Customs in Common

The Patricians and the PlebsThe Patricians and the Plebs

“The miserable Circumstance of this Country is now such, that, in short, if it goes on, the Poor will be Rulers over the Rich, and the Servants be Governours of their Masters, the Plebeij have almost mobb’d the Patricij. . . in a Word, Order is inverted, Subordination ceases, and the World seems to stand with the Bottoim upward.”

Daniel Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination considered or, The Insolence and Insuffrable Behaviour of SERVANTS in England duly enquired into (1724).

The relationship which I wish to examine in this chapter is that between “the gentry” and “the labouring poor”. Both terms are vague. But we have some notion as to what both stand for. In the first six decades of the eighteenth century one tends to associate the gentry with the land. Land remained the index of influence, the plinth on which power was erected. If one adds to direct landed wealth and status, that part of industry which either directly served the agricultural interest (transport, saddlery, wheelwrights, etc.) or which processed agricultural products (brewing, tanning, milling, the great woollen industry, etc.) one can see where the scales of wealth were tipped. So that, despite the immense growth of London and the growth of Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Birmingham, Norwich, Leeds etc., England retained until the 1760s an agrarian profile, and many who earned their wealth in urban, commercial occupations still sought to translate their wealth into gentry status by translating it into land. William Hutton, the Birmingham paper merchant, describes in his memoirs his first purchase of lands (1766): “ever since I was 8 years old, I had shewn a fondness for land. . . and wished to call some my own. This ardent desire after dirt never forsook me.”¹¹

Yet both “gentlemen” and “the poor” are “gentry-made terms”²² and both carry a normative freight which can be taken on board uncritically by historians. We are told (for example) that “honour, dignity, integrity, considerateness, courtesy and chivalry were all virtues essential to the character of a gentleman, and they all derived in part from the nature of country life”.³³ This suggests a somewhat distanced view of “country life”, from which — just as from much eighteenth-century painting of the countryside⁴⁴ — the labourers have been subtracted. As for “the poor” this wholly indiscriminate term carries the suggestion that the bulk of the working population were deserving of gentry condescension, and perhaps of charity (and were somehow supported by the gentry instead of the direct opposite); and the term puts together paupers and fiercely-independent yeomen, small peasants, farm servants, rural artisans, and so on, in the same gentry-made category.

Vague as the two terms are, yet this chapter will turn upon these two poles and their relation to each other. I shall pass over a great deal of what lies in between: commerce, manufacture, London’s luxury trades, overseas empire. And my emphases will not be those which are popular with most established historians. There is perhaps a reason for this. No-one is more susceptible to the charms of the gentry’s life than the historian of the eighteenth century. His major sources are in the archives of the gentry or aristocracy. Perhaps he may even find some of his sources still in the muniments room at an ancient landed seat. The historian can easily identify with his sources: he sees himself riding to hounds, or attending Quarter Sessions, or (if he is less ambitious) he sees himself as at least seated at Parson Woodforde’s groaning table. The “labouring poor” did not leave their workhouses stashed with documents for historians to work over nor do they invite identification with their back-breaking toil. Nevertheless for the majority of the population the view of life was not that of the gentry. I might phrase it more strongly, but we should attend to the quiet words of M. K. Ashby: “The great house seems to me to have kept its best things to itself, giving, with rare exceptions, neither grace nor leadership to villages, but indeed depressing their manhood and culture.”¹¹

When I and some colleagues offered, a few years ago, a somewhat sceptical view of the virtues of the Whig great gentry and of their lawyers some part of the historical profession was scandalised.²² Our threat was beaten off, and a view of eighteenth-century England has been reconstituted which passes over, with a few words, the society’s deep contradictions. We are told that it was a thriving “consumer society” (whatever that means) populated by “a polite and commercial people”.³³ We are not reminded sharply that this was the century in which the commoners finally lost their land, in which the number of offences carrying the capital penalty multiplied, in which thousands of felons were transported, and in which thousands of lives were lost in imperial wars; a century which ended, despite the agricultural “revolution” and the swelling rent-rolls, in severe rural immiseration. Meanwhile the historical profession maintains a bland view of things: historical conferences on eighteenth-century questions tend to be places where the bland lead the bland. We will attempt a less reassuring reconstruction.

It has been a common complaint that the terms “feudal”, “capitalist”, or “bourgeois” are too imprecise, and cover phenomena too vast and disparate, to be of serious analytic service. We now, however, find constantly in service a new set of terms such as “pre-industrial”, “traditional”, “paternalism” and “modernization”, which appear to be open to very much the same objections; and whose theoretical paternity is less certain.

It may be of interest that whereas the first set of terms direct attention to conflict or tension within the social process, the second set appear to nudge one towards a view of society in terms of a self-regulating sociological order. They offer themselves, with a specious scientism, as if they were value-free. They also have an eerie timelessness. My own particular dislike is “pre-industrial”, a tent within whose spacious folds there sit beside each other West of England clothiers, Persian silversmiths, Guatemalan shepherds, and Corsican bandits.¹¹

However, let us leave them happily in their bazaar, exchanging their surprising cultural products, and look more closely at “paternalism”. In some writers the “patriarchal” and the “paternal” appear as interchangeable terms, the one carrying a sterner, the other a somewhat softened implication. The two may indeed run into each other in fact as well as in theory. In Weber’s description of “traditional” societies the locus for analysis is posited in the familial relations of the tribal unit or household, and from these are extrapolated relations of domination and dependency which come to characterise a “patriarchal” society as a whole — forms which he relates specifically to ancient and feudal forms of social order. Laslett, who has reminded us urgently as to the social centrality of the economic “household” in the seventeenth century, suggests that this contributed to the reproduction of paternal or of patriarchal attitudes and relations which permeated the whole of society — and which perhaps continued to do so until the moment of “industrialization”.²² Marx, it is true, had tended to see patriarchal attitudes as characteristic of the guild system of the Middle Ages, when:

The journeymen and apprentices were organised in each craft as it best suited the interest of the masters. The filial relationship in which they stood to their masters gave the latter a double power — on the one hand because of their influence on the whole life of the journeymen, and on the other because, for the journeymen who worked with the same master, it was a real bond, which held them together against the journeymen of other masters and separated them from these.

Marx argued that in “manufacture” these relations were replaced by “the monetary relation between worker and capitalist”; but this relationship “in the countryside and in small towns retained a patriarchal tinge”.¹¹ This is a large allowance, especially when we recall that at any time before about 1840 the bulk of the British population lived in such conditions.

And so for “a patriarchal tinge” we may substitute the weaker term, “paternalism”. It may seem that this magical social quantum, every day refreshed from the innumerable springs of the small workshop, the economic household, the landed estate, was strong enough to inhibit (except here and there, for brief episodes) class confrontation, until industrialisation brought all that in its train. Before this occurred, there was no class-conscious working class; no class-conflict of that kind, but only fragments of proto-conflict; as an historical agent, the working class did not exist, and, since this is so, the exceedingly difficult business of attempting to find out what was the actual consciousness of the inarticulate labouring poor would be tedious and unnecessary. We are invited to think of the consciousness of a Trade rather than of a class, of vertical rather than horizontal divisions. We can even speak of a “one-class” society.

Examine the following accounts of the eighteenth-century landed gentleman. The first —

The life of a hamlet, a village, a parish, a market town and its hinterland, a whole county, might revolve around the big house in its park. Its reception rooms, gardens, stables and kennels were the centre of local social life; its estate office the exchange for farm tenancies, mining and building leases, and a bank for small savings and investments; its home farm a permanent exhibition of the best available agricultural methods. . .; its law room. . . the first bulwark of law and order; its portrait gallery, music-room and library the headquarters of local culture; its dining-room the fulcrum of local politics.

And here is the second —

In the course of running his property for his own interests, safety and convenience he performed many of the functions of the state. He was the judge: he settled disputes among his followers. He was the police: he kept order among a large number of people. . . He was the Church: he named the chaplain, usually some near relative with or without religious training, to care for his people. He was a welfare agency: he took care of the sick, the aged, the orphans. He was the army: in case of uprisings. . . he armed his kin and retainers as a private militia. Moreover, through what became an intricate system of marriages, kinship, and sponsorship. . . he could appeal for support if need be to a large number of relatives in the country or in the towns who possessed property and power similar to his own.

These are both acceptable descriptions of the eighteenth-century landed gentleman. However, it happens that one describes the aristocracy or great gentry of England, the other the slave-owners of Colonial Brazil.¹¹ Both might, equally, and with the smallest revision, describe a patrician in the campagna of ancient Rome, one of the landowners in Gogol’s Dead Souls, a slave-holder in Virginia,²² or the landowners in any society in which economic and social authority, summary judicial powers, etc., were united in a single place.

Some difficulties, however, remain. We may call a concentration of economic and cultural authority “paternalism” if we wish. But if we allow the term, then we must also allow that it is too large for discriminating analysis. It tells us little about the nature of power and of the State; about forms of property-ownership; about ideology and culture; and it is even too blunt to distinguish between modes of exploitation, between slave and free labour.

