as it seems to me) no laborer whatsoever undergoes greater hazard of peril or danger  .  .  .”. He spent the day “like a mole or earth-worm underground, mining in deep vaults or pits” and living with the threat that, although the earth is “propped, posted, crossed, traversed, and supported with divers great beams of timber to keep them in security, yet all is sometimes too little; they perish with the fall thereof notwithstanding.” The miner’s diet was “hard or coarse fare  .  .  .  bread, the brownest; cheese, the hardest; drink, the thinnest . . .”. Yet, in contrast to the affluent, miners achieved a kind of nobility of their own: “they are satisfied; sleep soundly without careful thoughts, which most rich men want not, which are either greedy of more, or press nature with superfluities of provoking sauces, hot wines, waters and spices . . .”.47 Similarly positive about “artificers and mechanics” was Risdon, who reported Devon’s were “trained up in trades, who are excellent in making colored cloths”—called Devonshire kerseys—the “best and finest of the kingdom.”48 Descriptions of the poor are rarely neutral. They connect with social assumptions, which, of course, is a premise of this book. These observations are no less true when it comes to early modern county histories, which demonstrate a variety of positions and policies. They range from belief in a comprehensive, inclusive, Christian community reminding one of St. Francis’s vision, which had its correlative in English Church ales, to the rejection of such gatherings as immoral, to harsh government policies towards the voluntarily poor, to attempts to relieve and employ the poor through statutory regulations, and to stricter control of charitable foundations. The closest thing to a Franciscan vision of the poor and the representation of a body social came from Reyce’s Breviary and Aubrey’s (admittedly nostalgic) description of traditional charity. Reyce began his section on the “poorer sort” by saying it was they “from whom all other sorts of estates do take their beginning.” He denounced those “many in these days, who esteem the multitude of our poor here to be a matter of heavy burden, and

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  335 a sore discommodity, thinking that as no grief is greater than their own, so no incommodity to be greater than that which is where they dwell.” Reyce reminded the reader that as well the poor as the rich proceed from the Lord, and that the rich cannot stand without the poor, or if they did see how far the number of the poor in other shires do exceed ours, they would not esteem of our poor as a burden, but as a looking glass wherein the rich may see his own estate, if once the Lord should bereave him of his benefits which he does daily abuse. Reyce did not, however, break with the now-familiar rejection of voluntary poverty and the Franciscan paradigm. He thought that few of the truly poor “by impotence or by casualty” went unrelieved by charity. For the “thriftless,” he favored the many “late godly laws” against the “riotous, idle person, or vagabond” which, like social humanists, he felt would reform them and diminish their numbers.49 Aubrey’s Topographical Collections dates from the 1650s and ’60s and drew sharp contrasts between pre- and post-Reformation society. He endorsed the position that the body social was a living, real thing. In old times, lords of manors never went to London except when Parliament met and once a year to do homage to the monarch. They kept “good houses” and dined in “great Gothic halls” at high table with “the folk at the side tables.” Servants and retainers slept in the great halls, where Christmas plays were performed and armaments were stored. Alehouses and inns hardly existed except in large towns; thirsty people went to the friaries. Sounding like James Harrington (see below), Aubrey claimed the “balance of government” was altered by the sale of Church lands to the common people. Organic social bonds were in a state of dissolution, and the “mean people lived lawless, nobody to govern them, they cared for nobody, having on nobody any dependence . . .”. Women were increasingly ornamental rather than useful. The nunneries had trained young maidens in “modesty and obedience” and taught them needlework, confectionary, and surgery. Then there were no apothecaries or surgeons because “the gentlewomen did cure their poor neighbors: their hands are now too fine  .  .  .”. As for the poor, taxes were not levied to support them, and almshouses were few. Every parish had a poor man’s box and Church house where Church ales were held to bring together neighbors and raise funds for the needy. Since the Reformation, “these parts have swarmed with poor people” because of the privatizing of common lands. Statutory taxes to support the poor had to be raised, and the sums were considerable: the parishes of Calne and Chippenham each spent £500 p.a. in 1663, Aubrey averred. Nevertheless, some conditions were improving. Even the poorest in receipt of alms now had glass windows, whereas before Henry VIII’s reign, only churches and the best rooms of gentlemen’s homes were so furnished.50

336  Society as Property, 1550–1697 The institution of Church ales was controversial in the early modern era.51 Carew included a lengthy discussion of the pros and cons in his Survey of Cornwall. There were a variety of feasts held in many parishes, including harvest dinners of the wealthy, to which neighbors and kin were invited, a feast on the dedication day of the Church in which all householders participated, and the Church ales. In Cornwall, two young men were chosen each year to organize these gatherings. They collected food and drink to feed neighbors at the Church house and gathered contributions for the parish stock for the poor. Members of the clergy denounced the feast days as “superstitious” and the Church ales as “licentious.” Carew gave both sides of the story. Regarding Church ales, the defense was that they augmented the “entertaining of Christian love, conforming of men’s behavior to a civil conversation, compounding of controversies, appeasing of quarrels, raising a store which might be converted partly to good and godly uses,” including relief of the poor. Contrariwise, the get togethers mixed the sacred and the profane: “the very title of ale was somewhat nasty, and the thing itself had been corrupted with such a multitude of abuses, to wit, idleness, drunkenness, lasciviousness, vain disports of minstrelsy, dancing, and disorderly night-watchings, that the best curing was to cut it clean away.”52 Dedication days, too, came in for criticism. The editor of the second edition of Dugdale’s Antiquities of Warwickshire (1730) included a statement from the vicar of Ilmington questioning whether an annual feast on September 21st was the genuine article. The inhabitants claimed to be celebrating St. Matthew’s Day, but the minister said it was “by some very improperly called the wake, being of no religious institution, or in the least relating to the dedication of the church, but was set up by mobbish people for wrestling and other masculine exercises about the year 1650.”53 Carew was concerned about popular disorder and morality, so he not surprisingly took a negative line similar to Reyce’s on voluntary poverty. Carew maintained that Ireland was the source of most vagabonds in Cornwall, and was a “nursery, which sends over yearly, yea and daily, whole shiploads of these crooked slips . . .”. There were good laws passed against them, but “after the nine days’ wonder expired  .  .  .  those vermin swarm again in every corner.” Their misdeeds were “to the high offence of God and good order” and included atheism, blasphemy, drunkenness, idleness, lechery, and theft, “and, in a word, all impiety . . .”. What one of them consumed in a day would keep an honest pauper for a week.54 Other reforms aimed at reforming the poor appeared in county histories and reflected national developments. Aubrey’s account of Surrey listed almshouses in the county c. 1651, including strict regulations to be used according to a donor’s bequest.55 Fleming reported that at Kendal, many of the poor were put to work in the thriving cloth manufactures, whereby “the town [is] much enriched.” Patterns of charity were changing more broadly, judging by examples from Berkshire’s county historian, who in 1719 published the bequest of John Kendrick, citizen and draper of London, dated December 30,

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  337 1624. Kendrick specified that the poor of Reading were to receive preference in working on a “common stock” derived from the huge gift of £7,500. He also bequeathed £200 to put to work 40 London vagrants in Bridewell, the nation’s first house of correction and a humanist-inspired institution.56 III. THE BELLY, PATRIARCHY, AND SOCIAL CLASSES IN CORIOLANUS (1608) The play was set in ancient Rome, with most of the action occurring in the city and its hinterland, and it encompassed a number of political and social narratives. The political dimensions included conflicts in Parliament with James VI and I  in 1606 over the location of sovereignty in the constitution.57 A number of authorities agree that contretemps in government made it harder and harder to represent government using an organic metaphor.58 These upheavals signified that the “Jacobean state was clearly not unified around a universally accepted organic analogy” for a model of society and government.59 Yet another scholar sees the drama of Coriolanus originating in the micro-politics of Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1590s and early 1600s, when Fulke Greville, notorious as a grasping landlord, took on the local burghers over a parliamentary election.60 Politics and the state were unquestionably present in Coriolanus, and so too were social narratives, including categories and conflicts between classes driven by economic issues. The play included a little-noticed redefinition of the body social and offered alternative structures centered on patriarchy and virtue. A  number of authorities have stated that the organic analogy no longer worked, that it was outmoded, even “travestied” by its simplistic representation in the play, suggesting that Shakespeare was satirizing the use of the metaphor.61 But scholars have been hard put to discover an alternative model apart from generalities about feudalism, capitalism, and the growing impact of market forces upon society.62 These generalizations are too abstract and lack context. Ruling out organic metaphors, moreover, does little to clarify their significance. Most useful is Hale’s observation that organic analogies provide “no guidance” in the play because its world was not functioning “for the well-being of the whole body.” Rather “individual members are variously selfish or self-righteous, Machiavellian or muddle-headed.” The social conflict between the patricians and plebians made it “too complicated to be comprehended by a simple analogy.”63 As regards the play’s social context, the critical event was the recent Midland Revolt of 1607, the questions that arose from it, and what they say about representations of the rural social order of early Stuart England.64 Despite its urban venue, the play used the language of English landed society. The tribune Brutus criticized Coriolanus for saying that, if chosen consul, he would not listen to the people, but rather “by the suit of the gentry

338  Society as Property, 1550–1697 to him, and the desire of the nobles.” Minor officials working in the Senate repeated these statements, saying Coriolanus “loves not the common people” and was culpable of “noble carelessness” and considered himself “too noble . . .”. En route to a meeting in the Capitol, Coriolanus was accompanied by “all the gentry . . .”. When challenged by the tribunes, he accused them of being “against all noble sufferance” and claimed the people’s purpose was “by plot to curb the will of the nobility” because they were “foes to nobleness.” When he left Rome in Act 4 Sc. 1, he was accompanied by supporters from “the young nobility” who were vexed that the tribunes had set the people “against the senators, patricians, and nobles.” When Coriolanus went to treat with the enemy Volscians and was challenged by their general’s servants, he described himself as “a gentleman” and they referred to him as a “poor gentleman  .  .  .”. The Roman patricians were referred to as “the lords of the city.”65 Privileging the landed elites enhanced the playwright’s ability to communicate with that part of his audience; it also reflected the idealized balance of property holding in early seventeenthcentury England. The play occasionally used traditional body imagery. Coriolanus welcomed war with the Volsces “to vent our musty superfluity . . .”. The play referred to the “common body” and the “body of the weal” in dialogues concerning society and the state. When the tribunes and the mob sought to unseat Coriolanus, they referred to him as “a disease that must be cut away,” “a limb that has but a disease; mortal to cut it off, to cure it easy.”66 In reality, the play redefined the social order, basing it on property holding. As in much contemporary commentary, wealth and social conflict were center stage in Coriolanus. The play’s opening act radically reordered how the body worked. When the citizens rioted, calling for the Senate to provide them with food, Menenius, a friend and ally of Coriolanus, invoked Aesop’s fable about the belly, arguing that it fed the rest of the body, even though it was “idle and unactive . . . never bearing like labor with the rest” because it “did minister unto the appetite and affection common of the whole body.” The citizens challenged this gloss, arguing, as Aesop had, that “the cormorant belly be restrain’d, who is the sink o’th’ body . . .”.67 In his replies, Menenius asserted the primacy of the belly as consumer and distributor of wealth, revamping the three-estate theory in which the commons were the providers, and endorsing trickle-down economics, in which those with the most property were the source of nourishment. The belly admitted, “I receive the general food at first which you do live upon,” which was justifiable because “I am the storehouse and the shop of the whole body.” In anatomical analogies that might have delighted William Harvey, Menenius said the belly sent the food “through the rivers of your blood even to the court, the heart, to th’seat o’th’ brain; and through the cranks and offices of man the strongest nerves and small inferior veins from me receive that natural competency whereby they live.” To the “mutinous members,” he responded that the common people gave nothing but received all from the stomach, or the

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  339 top people: “The senators of Rome are this good belly. . . . For examine their counsels and their cares, digest things rightly touching the weal o’th’common, you shall find no public benefit which you receive but it proceeds or comes from them to you, and no way from yourselves.”68 No longer did the warriors and clergy stand upon and draw their nourishment from the “feet,” or commonalty. The elites were now the organ from which all nourishment flowed. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare showed a sharp eye for social consciousness and conflict. Both Coriolanus and Menenius referred disparagingly to the commonalty and represented the positions of the aristocracy. Hostility between the commons and nobility was expressed in harsh, graphic terms. Menenius called the tribunes “herdsmen of the beastly plebeians,” while Coriolanus dubbed them “the tongues o’th’ common mouth,” adding, “I do despise them . . .”. For their parts, the tribunes speculated about their fate if their enemy stood for consul, taking comfort from the likelihood that he would refuse to appear before the common people in the marketplace and “beg their stinking breaths.” While they elected Coriolanus, who was a war hero, the citizens said if they had not done so, they would have been considered “a monster of the multitude” and “monstrous members” because when they complained about grain prices, he had labeled them “the manyheaded multitude.”69 When the citizens were out of earshot, Coriolanus called them “Hob and Dick,” the equivalent of “Tom, Dick, and Harry,” and “the mutable, rank-scented meinie  .  .  .”. Popular rule would bring down the Senate, he argued, “and bring in the crows to peck the eagles.” Upon his exile, Coriolanus told his family, allies, and the young nobles who assembled for his leave taking that “the beast with many heads butts me away.” For her part, Coriolanus’s mother Volumnia accused the tribunes of having “incens’d the rabble,” while Menenius told them they stood for “the breath of garlic-eaters” and lambasted the citizens—“your stinking greasy caps”—for forcing Coriolanus into exile.70 From the opening scenes, the play made clear that the basis of class hostilities was economic. In the first scene, when Rome was about to be attacked by the Volscians, a “company of mutinous Citizens with staves, clubs, and other weapons” gathered to protest against the patricians. The citizens were inflamed about the lack of food in the city, and they blamed the patricians and above all, Coriolanus, “chief enemy to the people,” whom one citizen proposed to kill so that “we’ll have corn at our own price.” The same man maintained that the surplus wealth of the elites would supply the needs of the crowd: “The leanness that afflicts us, the object of our misery, is as an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain to them.” If the rich would not assist them, “[l]et us revenge this with our pikes ere we become rakes; for the gods know, I speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge.”71 Menenius claimed in response that the gods, not the patricians, caused food shortages; that citizens slandered the holders of “the helms o’th’state, who care for you like fathers, when you curse them as enemies.” The same

340  Society as Property, 1550–1697 citizen summed up well the position of the populace: “Care for us? True, indeed! They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain . . .”. Instead, the patricians allowed usury to be practiced and repealed “any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor.” Were the statutes the Elizabethan and Jacobean poor laws? Menenius’s parting shot added the military burden the rich laid on the poor: “If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us.”72 The tribunes Brutus and Sicinius agreed, suggesting Coriolanus would have dispossessed the populace and enslaved them. He defined their fate in terms of property: “he would have made them mules, silenc’d their pleaders, and dispropertied their freedoms, holding them . . . of no more soul nor fitness for the world than camels in the war, who have their provand only for bearing burdens, and sore blows for sinking under them.”73 Besides his own “virtue,” discussed below, the only refuge Coriolanus found was in the patriarchal household. There were repeated references in the play to the household; family members, especially his wife and mother, played prominent roles in the drama. Ultimately, the women were unsuccessful in saving him from his fate, but that was not their fault, because they had successfully acted as peacemakers. Patriarchal language was commonly mixed with references to the state, showing the power of this imagery to an early seventeenth-century audience. We have seen that those at “the helm of the state” were described as being “like fathers.” The third scene of Act I took place in in the household of Coriolanus, where the female protagonists Volumnia (his mother) and Virgilia (his wife) sat in domestic poses on low stools, sewing. A gentlewoman named Valeria visited them, observing to the women, “[Y]ou are manifest housekeepers.” Valeria wished Virgilia to go with her and “play the idle housewife,” but the latter refused, saying she would not go “over the threshold” until Coriolanus returned from the wars. She called him “my lord,” while Volumnia referred to him as “sir, sir, sir . . .”. It was the women who announced the victorious return of Coriolanus, who welcomed him home, and whose hands he held in welcome and celebration.74 Yet, the patriarchal household did not hold together, despite the women’s involvement in politics and their success in peacemaking. After the assassination of Coriolanus, the household was presumably destroyed. In the meantime, the women actively engaged in the politics of the street. They accompanied Coriolanus to the gate whence he was banished and then confronted the tribune Sicinius, who introduced a number of stereotypes of female behavior in his defense. As Virgilia was weeping profusely, Sicinius suggested avoiding her attention because “they say she’s mad.” Even their supporter Menenius told the women to keep themselves under control and “be not so loud . . .”. Virgilia connived in the theme of female weakness, protesting her powerlessness to stop Coriolanus from leaving, saying “I would I had the power to say so to my husband.” Volumnia was prepared to take up the cudgels, again introducing the concept of the household in asserting

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  341 that the tribunes were unworthy of “the meanest house in Rome . . .”. And then we were back to negative stereotypes as Sicinius accused her, too, of “one that wants her wits,” while the mother called upon the gods to “confirm my curses” and stated that she embraced her anger.75 The denouement of the drama again had the women center stage. When Coriolanus returned to attack Rome at the head of the Volscian army, his Roman supporter Cominius observed that “all hope is vain—unless his noble mother and his wife, who, as I hear, mean to solicit him for mercy to his country . . .”. But Coriolanus was desperate. When Menenius begged him to “pardon Rome,” he rejected his obligations, even as a patriarch: “Wife, mother, child, I know not. My affairs are servanted to others.” In gestures of supplication to the patriarch, Virgilia kissed him and Volumnia knelt before him, as did his son. Volumnia pulled no punches and accused Coriolanus of breaking the patriarchal bond: “Making the mother, wife, and child to see the son, the husband, and the father tearing his country’s bowels out . . .”. She called upon him to desist from his attack and invoked her maternal position: “thou shalt no sooner march to assault thy country than to tread—trust to’t, thou shalt not—on thy mother’s womb that brought thee to this world.” Virgilia added her own protest concerning her son: “and mine that brought you forth this boy to keep your name living to time.” Finally, after considerably more pleading by the women and his son, Coriolanus agreed to make peace rather than war. The ladies were celebrated in a triumphant parade in Act 5.76 Coriolanus includes a number of representations related to the body social. The play moved beyond the concept of a natural interdependence of the three estates. The character Coriolanus fatefully leaned on the old martial model and was weak on social humanist virtues. Greater attention to Machiavellian issues of political survival and mass urban politics might have been his salvation. He was little interested in the promotion to consul and refused to campaign for it, though he eventually accepted it. He showed disrespect to the tribunes and to the citizens. Coriolanus exemplified life in an age of social polarization, his attitudes bearing witness that people were conscious of their economic situations and those of others. His Achilles heel was his obsession with personal honor and, in some measure, that of his class. His sense of virtue was largely limited to his family and his personal world. Concerning his commitment to fight for Rome, a rebellious citizen observed that “though soft-conscienced men can be content to say it was for his country, he did it to please his mother and to be partly proud—which he is, even to the altitude of his virtue.”77 The play’s definition of virtue was narrow and focused on “valiantness,” a term that Shakespeare drew from Plutarch, which was a throwback to chivalric feats and concepts of honor, and was decidedly pre-social humanist. After defeating the Volsces in Act 2, Coriolanus announced that “valor is the chiefest virtue, and most dignifies the haver.”78 In the sixteenth century, such limited definitions still had currency, but they were increasingly

342  Society as Property, 1550–1697 intermingled with notions of virtue and learning. Following the arguments of Bartolus de Saxoferrato in the fourteenth century, honor was represented as the reward for virtue. Ultimately, virtue was given more prominence than lineage, learning more than martial feats, and godliness more than personal honor.79 Perhaps the closest real-life parallel to Coriolanus was Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex (1566–1601), who also despised the lowborn and was a military man, but whose political ambitions, alleged atheism, and ultimate rebellion were not paralleled in the play.80 IV. HOBBES AND PROPERTY With respect to the model of the body, Hobbes renounced the use of “metaphors, tropes, and other rhetorical figures, instead of words proper.” He employed the body image, included most famously on the title page of Leviathan (1651), but the picture and the words accompanying it were a reversal of hundreds of years of the three-estate theory, because the monarch’s body was an abstraction representing the sovereign authority, which contained dozens of equally abstracted small human bodies. Hobbes consistently stated that the body politic was an artificial creation, the work of man, not of a divinity, as much like a machine as a living thing. The body politic, he had stated in The Elements of Law (1640–42), was a “fictitious body . . .”.81 Leviathan continued this theme, asserting that “that great Leviathan called a Common-Wealth, or state, (in Latin civitas) . . . is but an artificial man,” hence the frontispiece to the book. It was created by nature, which God had made, but who also gave humankind “the Art” to “make an artificial animal.” This artificial body, which Hobbes defined as “but a motion of limbs,” could be replicated as a machine or “Automata” with a spring for the heart, strings for the nerves, and wheels for joints. So, through art, a state could be constructed “in which, the Sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body . . .”. Hobbes made some later use of the body metaphor in Leviathan, but most often as a weak analogy.82 Beginning, as he had, from the premise that bodies were artificial, even mechanical inventions, it was not inconceivable that Hobbes might have drawn the same conclusion about social bodies, but he did not. Socially, the overall burden of Leviathan is that there was no pre-existing set of estates and established relationships between them as specified in the organic, functionalist model. Where Hobbes’s social positions are concerned, it is worth citing a frequently ignored passage in part III of Leviathan, “Of a Christian Commonwealth.” Here, Hobbes spelled out his objections to Cardinal Bellarmine’s use of the organic model. He denied the cardinal’s suggestion that “the members of every Commonwealth, as of a natural body, depend one of another . . .”. While allowing they might “cohere together,” he added, “they depend only on the sovereign, which is the soul of the Commonwealth;

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  343 which failing the Commonwealth is dissolved into a civil war . . .”. Lacking political life, the result was social death: “[F]or want of a common dependence on a known sovereign; just as the members of the natural body dissolve into earth, for want of a soul to hold them together.” The remnants of the three estates were no more than that and were nothing without the sovereign authority; relationships of dominance and subordination were no more: “there is nothing in this similitude, from whence to infer a dependence of the laity on the clergy, or of the temporal officers on the spiritual; but of both on the civil sovereign . . .”.83 What social arrangements, if any, did Hobbes put in place of the organic three estates? Where does he stand in comparison with contemporaries who also eschewed the body social? One must, of course, beware of the possibility that Hobbes deployed rhetoric concerning matters social (and political) in order to justify the need for a sovereign state. After all, we have seen him positing civil war as the sole alternative to the maintenance of a sovereign authority. It would have been tempting and rhetorically efficacious for him similarly to offer no social underpinning to the state and instead to posit a tabula rasa in social terms. Nevertheless, there is good reason to see a model of society in Hobbes. It was not the full-blown “possessive market society” posited by Macpherson, but it is one that quite thoroughly broke with the body social. Hobbes had social issues he seemed to think required resolution. He rejected the notion that humans were capable of cooperation in society. He famously raised the question of why bees and ants could “live sociably one with another” so that Aristotle counted them among “political creatures,” whereas “mankind cannot do the same.” Hobbes gave several reasons for human failure in this regard, some of which are considered shortly and which were fundamental to his definition of human psychology as basically selfish. Hobbes’s model was one based upon competition, individualism, and the positive value of wealth. The last two, at least, owed much to the social humanist model. As regards the first, in answering the question of why humans were unable to live cooperatively in society like the ants and the bees, Hobbes cited several reasons. The first was that humans were competing with one another: “men are continually in competition for honor and dignity, which these creatures are not,” so, “consequently among men there arises on that ground, envy and hatred, and finally war; but among these not so.” The second explanation was the difference in regard for the common good, for among bees and ants, “the common good differs not from the private,” while man’s “joy consists in comparing himself with other men  .  .  .”.84 The human was a lone wolf driven by a huge ego, because Hobbes defined “power, worth, dignity, honor, and worthiness” as qualities of the individual person. This made it impossible for a man to act collectively, “seeing [as] every man is presumed to do all things in order to his own benefit . . .”. Government was needed because competition between individuals caused crime and civil strife. This was not, however, some historically

344  Society as Property, 1550–1697 remote or abstract state of nature. Even when there were laws to protect the individual, and they were enforced by public officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall be done him; what opinion he has of his fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests. Does he not there as much accuse mankind by his actions, as I do by my words?85 A bleak view of fellow humans, some might say, but a point to which Hobbes returned again and again. One of the promises of Leviathan concerned property and its security. Again, this guarantee was not presented as an abstraction, but was based on a positive affirmation of the value of wealth and a rejection of poverty. Hobbes affirmed in his chapter on power that “riches, are honorable; for they are power. Poverty, dishonorable.” He went further, turning the tables on the social vocabulary of the “Commonwealth-men” by validating “covetousness.” He wrote that “covetousness of great riches, and ambition of great honors, are honorable; as signs of power to obtain them. Covetousness, and ambition, of little gains, or preferments, is dishonorable.” He also used the language of the cash nexus, acquisitiveness, and the marketplace in his rhetoric.86 Regarding personal power, “the value, or worth of a man, is as of all other things, his price”; it was “not the seller, but the buyer [who] determines the price.” The upshot of competition, he stated, “makes men invade for gain . . .”. Hobbes described the pursuit of power in terms of acquisitiveness associated with living well. He posited, “[A] general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceases only in death.” It was not simply that a man sought greater and greater pleasure, or that he was unhappy with a modicum of power. Rather, it was that “he cannot assure the power and means to live well . . . without the acquisition of more.” It was not enough for the state to ensure the safety of having a “bare preservation”; there should also be available “all other contentments of life, which every man by lawful industry, without danger, or hurt to the Commonwealth, shall acquire to himself.” Echoing Sir Thomas Smith in an earlier era, he observed concerning the “nourishment” and “procreation” of a Commonwealth that “money . . . is a sufficient measure of the value of all things . . .”.87 As concerned the poor, Hobbes adopted the by then conventional social humanist imposition of institutional isolation. He favored traditional charity, which was to enhance the honor of “great persons” and givers, but he questioned the effectiveness of the organic nexus of rich and poor. In justifying public responsibility, he denounced “uncharitableness in any man, to neglect the impotent” and included the state if it abandoned them “to the hazard of such uncertain charity.” The poor who were unable to support themselves were to receive institutionalized public welfare, while those with “strong bodies” were to be put to forced labor at home or sent to the colonies.88

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  345 Hobbes’s position on the question of property affirms that he considered it important for his society and his audience. In the doomsday scenario of civil war and “every man against every man,” “there be no propriety [property], no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man’s, that he can get . . .”. The seventh provision of “the rights of sovereigns” concerned property and the setting of rules, “whereby every man may know, what goods he may enjoy, and what actions he may do, without being molested by any of his fellow subjects: and this is it [sic] men call propriety.” The sovereign, in effect, created property, which was “an effect of Commonwealth,” although the subject’s right to property was not absolute and could be overruled by the state.89 The foregoing suggests that Hobbes’s view of society represents a decisive break with the body social. Admittedly, earlier writers such as Smith had articulated an alternative vision of the social world emphasizing competition and individualism, but Hobbes took things further. He boldly rejected the organic model of social cooperation and assumed the opposite, that is, that humans were inherently and irretrievably competitive and self-interested, that it was honorable for them to be wealthy and to seek riches, that only a sovereign authority could control their appetites for wealth and power, and that such an authority was needed to care for the impotent and to police the able-bodied poor, because acts of charity were insufficient in a selfish world. Hobbes discarded the principle of social interdependence that figured so strongly in the body social. Like others before him, he observed the casting off of notions of a fixed social hierarchy based upon birth. In Behemoth, he explained the English civil wars by reference to old versus new concepts of property. According to Macpherson, those who supported Parliament believed in a “new concept of unconditional individual right to property” and rejected the “old order of ranks . . .”. Hobbes observed that the “ ‘King, they thought, was but a title of the highest honor, which gentleman, knight, baron, earl, duke, were but steps to ascend to, with the help of riches . . . ’ ”.90 Even if Hobbes retained an important role for the nobility, the hierarchy was perceived to be open to mobility up and down the social scale as other commentators had done for some time, from Medwall’s late fifteenth-century play Fulgens and Lucrece to Edward Waterhouse in the mid-seventeenth century.91 V. HARRINGTON AND PROPERTY Among historians of seventeenth-century politics and political thought, the work of James Harrington is highly regarded. Woolrych described Oceana (1656) as “the greatest work of republican thought” in early modern England, while Pocock called it a “major revision” of political thought, “the true pioneer of civic humanist thought in England,” which forged a vital link between Florentine republicanism and that of the American colonists. According to Pocock, Harrington used the language of property rather than

346  Society as Property, 1550–1697 the natural law of the Levellers, the common law of the lawyers, or the divine law of the saints; he rejected conceiving of political change in moral terms, opting instead for material and institutional explanations, and he observed that a Commonwealth was held together, not by divine rule and intervention, but by a stable distribution of property.92 The interest of Harrington for this book is his inclusion of social analysis in his theory of politics. This incorporation of a social dimension is well known to historians. According to Sabine, Harrington presented republicanism “as a consequence of social and economic evolution” and observed “the shifting of economic power” from the nobility and monarchy to the common people, an imbalance of forces that led to civil wars and revolutions in the seventeenth century.93 Tawney similarly recognized Harrington as “the first English thinker to find the cause of political upheaval in antecedent social change” and to perceive that England’s revolutions were caused by “changes in social organization” and “impersonal forces” that few others noticed at the time.94 Pocock allowed that Harrington developed “the economic foundation on which any political society must ultimately rest” and compared him, probably facetiously, to Marx using the dialectic.95 Macpherson took the discussion of the social issue still further, contending that the triumphant gentry in Harrington’s model were progenitors of the English middle classes because the landed elites were “sufficiently bourgeois to administer an entrepreneurial society acceptably to the entrepreneurs.” Macpherson pointed to Harrington’s acceptance of usury, rackrenting, capital accumulation, and “upward class mobility” based upon one’s labor as indications of his acceptance of development towards a “bourgeois society.”96 Even if Macpherson’s position is not widely accepted, Harrington is still perceived as giving prominence to material conditions in political development. Worden writes that he “ ‘made property the foundation of all government’,” that it was the “secret of political stability,” that rulers had to”ensure that the balance of political power . . . reflected the balance of economic power,” and that forms of government were dictated by the “distribution of landed wealth.”97 Despite Harrington’s stellar reputation as a political thinker, the social dimensions of his work have received limited analysis. This is partly, perhaps, because Harrington, like Hobbes, subsumed the social under the political, which he did arguably in the interest of capturing the social, i.e., preventing the at-the-time much-feared social disorder and threats to property. Whatever the reason, scholars have given too little attention to Harrington’s social thinking, leaving open some interesting questions. If he was interested in preserving the social order, what did he say concerning the body social, patriarchalism, and the three estates? Were his social ideas original to himself, or did he owe significant debts to others? To Francis Bacon? To Thomas Wilson? To the Levellers—for a theory of social change? As a result, can he be contextualized in his time rather than treated as a “utopian” thinker?98

