Freedom, Tradition, and Property in Early Modernity, by Brendan Case

8/14/2019 Freedom, Tradition, and Property in Early Modernity, by Brendan Case

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Freedom, Tradition, and Property in Early Modern England

Senior Thesis

Submitted by

Brendan Case

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Bachelor of Arts in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics

The Kings College

New York City

7 December 2009

Between 1500 and 1700 AD, England experienced a social revolution on a grand order,

which transformed economic, religious, and political discourse and practice: medieval

society, centered on the cultivation of charity in a well-ordered community, was

eclipsedoften violentlyby a new culture, whose animating principle was the freedom

of the individual from tradition. Liberal political theoryexemplified in the work of John

Lockeemerged as a project to overcome the chaos unleashed by this transformation,

while solidifying the social new order and dissembling the violence of its founding.


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Between Buffered and Porous Selves: In Search of the Modern

This is yet another installment in a longstanding genre: the genealogy of modernity. As

the conclusion will suggest, this genre in some ways reaches back to the very beginnings

of the modern era, and so might be characterized as a counter-modernity or shadow

modernity1

in its own right. Nonetheless, its literary form is properly the critique and the

prolegomena, which means that those who employ it are, at least to some degree, in

search of a social theory, strangers in the strange land of the modern West. In that

tradition, this paper is on one hand an examination and critique of the birth of liberalism,

first in the enclosure controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and then

more fully in the philosophy of John Locke, as well as an attempt to suggest how a free

and just society might have been framed in more humaneand ultimately, more

Christianterms.

With that in mind, the reader should pause to note the various things this paper will

notattempt to address or to criticize. First, though I take liberalism to encompass

virtually the whole of contemporary American political practicein the classical

liberalism or libertarianism of the Republican, or the political liberalism of the

Democratic Partythis paper will neither seek to establish that thesis, nor to address the

bearing of its historical criticism on particular matters of contemporary public policy.

There are elementsin particular, federalism, which hearkens back to the overlapping

local communities of medieval society, and which points forward to the revival of

subsidiarity in nineteenth century Catholic social thoughtin Americas political and

cultural heritage that provide excellent resources for resisting bureaucratic, saccharine

nihilism; I understand political participation in America today to be an exercise in

1 Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory, 2nd ed. Blackwell: Hoboken, NJ, 2006, p. 4


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recovering those elements at the regional and local level. Second, this paper is in no way

an indictment of private property, whichas I argue belowis compatible with any

number of moral metaphysics or anthropologies.

Rather, this is a cursoryindeed, a whirlwindexamination of the social tumult

than overtook England approximately between 1500 and 1700 AD. This study will focus

on the changing nature of (to borrow Charles Taylors evocative phrase) social

imaginaries,2 webs of meaning that delimit public discourse, and in particular on

governing metaphors, interpretative images that lend coherence and intelligibility to a

variety of social acts and goods. Governing metaphors bind and disperse: they draw

together diverse realms of life (the home, the market, the law, the church) by leavening

the whole society with their presence. InA Secular Age, Taylor offers just such a

typology of the rise of modernity, in tracing the decline of the porous self, and the

emergence of the buffered self, the former not only vulnerable to physical and

supernatural influence, but still more constituted by her very openness to others, from

whom she receives her identity and purpose, the latter walled within himself secure,

impenetrable to external exertions, at liberty to elect his company.3

In great measure, this

paper might be considered a marginalia to some page of Taylors, tracing as it does the

significancenot only in economic terms, but still more for shaping political and social

discourseof the enclosure movements in originating a host of new social forms all

characterized by their pursuit of the individuals freedom from history.

A number of thinkers are important to this study, in particular John Locke, who in

many respects offered the first theoretical defense of the political regime and social

2 Taylor, Charles.A Secular Age. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2007 (200).3 Ibid. 38


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program emanating from (and synergistically justifying) the practice of enclosure: to be a

Lockean is to be willfully, obstinately adrift from ones history. In the sixteenth century,

a spiders web of fractures began to fragment social relations in England, a movement

expanding outward from centers of commerce and increasingly-commercialized estates.