Moreover, it is a description of social relations as they may be seen from above. This does not invalidate it, but one should be aware that such a description may be too persuasive. If the first description is the only one that we are offered, then it is only too easy to pass from this to some view of a “one-class society”; the great house is at the apex, and all lines of communication run to its dining-room, estate office or kennels. This is, indeed, an impression easily gained by the student who works among estate papers, quarter sessions records, or the duke of Newcastle’s correspondence.

But there might be other ways of describing the society than the one offered by Harold Perkin in the first of our two extracts. The life of a parish might equally well revolve around the weekly market, the summer and winter festivals and fairs, the annual village feast, as about the occasions of the big house. The gossip of poaching, theft, sexual scandal and the behaviour of the overseers of the poor might occupy people’s minds rather more than the remote comings and goings up at the park. The majority in the village would have little occasion for savings or investment or for agricultural improvement: they might be more bothered about access to firing, turves and grazing on the common than to crop rotations.¹¹ The law might appear not as a “bulwark” but as a bully. Above all, there might be a radical disassociation — and at times antagonism — between the culture and even the “politics” of the poor and those of the great.

Few would dispute this. But descriptions of the social order in the first sense, as seen from above, are far more common than are attempts to reconstruct the view from below. And whenever the notion of “paternalism” is introduced, it is the first model which it calls to mind. And the term cannot rid itself of normative implications: it suggests human warmth, in a mutually assenting relationship; the father is conscious of duties and responsibilities towards his son, the son is acquiescent or actively complaisant in his filial station. Even the model of the small economic household carries (despite disclaimers) some sense of emotional cosiness: “time was”, Laslett once wrote, “when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size”.²² It would be unfair to meet this with the reminder that Wuthering Heights is presented in exactly such a familial situation. Laslett was reminding us of a relevant aspect of small-scale economic relations, even if the warmth could be of impotent revolt against abject dependency as often as it could be a warmth of mutual respect. In the early years of the industrial revolution workers often harked back to lost paternalist values, Cobbett and Oastler enlarged upon the sense of loss, and Engels endorsed the grievance.

But this raises a further problem. Paternalism as myth or as ideology is nearly always backward-looking. It offers itself in English history less as actuality than as a model of an antique, recently passed, golden age from which present modes and manners are a degeneration. Thus we have Langhorne’s Country Justice (1774):

When thy good father held this wide domain,

The voice of sorrow never mourn’d in vain.

Sooth’d by his pity, by his bounty fed,

The sick found medecine, and the aged bread.

He left their interest to no parish care,

No bailiff urged his little empire there;

No village tyrant starved them, or oppress’d;

He learn’d their wants, and he those wants redress’d. . .

The poor at hand their natural patrons saw,

And lawgivers were supplements of law!

And so on, to the disclaimer that such relations have any present reality:

. . . Fashion’s boundless sway

Has borne the guardian magistrate away.

Save in Augusta’s streets, on Gallia’s shores,

The rural patron is beheld no more. . .

But we may take our literary sources where we will. We may move back some sixty or seventy years to Sir Roger de Coverley, a late survivor, a quaint old-fashioned man, both ridiculous and lovable for being so. We may move back another hundred years to King Lear, or to Shakespeare’s “good old man” Adam; once again, the paternalist values are seen as “antique”, they are crumbling before the competitive individualism of the natural man of young capitalism, where “the bond [is] crack’d ’twixt son and father” and where the gods stand up for bastards. Or we may move back another hundred years to Sir Thomas More. Always paternalist actuality appears to be receding into an ever more primitive and idealized past.¹¹ And the term forces us into confusions of actual and ideological attributes.

To resume: paternalism is a loose descriptive term. It has considerably less historical specificity than such terms as feudalism or capitalism; it tends to offer a model of the social order as it is seen from above; it has implications of warmth and of face-to-face relations which imply notions of value; it confuses the actual and the ideal. This does not mean that the term should be discharged as utterly unfit for service. It has as much and as little value as other generalized terms — authoritarian, democratic, egalitarian — which cannot in themselves, and without substantial additions, be brought to characterize a system of social relations. No thoughtful historian should characterize a whole society as paternalist or patriarchal. But paternalism can, as in Tsarist Russia, in Meiji Japan, or in certain slave-holding societies, be a profoundly important component not only of ideology but of the actual institutional mediation of social relations. How do matters stand in eighteenth-century England?

Let us put aside at once one tempting but wholly unprofitable line of investigation: that of attempting to divine the specific gravity of that mysterious fluid, the “patriarchal tinge”, in this or that context and at different moments in the century. We commence with impressions: we ornament our hunches with elegant or apt quotations; we end with impressions.

If we look, rather, at the institutional expression of social relations, then this society appears to offer few genuine paternalist features. What one notices about it first of all is the importance of money. The landed gentry are graded less by birth or other marks of status than by rentals: they are worth so many thousand pounds a year. Among the aristocracy and ambitious gentry, courtship is conducted by fathers and by their lawyers, who guide it carefully towards its consummation, the well-drawn marriage settlement. Place and office could be bought and sold (provided that the sale did not seriously conflict with the lines of political interest); commissions in the Army; seats in parliament. Use-rights, privileges, liberties, services — all could be translated into an equivalent in money: votes, burgage-rights, immunities from parish office or militia service, the freedom of boroughs, gates on the common. This is the century in which money “beareth all the stroke”, in which liberties become properties, and use-rights are reified. A dove-cot on the site of an ancient burgage may be sold, and with it is sold a right to vote; the rubble of an ancient messuage may be bought up in support of a claim for common right and, thereby, of an extra allocation of the common on enclosure.

If use-rights, services, etc., became properties to be marked up at so many £s value, they did not, however, always become commodities open to any purchaser on the free market. The property assumed its value, as often as not, only within a particular structure of political power, influence, interest and dependency, made familiar to us by Namier. Titular offices of prestige (such as Rangers, Keepers, Constables) and such perquisites as came with them might be bought and sold; but these could not be bought or sold by anyone (during Walpole’s rule, no Tory or Jacobite peer was likely to succeed in this market); and the holder of an opulent office who incurred the disfavour of politicians or Court might find himself threatened with ejection by legal process.¹¹ Preferments to the highest and most lucrative offices in the Church, the Law and the Army were in a similar position. The offices came through political influence but, once gained, they normally carried life tenure, and the incumbent must milk them of all possible revenue while he could. The tenure of Court sinecures and of high political office was much more uncertain, although by no means less lucrative: the earl of Ranelagh, the duke of Chandos, Walpole and Henry Fox were among those who founded fortunes upon brief tenures of the office of Paymaster General. And on the other hand, the tenure of landed estates, as absolute property, was wholly secure and heritable. It was both the jumping-off point for power and office, and the point to which power and office returned. Rentals might be jacked up by keen stewardship and improving agriculture, but they offered no windfall gains as did sinecure, office, commercial speculation or fortunate marriage. Political influence could do more to maximize profits than could four-course rotations — as, for example, in smoothing the way for private acts, such as enclosure, or in bringing a wad of unearned sinecurist income back to mortgaged estates, in easing the way to a marriage uniting congenial interests, or in gaining preferential access to a new issue of stock.

This was a predatory phase of agrarian and commercial capitalism, and the State was itself among the prime objects of prey. Victory in high politics was followed by the spoils of war, just as victory in war was often followed by the spoils of politics. The successful commanders of Marlborough’s wars gained not only public rewards but also huge sums out of military subcontracting, for fodder, transport, ordnance; for Marlborough there was Blenheim Palace, for Cobham and Cadogan the mini-palaces of Stowe and Caversham. The Hanoverian succession brought a new set of courtier-brigands in its train. But the great financial and commercial interests also required access to the State, for charters, privileges, contracts, and for the diplomatic, military and naval strength required to break open the way for trade.¹¹ Diplomacy gained for the South Sea Company the assiento, or licence to trade in slaves in Spanish America; and it was upon the expectations of massive profits from this concession that the South Sea Bubble was blown. Blowing a bubble cannot be done without spit, and the spit in this case took the form of bribes not only to the king’s ministers and mistresses, but also (it is probable) to the king.

We are habituated to think of exploitation as something that occurs at ground level, at the point of production. In the early eighteenth century wealth was created at this lowly level, but it rose rapidly to higher regions, accumulated in great gobbets, and the real killings were to be made in the distribution, cornering and sale of goods or raw materials (wool, grain, meat, sugar, cloth, tea, tobacco, slaves), in the manipulation of credit, and in the seizure of the offices of State. A patrician banditti contested for the spoils of power, and this alone explains the great sums of money they were willing to expend on the purchase of parliamentary seats. Seen from this aspect, the State was less an effective organ of any class than a parasitism upon the backs of that very class (the gentry) who had gained the day in 1688. And it was seen as such, and seen to be intolerable, by many of the small Tory gentry during the first half of the century, whose land tax was transferred by the most patent means to the pockets of courtiers and Whig politicians — to that same aristocratic élite whose great estates were, during these years, being consolidated against the small. An attempt was even made by this oligarchy, in the time of the earl of Sunderland, to make itself institutionally confirmed and self-perpetuating, by the attempted Peerage Bill and by the Septennial Act. That constitutional defences against this oligarchy survived these decades at all is due largely to the stubborn resistance of the largely Tory, sometimes Jacobite, independent country gentry, supported again and again by the vociferous and turbulent crowd.

