If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth and in the body of the Church.
LAUD, Sermon before His Majesty, 19 June 1621.
THE ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which were motived by changes in the texture of society and the relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their result without significance for the future. In England, as on the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages. The result was a reassertion of the traditional doctrines with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their gradual retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both of economic organization and of the province of religion, and their final decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the storm blew and they flickered out.
Medieval England had lain on the outer edge of economic civilization, remote from the great highways of commerce and the bustling financial centres of Italy and Germany. With the commercial revolution which followed the Discoveries, a new age began. After the first outburst of curiosity, interest in explorations which yielded no immediate return of treasure died down. It was not till more than half a century later, when the silver of the New World was dazzling all Europe, that Englishmen reflected that it might conceivably have been lodged in the Tower instead of at Seville, and that talk of competition for America and the East began in earnest.
In the meantime, however, every other aspect of English economic life was in process of swift transformation. Foreign trade increased largely in the first half of the sixteenth century, and, as manufactures developed, cloth displaced wool as the principal export. With the growth of commerce went the growth of the financial organization on which commerce depends, and English capital poured into the growing London money-market, which had previously been dominated by Italian bankers. At home, with the expansion of internal trade which followed the Tudo peace, opportunities of speculation were increased, and a new class of middlemen arose to exploit them. In industry, the rising interest was that of the commercial capitalist, bent on securing the freedom to grow to what stature he could, and produce by what methods he pleased. Hampered by the defensive machinery of the gilds, with their corporate discipline, their organized torpor restricting individual enterprise, and their rough equalitarianism, either he quietly evaded gild regulations by withdrawing from the corporate towns, within which alone the pressure of economic conformity could be made effective, or he accepted the gild organization, captured its government, and by means of it developed a system under which the craftsman, even if nominally a master, was in effect the servant of an employer. In agriculture the customary organization of the village was being sapped from below and battered down from above. For a prosperous peasantry, who had commuted the labour services that were still the rule in France and Germany, were rearranging their strips by exchange or agreement, and lords, no longer petty sovereigns, but astute business men, were leasing their demesnes to capitalist farmers, quick to grasp the profits to be won by sheep-grazing, and eager to clear away the network of communal restrictions which impeded its extension. Into commerce, industry, and agriculture alike, the revolution in prices, gradual for the first third of the century, but after 1540 a mill race, injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving all customary relationships.
It was a society in rapid motion, swayed by new ambitions and haunted by new terrors, in which both success and failure had changed their meaning. Except in the turbulent north, the aim of the great landowner was no longer to hold at his call an army of retainers, but to exploit his estates as a judicious investment. The prosperous merchant, once content to win a position of dignity and power in fraternity or town, now flung himself into the task of carving his way to solitary pre-eminence, unaided by the artificial protection of gild or city. To the immemorial poverty of peasant and craftsman, pitting, under the ever-present threat of famine, their pigmy forces against an implacable nature, was added the haunting insecurity of a growing, though still small, proletariat, detached from their narrow niche in village or borough, the sport of social forces which they could neither understand, nor arrest, nor control.
The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns as a source of high debates on church government and doctrine, was to contemporaries a cauldron seething with economic unrest and social passions. But the material on which agitation fed had been accumulating for three generations, and of the grievances which exploded in the middle of the century, with the exception of the depreciation of the currency, there was not one – neither enclosures and pasture farming, nor usury, nor the malpractices of gilds, nor the rise in prices, nor the oppression of craftsmen by merchants, nor the extortions of the engrosser – which had not evoked popular protests, been denounced by publicists, and produced legislation and administrative action, long before the Reformation Parliament met. The floods were already running high when the religious revolution swelled them with a torrent of bitter, if bracing, waters. Its effect on the social situation was twofold. Since it produced a sweeping redistribution of wealth, carried out by an unscrupulous minority using the weapons of violence, intimidation, and fraud, and succeeded by an orgy of interested misgovernment on the part of its principal beneficiaries, it aggravated every problem, and gave a new turn to the screw which was squeezing peasant and craftsman. Since it released a torrent of writing, on questions not only of religion, but of social organization, it caused the criticisms passed on the changes of the past half-century to be brought to a head, in a sweeping indictment of the new economic forces, and an eloquent restatement of the traditional theory of social obligations. The centre of both was the land question. For it was agrarian plunder which principally stirred the cupidity of the age, and agrarian grievances which were the most important ground of social agitation.
The land question had been a serious matter for the greater part of a century before the Reformation. The first detailed account of enclosure had been written by a chantry priest in Warwickshire, soon after 1460.1 Then had come the legislation of 1489, 1515, and 1516, Wolsey’s Royal Commission in 1517, and more legislation in 1534.2 Throughout, a steady stream of criticism had flowed from men of the Renaissance, like More, Starkey, and a host of less well-known writers, dismayed at the advance of social anarchy, and sanguine of the miracles to be performed by a Prince who would take counsel of philosophers.
If, however, the problem was acute long before the confiscation of the monastic estates, its aggravation by the fury of spoliation let loose by Henry and Cromwell is not open to serious question. It is a mistake, no doubt, to see the last days of monasticism through rose-coloured spectacles. The monks; after all, were business men, and the lay agents whom they often employed to manage their property naturally conformed to the agricultural practice of the world around them. In Germany revolts were nowhere more frequent or more bitter than on the estates of ecclesiastical land-owners.3 In England a glance at the proceedings of the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests is enough to show that holy men reclaimed villeins, turned copy-holders into tenants at will, and, as More complained, converted arable land to pasture.4
In reality, the supposition of unnatural virtue on the part of the monks, or of more than ordinary harshness on the part of the new proprietors, is not needed in order to explain the part which the rapid transference of great masses of property played in augmenting rural distress. The worst side of all such sudden and sweeping redistributions is that the individual is more or less at the mercy of the market, and can hardly help taking his pound of flesh. Estates with a capital value (in terms of modern money) of £15,000,000 to £20,000,000 changed hands.5 To the abbey lands, which came into the market after 1536, were added those of the gilds and chantries in 1547. The financial necessities of the Crown were too pressing to allow of its retaining them in its own possession and drawing the rents; nor, in any case, would that have been the course dictated by prudence to a Government which required a party to carry through a revolution. What it did, therefore, was to alienate most of the land almost immediately, and to spend the capital as income. For a decade there was a mania of land speculation. Much of the property was bought by needy courtiers at a ridiculously low figure. Much of it passed to sharp business men who brought to bear on its management the methods learned in the financial school of the City; the largest single grantee was Sir Richard Gresham. Much was acquired by middlemen, who bought scattered parcels of land, held them for the rise, and disposed of them piecemeal when they got a good offer; in London, groups of tradesmen – cloth-workers, leather-sellers, merchant tailors, brewers, tallow-chandlers – formed actual syndicates to exploit the market. Rack-renting, evictions, and the conversion of arable to pasture were the natural result, for surveyors wrote up values at each transfer, and, unless the last purchaser squeezed his tenants, the transaction would not pay.6
Why, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish than the Crown? ‘Do ye not know’, said the grantee of one of the Sussex manors of the monastery of Sion, in answer to some peasants who protested at the seizure of their commons, ‘that the King’s Grace hath put down all the houses of monks, friars, and nuns? Therefore now is the time come that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor knaves as ye be.’7 Such arguments, if inconsequent, were too convenient not to be common. The protests of contemporaries receive detailed confirmation from the bitter struggles which can be traced between the peasantry and some of the new landlords – the Herberts, who enclosed a whole village to make the park at Washerne, in which, according to tradition, the gentle Sidney was to write his Arcadia, the St Johns at Abbot’s Ripton, and Sir John Yorke, third in the line of speculators in the lands of Whitby Abbey, whose tenants found their rents raised from £29 to £64 a year, and for nearly twenty years were besieging the Government with petitions for redress.8 The legend, still repeated late in the seventeenth century, that the grantees of monastic estates died out in three generations, though unveracious, is not surprising. The wish was father to the thought.
It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence. In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and licence which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine. The touching words9 in which the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace painted the social effects of the dissolution of the Yorkshire monasteries were mild compared with the denunciations launched ten years later by Latimer, Crowley, Lever, Becon, and Ponet.
Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in the green tree, they saw in the dry, and their horror at the plunge into social immorality was sharpened by the bitterness of disappointed hopes. It was all to have been so different! The movement which produced the Reformation was a Janus, not with two, but with several, faces, and among them had been one which looked wistfully for a political and social regeneration as the fruit of the regeneration of religion.10 In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men had dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the State and society, as well as the Church. The purification, not merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty, by the stirring into life of a mass of sleeping endowments, a spiritual and social revival inspired by the revival of the faith of the Gospel – such, not without judicious encouragement from a Government alert to play on public opinion, was the vision which had floated before the eyes of the humanitarian and the idealist.
It did not vanish without a struggle. At the very height of the economic crisis, Bucer, the tutor of Edward VI and Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated the social programme of a Christian renaissance in the manual of Christian politics which he drafted in order to explain to his pupil how the Kingdom of Christ might be established by a Christian prince. Its outlines were sharpened, and its details elaborated, with all the remorseless precision of a disciple of Calvin. Wilful idlers are to be excommunicated by the Church and punished by the State. The Government, a pious mercantilist, is to revive the woollen industry, to introduce the linen industry, to insist on pasture being put under the plough. It is to take a high line with the commercial classes. For, though trade in itself is honourable, most traders are rogues – indeed ‘next to the sham priests, no class of men is more pestilential to the Commonwealth’; their works are usury, monopolies, and the bribery of Governments to overlook both. Fortunately, the remedies are simple. The State must fix just prices – ‘a very necessary but an easy matter’. Only ‘pious persons, devoted to the Commonwealth more than to their own interests’, are to be allowed to engage in trade at all. In every village and town a school is to be established under a master eminent for piety and wisdom. ‘Christian princes must above all things strive that men of virtue may abound, and live to the glory of God…. Neither the Church of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to the hurt of their neighbours.’11
The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those that prevail. The classes whose backing was needed to make the Reformation a political success had sold their support on terms which made it inevitable that it should be a social disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not to be whipped off by a sermon. The Government of Edward VI, like all Tudor Governments, made its experiment in fixing just prices. What the astute Gresham, its financial adviser, thought of restricting commerce to persons of piety, we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, what it did for them Mr Leach has told us. It swept them away wholesale in order to distribute their endowments among courtiers. There were probably more schools in proportion to the population at the end of the fifteenth century than there were in the middle of the nineteenth. ‘These endowments were confiscated by the State and many still line the pockets of the descendants of the statesmen of the day.’12 King Edward VI’s Grammar Schools are the schools which King Edward VI did not destroy.