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  347 What were the social assumptions with which he analyzed political developments and with which he built a thinly disguised model for England in Oceana? Was he possibly arguing for an aristocratic revival as a solution to the perceived chaos of the 1640s and ’50s? Like Hobbes and the Levellers before him, Harrington rejected functionbased, organic models. He cast aside dependency, a core element of the body social, in various forms. As regards participation in government and the military, the constitution of Oceana divided people into citizens and servants, and the second group had no voice because their status was “inconsistent with freedom or participation . . . in a Commonwealth.” In addition, they were not permitted to enroll in the militia because they held no land.99 Harrington’s denial of dependents’ rights was not merely a principled objection to the participation of “servants” in government and the military. His rejection also encompassed what he considered feudal service, the basis of what he termed the “Gothic” monarchy, which he dismissed based upon practical, historical considerations. Harrington maintained, following Bacon’s account of Henry VII’s reign, that the Crown’s suppression of the nobility’s armed retainers in the long term undermined aristocratic power, but with the unforeseen consequence that the monarchy was destroyed in the civil wars of Harrington’s lifetime. The king’s arms, he noted, “proved as ineffectual as his nobility” because “without a nobility or an army . . . there can be no monarchy.”100 Yet, the nobility’s private armies of retainers could not survive because they made the nobles a permanent threat to the Crown, and he cited the recent history of Oceana (read: England) where “the nobility had frequent interest and perpetual power by their retainers and tenants to raise sedition and . . . to levy a lasting war unto the vast effusion of blood . . . wherefore monarchy by a nobility is no perfect government.”101 Harrington’s denial of dependency was quite complete, although, as shown below, he did retain elements of hierarchy and functionalism in Oceana. As regards dependency, it is easy to exaggerate the originality of Harrington’s analysis. The Grandees and some Levellers, as will be shown in the next chapter, had already questioned the right of servants—though not all wage earners—to vote. Moreover, Harrington’s historical analysis, while (for once) more cogently expressed than the Levellers’, reprised much of what they had said about the “Norman Yoke,” albeit from more materialistic and less hortatory and remonstrative perspectives. Regarding the traditional three-estate theory, it is interesting to observe the transformation of language and content in Harrington’s work. In Oceana, the “three orders” actually became a senate, magistracy, and the people.102 A  year later, the counter-revolutionary “Humble Petition and Advice,” which called for a hereditary protector and a revival of the House of Lords, cited the desirability of restoring “the three estates,” which would include a monarch, lords, and commons.103 Here were significant departures from the estates of clergy, lay lords, and commons. The confusion was

348  Society as Property, 1550–1697 compounded by Cromwell’s observation that in his opinion, society consisted of “a nobleman, a gentleman and a yeoman” and by his stated uncertainty about what a Commonwealth was.104 The exclusion of the Church is yet another sign that the old theory was badly disabled, even among those seeking a restoration of the monarchy and the House of Lords. The possession and distribution of property was vital to Harrington. Landholding was the basis of the new society of Oceana. His rejection of the principle of feudal service derived from his observation that it destabilized the monarchy and that, in practice, changing property relations had undermined the institution. The basis of power, he contended, was real property; if one altered the latter, power relations would change. Ideally, Harrington wanted a “balance of dominion or property in land” with not too many nobles and gentlemen, so that “the commons will be base,” causing conflict with the landed elites.105 England’s recent civil wars, he asserted, resulted from property relations being out of sync with the political system. Henry VII had put down armed retainers, and through the dissolution of the monasteries, Henry VIII swelled the landholdings of the populace so that aristocratic landholding and military power declined. This in turn led to an imbalance in the constitution that was manifested in the rise of the House of Commons, the weakening of the monarchy under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, and then civil wars in which the monarchy was overthrown (and the House of Lords abolished).106 There have been desultory discussions of whether Harrington’s explanations were in tune with the economic developments of his time. There is no question that he underestimated the importance of the worlds of trade and finance and said very odd things about wage earning. But this does not seem justification for dubbing him “pre-capitalist” in his economics.107 It is now widely accepted that English landowners and their leaseholder tenant farmers increasingly applied capitalistic methods of farming in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is true that Harrington was not interested in production per se, that he ignored the fact of productivity increases, and underestimated the power of finance and state intervention in the economy. Certainly his dismissal of wage earners as potential soldiers is strange, although consistent with his position that armies should be recruited from an independent peasantry.108 Where he most glaringly missed the boat was in ignoring the power of public finance in recruiting and equipping an effective military on land and sea, as the years from the 1680s to the 1750s were to show.109 He might be excused, however, for failing to predict the remarkably dynamic growth of revenues from the customs and Excise after 1660 and the explosion in foreign and domestic trade that fueled those revenues and, ultimately, Britain’s war machine and empire building.110 What, then, was the shape of society to be, according to Harrington? Landed wealth was central to the issue. To begin, he posited that a Commonwealth was comprised of “ ‘riches’ ” or “ ‘an estate, be it in lands, goods or money’,” but he held strongly that the basis of political life was “the proprietor of land autonomous in his own defense and government” because

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  349 property that was mobile was “open to the reproach ‘lightly come, lightly go . . . ’ ”. Land would always be the basis of military power.111 The outlines of an Oceanic society were to be different from the old order. For one thing, the monarchy, the lords, and the Church found no place in Harrington’s “propertied democracy,” which he erected “on the ruins of feudal monarcho-aristocracy.” The monarchy and aristocracy, for historical reasons already noticed, were no longer viable. Oceana’s government consisted of “one single council of the people, to the exclusion of the king and of the lords . . . and called a parliament . . .”.112 Following the lead of the Levellers and others, Harrington opposed rule by clerics and abolished the Church. He seems to have rejected all potential theocracies, denouncing both Presbyterianism and rule by the Independent Puritan saints. He rejected tithes and excommunication and favored liberty of conscience and the election of ministers by local elders.113 Having demolished the old regime, what did Harrington propose to put in its place? His “propertied democracy” was really not very democratic, because it was based upon landholding, which a minority enjoyed. Admittedly, Harrington favored franchise reform as much as the Levellers, even though Oceana was, in practice, a limited democracy.114 Generally, it is no surprise, given his emphasis on the power of property, that Harrington maintained the status quo in the structure of society. His agrarian law mandated the division of great estates: no one was permitted more than £2,000 a year in income from land. He abolished primogeniture because it tended to concentrate land in the hands of a few. He theorized that 5,000 large landowners were sufficient to maintain a Commonwealth militarily and politically. But there would be no attempt, unlike the Levellers and Diggers, to expand popular ownership.115 Unlike the body social, Harrington did make allowance for upward mobility, which he considered essential to the health of the Commonwealth. He thought that “the meaner sort” (or “foot” in his military model) would naturally vote for “the better sort” (or “horse”). But he claimed that “is no man barred from any preferment; only industry . . . is first enjoined by this policy, but rewarded amply . . .”. Mobility was a sine qua non of Oceana’s success: “Where a man from the lowest may not rise unto the due pitch of his unquestionable merit, the Commonwealth is not equal,” he asserted.116 There seems little question (and Harrington positively supported the idea) that a “natural aristocracy” would rise from the gentry and yeomanry (which would not exclude willing aristocrats) to dominate government and society. After all, even though people could rise economically, political position was based on landed wealth. There was to be a popular representative body numbering about a thousand members whose incomes were each less than £100 a year, and then a senate of 300 members each worth £100 or more. The first body would have the power of decision (but not debate) over motions discussed and passed by the senate. The government had a powerful council of state and an extensive network of local

350  Society as Property, 1550–1697 military and civilian officials whose authority was decentralized, rather like the Levellers proposed. There would be no lawyers or clergy in public office because they tended to dominate proceedings, taking authority from the people at large. To avoid the development of corrupt oligarchies, the constitution provided for voting through ballot boxes and for rotation in and out of office.117 As with Utopia, Filmer, and the Diggers, society was organized around patriarchal figures in Oceana. The result of a wider distribution of property and power was to be “a multitude of patriarchs” who could “occupy themselves with sharing and exercising the capacity of intellect to direct the lives of free men” and to liberate themselves from the “dictatorship of fortune.”118 The backbone of patriarchy would be the idealized yeoman farmer, who later migrated in a trans-Atlantic move to provide the foundation of Jeffersonian democracy.119 The people’s liberation did not extend 100 percent to women’s rights, but as a guard against excessive patriarchal power, Harrington’s attacks upon marriage for money were sustained, witty, and persuasive. He limited bridal dowries to £1,500 under the agrarian law, with the aim that marriage would be “an homage unto pure and spotless love,” and “the marriage bed will be truly legitimate, and the race of the Commonwealth not spurious.”120 What were the driving forces in Harrington’s writing of Oceana? For some time, historians of political thought have disagreed about the answer to the question. On the one hand, some emphasize his interest in “social-change explanations” of England’s civil wars and his place in the civic humanist tradition of republicanism. For Pocock, this means a transition from feudalism’s “goods of fortune” to the humanist’s “goods of the mind.”121 On the other hand, there is Jonathan Scott’s argument that Harrington, whom he calls Hobbes’s “greatest disciple,” like his intellectual mentor, was chiefly interested in stability and was prepared to substitute a balance of property for liberty and choice in order to achieve it. Scott doubts whether Oceana was very republican, calls it “aristocratic” and against “uncontrolled political participation,” and speculates that its extensive “orders” were possibly inspired by the anti-revolutionary “Instrument of Government.”122 Pocock allows that Oceana was an example of “baronial republicanism,” and there is certainly evidence to support the contention that Harrington’s prime concern was not democracy, but stability. Pocock cites “the de facto disorderliness of the English Civil War” and Harrington’s assumption that anarchy occurred when “the people seize power without the preponderance in land necessary to support it . . .”.123 Yet, certain of Harrington’s remarks can be interpreted as suggesting an absolute commitment to equality. He maintained that “a Commonwealth that is internally equal [in civil rights, not property] has no internal cause of commotion,” while one “internally unequal has no internal cause of quiet  .  .  .”. It is true his concern was with the problem of civil war, but his assumption was that a measure of political democracy would mitigate

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  351 the problem. Harrington also discussed at length the threat of economic democracy and the possibility that “an whole people should turn robbers or levellers,” which he judged impossible because there would be insufficient wealth to support the resulting equal shares and “if the people then obstruct industry, they obstruct their own livelihood . . .”.124 How significant was social humanist thought in the Harrington opus? There is some doubt whether his theoretical commitment to a humanist republic really ran very deep. As Scott pungently observed, “under that loose sheepskin cover, [there was] a full set of whiskers and a low growl.”125 For Pocock, the important historical contrast was between “vassalage and freehold; . . . whether a man’s sword was his lord’s or his own and the Commonwealth’s . . .”. “Free proprietorship” in land meant the “liberation of arms” and “free public action and civic virtue.”126 What drove this development was the shift in property relations, according to Harrington, so was social humanist thinking more than window dressing, at most a justification for material causes? It is argued that Harrington wished to “release human virtue” through a republican system; that he valued merit over wealth or birth “in agreement with humanist tradition,” and that the language of virtue dominated his discourse.127 There is some mileage in these assertions. Harrington appeared to believe that the basis of civil life was the “goods of the mind,” or virtue. He contrasted passion, which led to sin, and reason, which “is virtue and the freedom of the soul.” Politically, “that which was reason in the debate of a Commonwealth . . . must be virtue,” he stated. The way to do this was to “raise ourselves out of the mire of private interest unto the contemplation of virtue . . .”.128 Harrington’s educational program in Oceana also backs up his commitment to the humanist agenda. Like his contemporaries, he adhered to the theory that idleness was synonymous with “mischief,” while industry denoted health. His 26th order provided that local, free schools be created for the education of males between the ages of nine and 15 (between the ages of 15 and 30, they were liable to military service). Education was to be open to all (but not women), including the poor and “mechanics.” The reasoning was not that different from the humanist Richard Morison’s in the 1530s: “”it cannot be conceived but that which comes (though in small parcels) to the advantage of every man in his vocation must amount unto the advantage of every vocation, and so unto that of the Commonwealth.” Then from age 15, male youths would be shunted by parents into “agriculture or husbandry, unto manufactures, or unto merchandise,” but, as in Utopia, with agriculture having pride of place because according to Aristotle, “a Commonwealth of husbandmen (and such is ours) must be the best of all others.”129 It has become common to credit Harrington with great originality, but doubts continue to linger. For his educational theory and possibly his penchant for Machiavelli, he owed something to England’s social humanists of the 1530s, especially Morison but also Sir Thomas Elyot. The notion of a balance and the prominence of agriculture he owed to Aristotle, Cicero, and

352  Society as Property, 1550–1697 More; the rejection of resistance to established authority and the concern with stability he drew from Hobbes.130 Harrington’s preoccupation with the power of property dates back to Thomas Smith’s De Republica (published 1583), which laid out political roles based on economic power. Harrington’s unique contribution was more thoroughly to capture the social through the political than any other contemporary author, republican or not. Hobbes’s Leviathan held the bodies of the disorderly masses within that of the monarchy, but how that magic trick was achieved, beyond the uncritical acceptance of authority, was unclear. Harrington did it by restoring government at national and local levels in a conservative framework based on the possession of property, which put him very much in the camp of Henry Ireton and the Grandees. He deployed a seductive historical explanation based upon the history of property relations, but his grasp of events was factually flawed. Henry VII was unable to curb private armies, which persisted into the Elizabethan period. His most effective controls were exerted through attainders, forfeitures, bonds, and recognizing the great lords.131 “The people” were not enriched by the dissolutions; over the long term, it was the gentry who gained the most, which was probably what Harrington really meant. He was correct that property relations had changed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but the greatest shift was the decline of holdings of the Church and the Crown and the growing share of the gentry. The aristocracy, those dangerous bugbears, in his perspective, held their own. Despite these flaws, Harrington’s analysis shows that social thinking in 1656 had come a long way from the body social. This book contends that Harrington’s social theory, while interesting, was less innovative than his political theories. He did develop a diachronic overview of England’s revolutions, but in this area he owed a great deal to the Levellers, who preceded him in their critique of what he termed the “Gothic” system. As regards the power of property, he again owed a debt to the Levellers and to the Diggers, as well as to earlier generations of writers, including More and Thomas Wilson. His most novel social innovation was probably his bolstering of gentry power in the constitution of Oceana, but even here, his debts to the past were considerable—to Thomas Starkey, to Lawrence Humfrey and a host of writers who sought to reform the nobility, or, as with Utopia and the Levellers, to abolish them. VI. WATERHOUSE ON LANDED SOCIETY Waterhouse’s Gentleman’s Monitor (1665) also addressed the subject of the landed upper classes and their role in society. Smith, Harrison, Wilson, and others had dropped the body social entirely in their social schemas. They now accepted as natural the existence of divergent economic interests, mutability and mobility in the social structure, and the inevitability of

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  353 conflict over material issues. In Waterhouse, one discovers the fulfillment of these new positions and a world in which the author was principally concerned with the survival of families of the landed elites, who, he argues, are chiefly threatened by loss of substance. While it is doubtful that Waterhouse should be crowned as “England’s first sociologist”—the quantifier Wilson would appear to have a better claim—it is true that Waterhouse conducted an extended analysis of the reasons for the rise and fall of the great families. It also seems this was his chief preoccupation, placing him close to Wilson in subject matter and in the larger scheme of things.132 Waterhouse was acute in his understanding of England’s social situation in the mid-seventeenth century. He made all the right noises about the importance of birth—“I am for blood and antiquity of family, and am concerned in the honor of them as much as other gentlemen of ancient extract are”—but then moved quickly to describe a situation in which inherited rank played a limited role. Like Smith and Wilson, he emphasized the significance of the economy; echoing Starkey, he was concerned about demographics. He observed both the growth of population and economic prosperity, saying the country was “peopled more than heretofore, and necessity giving aim to ingenuity, there are now more courses of employment.” The result was a highly mobile society in which the issue was no longer entrée to the aristocracy, as had concerned early commentators, but plebian access to gentle status, as Smith, Harrison, and Wilson had articulated, and the professions. Waterhouse cited as evidence of the new regime a number of key markers. One was that “all sumptuary laws are vanished by the mixtures of gentry with the plebs in corporations . . .”. In addition, the landed were able to place their younger children in the professions and trades. These were “steps and ascents of meanness into greatness”; “nor would the great men of England know how to dispose of their younger children . . . were it not for learned callings, and employments of trade  .  .  .”. He cited the universities, Inns of Court, and town corporations “as wombs no less fruitful of rises and additions to honor, than country residences, and the great estates in them . . .”. He pushed the argument still further, arguing that “the present greatness and wealth of England owes much to vocational improvements,” so that any talk of rivalry between country and city, landed versus moneyed, should be set aside.133 Waterhouse’s main concern lay in the book’s subtitle, “Of the Rise and Decay of Men and Families.” While he welcomed the prosperity of economic change, he also feared its challenges, and his book was for the most part a guide to avoiding the “decay” he cited. His remedies for failure were numerous and mixed in nature. Some were conventionally moralistic and religious, though often these were combined with or existed alongside vocational and economic considerations. The sum total of Waterhouse’s prescriptions was to mold the subject into something like the complete bourgeois man, 170 years before his alleged appearance in the 1820s. He laid down ethical and religious norms aplenty. He decried idleness, saying it “lays a man open to villainy and misery . . .”.134

354  Society as Property, 1550–1697 Waterhouse denounced profaneness, sacrilege, and sectarianism, especially Catholic dissent, and called upon nobles and gentlemen to be pious and conformist in their faith. No one should take the Grand Tour until he was 40 because of the seductiveness of the Roman faith. They must also rid themselves of their “confidence in wicked pleasures, and beastly sensualities,” think of God and of death, and avoid “carnival [recte: “carnal”?] hospitality” and the misdeeds of “hotspurs.”135 Waterhouse regularly mixed economic and ethical prescriptions, showing that otherworldly asceticism was not yet pure in strain. His social ethic he owed to social humanist thinking and its critique of voluntary poverty. Idleness, he wrote, was “the direct track to beggary and devastation, both of virtue in the mind, and riches in the purse.” Further, sloth was “so apparent a road to vicious life” that “it must needs be a certain and unavoidable way to the extirpation and diminution of men and families; which are only and best built and enlarged by frugality and employments of revenue and fortunary [sic] addition or income.” High living was a deadly snare: “Immoderate coming to, and long staying in London” and its temptations—“high diet, rich clothes . . . fashionable equipage  .  .  .  amorous caressings”—were financial as well as moral in nature, so that “their master or lord is shriveled up” and forced into mortgaging his lands.136 Waterhouse’s denunciations of the “height of port and pride of living” and “pompous housekeeping” combined moral and economic messages, as did his admonitions against gambling, which is numbered among the “great cancers of moral virtue, of oeconomique [sic] thrift . . .”.137 Waterhouse took a remarkable social humanist position on vocations and education, which he strongly recommended to the landed elites. He linked economic growth with the diversity of employments, but he went still further to state his approval of the labor laws. Not only was it a good thing that idleness was punished “as an extraordinary crime,” but, as with Starkey’s and Winstanley’s censors, he approved of labor legislation “to permit no man to live, but to show to the magistrate how he supported himself and no child to be brought up without some manual skill . . .”.138 At the top of the social scale, he noted that the favor of a prince was an important avenue to advancement and that flattery of the powerful was “a way and means towards rise, advance, and riches.”139 But he also focused on the middling levels of society, asserting the value of “callings and employments, exercising the mind and body, to both which they are gainful, are advances to men and families.” He cited the legal profession, trade, and the Church as examples.140 He argued, moreover, for the importance of book learning, which he maintained was not an “effemination,” encouraged young men to attend university and meetings of the Royal Society rather than taking the Grand Tour, and advised them to study English law and customs.141 Waterhouse was clear about the real value of money for the survival of families. He wrote that “to have money, is to be master of every almost desirable adjument [sic], to God’s glory and men’s good.” This was because “[m]oney then being thus prevalent, it cannot be denied to be a probable

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  355 rise to men and in them to families. For in that it answers all things in the exchange of it, there is no match, honor, place, character, privilege, which it . . . will not procure . . .”.142 Waterhouse emphasized the roles played by land stewards in the management of landed incomes and family life. Before marriages were made and children sent away to study, travel, or seek a calling, “the good word of the steward or prime servant must be had, before any thing towards such provision or expense can be raised, and the manner of its supplement settled.”143 He deplored “that disdain of thrift,” which he said was “a way and means to the decay of men and families,” and praised “frugal living [and] not contracting debts.” Too much time in London led to the neglect of one’s estates, as well as of one’s role in local government.144 VII. CONCLUSIONS A common theme of the period was a concern about the stability of property holding. This is not surprising, given the impression of the mutability of social fortunes that comes through the county histories of the period. It is also unsurprising given the subject matter in Coriolanus, which can certainly be considered a story of a family’s tragic downfall faced with conflicting social models. Nor does it seem odd in the context of Hobbes’s philosophy that it was natural and honorable to compete for material advantages and for there to be winners and losers. For his part, Harrington’s perspectives were nothing if not concerned with the possession of landed wealth in both the past and the future. Waterhouse’s concerns focused on the survival of family fortunes among the landed elites. Were these fears in any way justified? The next chapter suggests they were, for we find there the Levellers and Diggers both questioning, albeit from different angles, the authority of wealth, especially landholding, in society and politics. NOTES  1. Listed in Conyers Read, ed., Bibliography of British History: Tudor Period, 1485-1603 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959); M. F. Keeler, ed. Bibliography of British History: Stuart Period, 1603–1714 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1970). For later periods, see sections on “Local History” in volumes in the same series edited by S. Pargellis and D. J. Medley (1714–1789); Lucy M. Brown and Ian R. Christie (1789–1851); H. J. Hanham (1851–1914).   2. William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent Containing the Description, History and Customs of that Shire (London: Ralph Newberie, 1576; S.T.C. 15175; ESTC S108239); John Philipot, Villare Cantianum or Kent Surveyed and Illustrated (London: William Godbid, 1658), Wing 1989.  3. Thomas Westcote, A View of Devonshire in MDCXXX: With a Pedigree of Most of Its Gentry (Exeter: William Roberts, 1845); Tristram Risdon, The Chorographical Description of Devon and Exeter (London: E. Curll, 1714). 2 vols. ESTC T117944. Chorography is “the art or practice of describing, or of delineating on a map or chart, particular regions, of districts . . .”: OED.

356  Society as Property, 1550–1697   4. James Wright, History and Antiquities of the County of Rutland (London: Bennet Griffin, 1684; Wing W3696); Daniel Fleming, Description of the County of Westmorland [1671], ed. G.F. Duckett (London: D. Quaritch, 1882).  5. John Norden, Speculi Britanniæ Pars: An Historical and Chorographical Description of the County of Essex [1594], ed. Henry Ellis (London: Camden Society, 1840), further books on Cornwall, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Northamptonshire. For a brief biography, see Norden, Speculi Britanniæ Pars: A Topographical and Historical Description of Cornwall (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Frank Graham, 1966 repr.), 6; also Ellis, op.cit., ix–xliii, more details.   6. See note 2 above.   7. Robert Plot, The Natural History of Oxfordshire (Oxford: At the Theater, 1677; Wing P2586); Robert Plot, The Natural History of Staffordshire (Oxford: At the Theater, 1686; Wing P2588).   8. William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (London: Thomas Warren, 1656; Wing D2479); Robert Thoroton, The Antiquities of Nottinghamshire (London: Robert White, 1677; Wing T1063) vii; see comments in ibid. 1790 edn., John Throsby, ed. (repr. Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1972), introduction by M. W. Barley & K. S. S. Train, vi.  9. Norden, Speculi Britanniæ Pars . . . Cornwall, 15, 18–20, 22. 10. Richard Carew, The Survey of Cornwall, ed. F. E. Halliday (London: Andrew Melrose, 1953; orig. edn. (London: Simon Stafford), 1602; S.T.C. 4615; ESTC S107479), 123–4, 130–1, 135–9. 11. Robert Reyce, Suffolk in the XVIIth Century: The Breviary of Suffolk, with notes by Lord Francis Hervey (London: John Murray, 1902), 56–82. 12. Westcote, A View of Devonshire in MDCXXX, 1845), 44–54. 13. John Aubrey, The Natural History of Wiltshire, ed. John Britton (London: Wiltshire Topographical Society, 1847; new edn. the Echo Library: Teddington, Middlesex, 2006), 22–3, 92–6, 107, 115, 125, 133, 135. 14. Risdon, The Chorographical Description of Devon and Exeter, 5, 6, 8, 133–86. 15. Fleming, Description of the County of Westmorland, 8. 16. For developments in a later period, see Daniel R. Headrick, When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch. 3. 17. Elias Ashmole, History and Antiquities of Berkshire (London: E. Curll, 1719; ESTC T140219), 3 vols. (esp. vols. I, III); John Aubrey, The Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey (London: E. Curll, 1718–19; ESTC T89094), 5 vols. 18. Aubrey, Natural History of Wiltshire, 92–8, 107–10, 140–1. 19. Reyce, Breviary of Suffolk, 59–228. 20. Dugdale, Antiquities of Warwickshire, A.3.a, A.4.a. 21. Henry Chauncy, Historical Antiquities of Hertfordshire (London: Ben Griffin, 1700; ESTC R6200), frontispiece. Admittedly, Chauncy also gave considerable space to the history of the Church. 22. Risdon, Chorographical Description . . . of Devon, 5–10, 35–425, esp. 133–186. 23. Lambarde, Perambulation, 367–8. 24. Reyce, Breviary of Suffolk, 59. 25. Westcote, Devonshire, 45. 26. Lambarde, Perambulation, 368–9. 27. Sampson Erdeswicke, A Survey of Staffordshire (London: E. Curll, 1717; ESTC T119504), 11. The date of the book’s writing is uncertain; 1603 is the year of the author’s death. 28. Westcote, Devonshire, 47. 29. Risdon, Devon and Exeter, 5, 425.

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  357 30. Norden, Cornwall, 21–2. 31. Ibid. 19. Carew, Survey of Cornwall, 137, was less impressed. 32. Fleming, Westmorland, 8. 33. Westcote, Devonshire, 51–2. 34. Aubrey, Natural History, 136–8, citing Fuller and Leland; italics added. 35. Norden, Description of Cornwall, 22. 36. Westcote, View of Devonshire, 47, 52, 54. 37. Daniel King, The Vale Royal of England: Or, the County Palatine of Chester Illustrated (London: John Streater, 1656; ESTC R200961), 19. 38. Fleming, Westmorland, 8. 39. Aubrey, Natural History of Wiltshire, Britton, ed., 22–3. 40. Risden, Devon and Exeter, 6. 41. Carew, Survey of Cornwall, 138–9. 42. Reyce, Breviary of Suffolk, 58. 43. Westcote, View of Devonshire, 48–50. 44. Thoroton, Antiquities of Nottinghamshire, Preface (no pagination). Note that Thoroton recorded without disapproval enclosures by some lords of manors: ibid. 252–3. 45. Norden, Cornwall, 15. 46. Reyce, Breviary, 57, but note that women frequently outnumbered men in settled poor populations: Paul A. Fideler, Social Welfare in Pre-Industrial England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 95. 47. Westcote, Devonshire, 53. 48. Risdon, Devon and Exeter, 8. 49. Reyce, Breviary, 56–7. 50. John Aubrey, Wiltshire. The Topographical Collections, John E. Jackson, ed., The Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society (Devizes: Henry Bull, 1862), 8–14. N.B. Aubrey’s dates were 1626–97; the windows statements are dated as 1671 by the editor. 51. Marjorie K. McIntosh, Poor Relief in England, 100, 230; Steve Hindle, On the Parish? 58–60, 289–90. 52. Carew, Survey of Cornwall, 140–2. 53. William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated, 2 vols. (London: J. Osborn & T. Longman, 1730; ESTC T127054; repr. Didsbury: E. J. Morten Ltd., n.d.), I, 631. I wish to thank Mr. E. P. Thompson for corresponding on this subject. 54. Carew, Survey of Cornwall, 139–40. 55. Aubrey, The Natural History and Antiquities of the County of Surrey, vol. 5, 142–55. 56. Ashmole, The Antiquities of Berkshire, II, 515, 524, 526. For influences on Bridewell’s foundation, see A. L. Beier, “Foucault Redux?: The Roles of Humanism, Protestantism, and an Urban Elite in Creating the London Bridewell, 1500–1560,” Crime, Gender, and Sexuality in Criminal Prosecutions, vol. 17 of Criminal Justice History: An International Annual, ed. Louis A. Knafla, 2002: 33–60. 57. Andrew Gurr, “ ‘Coriolanus’ and the Body Politic,” Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975): 63–4. 58. Arthur Riss, “The Belly Politic: Coriolanus and the Revolt of Language,” English Literary History, 59 (1992): 53. 59. James Holstun, “Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus,” English Literary History, 50, no. 3 (Autumn, 1983): 485. 60. Richard Wilson, “Against the Grain: Representing the Market in Coriolanus,” Seventeenth Century, 6, no. 2 (1991): 126.

358  Society as Property, 1550–1697 61. Gurr, “Body Politic,” 63, 68; Holstun, “Tragic Superfluity,” 492, 496, 498–9, 503–4; Robin Wells, “ ‘Manhood and Chevalrie’: Coriolanus, Prince Henry, and the Chivalric Revival,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 51, no. 203 (2000): 415– 16. The origin of this concept of decadence is David G. Hale, “Coriolanus: The Death of a Political Metaphor,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 22, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 202. 62. Riss, “The Belly Politic,” 55, 57; Wilson, “Against the Grain,” 112–13. 63. Hale, “Coriolanus,” 201–2. 64. The best guide to the events of 1607 is John E. Martin, Feudalism to Capitalism: Peasant and Landlord in English Agrarian Development (London: Macmillan, 1983), part III. For a micro-history, see John Walter, “ ‘The Pooremans Joy and the Gentlemans Plague’: A  Lincolnshire Libel and the Politics of Sedition in Early Modern England,” P&P 203 (May 2009), 35–6. 65. Roma Gill, ed. Coriolanus, Oxford School Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44, 46, 63–5, 74, 79, 91, 93, 96, 100, 136. The editor notes, xxix, that Shakespeare relied heavily on Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans (1575). 66. Coriolanus, 8, 48, 59, 76. 67. Ibid. 4–5. 68. Ibid. 5–6. 69. Ibid. 38, 44, 51–3, 64. 70. Ibid. 56, 66, 68, 91, 95, 112–13. The term “meinie” on p. 66 is defined by the editors as “multitude, crew.” 71. Ibid. 1–2. 72. Ibid. 1–3. 73. Ibid. 45 (italics added). Dispropertied here means dispossessed: Marvin Spevack, The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). 74. Coriolanus, 3, 13, 15–16, 42, 78. 75. Ibid. 93–5. 76. Ibid. 120, 123, 128–9. 77. Ibid. 2 and (n. 36). 78. Ibid. 49. 79. Mervyn James, “English Politics and the Concept of Honor, 1485–1642,” in his collection of essays, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 310–11, 320–1, 332–3, 375–6. 80. Ibid. James, “At a Crossroads of the Political Culture: The Essex Revolt, 1601,” 417, 423, 429. 81. T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 35; Robin Douglass, “The Body Politic ‘is a fictitious body’ ”, Hobbes Studies, 27, no. 2 (2014): 126–147. 82. Leviathan, 9–10 (ital. orig.); other references to bodies and members at 174–5, 183, 222, 228–30, 269. 83. Leviathan, 397–8. 84. Ibid. 119. 85. Ibid. 62–3, 89, 90, 109. 86. Ibid. 66. 87. Ibid. 63, 70, 88, 174–5, 231 (italics added); cf. margin comment, 174: “Money the blood of a Commonwealth.” 88. Ibid. 238–9. 89. Ibid. 90, 125–6, 171, 224–5 (italics original). 90. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or the Long Parliament (_c_. 1668), ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); quoted Macpherson, 65–6.