All this was done in the king’s name. It was in the name of the king that successful ministers could purge even the most subordinate officer of State who was not wholly subordinate to their interest. “We have left nothing untry’d, to find out every malignant; and have dismiss’d all of whom we could have the least proof either from their present or pass’d behaviour,” wrote the three grovelling Commissioners of Customs in Dublin to the earl of Sunderland in August 1715. It is “our duty not to suffer any subordinate to us to eat His Majesty’s Bread, who have not all imaginable zeal & affection for his service & Government.”¹¹ But it was a prime interest among the political predators to confine the influence of the king to that of primus inter predatores. When George II at his accession seemed to be about to dispense with Walpole, it turned out that he could be bought like any Whig politician, but at a higher price:

Walpole knew his duty. Never had a sovereign been more generously treated. The King — £800,000 a year down and the surplus of all taxes appropriated to the civil list, reckoned by Hervey at another £100,000: the Queen — £100,000 a year. The rumour ran that Pulteney offered more. If so, his political ineptitude was astounding. No one but Walpole could have hoped to get such grants through the Commons. . . a point which his Sovereign was not slow in grasping. . .

“Consider, Sir Robert,” said the King, purring with gratitude as his minister set out for the Commons, “what makes me easy in this matter will prove for your ease too; it is for my life it is to be fixed and it is for your life.”¹¹

So Walpole’s “duty” turns out to be the mutual respect of two safe-breakers raiding the vaults of the same bank. In these decades the noted Whig “jealousy” of the Crown did not rise from any fear that the Hanoverian monarchs would effect a coup d’état and trample underfoot the liberties of the subject in assuming absolute power — that rhetoric was strictly for the hustings. It arose from the more realistic fear that an enlightened monarch might find means to elevate himself, as the personification of an “impartial”, rationalizing, bureaucratic State power, above and outside the predatory game. The appeal of such a patriot king would have been immense, not only among the lesser gentry, but among great ranges of the populace: it was exactly the appeal of his image as an uncorrupted patriot which carried William Pitt the elder on a flood of popular acclaim to power, despite the hostility of politicians and of Court.²²

“The successors of the old Cavaliers had turned demagogues; the successors of the old Roundheads had turned courtiers.” Thus Macaulay; and he continues:

During many years, a generation of Whigs, whom Sidney would have spurned as slaves, continued to wage deadly war with a generation of Tories whom Jeffreys would have hanged for republicans.¹¹

This characterization does not long survive the mid-century. The feud between Whigs and Tories had been greatly softened ten years before the accession of George III, and the ensuing “slaughter of the Pelhamite innocents”. The Tory survivors among the great gentry re-entered the commission of peace, regained their political presence in the counties, had hopes of shares in the spoils of power. As manufacture moved up in the scales of wealth against merchanting and speculation, so certain forms of privilege and corruption became obnoxious to moneyed men, who became reconciled to the rationalized “impartial” arena of the free market: killings could now be made without some prior political purchase within the organs of State. The accession of George III changed in many ways the terms of the political game — the opposition got out its old libertarian rhetoric and dusted it, for some (as in the City of London) it assumed a real and revivified content. But the King sadly bungled any attempt to offer himself as an enlightened monarch, an imperial apex to a disinterested bureaucracy. The parasitic functions of the State came under increasing scrutiny and piecemeal attack (the reform of the Excise, attacks on the East India Company, upon places and sinecures, upon the misappropriation of public lands, etc.); but, despite an efficient revenue service, and a serviceable navy and army, the parasitic role of the State survived.

“Old Corruption” is a more serious term of political analysis than is often supposed; for political power throughout most of the eighteenth century may best be understood, not as a direct organ of any class or interest, but as a secondary political formation, a purchasing-point from which other kinds of economic and social power were gained or enhanced; in its primary functions it was costly, grossly inefficient, and it survived the century only because it did not seriously inhibit the actions of those with de facto economic or (local) political power. Its greatest source of strength lay precisely in the weakness of the State itself; in the desuetude of its paternal, bureaucratic and protectionist powers; in the licence which it afforded to agrarian, mercantile and manufacturing capitalism to get on with their own self-reproduction; in the fertile soil which it afforded to laissez-faire.¹¹

I must emphasise that this is a view of the State as seen from “within”. From “without”, in its effective military, naval, fiscal, diplomatic and imperial presence, whether directly or indirectly (as in the para-State of the East India Company) it must be seen in a very much more aggressive aspect. John Brewer has helpfully analysed its military strength, and also the efficiency of its fiscal organisation and taxation bureaucracy — Treasury departments and the extensive excise service were comparatively free from the corruption and favours endemic in other government office — in The Sinews of Power (1989). This mixture of internal weakness and external strength, and the balance between the two (in “peace” and “war” policies) leads us to most of the real issues of principle thrown up in mid-eighteenth-century high politics. It was when the weaknesses inherent in the internal parasitism wreaked their revenges in external defeat (the loss of Minorca and the ritual sacrifice of Admiral Byng; the American disaster) that elements in the ruling class were shocked out of mere factionalism into a class politics of principle.

It scarcely seems, however, to be a fertile soil for paternalism. We have become used to a rather different view of eighteenth-century politics, presented by historians who have become habituated to seeing this age in terms of the apologetics of its principal actors.²² If corruption is noted, it can be passed off by noting a precedent; if Whigs were predators, then Tories were predators too. Nothing is out-of-the-way, all is subsumed in the “accepted standards of the age”. But the alternative view which I have offered should come with no sense of surprise. It is, after all, the criticism of high politics offered in Gulliver’s Travels and in Jonathan Wild; in part in Pope’s satires and in part in Humphrey Clinker; in Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes” and “London” and in Goldsmith’s “Traveller”. It appears, as political theory, in Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, in the polemics of the “country party”, with a Tory gloss in Bolingbroke’s thought and it reappears, in more fragmentary form, and with a Whiggish gloss, in Burgh’s Political Disquisitions.¹¹ In the early decades of the century, the comparison between high politics and the criminal underworld was a common figure of satire:

I know that if one would be agreeable to men of dignity one must study to imitate them, and I know which way they get Money and places. I cannot wonder that the Talents requisite for a great Statesman are so scarce in the world since so many of those who possess them are every month cut off in the prime of their Age at the Old-Baily.

Thus John Gay, in a private letter, in 1723.²² The thought was the germ for the Beggar’s Opera. Historians have commonly dismissed this figure as hyperbole. They should not.

There are, of course, qualifications to be made. One qualification, however, which can not be made is that this parasitism was curbed, or jealously watched, by a purposive, cohesive, growing middle class of professional men and of the manufacturing middle class.³³ To be sure, all the elements of such a class were gathering, and recent historical research has emphasised the growth in the wealth, numbers and cultural presence of the commercial, professional, farming and trading sections of society;⁴⁴ the occasional assertion of independence in urban politics;⁵⁵ the vigorous growth of leisure centres and facilities mainly serving the “middling orders”.¹¹ If in the first decades of the century such groups could be held in place by palpable measures of clientage and dependency,²² by the mid-century they were numerous enough — certainly in London and also in some large towns — to be no longer dependent upon a few patrons, and to have acquired the independence of the more anonymous market. There is a sense in which a middle class was creating its own shadowy civil society or public sphere.

Nevertheless, all this fell far short of a class with its own institutions and objectives, self-confident enough to challenge the managers of Old Corruption. Such a class did not begin to discover itself (except, perhaps, in London) until the last three decades of the century. For most of the century its potential members were content to submit to a condition of abject dependency. They made little effort (until the Association Movement of the late 1770s) to shake off the chains of electoral bribery and influence; they were consenting adults in their own corruption. After two decades of servile attachment to Walpole, the Dissenters emerged with their reward: £500 p.a. to be allocated to the widows of deserving clergy. Fifty years later, and they had still failed to secure the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. As churchmen, the majority fawned for preferment, dined and joked (upon suffrance) at the tables of their patrons, and, like Parson Woodforde, were not above accepting a tip from the squire at a wedding or a christening.³³ As surveyors, attorneys, tutors, stewards, tradesmen, etc., they were contained within the limits of dependency; their deferential letters, soliciting place or favour, are stashed in the manuscript collections of the great.¹¹ (As such, the sources give a historiographical bias to overemphasize the deferential element in eighteenth-century society — a man put, perforce, into the stance of soliciting favours will not reveal his true mind.) In general, the middle class submitted to a client relationship. Here and there men of character might break free, but even the arts remained coloured by dependency upon the liberality of patrons.²² The aspirant professional man or tradesman sought to remedy his sense of grievance less by social organization than by social mobility (or geographical mobility to Bengal, or to that European “West” — the New World). He aimed to purchase immunity from deference by acquiring the wealth which would give him “independence”, or land and gentry status.³³ The profound resentments generated by this client status, with its attendant humiliations and its impediments to the career open to talents, fuelled much of the intellectual radicalism of the early 1790s; its embers scorch the foot even in the cool rationalist periods of Godwin’s prose.