The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising that the reformers should ask what had become of the devout imaginations of social righteousness, which were to have been realized as the result of a godly reformation? The end of Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges, six new bishoprics, lectureships in Greek and Latin in place of the disloyal subject of the canon law, the reform of doctrine and ritual – side by side with these good things had come some less edifying changes, the ruin of much education, the cessation of much charity, a raid on corporate property which provoked protests even in the House of Commons,13 and for ten years a sinister hum, as of the floating of an immense land syndicate, with favourable terms for all sufficiently rich, or influential, or mean, to get in on the ground floor. The men who had invested in the Reformation when it was still a gambling stock naturally nursed the security, and denounced the revolting peasants as communists, with the mystical reverence for the rights of property which is characteristic in all ages of the nouveaux riches.14 The men whose religion was not money said what they thought of the business in pamphlets and sermons, which left respectable congregations spluttering with fury.
Crowley pilloried lease-mongers and usurers, wrote that the sick begged in the street because rich men had seized the endowments of hospitals, and did not conceal his sympathy with the peasants who rose under Ket.15 Becon told the gentry, eloquent on the vices of abbey-lubbers, that the only difference between them and the monks was that they were more greedy and more useless, more harsh in wringing the last penny from their tenants, more selfish in spending the whole income on themselves, more pitiless to the poor.16 ‘In suppressing of abbies, cloisters, colleges, and chantries’, preached Lever in St Paul’s, ‘the intent of the King’s Majesty that dead is, was, and of this our king now is, very godly, and the purpose, or else the pretence, of other wondrous goodly: that thereby such abundance of goods as was superstitiously spent upon vain ceremonies, or voluptuously upon idle bellies, might come to the king’s hands to bear his great charges, necessarily bestowed in the common wealth, or partly unto other men’s hands, for the better relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and the setting forth of God’s word. Howbeit, covetous officers have so used this matter, that even those goods which did serve to the relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and to comfortable necessary hospitality in the common wealth, be now turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous ambition…. You which have gotten these goods into your own hands, to turn them from evil to worse, and other goods more from good unto evil, be ye sure it is even you that have offended God, beguiled the king, robbed the rich, spoiled the poor, and brought a common wealth into a common misery.’17
This was plain speaking indeed. Known to their enemies as the ‘Commonwealth men’ from their advocacy of social reconstruction, the group of which Latimer was the prophet and Hales the man of action naturally incurred the charge of stirring up class-hatred, which is normally brought against all who call attention to its causes. The result of their activity was the appointment of a Royal Commission to inquire into offences against the Acts forbidding the conversion of arable to pasture, the introduction of legislation requiring the maintenance of tillage and rebuilding of cottages, and a proclamation pardoning persons who had taken the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges. The gentry were furious. Paget, the secretary to the Council, who was quite ready for a reign of terror, provided that the gentlemen began it, prophesied gloomily that the German Peasants’ War was to be re-enacted in England; the Council, most of whose members held abbey lands, was sullen; and Warwick, the personification of the predatory property of the day, attacked Hales fiercely for carrying out, as chairman of the Midland committee of the Depopulation Commission, the duties laid upon him by the Government. ‘Sir,’ wrote a plaintive gentleman to Cecil, ‘be plain with my Lord’s Grace, that under the pretence of simplicity and poverty there may [not] rest much mischief. So do I fear there doth in these men called Common Wealths and their adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I mean as well the greatest as the lowest), I assure you they are in such doubt, that almost they dare touch none of them [i.e. the peasants], not for that they are afraid of them, but for that some of them have been sent up and come away without punishment, and the Common Wealth called Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others.’18
The Commonwealth called Latimer was unrepentant. Combining gifts of humour and invective which are not very common among bishops, his fury at oppression did not prevent him from greeting the Devil with a burst of uproarious laughter, as of a satirical gargoyle carved to make the sinner ridiculous in this world before he is damned in the next. So he was delighted when he provoked one of his audience into the exclamation, ‘Mary, a seditious fellow!’ used the episode as comic relief in his next sermon,19 and then, suddenly serious, redoubled his denunciations of step-lords and rent-raisers. Had not the doom of the covetous been pronounced by Christ Himself?
You thoughte that I woulde not requyre
The bloode of all suche at your hande,
But be you sure, eternall fyre
Is redy for eche hell fyrebrande.
Both for the housynge and the lande
That you have taken from the pore
Ye shall in hell dwell evermore.20
On the technicalities of the Tudor land question the authors of such outbursts spoke without authority, and, thanks to Mr Leadam and Professor Gay, modern research has found no difficulty in correcting the perspective of their story. At once incurious and ill-informed as to the large impersonal causes which were hurrying forward the reorganization of agriculture on a commercial basis, what shocked them was not only the material misery of their age, but its repudiation of the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves. Their enemy was not merely the Northumberlands or Herberts, but an idea, and they sprang to the attack, less of spoliation or tyranny, than of a creed which was the parent of both. That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority. It was, in short, the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.
The question of the respective rights of lord and peasant had never, at least within recent centuries, arisen in so acute a form, for, as long as the customary tenants were part of the stock of the manor, it was obviously to the interest of the lord to bind them to the soil. Now all that had been changed, at any rate in the south and midlands, by the expansion of the woollen industry and the devaluation of money. Chevage and merchet had gone; forced labour, if it had not gone, was fast going. The psychology of landowning had been revolutionized, and for two generations the sharp landlord, instead of using his seigneurial right to fine or arrest run-aways from the villein nest, had been hunting for flaws in titles, screwing up admission fines, twisting manorial customs, and, when he dared, turning copyholds into leases. The official opposition to depopulation, which had begun in 1489 and was to last almost till 1640, infuriated him, as an intolerable interference with the rights of property. In their attacks on the restraints imposed by village custom from below and by the Crown from above, in their illegal defiance of the statutes forbidding depopulation, and in their fierce resistance to the attempts of Wolsey and Somerset to restore the old order, the interests which were making the agrarian revolution were watering the seeds of that individualistic conception of ownership which was to carry all before it after the Civil War. With such a doctrine, since it denied both the existence and the necessity of a moral title, it was not easy for any religion less pliant than that of the eighteenth century to make a truce. Once accepted, it was to silence the preaching of all social duties save that of submission. If property be an unconditional right, emphasis on its obligations is little more than the graceful parade of a flattering, but innocuous, metaphor. For, whether the obligations are fulfilled or neglected, the right continues unchallenged and indefeasible.
A religious theory of society necessarily regards with suspicion all doctrines which claim a large space for the unfettered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the imperfect reflection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high value to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means, it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for ‘the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate’. To a temper nurtured on such ideas, the new agrarian regime, with its sacrifice of the village – a fellowship of mutual aid, a partnership of service and protection, ‘a little commonwealth’ – to the pecuniary interests of a great proprietor, who made a desert where men had worked and prayed, seemed a defiance, not only of man, but of God. It was the work of ‘men that live as thoughe there were no God at all, men that would have all in their owne handes, men that would leave nothyng for others, men that would be alone on the earth, men that bee never satisfied’.21 Its essence was an attempt to extend legal rights, while repudiating legal and quasi-legal obligations. It was against this new idolatry of irresponsible ownership, a growing, but not yet triumphant, creed, that the divines of the Reformation called down fire from heaven.
Their doctrine was derived from the conception of property, of which the most elaborate formulation had been made by the Schoolmen, and which, while justifying it on grounds of experience and expediency, insisted that its use was limited at every turn by the rights of the community and the obligations of charity. Its practical application was an idealized version of the feudal order, which was vanishing before the advance of more business-like and impersonal forms of land-ownership, and which, once an engine of exploitation, was now hailed as a bulwark to protect the weak against the downward thrust of competition. Society is a hierarchy of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce the second, as much as to protect the first. Property is not a mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible office. Its raison d’être is not only income, but service. It is to secure its owner such means, and no more than such means, as may enable him to perform those duties, whether labour on the land, or labour in government, which are involved in the particular status which he holds in the system. He who seeks more robs his superiors, or his dependants, or both. He who exploits his property with a single eye to its economic possibilities at once perverts its very essence and destroys his own moral title, for he has ‘every man’s living and does no man’s duty’.22
The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the function which he performs and should lapse if he repudiates it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants against him. Just as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way which he may think most profitable to himself, but is bound by the law of the village to grow the crops which the village needs and to throw his strips open after harvest to his neighbours’ beasts, so the lord is required both by custom and by statute to forego the anti-social profits to be won by methods of agriculture which injure his neighbours and weaken the State. He may not raise his rent or demand increased fines, for the function of the peasant, though different, is not less essential than his own. He is, in short, not a rentier, but an officer, and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he sacrifices the duties of his charge to the greed for personal gain. ‘We heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings … but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands, and pastures, that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.’23 Thus, while the covetous worldlings disposed the goods of this transitory life to their liking, did a pious monarch consider their eternal welfare in the Book of Private Prayer issued in 1553.