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  359   91. For Hobbes on the aristocracy, see K. V. Thomas, “The Social Origins of Hobbes’ Political Thought,” in K. C. Brown, ed. Hobbes Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 192–3.   92. A. H. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 644; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2nd edn., 2003), 384, 386 (hereafter MM); J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xiii, xxii.   93. George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (London: Harrap, 3rd edn., 1951; orig. pub. 1937), 421. Note that Tawney, cited below, is usually given responsibility for emphasizing the importance of economic changes in Harrington’s theory, even though his interpretation was anticipated by Sabine.   94. R. H. Tawney, “Harrington’s Interpretation of his Age,” Proceedings of the British Academy, xxvii (1940) (read 14 May 1941), 200, 207.   95. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967; 1st pub. 1957), 128, 144.  96. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 175–9, 180, 193.   97. Blair Worden, “English Republicanism,” in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 451.   98. On the utopian question, see Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1997; repr. of 1954 ed.), 144–5; G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper, 1959; repr. of 1898 ed.), 251; Davis, Utopia, 207; J. G. A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 74 (henceforth PW); Pocock, ed., The Commonwealth of Oceana, xvi.   99. Quoted by J. C. Davis, “Equality in an Unequal Commonwealth: James Harrington’s Republicanism and the Meaning of Equality,” in Ian Gentles, John Morrill, Blair Worden, eds., Soldiers, Writers and Statements of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 231; Pocock, Ancient Constitution, 140; Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 645. 100. Pocock, ed., PW, 50–1, 198. 101. Ibid. 179. 102. Sabine, 428–30. 103. PW, 52; Pocock, Moment, 383–4, 404. 104. J. C. Davis, “Equality in an Unequal Commonwealth,” 229, PW, 8; CT, viii. 105. PW, 157, 163–4, 166–7, 179. 106. Ibid. 196–8. That Harrington’s history was simplistic in the extreme is obvious. See Stone, Crisis, 199–217, for the persistence of armed retaining after Henry VII’s reign. On the landholding issue Harrington was closer to the mark, but missed the fact that the monarchy and Church experienced the greatest losses compared to the nobles (limited change) and the gentry (the big gainers). Of course, these findings have important implications for that old chestnut, “the gentry debate”: see Gordon E. Mingay, The Gentry: The Rise and Fall of a Ruling Class (London: Longman, 1976), 59; C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500–1700: Volume I: People, Land, and Towns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 143. 107. Sabine, 424, 430; Gooch, 253–4; Pocock, Ancient Constitution, 128; Pocock, Moment, 391–2; Tawney, 221; Pocock, PW, 59.

360  Society as Property, 1550–1697 108. Pocock, PW, 60; Pocock, MM, 390, argues that independent wage earners would be eligible for some measure of participation. 109. P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967), 9–11. 110. Ralph Davis, “English Foreign Trade, 1660–1700” in Essays in Economic History, ed. E. M. Carus-Wilson (London: Arnold, 1962), II, 257–8. Though Dickson, op.cit., 10, argued that taxation was insufficient to finance wars after c. 1688, the improving trade balances documented by Davis, especially in reexports, generated mercantile wealth that could be tapped for military purposes, especially in the decisive wars from 1739 to 1763; also Dickson op.cit., 11–13 for overseas trade; Pocock, ed., PW, 137–41. 111. PW, 43, 121, 139, 687–8, 690. 112. Ibid. 46, 53, 205. 113. Ibid. 36–7, 77–8, 96, 110, 185, 205, 217, 680. 114. Commonwealth of Oceana, viii. 115. PW, 231–3, 236; Sabine, Political Theory, 427. 116. PW, 677. 117. Ibid. 67–9, 99; B. Worden, “James Harrington” in David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 95–7, 106. 118. Commonwealth of Oceana, xxi. 119. Worden, “James Harrington,” 93; Pocock, Moment, 533, 539–40. 120. PW 240. 121. J. G. A. Pocock, “A  Discourse of Sovereignty: Observations on the Work in Progress,” in Nicholas Phillipson & Quentin Skinner, eds., Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 406– 7; Worden, “James Harrington,” 95–7 106. 122. Jonathan Scott, “The Rapture of Motion: James Harrington’s Republicanism,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Phillipson & Skinner, 141, 147–8, 150–151, 155–6, 162–3. Reply ibid. by Pocock, 403–6. 123. CO, xvi; PW, 120. 124. PW, 274–5, 292–3. 125. Scott, “Rapture,” 141. 126. Pocock, Moment, 386. 127. Worden, “James Harrington,” 94–5, 97. 128. PW, 169–70; also Pocock in Phillipson, 406. 129. PW, 298, 304. 130. Scott, “Rapture,” 146–8. 131. J. R. Lander, “Bonds, Coercion, and Fear: Henry VII and the Peerage,” in Lander, ed., Crown and Nobility, 1450–1509 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1976), 267–300. 132. Lawrence Stone, ed. Social Change and Revolution in England, 1540–1640 (London: Longmans, 1965), 133. 133. Edward Waterhouse, The Gentleman’s Monitor; Or, a Sober Inspection into the Vertues, Vices, and Ordinary Means, Of the Rise and Decay of Men and Families . . . (London: R. Royston, 1665; Wing W1047), 70–1 (italics in original). 134. Ibid. 135. 135. Ibid. 399, 402, 404, 416. 136. Ibid. 132, 137, 226–7, 292–5, 301. 137. Ibid. 261, 275–7, 272. 138. Ibid. 134; cf. Humfrey, The Nobles, I.8.b, who provided that “noblemen’s sons should learn some art.” 139. Waterhouse, Gentleman’s Monitor, 176, 237.

The Power of Property Perceived, 1576–1730  361 40. Ibid. 198, 202, 204, 212. 1 141. Ibid. 342, 349–50, 360. 142. Ibid. 175 (italics in original). 143. Ibid. 228–230. 144. Ibid. 285, 297, 385.

16 Property Assailed and Defended Grandees, Levellers, and Diggers, 1647–1649

I. INTRODUCTION The English Levellers have justifiably attracted scholarly attention. As one historian of political thought observes, their platform represented “the first proposal in history for a written constitution based on inalienable natural rights.” Their thinking was revolutionary, for “what was in prospect was a new epoch in world history.” This is because they raised the issue of manhood suffrage, gave supreme authority to an elected representative body, and limited the powers of government by principles of natural justice—equality before the law, freedom of conscience, the abolition of commercial monopolies, the banning of conscription, and the right to revolution if a government violated these principles.1 Early modern Europe witnessed many popular movements, but none was as radical as the Levellers in their anticipation of modern democracy. In the longer perspective, the West experienced nothing like the Levellers until the American and French Revolutions.2 Admittedly, they were ultimately defeated—by shifting political circumstances and the opposition of the ruling elites—but their ideas were no less significant because they were premature and unsuccessful.3 Scholars have studied the Levellers as a political and religious movement, but have given limited attention to their social positions, which this chapter maintains should occupy a position of significance in the history of social thought.4 One exception to the predominantly political and religious orientation of the histories of the Levellers is C. B. Macpherson’s study of their stance on the social composition of the parliamentary franchise. This subject was debated at Putney by the “Grandee” generals of the New Model Army and the Levellers, who introduced their first written constitution, the “Agreement of the People,” in the autumn of 1647.5 The next section of this chapter examines the franchise question, which I argue has obscured broader social issues raised before and during the debates. The third section examines the historiography of Leveller social positions and argues for the complexity of their views, which included considerable—and in contemporary terms, conventional—patriarchal authority, as well as more radical positions.

Property Assailed and Defended  363 Focusing on the franchise debates at Putney has had a narrowing effect, so that scholars have assigned less prominence to Leveller thinking in the 18 months before Putney, when they mounted frontal attacks on the twin pillars of the old order, the Church and the Lords, which are discussed in the fourth part of this chapter. The drama of the confrontation at Putney has meant an over-concentration on the Levellers’ role in those interchanges, while giving less attention to the views of the Grandees, and so the fifth part of this chapter examines the social positions of both groups. Putney provides a marvelous opportunity to observe social ideas, not only of the Levellers, but also of the Puritan landed elites, including Oliver Cromwell, where they were often expressed with brutal candor. The Grandees stressed the preeminent power of property and wealth, whereas the Levellers argued for the power of natural rights and “birthright,” or citizenship. The chapter includes a sixth section on Leveller positions on a wide range of questions beyond the issues of property and the franchise. Then the final section examines the social ideas of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers, which demonstrate once again that issues of property were never far from center stage and that radicals were fully able to articulate new social and political ideas to deal with the question. II. THE MACPHERSON THESIS Following Macpherson, scholars have examined the debates at Putney about the franchise. The historiography is too well known to require more than summary consideration here. Macpherson contended that, contrary to the liberal historians who saw the Levellers as avatars of modern democracy, the franchise they proposed was restrictive because it disenfranchised two thirds of adult males. Macpherson based his interpretation on the fact that some Levellers, including those who wrote the third “Agreement of the People” of 1649, excluded servants and alms takers from the vote because they allegedly lacked independent voices and would vote according to the will of others. Among “servants,” Macpherson included all laboring adult males. The exclusion of servants, he argued, reflected a deeper Leveller social principle: that the foundation of political participation was the “individual right to property,” which included one’s labor as the proprietor of one’s own person.6 Macpherson was correct that “servants” were numerous, accounting for the single largest element in the labor force in many places. In reality, workers dependent upon the will of employers—for shelter, board, clothing, and wages—were a bewildering multitude, which can nevertheless be grouped under the rubric of “dependent” workers. This group was highly diverse in social background and occupations. London apprentices could be the sons of wealthy gentlemen, while domestic servants were usually from humble backgrounds. The subcategory “servant” included a great variety of people, from domestics to “servants in husbandry.” In the late medieval period,

364  Society as Property, 1550–1697 masters used the term to describe apprentices, parents even applied it to their children, and it covered employees of corporate bodies, such as boroughs. Broadly, the word included anyone who contracted with someone to work for a stated time period.7 In the early modern era, servants included persons who covenanted to work in an “art” or trade for a year. These included urban jobs as well as agricultural ones; servants in husbandry as well as in “huswifry”and in traditional crafts.8 In early modern England, the numbers of dependent workers were significant. In censuses of English communities between 1574 and 1821 “servants” alone accounted for 13 percent of the total population, and 29 percent of households included them.9 Overall, dependent workers made up possibly as much as 40 percent of the population in seventeenth-century villages and between 50 and 66 percent of urban employees.10 The recipients of statutory relief, whom some Levellers also excluded from voting, were less numerous, although not insignificant. Where censuses were conducted of towns and villages between 1582 and 1630, the people receiving the dole numbered between 1.8 and 14.3 percent of the population.11 Taken together, dependent workers and the poor were significant exclusions from the franchise, which supports Macpherson’s arguments. It is questionable, however, whether all this adds up to the “possessive market-society” that he hypothesized. His definition of labor was that “each individual’s capacity to labor is his own property and is alienable.” According to the theory of possessive individualism, its special character was “its conception of the individual as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them. The individual was seen neither as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social whole, but as an owner of himself.”12 It is doubtful, though, whether many contemporaries subscribed to a theory of free labor, which is anachronistic. As will be seen below, both the Levellers and the Grandees recognized that a significant portion of the labor force was unfree for extended periods of their lives. The Levellers argued that political participation was a matter of freedom as a citizen, not as a free laborer, while the Grandees posited that landed property was the key. John Locke and other observers accepted the masterservant relationship, which was not the same as the capitalist-worker, as the dominant labor relationship of the period.13 Historians have found a number of further difficulties with Macpherson’s theory. One criticism is that the franchise was not the most important part of the Levellers’ program: it was not even mentioned in the first “Agreement of the People.” At Putney, it was actually one of the Grandees, their lead speaker, Commissary General Henry Ireton, who first brought it up. A second point is that while one or two Levellers and the Third Agreement called for the exclusion of servants and welfare recipients, these examples can be considered exceptional because the group were a “heterogeneous party” and included others who called for complete manhood suffrage. A further objection is that the franchise was already greatly expanded beyond the qualification of the 40s. freehold laid down in a parliament Act in 1430—by

Property Assailed and Defended  365 inflation, to be sure, but also because of local practices that sometimes allowed even alms takers to vote.14 The most problematic of Macpherson’s assertions concerns the category of “servant.” England was in a long-term transition from having substantial numbers of unfree workers in the Middle Ages to a free labor force, and the language of service was similarly transitional and confused.15 If live-in servants were numerous, so were laborers who cannot be lumped together with them. In a Gloucestershire census of 1607, servants formed 16.6 percent of the male population with occupations or status listed, while laborers were 11.9 percent.16 If this document were typical, Macpherson’s inclusion of the latter group would exaggerate the numbers of the disenfranchised. He defended conflating the two groups in 1973, but ignored the important work by Alan Everitt, published in 1967, which showed that a substantial group of laborers should not be lumped together with servants because they were farm laborers keeping independent households. Moreover, they were only partially reliant upon wage earning, because they farmed their own smallholdings, which included livestock, gardens, and by-employments.17 Ultimately, the Levellers compromised and settled for enfranchising one third of adult males—far less than manhood suffrage would have brought. But a number of points need to be made about the compromise. For the Levellers, voting was to be based upon status, not property or income, as Macpherson maintained.18 Moreover, they did not give up without a fight over how democratic voting should be. Further, their proposal would have doubled the number of men voting. And, because dependency was for many a temporary phase in the lifecycle, many of the “excluded” would have voted when they became independent.19 We must consider the context. No contemporary European state had manhood suffrage, and few representative bodies survived the rising tide of absolutism in the seventeenth century. England’s Parliament would not have full manhood suffrage for another two and a half centuries. Only gradually were manual workers incorporated; paupers and live-in servants were still not enfranchised in the Third Reform Act of 1884–5.20 III. HISTORIOGRAPHY AND LEVELLER ALTERNATIVES What, then, would be the shape of a Leveller social order? Historians do not agree about their location in the history of social thought. Zagorin maintained that the third “Agreement” would have produced a “lower-middleclass utopia.” Others think that, unlike Harrington and Winstanley, the group did not present a fully articulated social blueprint and does not fit into the category “utopian.”21 Still others take the position that the labels “liberal” or “radical” versus “conservative” are not useful in defining the Levellers, who should be judged, not with these anachronistic descriptions, but with reference to their contemporary context.22 One attempt to do this argues that economically and socially, the Levellers “wanted to preserve (or

366  Society as Property, 1550–1697 rather to create) a world in which every man was an independent producer” and “would enjoy a modest self-sufficiency.” They were not, however, the harbingers of “the new age of capitalism and wage-labor.”23 None of these descriptions goes far enough, for the Leveller social positions were complex—in some senses conventional; in others respects, revolutionary. Descriptively, Zagorin was closest to the mark in seeing in Leveller proposals a more “equalitarian order which aimed at dissociating wealth from privilege” that would have empowered “small merchants, craftsmen, and yeomen,” and diminished the authority of urban oligarchies, the central government, the Church, and the aristocracy.24 Even these remarks may exaggerate Leveller radicalism, because in some important respects, their social model was conventional. It assumed a large dependent population, as in Smith’s De Republica, encompassing women, children, servants, and apprentices, who would have remained disenfranchised and relatively powerless. The Levellers’ emphasis on household suffrage gave the vote to the male head of household and no one else. In this sense, their thinking can be compared to that of More’s Utopia, Filmer’s Patriarcha, and Winstanley’s paternalist gerontocracy, all of which used the household as the basis for society and government. The exclusion of servants and the poor confirmed the Levellers’ endorsement of other contemporary social positions. The Levellers demanded their own “birthrights,” but they mandated that significant numbers of their brethren would be denied those rights, at least temporarily, during the periods when they were either servants or apprentices. As regards the poor, the Levellers took the social humanist positions shared by most contemporaries: that the worthy, disabled poor should receive relief from their parishes, and that the able-bodied should not. There was little new here, for as we have observed in previous chapters, the patriarchal household, dependent labor, and the marginalization of the able poor were established social positions by 1600. Even though the Levellers retained the patriarchal household, their model still represented a departure from the old paradigm of the body social. No longer was society organized around the principle of service between the three estates. And there was more to come. A social democratic thrust in Leveller thought is most apparent in their calls for the abolition of the Church, the aristocracy, and the monarchy. These moves would very likely have included the nationalization of their lands, which, despite the Levellers’ protests to the contrary, would have severely revamped the social order. IV. BEFORE PUTNEY: ASSAULTING “PUTRIFIED MEMBERS” Discussions of the Levellers understandably focus on the debates at Putney in the autumn of 1647. As Woolrych observed, Putney is probably the “most famous debate in British history.”25 This is because the Levellers had the courage to engage in debate with their generals and officers. They mustered up the audacity to present the first “Agreement of the People” to their Grandee

Property Assailed and Defended  367 leaders, in sum, to speak out about the shape of England’s polity and society. As Sabine observed, Putney was amazing because the debates not only “recreate actual conversations three centuries dead,” but also “permit a glimpse into the minds of a group of Englishmen in lowly station . . .”.26 Yet there are good reasons not to overstate the significance of Putney where Leveller ideas are concerned. The debates were incompletely recorded and were censored in the press, so that important material may be missing, purposely excluded.27 In addition, although civilians of the “middling sort” and soldiers from the ranks had their say, the Grandees tended to dominate the proceedings. This was especially true of Cromwell and his son-in-law, Ireton. The latter was the first to raise the most divisive issues of the debates: the franchise and the fates of the Lords and the monarchy. The presence of these generals, who also chaired the meetings, probably intimidated some of the lower ranks. One of the tactics the leadership used at Putney was to sow fears about army disunity, the Royalist threat, and changes of government leading to anarchy. Ireton asserted that implementing the first Agreement would result in “the end of all government,” and, sounding like Hobbes, that if property were insecure, there would be perpetual civil war.28 Assigning pride of place to Putney may also lead us to underestimate the extensive, uncensored contributions from other Levellers who did not attend, including the leading pamphleteers John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn. Before Putney, these three “London Levellers” already had a social agenda that would have remodeled the old regime. Several months before Putney, Overton, in a lengthy diatribe or “Appeal” against the Long Parliament, trenchantly broke with the model of the body social, turning it on its head, and transforming it into a revolutionary, democratic program. Invoking the concept of natural rights, a favorite Leveller idea, he used the phrase “body natural” to describe society. Rather than the body incorporating the principle of social order favored by proponents of an organic regime, for Overton, it now had the meaning of “popular safety” in a Hobbesian sense of the state of nature. But unlike Hobbes, in Overton’s model, the body natural was a potent force for refashioning the constitution and society. He wrote: [T]he body natural for its own safety may prune, amputate and cut off the corrupt putrified members from the body representative, yea utterly renounce, oppose, resist, and dissolve all the members therein upon total forfeiture of, and real apostasy from the true representative capacity of Parliament . . . ; it then inevitably follows, that this natural body, by virtue of its instincted [sic], inherent natural sovereignty, may create, or depute any person or persons for their deputy or deputies for the removal of those dead, corrupt, putrified members . . . for the suppression of injustice and tyranny, recovery of liberty and freedom. . . .29 Here was a proposal for the transformation of the body social, making it a potent revolutionary force, expressed in terms prefiguring a Rousseau-like

368  Society as Property, 1550–1697 general will, and opposed to the traditional justifications for a fixed, organic hierarchy of three estates. Overton’s scheme was political, i.e., directed at the “Presbyterian” element running Parliament in 1647, but it was also social. He saw a polarization of the “free commoners’ right, and the jurisdiction of the Lords” and appealed to the New Model Army “as to the natural head of the body natural of the people at this present [time] . . .”.30 Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn set the scene for Putney. They had already taken the position that two of the traditional three estates—the Church and the Lords—should be abolished. Even though the Levellers at Putney left uncertain—and ultimately unresolved, because of Grandee resistance—the fate of these pillars of the old order, their dismantling was certainly on the Leveller agenda. The mere suggestion of such changes made Ireton apoplectic. The removal of a state Church with a monopoly over religion and education and with judicial authority in its own courts was a mammoth move. The end of a titled aristocracy with its own house of Parliament would have a huge symbolic significance in a society governed for centuries by a titled elite. Then there was the issue of aristocratic lands: would they be nationalized along with those of the Church? Demolishing the foundations of the old society was a giant step by comparison with the issue of the franchise. And there was more to come, as the Levellers broached a myriad of social issues. At Putney, the Levellers barely mentioned the Church, except to reject the payment of tithes and to call for freedom of conscience. But everything else we know about the movement suggests they would disestablish the Church of England, which was already in a state of semi-dissolution because of Parliament’s attacks in the 1640s. The Levellers were extremely hostile to episcopacy, which they associated with popery, a point upon which they agreed with the Grandees. The first Agreement of the People ruled out “compulsive” forms of religious instruction.31 This position reflected a long-standing antipathy to state churches, whether the persecuting Church of England of Archbishop Laud or Parliament’s agreement with the Scots that England would move to a presbyterian system. The leading theorists of the Leveller position were separatists to a man; Lilburne would eventually join the Quakers.32 The Levellers would permanently take down the Church of England. Lilburne wrote from the Tower in October 1646, to “oppose myself against the Bishops  .  .  .”. The “Large Petition” of March  1647, the first major articulation of Leveller principles, praised Parliament for having “suppressed the Bishops” and “abolished Episcopacy  .  .  .”. In the “Humble Petition” of September  1648, the Levellers cited favorably the House of Commons’s removal of bishops from the House of Lords, who “by tradition also, had been accounted an essential part of the supreme authority . . .”.33 The Grandees’ attitude was more fluid. In the “Heads of the Proposals” of August 1647, they allowed for the restoration of bishops and even toleration for Catholics as a move towards compromise with the King. In the Instrument of Government of December 1653, however, “prelacy,” which

Property Assailed and Defended  369 included the episcopal system and “a substantial portion of the population,” was banned, along with Catholics, Unitarians, and non-Christians.34 The Levellers favored a high degree of toleration. This followed from their religious beliefs, but also from their denial of the very concept of a clerical estate, which is apparent in their rejection of the presbyterian as well as episcopal versions. The context for Overton’s “Arrow Against All Tyrants” of October 1646 was that the House of Lords had imprisoned him for his denunciation of presbyterian restrictions on the freedom of religious expression. The Presbyterians, contrary to Brailsford, were never the force their sectarian enemies painted them, but perceptions are, in large measure, what matter.35 Whether the Presbyterians could be included in the first Agreement of the People was a matter of debate in the autumn of 1647, notably between Hugh Peter, the chaplain, and Lilburne. But in large measure, the die was cast in the spring, when a number of rank-and-file army statements and others from the London Levellers, condemned the attacks by Parliamentary Presbyterians and Thomas Edwards and called for the expulsion of their military counterparts. The “Large Petition” continued the attacks, comparing the new clergy to the Laudian persecution: [T]he very same, if not greater molestations are set on foot and violently prosecuted by the instigation of a clergy, no more infallible then [sic] the former, to the extreme discouragement and affliction of many thousands of your faithful adherents, who are not satisfied that controversies in religion can be trusted to the compulsive regulation of any. . . .36 The Levellers did not stop at general principles regarding the Church. They attacked its economic base, both in its landholdings and in its tax base of tithes. Overton’s “Appeal from the Degenerate Representative Body” of July 1647 proposed that all glebe lands be nationalized and deployed to succor the poor.37 Wildman’s response to Ireton’s “Heads of the Proposals” called for the expropriation and sale of bishops’ lands. In “The Case of the Army Truly Stated,” which was thought to be a bridge to the first Agreement, the Agitators on October 15, 1647 called for the sale of dean and chapter lands, as well as of Royal forests, to pay for soldiers’ arrears in pay. The demand for dissolution of the Church’s patrimony was repeated in December 1648.38 These moves against clerical wealth, the heritage of several centuries, along with abolishing their ability to tax, would have gutted the Church, changing its ministers into civil servants chosen and supported by the parishes. As things turned out, tithes were never completely abolished during the civil wars and Interregnum. One likely reason was that so many landed gentlemen, including Cromwell himself, held tithes and, as Putney showed, the Grandees fiercely defended property rights, even those of their enemies. Overton was among the first Levellers in 1645–46 to attack the presbyterian alternative when he lumped them together with bishops as predators: “the

370  Society as Property, 1550–1697 bishops’ courts stripped us of our clothes, but the presbyters’ courts will strip us of our clothes, skin, lives and all.”39 The “Large Petition” of March 1647 targeted tithes and other “enforced maintenance . . . though there be no ground for either under the Gospel” and which caused “multitudes of suits, quarrels and debates both in former and latter times.” In their place should be substituted a system in which “all ministers may be paid only by those who voluntarily choose them, and contract with them for their labors.” As Brailsford noted, this statement gave several thousand Church of England clergy good reason to “denounce the Levellers as the enemies of God” and undoubtedly influenced many members of the lay landed elites whose families had been flocking into Church livings since the end of the sixteenth century.40 Overton took the matter still further in July, when he observed the social significance of tithes for the clerical estate. He cited the “benefit of the subject and his freedom” that would accrue from abolition, but also argued it would foster the “prevention of the lordliness, in [sic] and the commotions, oppressions and tyrannies, that might happen by the clergy.”41 Calls for the abolition of tithes continued to be made. After the “Heads of Proposals” were agreed on August 1st, Wildman attacked their compromise of retaining episcopacy while proposing to curb the “coercive power and jurisdiction of bishops . . . ” Capt. John Merriman said at Putney that both the Levellers and the Grandees had promised “to free the people, which you may do by taking off tithes and other Antichristian yokes . . .”. Later making the same call were the Humble Petition in September 1648 and Lilburne later that year or early in 1649, but by this time, the Levellers’ teeth were drawn. In the Humble Petition and in the Third Agreement of the People in May 1649 they compromised, ruling out Parliament compelling anyone to pay tithes, while offering “reasonable satisfaction to all impropriators . . . ” and allowing a rent charge to support clerics.42 The Leveller movement had its origins in attacks upon the House of Lords’ aristocratic members, which began in 1646 with the imprisonment of Lilburne and Overton for contempt, on charges arising from their publications attacking the Earl of Manchester’s tepid prosecution of the first civil war. These pamphlets are rarely reprinted in modern collections of Leveller publications, yet they represent crucial steps in the movement’s beginnings. Besides questioning the Lords’ authority to prosecute them, the authors threw doubt upon their constitutional position, on the historical justification for their status, and upon the principles behind their social positions. Lilburne questioned the Lords’ constitutional authority, saying, “[Y]ou being peers, as you are called, merely made by prerogative, and never entrusted or empowered by the Commons of England, the original and fountain of power . . .”. He alleged that in the recent civil war, the Lords were in it for personal aggrandizement. They sought “to set us a-fighting to unhorse and dismount our old riders and tyrants, that so you might get up, and ride us in their stead.” In July, Lilburne was imprisoned by the Lords for

Property Assailed and Defended  371 seven years, fined £4,000—a huge sum in seventeenth-century money—and barred from public office for life.43 Overton soon followed him in August after publishing in June “A  Pearl in a Dunghill,” in which he, too, questioned the authority of the upper house. In July, he collaborated with Walwyn in “A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens of England to Their Own House of Commons, occasioned through the illegal imprisonment of John Lilburne,” which called for the abolition of the upper house on the grounds that the Lords’ assent to legislation had “no root in the choice of the people, from whom the power that is just must be derived . . . ”44 The Levellers’ attacks on the aristocracy questioned their social and legal status as well as their political authority. Invoking humanist theories of virtue, they raised doubts about noble “merit” and “virtues.” In “A Pearl in a Dunghill,” Walwyn queried, “Why then . . . are we now subjected to the Lords? Is it not sufficient that they are Lords over their Tenants, but they must be Lords over the People”? He answered his own questions with negatives: Why presume ye thus Oh ye Lords? Set forth your merit before thepeople, and say for this good it is, that we will reign over you.  .  .  . Which of ye before this Parliament, minded anything so much as your pleasures? Plays, masques, feastings, huntings, gamings, dancings, with the appurtenances. The aristocracy enjoyed legal privileges protecting them from prosecution for debt or assault: “If you owed any man money, or abused any man, what law was to be had against you?” Walwyn blamed the nobles for failing to oppose the king’s Personal Rule and for Parliament’s military defeats, whereas now in the New Model Army, “there is not one Lord.”45 In the “Remonstrance,” too, the authors excoriated the nobility’s social and political roles. They called upon them to stand for parliamentary elections as “the gentry and free men of this nation do   .  .  .” because then, “also they would be distinguished by their virtues and love to the Commonwealth  .  .  .”. This would constitute a change from the present when they were Royal creatures chosen because of their social rank, so that “they act and vote in our affairs but as intruders or as thrust upon us by kings to make good their interests, which to this day have been to bring us into slavish subjection to their wills.”46 At the end of July, in “An Alarum to the House of Lords,” Overton assailed the social basis of the Lords. He pulled no punches in impugning them as a class—for corruptly gaining titles through birth and inheritance, toadying to Royalty, oppressing the commonalty, and through corruption. He asserted: By what means some of you came by your titles is very uncertain, but this is certain, that most of you gained no part of it yourselves: and the common ways your ancestors gained it for you, was generally by adhering to kings, in subduing and oppressing the Commons, or by pleasing their lusts, malice, revenge, or covetousness. . . .47

372  Society as Property, 1550–1697 Overton named names, citing Lionel Cranfield, who he alleged received his earldom of Middlesex “for betraying the secrets of the City, and devising ways to shark the people,” Thomas, Lord Coventry, ennobled “for his great abilities in deceivings, and various ways to oppress the people, heaping up masses of wealth by extremity of bribery, extortion and cruelty,” and the Earl of Manchester, promoted “by the most palpable corruption that ever was . . .”. Overton attacked the principle of birth by citing their sons’ succession to the titles, while summing up that “we need not enlarge; for your own selves know very well how, and by what means you came to be Lords.”48 In January 1647, Lilburne and Overton developed an historical critique of the Lords that would later resonate at Putney. In “Regal Tyranny Discovered,” another pamphlet that is infrequently reprinted, they pilloried the old aristocracy, asserting their titles were illegitimate because they were based upon conquest, expropriation, and denial of the popular will. Their titles came from “ ‘their predecessors whom William the Conquerer, alias ‘The Thief and Tyrant,’ made Dukes, Earls, and Barons, for helping him to subdue and enslave the free nation of England’ ”; for their services, William gave them “ ‘by the law of his own will the estates of the inhabitants the right owners thereof, to maintain the grandeur of their tyranny.’ ” Lilburne and Overton instead invoked the principle of popular sovereignty: “ ‘It is a maxim in nature and reason that no man can be concluded [included] but by his own consent, and that it is absolute tyranny for any . . . to impose a law upon a people, that were never chosen . . . by them to make them laws.’ ” They called for the abolition of the upper house because “ ‘[o]ur present house of peers . . . are no legal judicature at all, nor have no true legislative or law-making power at all in them; having never in the least derived it from the people, the true legislators and fountain of power.’ ” While allowing the lords to be elected to Parliament, Lilburne and Overton minced no words about abolishing the upper house, shouting, “ ‘away with the pretended power of the Lords; up with it by the roots, and let them sit no longer as they do . . . ’ ”. They called upon the “ ‘freemen or commoners of England’ ” to petition the House of Commons “ ‘to desire them speedily to remove them before the kingdom be destroyed.’ ” The campaign continued in Overton’s “Appeal from the Degenerate Representative Body  .  .  .  ” of July  1647, in which he argued for the abolition of “all titles, by prerogative, privilege, patent, succession, peerage, birth or otherwise to set and act in the Assembly of Parliament . . . without the free choice and election of the people . . .”.49 Thus, Lilburne, Overton, and to a lesser extent, Walwyn, set the scene for the drama at Putney. V. PUTNEY, THE OLD REGIME, AND PROPERTY Historians are sometimes exercised about the relationship between the London Levellers and the New Model Army. One scholar believes it is important to conclude that the Army was not radicalized until the spring and