Thus for at least the first seven decades of the century we can find no industrial or professional middle class which exercises an effective curb upon the operations of predatory oligarchic power. But if there had been no curbs at all, no qualifications of parasitic rule, the consequence must have been anarchy, one faction preying without restraint upon another. The major qualifications to this rule were four.

First, we have already noted the largely Tory “Country” tradition of the independent lesser gentry. This tradition is the only one to emerge with much honour from the first half of the century; it re-emerges, in a Whig mantle, with the Association Movement of the 1770s.¹¹ Secondly, there is the Press: itself a kind of middle-class presence, in advance of other articulated expression — a presence extending in range as literacy extended, and as the Press itself learned how to enlarge and sustain its freedoms.²² Thirdly, there is “the Law”, elevated during this century to a role more prominent than at any other period of our history, and serving as the “impartial”, arbitrating authority in place of a weak and unenlightened monarchy, a corrupt bureaucracy and a democracy which offered to the real intrusions of power little more than rhetoric about its ancestry. The civil law afforded to the competing interests both a set of defences to their property and those rules of the game without which all would have fallen into anarchy. The higher institutions of the law were not free from influence and corruption, but they were freer from these than was any other profession. To maintain their credibility, the courts must sometimes find for the small man against the great, the subject against the King. In terms of style, the performance was superb: serene, untainted by influence, remote from the hubbub of affairs, lucid, combining a reverence for the precedents of antiquity with a flexible assimilation of the present. Money, of course, could buy the best performers, and the longer purse could often exhaust the lesser; but money could never effect an outright purchase of judgement, and on occasion was visibly discomfited. The civil law provided a fair framework within which the predators could fight for some kinds of spoil: for tithes, for claims to timber and common land, over legacies and entails: on occasion their lesser victims could defend themselves in the same medium. But the criminal law, which faced in the main towards the loose and disorderly sort of people, wore an altogether different aspect. Moreover, eighteenth-century law was concerned less with relations between persons than with relations between property, or claims upon property, or what Blackstone called “the Rights of Things” (see below, p. 135).

Although the Country opposition to Walpole had central demands which were democratic in form (annual parliaments, curbs on placemen and corruption, no standing army, etc.), the democracy demanded was of course limited, in general, to the landed gentry (as against the Court and the moneyed interest) as is made clear by continued Tory support for landed property qualifications for MPs. See Quentin Skinner’s useful discussion (which, however, neglects the dimension of the political nation “without doors” to which Bolingbroke appealed). “The principles and practice of opposition: the case of Bolingbroke versus Walpole”, in Neil McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives (1974); H. T. Dickinson, “The eighteenth-century debate on the ‘Glorious Revolution’,” History, vol. lxi, 201 (February 1976), pp. 36-40; and (for the continuity between the platform of old Country party and new radical Whigs), Brewer, op. cit., pp. 19, 253-5. The Hanoverian Whigs also endorsed the high property qualifications for MPs: Cannon, op. cit., p. 36.

Fourthly, and finally, there is the ever-present resistance of the crowd: a crowd which stretched at times from small gentry and professional men to the poor (and within whose numbers the first two groups sometimes sought to combine opposition to the system with anonymity), but which appeared to the great, through the haze of verdure surrounding their parks, to be made up of “the loose and disorderly sort”. The relation between the gentry and the crowd is the particular concern of this argument.

III

One would not expect paternal responsibilities or filial deference to be vigorous in the predatory regime to which I have gestured. But it is of course possible for a society to be fissured and savagely factional at the top, but to preserve its cohesion below. The military juntas engage in coup and counter-coup, pretenders to the throne exchange places, warlords march and counter-march, but at the base of society the peasantry or plantation-workers remain passive, sometimes submitting to a change of masters, contained by the strength of local paternal institutions, made submissive by the absence of alternative social horizons. Whatever parasitism infested the eighteenth-century State, perhaps the gentry, secure in their counties, threw over the whole of society a paternalist net?

It would not be difficult to find instances of the great estate or the closed manorial village where this might seem to be so. And we will return to such examples. It would be equally easy to find pasture and forest regions of expanding domestic industry where this is evidently false. The trading of instances will not get us very far. The question we should ask is: What were the institutions, in the eighteenth century, which enabled the rulers to obtain, directly or indirectly, a control over the whole life of the labourer, as opposed to the purchase, seriatim, of his labour power?

The most substantial fact lies on the other side of the question. This is the century which sees the erosion of half-free forms of labour, the decline of living-in, the final extinction of labour services and the advance of free, mobile, wage labour. This was not an easy or quick transition. Christopher Hill has reminded us of the long resistance made by the free-born Englishman against the pottage of free wage labour. One should note equally the long resistance made by their masters against some of its consequences. These wished devoutly to have the best of both the old world and the new, without the disadvantage of either. They clung to the image of the labourer as an un free man, a “servant”: a servant in husbandry, in the workshop, in the house. (They clung simultaneously to the image of the free or masterless man as a vagabond, to be disciplined, whipped and compelled to work.) But crops could not be harvested, cloth could not be manufactured, goods could not be transported, houses could not be built and parks enlarged, without labour readily available and mobile, for whom it would be inconvenient or impossible to accept the reciprocities of the master-servant relationship. The masters disclaimed their paternal responsibilities; but they did not cease, for many decades, to complain at the breach of the “great law of subordination”, the diminution of deference, that ensued upon their disclaimer:

The Lab’ring Poor, in spight of double Pay,

Are saucy, mutinous, and Beggarly.¹¹

The most characteristic complaint throughout the greater part of the century was as to the indiscipline of working people, their irregularity of employment, their lack of economic dependency and their social insubordination. Defoe, who was not a conventional “low wages” theorist, and who could on occasion see merit in higher wages which increased the consuming power of “manufacturers” or of “artificers”, stated the full case in his Great Law of Subordination Consider’d; or, the Insolence and Insufferable Behaviour of Servants in England duly enquir’d into (1724). He argued that through the insubordination of servants:

Husbandmen are ruin’d, the Farmers disabled, Manufacturers and Artificers plung’d, to the Destruction of Trade. . . and that no Men who, in the Course of Business, employ Numbers of the Poor, can depend upon any Contracts they make, or perform any thing they undertake, having no Law, no Power. . . to oblige the Poor to perform honestly what they are hir’d to do.

Under a stop of Trade, and a general want of Work, then they are clamorous and mutinous, run from their Families, load the Parishes with their Wives and Children. . . and. . . grow ripe for all manner of mischief, whether publick Insurrection, or private plunder.

In a Glut of Trade they grow saucy, lazy, idle and debauch’d. . . they will Work but two or three Days in the Week.

Paternalist control over the whole life of the labourer was in fact being eroded; wage assessment fell into desuetude; the mobility of labour is manifest; the vigour of eighteenth-century hiring-fairs, “statutes” or “statties”, proclaim the right of the rural (as well as urban) labourer to claim if he so wished, a change of master.¹¹ Moreover, there is evidence (in the very refusal of labourers to submit to the work-discipline demanded of them) of the growth of a newly-won psychology of the free labourer. In one of Defoe’s moralistic anecdotes, the JP summons the cloth worker upon a complaint from his employer that his work was being neglected:

Justice. Come in Edmund, I have talk’d with your Master.

Edmund. Not my Master, and’t please your Worship, I hop I am my own Master.

Justice. Well, your Employer, Mr E —, the Clothier: will the word Employer do?

Edmund. Yes, yes, and’t please your Worship, any thing, but Master.¹¹

This is a large change in the terms of relations: subordination is becoming (although between grossly unequal parties) negotiation.

The eighteenth century witnessed a qualitative change in labour relations whose nature is obscured if we see it only in terms of an increase in the scale and volume of manufacture and trade. This occurred, of course. But it occurred in such a way that a substantial proportion of the labour force actually became more free from discipline in their daily work, more free to choose between employers and between work and leisure, less situated in a position of dependence in their whole way of life, than they had been before or than they were to be in the first decades of the discipline of the factory and of the clock.

This was a transitory phase. One prominent feature was the loss of non-monetary usages or perquisites, or their translation into money payments. Such usages were still extraordinarily pervasive in the early eighteenth century. They favoured paternal social control because they appeared simultaneously as economic and as social relations, as relations between persons not as payments for services or things. Most evidently, to eat at one’s employer’s board, to lodge in his barn or above his workshop, was to submit to his supervision. In the great house, the servants who were dependent upon “vails” from visitors, the clothing of the mistress, the clandestine perquisites of the surplus of the larder, spent a lifetime ingratiating favours. Even the multiform perquisites within industry, increasingly being redefined as “theft”, were more likely to survive where the workers accepted them as favours and submitted to a filial dependency.

On occasion, one catches a glimpse of the extinction of a perquisite or service which must have induced a shock to paternal control out of all proportion to the economic gain to the employer. Thus when Sir Jonathan Trelawney, as Bishop of Winchester, was seeking to increase the revenue of his see, he employed as Steward one Heron, a man strongly committed to ruthless economic rationalization. Among accusations brought against Heron, in 1707, by tenants and subordinate officials of the Bishop’s Courts were that:

He breakes old Customes. . . in Minute and Small matters, which are of Small value to your Lordshipp. . . he has denyed to Allow five Shillings at Waltham to the Jury att the Court. . . to drinke your Lordshipps health, a Custome that has beene used time out of Mind. . . he has denyed your Lordshipp’s Steward and Officers a small perquisite of haveing theire horses shoo’d att Waltham According to an Antient usage which never Exceeded above Six or Seven Shillings. . . he denied your Lordshipp’s Tennants Timber for the repaire of Severall Bridges and Common pounds.