Religious Theory and Social Policy
If a philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be as mobile and realistic as the forces which it would control. The weakness of an attitude which met the onset of insurgent economic interests with a generalized appeal to traditional morality and an idealization of the past was only too obvious. Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, if courageous and eloquent, defensive by changes even in the slowly moving world of agriculture, medieval social theory, to which the most representative minds of the English Church still clung, found itself swept off its feet after the middle of the century by the swift rise of a commercial civilization, in which all traditional landmarks seemed one by one to be submerged. The issue over which the struggle between the new economic movements of the age and the scheme of economic ethics expounded by churchmen was most definitely joined, and continued longest, was not, as the modern reader might be disposed to expect, that of wages, but that of credit, money-lending, and prices. The centre of the controversy – the mystery of iniquity in which a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately, epitomized – was the problem which contemporaries described by the word usury.
‘Treasure doth then advance greatness,’ wrote Bacon, in words characteristic of the social ideal of the age, ‘when the wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than few.’24 In spite of the growing concentration of property, Tudor England was still, to use a convenient modern phrase, a Distributive State. It was a community in which the ownership of land, and of the simple tools used in most industries, was not the badge of a class, but the attribute of a society, and in which the typical worker was a peasant farmer, a tradesman, or a small master. In this world of small property-owners, of whose independence and prosperity English publicists boasted, in contrast with the ‘housed beggars’ of France and Germany, the wage-earners were a minority scattered in the interstices of village and borough, and, being normally themselves the sons of peasants, with the prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at worst, the chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a strong position vis-à-vis their employers.
The special economic malaise of an age is naturally the obverse of its special qualities. Except in certain branches of the textile industry, the grievance which supplied fuel to social agitation, which evoked programmes of social reform, and which prompted both legislation and administrative activity, sprang, not from the exploitation of a wage-earning proletariat by its employers, but from the relation of the producer to the landlord of whom he held, the dealer with whom he bought and sold, and the local capitalist, often the dealer in another guise, to whom he ran into debt. The farmer must borrow money when the season is bad, or merely to finance the interval between sowing and harvest. The craftsman must buy raw materials on credit and get advances before his wares are sold. The young tradesman must scrape together a little capital before he can set up shop. Even the cottager, who buys grain at the local market, must constantly ask the seller to ‘give day’. Almost everyone, therefore, at one time or another, has need of the money-lender. And the lender is often a monopolist – ‘a money master’, a maltster or corn monger, ‘a rich priest’, who is the solitary capitalist in a community of peasants and artisans. Naturally, he is apt to become their master.25
In such circumstances it is not surprising that there should have been a popular outcry against extortion. Inspired by practical grievances, it found an ally, eloquent, if disarmed, in the teaching of the Church. The doctrine as to the ethics of economic conduct, which had been formulated by medieval Popes and interpreted by medieval Schoolmen, was rehearsed by the English divines of the sixteenth century, not merely as the conventional tribute paid by a formal piety to the wisdom of the past, but because the swift changes of the period in commerce and agriculture had not softened, but accentuated, the problems of conduct for which it had been designed. Nor was it only against the particular case of the covetous money-lender that the preacher and the moralist directed their arrows. The essence of the medieval scheme of economic ethics had been its insistence on equity in bargaining – a contract is fair, St Thomas had said, when both parties gain from it equally. The prohibition of usury had been the kernel of its doctrines, not because the gains of the money-lender were the only species, but because, in the economic conditions of the age, they were the most conspicuous species, of extortion.
In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, the word usury had not the specialized sense which it carries today. Like the modern profiteer, the usurer was a character so unpopular that most unpopular characters could be called usurers, and by the average practical man almost any form of bargain which he thought oppressive would be classed as usurious. The interpretation placed on the word by those who expounded ecclesiastical theories of usury was equally elastic. Not only the taking of interest for a loan, but the raising of prices by a monopolist, the beating down of prices by a keen bargainer, the rack-renting of land by a landlord, the sub-letting of land by a tenant at a rent higher than he himself paid, the cutting of wages and the paying of wages in truck, the refusal of discount to a tardy debtor, the insistence on unreasonably good security for a loan, the excessive profits of a middleman – all these had been denounced as usury in the very practical thirteenth-century manual of St Raymond;26 all these were among the ‘unlawful chaffer’, the ‘subtlety and sleight’, which was what the plain man who sat on juries and listened to sermons in parish churches meant by usury three centuries later. If he had been asked why usury was wrong, he would probably have answered with a quotation from Scripture. If he had been asked for a definition of usury, he would have been puzzled, and would have replied in the words of a member of Parliament who spoke on the Bill introduced in 1571: ‘It standeth doubtful what usury is; we have no true definition of it.’27 The truth is, indeed, that any bargain, in which one party obviously gained more advantage than the other, and used his power to the full, was regarded as usurious. The description which best sums up alike popular sentiment and ecclesiastical teaching is contained in the comprehensive indictment applied by his parishioners to an unpopular divine who lent at a penny in the shilling – the cry of all poor men since the world began – Dr Bennet ‘is a great taker of advantages’.28
It was the fact that the theory of usury which the divines of the sixteenth century inherited was not an isolated freak of casuistical ingenuity, but one subordinate element in a comprehensive system of social philosophy, which gave its poignancy to the controversy of which it became the centre. The passion which fed on its dusty dialectics was fanned by the conviction that the issue at stake was not merely a legal technicality. It was the fate of the whole scheme of medieval thought, which had attempted to treat economic affairs as part of a hierarchy of values, embracing all interests and activities, of which the apex was religion.
If the Reformation was a revolution, it was a revolution which left almost intact both the lower ranges of ecclesiastical organization and the traditional scheme of social thought. The villager who, resisting the temptations of the alehouse, morris dancing, or cards, attended his parish church from 1530 to 1560, must have been bewildered by a succession of changes in the appearance of the building and the form of the services. But there was little to make him conscious of any alteration in the social system of which the church was the centre, or in the duties which that system imposed upon himself. After, as before, the Reformation, the parish continued to be a community in which religious and social obligations were inextricably intertwined, and it was as a parishioner, rather than as a subject of the secular authority, that he bore his share of public burdens and performed such public functions as fell to his lot. The officers of whom he saw most in the routine of his daily life were the churchwardens. The place where most public business was transacted, and where news of the doings of the great world came to him, was the parish church. The contributions levied from him were demanded in the name of the parish. Such education as was available for his children was often given by the curate or parish schoolmaster. Such training in cooperation with his fellows as he received sprang from common undertakings maintained by the parish, which owned property, received bequests, let out sheep and cattle, advanced money, made large profits by church ales, and occasionally engaged in trade.29 Membership of the Church and of the State being co-extensive and equally compulsory, the Government used the ecclesiastical organization of the parish for purposes which, in a later age, when the religious, political, and economic aspects of life were disentangled, were to be regarded as secular. The pulpit was the channel through which official information was conveyed to the public and the duty of obedience inculcated. It was to the clergy and the parochial organization that the State turned in coping with pauperism, and down to 1597 collectors for the poor were chosen by the churchwardens in conjunction with the parson.
Where questions of social ethics were concerned, the religious thought of the age was not less conservative than its ecclesiastical organization. Both in their view of religion as embracing all sides of life, and in their theory of the particular social obligations which religion involved, the most representative thinkers of the Church of England had no intention of breaking with traditional doctrines. In the rooted suspicion of economic motives which caused them to damn each fresh manifestation of the spirit of economic enterprise as a new form of the sin of covetousness, as in their insistence that the criteria of economic relations and of the social order were to be sought, not in practical expediency, but in truths of which the Church was the guardian and the exponent, the utterances of men of religion in the reign of Elizabeth, in spite of the revolution which had intervened, had more affinity with the doctrines of the Schoolmen than with those which were to be fashionable after the Restoration.
The oppressions of the tyrannous landlord, who used his economic power to drive an unmerciful bargain, were the subject of constant denunciation down to the Civil War. The exactions of middlemen – ‘merchants of mischief … [who] do make all things dear to the buyers, and yet wonderful vile and of small price to many that must needs set or sell that which is their own honestly come by’ – were pilloried by Lever.30 Nicholas Heming, whose treatise on The Lawful Use of Riches became something like a standard work, expounded the doctrine of the just price, and swept impatiently aside the argument which pleaded freedom of contract as an excuse for covetousness: ‘Cloake the same by what title you liste, your synne is excedyng greate.… He which hurteth but one man is in a damnable case; what shall bee thought of thee, whiche bryngest whole householdes to their graves, or at the leaste art a meanes of their extreame miserie? Thou maiest finde shiftes to avoide the danger of men, but assuredly thou shalte not escape the judgemente of God.’31 Men eminent among Anglican divines, such as Sandys and Jewel, took part in the controversy on the subject of usury. A bishop of Salisbury gave his blessing to the book of Wilson; an archbishop of Canterbury allowed Mosse’s sharp Arraignment to be dedicated to himself; and a clerical pamphleteer in the seventeenth century produced a catalogue of six bishops and ten doctors of divinity – not to mention numberless humbler clergy – who had written in the course of the last hundred years on different aspects of the sin of extortion in all its manifold varieties.32 The subject was still a favourite of the ecclesiastical orator. The sixteenth-century preacher was untrammelled by the convention which in a more fastidious age was to preclude as an impropriety the discussion in the pulpit of the problems of the market-place. ‘As it belongeth to the magistrate to punishe,’ wrote Heming, ‘so it is the parte of the preachers to reprove usurie…. First, they should earnestly inveigh against all unlawfull and wicked contractes…. Let them … amend all manifest errours in bargaining by ecclesiasticall discipline…. Then, if they cannot reforme all abuses which they shall finde in bargaines, let them take heede that they trouble not the Churche over-muche, but commende the cause unto God…. Last of all, let them with diligence admonishe the ritche men, that they suffer not themselves to be entangled with the shewe of ritches.’33
‘This’, wrote an Anglican divine in reference to the ecclesiastical condemnation of usury, ‘hath been the generall judgement of the Church for above this fifteene hundred yeeres, without opposition, in this point. Poor sillie Church of Christ, that could never finde a lawful usurie before this golden age wherein we live.’34 The first fact which strikes the modern student of this body of teaching is its continuity with the past. In its insistence that buying and selling, letting and hiring, lending and borrowing, are to be controlled by a moral law, of which the Church is the guardian, religious opinion after the Reformation did not differ from religious opinion before it. The reformers themselves were conscious, neither of the emancipation from the economic follies of the age of medieval darkness ascribed to them in the eighteenth century, nor of the repudiation of the traditional economic morality of Christendom, which some writers have held to have been the result of the revolt from Rome. The relation in which they conceived themselves to stand to the social theory of the medieval Church is shown by the authorities to whom they appealed. ‘Therefore I would not’, wrote Dr Thomas Wilson, Master of Requests and for a short time Secretary of State, ‘have men altogether to be enemies to the canon lawe, and to condempne every thinge there written, because the Popes were aucthours of them, as though no good lawe coulde bee made by them…. Nay, I will saye playnely, that there are some suche lawes made by the Popes as be righte godly, saye others what they list.’35 From the lips of a Tudor official, such sentiments fell, perhaps, with a certain piquancy. But, in their appeal to the traditional teaching of the Church, Wilson’s words represented the starting point from which the discussions of social questions still commonly set out.
The Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen, the decretals, church councils, and commentators on the canon law – all these, and not only the first, continued to be quoted as decisive on questions of economic ethics by men to whom the theology and government of the medieval Church were an abomination. What use Wilson made of them a glance at his book will show. The writer who, after him, produced the most elaborate discussion of usury in the latter part of the century prefaced his work with a list of pre-Reformation authorities running into several pages.36 The author of a practical memorandum on the amendment of the law with regard to money-lending – a memorandum which appears to have had some effect upon policy – thought it necessary to drag into a paper concerned with the chicanery of financiers and the depreciation of sterling by speculative exchange business, not only Melanchthon, but Aquinas and Hostiensis.37 Even a moralist who denied all virtue whatever to ‘the decrees of the Pope’, did so only the more strongly to emphasize the prohibition of uncharitable dealing contained in the ‘statutes of holie Synodes and sayings of godlie Fathers, whiche vehemently forbid usurie’.38 Objective economic science was developing in the hands of the experts who wrote on agriculture, trade, and, above all, on currency and the foreign exchanges. But the divines, if they read such works at all, waved them on one side as the intrusion of Mammon into the fold of Christian morality, and by their obstinate obscurantism helped to prepare an intellectual nemesis, which was to discredit their fervent rhetoric as the voice of a musty superstition. For one who examined present economic realities, ten rearranged thrice-quoted quotations from tomes of past economic casuistry. Sermon was piled upon sermon, and treatise upon treatise. The assumption of all is that the traditional teaching of the Church as to social ethics is as binding on men’s consciences after the Reformation as it had been before it.
Pamphlets and sermons do not deal either with sins which no one commits or with sins that every one commits, and the literary evidence is not to be dismissed merely as pious rhetoric. The literary evidence does not, however, stand alone. Upon the immense changes made by the Reformation in the political and social position of the Church it is not necessary to enlarge. It became, in effect, one arm of the State; excommunication, long discredited by abuse, was fast losing what little terrors it still retained; a clergy, three-quarters of whom, as a result of the enormous transference of ecclesiastical property, were henceforward presented by lay patrons, were not likely to display any excessive independence. But the canon law was nationalized, not abolished; the assumption of most churchmen throughout the sixteenth century was that it was to be administered; and the canon law included the whole body of legislation as to equity in contracts which had been inherited from the Middle Ages. True, it was administered no longer by the clergy acting as the agents of Rome, but by civilians acting under the authority of the Crown. True, after the prohibition of the study of canon law – after the estimable Dr Layton had ‘set Dunce in Bocardo’ at Oxford – it languished at the universities. True, for the seven years from 1545 to 1552, and again, and on this occasion for good, after 1571, parliamentary legislation expressly sanctioned loans at interest, provided that it did not exceed a statutory maximum. But the convulsion which changed the source of canon law did not, as far as these matters are concerned, alter its scope. Its validity was not the less because it was now enforced in the name, not of the Pope, but of the King.
As Maitland has pointed out,39 there was a moment towards the middle of the century when the civil law was pressing the canon law hard. The civil law, as Sir Thomas Smith assured the yet briefless barrister, offered a promising career, since it was practised in the ecclesiastical courts.40 Though it did not itself forbid usury, it had much to say about it; it was a doctor of the civil law under Elizabeth by whom the most elaborate treatise on the subject was compiled.41 By an argument made familiar by a modern controversy on which lay and ecclesiastical opinion have diverged, it is argued that the laxity of the State does not excuse the consciences of men who are the subjects, not only of the State, but of the Church. ‘The permission of the Prince’, it was urged, ‘is no absolution from the authority of the Church. Supposing usury to be unlawfull… yet the civil laws permit it, and the Church forbids it. In this case the Canons are to be preferred.… By the laws no man is compelled to be an usurer; and therefore he must pay that reverence and obedience which is otherwise due to them that have the rule over them in the conduct of their souls.’42
It was this theory which was held by almost all the ecclesiastical writers who dealt with economic ethics in the sixteenth century. Their view was that, in the words of a pamphleteer, ‘by the laws of the Church of England … usury is simply and generally prohibited’.43 When the lower House of Convocation petitioned the bishops in 1554 for a restoration of their privileges, they urged, among other matters, that ‘usurers may be punished by the canon lawes as in tymes past has been used’.44 In the abortive scheme for the reorganization of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction drawn up by Cranmer and Foxe, usury was included in the list of offences with which the ecclesiastical courts were to deal, and, for the guidance of judges in what must often have been somewhat knotty cases, a note was added, explaining that it was not to be taken as including the profits derived from objects which yielded increase by the natural process of growth.45 Archbishop Grindal’s injunctions to the laity of the Province of York (1571) expressly emphasized the duty of presenting to the Ordinary those who lend and demand back more than the principal, whatever the guise under which the transaction may be concealed.46 Bishops’ articles of visitation down to the Civil War required the presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers, together with drunkards, ribalds, swearers, and sorcerers.47 The rules to be observed in excommunicating the impenitent, promulgated in 1585, the Canons of the Province of Canterbury in 1604, and of the Irish Church in 1634, all included a provision that the usurer should be subjected to ecclesiastical discipline.48
The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased with the Reformation, and they continued throughout the last half of the century to play an important, if increasingly unpopular, part in the machinery of local government. In addition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of charity, by punishing the man who refused to ‘pay to the poor men’s box’, or who was ‘detected for being an uncharitable person and for not giving to the poor and impotent’,49 they dealt also, at least in theory, with those who offended against Christian morality by acts of extortion. The jurisdiction of the Church in these matters was expressly reserved by legislation, and ecclesiastical lawyers, while lamenting the encroachments of the common law courts, continued to claim certain economic misdemeanours as their province. That, in spite of the rising tide of opposition, the references to questions of this kind in articles of visitation were not wholly an affair of common form, is suggested by the protests against the interference of the clergy in matters of business, and by the occasional cases which show that commercial transactions continued to be brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The typical usurer was apt, indeed, to outrage not one, but all, of the decencies of social intercourse. ‘Thomas Wilkoxe’, complained his fellow burgesses, ‘is excommunicated, and disquieteth the parish in the time of divine service. He is a horrible userer, taking 1d. and sometimes 2d. for a shilling by the week. He has been cursed by his own father and mother. For the space of two years he hath not received the Holy Communion, but every Sunday, when the priest is ready to go to the Communion, then he departeth the church for the receiving of his weekly usury, and doth not tarry the end of divine service thrice in the year.’50 Whether the archdeacon corrected a scandal so obviously suitable for ecclesiastical discipline, we do not know. But in 1578 a case of clerical usury is heard in the court of the archdeacon of Essex.51 Twenty-two years later, a usurer is presented with other offenders on the occasion of the visitation of some Yorkshire parishes.52 Even in 1619 two instances occur in which money-lenders are cited before the Court of the Commissary of the Bishop of London, on the charge of ‘lending upon pawnes for an excessive gain commonly reported and cried out of’. One is excommunicated and afterwards absolved; both are admonished to amend their ways.53
There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases were other than highly exceptional; nor is it from the occasional activities of the ever more discredited ecclesiastical jurisdiction that light on the practical application of the ideas of the age as to social ethics is to be sought. Ecclesiastical discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to the influence of religious opinion, and on the practice of a time when, except for the Court of High Commission, the whole system was in decay, the scanty proceedings of the courts christian throw little light. To judge the degree to which the doctrines expounded by divines were accepted or repudiated by the common sense of the laity, one must turn to the records which show how questions of business ethics were handled by individuals, by municipal bodies, and by the Government.
The opinion of the practical man on questions of economic conduct was in the sixteenth century in a condition of even more than its customary confusion. A century before, he had practised extortion and been told that it was wrong; for it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was to practise it and be told that it was right; for it was in accordance with the law of nature. In this matter, as in others of even greater moment, the two generations which followed the Reformation were unblessed by these ample certitudes. They walked in an obscurity where the glittering armour of theologians
made
A little glooming light, most like a shade.
In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had arisen, but had not yet wholly submerged those which preceded them, every shade of opinion, from that of the pious burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled with a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitudinarianism of the cosmopolitan financier, to whom the confusion of business with morals was a vulgar delusion, was represented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan England.