At the level of ideas, one might (with an admitted degree of violence to the finest shades

of history) trace these social changes as a tectonic shift out of a culture primarily and

intentionally rooted in the cultivation of Christian charity, towards a culture

instrumentally conceived in terms of the useful and fungible. Thus, argues Taylor, in

Locke's notion of social order, "the economic dimension took on increasing importance":

"because the whole theory emphasized a kind of profitable exchange, one could begin to

see political theory itself through a kind of quasi-economic metaphor.4

The truest linkage, perhaps, between the long process of enclosure and the

emergence of Taylor's "buffered self," secure and inviolable in his self-possession, relates

to the former's unstable and unpredictable ability to inject its logic into new and

surprising areas: enclosure in itself is no intrinsic evil (as attested by the relatively high

early rates of voluntary transition), but enclosure as a synecdoche of the human

experience, conceived and articulated (as in Locke) as in some sense the fundamental

human act of self-possession, became the gateway to a new vision of humanity itself, one

that has proven almost infinitely plastic in its adaptations to new spheres of life. Thus,

Taylor suggests, "The very revolutionary nature of the consequences [of Lockes theory]

assured that those who first took up this theory would fail to see its application in a host

of areas which seem obvious to us today.5

Likewise, James Boyle has argued that the

4 Ibid. 200.5 Ibid. 167


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truest cost of enclosure was the relentless power of market logic to migrate to new areas,

disrupting traditional social relationships and perhaps even views of the self.6

A Plea for Contingency

Of course, this reading of social discourse implies a specific philosophy of history. As

R.H. Tawney argued in The Agrarian Problem in the Seventeenth Century:

A common view of social development regards it as the outcome ofirresistible causes working towards results which can be neither hastened

nor averted, and treats the fact that events have followed a certain courseas in itself an indication that no other course was possible.

7

For Tawney, however, "If we must talk of social evolution, we ought to remember that it

takes place through the action of human beings, that such action is constantly violent, or

merely short-sighted, or deliberately selfish.8

This requires us explicitlycontra

Hegelto deny history any teleological passage through finitude towards a grasp of the

whole. The end of history is never a moment of consummate awareness; it only (so to

speak) comes as a thief in the night. It is the great challenge of historical examination

to recognize that a form of social organisation which appears to us now to be inevitable,

once hung in the balance as one of several competing possibilities.9

To emphasize the contingency of history is to disavow the ability of any single

master discourse to map its course and meaning. Paradoxically, such an admission

commits the scholar to an almost slavish devotion to the historical positioning of

traditions of thought. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, To imagine a language is to imagine a

6Boyle, James. The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.

Law and Contemporary Problems Vol. 66 No. 33 (2003), p. 34.7

Tawney, R.H. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. Longmans, Green and Co., 1912

(p. 177).8 Ibid.9 Ibid. 178


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way of life10

: because moral and political reflection must occur within the confines of a

language birthed and refined in the institutions and mores of a particular society,

understanding even the plain sense of a document such as the Second Treatiseauthored

by a Country party conspirator to advance the cause of Parliament against the King

requires a fine attention to the social conditions and transformations that form the

background of Lockes thought.11

Alasdair MacIntyre argues in his Short History of

Ethics that because moral concepts are embodied in and are partially constitutive of

forms of social life, it is impossible to make any clear distinction between the social

use of key concepts and their philosophical use when deployed in theoretical

arguments.12

Some might confuse such an enterprise with the commission of the genetic

fallacy, a confusion of genesis with validity (e.g., he only says that because he is a

conspirator). Matthew Kramer, for instance, in his excellent study of property in Locke,

advocates a philosophical approach to philosophy, meaning that he elects to author a

book that trains it scrutiny on the philosophical merits and failings of the theories which

Locke propounded, without attempting to highlight the concrete circumstances that

surrounded the drafting and the reception of the Two Treatises.13 He acknowledges that

10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig.Philosophical Explorations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Blackwell:

Oxford, 1997 (19).11 As MacIntyre has observed, some forms of discourse (Wittgensteinian language-games) can

achieve tremendous stability and historical uniformity if the goods which they serve are themselves stable,

as in Euclidean geometry or number theory (though, strangely enough, each of these fields have been

proven [in the work of Bernhard Riemann (and others) and Kurt Godel, respectively] to be only one among

an infinity of alternatives, each of which is internally consistent according to its own canons of reason). For

more on this history, see Douglas Hoftstadters Godel, Escher, Bach (Basic Books: New York, 1999).12

MacIntyre, Alasdair.A Short History of Ethics. Simon and Schuster: New York, 1966 (1).13 Kramer, Matthew.John Locke and the origins of private property . Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 1997 (4).


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assumptions built on copious knowledge of the relevant historical settings can forestall

smug anachronisms and easy oversimplifications.14 However, he insists,

While an awareness of the interaction between arguments and their

contexts is extremely useful for understanding the argumentsspecificities, a gauging of their soundness must proceed not by looking attheir furtherance of some ends in their original times and places, but by

checking how well their premises support their conclusions when detachedfrom those original sites. What interests the philosophical reader is the

lasting power or speciousness of an argument.15

It is perfectly legitimate to note that someone might speak truth despite an ill motive, but

that is not the question at hand. Rather, as Wittgenstein observed, to argue about the good

for man is from the very beginning to arguefora social order, which (even if imaginary,

as in Mores Utopia, or PlatosRepublic) is always susceptible of historical investigation

and explanation at the level of language, simply because no one can use words

independently of a social context; there is no such thing as a private language. Thus, if we

are to decide whether Lockes arguments are compelling, we must first establish just for

what he is arguing, and that is an enterprise inextricable from the tasks of history.