Property Assailed and Defended  373 summer of 1647. Another finds little overlap in the concerns of the “Agitators” chosen by the troops and the London Levellers until the summer that year, even though soldiers had begun drafting petitions to their commanders since late April.50 What scholars have not examined is the relationship between the social ideas of the two groups. When that is done, there appears to have been real confluence in their thinking. It might be objected that this could be expected, since at Putney, there were present Levellers from London (Petty and Wildman) and representatives of the soldiers. The tip off of the coming together of the two groups came on May 18th, when Lt. Edmund Chillenden wrote to other Agitators and enclosed copies of the “Large Petition.” He said he was concerned that Parliament was trying to split the officers and men by paying the latter their arrears. But links were also possibly forged by Lilburne’s connections with the Army through his service as an officer as well as his publications and notoriety.51 As it turned out, the link with the Army came initially from an odd source—from Ireton, the scourge of those at Putney who wanted to expand the franchise. Just as he was the first to introduce the question of who should have the vote, he was also the first to raise the issue of the Lords. There were obvious strategic advantages to the Grandees to bring up this subject, because the implication was that their opponents really were “Levellers” if they sought to ditch the Lords. As it turned out, it was mainly the London Levellers, especially Wildman and Petty, who took the bait. By comparison, the Agitators and officers played a lesser role. Nevertheless, the subject of aristocratic power and privilege was thoroughly considered, and Ireton connected it to the discussion of property and political rights. His defense of property led Ireton ultimately to defend the rights and titles of the monarchy and the aristocracy. He began the debate with a brilliant piece of rhetoric, saying that if he “saw the hand of God leading so far as to destroy King, and destroy Lords, and destroy property . . . I should acquiesce in it . . .”. But then he shifted gears to the state, saying, “I would have an eye to property” and warning that “let every man consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property.”52 While Ireton’s purpose was to waylay the Levellers’ Agreement, his support for the nobility and monarchy, despite his rhetoric, also constituted an endorsement of the old social order, which was consistent with the rest of his thinking about property. Citing the “Heads of the Proposals,” which he had helped draft, Ireton stuck by the Lords, which, with the Commons, would have control over the militia. The monarch would not have a veto, but nor did the document rule out him having it. Thus, and by the purging of Parliament, would it be possible to “lay foundations of an hopeful constitution in the future.”53 In a debate on November  1st, Ireton reported on a set of committee proposals that apparently exempted the Lords from laws to which they had not agreed, made them eligible for election to the Commons, and raised the property qualification for a member of Parliament to £20 a year. To Leveller objections, especially by one of the Rainborough brothers, that these

374  Society as Property, 1550–1697 proposals restored and strengthened the authority of the king and Lords, Ireton replied that they took away their power of veto, which would reside solely in the Commons. He maintained the Commons still retained the authority to abolish the “honor, title, estate, liberty, or life, [if] [they] have a mind to take it away by a law . . .”. But he defended the judicial authority of the Lords in the “ancient constitution” and made reference to the king’s oath, presumably meaning his obligation to enforce the laws passed by Parliament, which he would apparently retain. Ireton’s parting shot on the subject again invoked divine intervention, which could destroy the king and Lords “without our or your wrong-doing.” But, he warned, “if you [not only] take away all power from them, which this [the Agreement] clearly does, but [do also] take away all kind of distinction of them from other men, then you do them wrong.”54 Here Ireton referred to the Levellers’ calls for the abolition of—in their eyes—privileged institutions. He would later support the Regicide, but on the grounds that Providence directed it, suggesting he had not budged on his social principles.55 At Putney, the Levellers and Agitators built upon the ideas of Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn and took them further. The premise from which they often began was that since the Conquest, England had been under the “Norman Yoke.” Commissary Nicholas Cowling drew a picture in which “since the Conquest the greatest part of the kingdom was in vassalage.” He questioned the validity of the 40s. freehold, arguing that it meant that historically, “the Commons of England were overpowered by the Lords, who had abundance of vassals,” but that now the situation had changed and “all slaves have bought their freedoms,” some of whom were wealthy and yet had no vote. Wildman also considered that the justification for changing the electoral system was that socially, “we have been under slavery. That’s acknowledged by all.” Even Cromwell did not gainsay this assertion.56 Like their London brethren, the Levellers at Putney singled out the titled aristocracy for attack. The first Agreement of the People ignored the Lords and specifically called for equality before the law, saying “no tenure, estate, charter, degree, birth, or place, do confer any exemption from the ordinary course of legal proceedings, whereunto others are subjected.” Here, in one fell swoop, the legal privileges of the peerage were rescinded.57 In debate, responding to Ireton, one of the Rainboroughs appeared to extend an olive branch, averring that he cared “very much” whether the lords, king, and property survived because if “we do not all take care, we shall all have none of these very shortly.” Rainborough’s response, however, raised the question of “why any man that is born in England ought not to have his voice in election of burgesses.” He denounced rotten boroughs, saying, “I do not find anything in the Law of God, that a lord shall choose twenty burgesses, and a gentleman but two, or a poor man shall choose none: I find no such thing in the Law of Nature, nor in the Law of Nations.”58 The fate of the Lords dominated the remainder of the Putney discussions, and Ireton continued to press the issue.59 At one point, he even corrected

Property Assailed and Defended  375 his fellow Grandee, Cromwell, who had cited the “danger” of the king and Lords to the people. Ireton took pains to point out that Cromwell did not mean to call for the “destruction” of the Lords and the king.60 Petty responded that he was present during the debates on the “Heads of Proposals” and was opposed then, as now, to “the King’s vote and the Lords’ ” and their retaining a “negative voice” or veto on Parliamentary issues. Replying directly to Ireton, he stated, “for my part I cannot but think that both the power of the King and Lords was ever a branch of tyranny.” Petty’s reasoning was that the civil wars had created a crucible of constitutional change leading to freedom and liberty: “if ever a people shall free themselves from tyranny, certainly it is after seven years’ war and fighting for their liberty.” But if the Lords and king were restored and “the constitution of this kingdom shall be established as formerly, it might rivet tyranny into this kingdom more strongly than before.”61 Wildman, too, objected to the Heads of Proposals in their reinstatement of the Lords and compromise with the king if the two were given authority over the military or the veto power. In his initial response, printed on August 1, 1647, he protested against their making “ ‘all the Commons of England . . . to depend upon the King’s absolute creatures for freedom and justice.’ ” These powers included “ ‘power over the militia’,” making them co-equal to the House of Commons, judicial authority that could contradict that of the Commons, the authority, again equal to the Commons, to dispose of national offices, and the right to veto the Commons’s resolutions. Wildman also mounted a personal attack on Cromwell as “ ‘the most daring champion of kingly lordly interest.’ ” Had not Cromwell, Wildman queried, “professed to [the Earl of] Manchester’s face, that England would never flourish, until he was only Mr. Montagu, nor the public affairs be managed successfully whilst a House of Peers are extant?” Now Cromwell had sold out: “does he not now prostitute the estates, liberties, and persons of all the people, at the foot of the king’s lordly interest?”62 At Putney, Wildman continued his protest against the “Heads” and its provisions retaining the Lords. Using Petty’s language, he declaimed that “the foundation of slavery was riveted more strongly than before—as where the militia is instated in the King and Lords, and not in the Commons, [and] there [too] is a foundation of a future quarrel constantly laid.” But addressing Ireton, Wildman gave ground, admitting that neither the person nor the names of the Lords were in question, because he did not assume that either the king or Lords had the authority of the veto, and so it would be a novelty that altered “the old foundations of our government” to do so. The Lords were to have no power of veto because it would violate the principle of popular sovereignty: “seeing the foundation of all justice is the election of the people, it is unjust that they should have that power.” In the end, Ireton appeared to accept these concessions, though the “Heads” seem to have said otherwise.63 This ambiguity found its way, too, into subsequent Leveller manifestos. Their petition of September 1648 denounced the “manifold

376  Society as Property, 1550–1697 oppressions” of the Lords, bishops, and king, and provided for equality before the law, but did not call for the abolition of the Lords and actually took a stand against “abolishing propriety [property], leveling men’s estates, or making all things common.”64 VI. A SOCIETY OF CITIZENS? What shape would society have, according to the Grandees and the Levellers? Despite ambiguities and compromises, there is little doubt the two groups saw things differently. The Grandees’ willingness to defend the Lords so steadfastly was linked to a view of society in which property was preeminent. This is seen in the debates about the franchise as well as those about the Lords. In Ireton’s view, the Lords had to be defended because they represented the “old constitution” that guaranteed order—and property. He did not explain by what right some held property, while others did not, except by describing the processes by which some gained it. Like Harrington, he subsumed “society” into the constitution, but did not deal with the reality that political participation was connected to the possession of property, which gave people social positions and, thus, the right to take part. For their part, the Levellers saw the basis of social and political position to be a “birthright” or, as Ireton observed, a matter of natural rights. From that point, the Leveller vision of society extended outwards, rather like waves on a pond, to encompass developments that would have made England a very different society from that envisaged by Ireton and the Grandees. Let us begin with the franchise, which is important for the Levellers qua political movement, but also as an indication of their social ideas and those of the Grandees. When these social positions are examined, as the often very candid debates at Putney allow, major differences appear between the Levellers and the Grandees. The key player was Ireton, who first raised the property question regarding suffrage and who dominated the debates. His position was summed up in the statement restricting the vote to those with property: I think that no person has a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and in determining or choosing those that shall determine what laws we shall be ruled by here—no person has a right to this, that has not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom. . . . This was the “most fundamental constitution of this kingdom,” he asserted. He rejected the Leveller idea that all Englishmen had a “birthright” that gave them the right to vote, saying it gave them “nothing at all” except the right not to be exiled, to “air and place and ground, and the freedom of the highways . . .”. The right to choose representatives lay with “the local interest of this kingdom; that is, the persons in whom all land lies, and those in corporations in whom all trading lies.”65

Property Assailed and Defended  377 Cromwell added pungently—in response to one of the Rainborough brothers’ statement that he and Ireton were trying to frighten people with the threat of anarchy—that implementing the Agreement would lead to anarchy. He bluntly stated that those without property had no rights but the right to breathe: “for where is there any bound or limit set if you take away this [limit] [i.e., property], that men that have no interest but the interest of breathing [shall have a voice in elections]?”66 Before considering the Levellers’ responses to these assertions, it is worth noting that Ireton, besides leading off with the property question, was also the first to cite, and took the lead in framing, the exclusion of servants, with Cromwell backing him up. Until this point in the debates, the focus was almost entirely on the issue of property. Ireton cut the Gordian knot by proposing that “those who shall choose the law-makers shall be men freed from dependence upon others.” Cromwell immediately chimed in, suggesting a degree of prior planning, saying, “Servants, while servants, are not included,” and then adding paupers by posing the question, “Then you agree he that receives alms is to be excluded?”67 These interjections put the Levellers on the spot, leading to the statements by Petty accepting the limits proposed by Ireton and Cromwell, which, according to one authority, confirms Macpherson’s arguments that Petty’s position was typical of the movement in limiting the franchise.68 Controversies over whether Petty’s views were representative of all the Levellers need not detain us.69 But the positions taken by all parties are of interest to the historian of social thought. Let us return to the leading Grandees, Cromwell and above all Ireton, both of whom were conventional in their views of the social order. Cromwell, as noted, saw society as a hierarchy of the landed—“a nobleman, a gentleman and a yeoman.” He encouraged the Council of State in 1649 to suppress anyone who sought legal or religious equality. The “Humble Petition and Advice” of 1657, which Pocock describes as “the crucially antirevolutionary step of the Cromwellian decline,” referred to the “three estates” in Parliament.70 Ireton’s position was rather more complex. According to Richard Tuck, he was not simply for “atavistic conservatism” and actually favored “a new kind of theory” that rejected the belief that “by nature . . . men were totally free  .  .  .”. Rather, Ireton focused on property arising from constitutional rights.71 It should be added, as Pocock indicated, that for Ireton, the crucial step towards political participation was to possess property, because a person was “defined by human society if the latter was to exist; law and property must give him his social rights and personality.”72 Property was of such great significance for Ireton that one scholar has observed that “far more obviously than the Levellers [Ireton] can be described as a ‘possessive individualist’ . . .”.73 Ireton was certainly closely attuned to social thinking of his time in emphasizing the power of property, as numerous examples discussed elsewhere in

378  Society as Property, 1550–1697 this book attest. For Cromwell and Ireton, participation in civil society, particularly voting in parliamentary elections, presumed the possession of property. Ireton framed the discussion by rejecting the notion of natural rights to property, asserting that a “constitution” was the main guarantor. He questioned the Levellers about “the right you have to anything in England— anything of estate, land or goods, that you have, what ground, what right you have to it.” A contrary natural right he posed was that “I have as much right to take hold of anything that is for my sustenance, [to] take hold of anything that I have a desire to for my satisfaction, as you.” Rather, he proposed, the basis of property was a contract, an agreement, or “traduction from his ancestors . . .”. Similarly with one’s goods: it was only the law that prevented someone from taking them from you.74 Ireton elaborated on the significance of property for society and government. He allowed that even a man with “the meanest local interest” and possessing only a 40s. freehold had the right to vote and, he boasted, “has as great voice in the election of a knight for the shire as he that has ten thousand [pounds] a year . . .”. If one took away all property qualifications, property itself would be abolished, a theme he belabored in the debates, adopting the anti-leveling rhetoric of Charles I: “if we shall go to take away this, we shall plainly go to take away all property and interest that any man has either in land by inheritance, or in estate by possession, or anything else—[I say], if you take away this fundamental part of the civil constitution.”75 Just in case anyone was in any doubt, Ireton said, “the most fundamental civil constitution of this kingdom, and which is, above all, that constitution by which I have any property.” The analogy that he drew was “Thou shall not steal,” but he went further to flirt with a parallel that resembled Filmer’s patriarchalism (which also denied natural rights), citing the commandment that parents were to be honored “and that law doeth likewise hold out that it doth extend to all that (in that place where we are in) are our governors . . .”. Like natural law, however, divine law did not apply to matters of property, the right to which “descends from other things . . .”.76 Ireton’s ideas about the relationship between property and politics were in some important respects ambiguous. He maintained that the basis of property was the civil constitution rather than natural rights, while at the same time postulating that property was a “fundamental” right of civil society. Which came first, property, or the laws that protected it? Common sense would suggest that property holding would precede the laws, but Ireton was unclear about this. How did one come by property and rightfully possess it? He cited contracts and inheritance, but these are descriptive examples rather than explanations. He also, contradictorily if the constitutional preceded property, suggested that social position was a prerequisite to the political.77 The answers to these questions lie in Ireton’s attacks on the argument of some Levellers that all Englishmen had a “birthright,” or natural right, that included the vote. His response was that gaining property was the key to political participation and, thus, the civil constitution to which he assigned

Property Assailed and Defended  379 such preeminence. Basically, like some sixteenth-century commentators and the French Prime Minister Guizot in the 1830s, Ireton was telling the disenfranchised to “enrichissez-vous”: get the vote through upward social mobility. He actually specified that “liberty” or “freedom” included the right to trade, to acquire land, and “to build up such a foundation of interest to himself” so that he should not be subject to “the will of one man,” so that he and others—“fixed men, and settled men, that had the interest of this kingdom [in them]”—would secure the right to choose others to represent them and their interests.78 But if the unpropertied ruled, the upshot would be the destruction of “that liberty which the freeholders, and burghers in corporations, have in choosing [knights and] burgesses (that which if you take away, you leave no constitution) . . .”.79 From the foregoing, it appears that Ireton was thoroughly conventional— in contemporary terms—in his social position. He was not at all an “atavistic” conservative who wished to return to the three-estate body social. Rather, he resembled social humanist positions in his social theory. He accepted hierarchy in society by excluding those in positions of dependency from the vote, but he was not wedded to the fixity of the social order and actually held out the promise of upward mobility as a means to political participation. There is little sign of notions of mutual aid and interdependence in his statements. The statuses of “service” and “dependence,” key organs in the body model, were absent from Ireton’s thinking, despite his defense of the Lords. As regards Ireton as “possessive individualist,” there is some limited mileage in this proposition, though it is doubtful whether property was to be garnered for its own sake or, presumably in the Macpherson mold, to provide capital for investment purposes. Yet there is no doubt that property for Ireton was the key to civil society, and there is little question that he shared in the general trend of the period towards “absolute individual ownership.” The chief condition of such ownership, Ireton would have approvingly learned if he were still alive in 1656, came from Protector Cromwell’s legal adviser William Sheppard. Central was the rejection of dependency and the premium placed on independence: “property is the right that a man has to anything which no way depends upon another man’s courtesy.” After 1660, “absolute power” over property was given to the “proprietor” thereof (in the Lockean lexicon), which was incorporated into legal dictionaries.80 Yet there is another side to the story—the Levellers’ social position, especially the issue of birthright that so vexed Ireton. By opting for status as opposed to property as a criterion, the Levellers endorsed some traditional social positions, but they also asserted a vital new one: citizenship. As they articulated it, the concept of citizenship included assertions of a level social playing field, which they achieved by withdrawing the criteria of wealth and property. In this light, the hoary quotations from Putney are worth repeating, because they no longer only concern the franchise. They are fundamentally about social equality based on birthright, and then about political

380  Society as Property, 1550–1697 rights. As you will, the Levellers were speaking about a basic human, or, in contemporary terms, “natural” right. In 1642, Hobbes laid out the principle that “all men are equal to each other by nature” and that “our actual inequality has been introduced by civil law.” Like the Levellers, he proposed the polarity, on the one hand, between a free man and citizen, and on the other, slavery and servitude. But liberty, according to Hobbes, was circumscribed within what he called the “patrimonial kingdom,” which governed the movements of the free man through “his Commonwealth or father or Master . . .”.81 By isolating dependent persons, including servants and alms takers, the Levellers were able to go beyond patriarchy to the Commonwealth, thus making a leap that Hobbes did not. The Levellers’ insistence on equal citizenship was forcefully stated at Putney and elsewhere. Petty asserted that “all inhabitants that have not lost their birthright should have an equal voice in elections.” Petty’s position was famously pushed further by one of the Rainboroughs, who proposed that “the poorest he that is in England has a life to live, as the greatest he” and “that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government . . .”. The same speaker added, concerning the citizen’s consent, that “I  do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under . . .”. One of the Rainboroughs, as noted earlier, did battle with Ireton on the social issue. Similarly, as regards voting, Rainborough questioned why it should be considered the province of some and not all. He granted that estates and possessions belonged to people, but denied the franchise was “a property, to a lord, to a gentleman, to any man more than another in the kingdom of England.”82 Petty and the Rainboroughs were not alone in rejecting Ireton’s arguments that the social order was all about property. Cromwell, too, stuck to the property principle by proposing citizenship and voting rights for copyholders by inheritance, who were legally virtual freeholders, but Hugh Peter broke with the principle by calling for the inclusion of veterans of the New Model Army, as had many of the Levellers.83 Wildman continued the argument favoring social and political parity, stating that “every person in England has as clear a right to elect his representative as the greatest person in England,” adding that “I conceive that‘s the undeniable maxim of government: that all government is in the free consent of the people.” Even those hostile to the Leveller position on the franchise and fearful of dividing the Army offered some support for the principle of citizenship. Capt. John Clarke continued the argument by offering that foreigners should be excluded, while doubting whether one-man, one-vote based on citizenship would threaten property relations. Audley, too, accepted “the right of every free-born man to elect, according to the rule . . . that which concerns all ought to be debated by all.”84 The alternatives to citizenship were unattractive. The Levellers equated “slavery” with property under the old Norman Yoke and spelled out what

Property Assailed and Defended  381 that meant in terms of social and political inequality. Thomas Rainborough claimed that under Ireton’s proposals, “rich men [only] shall be chosen” for Parliament, and so “the one part shall make hewers of wood and drawers of water of the other five, and so the greatest part of the nation be enslaved.” If this were to be so, what had the soldiers of the New Model Army fought for, he asked. The answer was that “he has fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.”85 The most powerful statements concerning social position came from Edward Sexby, an Agitator representing Fairfax’s Regiment of Horse, who related social structure to the civil wars. He claimed that the purpose of the conflicts was “to recover our birth-rights and privileges as Englishmen,” and he took up the cause of the propertyless, stating “we have had little propriety in the kingdom as to our estates, yet we have had a birthright.” Now, according to Ireton, Sexby said, “except a man has a fixed estate in this kingdom, he has no right in this kingdom.” If they had no rights, then “we were mere mercenary soldiers.” He claimed they did possess birthrights—as much as “those two [seemingly pointing to Cromwell and Ireton] who are their lawgivers, as any in this place.” It would be “the greatest scandal” to deny this birthright to the poor and “those in low condition,” because they have been “the means of the preservation of this kingdom.”86 If an “open society” was defined by egalitarianism in status and political rights and “love of freedom,” it is reasonable to include the Levellers in that description and, contrary to Popper, unnecessary to jump forward to 1776 or 1789 to find examples.87 VII. WHO GAINED AND WHO LOST? Were the Levellers backward or forward looking in their social thinking? It would certainly be unfair to consider them as patriarchalists tout court. At times, they appear to support the social humanist model of mobility based upon merit, endorsing the position that rank should be based upon ability or “virtue” rather than birth or titles, but they also criticized wealth alone as a justification for a high position. The rich, Walwyn wrote in 1643, should “make yourselves equal to men of low degree: you will no longer value men and women according to their wealth, or outward shows, but according to their virtue, and as the love of God appears in them.” Taking a similar humanist line, Lilburne objected to the Lords in 1646 that their positions were based on office and wealth rather than virtue: “titles of honor, without honesty and justice, are not excellenter than a gold ring in a swine’s snout,” he protested.88 In 1647, in “Certain Articles for the good of the Commonwealth,” Overton called for the end to “all titles, by Prerogative, Privilege, Patent, Succession, Peerage, Birth or otherwise” that granted the right to sit in Parliament.89 The Levellers repeatedly denied accusations that they wished to level the property of the rich, yet the foregoing and many of their other statements tend to confirm Manning’s point that they were of middling rank and

382  Society as Property, 1550–1697 “wanted changes, but only in so far as their own status was maintained and improved.” This was because they wanted to supplant “an aristocracy of birth and riches by an aristocracy of virtue.” They were not complete Levellers, because they eschewed redistributing wealth to the poor. They would not take from the rich to give to those more needy than they because “they hated the rich and feared the poor,” and “would take power from the rich, not to give it to the masses but to men of virtue . . .”.90 So who actually would benefit from Leveller social proposals? Did they mainly favor the middling sort? Were they keen on keeping the poor under wraps? The answers are not immediately obvious, because the group wrote only tangentially about many social issues. There seems no question that they would have severely cut back the wealth and status of the Church, the monarchy, and the nobility. Yet, overall, it seems their focus was not solely on the middling groups, and they were not exceptionally draconian towards the poor. In actuality, it is sometimes difficult to separate the interests of the middling from the poor—e.g., the proposed abolition of the Excise, which, like most taxes on basic necessities, hit the poor hardest of all, but which also affected the middling sort. In addition, the Third Agreement stated that customs duties were to be abolished. Here, in one fell swoop, the Levellers proposed to abolish the financial bases of English governments until the day of the Land Tax. Their rationale combined social concerns about hardship with economic ones about trade, describing both taxes as “extreme[ly] burdensome and oppressive to trade . . .”.91 The Levellers sought directly to benefit the intermediate and poorer classes by introducing the principle of progression in taxation, i.e., one’s burden should reflect one’s wealth. In the second Agreement, they provided that the Excise should disappear within 20 days of electing a new Parliament, that future taxation should be “proportionably to men’s real or personal estates,” and that those with £30 or less in property should be exempt, except for local poor rates and other levies.92 The preoccupation with trade is a tip off that the Levellers were concerned about the fortunes of the middling sort, for other economic planks in their platform proposed to open up trade both at home and overseas. In the “Large Petition” of March 1647, they twice attacked the Merchant Adventurers’ monopoly on cloth exports. Again, the message was socially mixed and involved both the middling and the poorer sort. While noting that patents (i.e., monopolies) were outlawed by the Long Parliament, the petition claimed the Merchant Adventurers’ cartel was still in force, asserting it was “oppressive” and an “abridgement of the liberty of the people, and to the extreme prejudice of all such industrious people, as do depend on clothing or woolen manufacture . . .”. It noted that woolen cloth was “the staple commodity of this kingdom and nation” and that the monopoly led to “the great discouragement and disadvantage of all sorts of tradesmen, seafaring-men, and hindrance of shipping, and navigation . . .”.93

Property Assailed and Defended  383 A petition of January 1648 again targeted the Adventurers, while broadening the complaint to that “all such restrictions of trade, do in the consequence destroy not only liberty but property . . .”. The “Humble Petition” of September 1648 said it expected “you would have freed all trade and merchandising from all monopolizing and engrossing, by companies or otherwise.” Both the second and third Agreements included clauses prohibiting Parliament from making any laws “to abridge any person from trading unto any parts beyond the seas, unto which any are allowed to trade, or to restrain trade at home.”94 We know too little about the subject of credit to say who incurred debt and how much, but it is likely the Levellers’ proposals on interest rates and the abolition of imprisonment for debt cut across various social boundaries (if not the aristocratic one) and would have included the middling sort and in some measure, the poor. In the second Agreement, they limited interest rates to six percent, which was about half the 12 to 14 percent that was commonly charged.95 Their reasoning about imprisonment for debt included religious, pragmatic, and civic objections, arguing it was “unchristian in itself, and no advantage to the creditors, and both a reproach and prejudice to the Commonwealth.”96 The Levellers made several proposals directly concerned with the poor, a number of which had radical implications for property relations, and which would seem to justify the description “Leveller” with which they were tagged. In mid-March 1647, they published the so-called “Large Petition,” which Parliament declared seditious. It laid down the principle that it should “provide some powerful means to keep men, women, and children from begging and wickedness, that this nation may be no longer a shame to Christianity therein.”97 In July 1647, Overton published “Certain Articles for the Good of the Commonwealth,” in which he argued for extensive economic and institutional changes for the benefit of the poor. He called for the return of impropriated donations “towards the constant relief of the poor” to be restored to their original purposes. In addition, he proposed the creation at the public charge of multi-purpose “hospitals” in all counties, which would undertake the education of “poor fatherless or helpless children, maintenance and relief of poor widows, aged, sick, and lame persons.” These institutions were to be supported by the glebe lands of the clergy, which would presumably be nationalized for the purpose; Overton did not specify whether the incumbents would be reimbursed for their loss of property. He further attacked the enclosure issue, proposing that all land that “anciently lay in common for the poor” and had been enclosed and impropriated “be cast out, and laid open again to the free and common use and benefit of the poor.”98 Again, there was no provision for compensation. Over time, as the Grandee generals and the Presbyterians in Parliament reacted with horror to the Levellers, their proposals regarding the poor, as much else, grew more restrained. The radicalism of the Levellers in this regard is not signified by the institutional arrangements they brought to the

384  Society as Property, 1550–1697 problem. For example, regarding the poor, far more creative ideas came from the pens of Samuel Hartlib, who proposed workhouses, and John Cooke and others, who offered improved medical care.99 The Levellers did not, it is worth noting, adopt the humanist policy of incarcerating the vagrant and prostitute. Ultimately, they were most creative—again, as their critics observed—in fearlessly raising the issue of property. One of the most daring of their proposals concerning the poor was contained in the “Humble Petition” of September 1648, which called for the laying open of recently enclosed fens and common land “only or chiefly to the benefit of the poor.” This would necessarily have involved either compensation to the enclosers or their dispossession, but if they were to be consistent, the first option must have prevailed, because the “Humble Petition” stated that Parliament and those it represented were committed to refrain from “abolishing property, leveling men’s estates, or making all things common.” As noticed earlier, the same document provided for impropriators of tithes to be compensated as part of the process of abolition.100 The petition did, however, issue a general, principled call for Parliament to take action to relieve the poor by “some effectual course to keep people from begging and beggary, in so fruitful a nation as through God’s blessing this is.” Here again, the reasoning was complex, including an economic statement about England’s natural fertility and a religious one about God’s grace.101 The Levellers also addressed the issue of capital punishment, taking a page, figuratively, from More’s Utopia. They called for the abolition of the death penalty, except in cases of murder, and opposed the confiscation of felons’ property apart from cases of treason. The argument was in part pragmatic and in part moral, because in the Third Agreement the Levellers objected that “men’s lives, limbs, liberties, and estates may not be liable to be taken away upon trivial or slight occasions as they have been . . .”. The assumption was that many felons who were executed had committed crimes because of poverty, and so the same clause specified that Parliament “shall have special care to preserve, all sorts of people from wickedness, misery, and beggary . . .”.102 Although many Leveller positions were ostensibly “political,” it is worth considering their social implications, which could be of considerable moment. We have already observed that their assaults on the Church and the Lords would have had huge social consequences in pulling down two of the three pillars of the body social. Besides tearing down some, the Levellers would have elevated others. On the economic front, the distribution of common and glebe lands, the abolition of the Excise, control of interest rates, and institution of progressive taxation would have improved the fortunes of the poor and the middling. On the political side, the abolition of titles, expansion of parliamentary representation, and opening up of local government— all key marks of status in county and village society—would have raised the status of some, if not all. Equality before the law was another significant political change with social implications, and it was a frequent plank in the Leveller platform.

