A Radical Reader (Struggle for Change in England, 1381-1914)

STRUGGLE FOR CHANGE IN ENGLAND (Christopher Hampton) between 1381 and 1914. We quote from page 17 in the INTRODUCTION: -

"All these are people who saw to it as imperative to come to the defence of the people, and who recognised that, though they could do little on their own to bring about the necessary changes, nevertheless for them, as for Byron,

Words are things, and a small drop of ink
Falling like dew upon a thought produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

The year 1381 seemed a natural starting-point for this book, not only because of the first great popular uprising driven by rational collective will towards equality, freedom and common wealth, but because (being this) it points forward towards the socialist revolutionary movements which have defined the social changes of the last two hundred years.

Of course the pattern of English life in the Middle Ages has to be seen in terms of hierarchic orders of the feudal system under which the common people lives as slaves, the chattels of of their masters. Though people had begun to question the authority of the Catholic Church, it was still a major factor for them in a world constantly threatened with war, famine, disease and periodic disorder. But at the same time the kings and their advisers were pursuing secular policies in keeping with their own arrogant autocratic view of the state and its subjects.

In the late fourteenth century agriculture was the basis of England's economy, and wool the chief export; and with the organisation of the cloth trade, and the expansion of wool which brought into being large scale increases in enclosures, these years were to become the breeding-ground of English capitalism. It might even be said that the ruinous Hundred Years' War, which started in the mid-century as a squabble for plunder and dynastic influence, was also an attempt to keep the markets open. But whatever the advantages of these developments in the agrarian economy, they brought widespread distress and disorder to the lives of the common people, already unsettled by the decimation of the Black Death, and burdened with the taxes of state and Church. It was in this context of growing unrest (recorded in the statutes) that the uprising of 1381 occurred, incited by such travelling preaches as John Ball, who agitated against the negligence of the Church with calls for the establishment of a Christian democracy which defines an early form of socialist ideas.

It is clear that the people were in a mood seething resentment, not only against the paying of tithes to the greedy extortioners of the Church, whose income was said to be 'five times more than is paid to the king from the whole produce of the realm', but also against the state taxes. And quite suddenly, though with promptitude and unity that suggests careful preparation, the people refused to pay, and the revolt began.

For this was much more than a dispute about money. Its millenarian aims were a fundamental challenge to the whole social structure and its long-established ideology of enslavement; for they asserted the right of all men to freedom and equality. Not only that; men are prepared to die for them. And so, although this revolt against thraldom seems to have been almost immediately denied, to the become little more than a pre-condition for new kinds of enslavement - the enslavement of the wage-earner selling his labour - it represents an indispensable step forward in the contradictory struggle for progress.

This early record of the radicalism and heresy of the common people remains incomplete because, as I have already suggested, few could read or write. They talked, discussed and argued unrecorded. And it was no doubt as a result of the oral transmission of the ideas that revolts occurred such as those of 1413-14 in Buckinghamshire, 1414 in Essex and 1414 in London. John Ball's arguments that 'we are all sons of Adam, born free, is rooted in the scriptures; and the struggles of the people against their masters have to be registered in the context of the religious disputes of the age. The radicalism of the fifteenth century, that is, would continue to have been nourished through the Lollard followers of Wycliffe by the Christian vision of justice. Religion and politics acted upon each other. It was through the teachings of Christ that men sought to change society, very often against the official priests and bishops in their wealth and pride, and the coercive powers of the Church itself.

Things may not have changed by 1450 at the bitter end of the Hundred Years' War; but with the country almost bankrupt and the Wars of the Roses about to start secular issues must have been paramount. BY 1516, when More wrote Utopia, the more purely class nature of the rulers had become apparent, together with the economic exploitation (again through the enclosures) of the landless peasantry, of whom More writes with such passionate feelings as the cheated producers of wealth. This was now an age of monarchical absolutism., which by 1549 (year of the Norfolk Revolt, another peasant's uprising) gone part of the way towards refreshing the vast wealth of the feudal Church to the Crown. But the fundamental issues of taxes and tithes, and the great enclosures for sheep, remained a crushing burden under which the people were to continue to react in scattered revolt against their rulers.

The rising capitalist class that had been testing its strength and accumulated its own wealth during the Elizabethan age was of course to become the main revolutionary force in the seventeenth century, led by Cromwell and the Grandees and Parliament against the feudal power of the monarch. And this class was to make sure that the instrument it had created for its conquest of power, the New Model Army, would function in its own interests, the interest of these new men of property, rather than in the interests of the theoretical freedoms proclaimed for the Commonwealth.