There is perhaps a limited place for Kramers a-historicism, though only if we

strictly distinguish evaluation from prescription. That is, a theorist could possibly speak

of the conditionaltruth of a political theory (e.g., the conditions under which a claim

could be held true) without any commitment to a particular social order; but as soon as he

begins to take sides, to commit himself to the legitimacy of one theory versus another, he

has entered the realm of history, where the social consequences of ideas are real, and

often deadly.

14 Ibid., 5.15 Ibid.


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The Individual, Community, and the Ideal of Charity in Medieval English SocietyThere are, of course, any number of ways to trace feudalism's transformation and

subsumption into early modernity. Charles Taylor sought to trace that transition in the

difference between the medieval, "porous self," and the modern, "buffered self; this

paper will approach that subject from the vantage of changing metaphors governing the

social imaginary of England, approximately from the years 1400-1700, though

occasionally ranging beyond those boundaries at certain points. Further, this paper will

argue that at the heart of the governing metaphors in this periodforming, as it were, a

fault line along with the greatest and most traumatic changes were experiencedwere the

English people's understanding of land ownership and property rights.

To understand the enclosure controversies that formed the heart of changing

property relations in this period, to understand what was lost and what replaced it, is in

great measure to understand the new metaphorical regime that haswith ever-greater

consistency and expansivenessgoverned social discourse in the Western democracies

ever since. Thus, a full critique of enclosure must focus not, in puerile Marxist fashion,

on the simple fact of a change in property relations, as though holding in severalty had

alchemical properties that transmogrified society as a whole. Rather, we must seek to

understand first how the change came about, and what that method indicates about the

social and cultural dimensions of enclosure.

In Making a Living in the Middle Ages, Christopher Dyer describes a particular

system of farming that emerged in Britain from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. This

system was both personal and communal: Each household ploughed and harvested its

own holding of land, which was regarded as its property, though the working and


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cropping of the land was regulated by common rules. Everyone had to fallow part (often

half) of the land each year, and the fallow ideally formed one block of land, a single

field consisting of hundreds of acres belonging to each of the villagers holdings, so that

animals could wander over it after harvest and until the next sowing, finding grazing in

the stubble.16

Further, even individual holdings were intermixed in a series of strips, so

that an individuals holdings were scattered across the villages fields; this ensured that

everyone worked some of the best and some of the worst landLand and people were

working together in equilibrium within the village.17

Such a system of open-field

agriculture, writes M.J. Daunton, was highly organized and communal, regulated by a

manorial court or an assembly of the villagers which determined the farming schedule

and regulated each individuals access to common grazing and waste land.1819

Now, the exact proportion of England dominated by this system of agriculture is

disputed; Daunton has suggests that common-field agriculture was characteristic of

the centre of the country, in an area stretching from part of Yorkshire through the

Midlands.2021

However, the reader should note that even he suggests that this system

made most sense in areas with a large population, which compelled the intense

cultivation of land, which led in turn to a shortage of land for grazing, so that the arable

16 Dyer, Christopher. Making a Living in the Middle Ages. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT,

2002 (23).17 Ibid. 2418

Daunton, Martin J.Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700-1850. Oxford University Press, 1995 (93).

19See also H.C. Darby,An Historical Geography of England before AD 1800: Fourteen Studies,

1951 (191).20

Daunton, Martin J.Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700-1850. Oxford University Press, 1995 (p. 95).

21Again, Darby concurs: The open-field system itself was not the only method of agricultural

exploitation on the English plain. It was restricted to a large irregular area lying chiefly in the midlands,

reaching northward as far as Durham and southward to the Channel, and extending from Cambridgeshire

on the east to the Welsh border on the west (193).


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fields had to serve this purpose after the harvest.22

The heart of England, and likely a

majority of its population, lived and worked under this communal discipline.

In 1968 Garrett Hardin argued that the inherent logic of the commons

remorselessly generates tragedy, because each man is locked into a system that

compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited.23

Interestingly, though Hardin is offering a Malthusian critique of Smiths theory of the

invisible hand, he shares with his opponent the premise that a commons must result in

over-exploitation. In the anthology,A Social History of England, 1200-1500, Bruce

Campbell critiques Hardin, arguing that the commons were such an indispensable part

of the agricultural system, and were so carefully supervised, that such degradation rarely

materializedNormally rules were developed for managing the land in the common

interestOver many centuries, common pastures therefore remained a stable and

essential component of land use.24

Most fundamentally, Hardin can be faulted for a lack

of imagination, a mistaken assumption that to describe men-in-general, one need only

describe late-modern Westerners in rustic attire.