Property Assailed and Defended  385 The “Humble Petition” of 1648 said it expected Parliament to pass legislation that “would have made both kings, queens, princes, dukes, earls, lords, and all persons, alike liable to every law of the land . . .”. The aim was to be that “all persons even the highest might fear and stand in awe and neither violate the public peace, nor private right of person or estate, (as has been frequent) without being liable to account as other men.” The Second and Third Agreements made similar provisions.103 The granting of civil rights is not, as we know from recent history, a guarantee of social justice for all, but it has tended to raise the status of groups like blacks, women, indigenous peoples, and gays.104 The decentralization of government also contained the potential for augmenting the status of the middling and lower orders, if only by eliminating the higher ones. The Levellers rejected the institutions of Royal judges and a central administrative body, whether the old Privy Council or the new Council of State. Instead, they proposed in the Second Agreement that there be courts in every hundred with local juries, that every county have a local land registry, and that all mayors, sheriffs, justices of the peace, and deputy lieutenants be elected annually by the same franchise as Parliament.105 The expansion of education also had the potential for social progress. Overton appealed in July 1647 for universal primary education. He called for existing “Free-Schools” that had been closed or impropriated to be revived. Where there were no schools, he proposed creating new ones at the public expense, so “that few or none of the free men of England may for the future be ignorant of reading and writing.” In addition, the Levellers favored vocational learning: a pamphlet in 1648 called for the training of youth in productive employments.106 VIII. THE DIGGERS It is well known that Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers would have abolished property and thereby, in their view, rid society of greed and poverty. Winstanley declared that “property and single interest divides the people of a land and the whole world into parties, and is the cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere.”107 His calls for the abolition of private landholding are notorious, but less often recognized are his criticisms of what he considered the old order and his views on alternative social formations and their institutional expressions, which in many respects paralleled the Levellers. In the spring of 1649, he and his fellow “Diggers” set up a community on St. George’s Hill, a piece of waste land in the parish of Walton-on-Thames in Surrey, where they cultivated collectively. Supporters in perhaps eight other counties created similar communities in the period, though none lasted more than a few months because hostile locals and the authorities forcibly dispersed them.108 But the evanescent quality of the Digger movement should not blind us to the power of Winstanley’s program. While his social activism is striking in

386  Society as Property, 1550–1697 its challenge to traditional values and institutions, his impact is also greatly enhanced by the fact that he published extensively about his project, its reasons, and its objectives. As a result, we are able to perceive his rationale for abolishing property, which was based on a broader theoretical critique of the old order. Winstanley’s rejection of property rights was both historical and contemporary. He attacked the old order at length and proposed a new one based on social equality and institutions to enforce it and to curb the competition that Smith, Hobbes, and others argued was “natural” to human society. Winstanley’s criticisms of landowning targeted the clergy and the aristocracy. His attack might be considered an old chestnut, because many had previously urged the reform of these groups. But Winstanley’s precursors, with the exception of Thomas More and in some measure, the Levellers, had not called for the takeover of properties. Winstanley linked the clergy with the Norman Conquest and what he and other radicals called the Norman Yoke. He also asserted that the Conquest brought two groups to the fore who governed the country: lawyers and the clergy.109 Winstanley left no doubt that the clergy were to be chastised by referring to the “teachers” who, along with rulers, had “hedged into enclosures” the earth, “which was made to be a common treasury of relief for all . . .”. These “professors,” he alleged, “pretend to the spirit” but in reality, wherever they were, “all places stink with the abomination of self-seeking teachers” who preach for money, counsel, and fight for it “to maintain particular interests.” The alternative was the apostolic church, when the rich sold their property and gave part of it to the poor, when no one claimed anything to be his own, and they held all things in common. As things stood, “the burdens of the clergy remains [sic] still upon us”: denial of the liberty of conscience, ignorant ministers from pre-revolutionary days who spread sedition against the new government, and burdensome tithes.110 Winstanley’s attack on lay landed elites was again based on his concept of history since the Conquest. The monarch and the gentry were “but the successors of the Norman victory,” he wrote. The choice was between freedom from oppression, conquest, and theft—“to have the earth set free from all kingly bondage of lords of manors and oppressing landlords, which came in by conquest as a thief takes a true man’s purse upon the highway, being stronger than he.”111 Winstanley’s remarks were based on his positions on morality and class relations. People should and would live in “righteousness” if there were no great landowners; it was a “curse” if people accepted “the earth to be the peculiar interest of lords and landlords, and not common to others as well as them  .  .  .”. In fact it was worse, because landowning involved murder and theft: “those that buy and sell land, and are landlords, have got it either by oppression or murder or theft,” and because all landlords were in breach of the seventh and eight commandments.112 In The Law of Freedom, Winstanley mounted further critiques of landowners, with specific reference to the recent overthrow of the monarchy.

Property Assailed and Defended  387 First, the lords demanded rents and denied tenants, “their brethren,” the free use of the commons. The lords’ authority came from the king, “the conqueror’s successor,” but now that the king was gone, everyone should be free “from the slavery of that lordly power.” Second, where commons still existed, the “rich Norman freeholders, or the new (more covetous) gentry” overstocked the land with livestock, which impoverished the poor. Third, some parishes were controlled by just two or three landlords, who held the most important offices and overcharged the rest in taxes. Finally, country folk were charged tolls to sell their produce in towns, on top of new taxes such as free quarter for troops, so that people still needed freedom from the “covetous Norman toll-taker . . .”.113 Winstanley’s proposals involved a radical reordering of things that centered on the reform of property. His positions owed only a little to traditional social theory. When describing the action at St. George’s Hill, he cited the old trope of the organic society, saying that “for as divers members of our human bodies make but one body perfect; so every particular man is but a member or branch of mankind . . .”. But when he later invoked the image of the Great Chain, it was with reference to a complex diagram of “the officers’ names in a free Commonwealth.”114 There is no question the Digger Commonwealth was to be a heavily governed, if egalitarian, system. The key was landed property, the expropriation of which Winstanley traced back to Adam, leading to loss of freedom or “bondage,” “miserable poverty,” and oppression by the authorities, who protected the property of the rich through punishment and imprisonment of the poor. The solution, as God originally designed it, was that “the earth becomes a common treasury” so that human kind would once again “be made of one heart and one mind . . .”. This would happen according to the following, somewhat vague, plan: “we may work in righteousness and lay the foundation of making the earth a common treasury for all, both rich and poor, that everyone that is born in the land may be fed by the earth his mother that brought him forth, according to the reason that rules in the creation.” No one could enclose any land for personal gain; all would work together as a family (a common metaphor in the Winstanley oeuvre), looking on one another as equals.115 The Diggers promised a great deal through the abolition of private landholding, including the elimination of wage labor and poverty. Winstanley believed that God had promised humanity freedom from the bondage of working for others, which would be achieved by laboring “with the sweat of our brows, neither giving hire not taking hire but working together and eating together as one man or as one house of Israel restored from bondage.” Then we would be able “to lift up the creation from that bondage of civil property which it groans under.” Those who opposed “property and single interest,” Winstanley observed, would not work for others because of the political consequences: “for by their labors they have lifted up tyrants and tyranny; and by denying to labor for hire they shall pull them down again.” Wage labor

388  Society as Property, 1550–1697 was “unrighteous” work that “still lifts up the curse,” i.e., the Fall. Instead, he who chose to work and eat together “does join hands with Christ to lift up the creation from bondage, and restores all things from the curse.”116 By attacking the institution of private landholding, Winstanley held out the prospect of the eradication of poverty. “We would have none live in beggary, poverty or sorrow, but that everyone might enjoy the benefit of his creation,” he wrote. With bondage removed and “tears wiped away,” people would be lifted from poverty, and beggary would disappear as it did in ancient Israel.117 In The Law of Freedom, he responded to the charge that “this will bring poverty” by saying that there would be “plenty of all earthly commodities, with less labor and trouble than now it is under monarchy” because there would be a “common stock” to cover those in need. There would be no unemployment, because “it will make idle persons to become workers . . . [so] there shall be neither beggar nor idle person.”118 In the same pamphlet, Winstanley repeated the promise of no beggary in a section in which a parallel was drawn between England’s forfeited Crown lands in the 1650s and the story of Israel’s conquest of the Canaanites. The Jews distributed the land for “the whole Commonwealth” and provided “for every tribe and for every family in a tribe, nay for every particular man in a family; every one had enough, no man was in want, there was no beggary among them.”119 The extent to which Winstanley broke with the body social is apparent in the ways in which he structured social life and political institutions. Like Hobbes, he favored strong institutional measures. However, unlike Hobbes and Filmer, who, ironically, are renowned for supporting strong, patriarchal institutions, Winstanley was specific about his plans. He vigorously promoted a social order dominated by family heads and a political system run by geriatric patriarchs. From the outset of The Law of Freedom, Winstanley founded his society on the family, whose head was the father, and whose house, wife, children, furnishings, and share of the “storehouses” belonged to the family and could not be removed by anyone without punishment.120 The new society would be based upon family production, beginning with agricultural produce, which would be put into a common stock. All men were to be trained in trades and labor; tradesmen would receive materials from the public storehouses and their production would be placed in shops, but “without buying and selling.” All families would go to the shops for their necessities and receive them “without money . . .”.121 Youths were to be educated and not allowed “to live in idleness and youthful pleasure all their days”; rather, they were to be “brought up like men and not like beasts: that so the Commonwealth may be planted with laborious and wise experienced men, and not with idle fools.” Youth was considered to last until the age of 40 (!). Education was not to be limited to book learning, which led to idleness and a threat to the “common peace” (another echo of Hobbes). Rather, reprising social humanist thinking, they

Property Assailed and Defended  389 should be “set to such trades, arts and sciences as their bodies and wits are capable of”; then, after 40, they would be allowed to retire.122 Young women would be trained in music, knitting, reading, sewing, and spinning, to provide the storehouses with cloth and needlework. Of adult women, Winstanley took little note, except to refer to them as begetters of children, objects of carnal desire and coveting.123 The redistribution of property in his system would even solve a perennial problem of primogeniture, in which the younger sons were servants to the eldest brother, who was “landlord of the earth” and which caused “murmurings, wars and quarrels.”124 Winstanley gave an historical analysis of the Norman Yoke in his critique, but also a contemporary one. He linked the power of landlords to the Conquest and the elites’ promise “to preserve a people in safety by the power of the sword,” after which they became “justices, rulers and state governors . . .”.125 The Diggers were also attacking the Rump government of 1649. The manifesto from St. George’s Hill was addressed to “you powers of England and of the whole world . . .”. It denounced the free quarter and plundering of recent years, the “sessions, lawyers, bailiffs of hundreds, committees, impropriators, clerks of peace and courts of justice (so called)” engaging in religious persecution. It called for the overthrow of “stouthearted Pharaoh” and his allies the landlords with their “rich clothing, full bellies . . . honors and ease . . .”.126 Winstanley’s plan for a “free Commonwealth” was traditional in drawing upon existing units of government and using patriarchal authority. He first defined a Commonwealth, as Hobbes had, in material terms. It was a government “without buying and selling,” but also a “restorer of ancient peace and freedom” that provides for the “oppressed, the weak and the simple, as well as for the rich, the wise and the strong.” Removed from power were kings, lords of manors, lawyers, landlords, and the clergy.127 As noted, the basic unit was the family and the “father or master of a family,” but with little mention of the mother. He was responsible for the education, vocational training, and employment of his children. The next rung on the ladder was the parish, town, or city, which had various numbers of “peacemakers” who, rather like judges, had overall responsibility for law and order and administration. Responsible to them were four kinds of “overseer[s],” who provided the policing of crime, the employment of youth, the running of the storehouses; those over 60 who were “elders” had oversight of all other overseers. Each community had a soldier, who Winstanley compared to a provost marshal, and who had wide police powers over the population. The “task-master” was empowered to deal with convicted criminals, feeding and whipping them as needed. The executioner’s job was obvious, but did not only involve death sentences, but also whipping and imprisonment.128 The next tier of government was the county, which Winstanley renamed “the judge’s court, or the county senate,” because he was hostile to the old quarter sessions and assizes (but retained a quarterly meeting schedule). The judge would interpret Parliament’s legislation and would meet in

390  Society as Property, 1550–1697 sessions with the peacemakers, overseers, and soldiers from a circuit within the county to judge cases.129 At the national level, the government looked a great deal like the Commonwealth of 1649–53, with a Parliament, a “ministry” (read Council of State), an army (cf. the New Model), and a peculiar position called a “postmaster,” who was responsible for exchanging news with the various parts of the country in a kind of communications department.130 Parliament’s first task was to mandate “the free planting and reaping of the Commonwealth’s land,” which was to include any land taken “by conquerors, kings and their tyrant laws . . .”. Echoing the Levellers, the land settlement was to include all land belonging, formerly or currently, to monasteries, bishops, the monarch, as well as all common and waste lands, including commons withheld from the commoners by lords of manors . . .”. Parliament was also to be “a punisher of them who are idle.”131 The government was to be strict with those deemed inferior or “foolish,” such as the youthful and the malingerer. The father’s authority was justified as the “original root of magistracy” in which Adam was the “first governor or officer in the earth . . .”. The patriarch was there to protect children, who were unable to protect themselves, and “to help the weak and the foolish.” This notion of “common preservation” was reminiscent of Hobbes, too.132 All officers were to be elected annually, but the clear implication was that each would be a male head of family, because naturally he would be chosen “by them who are in necessity and who judge him fit for that work.” No one would be permitted to be a head of household until he had served a seven-year apprenticeship, so that “every family may be governed by staid and experienced masters, and not by wanton youth.” If a family head were incompetent or died, the overseers of the craft would apprentice the children in appropriate households.133 Winstanley’s construction of a new society and state included institutions to deal with the wayward. He made clear from the outset of The Law of Freedom that he rejected voluntary poverty: “idle persons and beggars will be made to work.” At several local levels, a regime of work was to be enforced. Regarding children, the master of a family would “command them their work and see they do it, and not suffer them to live idle; he is either to reprove by words or whip those who offend, for the rod is prepared to bring the unreasonable ones to experience and moderation [sic] . . .”.134 One of the jobs of the overseer for trades was to go house to house, rather like a Roman censor, and “view the works of the people of every house” and “see that no youth be trained up in idleness . . .”. As a result, there would be “neither beggar nor idle person in the Commonwealth.”135 The rationale for ridding the country of idleness was not only the policing of the young and idle. It was also stated at length that, as in Utopia, the principle of compulsory labor applied to all. Anyone refusing to learn a trade or to work in agriculture or in the storehouses and who took food and clothing would first be privately admonished by the overseers, then publicly criticized by them and given a month to mend his ways,

Property Assailed and Defended  391 then to be whipped and given a further month, and finally delivered to a taskmaster to be employed for 12 months, “or till he submit to right order.” Such employment would prevent pride and dissent, was healthy for one’s body, was a pleasure to the mind, and provided production for the Commonwealth.136 Winstanley made detailed provision for the loss of freedom and the descent into “slavery”: the penal regime went beyond anything the Levellers proposed. Offenders were to be clothed in white woolen clothing to distinguish them and were to be under the rule of the taskmaster, who could assign them any kind of labor and who was responsible for farming them out to any freeman. Any refusing to work were to be whipped and fed with “coarse diet”; any who questioned the rules were to receive the same treatment, and any resisting with weapons were condemned as traitors. Freedom could be gained by “humility and diligence” and expiry of their sentences, which would be a minimum of 12 months as “laboring servants to the Commonwealth . . .”.137 Those who became ill would be treated by surgeons; the dead were to be buried by the parish “in a civil manner,” but without any words from the minister or anyone else.138 IX. CONCLUSIONS The Grandees, Levellers, and Diggers held divergent positions on the shape that society should take, but there is little question they were all exercised by the issue of property. The Grandees were chiefly concerned to preserve the status quo, especially the primacy of landed property. They would have preferred to retain the monarchy, although this proved impossible because of Charles I’s personal limitations; they would keep the House of Lords, albeit in a diminished capacity, and hold on to a national Church, although one of independent churches, supported by the traditional tithe. Before and during Putney, the Levellers were preoccupied with social issues, and not only with the franchise. Even if they were not a unified party, there was widespread agreement that the Church should be disestablished and its tithes, bishops’, deans’, and chapters’ lands confiscated. The fate of aristocratic lands was more open, although Overton and Walwyn, at least, raised the question of whether they were not illegitimately gained through conquest, and there was a consensus that titles, legal privileges, and the House of Lords should be abolished. There is good reason to dub the Diggers the “true Levellers,” because they left no doubt about the fate of clerical and aristocratic landholdings, which they would have nationalized. The Levellers themselves would have distributed clerical landholdings to the poor and to the soldiery. As More and the Levellers had, Winstanley promised to abolish wage earning and poverty through a division of landed wealth. Given these positions, it is not problematical to conclude that landed property was a core issue informing

392  Society as Property, 1550–1697 discussions of social structure in the mid-seventeenth century. Whether one was concerned, like Harrington, with the survival of the landed elites or with their possible extinction, with the Grandees, the Levellers, and Diggers, the story was the same: property was the key.

NOTES   1. David Wootton, “Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution,” in J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie, eds., The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 412, 421.   2. For a survey, see Perez Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1660, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).   3. Wootton, “Leveller Democracy,” 442.   4. Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 3–7, usefully sums up the political historiography). Joseph Frank, The Levellers: A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth-Century Social Democrats: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955). Frank’s book is excellent, but it gives limited attention to the topic of social democracy.   5. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) (see below for further citations).   6. Ibid. 107, 111, 137–9, 142–5, 280–92 (esp. p. 137).   7. Clark, “Medieval Labor Law and English Local Courts,” American Journal of Legal History, 27 (1983): 337.   8. Ibid. 337–8.   9. Peter Laslett, Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 219. 10. C. Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 204; Laslett, Household and Family in Past Time, 151–8; Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), ch.2. 11. A. L. Beier, “Poverty and Progress in Early Modern England,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honor of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 207. 12. Macpherson, 3, 53–4. 13. James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 136–7; see also the remarks of Edward Waterhouse in the previous chapter. 14. Keith Thomas, “The Levellers and the Franchise,” The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646–1660, ed. G. E. Aylmer (London: Macmillan, 1972), 57–66. 15. Thomas, “Levellers and Franchise,” 72. 16. A. J. Tawney and R. H. Tawney, “An Occupational Census of the Seventeenth Century,” Ec.H.R 5 (October 1934): 47. 17. C.  B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 219. Cf. Alan Everitt, “Farm Laborers,” in Joan Thirsk, ed., The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume IV, 1500–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), ch. 7. 18. Aylmer, Levellers, 162 (Third Agreement). 19. Thomas, “Levellers and Franchise,” 59. 20. Donald Read, The Age of Urban Democracy: England, 1868–1914 (London: Longman, 1979; revised edn., 1994), 301–2.

Property Assailed and Defended  393 21. Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997; repr. of 1954 edn.), 39; Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel, Utopian Thought in the Western World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 343–9; J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study in English Utopian Writing (Cambidge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 208–9. 22. Frank, The Levellers, 136–7; Brian Manning, The Far Left in the English Revolution, 1640 to 1660 (London: Bookmarks, 1999), 74–5. 23. Keith Thomas, “The Levellers and the Franchise,” 77–8. 24. Zagorin, 39. 25. Austin Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and its Debates, 1647–1648 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 245–6. 26. George H. Sabine, A History of Political Thought (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 3rd edn., 1951; orig. pub. 1937), 408. 27. Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 231 n. 59. 28. Woodhouse, “The Putney Debates,” 29, 57, 71, 79; (and Cromwell, 59). It is worth noting that the Levellers also used fear tactics in the debates, especially the threat of being “enslaved”: ibid., 67, 71. 29. Richard Overton, An Appeal from the Degenerate Representative Body [July 17, 1647], repr. in Don M. Wolfe ed. Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution (New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1944), 178–9 (italics in original). 30. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, 184 (italics original). 31. H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Great Britain: The Cresset Press, 1961; 2nd edn. 1983, Spokesman), 26; Aylmer, 10; Woodhouse, 444. 32. Aylmer, 15, 18, 20; Brailsford, 385. 33. John Lilburne, Postscript to London’s Liberty (March 1647); The Humble Petition (September 1648), repr. in Aylmer, 73, 76, 132–33. 34. Brailsford, 388–393. 35. Overton, An Arrow against all Tyrants (October 1646) repr. in Aylmer, 68; cf. Brailsford, 27–9. 36. Woodhouse, 347, 387, 398–400; Brailsford, 158, 169–70; Aylmer, 76–7. 37. Aylmer, 86–7; Wolfe, 193–4. 38. Woodhouse, 427, 435; Wolfe, 320 (demanded by John Jubbes, who was not a Leveller according to Wolfe, 311–12). 39. Overton quoted by Brailsford; for Cromwell, ibid. 135–6. The best study of the tithes debate remains Margaret James, “The Political Importance of the Tithes Controversy in the English Revolution, 1640–60,” History, 26, no. 101 (June 1941), 1–18. 40. Michael Hawkins, “Ambiguity and Contradiction in ‘the Rise of Professionalism’: The English Clergy, 1570–1730,” in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, & James M. Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honor of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 267. 41. Aylmer, 25, 77, 80, 86; Brailsford, 133–5. 42. Woodhouse, 35, 427 (Wildman); Aylmer, 136, 166; Brailsford, 380, 470. 43. Charles H. Firth, The House of Lords During the Civil War (London: Longmans, Green, 1910; repr. Kessinger), 157–9. 44. Firth, 164–5; Andrew Sharp, ed., The English Levellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ix (authorship), 37. Cf. Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: George G. Harrap, 1961), esp. 406, and 399–414 for the excellent bibliography there. 45. A. L. Morton, ed. Freedom in Arms: A Selection of Leveller Writings (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 83 (emphasis added), who dates it from the end of June 1646 and attributes it to William Walwyn; cited without attribution by Firth, House of Lords, 161. 46. Firth, 165; Sharp, ed., English Levellers, 37–8 (emphasis added).

394  Society as Property, 1550–1697 47. Firth, House of Lords, 160–2. 48. Ibid. 162–3. 49. Quoted Firth, 163–4. Gregg, 409, lists the publication with a “?” and gives its Thomason reference as E.370/12; B. 50. Mark A. Kishlansky The Rise of the New Model Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), xi; A. H. Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen. 57, 63–4. 51. Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 63–4, 96. 52. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 57. 53. Ibid. 92–3, 423. 54. Ibid. 114–15, 119, 123. 55. David Farr, Henry Ireton and the English Revolution (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2006), 192; for an earlier account that stresses Ireton’s doubts, see Robert W. Ramsey, Henry Ireton (London: Longmans, 1949), 139–40. 56. Woodhouse, 53, 65. 57. Aylmer, 91; for aristocratic privileges, see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 54–6. These included freedom from arrest (except for breaches of the peace, felonies, and treason), which allowed them to evade creditors, relief from being outlawed and forced to appear in court for various offenses, excused from local office and from military and fiscal obligations imposed by local officials, the right to participate in a virtual monopoly of high office, including membership in the House of Lords. 58. Woodhouse, 55–6. 59. Ibid. 68, 88, 92, 108. 60. Ibid. 104, 108. 61. Ibid. 89. 62. Firth, House of Lords, 173–4. 63. Woodhouse, 109–110; cf. S. R. Gardiner, ed. The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), 319, clause II.2. 64. Aylmer, 132, 136. 65. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 52–4; also 57. 66. Ibid. 59. The last quotation has been modified from Woodhouse’s editing. 67. Ibid. 82. 68. Christopher Thompson, “Maximilian Petty and the Putney Debate on the Franchise,” P&P 88 (August 1980): 69. 69. But see Thomas, “Levellers and Franchise,” 66. 70. J. C. Davis, “Equality in an Unequal Commonwealth: James Harrington’s Republicanism and the Meaning of Equality,” in Ian Gentles, John Morrill, and Blair Worden, eds., Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 229; Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 384. 71. Richard Tuck, “ ‘The Ancient Law of Freedom’: John Selden and the Civil War,” in John Morrill, ed., Reactions to the English Civil War, 1642–1649 (London: Macmillan, 1982): 156 (italics by Tuck). 72. Pocock, MM, 375. 73. Michael Mendle, “Introduction,” in Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 11. 74. Woodhouse, 26–7, 57. The OED (2nd edn.) defines “traduction” as “Transmission by generation to offspring or posterity; production, propagation; derivation from ancestry, descent.” 75. Woodhouse, 54–5 (italics in original). In a strange affinity of opposites, the label “Leveller” apparently first emanated from the mouth of Charles I and was then repeated by Cromwell: Ian Gentles, “The ‘Agreements of the People,’ 1647– 1649,” in The Putney Debates, ed. Mendle: 152.

Property Assailed and Defended  395 76. Woodhouse, 60; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 375–6, for Ireton and Filmer. 77. Woodhouse, 71; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 377. 78. Woodhouse, 72–3. 79. Ibid. 79. 80. G. E. Aylmer, “ ‘Property’ in Seventeenth-century England,” P&P 86 (Feb. 1980): 93, 95, 97. 81. T. Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 26, 111–112 (italics original). 82. Woodhouse, op.cit. 53, 55–6, 60–1. 83. Ibid. 73. 84. Ibid. 66, 80–1. 85. Ibid. 67, 71. 86. Ibid. 69–70. 87. K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 5th edn., 1966 [texts completed between October 1942 and February 1943], I, 199; II, 30. 88. Quoted Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution (New York: Peregrine Books, 1978; orig. pub. Heinemann, 1976), 338. 89. Overton excerpt in Aylmer, Levellers, 82–3. 90. Manning, English People, 338–9. 91. Wolfe, ed., Leveller Manifestoes (New York: Nelson & Sons, 1944), 407. For opposition to Excise taxes, see Edward Hughes, Studies in Administration and Finance, 1558–1825 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1934; repr. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1980), 122–3. 92. Wolfe, 302. 93. Aylmer, Levellers, 76–7, 79. 94. Wolfe, 268, 302, 407; Aylmer, 135. 95. Wolfe, 302; L. Stone, Crisis, 142. 96. Wolfe, op.cit., 407. 97. Aylmer, Levellers, 80. 98. Aylmer, Levellers, 86–7. 99. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626-1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 260–3. 100. Aylmer, Levellers, 135–6. For the murky question of whether Oliver Cromwell opposed or favored enclosing the fens, see Barry Coward, Oliver Cromwell (London: Longman, 1991), 9. For similar proposals on common lands and provision of one quarter of their revenues to the poor, see Wolfe, 319. 101. Aylmer, Levellers, 136. 102. Ibid. 136; Wolfe, 407. 103. Aylmer, 135, 164–5; Wolfe, 300, 316, 406. 104. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492–Present (New York: Harper, 1980; reissued 2005), chs. 17, 19. 105. Wolfe, 96, 98, 405. The deputy lieutenant is a curious survival from the old regime: did it not presume the existence of a lord lieutenant, who was usually a titled aristocrat? 106. Wolfe, 80, 194 (also Aylmer, 86). 107. Christopher Hill, ed. Winstanley: “The Law of Freedom” and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 90. 108. For a useful survey see Hill, ed. “Introduction,” Winstanley: The Law of Freedom, 26–31; and on the property issue, Timothy Kenyon, Utopian Communism and Political Thought in Early Modern England (London: Pinter Publishers, 1989), esp. chs. 5, 7. 109. Jerrard Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform; Or, True Magistracy Restored (London: Giles Calvert, 1652), Thomason E.655 (8), Wing 3045. Christopher Hill, ed., Winstanley, op.cit 297.

396  Society as Property, 1550–1697 10. Hill ed. 78, 88, 91, 279; also 348–54. 1 111. Ibid. 297, 302–3. 112. Ibid. 84–5. 113. Ibid. 280–1. 114. Ibid. 89, 324. 115. Ibid. 78, 80, 84. 116. Ibid. 83, 90. 117. Ibid. 90–1. 118. Ibid. 289. 119. Ibid. 300–1. 120. Ibid. 288, 303. 121. Ibid. 303. 122. Ibid. 361–2. 123. Ibid. 294, 302, 350, 365. 124. Ibid. 294, 301, 306–7, 309. 125. Ibid. 85–7. 126. Ibid. 92. 127. Ibid. 311. 128 Ibid. 324–335 (itals. orig.). 129. Ibid. 337. 130. Ibid. 338–61, esp. 354–6 (post-masters); the section also contains a lengthy examination of the qualities to be expected of the clergy. 131. Ibid. 339. 132. Ibid. 314–15. 133. Ibid. 317–18, 329, 331. 134. Ibid. 303, 325. 135. Ibid. 329, 331. 136. Ibid. 381. 137. Ibid. 386–7. 138. Ibid. 387.