As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, the sentiment of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely from the doctrines expounded by divines than it did from the individualism which was beginning to carry all before it among the leaders of the world of business. Against the rising financial interests of the day were arrayed the stolid conservatism of the peasantry and the humbler bourgeoisie, whose conception of social expediency was the defence of customary relations against innovation, and who regarded the growth of this new power with something of the same jealous hostility as they opposed to the economic radicalism of the enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was an instinctive movement of self-protection. Free play for the capitalist seemed to menace the independence of the small producer, who tilled the nation’s fields and wove its cloth. The path down which the financier beguiles his victims may seem at first to be strewn with roses; but at the end of it lies – incredible nightmare – a regime of universal capitalism, in which peasant and small master will have been merged in a property-less proletariat, and ‘the riches of the city of London, and in effect of all this realm, shall be at that time in the hands of a few men having unmerciful hearts’.54
Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted arable to pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resentment, unless supported by the Government, was powerless. Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even, on occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a monopoly of the right to make loans, as a protection to the inhabitants against extreme ‘usurers and extortioners’. The commonest charity of the age, which was the establishment of a fund to make advances without interest to tradesmen, was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was to enable the young artisan or shopkeeper, the favourite victim of the money-lender, to acquire the indispensable ‘stock’, without which he could not set up in business.55
The issues which confronted the Government were naturally more complicated and its attitude was more ambiguous. The pressure of commercial interests growing in wealth and influence, its own clamorous financial necessities, the mere logic of economic development, made it out of the question for it to contemplate, even if it had been disposed to do so, the rigorous economic discipline desired by the divines. Tradition, a natural conservatism, the apprehension of public disorder caused by enclosures or by distress among the industrial population, a belief in its own mission as the guardian of ‘good order’ in trade, not unmingled with a hope that the control of economic affairs might be made to yield agreeable financial pickings, gave it a natural bias to a policy which aimed at drawing all the threads of economic life into the hands of a paternal monarchy.
In the form which the system assumed under Elizabeth, considerations of public policy, which appealed to the State, were hardly distinguishable from considerations of social morality, which appealed to the Church. As a result of the Reformation the relations previously existing between the Church and the State had been almost exactly reversed. In the Middle Ages the former had been, at least in theory, the ultimate authority on questions of public and private morality, while the latter was the police-officer which enforced its decrees. In the sixteenth century the Church became the ecclesiastical department of the State, and religion was used to lend a moral sanction to secular social policy. But the religious revolution had not destroyed the conception of a single society, of which Church and State were different aspects; and, when the canon law became ‘the King’s ecclesiastical law of England’, the jurisdiction of both inevitably tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiastical authority into itself, the Crown had its own reasons of political expediency for endeavouring to maintain traditional standards of social conduct, as an antidote for what Cecil called ‘the license grown by liberty of the Gospel’. Ecclesiastics, in their turn, were public officers – under Elizabeth the bishop was normally also a justice of the peace – and relied on secular machinery to enforce, not only religious conformity, but Christian morality, because both were elements in a society in which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been completely disentangled from each other. ‘We mean by the Commonwealth’, wrote Hooker, ‘that society with relation unto all public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion excepted; by the Church, the same society, with only reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides.’56
In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the opening years of Elizabeth were a period of conservative reconstruction. The psychology of a nation which lives predominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with that of a commercial society. In the latter, when all goes well, continuous expansion is taken for granted as the rule of life, new horizons are constantly opening, and the catchword of politics is the encouragement of enterprise. In the former, the number of niches into which each successive generation must be fitted is strictly limited; movement means disturbance, for, as one man rises, another is thrust down; and the object of statesmen is, not to foster individual initiative, but to prevent social dislocation. It was in this mood that Tudor Privy Councils approached questions of social policy and industrial organization. Except when they were diverted by financial interests, or lured into ambitious, and usually unsuccessful, projects for promoting economic development, their ideal was, not progress, but stability. Their enemies were disorder, and the restless appetites which, since they led to the encroachment of class on class, were thought to provoke it. Distrusting economic individualism for reasons of state, as heartily as did churchmen for reasons of religion, their aim was to crystallize existing class relationships by submitting them to the pressure, at once restrictive and protective, of a paternal Government, vigilant to detect all movements which menaced the established order, and alert to suppress them.
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows….
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong
(Between whose endless jar justice resides)
Should lose their names, and so should justice too,
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And, last, eat up himself.
In spite of the swift expansion of commerce in the latter part of the century, the words of Ulysses continued for long to express the official attitude.
The practical application of such conceptions was an elaborate system of what might be called, to use a modern analogy, ‘controls’. Wages, the movement of labour, the entry into a trade, dealings in grain and in wool, methods of cultivation, methods of manufacture, foreign exchange business, rates of interest – all are controlled, partly by statute, but still more by the administrative activity of the Council. In theory, nothing is too small or too great to escape the eyes of an omniscient State. Does a landowner take advantage of the ignorance of peasants and the uncertainty of the law to enclose commons or evict copyholders? The Council, while protesting that it does not intend to hinder him from asserting his rights at common law, will intervene to stop gross cases of oppression, to prevent poor men from being made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation, to settle disputes by common sense and moral pressure, to remind the aggressor that he is bound ‘rather to consider what is agreeable … to the use of this State and for the good of the comon wealthe, than to seeke the uttermost advantage that a landlord for his particular profit maie take amonge his tenaunts’.57 Have prices been raised by a bad harvest? The Council will issue a solemn denunciation of the covetousness of speculators, ‘in conditions more like to wolves or cormorants than to natural men’,58 who take advantage of the dearth to exploit public necessities; will instruct the Commissioners of Grain and Victuals to suspend exports; and will order justices to inspect barns, ration supplies, and compel farmers to sell surplus stocks at a fixed price. Does the collapse of the continental market threaten distress in the textile districts? The Council will put pressure on clothiers to find work for the operatives, ‘this being the rule by which the wool-grower, the clothier, and merchant must be governed, that whosoever had a part of the gaine in profitable times … must now, in the decay of trade … beare a part of the publicke losses, as may best conduce to the good of the publicke and the maintenance of the general trade’.59 Has the value of sterling fallen on the Antwerp market? The Council will consider pegging the exchanges, and will even attempt to nationalize foreign exchange business by prohibiting private transactions altogether.60 Are local authorities negligent in the administration of the Poor Law? The Council, which insists on regular reports as to the punishment of vagrants, the relief of the impotent, and the steps taken to provide materials on which to employ the able-bodied, inundates them with exhortations to mend their ways and with threats of severer proceedings if they fail. Are tradesmen in difficulties? The Council, which keeps sufficiently in touch with business conditions to know when the difficulties of borrowers threaten a crisis, endeavours to exercise a moderating influence, by making an example of persons guilty of flagrant extortion, or by inducing the parties to accept a compromise. A mortgagee accused of ‘hard and unchristianly dealing’ is ordered to restore the land which he has seized, or to appear before the Council. A creditor who has been similarly ‘hard and unconscionable’ is committed to the Fleet. The justices of Norfolk are instructed to put pressure on a money-lender who has taken ‘very unjust and immoderate advantage by way of usury’. The bishop of Exeter is urged to induce a usurer in his diocese to show ‘a more Christian and charitable consideration of these his neighbours’. A nobleman has released two offenders imprisoned by the High Commission for the Province of York for having ‘taken usury contrary to the laws of God and of the realm’, and is ordered at once to recommit them. No Government can face with equanimity a state of things in which large numbers of respectable tradesmen may be plunged into bankruptcy. In times of unusual depression the Council’s intervention to prevent creditors from pressing their claims to the hilt was so frequent as to create the impression of something like an informal moratorium.61
The Governments of the Tudors, and, still more, of the first two Stuarts, were masters of the art of disguising commonplace, and sometimes sordid, motives beneath a glittering façade of imposing principles. In spite of its lofty declarations of a disinterested solicitude for the public welfare, the social policy of the monarchy not only was as slipshod in execution as it was grandiose in design, but was not seldom perverted into measures disastrous to its ostensible ends, both by the sinister pressure of sectional interests, and by the insistent necessities of an empty exchequer. Its fundamental conception, however – the philosophy of the thinkers and of the few statesmen who rose above immediate exigencies to consider the significance of the system in its totality – had a natural affinity with the doctrines which commended themselves to men of religion. It was of an ordered and graded society, in which each class performed its allotted function, and was secured such a livelihood, and no more than such a livelihood, as was proportioned to its status. ‘God and the Kinge’, wrote one who had laboured much, amid grave personal dangers, for the welfare of his fellows, ‘hathe not sent us the poore lyvinge we have, but to doe services therefore amonge our neighbours abroade.’62 The divines who fulminated against the uncharitable covetousness of the extortionate middleman, the grasping money-lender, or the tyrannous landlord, saw in the measures by which the Government endeavoured to suppress the greed of individuals or the collision of classes a much-needed cement of social solidarity, and appealed to Caesar to redouble his penalties upon an economic licence which was hateful to God. The statesmen concerned to prevent agitation saw in religion the preservative of order, and the antidote for the cupidity or ambition which threatened to destroy it, and reinforced the threat of temporal penalties with arguments that would not have been out of place in the pulpit. To both alike religion is concerned with something more than personal salvation. It is the sanction of social duties and the spiritual manifestation of the corporate life of a complex, yet united, society. To both the State is something more than an institution created by material necessities or political convenience. It is the temporal expression of spiritual obligations. It is a link between the individual soul and that supernatural society of which all Christian men are held to be members. It rests not merely on practical convenience, but on the will of God.