Of course, some might contend that there is another critique of common

stewardship available from the archetypal High Medieval intellectual, Thomas Aquinas.

Indeed, at first blush, Thomass discussion of property in Summa Theologica II.II Q 66

seems almost Lockean. Presuming that we might take Aquinas to exemplify (indeed,

largely to originate) the Augustinian-Aristotelian synthesis that prevailed throughout

22Daunton, Martin J.Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700-

1850. Oxford University Press, 1995 (p. 95).23

Hardin, Garrett. The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, New Series, Vol. 162, No. 3859

(Dec. 13, 1968), 1243-1248.24 Campbell, Bruce. The land.A Social History of England 1200-1500. Ed. Rosemary Horrox.

Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006 (p. 188).


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High and Late Medieval Europe (allowing for the success in England of the Franciscan

nominalism-voluntarism of Roger Bacon and William of Ockham), clarifying Aquinass

position on these matters could be highly instructive to understanding what changed and

what remained in the advent of modernity.

For Aquinas, the right to property begins with the providence of God, who has

directed certain things to the sustenance of mans body. For this reason man has

a natural dominion over things, as regards the power to make use of them. Ownership

itself is not evil; rather, the rich man is reproved for deeming external things to belong

to him principally, as though he had not received them from another, namely from

God.25

Property "is necessary to human life for two reasons: Every man is more

careful to procure what is for himself alone than that which is common to many or to all,

and human affairs are conducted in more orderly fashion if each man is charged with

taking care of some particular thing himself, whereas there would be confusion if

everyone had to look after any one thing indeterminately.26

However, he insists, Man

ought to possess external things, not as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is

ready to communicate them to others in their need.27

This brings to mind Charles Taylors helpful distinction between atomists and

holists, and between individualists and collectiviststhe former spectrum divides

thinkers over the attention given to individuals in deliberation about social goods, while

the latter divides thinkers over the relative importance given to individual freedom or to

25Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II.II. Q. 66 a.1 rep. 2. Trans. R.J. Batten. Cambridge

University Press: 2006.26 Ibid., 2a27 Ibid.


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the realization of the common good.28

Now, a peculiar dimension of modern deliberation

about property and politics is the widespread perception (certainly present in Locke) that

to endorse private property necessarily commits you to an individualist system of

production and exchange, as though the simple distinction between his and hers implies a

metaphysical commitment to a society of atomized consumers. Such was certainly the

position of Marx, and before him, Rousseau, who wrote in the Second Discourse,

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himselfof saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him,

was the real founder of civil society. Humanity would have been sparedinfinite crimes, wars, homicides, murders, if only someone had ripped up

the fences or filled in the ditches and said, "Do not listen to thispretender!29

Aquinas, however, seems to have occupied, not merely a middle position between

Locke and Marx, but rather separate world of thought, which establishes, as John

Milbank has argued, a property right of free procuration and disposal whose final

justification was still ususby society in general.30

It is possible, argues Taylor, to be a

holist individualist, to recognize the social embedding of human agents, but at the

same time prize liberty and individual differences very highly.31 This is the approach of

Aquinas, who was profoundly cognizant of the importance of individual virtue, desires,

and will in understanding and shaping a healthy society, but whose individualism was

nonetheless saturated by the overall orientation of each life, family, and regime toward

the realization of the common good in charity.

28 Taylor, Charles. Cross Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate.Debates in

Contemporary Political Philosophy. Eds. Derek Matravers and Jon Pike.

Routledge: New York, 2003 (195-196).29

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Discourses. Trans. G.D.H. Cole. J.M. Dent &Sons: London, 1920. (207).

30Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory. Blackwell: Cambridge, MA, 1990. (13)

31Taylor, Charles. Cross Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate.Debates in

Contemporary Political Philosophy. Eds. Derek Matravers and Jon Pike.

Routledge: New York, 2003 (p. 196).


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As Dyer observed, this Thomist ethic was in great measure embodied in the three-

field system of agriculture that prevailed after the ninth century, which embedded

individual property within a broader context of communal control, much of which was

born of economic necessity, but which was nonetheless defined in terms of Christian

charity and an Aristotelian emphasis upon just distribution. And though we often

associate feudal tenure with an exacting and oppressive oligarchy, Dyer suggests, The

estate was not geared to squeezing the land and its people with any great intensity. The

food rents represented a tiny fraction of the produce of the areas of the land in the

estate.