Nevertheless, any understanding of the driving forces behind revolutionary theory and practice in seventeenth-century England has to take account of the heretical Christian doctrines upon which so many of its greatest radicals made their challenge and sought to transform their world. If England was 'to be first restorer of buried truth', as Milton and the revolutionary leaders believed, the struggle for that truth and for a just society, with the 'foundation firmly laid of a free commonwealth', was considered inseparable from the great issues of the Christian debate. Though it is of course true that the underlying thrust of seventeenth-century civil strife turned upon economics, the self-interest of the middle class, the ambitions of the army generals and the defence of property, this debate was part of the ferment of ideas that was ongoing on everywhere, among the labourers, the villagers, the artisans, men and women, the common soldiers, encouraged by the upheavals of the time, the danger, confusion and excitement of war. For the whole country was aroused, and it really must have felt as if the world had turned upside down. Radical sects sprang up almost overnight - Quakers, Ranters, Seekers, Fifth Monarchists, Baptists, accompanied by a flood of pamphlets, questioning and probing all accepted tenets, cutting across the lines of religion and politics. And the army was restlessly on the move, formulating its Leveller principles, appointing its agitators, urged into debate and revolt by men like Lilburne, Overton and Walwyn. But perhaps the most radical ideas and actions of all came from the Diggers. For though the Diggers had hardly any influence and quickly disappeared, their conception of the Commonwealth, as systematically defined in the writings of Winstanley and embodied in the actions of the colonies, rejected the whole basis of a capitalist economy, 'the power of enclosing land and owning property', and urged universal equality. 'If the waste land of England were manured by her children,' Winstanley believed, 'it would become in a few years the richest, the strongest and most flourishing land in the world.'

But this was not, and could not have been, the way things turned out. The men of property were in control, the land was 'other men's rights' and, as Winstanley could see, this had been organised to ensure the triumph of those who would once again make England a prison and its laws the 'bolts and bars and doors of the prison' to deprive the poor of their rights.

Radical reader : the struggle for change in England, 1381-1941
Christopher Hampton
ISBN: 0851247253 and 9780851247250
Published: Nottingham, England : Spokesman, 2006

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kerchival

Monticello, July 12th, 1816

[...]

If we run into such [government] debts, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-suffers.

Our landholders too, like theirs, retaining indeed the title and stewardship of estates called theirs, but held really in trust for the treasury, must wander, like theirs, in foreign countries, and be contented with penury, obscurity, exile, and the glory of the nation. This example reads to us the salutary lesson that private fortunes are destroyed by public, as well as by private extravagance. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second ; that second for a third ; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and, in its train, wretchedness and oppression.

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceeding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well: I belonged to it, and laboured with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present ; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead. I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, instututions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. It is this preposterous idea which has lately deluged Europe in blood. Their monarchs, instead of wisely yielding to the gradual chanegs of circumstances, of favouring progressive accommodation to progressive improvement, have clung to old abuses, entrenched themselves behind steady habits, and obliged their subjects to seek through blood and violence rash and ruinous innovations, which, had they been referred to the peaceful deliberations and collected wisdom of the nation, would have bee put into acceptable and salutary forms. Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as another of taking care of itself, and of ordering its own affairs. Let us, as our sister States have done, avail ourselves of our reason and experience, to correct the crude essays of our first and unexperienced, although wise, virtuous, and well-meaning councils. And, lastly, let us provide in our constitution for its revision at stated periods. What these periods should be, Nature herself indicates. By the European tables of mortality, of the adults living at any one moment of time, a majority will be dead in about nineteen years. At the end of that period, then, a new majority is come into place; or, in other worlds, a new generation. Each generation is as independent of the one preceeding as that was of all which have gone before. It has, then, like them, a right to choose for itself the form of government it believes most promotive of its own happiness; consequently, to accommodate to the circumstances in which it finds itself, that receievd from its predecessors: and it is for the peace and good of mankind, that a solemn opportunity of doing this every nineteen or twenty years should be provided by the constitution; so that it may be handed on, with periodical repairs, from generation to generation, to the end of time, if any thing human can so long endure. It is now forty years since the constitution of Virginia was formed. The same tables inform us, that, within that period, two thirds of the adults then living are now dead. Have, the, the remaining third, even if they had the wish, the right to hold in obedience to their will, and to laws heretofore made by them, the other two thirds, who, with themselves, compose the present mass of adults? If they have not, who has? The dead? But the dead have no rights. They are nothing; and nothing cannot own something. Where there is no substance, there can be no accident. This corporeal gloe, and everything upon it, belong to its present corporeal inhabitants, during their generation. They alone have a right to direct what is the concern of themselves alone, and to declare the law of that direction: and this declaration can only be made by the majority.

That majority, then, has a right to depute representatives to a convention, and to make the constitution what they think will be best for themselves. But how collect their voice? This is the real difficulty. If invited by private authority to county or district meetings, these divisions are so large that few will attend; and their voice will be imperfectly or falsely pronounced. Here, then, will be one of the advantaegs of the ward divisions I have proposed. The mayor of every ward, on a question like the present, would call his ward together, take the simple yea or nay of its members, convey these to the county court, who would hand on those of all its wards to the proper general authorioty; and the voice of the whole people would be thus fairly, full, and peaceably expressed, discussed, and decided by the common reason of the society. If this avenue be shut to the call of sufferance, it will make itself heard through that of force, and we shall go on, as other nations are doing, in the endless circle of oppression, rebellion, reformation; and oppression, rebellion, reformation, again; and so on for ever.

Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kerchival