Of that philosophy, the classical expression, at once the most catholic, the most reasonable, and the most sublime, is the work of Hooker. What it meant to one cast in a narrower mould, pedantic, irritable, and intolerant, yet not without the streak of harsh nobility which belongs to all who love an idea, however unwisely, more than their own ease, is revealed in the sermons and the activity of Laud. Laud’s intellectual limitations and practical blunders need no emphasis. If his vices made him intolerable to the most powerful forces of his own age, his virtues were not of a kind to commend him to those of its successor, and history has been hardly more merciful to him than were his political opponents. But an intense conviction of the fundamental solidarity of all the manifold elements in a great community, a grand sense of the dignity of public duties, a passionate hatred for the self-seeking pettiness of personal cupidities and sectional interests – these qualities are not among the weaknesses against which the human nature of ordinary men requires to be most upon its guard, and these qualities Laud possessed, not only in abundance, but to excess. His worship of unity was an idolatry, his detestation of faction a superstition. Church and State are one Jerusalem. ‘Both Commonwealth and Church are collective bodies, made up of many into one; and both so near allied that the one, the Church, can never subsist but in the other, the Commonwealth; nay, so near, that the same men, which in a temporal respect make the Commonwealth, do in a spiritual make the Church.’63 Private and public interests are inextricably interwoven. The sanction of unity is religion. The foundation of unity is justice: ‘God will not bless the State, if kings and magistrates do not execute judgement, if the widow and the fatherless have cause to cry out against the “thrones of justice”.’64
To a temper so permeated with the conception that society is an organism compact of diverse parts, and that the grand end of government is to maintain their cooperation, every social movement or personal motive which sets group against group, or individual against individual, appears, not the irrepressible energy of life, but the mutterings of chaos. The first demon to be exorcised is party, for Governments must ‘entertain no private business’, and ‘parties are ever private ends’.65 The second is the self-interest which leads the individual to struggle for riches and advancement. ‘There is no private end, but in something or other it will be led to run cross the public; and, if gain come in, though it be by “making shrines for Diana”, it is no matter with them though Ephesus be in an uproar for it.’66 For Laud, the political virtues, by which he understands subordination, obedience, a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the good of the community, are as much part of the Christian’s religion as are the duties of private life; and, unlike some of those who sigh for social unity today, he is as ready to chastise the rich and powerful, who thwart the attainment of that ideal, as he is to preach it to the humble. To talk of holiness and to practise injustice is mere hypocrisy. Man is born a member of a society and is dedicated by religion to the service of his fellows. To repudiate the obligation is to be guilty of a kind of political atheism.
‘If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth, and in the body of the Church.’67 To one holding such a creed economic individualism was hardly less abhorrent than religious nonconformity, and its repression was a not less obvious duty; for both seemed incompatible with the stability of a society in which Commonwealth and Church were one. It is natural, therefore, that Laud’s utterances and activities in the matter of social policy should have shown a strong bias in favour of the control of economic relations by an authoritarian State, which reached its climax in the eleven years of personal government. It was a moment when, partly in continuance of the traditional policy of protecting peasants and maintaining the supply of grain, partly for less reputable reasons of finance, the Government was more than usually active in harrying the depopulating landlord. The Council gave sympathetic consideration to petitions from peasants begging for protection or redress, and in 1630 directions were issued to the justices of five midland counties to remove all enclosures made in the last five years, on the ground that they resulted in depopulation and were particularly harmful in times of dearth. In 1632, 1635, and 1636 three Commissions were appointed and special instructions against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize. In parts of the country, at any rate, land which had been laid down to grass was ploughed up in obedience to the Government’s orders. In the four years from 1635 to 1638 a list of some 600 offenders was returned to the Council, and about £50,000 was imposed upon them in fines.68 With this policy Laud was whole-heartedly in sympathy. A letter in his private correspondence, in which he expresses his detestation of enclosure, reveals the temper which evoked Clarendon’s gentle complaint that the archbishop made himself unpopular by his inclination ‘a little too much to countenance the Commission for Depopulation’.69 Laud was himself an active member of the Commission, and dismissed with impatient contempt the squirearchy’s appeal to the common law. In the day of his ruin he was reminded by his enemies of the needlessly sharp censures with which he barbed the fine imposed upon an enclosing landlord.70
The prevention of enclosure and depopulation was merely one element in a general policy, by which a benevolent Government, unhampered by what Laud had called ‘that noise’ of parliamentary debate, was to endeavour by even-handed pressure to enforce social obligations on great and small, and to prevent the public interest being sacrificed to an unconscionable appetite for private gain. The preoccupation of the Council with the problem of securing adequate food supplies and reasonable prices, with poor relief, and, to a lesser degree, with questions of wages, has been described by Miss Leonard, and its attempts to protect craftsmen against exploitation at the hands of merchants by Professor Unwin.71 In 1630–1 it issued in an amended form the Elizabethan Book of Orders, instructing justices as to their duty to see that markets were served and prices controlled, appointed a special committee of the Privy Council as Commissioners of the Poor and later a separate Commission, and issued a Book of Orders for the better administration of the Poor Law. In 1629, 1631, and again in 1637, it took steps to secure that the wages of textile workers in East Anglia were raised, and punished with imprisonment in the Fleet an employer notorious for paying in truck. As President of the Council of the North, Wentworth protected the commoners whose vested interests were threatened by the drainage of Hatfield Chase, and endeavoured to insist on the stricter administration of the code regulating the woollen industry.72
Such action, even if inspired largely by the obvious interest of the Government, which had enemies enough on its hands already, in preventing popular discontent, was of a kind to appeal to one with Laud’s indifference to the opinion of the wealthier classes, and with Laud’s belief in the divine mission of the House of David to teach an obedient people ‘to lay down the private for the public sake’. It is not surprising, therefore, when the Star Chamber fines an engrosser of corn, to find him improving the occasion with the remark that the defendant has been ‘guilty of a most foule offence, which the Prophet hath (called) in a very energeticall phrase grynding the faces of the poore’, and that the dearth has been caused, not by God, but by ‘cruell men’;73 or taking part in the proceedings of the Privy Council at a time when it is pressing justices, apparently not without success, to compel the East Anglian clothiers to raise the wages of spinners and weavers; or serving on the Lincolnshire sub-committee of the Commission on the Relief of the Poor, which was appointed in January 1631.74
‘A bishop’, observed Laud, in answer to the attack of Lord Saye and Sele, ‘may preach the Gospel more publicly and to far greater edification in a court of judicature, or at a Council-table, where great men are met together to draw things to an issue, than many preachers in their several charges can.’75 The Church, which had abandoned the pretension itself to control society, found some compensation in the reflection that its doctrines were not wholly without influence in impressing the principles which were applied by the State. The history of the rise of individual liberty – to use a question-begging phrase – in economic affairs follows somewhat the same course as does its growth in the more important sphere of religion, and is not unconnected with it. The conception of religion as a thing private and individual does not emerge until after a century in which religious freedom normally means the freedom of the State to prescribe religion, not the freedom of the individual to worship God as he pleases. The assertion of economic liberty as a natural right comes at the close of a period in which, while a religious phraseology was retained and a religious interpretation of social institutions was often sincerely held, the supernatural sanction had been increasingly merged in doctrines based on reasons of state and public expediency. ‘Jerusalem … stands not for the City and the State only … not for the Temple and the Church only, but jointly for both.’76 In identifying the maintenance of public morality with the spasmodic activities of an incompetent Government, the Church had built its house upon the sand. It did not require prophetic gifts to foresee that the fall of the City would be followed by the destruction of the Temple.
Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics continued to be made by one school of churchmen down to the meeting of the Long Parliament, it was increasingly the voice of the past appealing to an alien generation. The expression of a theory of society which had made religion supreme over all secular affairs, it had outlived the synthesis in which it had been an element, and survived, an archaic fragment, into an age to whose increasing individualism the idea of corporate morality was as objectionable as that of ecclesiastical discipline by bishops and archdeacons was becoming to its religion. The collision between the prevalent practice and what still purported to be the teaching of the Church is almost the commonest theme of the economic literature of the period from 1550 to 1640; of much of it, indeed, it is the occasion. Whatever the Church might say, men had asked interest for loans, and charged what prices the market would stand, at the very zenith of the Age of Faith. But then, except in the great commercial centres and in the high finance of the Papacy and of secular Governments, their transactions had been petty and individual, an occasional shift to meet an emergency or seize an opportunity. The new thing in the England of the sixteenth century was that devices that had formerly been occasional were now woven into the very texture of the industrial and commercial civilization which was developing in the later years of Elizabeth, and whose subsequent enormous expansion was to give English society its characteristic quality and tone. Fifty years later, Harrington, in a famous passage, described how the ruin of the feudal nobility by the Tudors, by democratizing the ownership of land, had prepared the way for the bourgeois republic.77 His hint of the economic changes which preceded the Civil War might be given a wider application. The age of Elizabeth saw a steady growth of capitalism in textiles and mining, a great increase of foreign trade and an outburst of joint-stock enterprise in connexion with it, the beginnings of something like deposit banking in the hands of the scriveners, and the growth, aided by the fall of Antwerp and the Government’s own financial necessities, of a money-market with an almost modern technique – speculation, futures, and arbitrage transactions – in London. The future lay with the classes who sprang to wealth and influence with the expansion of commerce in the later years of the century, and whose religious and political aspirations were, two generations later, to overthrow the monarchy.
An organized money-market has many advantages. But it is not a school of social ethics or of political responsibility. Finance, being essentially impersonal, a matter of opportunities, security, and risks, acted among other causes as a solvent of the sentiment, fostered both by the teaching of the Church and the decencies of social intercourse among neighbours, which regarded keen bargaining as ‘sharp practice’. In the half-century which followed the Reformation, thanks to the collapse of sterling on the international market, as a result of a depreciated currency, war, and a foreign debt contracted on ruinous terms, the state of the foreign exchanges was the obsession of publicists and politicians. Problems of currency and credit lend themselves more readily than most economic questions to discussion in terms of mechanical causation. It was in the long debate provoked by the rise in prices and the condition of the exchanges that the psychological assumptions, which were afterwards to be treated by economists as of self-evident and universal validity, were first hammered out.
‘We see’, wrote Malynes, ‘how one thing driveth or enforceth another, like as in a clock where there are many wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the next and that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instrument that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a strait, where the foremost is driven by him that is next to him, and the next by him that followeth him.’78 The spirit of modern business could hardly be more aptly described. Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a soulless individualism, but, needless to say, their denunciations were as futile as they were justified. It might be possible to put fear into the heart of the village dealer who bought cheap and sold dear, or of the pawnbroker who took a hundred quarters of wheat when he had lent ninety, with the warning that ‘the devices of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God’. To a great clothier, or to a capitalist like Pallavicino, Spinola, or Thomas Gresham, who managed the Government business in Antwerp, such sentiments were foolishness, and usurious interest appeared, not bad morals, but bad business. Moving, as they did, in a world where loans were made, not to meet the temporary difficulty of an unfortunate neighbour, but as a profitable investment on the part of not too scrupulous business men, who looked after themselves and expected others to do the same, they had scanty sympathy with doctrines which reflected the spirit of mutual aid not unnatural in the small circle of neighbours who formed the ordinary village or borough in rural England.