32

He insists that we not think of a feudal society as one in which everything from

land to the serfs very self was owned by his lord, for everyone was a tenanteven

the magnates [the great lords] held their honours, grants of land centered on a castle and

often a monastery, of the king.33 On this basis, he wonders, Can words like property

and ownership be applied in a feudal world where society functioned on the principle that

land was held in exchange for service?34

Likewise, Helen Cam, inLiberties and Communities in Medieval England, has

argued, Free consent, in theory at least, underlay the relationship of lord and vassalIn

the day to day concerns of the fief and the honour and the manor, consultation and

discussion between lord and man was the normal and indispensable procedure.35

Campbell concurs: At no point in the middle ages was [land] owned exclusive of the

rights of othersUnder feudal tenure, all land was ultimately held from the king in return

32Dyer, Christopher. Making a Living in the Middle Ages. Yale University Press: New Haven, CT,

2002 (p. 23).33

Ibid. 10734

Ibid.35 Cam, Helen.Liberties and Communities in Medieval England. Barnes and Noble Books: New

York, 1963 (xii).


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for homage and service.36

The duties accompanying land use were often military, or in

the case of ecclesiastical tenants, prayers and charity. The legion of lesser

freeholders held their land by socage, which was the tenure of fixed rents.37

Not only was medieval English agriculture oriented in some measure to the

pursuit of a common good; as John Bossy relates in his Christianity in the West, 1400-

1700, this was in important respects a Christian culture, indeed, one whose very ideas

about the nature and good of society were largely constituted by the Christian ideals of

communal obligation and universal charity. The ideal of charity was formalized in a

number of ways, whether in ritual public salutations,

38

in the spiritual kinship of

godparenthood (which created a bar to marriage between all those whom it related),39

or in the enormously popular fraternal societies, whose members may have numbered a

tenth of the adult population.40 As late as 1581, William Stafford, a courtier and spy for

the French, could recapitulate this traditional ethic of charity at the opening of a dialogue

criticizing the enclosure movement:

As learned men have remembered, saying, we be not borne onely to ourselves, but partely to the use of our Countrey, of our Parentes, of our

Kinssfolkes, and partly of our Friendes and Neyghboures; and therefore,all good virtues are graffed in us naturally, whose effects be to doe good to

other, wherein we shewe forth the Image of God and man, whose propertyis ever to doe good to other, and to distribute his goodness abroad, lyke no

Nygarde nor envyous of any.41

36Campbell, Bruce. The land.A Social History of England 1200-1500. Ed. Rosemary Horrox.

Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006 (195).37

Ibid.38

Bossy, John. Christianity in the West, 1400-1700. Oxford University Press, 1985 (57).39

Ibid. 1540

Ibid. 5841 Stafford, William. Compendious or briefe Examination of certayne ordinary Complaints (1581).

Ed. Frederick J. Furnivall. N. Trubner & Co.: London, 1876 (15).


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avarice) to elevating the volume and venom of popular invective and social stigma

against the concupiscent sins, particularly those of a sexual nature.46 For Bossy, this is

indicative of the general decline of the Church from the chief mediator of a particular

social ethic ordered around the virtue of charity, to an increasingly private institution

concerned with sins of a personal nature.47

This illustrates that the logic of enclosure

was in no way isolated to agriculture (e.g., there was no Marxist base of cultural

emanation), but rather was a varied and halting instantiation of a new way of conceiving

the relations between individuals, society, and their obligations to tradition and history. If

this trend was initially most violent and dramatic in the realm of agriculture, it was no

less apparent in otherseemingly unrelatedvenues. And to describe this marginalizing

of the Church is in some ways negatively to describe the encroachments and expansion of

the enclosure movements, and the rise of a recognizably modern vision of the human

person and of society.

Nonetheless, Taylor cautions, we should not simply cast the Church as the victim

of absolutists and Whigs, for in some measure at least the emergence of modernity was

predicated on the growing lay dissatisfaction with their spiritual and social status: he

writes of "movements of lay people in the late twelfth century crying out for a new mode

of apostolic existence within the world.48

This cry began a restless movement within the

Church as a whole, towards a new emphasis on individual salvation and on the

individual's participation in Christ's suffering (think of Francis's stigmata).49 John

Milbank has suggested something similar: It was the increasing failure of the Church to

46Ibid. 41

47Ibid. 42

48 Taylor, Charles.A Secular Age. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2007 (93).49 Ibid.


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be the Church, to preserve the rule of the Gospel in the monasteries, and somehow to

extend this to laity [] which created a moral vacuum which the regnum could not easily

fill, because ideals of apurely politicalvirtue had been half-obliterated by Christianity.50

The Enclosure Controversies as Social Revolution

There is a venerable history, already implicit in Locke (see below), and clearly evident in

Adam Smith, of narrating the rise of the modern market economy as inevitable, natural,

and seamless. For instance, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith argues:

In the midst of all the exactions of government, this capital has beensilently and gradually accumulated by the private frugality and good

conduct of individuals, by their universal, continual, and uninterruptedeffort to better their own condition. It is this effort, protected by law and

allowed by liberty to exert itself in the manner that is most advantageous,which has maintained the progress of England towards opulence and

improvement.51

Both authors conspicuously fail to acknowledge that the positive emergence of the

liberal, market-based social order was in great measure premised on (or at least, preceded

by) a social transformation exemplified in new economic modes centered on enclosed,

privatized agriculture, and the devotion of consolidated, formerly arable land to

grazing.