To this Heron replied, somewhat testily:

I own, I affect sometimes to Intermit those minute Customs as he calls them because I observe that your Predecessor’s favours are prescribed for against your Lordship & insisted on as Rights, & then your Lordship is not thanked for them; Besides though they are Minute, yet many Minute Expences. . . amount to a Sume at the end.¹¹

In such ways economic rationalization nibbled (and had long been nibbling) through the bonds of paternalism. The other leading feature of this transitional period was of course the enlargement of that sector of the economy which was independent of a client relationship to the gentry. The “subject” economy remained huge: not only the direct retainers of the great house, the chambermaids and footmen, coachmen and grooms and gardeners, the gamekeepers and laundresses, but the further concentric rings of economic clientship — the equestrian trades and luxury trades, the dressmakers and pastry cooks and vintners, the coach makers, the innkeepers and ostlers.

But the century saw a growing area of independence within which the small employers and labourers felt their client relationship to the gentry very little or not at all. These were the people whom the gentry saw as “idle and disorderly”, withdrawn from their social control; from among these — the clothing workers, urban artisans, colliers, bargees and porters, labourers and petty dealers in the food trades — the social rebels, the food or turnpike rioters, were likely to come. They retained many of the attributes commonly ascribed to “pre-industrial labour”.¹¹ Working often in their own cottages, owning or hiring their own tools, usually working for small employers, frequently working irregular hours and at more than one job, they had escaped from the social controls of the manorial village and were not yet subject to the discipline of factory labour.

Gwyn Williams in Artisans and Sansculottes (1968) writes of “the brief, bawdy, violent, colourful, kaleidoscopic, picaresque world of pre-industrial society, when anything from a third to a half of the population lived not only on the subsistence line but outside and sometimes against the law”. That is one way of seeing a part of this population: and this is confirmed by several studies in P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged (1991). However, another part of this population should not be stereotyped as bawdy, colourful and criminal: upward revisions of the numbers engaged in industry (including rural industries) — see especially P. H. Lindert, “English Occupations, 1670-1811”, J. Econ. Hist., 40, (1980) — the rediscovery of the “cottage economy” and of an English peasantry — see David Levine, Reproducing Families (Cambridge, 1987) and below p. 176 — and the whole body of work and discussion around “proto-industrialization” have all served to emphasise the substantial and growing sector of the eighteenth-century economy independent of gentry control.

Many of their economic dealings might be with men and women little higher in the economic hierarchy than themselves. Their “shopping” was not done in emporiums but at market stalls. The poor state of the roads made necessary a multitude of local markets, at which exchanges of products between primary producers might still be unusually direct. In the 1760s,

Hard-labouring colliers, men and women of Somersetshire and Gloucestershire, travelled to divers neighbouring towns with drifts of horses. . . laden with coals. . . It was common to see such colliers lade or fill a two bushel coal sack with articles of provisions. . . of beef, mutton, large half stript beef bones, stale loaves of bread, and pieces of cheese.²²

Such markets and, even more, the seasonal fairs provided not only an economic but a cultural nexus, and a major centre for information and exchange of news and gossip.

In many regions, the people had not been shaken altogether from some sketchy tenure of the land. Since much industrial growth took the form, not of concentration into large units of production, but of the dispersal of petty units and of by-employments (especially spinning) there were additional resources for “independence”. This independence was for many never far from mere subsistence: a bountiful harvest might bring momentary affluence, a long wet season might throw people onto the poor rates. But it was possible for many to knit together this subsistence, from the common, from harvest and occasional manual earnings, from by-employments in the cottage, from daughters in service, from poor rates or charity. And undoubtedly some of the poor followed their own predatory economy, like “the abundance of loose, idle and disorderly persons” who were alleged, in the time of George II, to live on the margins of Enfield Chase, and who “infest the same, going in dark nights, with Axes, Saws, Bills, Carts and Horses, and in going and coming Rob honest people of their sheep, lambs and poultry. . .”¹¹ Such persons appear again and again in criminal records, estate correspondence, pamphlet and press; they appear still, in the 1790s, in the agricultural county surveys; they cannot have been wholly a ruling-class invention.

Thus the independence of labour (and small master) from clientage was fostered on the one hand by the translation of non-monetary “favours” into payments; and on the other by the extension of trade and industry on the basis of the multiplication of many small units of production, with much by-employment (especially spinning) coincident with many continuing forms of petty land tenure (or common right) and many casual demands for manual labour. This is an indiscriminate picture, and deliberately so. Economic historians have made many careful discriminations between different groups of labourers. But these are not relevant to our present enquiry. Nor were these discriminations commonly made by commentators from among the gentry when they considered the general problem of the “insubordination” of labour. Rather, they saw beyond the park gates, beyond the railings of the London mansion, a blur of indiscipline — the “idle and disorderly”, “the mob”, “the poor”, the “populace” — and they deplored —

their open scoffings at all discipline, religious as well as civil: their contempt of all order, frequent menace to all justice, and extreme promptitude to tumultuous risings from the slightest motives.¹¹

It is, as always, an indiscriminate complaint against the populace as a whole. Free labour had brought with it a weakening of the old means of social discipline. So far from a confident patriarchal society, the eighteenth century sees the old paternalism at a point of crisis.

And yet one feels that “crisis” is too strong a term. If the complaint continues throughout the century that the poor were indisciplined, criminal, prone to tumult and riot, one never feels, before the French Revolution, that the rulers of England conceived that their whole social order might be endangered. The insubordination of the poor was an inconvenience; it was not a menace. The styles of politics and of architecture, the rhetoric of the gentry and their decorative arts, all seem to proclaim stability, self-confidence, a habit of managing all threats to their hegemony.

We may of course have overstated the crisis of paternalism. In directing attention to the parasitism of the State at the top, and the erosion of traditional relations by free labour and a monetary economy at the bottom, we have overlooked intermediate levels where the older economic household controls remained strong, and we have perhaps understated the scale of the “subject” or “client” areas of the economy. The control which men of power and money still exercised over the whole life and expectations of those below them remained enormous, and if paternalism was in crisis, the industrial revolution was to show that its crisis must be taken several stages further — as far as Peterloo and the Swing Riots — before it lost all credibility.

Nevertheless, the analysis allows us to see that ruling-class control in the eighteenth century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power. To say that it was “cultural” is not to say that it was immaterial, too fragile for analysis, insubstantial. To define control in terms of cultural hegemony is not to give up attempts at analysis, but to prepare for analysis at the points at which it should be made: into the images of power and authority, the popular mentalities of subordination.

Defoe’s fictional cloth worker, called before the magistrate to account for default, offers a clue: “not my Master, and’t please your Worship, I hope I am my own Master”. The deference which he refuses to his employer overflows in the calculated obsequiousness to “your Worship”. He wishes to struggle free from the immediate, daily, humiliations of dependency. But the larger outlines of power, station in life, political authority, appear to be as inevitable and irreversible as the earth and the sky. Cultural hegemony of this kind induces exactly such a state of mind in which the established structures of authority and modes of exploitation appear to be in the very course of nature. This does not preclude resentment or even surreptitious acts of protest or revenge; it does preclude affirmative rebellion.

The gentry in eighteenth-century England exercised this kind of hegemony. And they exercised it all the more effectively since the relation of ruler to ruled was very often not face-to-face but indirect. Absentee landowners, and the ever-present mediation of stewards and bailiffs apart, the emergence of the three-tier system of landowner, tenant farmer and landless labourer, meant that the rural labourers, in the mass, did not confront the gentry as employers nor were the gentry seen to be in any direct sense responsible for their conditions of life; for a son or daughter to be taken into service at the great house was seen to be, not a necessity, but a favour.

And in other ways they were withdrawn from the polarities of economic and social antagonism. When the price of food rose, the popular rage fell not on the landowners but upon middlemen, forestallers, millers. The gentry might profit from the sale of wool, but they were not seen to be in a direct exploitive relation to the clothing workers.¹¹

In the growing industrial areas, the gentlemen JP frequently lived withdrawn from the main industrial centres, at his country seat, and he was at pains to preserve some image of himself as arbitrator, mediator or even protector of the poor. It was a common view that “whenever a tradesman is made a justice a tyrant is created”.²² The poor laws, if harsh, were not administered directly by the gentry; where there was blame it could fall upon the poor-rate-paring farmers and tradesmen from among whom the overseers came. Langhorne presents the idealized paternalist picture; exhorting the country justice to —

. . . bend the brow severe

On the sly, pilfering, cruel overseer;

The shuffling farmer, faithful to no trust,

Ruthless as rocks, insatiate as the dust.