17 Conclusions The Past Makes the Future

I. INTRODUCTION From the foregoing, it should be no surprise that later views of English society emphasized the economic fortunes of constituent groups. These representations include those by Edward Chamberlayne (1692), Gregory King (1695–6), and from later periods, those by Joseph Massie (1759–60) and Patrick Colquhoun (1806), which are discussed in this chapter. To varying extents, these authorities attempted to calculate the incomes of these groups by using ambitious and speculative quantitative methods. In the process, they painted detailed portraits of the larger society. Scholars have been at pains to determine the accuracy of these calculations, even attempting to measure income inequality and economic growth from the late seventeenth to the early twentieth century.1 But few have considered whether these representations of income had any significance in the history of social thought. A  partial exception was Geoffrey Holmes, who thought they had value because “they reflect how the pre-industrial Englishman of a traditionalist cast of mind preferred to think his social order was constituted.” Holmes did relate King’s work to a long-term historical perspective “in direct line of descent from the sumptuary laws of the late fifteenth century, through Sir Thomas Smith, Wilson and Chamberlayne, to Massie, and perhaps even Colquhoun.” Unfortunately, this fine scholar did not follow up these remarks with more detailed analyses of the diachronic importance of these authorities.2 Voicing similar sentiments, another historian observed of King, Massie, and Colquhoun that their importance lay not in “quantitative accuracy,” but in providing “probable fact, or at least of informed contemporary opinion which in its turn might well influence action.” Massie’s work was valuable “for the history of opinion—in showing assumptions current in the mid-eighteenth century about the structure of society.”3 How did these later commentators represent the social order? Did they agree with earlier seventeenth-century observers that wealth was the basis of society? The later sections of these Conclusions examine the social thinking of John Locke (1632–1704) in texts that remained in manuscript in his lifetime

398  Society as Property, 1550–1697 and in the Two Treatises of Government (published in 1690; composed between 1679 and 1680). This discussion takes place in the Conclusions because Locke captures the quintessential modernity of social thought at the end of the period covered in this book. While best known as a political theorist, Locke’s writings contained significant remarks about society—about property and its relation to society and government,4 about patriarchy (the chief concern of the first of the Two Treatises), and about the positive roles of labor, production, education, and criminal justice.5 Locke rejected voluntary poverty and championed obligatory labor and the fostering of production by the poor.6 In sum, Locke went beyond the numbers games of practitioners of Political Arithmetic such as King, defining social relations in terms of production. Here were answers to questions raised by social humanist thinking since the late fifteenth century. II. PAINTING BY NUMBERS It is worth perusing the mathematics of the early Political Arithmeticians, for the most striking characteristic of their work is their preoccupation with the distribution of income as the basis of society. In the early seventeenth century, as observed in Chapter 13, Thomas Wilson described the incomes of several social groups, and Chamberlayne’s material was similar in scope. King’s data was more extensive, as might be expected from one of the founding fathers of Political Arithmetic, and he set an example that Massie and Colquhoun imitated and adapted. Chamberlayne’s Angliae Notitia: Or, the Present State of England (1692) was a more conventional compilation of facts and figures about the rich and powerful of the country, together with lists of incumbents, and a great deal of historical and legal commentary. Because it was the seventeenth of many editions, one can safely assume the books were widely purchased. Chamberlayne’s views of society have been described as “reactionary.”7 He did frame his comments by reference to the three estates, privileged the clergy by discussing them as the first of the three, and used the language of the body social, describing day laborers as “the lowest member, the feet of the body politic . . .”. He also denounced changes in the social order.8 But there was more to Chamberlayne than a reprise of the body social, for in some respects, his remarks significantly departed from that model. He made almost no reference to the interdependence of the estates, apart from citing the role of bishops in founding university colleges, schools, hospitals, and almshouses.9 Like Wilson and others, Chamberlayne observed conflict, mobility, and money in his representation of society. He cited with disapproval the dwindling of the bishops’ wealth from the reign of Henry VIII to that of James VI and I. They were, he protested, “most miserably robbed and spoiled of the greatest part of their lands and revenues; so that at this day, a mean gentleman of £200 land yearly, will not change his worldly state

Conclusions  399 and condition with diverse bishops: an attorney, a shopkeeper, a common artisan will hardly change theirs with ordinary pastors of the church.” He provided a detailed accounting of the revenues and expenses of the wealthy bishopric of Durham, which he treated as an exception.10 Chamberlayne also described the wealth of the lower nobility and of freeholders. Baronets he numbered at 749 with £1,200 a year in incomes; knights, 1,400, with about £800 for each family; esquires and gentlemen he lumped together at 6,000, with about £400 each. The total of their wealth he estimated at £4,060,000 a year.11 The wealth of freeholders he put at £40–£50 and “very ordinary, £100–£200 in some counties, is not rare”; and “sometimes in Kent £1,000 and £1,500.”12 If attention to £ s. d. represented the wave of the future, it would be hard to ignore Chamberlayne on this evidence. His remarks on social mobility might seem reactionary, but are best understood in the context of contemporary debates about landed versus moneyed interests in English society.13 Chamberlayne recorded at length, though with disapproval, the mobility and social mixing one associates with modern societies. Rebutting Waterhouse, Chamberlayne vociferously decried the social mixing of the landed with the trades. He maintained that “anciently” it was “accounted an abasing of gentry, to put their sons to get their living by shop-keeping,” to marry a ward to a shopkeeper’s daughter, or to apprentice their children. Dubiously and rhetorically he claimed to have observed “of late not only the sons of baronets, knights, and gentlemen, sitting in shops, and sometimes of peddling trades, far more fit for women and their daughters, but also an earl of this kingdom subjecting his son to an apprentisage and trade . . .”. He reckoned there were 16,000 younger sons in England, who were usually “bred up to divinity, law, physic, to Court, and military employments, but of late too many of them to shopkeeping.”14 However distasteful he found it, Chamberlayne was evidently not averse to recording social mobility. Chamberlayne actually broke the mold of the three estates theory, as Sir Thomas Smith had done a century earlier, in writing separate chapters on women, children, and servants, which immediately followed those on the three estates, suggesting a more elaborate representation than the traditional body social, albeit one that is patriarchal in character. His account of women’s rights, or the lack thereof, was entirely conventional, confirming that a woman who married “loses not only the power over her person, and her will, and the property of her goods, but her very name . . . ” Yet he claimed that “such is the good nature of Englishmen towards their wives, such is the tenderness and respect, giving them the uppermost place at table, and elsewhere . . . if there were a bridge over into England . . . it is thought all the women in Europe would run hither.”15 Chamberlayne’s discussion of children did little more than spell out their rights, which were limited by their fathers having “absolute authority” over them.16 His account of servants was highly conventional too, laying out the terms of yearly contracts and endorsing social humanist and Lockean

400  Society as Property, 1550–1697 approval, discussed below, of compulsory labor. Chamberlayne asserted that a gentleman was not liable “to serve in husbandry” under the Statute of Artificers—yet another affirmation, if one is needed, of the existence of a social order that divided rich and poor based upon wealth.17 King’s tables and calculations of England’s social rankings are so well known to historians that a lengthy discussion would be hackneyed. Yet there are some new observations to be made about King’s analysis. Although an early exemplar of the quantifier, he was not wholly divorced from the old world. The honor and distinction afforded to traditional social ranking were not wholly ignored in King’s scheme, for gentlemen were listed higher than wealthy merchants, even though the former had yearly incomes of £280, while the latter had £400.18 But in most other regards social rank followed income, beginning at the top of King’s table with the 160 “temporal lords” whose yearly takings were between £2,800 to £3,200 for each family and ending with 30,000 “vagrants as gypsies, thieves, beggars, etc.” who he contended were decreasing the nation’s wealth by £30,000 because their expenditures (£3 p.a.) outstripped their earnings (£2 p.a.).19 Despite ranking gentlemen above merchants, King usually represented society as a hierarchy based on wealth. When it came to “persons in offices”— by which he presumably meant Royal office holders—the “greater” ones had incomes of £240 p.a. and were ranked above the “lesser” ones with £120 p.a. The same standard was applied to merchants, the “eminent” of whom trading by sea had £400 p.a. and were listed above the “lesser” with £200 p.a. Similarly treated were the clergy below the “spiritual lords.” The “eminent” among them were said to receive £60 p.a. and preceded in the table the “lesser” with £45. Freeholders “of the better sort” got £84 p.a. and preceded in the hierarchy “the lesser sort,” who had £50.20 While strictly outside this book’s chronological limits, the work of Massie and Colquhoun showed that in the long run, the view of society as wealth-based continued into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Massie’s table departed somewhat from King’s rankings, while still largely maintaining the principle of hierarchy based on wealth. The temporal lords once again topped the list, while cottagers and ale sellers were at the bottom. Massie divided the clergy into “superior” and “inferior” members, ranked four groups of “farmers,” four of “master manufacturers,” three of “merchants,” and five of “tradesmen,” according to their incomes. He added a geographical wrinkle by distinguishing between those working in the country and in London, a criterion that he applied to laborers, to manufacturers of wool and silk, and of wood and iron. Otherwise, Massie pretty much followed King’s system of ranking people by income.21 Colquhoun’s estimates for England and Wales for 1801–3 were much more conscious of the different sectors of the economy and did not always follow the principle of wealth determining hierarchies. He grouped the population into “high titles and professions,” an interesting combination of the landed and professional elites, those in commerce, in manufacturing and

Conclusions  401 building, agriculture, “maritime and military” pursuits, “laborers and the poor,” “confined income earners,” including prisoners for debt and lunatics, and groups set aside, including the king and pensioners. But, based upon their incomes, he still distinguished between “those in “higher” and “lesser” offices, and between “eminent” and “lesser” clergy and merchants.22 Representations of English society were not only about numbers after 1650. The social tables of King, Massie, and Colquhoun should not be privileged as definitive or uniquely important. One cannot assume their authors wholly rejected the body social simply because they did not mention it. Certainly right into the eighteenth century, members of the elites, particularly the Anglican clergy, championed a theory of a society of interdependent orders.23 Yet, looking at Chamberlayne, King, Massie, and Colquhoun, one is aware that significant changes had occurred in social theories since the time of Edmund Dudley. However much some authorities yearned for a return to the body social, this worldview was slipping away and had been from the mid-sixteenth century, as contemporaries increasingly based social organization on economic roles and income. III. GOVERNMENT, PROPERTY, AND LABOR IN THE TWO TREATISES One may impose a diachronic frame on the Political Arithmeticians, because they largely eschewed such a grid in their writings. They supplied the analytical social and occupational categories, together with the numbers they attached to them. They wrote little, however, about social relationships, their histories, or about what people actually did or produced in their positions. John Locke supplied a diachronic account of the origins of “society,” while staking out substantial new ground based upon a concept of productive labor, its moral force, its practical characteristics, and its application, including penal measures, to the lives of the poor. It is commonly observed that Locke developed a property-based theory of society in the Two Treatises of Government (1679–80).24 Preceding that condition, humans lived in a “state of nature” in which all were “equal and independent,” in a “state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions, and persons . . . ”, living without institutions of subordination unless God appointed them. “Society” and civil government were required in the state of nature because people transgressed the rules. To correct “those defects and imperfections which are in us . . . we are naturally induced to seek communion and fellowship . . . [which] was the cause of men’s uniting themselves, at first in politic societies.”25 “Society” had a strong institutional element according to Locke, who liberally used the terms “civil society,” “political society,” and “body politic” to describe it, often using italics, though not for the “body,” to denote the significance of society. The inception of such a society was God-given,

402  Society as Property, 1550–1697 because he put Adam and Eve together in a conjugal relationship. Women, masters, and servants were part of civil society, which did not include the enslaved. Emerging from the state of nature required the relinquishing of personal power to “unite into society” and yield to the majority or community of free men.26 Why surrender one’s liberty in the state of nature? The answer chiefly concerned property and was not far from a Hobbesian view. Locke says it is because the property holder was “constantly exposed to the invasion of others,” because “the enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure,” and is “full of fears and continual dangers,” so we seek out the “society” of others to preserve “lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property.” If civil society has a social foundation, it is because “Government has no other end but the preservation of property . . .”.27 IV. LABOR AND PRODUCTIVITY God’s definition of property protected the rights of laborers, because “every man has a property in his own person. This no body has any right to but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands . . . are properly his.” These principles were not unique to Locke; they were also voiced by a curious mixture of commentators: the Levellers, William Walwyn and William Petty, the presbyterian Richard Baxter, and fellow anti-absolutist James Tyrrell.28 Yet, Locke’s positions on labor-related issues were novel, and largely ignored by scholars.29 His critique of patriarchal political authority in the First Treatise is well known. Less known is his full-blown attack upon paternal economic power among the poor, which included the control of family income, manufacturing employment for women, and education for children. These positions, which are discussed below, were proposed to the Board of Trade in 1697, but remained in manuscript until the nineteenth century.30 What lay behind these proposals—and the concept of personal-laboras-property—was a model of a productive society, which was first elucidated in an essay c. 1674, which was reprised in the Two Treatises and in the 1697 treatise, all of which echo social humanist principles favoring wealth creation. Locke asserted c. 1674 that social positions should be based upon economic contributions. His assumption was that wealth could be increased if the correct policies were followed. He divided society into the “productive” and “unproductive.” The first contributed to trade, especially to exports, and included “men employed in husbandry, drapery, mines, and navigation.” Reprising the humanist position, he rejected voluntary poverty, non-producers, armies (both private and public), and lawyers: “such as are either idle and so do not help, as retainers to gentry and beggars, or, which is worse, hinder trade, as retailers . . . multitudes of lawyers, but above all soldiers in pay.”31 Locke’s definition of wealth was labor based, encompassing “domestic manufacture whereby is to be understood all labor employed by your people

Conclusions  403 in preparing commodities for your consumption  .  .  .”. Carriage was a second economic component, including the navigation and transportation of the merchandise in question. In policy terms, Locke’s vision of society prefigured modern liberalism, for he endorsed the liberal pillars of “freedom of trade,” “freedom of religion,” “certainty of property,” and “naturalization easy . . .”.32 Locke’s modernity was limited, however, because in his thinking, labor was not entirely free, and remained a legal obligation. Rejecting the principle of voluntary poverty and endorsing fourteenth-century legislation, he believed the authorities were mandated to force people to work at governmentcontrolled rates: “the magistrate has a power to command the subject to work, and limits his wages too,” and in case some bridled at such commandments he listed “public workhouses” among “promoters” of trade.33 On slavery, he took the line that slaves had no place in civil society because they were unfree and had no property.34 Locke provided an historical theory of property that he combined with a labor-based natural right to property and a moral injunction to make it productive. He at times seemed to presage a labor theory of value. In the state of nature, property was God-given and in common fields open to all, but what gave value to property was the labor given to it by “the industrious and rational . . .”.35 Land was of little value “without labor,” and was hugely improved by privatization through enclosure. Labor changed land from common to private ownership and higher productivity. Sounding a great deal like midcentury advocates of privatizing common lands, Locke asserted that enclosed land was worth more than common fields. Despite the example of Cain and Abel, there was plenty of land for all, even after it was enclosed.36 Locke praised “the great foundation of property” that made the comforts of life possible. This led to a natural law justification for inequality. Enclosure and “the invention of money” meant some had more than others because “different degrees of money were apt to give men possessions in different proportions . . .”.37 Thus, he justified different social positions according to their wealth. Locke’s assumption throughout this discussion was that productivity could be substantially increased through the application of labor, even among the poor (see section V below). He articulated the general principle that “he who appropriates land to himself by his labor, does not lessen but increase [sic] the common stock of mankind.” This was because “the provisions serving to the support of humane life” were 10-fold greater on “enclosed and cultivated land” over that left in common. Just in case anyone was confused by the mathematics, he went on to assert that 10 enclosed acres would produce “a greater plenty of the conveniences of life” than from 100 unenclosed acres. In fact, the “improved” land would probably produce a surplus of 100:1.38 The key to higher productivity was labor, which, when applied to community land, made all the difference: “for ‘tis labor indeed that puts the difference of value on every thing . . .”. He challenged anyone to compare

404  Society as Property, 1550–1697 the difference between an acre planted with tobacco, sugar, wheat, or barley and an acre lying in common. The reason was that “the improvement of labor makes the far greater part of the value.” Once again, the math was simple: “I think it will be but a very modest computation to say, that of the products of the earth useful to the life of man 9/10 are the effects of labor,” and, more likely, 99/100. In fact, the fruitful employment of labor was more significant than land: “numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions”; “the increase of lands and the right employing of them is the great art of government.”39 Locke cited at length the value of labor applied to the land. One of his favorite venues was the Americas where, he argued, there was no shortage of land, but a dearth of value because it was uncultivated. Twenty bushels of wheat at home might be worth £5, but would bring just a penny to the Indian because his land involved less labor input. At home, there was “the reaper’s and thresher’s toil, and the bakers [sic] sweat,” the labor of those breaking the oxen, of those who dug and wrought iron and stones, framed the wood for the mill, oven, and plough, and more than a dozen other commodities.40 Despite increased populations making land sometimes scarce, there was an abundance of waste lands held in common that could be cultivated. “Waste” in Locke’s view of productivity had a double meaning, because he applied it to goods as well as land. He gave the example of someone gathering 100 bushels of acorns or apples, who “had thereby a property in them” and who therefore had to ensure they were consumed before they rotted. By giving away or trading the produce, he avoided wasting it and diminishing the production of the original “common stock,” which had become his property.41 Locke praised the value of production-based trade over possessions as an engine of growth. Once again citing the example of the Americas, he questioned what the value was of holding 10,000 or 100,000 acres of land there, “ready cultivated, and well stocked too with cattle,” but where the owner “had no hopes of commerce with other parts of the world” and which was therefore not worth enclosing. There was no reason to expand one’s holdings with one’s labor without having markets beyond one’s immediate needs. Gold and silver represented the profits from expansion, and Locke appeared to question their intrinsic value compared with the power of development through labor.42 V.  UTOPIA REDUX: LOCKE’S VISION OF THE PRODUCTIVE POOR, 1697 Locke’s brief in the treatise that he drafted for the Board of Trade in 1697 included proposals to augment productivity by employing the poor and trimming the cost of welfare. As in the trade document c. 1674, his analysis took up major themes on the social humanist agenda—the definition of wealth as labor and production, the rejection of voluntary poverty and

Conclusions  405 unproductive occupations, the obligation of the poor to labor. In addition, the treatise provided extensive policy proposals affecting the patriarchal household, the employment of women, the disabled, the provision of education for the young, and a penal regime for the recalcitrant. Locke, it is argued here, gave higher priority to labor and productivity than to any other social issue; he considered labor the most productive sector in the economy and favored low wages, the “utility of poverty,” and the poor as a “source of profits.” The upshot would have been a root-and-branch reform of the Old Poor Law in a social humanist vein.43 The historiography of Locke’s treatise on the poor is marked by a consistent aura of disappointment in which the issues of labor and productivity are hardly mentioned and the penal aspects are highlighted. Although his Victorian biographer thought the 1697 manuscript showed Locke’s “amazing shrewdness and excellent philanthropy,” the Webbs considered it “somewhat naïve,” because it included “no statistical or other information as to what was the condition of the poor or as to the nature and extent of the evil with which it purported to deal.” They thought many of its provisions prefigured the harsh, nineteenth-century alternatives to the Old Poor Law. G. N. Clark took a similar line, stating that in the report that Locke’s “individualistic liberalism appears at its worst.” Cranston’s biography was even more damning. He described the paper as an “appalling document” and thought its proposed reform program, again invoking anachronism, was “precisely that which Dickens so passionately castigated” in Victorian times.44 More recent analyses have considered the document as evidence of Locke’s views on social differentiation and political power. Some scholars have concluded that Locke assumed the poor were less rational than their betters and, lacking property, should not enjoy full political rights.45 Another study overturned Fox Bourne’s view and cited Locke’s “savagely repressive proposals” as evidence of the lack of philanthropy in seventeenth-century economic and social thought.46 A  further perspective more perceptively suggests that from the mid-seventeenth century, commentators considered the able-bodied poor as “a productive resource” rather than as potential criminals. Although vagrancy was still a crime, reformers increasingly represented the itinerant poor as “an unrealized asset” and a labor problem rather than a threat to the social order.47 There is considerable evidence that Locke’s treatise was in the mainstream of discussions of the poor under William III and Mary II. One is struck by how thoroughly grounded in the economic and social thought of the 1690s the treatise was and how well placed Locke was to write thoughtfully about the poor laws. His personal library contained a number of important contemporary publications on the subject, including those by John Bellers, John Cary, Thomas Firmin, Mathew Hale, and a copy of a statute reforming poor relief in Bristol in 1697. He was in contact with most of the reformers of the period before writing his own paper, and his concerns were similar to theirs—the cost of welfare to the economy, problems of immorality and civil disorder among the needy, and ways of solving the

406  Society as Property, 1550–1697 problems, including, above all, the training and employment of the poor in manufacturing. On May 9, 1696, Cary sent Locke a copy of a publication that proposed reforms for Bristol, which Locke called “the best discourse I have ever read on the subject.” Cary also apparently enclosed a draft of the Act that established the Bristol system as law in 1697. Firmin, who employed the London poor in cloth manufacturing between 1676 and 1697, wrote to Locke in April 1697 listing details of wages and production, and again in October when his own enterprise was in trouble.48 Ideologically, Locke’s treatise drew upon contemporary religious rhetoric as well as the moral philosophy of the social humanist. The tract echoed the providentialism that justified the Revolution of 1688 and the moral reform movement that inspired the creation of the London and Westminster Societies for the Reformation of Manners. This religious and moralizing rhetoric shows that Locke was not a secularist, pure and simple, and can be linked with the belief in a “moral economy,” at least where the poor were concerned. His ethical principles went beyond the conventional providentialist strain, for he also subscribed to the established social humanist critique of voluntary poverty, whose pedigree was as old, at least, as More’s Utopia and Sir Thomas Smith’s “Discourse of the Common Weal,” which were concerned with poverty as a moral issue and a matter of civil order. Drawing upon social humanist theories of education and adopting the methods of Political Arithmetic, Locke prescribed extensive experimental economic, educational, and penal policies to lift the poor out of need, to encourage their economic productivity, and to police the malingerers.49 To explain the increased numbers and cost of relief, Locke cited the cause as moral decline. In words echoing the manifestos of the Reformation of Manners movement, he said the origin was “nothing else but the relaxation of discipline and corruption of manners.” The first step to check immorality among the poor was moral regulation, including “a restraint of their debauchery by a strict execution of the laws against it,” particularly by suppressing brandy shops and alehouses. Offenders were to be sent to houses of correction. If they were “stubborn, and not at all mended by the discipline of the place,” they were to be held longer and to receive “severer discipline” until they showed “manifest proof of amendment . . .”.50 Here the social humanist agenda dovetailed with the familiar Christian messaging. In words that could have been drawn from Utopia, beggars were to be suppressed who now swarmed in the streets, “to the increase of idleness, poverty, and villainy, and to the shame of Christianity.” Locke’s proposals for schools for young paupers combined the usual civic and religious mandates and the aim of productivity. The young would “from infancy be inured to work,” which would make them “sober and industrious all their lives after.” Another benefit was that “they may be obliged to come constantly to Church every Sunday . . . whereby they may be brought into some sense of religion.” As things stood, they were pariahs and “in their idle and

Conclusions  407 loose way of breeding up, they are as utter strangers both to religion and morality as they are to industry.”51 The issue of employment for the poor was a moral one: virtue and industriousness went together, as did vice and idleness, and Locke’s analysis of poverty throughout stressed the importance of Christian morals and values with, echoing Cicero, a heavy tinge of social responsibility. Like the authors of the early modern “literature of roguery” and “welfare reformers” in our times, Locke cynically maintained that some people receiving welfare were able to work, but “pretend they cannot get work and so live only by begging or worse” and so were to be classed as “begging drones” and “idle vagabonds.”52 There seems little question that Locke’s views on the poor put him in the camp of those favoring a moral economy based upon Christian and social humanist principles. But his ultimate aim was not purely religious: it was to advance productivity and to strengthen social stability. Locke’s treatise on the poor included a shrewd analysis of family poverty and can be considered the late seventeenth-century equivalent of Book II of Utopia in its insights. Extending his critique of Filmer’s patriarchal political order, Locke examined the viability of the patriarchal family as a productive unit, in the end questioning its viability. He linked deprivation to the institution of the family, observing that poverty especially affected families with young children. He believed that many receiving parish relief were actually able and willing to work, but were prevented from doing so by family responsibilities. He stipulated that each parish should organize a scheme whereby unemployed, able-bodied males would work at lower-than-normal wages, if necessary requiring other parishioners to hire them. This way, poor patriarchs on welfare would be discouraged from spending all their parish doles in the alehouse. Locke’s plans also aimed to liberate young mothers from the shackles of family hardship. He observed how women married to day laborers who “come to have two or three or more children” could not take on paid employment because “looking after their children gives them not liberty to go abroad to seek for work, and so having no work at home, in the broken intervals of their time, they earn nothing  .  .  .”.53 The clear implication was that patriarchalism did not work for the poor because relying on the adult male’s income, deployed unproductively, was insufficient to release families from destitution. Locke’s treatise contained some creative quantification. Regarding the cost of welfare, he calculated that if 100,000 persons receiving parish assistance earned a penny a day, this would produce £130,000 a year, which “would make England above a million of pounds richer” in eight years. But Locke went beyond the social calculations of other commentators to produce proposals to augment employment and national prosperity. His response to the cost of relief was economic, as we have seen, by boosting employment, but it was also institutional and potentially revolutionary, as perhaps befits the intellectual architect of modern liberalism.54

408  Society as Property, 1550–1697 Locke planned to liberate mothers from childcare through “working schools”: “By this means the mother will be eased of a great part of her trouble in looking after and providing for [children] at home, and so be at more liberty to work,” he declared. His plan was that every parish in the country should have a school. All children whose families required parish relief and who were not otherwise employed would be sent there. They would continue to live at home, but would be fed in school—normally just bread, but in winter, “a little warm water-gruel.” Thus they would be better nourished than at home, where they got only bread and water. The children would be trained to spin and knit woolens, and their labors would pay for their keep and produce a surplus. When they reached the age of 14, boys were to be apprenticed to local craftsmen and husbandmen. In the meantime, they would have learned “sober and industrious” habits, thus contributing to production while ceasing to burden their families and the poor rates.55 Locke’s plans also provided for the long-term unemployed and the disabled. They were to be trained for work or institutionalized. He required that adults who could not get work were also to attend the working schools to learn a craft. Echoing the Earl of Leicester in Elizabethan Warwick, even disabled adults could get some earnings; those completely unfit to work should be gathered together, three or four to a room, “and yet more in one house,” rather than being supported in their own homes. A  new bureaucracy would be created to oversee the system. “Guardians of the poor” were to be established in corporate towns and in shire hundreds. Chosen by their parishes, they would oversee the parishes and appoint storekeepers to take charge of the materials to be worked upon. Storekeepers and teachers would be paid from the parish rates.56 Where do Locke’s ideas about the poor stand in the bigger picture of English social theories? Apart from his insightful analysis of family poverty, his proposed reforms were not wholly original or very progressive. He suggested the poor who received doles should be required to wear badges as emblems of their dependency, an idea derived from Firmin and recent legislation.57 His schools were very similar in their intent—to mitigate vagrancy by putting the young to work—to the houses of correction established from 1576 and the workhouses created in many seventeenth-century counties. Moreover, the idea of institutionalization for instruction in manufacturing was very much in the air in 1697. Firmin had run a manufacturing school in London since 1676, and Bellers and Cary published plans for similar institutions in the mid-1690s. The schools of Firmin and Bellers, although mainly geared to training in manual work, also offered instruction in reading and writing, thus opening up the prospect of occupational and social mobility. In contrast, Locke’s regime for the poor, similar to Morison’s in the 1530s, was wholly devoted to manual labor, which would probably have reinforced the already considerable economic divisions in English society.58 It is possible to exaggerate the progressive and practical qualities of Locke’s tract, which contained many of the penal processes familiar to historians of

Conclusions  409 vagrancy and the poor laws. His proposals concerning vagabonds are notorious. Men between the ages of 14 and 50 caught begging in coastal counties without official passports were to be arrested and sent to the nearest seaport, where they would be put to hard labor until a navy ship arrived to which they could be assigned for three years. On board, they were to be kept under “strict discipline” at soldiers’ pay, and to be punished as deserters if they jumped ship. For other groups of the willfully idle, penalties were equally harsh. Most were sent to houses of correction for varying periods of incarceration and punishment. Men above age 50 or who were disabled and arrested in maritime counties and all males seized in inland shires were to be locked up for three years. Being sent to sea might have seemed an attractive alternative to rotting in jail. Counterfeiters of passports—a common abuse—were to have their ears cut off for first offenses and to be transported to the colonies for a second. Females caught begging five miles from home would be returned to their parishes for a first offense; for a second, they would be sent to houses of correction to be employed in “hard work” for three months. Children under the age of 14 found begging outside their parishes would be dispatched to a working school and “soundly whipped, and kept at work till evening,” and then allowed to go home. If they were arrested more than five miles from home, they were to suffer incarceration in a house of correction for six weeks.59 There is no reason to be shocked at such proposals, which were standard fare for the period. Unlicensed begging was already illegal, and impressment was an old policy. A possibly new, draconian provision in Locke’s paper was the physical mutilation and exile of persons caught counterfeiting passports. Similarly unprecedented in severity were the three-year jail sentences for disabled and elderly vagrants, and for those arrested in the inland counties. The flogging of children, to which Locke appears to put no lower age limit, was a particularly regressive step. Children under the age of seven were actually exempt from arrest in an Act of 1598, and since the 1530s, legislation had frequently provided for the apprenticeship of beggars aged five to 14. In these earlier statutes, corporal punishment was usually limited to persistent and recalcitrant offenders over the age of 14.60 It would be unhistorical to judge Locke’s paper purely on its penal provisions, which need to be considered in the context of contemporary opinion and legislation.61 When this is done, his proposals seem neither greatly out of step with the times nor excessively penal. In fact, the paper shares the seventeenth-century tendency away from corporal punishment for vagabonds. His proposed physical punishments were restricted to forgers of passports and vagrant children. Obviously, such penalties are shocking by the standards of the twenty-first century, but compared with earlier periods of English history, they affected fewer people. Corporal punishment, normally flogging, was the usual Elizabethan and early Stuart penalty for all vagrants, men, women, and sometimes children. Under a number of statutes of the period, branding was the rule for recidivists, and it occasionally applied even to women.62

410  Society as Property, 1550–1697 Transportation and impressment were standard penalties for vagrancy for many years, and they did not go out of vogue after the Revolution of 1688. The Quaker Bellers, whose writings were later praised by Robert Owen and Karl Marx, favored the “Exportation, to our Plantations” of convicted felons. The Whig poor law reformer Cary also proposed that refractory beggars should be conscripted into the navy: “the sea is very good to cure sore legs and arms, especially such as are counterfeit through sloth.” When Parliament passed a vagrancy Act in 1703, it included conscription in the navy as a penalty. Perhaps in this instance, one of Locke’s proposals was being adopted. But while in his plan, the punishment was limited to maritime counties, to males aged 14 to 50, and to a three-year sentence, the new law covered the entire country, included boys (who might presumably be less than 14 years old), and specified no terminal dates for sentences. All told, it seems Locke’s view on penal issues were probably no more severe than those of his contemporaries. Compared with Parliament’s line on impressment in 1703, his proposals were rather less ferocious.63 Locke’s scheme to reform the poor was, in some respects, incomplete and impractical. A glaring omission was its failure to provide for the employment of girls over the age of 14. More generally, the plans were unrealistic given the state of England in 1697. They would have meant a costly overhaul of local government at a time of economic crisis, political uncertainty, and expensive foreign wars. Many of Locke’s contemporaries agreed the poor laws needed reform, but many seemed to share Roger North’s view that the system should simply be abolished. Certainly the Parliament of 1704, in which reforms resembling Locke’s were proposed and defeated, showed great reluctance to change the old system. Perhaps the greatest failing of Locke’s scheme was that, unlike Cary’s, it failed to recognize that low wages rather than lack of employment were the greatest curse of the poor. Training father, mother, and children for poorly remunerated jobs was no solution to their problems. It would have kept the poor in the unsplendid isolation to which they were already consigned in contemporary thinking.64 VI. CONCLUSIONS Locke’s vision of society was remarkable in a number of ways. It was modern looking in being labor and production based, perhaps even anticipating a labor theory of value, but backward looking in adhering to the principle of the legal obligation to work. Locke’s vision was neither purely secular nor solely economic in character, but it was a significant move in several respects. It broke with the long-established paradigm of mutual aid as expressed in the charitable relationships of the Franciscan model and the body social. Like Chamberlayne and others, Locke’s treatise made little mention of charity as a possible alternative form of relief.65 Rather, he proposed massive government intervention to put the poor to work. This move, as indicated, was not peculiar to Locke’s analysis, for the Old Poor Law was already a

Conclusions  411 century or more old, but he pushed it further than most other commentators. The call for heavy-duty state involvement in matters social was in some measure the inevitable result of the passing of the old paradigm of the body. What was going to hold society together, if not the glue of the body social and its three estates? Wealth alone? Character building? Social humanist thinking was highly effective in questioning the old paradigm, but offered limited structure as a social theory. Programs based on education and selfimprovement—the classic liberal solutions to social problems—still required government intervention. Ultimately, these nostrums did not constitute a full-fledged model to follow, but a package of ideas and proposals. Locke’s educational and vocational proposals for the poor were imaginative and rigorous, but they were not “stand alone” ones, for they would have required massive government involvement both at the national and local levels and a remodeling of society along the lines of Utopia. NOTES   1. The starting point is G. S. Holmes, “Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England,” Transactions, Royal Historical Society, 5th s., 27 (1977): 41–68; Peter Mathias, “The Social Structure in the Eighteenth Century: A Calculation by Joseph Massie,” Economic History Review, 2nd s., 10 (1957): 30–45; repr. in Peter Mathias, The Transformation of England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), ch. 9; Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “Revising England’s Social Tables, 1688–1812,” Explorations in Economic History, 19 (1982): 385–408; “Reinterpreting Britain’s Social Tables, 1688–1913,” ibid. 20 (1983): 94–109.   2. Holmes, “Gregory King,” 64–5, who credited Donald Coleman with the insight about the “line of descent.”  3. Mathias, Transformation, 171–2.  4. See James Tully, A Discourse on Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and the authorities cited there.   5. Ibid. 135–45.   6. A. L. Beier, “ ‘Utter Strangers to Industry, Morality and Religion’: John Locke on the Poor,” in Robert P. Maccubbin and David F. Morrill, eds., Eighteenth Century Life: English Culture at the End of the Seventeenth Century, 12, n.s., no. 3 (1988): 28–41.   7. David Cressy, “Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England,” Literature and History 2, no. 3 (March 1976): 29, 31.   8. E. Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia: Or, the Present State of England Compleat (London: T. Hodgkin et al, 1692: 17th edn.), Wing C1834: 186, 264.   9. Ibid. 208–10. 10. Ibid. 205. 11. Ibid. 264 (N.B. duplicated pagination of 264–5 in author’s copy; first version cited.) 12. Ibid. 264–5. 13. W. A. Speck, “Debates: Social Status in Late Stuart England,” P&P 34 (July 1966): 127–9. It is interesting to find that “large-scale purchase [of landed estates] by merchants declined in the later seventeenth century.” See Richard Grassby, “English Merchant Capitalism in the Late Seventeenth Centuries. The Composition of Business Fortunes,” P&P 46 (February 1970): 93.