Strangely, a usefulif vastly over-ambitiouscorrective to Locke in this regard

is Karl Marx. Of course, Marxs more outrageous theorieshis facile acceptance of the

Malthusian iron law of wages, his bizarre privileging of the means of production as

the basis for all culture, his deluded proposal that an historical dialectic would inevitably

propel mankind into communist blisshave been demolished and beaten under foot so

50Milbank, John. Theology and Social Theory. Blackwell: Cambridge, MA, 1990 (18).

51 Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations (1776). Bantam Classics: New York, 2003. (II.3,

p. 349).


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often that scarcely more than a fine powder remains of them, drifting about indistinctly in

the winds of time. However, as regards certain historical observations from which he

derived his theories, Marx seems to have been largely correct, and the liberal

democratsand Adam Smith in particularwhom he opposed in some respects the

proponents of an ideological fantasy.

Marx opens the second volume of his Capitalwith a long discussion of primitive

accumulation, a gruesome (and at times embellished) re-telling of Englands enclosure

controversies. The primitive accumulation, he writes, plays approximately the same

role in political economy as original sin does in theology

52

:

Long ago, there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, the intelligent,and above all frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance,

and more, in riotous living [] The former accumulated wealth, and thelatter sort finally had nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this

original sin dates the poverty of the great majority.53

Marx suggests that the rise of the market economy in England rested less on the

inexorable and imperceptible progress of merited accumulation (though he was wrong to

assert that this did not occur), and more on conquest, enslavement, robbery,

murder.54

He emphasizes, The economic structure of capitalist society has grown out of

the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the

elements of the former.55

The engine driving this change was the great feudal lords []

driving the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal title as the

lords themselves, and the direct impulse for these evictions was the rise in the price

52Marx, Karl. Capital. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Random House: New York, 1977 (II.1.26).

53Ibid.

54 Marx, Karl. Capital. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Random House: New York, 1977 (II.1.26).55 Ibid.


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of wool.56

Further, in the mid-sixteenth century the process of enclosure saw a

tremendous spike with colossal spoliation of the church property during the formation

of the Church of England.57

Legislation against pauperism began in the late fifteenth

century, under Henry VII, and including whipping and imprisonment for sturdy

vagabonds.58

Bruce Campbell suggests, Possibly only a third of the land [of England]

remained subject to common rights by 1500. Seemingly, private and piecemeal enclosure

had already made great progress, a good deal of it consequent upon the voluntary or

forced desertion of settlement.

59

H.C. Darby, whose sympathies are by no means

traditionalist (he noted that only the enclosing great landowners produced experiment

and innovation, while the yeomen and peasant farmers remained stubborn

conservatives"60), offers a rather different perspective, however: In the midlands of

England, however, there had been comparatively little earlier enclosure; and

consequently it was this area that was more particularly affected by seventeenth-century

changes.61

He argues, in fact, that likely one-half of the arable land of England in 1700

was cultivated on the traditional open-field system.62

In The Agrarian Problem, Tawney suggests that, an observer of agrarian

conditions living about the year 1500 would have recognized two determined trends: the

the growth of prosperity among the small cultivators in tandem with the gradual

56 Ibid. II.I.2757

Ibid.58

Ibid. II.1.2959

Campbell, Bruce. The land.A Social History of England 1200-1500. Ed. Rosemary Horrox.Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006 (195).

60Darby, H.C. An Historical Geography of England before A.D. 1800. Cambridge University

Press: 1951 (385).61 Ibid. 40162 Ibid. 469


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consolidation of holdings, and even increasing individualism in the methods of

agriculture.63 Indeed, Rodney Stark has numbered the development of the three-field

system in the eighth century as a crucial methodological advance that allowed most

Europeans [] to eat far better than had the common people anywhere, ever.64

As the

three-field system of agriculture was a contingent innovation, so too it could have been

displaced by new methods without sparking a social revolution.

This point is crucial, for surely there was never an exercise so blindly and

stubbornly academic as the attempt trace some necessary relationship between

metaphysical commitments and the details of economic order. Metaphysical

commitments delimit a possible range of economic arrangements (few would contest that

chattel slavery is an impermissible practice for Christians), with a great measure of

variation and transformation within that range. The great question at the outset of the

sixteenth century then was to what degree a social order founded on a common

commitment to Christian charity could admit of individual expression, choice, freedom.