When the poor hind, with length of years decay’d,

Leans feebly on his once subduing spade,

Forgot the service of his abler days,

His profitable toil, and honest praise,

This slave, whose board his former labours spread!³³

And, once again, at least a ghostly image of paternal responsibilities could be maintained at very little real outlay in effort. The same JP who in his own closed parish aggravated the problems of poverty elsewhere, by refusing settlements and by pulling down the cottages on the common, could at quarter sessions, by granting the occasional appeal against the overseers of other open parishes, or by calling to order the corrupt workhouse master, place himself above the lines of battle.

We have the paradox that the credibility of the gentry as paternalists arose from the high visibility of certain of their functions, and the low visibility of others. A great part of the gentry’s appropriation of the labour value of “the poor” was mediated by their tenantry, by trade or by taxation. Physically they withdrew increasingly from face-to-face relations with the people in village and town. The rage for deer parks and the threat of poachers led to the closure of rights of way across their parks and their encirclement with high palings or walls; landscape gardening, with ornamental waters and fish ponds, menageries and valuable statuary, accentuated their seclusion and the defences of their grounds, which might be entered only through the high wrought-iron gates, watched over by the lodge. The great gentry were defended by their bailiffs from their tenants, and by their coachmen from casual encounters. They met the lower sort of people mainly on their own terms, and when these were clients for their favours; in the formalities of the bench; or on calculated occasions of popular patronage.

But in performing such functions their visibility was formidable, just as their formidable mansions imposed their presence, apart from, but guarding over, the village or town. Their appearances have much of the studied self-consciousness of public theatre. The sword was discarded, except for ceremonial purposes; but the elaboration of wig and powder, ornamented clothing and canes, and even the rehearsed patrician gestures and the hauteur of bearing and expression, all were designed to exhibit authority to the plebs and to exact from them deference. And with this went certain significant ritual appearances: the ritual of the hunt; the pomp of assizes (and all the theatrical style of the law courts); the segregated pews, the late entries and early departures, at church. And from time to time there were occasions for an enlarged ceremonial, which had wholly paternalist functions: the celebration of a marriage, a coming-of-age, a national festival (coronation or jubilee or naval victory), the almsgiving to the poor at a funeral.¹¹

We have here a studied and elaborate hegemonic style, a theatrical role in which the great were schooled in infancy and which they maintained until death. And if we speak of it as theatre, it is not to diminish its importance. A great part of politics and law is always theatre; once a social system has become “set”, it does not need to be endorsed daily by exhibitions of power (although occasional punctuations of force will be made to define the limits of the system’s tolerance); what matters more is a continuing theatrical style. What one remarks of the eighteenth century is the elaboration of this style and the self-consciousness with which it was deployed.

The gentry and (in matters of social intercourse) their ladies judged to a nicety the kinds of conspicuous display appropriate to each rank and station: what coach, how many footmen, what table, even what proper reputation for “liberality”. The show was so convincing that it has even misled historians; one notices an increasing number of references to the “paternal responsibilities” of the aristocracy, upon which “the whole system rested”. But we have so far noted gestures and postures rather than actual responsibilities. The theatre of the great depended not upon constant, day-by-day attention to responsibilities (except in the supreme offices of State, almost every function of the eighteenth-century aristocracy, and many of those of the higher gentry and clergy, was held as a quasi-sinecure, whose duties were farmed out to a subordinate) but upon occasional dramatic interventions: the roasted ox, the prizes offered for some race or sport, the liberal donation to charity in time of dearth, the application for mercy, the proclamation against forestallers. It is as if the illusion of paternalism was too fragile to be risked to more sustained exposure.

The occasions of aristocratic and gentry patronage certainly deserve attention: this social lubricant of gestures could only too easily make the mechanisms of power and exploitation revolve more sweetly. The poor, habituated to their irrevocable station, have often been made accessories, through their own good nature, to their own oppression: a year of short commons can be compensated for by a liberal Christmas dole. Their rulers were well aware of this. A contributor to the London Magazine commented: “Dancing on the Green at Wakes and merry Tides should not only be indulg’d but incourag’d: and little Prizes being allotted for the Maids who excel in a Jig or Hornpipe, would make them return to their daily Labour with a light Heart and grateful Obedience to their Superiors.”¹¹

But such gestures were calculated to receive a return in deference quite disproportionate to the outlay, and they certainly don’t merit the description of “responsibilities”. These great agrarian bourgeois evinced little sense of public, or even corporate, responsibility. The century is not noted for the scale of its public buildings but for that of its private mansions; and is as much noted for the misappropriation of the charities of previous centuries as for the founding of new ones.

One public function the gentry assumed wholly as their own: the administration of the law, the maintenance, at times of crisis, of public order. At this point they became magisterially and portentously visible. Responsibility this certainly was, although it was a responsibility, in the first and in the second place, to their own property and authority. With regularity and with awful solemnity the limits of tolerance of the social system were punctuated by London’s hanging days; by the corpse rotting on the gibbet beside the highway; by the processional of Assizes. However undesirable the side-effects (the apprentices and servants playing truant from service, the festival of pickpockets, the acclamation of the condemned) the ritual of public execution was a necessary concomitant of a system of social discipline where a great deal depended upon theatre.

In the administration of justice there were gestures also, which partake of the general studied paternalist style. Notably, in the exercise of the prerogative of mercy the aristocracy and great gentry could make evident their degree of interest by furthering or refusing to further intercession for the condemned. And, as Douglas Hay has shown, to share, even indirectly, in the powers of life and death greatly enlarged their hegemonic charisma.¹¹ The exercise of power of life and death could, on occasion, be arranged to the last detail. The duke of Montagu was writing in 1728 to the duke of Newcastle concerning “my man John Potter”, who had been condemned to death for stealing the duke’s hangings. Montagu desired that Potter might be transported for life instead of being executed: “I have talked with the Recorder about it, who when the Report is made tomorrow of the Condemned Malefactors at Council, will propose that he may be inserted in the dead warrant, but at the same tyme there may be a Repreeve for him, which he is to know nothing of till the Morning of Execution.” Three days later Montagu wrote anxiously to make sure that the letter of reprieve would arrive in time, for if Newcastle were to forget it “he’ll be hanged and if he is I had as good be hanged with him, for the Ladys of my famelly give me little rest to save him. . .” The king’s role in this exercise of the prerogative of mercy seems to have been fictional.²²

In any case, one is dubious as to how far it is useful to describe the function of protecting their own property and social order as “paternalist”. Certainly, this function exacted little evidence of filial loyalty either from their victims or from the crowds around the gallows.³³ A century which added more than one hundred new capital offences to the statute book had a stern (or flippant) view of fatherhood.

See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, op. cit. Thomas Laqueur’s assertion that the authorities had no “authorial” control over the executions is supported by anecdotal evidence of the Newgate Calendar kind (examples of cock-ups at Tyburn, sedulously copied in popular chronicles) but not by research into the sources (state papers, legal and military papers, etc.) relevant to such a judgement. Executions were not, as Laqueur supposes, “more risible than solemn”, and to present the Tyburn crowd as a “carnival crowd” is both to misunderstand the crowd and to libel “carnival”. Hanging days at Tyburn often enacted a conflict between alternative authorial scripts — that of the authorities and that of a resentful or brutalised Tyburn crowd. That sort of execution crowd was an execution crowd (and a carnival nothing). It was one of the most brutalised phenomena in history and historians ought to say so: see Laqueur, “Crowds, carnival and the state of English executions, 1604-1868”, in Beier et al, The First Modern Society (Cambridge, 1989). At times the crowd could express other kinds of solidarity with the condemned: see Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riots against the Surgeons”, in Hay et al., op. cit.

If the great were withdrawn so much, within their parks and mansions, from public view, it follows that the plebs, in many of their activities, were withdrawn also from them. Effective paternal sway requires not only temporal but also spiritual or psychic authority. It is here that we seem to find the system’s weakest link.

It would not be difficult to find, in this parish or in that, eighteenth-century clergy fulfilling, with dedication, paternalist functions. But we know very well that these are not characteristic men. Parson Adams is drawn, not to exemplify the practices of the clergy, but to criticize them; he may be seen, at once, as the Don Quixote of the eighteenth-century Anglican Church. The Church was profoundly Erastian; had it performed an effective, a psychologically compelling paternalist role, the Methodist movement would have been neither necessary nor possible.

All this could no doubt be qualified. But what is central to our purpose is that the “magical” command of the Church and of its rituals over the populace, while still present, was becoming very weak. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Puritanism had set out to destroy the bonds of idolatry and superstition — the wayside shrines, the gaudy churches, the local miracle cults, the superstitious practices, the confessional priesthood — which, as one may still see in Ireland or in parts of southern Europe today, can hold the common people in awe. The Restoration could not restore a tissue of papist idolatry for which, in any case, England had never been notably disposed. But the Restoration did loosen the new bonds of discipline which Puritanism had brought in its place. There can be little doubt that the early eighteenth century witnessed a great recession in Puritanism, and the diminution in the size of the popular Puritan following even in those artisan centres which had nourished the Civil War sects. In the result, there was an accession of freedom, although of a negative kind, to the poor — a freedom from the psychic discipline and moral supervision of priesthood or of presbyters.