It was a natural result of their experience that, without the formal enunciation of any theory of economic individualism, they should throw their weight against the traditional restrictions, resent the attempts made by preachers and popular movements to apply doctrines of charity and ‘good conscience’ to the impersonal mechanism of large-scale transactions, and seek to bring public policy more into accordance with their economic practice. The obstruction to the Statutes against depopulation offered by the self-interest of the gentry was being supported in the latter years of Elizabeth by free-trade arguments in the House of Commons, and the last Act, which was passed in 1597, expressly allowed land to be laid down to pasture for the purpose of giving it a rest.79 From at any rate the middle of the century, the fixing of prices by municipal authorities and by the Government was regarded with scepticism by the more advanced economic theorists, and towards the end of the century it produced complaints that, since it weakened the farmer’s incentive to grow corn, its results were the precise opposite of those intended.80 As markets widened, the control of the middleman who dealt in wool and grain, though strictly enforced in theory, showed unmistakable signs of breaking down in practice. Gresham attacked the prohibition of usury, and normally stipulated that financiers who subscribed on his inducement to public loans should be indemnified against legal proceedings.81 Nor could he well have done otherwise, for the sentiment of the City was that of the merchant in Wilson’s Dialogue: ‘What man is so madde to deliver his moneye out of his owne possession for naughte? or whoe is he that will not make of his owne the best he can?’82 With such a wind of doctrine in their sails men were not far from the days of complete freedom of contract.
Most significant of all, economic interests were already appealing to the political theory which, when finally systematized by Locke, was to prove that the State which interferes with property and business destroys its own title to exist. ‘All free subjects’, declared a Committee of the House of Commons in 1604, ‘are born inheritable, as to their land, so also to the free exercise of their industry, in those trades whereto they apply themselves and whereby they are to live. Merchandise being the chief and richest of all other, and of greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against the natural right and liberty of the subjects of England to restrain it into the hands of some few.’83 The process by which natural justice, imperfectly embodied in positive law, was replaced as the source of authority by positive law which might or might not be the expression of natural justice, had its analogy in the rejection by social theory of the whole conception of an objective standard of economic equity. The law of nature had been invoked by medieval writers as a moral restraint upon economic self-interest. By the seventeenth century a significant revolution had taken place. ‘Nature’ had come to connote, not divine ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free play.
The effect of these practical exigencies and intellectual changes was seen in a reversal of policy on the part of the State. In 1571 the Act of 1552, which had prohibited all interest as ‘a vyce moste odyous and detestable, as in dyvers places of the hollie Scripture it is evydent to be seen’, had been repealed, after a debate in the House which revealed the revolt of the plain man against the theorists who had triumphed twenty years before, and his determination that the law should not impose on business a utopian morality.84 The exaction of interest ceased to be a criminal offence, provided that the rate did not exceed ten per cent, though it still remained open to a debtor, in the improbable event of his thinking it expedient to jeopardize his chance of future advances, to take civil proceedings to recover any payment made in excess of the principal. This qualified condonation of usury on the part of the State naturally reacted upon religious opinion. The Crown was supreme ruler of the Church of Christ, and it was not easy for a loyal Church to be more fastidious than its head. Moderate interest, if without legal protection, was at any rate not unlawful, and it is difficult to damn with conviction vices of which the degrees have been adjusted on a sliding scale by an Act of Parliament. Objective economic science was beginning its disillusioning career, in the form of discussions on the rise in prices, the mechanism of the money-market, and the balance of trade, by publicists concerned, not to point a moral, but to analyse forces so productive of profit to those interested in their operation. Since Calvin’s indulgence to interest, critics of the traditional doctrine could argue that religion itself spoke with an uncertain voice.
Such developments inevitably affected the tone in which the discussion of economic ethics was carried on by the divines, and even before the end of the sixteenth century, though they did not dream of abandoning the denunciation of unconscionable bargains, they were surrounding it with qualifications. The Decades of Bullinger, of which three English translations were made in the ten years following his death, and which Convocation in 1586 required to be obtained and studied by all the inferior clergy, indicated a via media. As uncompromising as any medieval writer in his hatred of the sin of covetousness, he denounces with all the old fervour oppressive contracts which grind the poor. But he is less intolerant of economic motives than most of his predecessors, and concedes, with Calvin, that, before interest is condemned as usury, it is necessary to consider both the terms of the loan and the position of borrower and lender.
The stricter school of religious opinion continued to cling to the traditional theory down to the Civil War. Conservative divines took advantage of the section in the Act of 1571 declaring that ‘all usurie being forbydden by the lawe of God is synne and detestable’, to argue that the Statute had in reality altered nothing, and that the State left it to the Church to prevent bargains which, for reasons of practical expediency, it did not think fit to prohibit, but which it did not encourage and declined to enforce. It is in obedience to such doctrines that a scrupulous parson refuses a cure, until he is assured that the money which will be paid to him comes from the rent of land, not from interest on capital.85 But, even so, there are difficulties. The parson of Kingham bequeaths a cow to the poor of Burford, which is ‘set to hire for a year or two for four shillings a year’, the money being used for their assistance. But the arrangement has its inconveniences. Cows are mortal, and this communal cow is ‘very like to have perished through casualty and ill-keeping’.86 Will not the poor be surer of their money if the cow is disposed of for cash down? So it is sold to the man who previously hired it, and the interest spent on the poor instead. Is this usury? Is it usury to invest money in business in order to provide an income for those, like widows and orphans, who cannot trade with it themselves? If it is lawful to buy a rent-charge or to share in trading profits, what is the particular criminality of charging a price for a loan? Why should a creditor, who may himself be poor, make a loan gratis, in order to put money into the pocket of a wealthy capitalist, who uses the advance to corner the wool crop or to speculate on the exchanges?
To such questions liberal theologians answered that the crucial point was not the letter of the law which forbade the breeding of barren metal, but the observance of Christian charity in economic, as in other, transactions. Their opponents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the Church, argued that usury differed, not merely in degree, but in kind, from payments which, like rent and profits, were morally unobjectionable provided that they were not extortionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be interpreted as ‘whatever is taken for a loan above the principal’. The literature of the subject was voluminous. But it was obsolete almost before it was produced. For, whether theologians and moralists condemned all interest, or only some interest, as contrary to Christian ethics, the assumption implied in their very disagreement had been that economic relations belonged to a province of which, in the last resort, the Church was master. That economic transactions were one department of ethical conduct, and to be judged, like other parts of it, by spiritual criteria; that, whatever concessions the State might see fit to make to human frailty, a certain standard of economic morality was involved in membership of the Christian Church; that it was the function of ecclesiastical authorities, whoever they might be, to take the action needed to bring home to men their social obligations – such doctrines were still common ground to all sections of religious thought. It was precisely this whole conception of a social theory based ultimately on religion which was being discredited. While rival authorities were discussing the correct interpretation of economic ethics, the flank of both was turned by the growth of a powerful body of lay opinion, which argued that economics were one thing and ethics another.
Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the issue in which the whole controversy over ‘good conscience’ in bargaining came to a head, and such questions were only one illustration of the immense problems with which the rise of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the Fathers, and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished with citations from Scripture and from the canonists, were written to answer them. Many of them are learned; some are almost readable. But it may be doubted whether, even in their own day, they satisfied any one but their authors. The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions of a very different environment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth century.
The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality. The problem which it presents in the relations between States is a commonplace. But, since its essence is the difficulty of applying the same moral standard to decisions which affect large masses of men as to those in which only individuals are involved, it emerges in a hardly less acute form in the sphere of economic life, as soon as its connexions ramify widely, and the unit is no longer the solitary producer, but a group. To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another for private life, is to open a door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. To argue that there is no difference at all, is to lay down a principle which few men who have faced the difficulty in practice will be prepared to endorse as of invariable application, and incidentally to expose the idea of morality itself to discredit by subjecting it to an almost intolerable strain. The practical result of sentimentality is too often a violent reaction towards the baser kinds of Realpolitik.
With the expansion of finance and international trade in the sixteenth century, it was this problem which faced the Church. Granted that I should love my neighbour as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my neighbour? and, How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice? To these questions the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even realized that they could be put. It had tried to moralize economic relations, by treating every transaction as a case of personal conduct, involving personal responsibility. In an age of impersonal finance, world-markets, and a capitalist organization of industry, its traditional social doctrines had no specific to offer, and were merely repeated, when, in order to be effective, they should have been thought out again from the beginning and formulated in new and living terms. It had endeavoured to protect the peasant and the craftsman against the oppression of the money-lender and the monopolist. Faced with the problems of a wage-earning proletariat, it could do no more than repeat, with meaningless iteration, its traditional lore as to the duties of master to servant and servant to master. It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to it to point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism which was beginning to develop in the seventeenth century, the brethren of the English merchant were the Africans whom he kidnapped for slavery in America, or the American Indians whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen from whom he bought muslins and silks at starvation prices. Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles, by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of economic life no moral principles exist. But, for the problems involved in the association of men for economic purposes on the grand scale which was to be increasingly the rule in the future, the social doctrines advanced from the pulpit offered, in their traditional form, little guidance. Their practical ineffectiveness prepared the way for their theoretical abandonment.