Unfortunately, this question increasingly was to become a mere What if? of

history, for the sixteenth century witnessed the advent of a social revolution, which was

certainly consequent upon a host of (likely innumerable) factors: individualist pietism,

the growth of the towns as economic centers, and perhaps even the growth of free

holding.65

The chains of historical causation are always of necessity shrouded somewhat

in mystery, and in many cases we must settle for observing a temporal correlation.

63Tawney, R.H. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. Longmans, Green and Co., 1912

(178).64

Stark, Rodney. Gods Battalions. HarperOne: New York, 2009 (p. 70).65

Cf. Anthony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions, p. 8: The realities of sixteenth-century life

increasingly disturbed the traditional theory of a harmonious and static social order. The flood of monastic,

chantry and crown lands produced an open and speculative land market. The growth of the London and

provincial food markets, galloping inflation and increased commercial activity and litigation offered

exceptional opportunities for social mobility in Tudor England.


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However, Tawney insists that we must append to the above list of causesneither as

necessary or sufficient, but rather as inescapably prominentthe concentration of

landed property and the development of new relationships between landlord and tenant

[] imposed rapidly and with a high hand from without.66

This economic revolution

has very little resemblance to [high medieval] enclosure:

It is carried out by great men, not by small. It proceeds wholesale, notpiecemeal. It does not consist in many little cultivators rearranging their

holdings by purchase, or sale, or agreement, but in one great proprietor orhis agent consolidating small holdings into great estates.

67

Tawney observes that the debate is muddled somewhat by the various meanings

attaching to "enclosure" in different periods: in the High Middle Ages, "enclosure" most

often referred to isolated disputes between lords of manor over property boundaries, or

piecemeal arrangements to divide land among tenants. The divisions implicated in these

arrangements were more often "vertical" (e.g. between manors, with a lord and his

tenants arrayed together against a separate settlement), while those of the sixteenth

century were more often "horizontal" (along class lines, in a struggle between lords and

peasants in general).68

Daunton provides an excellent summary of the process of enclosure in its broad

outlines, which involved three distinct actionsundertaken at the same time or

separately.69

First was the consolidation of properties, bringing together scattered strips

in the open fields; second was the abolition of coincidental use-rights and the substition

of landholding in severalty, that is in individual or unshared tenure; third was


(179-80).67

Ibid. 18068

Ibid. 18169 Daunton, Martin J.Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700-

1850. Oxford University Press, 1995 (100).


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enclosure in a physical sense, by creating hedges or fences around the holding and

subdividing it into individual fields.70 Further, there were three distinct movements

within enclosure, each with a distinct actor, and a unique spirit: first, piecemeal enclosure

through the gradual cooperation of the inhabitants of a village; second, that carried out

aggressively, by lords and landowners; and, beginning in the seventeenth century,

through 5,265 Acts of Parliament.71

Daunton is careful to emphasize the broad range of motives that could result in

enclosure: at times, particularly during the late Middle Ages, the change occurred

gradually, with common fields existing alongside private holdings for some time; in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it often occurred in a sweeping effort by Parliament

to convert Englands many wastes and fens into habitable land; but in the sixteenth and

seventeenth, enclosure was often a calculated move on behalf of the lord to convert

arable to grazing land.72

According to Tawney, "What we meet in our period is [] a general movement

spreading across England from Berkshire in the South to Norfolk and Lincoln in the

Northeast, and affecting especially the corn-growing counties of the Midlands.73

This

movement generally meant a great extension of pasture-farming, and particularly a rise

in the husbanding of sheep.74

Darby acknowledges the significance of ill-dealing in this

period: The enclosure by great landowners of commons and wastes had also begun and

there were many disorders on this account, as for example at Enfield in 1589 where

70Ibid.

71Ibid. 100-101

72Ibid. 102


(182).74 Ibid. 182


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about 90 acres had been filched from the commoners, and in Westminster in 1592.75

Enclosure, writes the more sympathetic Keith Wrightson inEnglish Society, 1580-1680,

was frequently undertaken after agreement between a landlord and his leading tenants,

while in general those tenants whose rights were affected were compensated76

Nevertheless, he acknowledges, all enclosure had the effect of extinguishing common

rights, the importance of which to small tenants and cottagers might be incalculable.

Where extensive commons were lost, or where the number of agricultural holdings in a

reorganized manor was reduced, the improvement could constitute a disaster to

many.

77

Most importantly, Wrightson acknowledges that, even where violence did not

prevail, enclosure was characterized by a rather fundamental opposition of interests: The

difficulty, as one report on enclosure put it in 1607, was that ofreconcilingconflicting

interests in such a way that the poor man shall be satisfied in his end: habitation; and the

gentleman not hindered in his desire: improvement.78

As well, Tawney illustrates nicely the propensity of new social forms and

economic possibilities (imaginaries in Taylors sense) to migrate into regions

dominated by older conceptions, upon which the new and old hybridize, one influencing

the other: rich merchant families [learn] how to make a display as a landed proprietor

and a Justice of the Peace, the old-fashioned landlord how to cut down expenses and

squeeze the utmost farthing out of his property in the best City manner.79

The rise of the

mercantile boroughwhose exemplar ever was Londonoffered enticing new


Press: 1951 (364-365).76

Wrightson, Keith.English Society 1580-1680. Routledge: New York, 2002.77

Ibid.78

Ibid.79 Tawney, R.H. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. Longmans, Green and Co., 1912

(188).