A priesthood with active pastoral care has usually found ways of co-existing with the pagan or heretical superstitions of its flock. However deplorable such compromises may appear to theologians, the priest learns that many of the beliefs and practices of “folklore” are harmless; if attached to the calendar year of the Church they can be to that degree Christianized, and can serve to reinforce the Church’s authority. The forgers of the shackles of Holy Church, Brand — the pioneer of folklore — remarked, “had artfully enough contrived to make them sit easy, by twisting Flowers around them. . . A profusion of childish Rites, Pageants, and Ceremonies diverted the attention of the people from the consideration of their real state, and kept them in humour. . .”¹¹ What matters most is that the Church should, in its rituals, command the rites of passage of personal life, and attach the popular festivals to its own calendar.

The Anglican Church of the eighteenth century was not a creature of this kind. It was served not by priests but by parsons. It had, except in unusual instances, abandoned the confessional. It recruited few sons of the poor into the priesthood. When so many priests served as temporal magistrates and officered the same law as the gentry, they could scarcely present themselves convincingly as the agents of an alternative spiritual authority. When bishops were political appointments, and when the cousins of the gentry were placed in country livings, where they enlarged their vicarages and adopted the gentry’s style of life, it was only too evident from what source the Church’s authority was derived.

Above all, the Church lost command over the “leisure” of the poor, their feasts and festivals, and, with this, over a large area of plebeian culture. The term “leisure” is, of course, itself anachronistic. In rural society where small farming and the cottage economy persisted, and in large areas of manufacturing industry, the organization of work was so varied and irregular that it is false to make a sharp distinction between “work” and “leisure”. On the one hand, social occasions were intermixed with labour — with marketing, sheep shearing and harvesting, fetching and carrying the materials of work, and so on, throughout the year. On the other hand, enormous emotional capital was invested, not piecemeal in a succession of Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, but in the special feasts and festival occasions. Many weeks of heavy labour and scanty diet were compensated for by the expectation (or reminiscence) of these occasions, when food and drink were abundant, courtship and every kind of social intercourse flourished, and the hardship of life was forgotten. For the young, the sexual cycle of the year turned on these festivals. These occasions were, in an important sense, what men and women lived for; and if the Church had little significant part in their conduct, then it had, to that degree, ceased to engage with the emotional calendar of the poor.

One can see this in a literal sense. While the old saints’ days were scattered liberally across the calendar, the Church’s ritual calendar concentrated events into the months of light demands upon labour, from the winter to the spring, from Christmas to Easter. While the people still owed tribute to the last two dates, which remained as days of maximum communion, the eighteenth-century calendar of popular festivity coincides closely with the agrarian calendar. The village and town feasts for the dedication of churches — or wakes — had not only moved from the saints’ days to the adjacent Sunday, but in most cases they had also been removed (where necessary) from the winter to the summer solstice. In about 1730, the antiquarian, Thomas Hearne, made a note of the feast day of 132 villages or towns in Oxfordshire or on its borders. All fell between May and December; 84 (or more than three-fifths) fell in August and September; no fewer than 43 (or almost one-third) fell in the last week of August and the first week of September (old-style calendar). Apart from a significant group of some twenty, which fell between the end of June and the end of July, and which in a normal year might be expected to fall between the end of the hay harvest and the commencement of the cereal harvest, the weight of the emotional festive calendar fell in the weeks immediately after the harvest was gathered in.¹¹

Dr Malcolmson has reconstructed a calendar of feasts for Northamptonshire in the later eighteenth century which shows much the same incidence.²² Along with the secularization of the calendar goes a secularization of the style and the function of the occasions. If not pagan, then new secular functions were added to old ritual; the publicans, hucksters and entertainers encouraged, with their numerous stalls, the feasts when their customers had uncustomary harvest earnings in their pockets; the village charity and benefit clubs took over the old church ales of Whitsuntide. At Bampton Whit-Monday’s club feast included a procession with drum and piper (or fiddler), morris dancers, a clown with a bladder who carried the “treasury” (a money box for contributions), a sword bearer with a cake. There was, of course, no crucifix, no priest or nuns, no images of virgin or saints: their absence is perhaps too little noticed. Not one of the 17 songs or melodies recorded had the least religious association:

Oh, my Billy, my constant Billy,

When shall I see my Billy again?

When the fishes fly over the mountain,

Then you’ll see your Billy again.³³

Bampton, that living museum of folklore, was not an isolated rural village, but a sturdy centre of the leather industry; just as the Middleton and Ashton of Bamford’s boyhood were centres of domestic industry. What is manifest, in many such districts, and in many rural regions also in the eighteenth century, is that one could never for a moment sustain the view which (for example) Paul Bois is able to assert of the eighteenth-century French peasant of the West, that “c’était l’église, a I’ombre de laquelle se nouaient toutes les relations”.⁴⁴ Of course, the religious and the secular (or pagan) had co-existed uneasily, or conflicted, for centuries: the Puritans were concerned to keep morris dancers out of the church, and huckster’s stalls out of the church-yard. They complained that church ales were defiled by animal baiting, dancing, and all manner of “lewdness”. But there remains a sense in which the Church was the hub around which the spokes of this popular tradition turned; and the Stuart Book of Sports sought to confirm this relationship against Puritan attack. In the eighteenth century, the agrarian seasonal calendar was the hub and the Church provided none of the moving force. It is a difficult change to define but without doubt it was a large one.

The dual experience of the Reformation and of the decline in Puritan presence left a remarkable disassociation between the polite and the plebeian culture in post-Restoration England. Nor should we underestimate the creative culture-forming process from below. Not only the obvious things — folk songs, trades clubs and corn dollies — were made from below, but also interpretations of life, satisfactions and ceremonials. The wife sale, in its crude and perhaps exotic way, performed a function of ritual divorce both more available and more civilized than anything the polite culture could offer. The rituals of rough music, cruel as they might sometimes be, were no more vengeful and really no more exotic than the rituals of a Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer.

The legend of the revival of “merry England” after the Restoration is one which historians have perhaps been too impatient to examine. Even if some of the more sensational claims are discounted (Defoe, as a good accountant, assures us that 6,325 maypoles were erected in the five years after the Restoration)¹¹ there is no doubt that there was a general and sometimes exuberant revival of popular sports, wakes, rush bearings and rituals. “Help Lord!” exclaimed the Rev. Oliver Heywood, the ejected minister, when recounting the cockfighting, horse racing and stool-ball endemic in the Halifax district in the 1680s: “Oh, what oaths sworn! What wickedness committed!” And recounting the May Day celebrations of 1680 he had lamented: “There never was such work in Halifax above fifty years past. Hell is broke loose.”¹¹

We are more accustomed to analyse the age in terms of its intellectual history, and to think of the decline of hell. But the breaking loose of this hell of a plebeian culture quite beyond their control was the waking nightmare of surviving Puritans such as Heywood and Baxter. Pagan festivals which the Church had attached to its calendar in the middle ages (although with incomplete success) reverted to purely secular festivities in the eighteenth century. Wake nights came to an end; but the feasts of the following day or week became more robust with each decade. The ceremony of strewing rushes in the churches lingered here and there; but the feasts of rush bearings went from strength to strength. Near Halifax again, the incumbent (a Reverend Witter) attempted to prevent these feasts in 1682, at which festivals (Heywood complained) the people make great provision of flesh and ale, come from all parts, “and eat and drink and rant in a barbarous heathenish manner”. Mr Witter’s doors were broken down and he was abused as a “cobbler”.²² The rush-bearing ceremony continued in this district for at least a further one hundred and fifty years. But, as in most districts, it had lost any sacred significance. The symbols on the richly-decorated carts became bells and painted pots. The picturesque costumes of the men and the white dresses and garlands of the women appear more and more pagan. The pageants pay a mere passing obeisance to Christian symbolism: Adam and Eve, St George and the Dragon, the Virtues, the Vices, Robin Hood and Maid Marian, hobbyhorses, sweeps on pigs, morris dancers. The festivities ended with baitings, wrestling, dancing and drinking, and sometimes with the tour of the houses of the gentry and of wealthy householders for drink, food and money. “I could not suppress these Bacchanals,” wrote the Rev. John William de La Flechere of the Shropshire Wakes: “the impotent dyke I opposed only made the torrent swell and foam, without stopping the course.” Moreover, the people had found patrons outside the Church: if La Flechere preached against drunkenness, shows and bullbaiting, “the publicans and malsters will not forgive me. They think that to preach against drunkenness and to cut their purse strings is the same thing.”¹¹

But the resurgence of this culture cannot be put down to the commercialization fostered by publicans alone. The gentry had means, through Quarter Sessions, to harry these in their licenses if they had wished. This efflorescence of festivities can scarcely have taken place without a permissive attitude on the part of many of the gentry. In one sense, this was no more than the logic of the times. The materialism of the eighteenth-century rich and the Erastianism of their Church were met by the materialism of the poor. The race meetings of the rich became the poor’s popular holidays. The permissive tolerance of the gentry was solicited by the many taverns which — as inn signs still proclaim — sought to put themselves under the patronage of the great. The gentry could make no convincing missionary expeditions to reform the manners and morals of the poor if they were unwilling to reform their own ostentatious and pleasant vices.