412  Society as Property, 1550–1697 14. Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia, 261 [correct to 259], 264 [correct: 262]. 15. Ibid. 266–8 (itals. original). 16. Ibid. 271–2. 17. Ibid. 261, 273–4; for the origins and prosecution of the labor laws, see A. L. Beier, “A New Serfdom: Labor Laws, Vagrancy Statutes, and Labor Discipline in England, 1350–1800,” Cast Out: Homelessness and Vagrancy in Global and Historical Perspective (Miami: Ohio University Press, 2008), ch. 2. 18. Holmes, “Gregory King,” 66–7; cf. Cressy, “Describing the Social Order,” 32, makes the same point (cited Holmes, op.cit., 65 n.). 19. Holmes, “Gregory King,” 66–8. The figure of £2,800 for “temporal lords” was King’s; that of £3,200, a revision by Charles Davenant (ibid. 66–7). 20. Ibid. 66–7 (the descriptive tags are from the revised “Davenant version” of 1698–9, which contains some variations from the figures cited here). 21. Mathias, Transformation, 186–7. 22. Lindert & Williamson, “England’s Social Tables, 1688–1812,” 400–1. 23. Hay  & Rogers, Eighteenth Century English Society, 24–5, 191, 195; Clark, English Society, 1688–1832, 78–9. 24. Peter Laslett, ed., John Locke: Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn. 1967), 59–61 (on dates of composition), 100–5 (views on property). 25. Ibid. 287, 289, 296 (italics in original). 26. Ibid. 336, 342, 345–51 (italics in original). 27. Ibid. 347, 368, 370. 28. Ibid. 305–6 (italics in original); Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 220; Pipes, Property and Freedom, 35–7. 29. With the exception of G. N. Clark, Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 93. 30. Beier, “ ‘Utter Strangers,’ ” 28–41. 31. J. P. Cooper  & Joan Thirsk, eds., Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 96. Reprinted in John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 221–2. 32. Cooper and Thirsk, op.cit. 96. 33. Ibid. 96; Locke, Two Tracts on Government, ed. Philip Abrams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 157. 34. Two Treatises, 340–1, 401–2. 35. Ibid. 304–6, 309. 36. Ibid. 306–13 (italics in original). 37. Ibid. 310–11, 319 (italics in original). 38. Ibid. 312. 39. Ibid. 314 (and subsequent pages 315–17; italics in original). 40. Ibid. 316. 41. Ibid. 318. 42. Ibid. 319–20. 43. The originals of the Locke treatises are somewhat dispersed. There are important fragments in the Bodleian Library, Locke MS. 30. The full text of his “Representations” to the Board of Trade is in NA (UK) C.O. 388/5/fols. 233- 248; reprinted in Locke, Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 182–198. The document is discussed in A. L. Beier, “ ‘Utter Strangers to Industry, Morality and Religion’, John Locke on the Poor” Eighteenth Century Life, ed. Robert P. Maccubbin and David F. Morrill, n.s. (November 1988): 29–34. 44. H. R. Fox Bourne, The Life of John Locke (New York: Harper, 1876; repr. Darmstadt: Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1969), II, 391–2; Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb,

Conclusions  413 English Poor Law History, Part One (London: Longmans Green, 1927), 109–12; G. N. Clark, The Later Stuarts, 1660–1714 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 51; M. Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (London: Longmans, Green, 1957), 425–6. 45. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 221–2, 224, 229; Neal Wood, The Politics of Locke’s Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 116–17, although Wood suggests Locke believed the poor were capable of improving themselves. 46. J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 303. See also Richard Ashcraft, “Lockean Ideas, Poverty, and the Development of Liberal Political Theory,” in Early Modern Concepts of Property, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1995), 45–6, 48–9. 47. Joyce O. Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 151–2 (first quotation from the title of ch. 6). See also Anthony J. Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 214. 48. The Library of John Locke, ed. John Harrison & Peter Laslett, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 68, 102, 136, 150, 251; The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. de Beer (1979); (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 5:634–35, 6:84, 226; Locke on Cary quoted by Webb and Webb, English Poor Law History, 108. A through discussion of proposals for reforming the poor laws is in S. M. Macfarlane, “Studies in Poverty and Poor Relief in London at the End of the Seventeenth Century,” D. Phil. dissertation, Oxford University, 1983, 258–77. 49. Beier, “ ‘Utter Strangers’,” 29–34. 50. Goldie, ed. Political Essays, 184, 186. 51. Ibid. 190–2. 52. Ibid. 184–5; Beier, “ ‘Utter Strangers’,” 34 citing NA (U.K.), C.O. 388/5/fols. 232b, 233a-234b, 238a, 239a, 240a, 248a. 53. Goldie ed. Political Essays, 189–190; NA (U.K.) C.O. 388/5/237b, 238b-240b. 54. Goldie ed. 189. 55. Ibid. 190–1; Beier, “ ‘Utter Strangers’,” 36–7; NA (U.K.) C.O. 388/5/fols. 238b-240a. 56. Goldie ed. Political Essays, 185, 187, 194; National Archives, C.O. 388/5/fols. 241a-248b. 57. T. F[irmin], Some Proposals for the Imploying of the Poor (London: Barbazon Aylmer, 1678), 14–15: Wing F971; Beier, Masterless Men, 158–61; Statutes of the Realm, 7:282. 58. Webb and Webb, 106–9; M. G. Mason, “John Locke’s Proposals on WorkHouse Schools,” Durham Research Review, 4 (1962): 15. Locke’s belief in the importance of habits versus learning is consistent with his educational theories: see Nathan Tarcov, Locke’s Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 88–9, 186, 190. For workhouses and houses of correction, Joanna Innes, “Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555–1800,” in Labor, Law, and Crime: An Historical Perspective, ed. Francis Snyder & Douglas Hay (London: Tavistock, 1987): 77–8. 59. Goldie ed. Political Essays, 186–7; NA (U.K.), C.O. 388/5/fols. 232b, 233a-235b. For houses of correction, see Beier, Masterless Men, 164–9; Innes, op.cit. 60. Beier, Masterless Men, 161–4; Statutes of the Realm (1810–1828), 8.ii., 902; Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, Children in English Society, 2 vols. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 1: 94–8. 61. Cf. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 221–3. 62. Beier, Masterless Men, 158–61. Locke’s plan was consistent with his educational theories, which counseled against whipping except in cases of obstinacy or

414  Society as Property, 1550–1697 rebellion. See The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. James Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 150, 155, 177. 63. Goldie Political Essays, 186–8. John Bellers: His Life, Times and Writings, ed. George Clarke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 27–8, 103; John Cary, An Essay on the State of England (Bristol, 1695), 161: Wing C730; Statutes of the Realm, 8:260–1. 64. A. L. Beier, “Poverty and Progress in Early Modern England,” in The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honor of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), ch. 6; Cary cited by Webb and Webb, 115; cf. Roger North, A Discourse of the Poor, ed. Walter E. Minchinton (1750, 1753; New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1972): ESTC T8466 (1753 edn.). 65. The Two Treatises, 188, did say “charity gives every man a title to so much out of another’s plenty, as will keep him from extreme want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise . . .” (italics original).

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Index

Aesop: society as body 57, 267, 269, 338 agrarian issues see depopulation, “Improvement” Alberti, Leon Battista: exceptionally did not reject voluntary poverty 129 Anabaptists: community of goods 109, 278 apprentices: artisans cannot afford 254–5; Diggers 390; sons of wealthy 363; turnover 299; vagrants 299 apprenticeships: Diggers and 390; eighteenth century 32; empowering poor 13; as servitude 289; see also dependent workers: include: servants and apprentices 363–6 Aquinas, Thomas: acceptance of Aristotelian positive view of material things’ significance 144; Church as mystical body 57; debated community of goods 162; family and household key to civil society 298; of inherited wealth 157 Armstrong, Clement: critical of Parliament, lawyers, merchants 80–1; on economic history 87–90; the poor 85; social dimension 90–1; subscribed to body social 81–2; treatises on religion and trade 80; unsuccessful job suitor to Thomas Cromwell 79; views of commonalty 82–4 Arundel: English aristocratic family that held high offices in Church and state between 1381 CE and 1486 CE 26

Aubrey, John: on cloth industry in southwest 331; hatred of lawyers 328; nostalgia 334–5; on professions 328; on regional cultures 332; social taxonomy of Wiltshire 327 Bacon, Francis: for banning depopulation, against idleness, cited decline of charity 305; history of Henry VII’s reign and suppression of armed retainers 347 Baron, Hans: criticisms of Baron thesis and P. G. A. Pocock version 126; rejected economic and social links 125; third type of humanism or civic humanism 126 Bayker, John: craftsman or husbandman who petitioned Henry VIII to halt rural depopulation, citing rising population levels causing housing shortage xvii, 113–14 Becon, Thomas: decried greedy gentry 106; defended body social 100; opposed community of goods, rebellion 110 begging 7, 11–13; Diggers opposed 389–90; Erasmus rejected, asserting beggars spoke “cant” or criminal slang 129; false 174; Levellers opposed 383–4; Locke against 407, 409; Piers Plowman objected to 149; poor allowed children 320; Starkey approved for disabled in hospitals 230; three kinds and Lollards 146

444 Index Bellers, John: treatise on poor 405; favored exile of felons to colonies 410; teaching manufacturing 408; writings praised by Robert Owen, Karl Marx 410 Bentham, Joseph: For patriarchalism and social controls 302; denounced depopulators 1635 CE 302 Berry, Robert: M.P. for Ludlow 1597 CE favored agrarian legislation to augment grain production 312 Black Death: Resulting labor shortage and social changes 147, 149 Boccaccio, Giovanni: poverty stimulated mind, strengthened republican Rome 141 body social: 4–6, 49–60; charity 30; defective model 34; historiography 50–2; principles of hierarchy, mutual obligation, stasis 42; reaffirmed 1520s-1540s CE 96–104; 1607 CE “Diggers of Warwickshire” 301; “rotten” agrarian members 37 Bourchier: English aristocratic family supplying bishops and archbishops between 1381 CE and 1486 CE 26 Bracciolini, Poggio: personal merit basis of nobility 128 Breton, Nicholas, 1607 CE: continued use of body image; expanding membership 270 Bristol: reform of poor law, 1697 C.E. 405–6; social differences in festivals 32 Bridewell (London): compulsory work regime social humanist in tenets 12; model for rest of world’s penal institutions 176; to reform criminals 173 Brinklow, Henry: endorsed body social and three estates 96–7, 108 Brookes, Richard: opposed poor law reforms in Elizabethan Warwick 11 Bruni, Leonardo, Chancellor of Florence: context of census 125; doubts whether truly republican 126, 130; favored family in opposition to guild

and class interests 130; key to virtue is wealth 144; led census of Tuscany to strengthen government and society 8; man a social animal 4 Bucer, Martin: tutor of Edward VI endorsed body social theory, but also social humanist ideas such as compulsory labor 97–8, 102 Burckhardt, Jacob: emphasis on individualism; main concern with upper classes 127; pace Burckhardt, Renaissance not really about social equality 128; seminal study of Italian Renaissance 22; strengths and weaknesses 22–3 Bürgerhumanismus: Baron’s description of humanism signified both political and social aspects 129–130; see also Baron, Hans Calvin, John: favored mutual aid, not early capitalism 63–4; favored resistance in 1550s and 1560s CE 105; precursors endorsed work ethic before 71; social humanist leanings 130–1 Carew, Richard: asserted vagrants mainly originated in Ireland 336; on Church ales 336; excellent portrait of husbandmen 333; survey of Cornwall, 1602 CE Cartwright, Thomas: claimed beggars proliferated because England lacked presbyterian system 12; led census of poor to determine eligibility 9–12; in Warwick patronized by Earl of Leicester 9 Cary, John: corresponded with Locke regarding poor law reform in Bristol 406; proposed work training for poor 408; recognized low pay a problem unlike Locke 410; refractory to be conscripted into Royal Navy 410 catasto: census conducted in Tuscany in 1427 CE, Warwick 1587 CE, the first for military and taxation purposes, the second, to deal with the poor 8 Caxton, William: published regarding three estates 1476–81 CE 56, 59

Index  445 Cecil, Robert: fearing social dysfunction, proponent of state paternalism in agrarian policy 305 Chamberlayne, Edward: children, servants, and women represented, which exceptional 399; proponent of old models of body social and three estates 398; went beyond to describe social conflicts, importance of wealth, and social mobility 398 charity xv–xvi; in town of Warwick charity versus public poor laws divisive 9–13 Charles I (of England) body social arguments continued into reign of 309, 317; “natural body” executed in 1649; body politic survived 57 Cheke, John: Wrote against popular rebellions of Edward VI’s reign based on their violation of mutual obligation and hierarchy in body social 272–5; also accused rebels of jeopardizing wealth and upward social mobility 273–5 children: care of children 101; ; child care in Utopia 171; child labor and education 172; child support from taxation 219; Dudley on education of upper class children 71; gaining wealth 144–5; included in Smith’s “Discourse” and De Republica 279; jewelry for toys in Utopia 161; in line of battles in Utopian wars 170; Locke 406, 408; in manorial system 30; poor children, employment 291; school from age seven 220; statutes distinguish 292; traitors’ children not to be punished 228 Chartism historiography 16 Chivalry, nobles as: Edmund Dudley used as social descriptor 68–74; entry into 135; late usage of term 328; office holding 183 Church: roles as property holders 9; absent from social taxonomies 327–8; attendance every Sunday 406; Christianized wars and feuds 25–6; Church ales divisive 336; dispensers of charity 10;

Dudley critical 67, 131; glue bonding society 25; Harrington and 325, 349; Leveller attacks upon 363, 366–370; loss of wealth 398–9; peace-making through marriage, pax; Church courts covered multitude of offenses including sexual ones, marriage, probate, drunkenness, public order, Church fabric; arguably most commonly encountered judicial body in period 27; model of early Church for charity 99, 140–2; moves to disendow 145–6; political balance lost with sale of lands 335; secularism of attacks 235–6, 248–51, 281–2, 289; Starkey’s assault on clergy 210– 11, 218–30; tithes questioned 369–70, 391; Utopia’s attack on 162–4 Cicero favored wealth: accepted inherited wealth 157; family wealth a priority, enabling virtue 144; favored negotium or active life versus otium or inactivity 157; the poor virtual criminals; manual labor “sordid” 143; rich profited from government, which protected them 143; ruling classes required wealth to keep masses under control 184, 331 ciompi uprising: Florentine wool workers who rebelled in 1378 CE 8; frightened elites by countering electoral prowess of guilds by civic humanist stress on virtue 130 Clark, J. C. D. revisionist historian denying significant social change in period 1688–1832 and affirming persistence of body social 244 class conflict 127: body social opposed 105; Dudley and 178; and Marxism 244–7; in Renaissance Florence 130; Smith 243–56; Starkey raised specter 217, 220–1 Colquhoun, Patrick: more conscious of economic sectors than other authorities 400 commonalty: third estate conjoined with two others 3; divisions

446 Index in estates 34; Dudley and 69; resented the Church 82; also rustici 3; to be submissive, content with positions 69–73, 99 commonwealth, concept of: definition as body of people constituting society 67, 81; differing definitions of term 95–6; reforms of society 1540s, 1550s 64; “Tree” of by Edmund Dudley and context 65–7 “Commonwealth-men” 50: Armstrong compared 80; emphasis on harmony and mutual aid 99–102; hierarchy reaffirmed 102–4; historiography 95; proliferation of the body model 111–13; rejected voluntary poverty 98; sedition charges 98; social conflict and community of goods renounced 108–11; submission too 104–8; subscribing to theory of body social 94; wide range of issues examined 64, 66 community of goods: Plato, Utopia favored; Aquinas, Aristotle, Cicero opposed 157, 162; Elyot, Cooke, Crowley, Latimer and others rejected though opponents accused “Commonwealth-men” of supporting 97–8, 104–5, 109–10, 114–116, 185, 304; Thomas More favored 168–9 Comte, Auguste: traditionally seen as first sociologist 15 Coningsby, Thomas: M.P. for Herefordshire, 1597 CE 312–13; opposed including Shropshire in law against enclosure on grounds of regional specialization 312 contextualist or “Cambridge” school of history of political thought; focusing on study of authors’ objectives, eschewing reference to economic and social links; associated most commonly with P. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner; criticized for alleged elitism 14–16 Cope, Anthony: M.P. assize judges to keep records of enforcement of 1597 CE Act 304; feared results of not controlling rents and depopulation in new

agrarian law; urged taxation on privatized common lands to support the poor; Cooke, John: adhered to theory of body social in 1640s; for medical care for poor 384; rich to look after poor, but rejected utopian community of goods 301–4, 319 “Coriolanus” character and social conflict; favoring nobles 337–8; hatred of populace 339; issue of food shortage: gods caused, not patricians: Menenius 340; refuge in patriarchal household in which women prominent (wife and mother of Coriolanus) 340–1 Coriolanus play: promoted patriarchalism as new social glue; questioned martial versus civic virtue; affirmed roles of women in society 264; redefining body metaphor and representation of wealth and social divisions 337–8 correction: of youth and poor 220; see also London Bridewell; Locke Courtenay: aristocratic English family prominent in politics and the Church between 1381 CE and 1486 CE 26 Coventry, city of: body imagery in 1494 CE statement about “wealth and worship” 32; elite two % of householders, poor 27 % commoners 71% c. 1520 CE, 35–6; guild and Church processions reflecting social hierarchies 32; covetousness common moral issue in period: Thomas Cartwright 12; Hobbes validated as honorable 344; Hugh Latimer 108; Thomas Lever 107; Richard Overton denounced 371; Smith 236, 249; Stoic charge 145; William Thomas 276; Francis Trigge 301, 303; various and sundry 113, 305; Robert Wilkinson 304 criminal justice: More’s Utopia 159, 174–6; see also Locke, John, impressment, transportation overseas; penal measures against poor 408–10

Index  447 Cromwell, Oliver: At Putney debates 1647 CE; affirmed power of wealth and property 363 Cromwell, Thomas: patron of humanists Richard Morison, Thomas Starkey 79–80, 194; as statesman and “prime minister” 158; vicegerent, Henry VIII’s Church 133 Crowley, Robert: as “Commonwealthman” 50; historiography 95; opposed community of goods 9; supported body social 49–50, 97 Cusa Nicholas: Favored tripartite body social 53 Dati, Gregorio: Florentine elite guildsman co-opted into mythical “civic life” by Leonardo Bruni, Chancellor, to control electoral authority of the people and check crime by the poor 130 dependent workers include: servants and apprentices 363–6 depopulation (rural) cited in fifteenth century 37; Armstrong concerned with 87–90; “Commonwealth-men” versus skeptical scholars 95–104; and crime 173; 208–9, 300–20; regional impact varied 39; in Utopia 158–9, 164; see also agrarian issues dialogue form: favored by Thomas More, Thomas Starkey, and Thomas Smith; useful for structuring debates 235 Diggers: Among those who questioned absolute property rights 245–6; attacks upon private property based on critique of greed, wage labor, poverty, and “Norman Yoke”; promised sharing of production, patriarchal government, rigorous criminal justice system, education for all 387–91 dowries: Harrington limited to £1,500 so marriage would be based upon “pure and spotless love . . . ” 350; lack of led to prosecution for fornication and bastardy 37; in manorial system widowed continued to receive

income after spouse’s demise 31; Starkey proposed for poor “demoiselles and virgins” 219 Duby, Georges: body social an ideology about power, not a beneficent nostrum of sweetness and light in some version of a medieval utopia 52 Dudley, Edmund: “Tree of Commonwealth” in mainstream of late medieval and early modern social thinking 65; thought in terms of three estates and commonwealth and reform of same through purging of clerical corruption, education of nobles, and obedience by commonalty 66–75 Dudley, family: prominent in government and Church in west Midlands under Elizabeth I 11 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester: appointed Puritan Thomas Cartwright to mastership of hospital bearing Leicester’s name; played active role in town of Warwick in Elizabethan period; proposed work-scheme to support poor of town of Warwick seeking to curtail poverty through economic expansion and surveillance; scion of Dudley family and favorite of Elizabeth I 11–12 Dugdale, William: author of Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656); traced descent of lands from Conquest 1066 CE and Domesday Book 1086 CE 326 Education: social position not defined by in three estate scheme 3; Cheke defended wealth too 275; children too 141, 145; in Christian humanism 64–5; clergy too 124, 211, 223, 230; defined social position 3, 6, 228; Diggers not only book learning, but vocational 389; early Tudor commentators favored education over birth 182, 198; Elyot’s handbook on 184; Harrington favored education for all males 351; Harrison for promotion based upon 285;

448 Index Humfrey affirmed need for noble education 278; Lambarde and Norden agreed 330; life of the mind rules Utopia and affords upward social mobility 169–70; Locke gave priority to labor over schooling, despite creating “working schools” for all children 405–8; Morison said noble education key 191; new idea in social humanist canon; nobles badly educated 71, 212–14, 225; Overton favored for youth in need in free schools and universal primary 383, 385; personal habits 125; Waterhouse recommended to landed 354; and wardship 213, 224; women educated in Utopia 136, 171 Edward II (of England): Critiques of three estates in reign of-for avarice 53 Edward III (of England): Armstrong cited as period when English balance of trade favorable by sale of raw wool to Continent 87; reign said to have had successful military history because husbandmen and yeomen provided armies 306, 315 Edward VI (of England): Author of manuscript on social questions 15, 29; abolition of chantries, guilds, and hospitals 133; “Commonwealth-men” actively publishing in reign; context 96; debasement of coinage in reign 160, 240; during reign body social paradigm frequently invoked 49, 94; his “Discourse” mandated all should work and live in harmony and eschew social mobility 98, 101, 104, 109; historiography 95 Elias, Norbert: reform of personal manners in Renaissance humanism, including table manners 125 Elyot, Thomas: author of Book Named the Governor 1531 CE 131; endorsed Great Chain of Being, but also favored social mobility based on education and virtue

131, 184; rank to be based on labor, not birth 185–7 Enclosures: see agrarian issues; depopulation; “Improvement” Engels, Friedrich: saw rise of new industrial proletariat in Chartist movement, but critics question extent of social and economic polarization and point to his ignoring of ideological and political positions 16 Erasmus, Desiderius: Influence at Cambridge and Oxford 64; critical of beggars who said needed jobs rather than doles; claimed vagrants spoke a slang or “cant” 129; editions 125; publication of handbook for boys and table manners which ran to 130 editions estates, the three 3–4, 6; abolition of two proposed 368; beyond 279, 281, 306, 328, 343, 347, 399; body social 6; critique of 247, 255; demise 132, 136, 183; first two 46–30; government 56, 59; internal divisions within 57–9; Lollards support 55; period 1480–1550 CE 68, 82, 111–112; and poor 148; reform of 208, 222; theory simplistic 56; in various cultures 57 Filmer, Robert: argued for political theory of patriarchalism which posited oligarchy and a one class society and preeminence of the House of Lords over House of Commons in Parliament, while denouncing democracy 298; published in era of relaxed censorship 16 Fisher, John: Principal burgess, M.P., bailiff, deputy Recorder, town of Warwick; patronized by Earl of Leicester and Dudley family; favored taxation to support the poor 10–11 Fitzalan, Henry: 14th Earl of Arundel, pacified tenants during rebellion of 1549 (CE) 29 Fitzherbert, John: Author Book of Surveying (1526 CE) favored

Index  449 conversion to individual farming and privatizing common rights 309 Fortescue, John: Author of On the Laws and Governance of England 1468–71 CE, using body metaphor to describe society and polity 59 Forrest, William: Priest and author of doggerel 1548 CE favoring when “every degree observes his due”; opposed to rising rents and idleness 112 Forset, Edward 1606 CE: body politic underpinned by traditional tripartite division into estates and allowing for careers open to talent and a body subject to surgical intervention 269 Franciscans: doubts about their “holy poverty” into sixteenth century 200; in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries increasing unease about voluntary poverty and paupertas which increasingly affirmed value of wealth 143–6; Hobbes rejected Franciscan model, which after 1600 CE still occasionally echoed 265, 334–5, 410; ideals rejecting wealth and favoring voluntary poverty not limited to regular clergy, and felt in wider, lay communities, attracting lay persons including leading minds of the age such as Petrarch and Boccaccio, Ptolemy of Lucca and Salutati 141 Franck, Sebastian: Critic of German mercenaries in 1531 CE for venality and low sense of loyalty; similar to Machiavelli and More, favored native born troops who fought for love of country 162–3 fraticelli also called Spiritual Franciscans and “little brothers”; for complete clerical poverty; upheld purity of poverty; condemned by Church 1323 CE 128, 141; see also Franciscans gentry: Share of cultivated lands possibly increased in period 1436–1688 CE from 28% to

45–50%; 24, 133; accompanied Coriolanus 338; building beyond their means, Starkey opined 212–13; Cheke accused rebels in 1549 of seeking to suppress gentry 272–3, 275; county histories placed landed elites center stage 326–37; critical of gentry education 225; Dudley critiqued education of gentry children 71; England not a “one-class society” because of rising “pseudo-gentry” 245; gentry abased by children working in trades and shop keeping 399; gentry according to Crowley claimed commonalty favored community of goods 109; gentry to blame, Latimer maintained, for recent rebellions 108; Gerrard blamed gentry for causing Kett’s rebellion of 1549 CE in East Anglia 115; keeping of armed retainers 174; Harrington as advocate of gentry rule 265, 349; opposed primogeniture and wardship 213, 225; placing younger sons in Church positions 133; prosperity of gentry 285; rise of yeomen into gentry 282, 284; Smith queried authority of landed elites in society 256; Utopia targeted gentry and nobles for abusing economic positions by raising rents 165; Winstanley charged gentry overstocked land with livestock 387 Gerrard, PhilipL Author of “Exhortation” c. 1553 CE assigning guilt to “ravenous” gentry for rebellions of Edward VI’s reign by raising rents 114–15 Gouge, William: Took position endorsing patriarchal model of society but underestimated extent of instability among household members 299 Gower, John: c. 1325–1408 CE critical of three estates for failing to fulfill duties 53

450 Index Great Chain of Being: Cosmological paradigm encompassing celestial and terrestrial worlds; current in Tudor and Stuart times, though less and less so 50, 65, 271; Edmund Dudley endorsed 68 Greville, Fulke: Statement in 1593 CE to House of Commons that if common people- “the feet”“knew their strength as we know their oppression, they would not bear as they do “269; Greville as grasping landlord 337 guilds: Trade and religious bodies common in town and country, which celebrated social and political unity of communities while at same time recognizing divisions; religious guilds abolished in reign of Edward VI; trade guilds continued into early modern period; supplied welfare and prayers for the souls of the departed 25, 32–4 Hales, John: Used term “commonwealth” differently from contemporary Smith 96; denounced depopulators; accused of setting commonalty against nobility 108; education self-taught 131; used body social model while accused of sedition 97; 99–100; ignored estate of clergy 97 Halhead, Henry: Proposed census in 1650 CE similar to Bruni in Florence and Cartwright in Elizabethan Warwick to determine military and economic resources and extent of rural depopulation 317 Harman, Thomas: On the poor 1566 CE, one group of whom he criminalized; published in several editions including William Harrison’s 291 Harrington, James: In Oceana sought to examine history and impact of civil wars in England 1642–48 CE 325; broke with body social and three-estate theories 347–8; offered economic and social explanations centering on aristocratic loss of lands

and private armies to common people 346; “servants” not allowed in militia because landless 347; would abolish monarchy, Church, and House of Lords and create a republican system; limited wealth of great estates; abolished primogeniture; social mobility favored and a rising natural aristocracy based on “goods of the mind” and sought to create stability after the wars 349–51 Harrison, William: Recognized as historian and topographer viewed in social terms; among first to comment on lowest social groups as well as highest and was printed in Holinshed’s Chronicles 1577 CE; recognized social mobility, divisions, and poverty 280–5, 291 Henry I (of England): Nightmares focused upon three estates 53; see also Figure 3.1, 54 Henry II (of England): commissioned French monk to write panegyric of his dynasty with reference to the three estates 53 Henry IV (of England): Accession supported by estates, not Parliament 59 Henry VIII (of England): debasement of coinage 237, 240, 242; early Tudor policies swelled landholdings of populace 348; reign saw upheavals related to Royal takeover of Church and reorganization of responsibility for care of poor based on rejection of voluntary poverty 9; and Richard Morison 187; Royal Supremacy over Church 133; sponsorship of poor law reform 176; Starkey commissioned to defend his Royal Supremacy 194; Thomas More’s service to 66, 170 Heywood, John: author of play Of Gentleness and Nobility in which protagonists debated definitions of nobility in which classes of knights and merchants and plowmen confronted one another 183

Index  451 hierarchy in society: according to Edmund Dudley 68– 75; Armstrong 81, 85; “Commonwealth-men” 97, 102, 104, 112; defined and debated 3–4, 7, 50, 52, 63, 66; Elizabethan authors maintained principle but invoked virtue and wealth 279; Elyot 184–5; Harrington 325, 347; historiography 189, 244–5; Hobbes 345; of landed according to Oliver Cromwell 377; Leveller Overton opposed traditional 368; Morison 188–90; Political Arithmeticians defined as wealth 400; redefined as patriarchalism and a “moral economy” 297, 304; and Utopia 169 Hilton, Rodney: On teachings of medieval Church: guide to rituals, not to rules 25 Hobbes, Thomas: money measures all, poverty dishonorable, interdependence discarded 344–5; rejected body social; competition and property basis of social relations 343–4; rejection of theory of body social 342–3 Hobsbawm, E. J.: Argued early nineteenth century landlords opposed disturbing “society of ordered ranks” 245 Holmes, Geoffrey S.: Gregory King’s calculations had value as records of social thought; in line of descent from medieval period through Smith and Wilson 397 Hospitality: Arundel example 29–32; code of linked to lordship; decline of according to Cheke, Wilson et al 29, 275, 283; Dudley on 68, 70, 72; excessive to be avoided 279, 354; Smith on Church’s 249–50 Huizinga, Johan: Painted brilliant portrait of late medieval religion and culture; thesis possibly overly generalized; coverage limited to northern France and Low Countries 22–3 Humanism: argument for “social” brand rather than other versions 127–32; “civic” view of Hans