They were abandoned because, on the whole, they deserved to be abandoned. The social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to think. Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in economic thought – these qualities were to be the note of the seventeenth century, when once the confusion of the Civil War had died down. When mankind is faced with the choice between exhilarating activities and piety imprisoned in a shrivelled mass of desiccated formulae, it will choose the former, though the energy be brutal and the intelligence narrow. In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting with clamorous interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above all, in the germs of economic speculation, from which was to grow the new science of Political Arithmetic, the social theory of the Church of England turned its face from the practical world, to pore over doctrines which, had their original authors been as impervious to realities as their later exponents, would never have been formulated. Naturally it was shouldered aside. It was neglected, because it had become negligible.
This defect was fundamental. It made itself felt in countries where there was no Reformation, no Puritan movement, no common law jealous of its rights and eager to prune ecclesiastical pretensions. But in England there were all three; and, from the beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical authorities who attempted to enforce traditional morality had to reckon with a temper which denied their right to exercise any jurisdiction at all, above all, any jurisdiction interfering with economic matters. It was not merely that there was the familiar objection of the plain man, that parsons know nothing of business – that ‘it is not in simple divines to show what contract is lawful and what is not’.87 More important, there was the opposition of the common lawyers to part, at least, of the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. Bancroft in 1605 complained to the Privy Council that the judges were endeavouring to confine the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to testamentary and matrimonial cases, and alleged that, of more than five hundred prohibitions issued to stop proceedings in the Court of Arches since the accession of Elizabeth, not more than one in twenty could be sustained.88 ‘As things are,’ wrote two years later the author of a treatise on the civil and ecclesiastical law, ‘neither jurisdiction knowes their owne bounds, but one snatcheth from the other, in maner as in a batable ground lying betweene two kingdomes.’89 The jurisdiction of the Court of High Commission suffered in the same way. In the last resort appeals from the ecclesiastical courts went either to it or to the Court of Delegates. From the latter part of the sixteenth century down to the removal of Coke from the Bench in 1616, the judges were from time to time staying proceedings before the Court of High Commission by prohibitions, or discharging offenders imprisoned by it. In 1577, for example, they released on a writ of Habeas Corpus a prisoner committed by the High Commission on a charge of usury.90
Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a theory of the Church, which denied the very principle of a discipline exercised by bishops and archdeacons. The acquiescence of the laity in the moral jurisdiction of the clergy had been accorded with less and less readiness for two centuries before the Reformation. With the growth under Elizabeth of a vigorous Puritan movement, which had its stronghold among the trading and commercial classes, that jurisdiction became to a considerable proportion of the population little less than abhorrent. Their dislike of it was based, of course, on weightier grounds than its occasional interference in matters of business. But their attitude had as an inevitable result that, with the disparagement of the whole principle of the traditional ecclesiastical discipline, that particular use of it was also discredited. It was not that Puritanism implied a greater laxity in social relations. On the contrary, in its earlier phases it stood, at least in theory, for a stricter discipline of the life of the individual, alike in his business and in his pleasures. But it repudiated as anti-Christian the organs through which such discipline had in fact been exercised. When the Usury Bill of 1571 was being discussed in the House of Commons, reference to the canon law was met by the protest that the rules of the canon law on the matter were abolished, and that ‘they should be no more remembered than they are followed’.91 Feeling against the system rose steadily during the next two generations; excommunications, when courts ventured to resort to them, were freely disregarded;92 and by the thirties of the seventeenth century, under the influence of Laud’s regime, the murmur was threatening to become a hurricane. Then came the Long Parliament, the fierce denunciations in both Houses of the interference of the clergy in civil affairs, and the legislation abolishing the Court of High Commission, depriving the ordinary ecclesiastical courts of penal jurisdiction, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, sweeping them away altogether.
‘Not many good days’, wrote Penn, ‘since ministers meddled so much in laymen’s business.’93 That sentiment was a dogma on which, after the Restoration, both Cavalier and Roundhead could agree. It inevitably reacted, not only upon the practical powers of the clergy, which in any case had long been feeble, but on the whole conception of religion which regarded it as involving the control of economic self-interest by what Laud had called ‘the body of the Church’. The works of Sanderson and of Jeremy Taylor, continuing an earlier tradition, reasserted with force and eloquence the view that the Christian is bound by his faith to a rule of life which finds expression in equity in bargaining and in works of mercy to his neighbours.94 But the conception that the Church possessed, of its own authority, an independent standard of social values, which it could apply as a criterion to the practical affairs of the economic world, grew steadily weaker. The result, neither immediate nor intended, but inevitable, was the tacit denial of spiritual significance in the transactions of business and in the relations of organized society. Repudiating the right of religion to advance any social theory distinctively its own, that attitude became itself the most tyrannical and paralysing of theories. It may be called Indifferentism.
The change had begun before the Civil War. It was completed with the Restoration, and, still more, with the Revolution. In the eighteenth century it is almost superfluous to examine the teaching of the Church of England as to social ethics. For it brings no distinctive contribution, and, except by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as an independent moral authority, whose standards may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been abandoned.
An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own inevitably accepts that which happens to be fashionable. What set the tone of social thought in the eighteenth century was partly the new Political Arithmetic, which had come to maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was to be expected in the first great age of English natural science – the age of Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal Society – drew its inspiration, not from religion or morals, but from mathematics and physics. It was still more the political theory associated with the name of Locke, but popularized and debased by a hundred imitators. Society is not a community of classes with varying functions, united to each other by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a common end. It is a joint-stock company rather than an organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders are strictly limited. They enter it in order to insure the rights already vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. The State, a matter of convenience, not of supernatural sanctions, exists for the protection of those rights, and fulfils its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full scope for their unfettered exercise.
The most important of such rights are property rights, and property rights attach mainly, though not, of course, exclusively, to the higher orders of men, who hold the tangible, material ‘stock’ of society. Those who do not subscribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in the profits, though they have a moral claim on the charity of their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which treats almost all below the nobility, gentry, and freeholders as ‘the poor’ – and the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds, ‘the industrious poor’, who work for their betters, and ‘the idle poor’, who work for themselves. Hence the unending discussions as to whether ‘the labouring poor’ are to be classed among the ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’ classes – whether they are, or are not, really worth their keep. Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that any substantial amelioration of their lot could be effected by any kind of public policy. ‘It would be easier, where property was well secured, to live without money than without poor, … who, as they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving’; the poor ‘have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure’; ‘to make society happy, it is necessary that great numbers should be wretched as well as poor’.95 Such sentences from a work printed in 1714 are not typical. But they are straws which show how the wind is blowing.
In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low and equable, and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was an intellectual solecism and an error in taste. Religious thought was not immune from the same influence. It was not merely that the Church, which, as much as the State, was the heir of the Revolution settlement, reproduced the temper of an aristocratic society, as it reproduced its class organization and economic inequalities, and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of Englishmen. Not less significant was the fact that, apart from certain groups and certain questions, it accepted the prevalent social philosophy and adapted its teaching to it. The age in which political theory was cast in the mould of religion had yielded to one in which religious thought was no longer an imperious master, but a docile pupil. Conspicuous exceptions like Law, who reasserted with matchless power the idea that Christianity implies a distinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley’s sermon on The Use of Money, merely heighten the impression of a general acquiescence in the conventional ethics. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the natural counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated teleology, and which substituted the analogy of a self-regulating mechanism, moved by the weights and pulleys of economic motives, for the theory which had regarded society as an organism composed of different classes united by their common subordination to a spiritual purpose.
Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic harmony of apparently conflicting interests, left small scope for moral casuistry. The materials for the reformer were, indeed, abundant enough. The phenomena of early commercial capitalism – consider only the orgy of financial immorality which culminated in 1720 – were of a kind which might have been expected to shock even the not over-sensitive conscience of the eighteenth century. Two centuries before, the Fuggers had been denounced by preachers and theologians; and, compared with the men who engineered the South Sea Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In reality, religious opinion was quite unmoved by the spectacle. The traditional scheme of social ethics had been worked out in a simpler age; in the commercial England of banking, and shipping, and joint-stock enterprise, it seemed, and was called, a Gothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was quietly dropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from episcopal charges. In the popular manual called The Whole Duty of Man,96 first published in 1658, and widely read during the following century, extortion and oppression still figure as sins, but the attempt to define what they are is frankly abandoned. If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, ‘trade is one thing and religion is another’, they imply a not very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan. ‘National commerce, good morals, and good government’, wrote Dean Tucker, of whom Warburton unkindly said that religion was his trade, and trade his religion, ‘are but part of one general scheme in the designs of Providence.’
Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the Church to insist on commercial morality, since sound morality coincided with commercial wisdom. The existing order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope:
Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.
Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical examination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of conduct. It was, therefore, in the sphere of providing succour for the non-combatants and for the wounded, not in inspiring the main army, that the social work of the Church was conceived to lie. Its characteristic expressions in the eighteenth century were the relief of the poor, the care of the sick, and the establishment of schools. In spite of the genuine, if somewhat unctuous, solicitude for the spiritual welfare of the poorer classes, which inspired the evangelical revival, it abandoned the fundamental brain-work of criticism and construction to the rationalist and the humanitarian.
Surprise has sometimes been expressed that the Church should not have been more effective in giving inspiration and guidance during the immense economic reorganization to which tradition has assigned the not very felicitous name of the ‘Industrial Revolution’. It did not give it, because it did not possess it. There were, no doubt, special conditions to account for its silence – mere ignorance and inefficiency, the supposed teachings of political economy, and, after 1790, the terror of all humanitarian movements inspired by France. But the explanation of its attitude is to be sought, less in the peculiar circumstances of the moment, than in the prevalence of a temper which accepted the established order of class relations as needing no vindication before any higher tribunal, and which made religion, not its critic or its accuser, but its anodyne, its apologist, and its drudge. It was not that there was any relapse into abnormal inhumanity. It was that the very idea that the Church possessed an independent standard of values, to which social institutions were amenable, had been abandoned. The surrender had been made long before the battle began. The spiritual blindness which made possible the general acquiescence in the horrors of the early factory system was, not a novelty, but the habit of a century.