But as explanation this is not finally convincing. Only a ruling class which feels itself to be threatened is afraid to flaunt a double standard. Mandeville is only unusual in pressing to the point of satire the argument that private vices were public benefits. In more softened form the same argument, as to the valuable function of luxury in providing employment and spectacle for the poor, was part of the economic cant of the time. Henry Fielding could make the same point without satirical intention:

To be born for no other Purpose than to consume the Fruits of the Earth is the Privilege. . . of very few. The greater Part of Mankind must sweat hard to produce them, or Society will no longer answer the Purposes for which it was ordained.²²

Indeed, we have seen that the conspicuous display of luxury and “liberality” was part of the theatre of the great. In some areas (wages theory, the poor laws, the criminal code), the materialism of the rich consorted without difficulty with a disciplinary control of the poor. But in other areas — the permissive attitude to the robust, unchristian popular culture, a certain caution and even delicacy in the handling of popular disturbance, even a certain flattery extended to the poor as to their liberties and rights — in these areas we are presented with a problem which demands more subtle analysis. It suggests some reciprocity in the relations between rich and poor; an inhibition upon the use of force against indiscipline and disturbance; a caution (on the part of the rich) against taking measures which would alienate the poor too far, and (on the part of that section of the poor which from time to time rallied behind the cry of “Church and King”) a sense that there were tangible advantages to be gained by soliciting the favour of the rich. There is some mutuality of relationship here which it is difficult not to analyse at the level of class relationship.

Of course, no one in the eighteenth century would have thought of describing their own as a “one-class society”. There were the rulers and the ruled, the high and the low people, persons of substance and of independent estate and the loose and disorderly sort. In between, where the professional and middle classes, and the substantial yeomanry, should have been, relations of clientage and dependency were so strong that, at least until the 1760s, these groups appear to offer little deflection of the essential polarities. Only someone who was “independent” of the need to defer to patrons could be thought of as having full political identity: so much is a point in favour of the “one-class” view. But class does not define itself in political identity alone. For Fielding, the evident division between the high and the low people, the people of fashion and of no fashion, lay like a cultural fissure across the land:

whilst the people of fashion seized several places to their own use, such as courts, assemblies, operas, balls, &c., the people of no fashion, besides one royal place, called his Majesty’s Bear-Garden, have been in constant possession of all hops, fairs, revels, &c. . . . So far from looking on each other as brethren in the Christian language, they seem scarce to regard each other as of the same species.¹¹

This is a world of patricians and of plebs; it is no accident that the rulers turned back to ancient Rome for a model of their own sociological order. But such a polarization of class relations doesn’t thereby deprive the plebs of all political existence. They are at one side of the necessary equation of the res publica.

A plebs is not, perhaps, a working class. The plebs may lack a consistency of self-definition, in consciousness; clarity of objectives; the structuring of class organization. But the political presence of the plebs, or “mob”, or “crowd”, is manifest; it impinged upon high politics at a score of critical occasions — Sacheverell riots, excise agitation, cider tax, the patriotic and chauvinistic ebullitions which supported the career of the older Pitt, and on to Wilkes and the Gordon Riots and beyond. Even when the beast seemed to be sleeping, the tetchy sensibilities of a libertarian crowd defined, in the largest sense, the limits of what was politically possible. There is a sense in which rulers and crowd needed each other, watched each other, performed theatre and countertheatre to each other’s auditorium, moderated each other’s political behaviour. This is a more active and reciprocal relationship than the one normally brought to mind under the formula “paternalism and deference”.

It is necessary also to go beyond the view that labouring people, at this time, were confined within the fraternal loyalties and the “vertical” consciousness of particular trades; and that this inhibited wider solidarities and “horizontal” consciousness of class. There is something in this, certainly. The urban craftsman retained something of a guild outlook; each trade had its songs (with the implements of the trade minutely described), its chapbooks and legends. So the shoemaker’s apprentice might be given by his master The Delightful, Princely and Entertaining History of the Gentle-Craft, and there read:

. . . never yet did any know

A Shooemaker a Begging go.

Kind they are one to another,

Using each Stranger as his Brother.

He read this in 1725, and he would have read much the same in the time of Dekker. At times the distinctions of trades were carried over into festival and social life. Bristol, in the early eighteenth century, saw an annual pugilistic combat on Ash Wednesday between the blacksmiths, and the coopers, carpenters and sailors, with the weavers sometimes joining in on the side of the smiths. And in more substantial ways, when defining their economic interests as producers, craftsmen and workers — Thames-side coal heavers, London porters, Spitalfields silk weavers, west of England clothing workers, Lancashire cotton weavers, Newcastle keelmen — organized themselves tightly within their trades, and petitioned the State or corporate authorities for their fading paternalist favours.

Indeed, there is substantial evidence on this side; and the degree to which a guild or “trade” outlook and even vestigial continuity of organization contributed to the early trade unions was understated by the Webbs. Brentano, in 1870, had explored the possibility of continuity of organization and of traditions between the guilds and companies and the early trade unions.¹¹ But the Webbs, in their weighty History of Trade Unionism (1894) decreed decisively against Brentano. They did this, partly by insisting on the distinctively new character of trade unionism (in consequence of a sharp split between the interests of masters and journeymen), and partly by imposing definitions which made much eighteenth-century evidence appear to be suspect or irrelevant — for example, the demand that organization must be continuous and must have national dimensions.²² Such definitions for a long time discouraged further systematic enquiry, either into collective bargaining by direct action³³ or into local and regional organization, as of the Newcastle keelmen or west of England clothing workers.

Such studies have multiplied in recent years, and it is now clear that — if there is no record of continuous organization of national unions — there was certainly a continuous tradition of trade union activity throughout the century, and very probably (in clothing districts) continuous local organization and recognised leadership, for actions which sometimes disguised themselves as “rough musics”¹¹ and sometimes took on the protective masks of friendly societies. Such trade union traditions extend back into the seventeenth century, and I regret that several very helpful recent studies give a contrary impression.²² Some years ago in the Public Record Office I came upon what may be one of the earliest membership cards of a trade union which has (as yet) been found: it comes from a branch of the journeymen woolcombers at the small town of Alton (Hants) in 1725, although the card is printed in London and the date of formation of the club or “Charity-Stock” is given as 1700. (See plate I.) The woolcombers were being prosecuted (in the court of King’s Bench) in consequence of a long-standing dispute extending over several years. Edward and Richard Palmer, clothiers, employed 150 workers in the woollen manufactory. Their woolcombers had formed into a Woolcombers Club, fifteen or twenty of whom met at a public house, the “Five Bells”. A strike had been called (of seven combers) to enforce apprenticeship regulations and (in effect also) to enforce a “closed shop”. Combers were imported to break the strike, and their workshop was twice broken into, their combs and materials burned. Shortly before these events the common seal which had hitherto been used was replaced by a card or “ticket” which entitled the member “to employment or to receive benefitt in all Clothing Towns where the Woolcombers had formed themselves into Clubbs”. Strike pay or benefit for leaving an employer paying under rate (under the “By Laws and Orders” of the Club) was five shillings, with which the member must travel to another town. A blackleg woolcomber imported by the Palmers from Wokingham (Berks) deposed that as he passed along the street in Alton he was “often Affronted and Abused”, until at length he left the Palmers’ employment. Eight of the combers were duly convicted, and the case was given a little national publicity.¹¹

Thus John Rule’s helpful collection on British Trade Unionism: the Formative Years takes 1750 as the starting date. C. R. Dobson, Masters and Journeymen: A prehistory of industrial relations (1980) covers the dates 1717-1800. See also R. W. Malcolmson’s valuable essay, “Workers’ combinations in eighteenth-century England”, in M. and J. Jacob (eds,), The Origins of Anglo-American Radicalism (1984), p. 160, note 38, gives a weavers’ combination in Bristol in 1707. John Rule discusses the question more closely in The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (1981), esp. pp. 151-4. None of these authors seems to mention the extensive organisation of the Essex weavers in Colchester and region which much preoccupied the Privy Council in 1715. When the mayor of Colchester arrested some of their spokesmen, their fellows effected a rescue and “many hundreds of them Marched into Town, all armed with Pistols, Swords, or Clubs. . .” and also with a clear statement of their grievances and demands: see extensive documentation in PRO, PC 1.14. 101 Parts II and III.

This seems to push the date for trade unionism back at least as far as 1700, and all the recognised features of the craft society are already there — the attempt to make a closed shop, the control of apprenticeship, strike benefit, the tramping system. After all, the elaborate processional display of woolcombers, shoemakers, hatters, weavers, etc., on grand civic occasions (such as the Coronation of George III) did not spring out of nowhere. This was the Manchester order of procession:

The Procession of the Wool-Combers

Two Stewards with white wands. — A man on horseback in white, with a wool wig and sash, beating a pair of kettle drums. — A band of music. — The Arms of Bishop Blaize displayed on a banner. — The Treasurer and Secretary. — A Page Royal, with a white wand. — Bishop Blaze on horseback, attended by ten pages on foot. — The Members, two and two, with wool wigs, sashes, and cockades of the same. — Two Junior Stewards with each a white wand.