Baron and critiques 124–6; to define problematic and complex; “northern” or “Christian” of Erasmus 8, 64, 125, 156; Hexter version equating with modern radicalism 156; or, “course of study” of P.O. Kristeller including Latin grammar, history, moral philosophy, poetry, rhetoric 124–5 Humfrey, Lawrence: President of Magdalen College, Oxford translated from French The Nobles using body social paradigm at outset, then shifted to follow the social humanist one; called for noble rule, but by learned and “corrected” ones 266, 278 Hutchinson, Roger: preached in midTudor period against enclosing landlords for causing oppression of the needy by “mighty and rich men” 105 “Improvement” (agrarian): unrestricted farming proposed and privatizing of common lands and sanctioned enclosure in severalty 297; see also depopulation individualism: Burckhardt, Tönnies, and Popper see as path to modernity; nineteenth- century term (de Tocqueville, de Maistre) 51; criticisms point to medieval and Asian precedents 127 Ireton, Henry: lead speaker for “Grandee” officers of Parliament’s New Model Army in autumn 1647 CE at Putney; Levellers favored religious toleration, nationalizing Church lands, and abolition of Church tithes 369–70; Grandees opposed Levellers’ natural rights philosophy, calls for extending franchise, and abolition of the Church, monarchy, and House of Lords 367–8 Jackman, Henry: M.P., London merchant, son of City alderman, and possible barrister, spoke against tillage bill of 1597 CE, blaming bad weather for high grain prices instead of conversion of arable to pasture 313–14

452 Index James VI and I (of England and Scotland): Reign was context for debates in Parliament in 1606 CE over location of sovereignty in the constitution and for “Midland Revolt” of 1607 CE and play Coriolanus 1608 CE: 50, 270, 337 Kendal, Westmorland: Daniel Fleming commented on prosperity of town’s clothing business and the sobriety of inhabitants in manners and dress 331–2 Kett’s rebellion, 1549 CE: contemporary Gerrard (infra) blamed corrupt officials in alliances with gentry over issues of rising rents 115 King, Gregory: leader in “Political Arithmetic” movement of later Stuart era in which some old values retained, including ranking of gentlemen higher than merchants 400; see also Holmes, Geoffrey S. Kristeller, Paul O.: Historian of Renaissance humanism; argued was a “course of study” with limited impact in civic, religious, and social institutions, while significantly individualistic 124–7; see also humanism Kuhn, Thomas S.: “Paradigm shift” and relevance to body social and social humanism 132 labor laws: made work compulsory even for free laborer and single women 149; Diggers 390; evidence of enforcement, hostility, and resistance 150–1; later authorities (Waterhouse, Locke) continued to support 354, 364; to see labor as basis of wealth 405–5; see also Protestant ethic labor for wages: to be abolished by Diggers 387–8 Lambarde, William: Antiquary and magistrate who authored one of earliest county histories, A Perambulation of Kent 1576 CE, which among most historical by

relating local events to national ones 326 Landowners see gentry Langland, William: Began rethinking of voluntary poverty, adding a fourth estate of beggars, crooks, and wage laborers on grounds did not fit in first three estates 145, 149; also identified involuntary poor with large families, high rents, and low wages 149 Latimer, Hugh: argued for charity to poor, work ethic; defended charges against of sedition; denounced depopulation, debasement of coinage, covetousness, rebellion, and resistance on both sides of rebellions, opposed equality of possessions, for social quietism,104–10 law, reform of see criminal justice; Levellers Lee, Joseph: claimed privatized common rights made tenants wealthier than landlords and increased employment; those opposing enclosure were “the ruder sort” of a “profane and leveling spirit”; not the first to support privatization 308–9 Leicester’s hospital, Warwick: former medieval guild of Holy Trinity and St. George; town grant to Earl mainly used for family servants and war veterans 11–12 Levellers: aristocracy, Church, and Lords to be abolished, landholdings nationalized 365–72; Cromwell on the right to breathe if propertyless: paupers and servants excluded 377; franchise issue 363–5; Ireton’s rejection of “birthright” of citizenship to participate in politics 378; mainly favoring“intermediate and poorer” classes 382; property rights debated at Putney 1647 CE 372–7; where socially do they belong? For tax reform, free trade, welfare, abolition of death penalty (except for

Index  453 murder); equality before the law; expansion of education (universal primary); law reform (in English) 382–5 Lever, Thomas: against rebellion and community of goods 107, 110; “Commonwealth-man” who endorsed body social, but rejected egalitarianism; for compulsory labor and generous charity 98, 101–2; Ley-farming: (“up and down husbandry”) rotation system to allow land to recover heart; possibly stimulated individual or “several” farming and enclosures 309 Lilburne, John: criticized lords and Church for holding office without virtue; imprisoned for contempt and historical critique, setting scene for debates at Putney and links to New Model Army; “London Leveller” writing in 1646 C.E. 367–8, 370–3, 381 Locke, John: best known for political thought, but also a social thinker; developed propertybased theory of government and society; labor a key element in wealth; one was either productive or unproductive as in social humanist thought; enclosed land, including colonies, more productive than unenclosed 402–4; in treatise on the poor challenged patriarchal system and created productive roles for poor children and wives, while retaining penal measures for the recalcitrant 404–10 Lollards: contrasted humble abodes of truly poor with mansions of friars; English dissenting group that attacked voluntary poverty of mendicant orders such as Franciscans and accepting of alms; forbade giving to anyone but disabled; received support of elite members of clergy and laity, including John Wycliffe 145

London: aristocratic moves to 252; as center of growth of retail trades and population; Bridewell a model for “houses of correction” and penal institutions world wide; City retained guild institutions into eighteenth century 12, 32–3; high living in 354–5; hub for trade of Merchant Adventurers to Continent which, according to Armstrong, caused depopulation and poverty at home 88–90; Levellers in 369, 372–3; Lever charged citizens with being servants of Mammon, not Christ 107; London merchants wealthiest 289, 400; reform of hospitals and founding of Bridewell 173–6; Society for the Reformation of Manners 406; Thomas More as Londoner 167 Lordship, institution of: as cultural force survived into early modern period; authority over land and men; no longer only military or “feudal” but included economic aspects (demesne farming; labor services) and judicial authority even over felonies 27–8 Luxury, “wanton”: articulated by Dudley, Armstrong, More, Starkey, Smith 63, 85, 129, 145, 160–2, 171, 210, 214, 219, 220, 237, 252, 256 Lydgate, John: c. 1370 CE-c.1451 CE: translated popular Boccaccio text criticizing three estates 53, 55 Lyndwood, William: at opening of Parliament in 1430 gave keynote speech describing realm in terms of body imagery 58 Machiavelli, Niccolò in exile composed The Prince (1513): a question whether a true republican as Pocock (see also) maintained or a “realist constitutionalist” opposed to civic humanism and republicanism 126; criticized mercenary armies for supporting highest bidder; preferred citizen armies 162–3; observed class

454 Index consciousness 247; saw divisions between nobles and populace; patricians as greater threat 163, 165 Macpherson, C. B. Historian of political thought argued a “possessive market society” evinced in work of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke 343, 345–6; questioned whether Levellers would have extended the franchise given their exclusion of laboring classes 363–5 Malthus, Thomas: Thomas Starkey (infra) prefigured Malthus in seeing food supplies, diseases, warfare, and invasions as checks on population growth and sources of poverty and social disruption 202 Manorial system: covered widows and gave prior right of succession on land held in villeinage; on freehold lands widow received one third of revenue; provided for the poor in medieval period in Cambridgeshire and shires from Hereford to Durham and Hampshire to the Midlands 30 Marsiglio of Padua: as rector of University of Paris extended concept of membership of body social to argue members of the whole affected others in system of interdependent parts 50, 53 Marxism: Historical theory that the past driven by horizontal affinities of social class and class consciousness 51; historiography of “structural Marxism” 18, n. 8; not only a late modern phenomenon as class awareness evident in Renaissance 247 questions vertical social affinities 52 Marxist: adherents of Marxism whose interpretations of past subjected to questioning including the French Revolution, Chartism 16–17, 265 Massie, Joseph: adhered to belief that basis of society was wealth and income, following earlier scheme of Gregory King, while adding a geographic turn in distinguishing

those working in Londonlaborers, manufacturers of wool and silk, wood and iron-from ones working in the provinces 400 masterlessness: able bodied beggars liable to spell in stocks in Statute of Cambridge 1388 C.E. 150; banned by numerous Acts of Parliament 150; and Bridewell 173–4; groups likely to experience 299; Locke’s penal proposals regarding 408–10; rebels and 274; retainers who became in Utopia 167; see also poor laws mediocritas: preferable condition to Petrarch to poverty or wealth, offered frugality, harmony, health, poetry, and virtue, while later protégés of Bruni favored wealth because while led to corruption, laziness, and luxury, poverty was worse, leading to murder, robbery, thieving, and treason 141, 144, 145 Medwall, Henry: play a fine example of Tudor redefinition of honor and nobility, which now based on service and loyalty rather than birth; play Fulgens and Lucrece suggested commoner just as noble as a “gentleman born” and as worthy a suitor for the daughter of a patrician134 mendicant orders see begging; Franciscans; fraticelli Merchant Adventurers: Armstrong objected to virtual monopoly of London-based ones; assumed caused depopulation by encouraging sheep-farming especially in the Midlands; Levellers called for abolition of monopoly; Dudley accused of adulterating wool and woolen cloth; 68, 85, 87–90 Midland Revolt of 1607 CE: clergy denounced covetousness; event provided context for Coriolanus 1608 CE; rioters opposed to privatizing of common fields invoked ideology of body social, threw down hedges, and attacked alleged depopulators 50, 301, 304, 318, 337

Index  455 Milton, John: used body imagery in defending Parliament in 1641 CE; moved to contract theory; social views followed left-leaning politics as denounced nobility and moved to support “middle sort” in service of the state as “true nobility” 269 Mirandola, Pico della: oration on dignity of man said the virtuous able to shape own destiny and mold social world to fit personal needs, leading Burckhardt to characterize the Renaissance as “the perfecting of the individual” which played down the social class dimension, which Burckhardt eventually acknowledged 126–8 mobility, social: Armstrong 83 (opposition); tenet of modern democratic societies; developed as part of program that social humanist; based upon education, merit, and virtue 3–6, 51, 71, 135, 292, 325, 330–1, 379, 399; Bruni associate 144; Cheke 273, 275 (promise of), Harrison 282–5; Heywood 182; Locke 408; Morison 184, 187, Smith 282; Waterhouse 265; Wilson 283–4; Utopia 169–72 Moore, Adam: Rejected three-estate body social 1653 C.E.: against common fields and proenclosure; equated commons with marital infidelity 307 Moore, John (first): saw consequences of privatization of common fields affecting four main groups who would benefit, including poor cottagers and “impotent” 306–7 Moore, John (second; no apparent relation to first): In 1653 published sermon accusing enclosers of sin and covetousness; also considered effects upon poor, lamented loss of military manpower “moral economy”: proponents favored legislation, fearing famine, to halt depopulation and conversion of land from tillage to pasture 312, 320; in agrarian debates 264, 270, 300, 302–3;

Armstrong 81, 91; Dudley foreshadowed in calling for intervention in markets 74; in labor laws 151; Locke endorsed in contemporary religious rhetoric 406–7; often combined with patriarchalism 7, 38, 297; Utopia 162; see also Thompson, E. P. 322 citation moral philosophy: Dudley adopted in mandating earthly happiness, adherence to virtue, worldly goods, and pleasure 68; Elyot guidebook for 184; Locke 406; part of Renaissance curriculum of studia humanitatis 124–5; Smith 249; Starkey too 215; Utopians adopted in trade policies 162; widely adopted in English humanism 131, 169 Münster, 1534 CE: Anabaptists’ sharing of goods in Rhineland rebellion 109 Morison, Richard: propagandist opposing Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536, 187; protégé of Thomas Cromwell; invoked body social rhetoric while endorsing social humanist positions on merit over birth in social ranking 187–92; More, Thomas: compulsory labor for virtually all members; dismantling of private armies of retainers, structuring society to be patriarchal; education to inform government and foster self-advancement; most radical humanist tract of period, calling for abolition of property, “precious metals,” and nobility with welfare and health care for all; women permitted to be priests and warriors; 156–7 mutual obligation (in society): Armstrong 84–5, 90; Bucer 101; Caxton 59; Dudley 66, 73; John of Salisbury 58; Thomas More questioned viability of 168, 177; Starkey 195; Tyndale 101 negotium: active in civic life as Cicero urged as opposed to otium or contemplative life and withdrawal from politics as in Plato 156–7

456 Index nobility, hereditary: Armstrong maintained 82; birth versus virtue 128, 134–5; “chivalry” or nobility 35; defense of 12–13; Dudley 68; estates and 3; loss of if worked with hands 148; not well established until High Middle Ages 245; Renaissance literature intended for 128; in Sanskrit 57; true and untrue 34, 70–1, 74, 101 Norden, John: In 1596–7 used body social metaphor and patriarchal model 267–8, 298; in 1607 C.E. argued for the wealth of the few to maximize revenues and shelter the needy 301 “Norman Yoke”: Diggers and Levellers rejected; Harrington possibly drew upon their protests 347; equated slavery with property holding since Conquest 380; Levellers at Putney drew upon the metaphor from London brethren 374; system of landholding 389; Winstanley said Conquest or “Norman Yoke” brought rule by lawyers and clergy 386 Obama, Barack H. Forty-fourth president of the U.S.A. elected in 2008 and 2012; led economic recovery from “Great Recession” of 2008; statutory health care system; promised success to “middle classes” 3 Oldcastle, John: Leader of Lollards in 1414 abortive rebellion 55, 145 Otium: contemplative life favored by Plato, eschewing politics; as opposed to negotium or active life in politics and government favored by Cicero; Erasmus, More, and other humanists struggled with these choices, ultimately making differing decisions 156–7 Overton, Richard: One of “London Levellers” whose platform would have reconfigured the old social system by abolishing the state Church, the nobility, and monarchy, nationalizing their properties into the bargain; imprisoned for long periods by Parliament 367

patriarchalism: An ancient theory of society which revived in Elizabethan and early Stuart thought, led by More’s Utopia 163, 245, 298; Filmer and 297–8; limitations as social theory299–302; Locke and 407; Norden and 267; place of homely retreat? 265–6 Paul (apostle): used body image in I Corinthians 12 in regard to Church 57, 81; social interdependence 101 paupertas: contempt for riches; poverty more fruitful as stimulant to mind which unburdened soul of venery and strengthened military and government; Petrarch ultimately opting for “mediocritas” and valuing of wealth as source of morality and civic greatness 141–4 Pax, kiss of peace: preceded communion, symbolizing unity in community 26, 32 Petrarch, Francesco: Debated poverty versus wealth; at first opted for poverty, but switched to “moderate riches” as opposed to “sordid poverty”; ultimately a key mover of rejection of voluntary poverty 129, 134, 141, 143–4 Petre, William: generous provider of hospitality in mid-sixteenth century; 40 strangers daily receiving board in winter and 80 in summer and fall 31 Pocock, P. G. A.: Historian of “classical republicanism” with origins in the Renaissance with greater emphasis on Machiavelli than on Bruni et al, extended to North America and the American Revolution 126 Political Economy: how economies are influenced by differing social and economic structures; how public policy is developed and applied: whether subject existed in sixteenth century is doubtful except possibly through association via moral philosophy; belongs more to age of Adam Smith than Thomas Smith 234

Index  457 Pollard, A. F.: Historian who originated notion of “Commonwealth” party or “Commonwealthmen” to designate mid-sixteenth century group of preachers and agitators critical of rural depopulation and lack of charity by the rich 95 Ponet, John: citing the misshapen social body, blamed government of Mary I for social divisions in England 276–7 poor laws: legislation under the Tudors and Stuarts mandating public taxation for welfare payments to the poor and punishment of the voluntarily poor who were criminalized as “masterless men” and vagrants 63, 85, 149, 230, 340, 405, 409–10 Powell, Robert: flourished c. 1636–52 CE: opposed enclosures and depopulation; based upon adherence to social model of body social 301 presbyterian: form of church government with regional and national synods, without bishops and theologically Calvinist 12 Presbyterianism: religio-political movement of 1640s and 1650s: Harrington rejected along with Levellers and “Independents” for tendency towards clerical rule 349, 369, 383 primogeniture eldest son inherited; Harrington for abolition 349; Starkey reformed in proposals 213, 230; Winstanley also for abolition 389 property rights: Ireton: key to civil society; trend of period towards absolute individual ownership according to Oliver Cromwell’s legal adviser William Sheppard and legal dictionaries 379 “Protestant ethic,” the: critics of point to activism of Protestants in struggles for religious freedom and pre-Reformation debates about labor and voluntary poverty; theory of German sociologist Weber that Protestant faiths fostered capitalism by affirming wealth and rejecting

voluntary poverty; xvi, 4, 7, 142; see also Weber, Max Ptolemy of Lucca: critiqued involuntary poverty as threat to government; for voluntary poverty different parts of body social not of equal status: higher ranks to control lower; different members had different roles; 50, 141, 144 Putney debates, 1647 CE, between “Grandee” officers and the Leveller radicals of London and Parliament’s “New Model Army”: over the country’s constitution, franchise, Church, and social structures 369 Rainborough brothers (aka Rainsborough): both in Navy and New Model Army; Levellers who objected to Ireton proposals at Putney safeguarding, even extending, authority of House of Lords; made both accommodating and radical statements; accused by Oliver Cromwell of fostering chaos 373–4, 377, 380 Raleigh, Walter: opposed Parliament continuing to regulate grain trade in 1601 because surpluses existed in much of western Europe and because the best option is to set the market “at liberty and leave every man free, which is the desire of a true Englishman,” pitting him against those favoring a “moral economy” and state control 314, 320 rebellion: arises from social dysfunction (Morison) 188–9, 191–2; armies raised to combat in mid-Tudor period 29; Cade’s and labor laws 151; Cheke 274–5; in ciompi uprising in Florence 125, 130; denial of legitimacy of 106; Dudley 68–9, 72, 75; England faced if beggars allowed (Cartwright) 12; Essex’s rising 342; Hales and “Commonwealth-men” 97–8, 105, 111; Norden and Greville opposed 267–9; by people denying body social,

458 Index causing social divisions 114–15; Pilgrimage of Grace 1536 CE 29, 106; Ponet, Waad, The Nobles 277–8; poverty halts 160; rich to blame 107–8; Royal fears of seen in Henry I’s nightmares 53; seventeenth-century statements 316; in 1381 CE, 35, 42, 150; vertical or horizontal loyalties 51–2 retainers: Aubrey treated favorably 335; Harrington critical as undermining noble power 347–8; Locke opposed as “unproductive”402; part of a lord’s “affinity,” often “indentured” as in a contract, governments continued to rely upon for military needs into sixteenth century 29; received hospitality, room, and board from lords 31; Smith 252; Starkey critiqued 209–10, 212, 214;Utopia denounced for leading to idleness and crime 165–7, 172–4, 177–8; Wyatt praised institution 111; see also Wyatt, Thomas Reyce, Robert: Breviary mainly about gentry office holders, but with valuable information about social structures, the Church, and the poor 328–9, 333–5 Richard II (of England): at Mile End rebels in 1381 C. E. complained of compulsory labor provisions in Statute of Laborers; King replied with threat of worsening conditions 150–1 Rous, John: chantry priest who listed about 60 depopulated villages in south Warwickshire and presented petition to Parliament regarding 37–8 Riva, Bonvesin de la: c. 1313 CE wrote “On the Marvels of Milan” thus providing case of civic humanism predating fourteenth and fifteenth century examples cited by Hans Baron 129 Rome, republican and imperial: decline with demise of voluntary poverty 141–2

Royal Supremacy: Armstrong favored taking most radical stance 79–80, 159 Russell, John, bishop: in 1483 CE keynote speaker at opening of Parliament described realm as a body 58 Salisbury, John of: used language of body in describing England’s polity; in particular mutual obligations of “feet” (laborers and peasants) to serve superiors 58 Salutati, Coluccio: Florentine chancellor who used methods of humanism to defend republic against Milan 125; held that poverty was noble 141 Seymour, Edward, duke of Somerset: thought to patronize “Commonwealth-men” a reforming party of Protestant and social zealots 95 Skinner, Quentin: historian of political thought who adopted a “contextualist” approach to study texts from perspectives of authors’ intentions and relations to intellectual worlds in which composed; critics cite elitism of approach which can nevertheless be arguably broadened to incorporate the social 14 Smith, Thomas: among best informed of social and economic analysts in Tudor period; concept of “commonwealth” differed from Hales and others who emphasized social cooperation in a body social, while Smith argued class conflict inherent to societies based upon money and wealth 96, 112, 115, 234–56 social history: new critics of argue language more significant than structures 4–6 “social humanist”: Armstrong 82; Chamberlayne 399; Diggers 388; Dudley 76; general: 6, 12, 38, 121–152; Harrington 351; Hobbes 344; Ireton 379; later usages 264, 266, 269, 272–5,

Index  459 292, 307, 319, 329 331, 335, 341; Levellers 366, 381; Locke 398 402, 404–7, 411; Morison 191; Smith 236, 238–9, 247, 249; Starkey 192, 196, 204; in Utopia 161, 164, 169–70, 172– 3, 176, 178; Waterhouse 354 “social, the”: Possibility of saying something useful regarding 4–13 Stafford, Edward: as 3rd duke of Buckingham a spectacular provider of hospitality to between 100 and 200 persons in great hall at Thornbury in 1506–7 CE 31 Standish, Arthur: ran campaign seeking state sponsorship of tree-planting business; promised benefits to commonwealth and profits to investors 309 Starkey, Thomas: called for growth of population and wealth and policies to promote, extending to poor and rich 202–4; called for significant reforms of all three estates, especially the clergy and nobility 198–202; invoked body social and mutual obligation but they were dysfunctional and outpaced by individualism and conflict 194–6; historiography 192–4: leading humanist in Tudor England, patronized by Reginald Pole, Thomas Cromwell, and Cardinal Wolsey 192–4 Stubbes, Philip: in 1583 CE questioned self-aggrandizement by landlords in monopolizing land and “polling, pilling, and shaving of . . . poor tenants” 267 Tawney, agrarian data: for types of tenancies, duration, and entry fines 39–41 Tawney, R. H.: his role in the historiography of English capitalism, especially in agrarian sector but also in trade 39–42, 63–4; also on Harrington 346 Taylor (Silvanus aka Silas): in 1652 CE publicized scheme to increase

timber; assuming loving property was commonplace and key to was enclosing of common lands, which would increase livestock; poor would benefit by employment of children 309–10 Thomas, William: wrote discourses for Edward VI addressing question whether better to have democracy or aristocracy, deciding commonalty more dangerous because “most inconstant” and would destroy nobility and themselves; yet admitted the nobility had taken advantage of the multitude 275–6 Thompson, E. P.: Experience in World War II against fascism: article on “moral economy” cited 322; historiography of social class discussed 244; thanked for information 357 Tiptoft, John, 1st earl of Worcester: studied Latin and law in Italy and translated “Fulgens and Lucrece” into English, which said a poor man more noble than a titled one, thus raising question of how to define nobility 134 Tithes: clergy’s authority to collect 303; compensation to holders of impropriated ones 384; for confiscation 391; could be withheld or considered goods of poor according to Wycliffe 146; Cromwell probably held 369; Harrington rejection of 349,;Levellers on 368–70; obligation to pay 102; Winstanley said burdensome 386 Tönnies, Ferdinand: sociologist who developed binary distinction between Gemeinschaft (community and greater whole) versus Gesellschaft or selfinterest 51 towns: guilds and points of solidarity 32–4; points of dysfunction and conflict 35–6; Starkey on England’s urban blight 318; roles of small urban sector but

460 Index significant for economy and government 24–5 Townshend, Hayward M.P.: in 1597 CE Parliament who recorded deep divisions in Herefordshire and Shropshire over latter’s inclusion in agrarian legislation curbing expansion of livestock sector 312 Trigge, Francis: argued commons fostered social solidarity 318; one reason to maintain defenses 315; Lincolnshire rector blamed privatizing common rights in 1604 pamphlet for causing depopulation and greed, in framework of body social and three estates, while also observing conflict between them 301, 303, 306, 309 Tyndale, William: in critique of good works affirmed adherence to theory of body social and three estates: clergy preaching gospel, lords ministering law and order, and commons to pay rents, but common rights and rents had to be maintained 96, 102–3; objected to opposition to rulers 105–6 unemployment see masterlessness vagabonds, vagrants see masterlessness vera nobilitas Ongoing debate about what constituted true nobility in “Fulgens and Lucrece” 1480s CE; Dudley 71, 157; Thomas More 101, 159 villein (villeinage): conversion to copyhold and long term economic and social effects debated 41, 147, 151; rights of succession as form of welfare 30; unfree landholdings possibly Anglo-Saxon in origin with annual taxes, entry and other fines; precise details varied from manor to manor; by 1520s CE virtually a dead letter as labor system, superseded by compulsory labor since fourteenth century 27–8, 34 virtus: to be based on merit not blood 282–3, 285, 292; definitions

mainly political but social also possible as Renaissance consciousness 126–7, 141; wealth augmented virtue 147 Vives, Juan-Luis: Inspiration for re-thinking voluntary poverty (public begging), which rejected, drawing upon continental examples of Bruges and Ypres, recommending jobs rather than doles, isolating those with diseased bodies 12, 129, 198–9; re-thought concept of nobility, which based upon virtue not “chance birth” 128 Von Gierke, Otto: Author of “body social” theory; historiography; membership a crucial concept incorporating affinity to larger group, subordination to whole and interdependence, but also in immutable hierarchy of “like with unlike”; likely responsible for modern corporatist social and political thought to which modern liberalism and socialism ran contrary 49–52 Waad, Armagil: clerk to the Privy Council and author of manuscript in early years of Elizabeth I’s reign warning of social polarization between nobles and commonalty caused by “the penury of noblemen” 277 Walwyn, William “London Leveller” who collaborated with Overton in tract defending Lilburne against imprisonment by Parliament; attacked lords for allegedly aiming to take over government 368, 371–2, 391 Warwick: county town in Midlands that saw proposals and experiments to relieve the poor through a census and taxation in 1570s CE and ’80s CE, led by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and Puritan pastor Thomas Cartwright; expelled alleged non-residents, determined eligibility for relief and work in rejection of voluntary poverty 7–13

Index  461 Waterhouse, Edward: arguably the first “bourgeois man” by representing transition from martial and magisterial functions to preoccupation with moral and material survival 325; critiqued voluntary poverty and questioned birth after defending; decried immoderate living 353– 4; a social humanist who valued money, education, and success in professions and trades; summary of social treatise 265, 325 Weber, Max: German sociologist who developed theory that Protestant ethic fostered spirit of capitalism, which supported in work of R.H. Tawney in England 63–4; Weber also argued status more significant than social class in defining social position 247 Westcote, Thomas: allowed trade honorable but drew line against merchants aspiring to join ranks of gentle; gave sensitive, humane portrait of tin-miners; listed only four social categories, including day laborers; opposed popular sports that were “un-nice”; published in 1630 CE A View of Devonshire in which took social humanist line that rank achieved not only by birth but also by virtues, including learning 328–34 Whitelocke, Bulstrode: Chancery adjudicated many copyhold cases in mid-seventeenth century; Whitelocke as commissioner believed security of holdings permitted unlimited and equal freedom to dispose of by “the meanest as to the greatest person” 41 Wildman, John: A London Leveller who called for dissolution of dean and chapter lands and episcopacy: at Putney favored abolition because “we have been under slavery”; even Oliver Cromwell did not deny this assertion, though Wildman launched a personal attack on him; Wildman profited greatly

from sale of Church and Crown land 369–70, 373–5, 380 Wilkinson, Robert: sermon against covetous causing want in wake of Midland Revolt of 1607 CE; called for swift justice against insurgents but respect for mutual obligations and care for the poor “because God created the world for men, not sheep”: 318–19 Wilson, Thomas: civil lawyer whose “State of England, 1600 CE” has some claim to be England’s first sociologist; like contemporaries Harrison and Smith observed economic and social groupings in Wilson’s case 11 groups and eight subgroups based upon income (see Table 13.1); observed conflicts between groups including yeomen and gentry, demonstrating class consciousness according to F. J. Fisher and replacing the theory of the body social with a propertybased one 281, 283–4, 288 Winstanley, Gerard: abolished property and replaced with communal ownership and production in as many as eight counties; moves based upon repudiation of landholding system favoring first two estates of Church and gentry; also went beyond property to reform local government in a virtual gerontocracy in which poverty and wage labor were rejected 385–91 Wolsey, Thomas, cardinal and archbishop of York: issued decrees from Chancery to restore privatized common lands since 1485 while allowing for exceptions for lands “beneficial for the commonwealth” 113 Women: Diggers 389; Earl of Leicester would have employed disabled in processing wool 11; education denied by Harrington and vote by Levellers who promised welfare to avoid begging 351, 366, 383; education, office holding, priesthood, martial roles in Utopia 170–2; exclusion

462 Index from craft guilds 33; Locke included women in civil society and provided for work in critique of patriarchalism 402, 405–7; as paupers 13; picture mixed in seventeenth century as patriarchalism developed, Harrison, Smith, Coriolanus, Chamberlayne 279–81, 297, 340–1, 350, 399; women obliged to work under labor laws, especially the young 150 Wood, Neal: historian of political thought who found origins of Political Economy in sixteenth century while denying seeing past from present and slighting the roles of social and religious thought 64, 234 Woolrych, A. H.: historian of seventeenth-century Britain who summed up the significance of Harrington’s Oceana as “the greatest work of republican thought” in early modern history; the Levellers’ debates with the “Grandees” at Putney as the “most famous debate in British history” 345, 366 Wyatt, Thomas: defender of medieval social order and armed retainers providing private armies while denouncing “covetous folks” who robbed the poor in 1540s 111–12

Yeomanry: Smith on low wages; mobility in and out of gentry 282–5; still idealized by Harrington and Oliver Cromwell 348–9, 350, 377; value as military force disputed Starkey 212; Trigge 306, 315 York: annual feasts on craft guilds’ patron saints’ days lasting into eighteenth century; craft guilds provided relief to unemployed members; highlight of ceremonial year Corpus Christi Day May 21; incomes skewed towards wealthy in town where three men owned one eighth of city’s taxable wealth 32–3, 35–6 Zagorin, Perez: historian of seventeenth-century England who saw Levellers as proposing a “lower middle class utopia” whereas others find them less uopian than Harrington and Winstanley, Zagorin more aptly saw them proposing an “equalitarian order which aimed at dissociating wealth from privilege” that would have empowered “small merchants, craftsmen, and yeomen” by dissolving urban oligarchies, central government, the Church, and aristocracy 365–6