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possibilities, not only in terms of means of achieving wealth, but in ways of articulating

social roles and relations. The nouveau riche do what the wealthy English have always

done, and seek status in land, even as the country lords begin to think less like feudal

barons and more like clever merchants. Thus, from two directions, we witness a

transition from the medival conception of land as the basis of political functions and

obligations to the modern view of it as an income-yielding investment.80

The rise of enclosure required a new conception of social well-being, one that was

at once more collectivist and more individualist than the medieval conception: whereas

the 1235 Statute of Merton gave lords the right to enclose on common wasteland so long

as it left sufficient land for their tenants cultivation and grazing needs, by the sixteenth

century, writes Darby, many writers argued that enclosures were not disadvantageous

because, even if the rural population were displaced, work could always be found in the

towns; and also the supply of raw wool to the woollen industry would be increased.81

Barrington Moore offers a similar analysis of the changing social landscape: Under the

pressure of circumstances, the medieval notion of judging economic actions according to

their contribution to the health of the social organism began to collapse, and scattered

groups of Englishmen living in the countryside began to accept self-interest and

economic freedom as the natural basis of human society.82

The former conceived of the

common good in terms of the households ability to sustain itself as flourishing members

of the community; the latter, by contrast, aggregated individual profit into a sum of

80Ibid. 189


Press: 1951 (409).82Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Beacon Press: Boston, 1966

(8).


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social good. This is rather like the difference in accounting for national welfare either

in terms of per capita income or gross domestic product.

A further contributing factor that contributed to and accelerated social change was

the revolution that sent commodity prices, and with them rents, soaring. The huge

increase in the amount of silver bullion available in Europe (partly due to the waves of

treasure carried back from the New World by the Spanish and the Portuguese, and partly

by the silver-copper mining boom in Central Europe, beginning in the 1460s83

), led to

tremendous debasement of the English currency (beginning, at least, under Henry VIII)

and rising prices throughout the country, which inevitably meant rising rents, and a

greater emphasis upon the commercial exploitation of property.

In 1601, Gerard de Malynes offered a similar analysis in his Treatise of the

Canker of England's Commonwealth:

Every man knoweth, that by reason of the base money coined in the end of

the most victorious reign of King Henry VIII. all the forrain commoditieswere sold dearer, which made afterwards the commodities of the realm to

rise at the farmers' and tenants' hands, and therefore gentlemen did raisethe rents of their lands and take farms themselves and made inclosures.

84

Tawney emphasizes that the modern reader, for whom dramatic peaks and

valleys in the price of necessary goods are simply part of life within the market, can

hardly grasp the anarchy which it tended to produce in a world where values, especially

land values, were objective realities which had stood unaltered for centuries together.85

83Munro, James. The Monetary Origins of the Price Revolution: South German Silver Mining,

Merchant-Banking,and Venetian Commerce, 1470-1540. Department of Economics and Institute forPolicy Analysis, Working Paper No. 8 (2003). http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/ecipa/archive/UT-ECIPA-MUNRO-99-02.pdf. Accessed 11/10/2009. (p. 6)

84Quoted in Tawney, R.H. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. Longmans, Green and

Co., 1912 (199).85Tawney, R.H. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. Longmans, Green and Co., 1912

(200).


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To some extent, what it means is that much enclosure occurred as a bewildered reaction

to Englands suddenly being thrust into the much larger social world carved out by

escalating international trade, a new realm in which production in Germany could have

unprecedented effects upon consumption in England. There is no perfectly culpable party

in the enclosure controversies, for even the gentry were beset to some degree by forces

beyond their control. As in any great social transformation, there are degrees of

responsibility, and if the landowners bear the lions share, even that blame is not without

qualification.

Riots, Rebellions, Revolts: Resistance to Enclosure

Tawney emphasizes that even if the actual geographic extent of enclosure were limited,

that in no way necessarily delimits its social importance: The drifting away of one tenant

from each of fifty manors, and the eviction of fifty tenants from one manor, yield

precisely the same statistical results (264): the difference between them is in the visible

social disruption and turmoil they cause. In Tudor Rebellions, Anthony Fletcher and

Diarmaid MacCulloch document some of the social consequences of enclosure. They

write, Sixteen cases of popular rioting and unrest over enclosure in the north reached the

courts in the period 1528-47, while, the York commons were involved in enclosure

riots in 1534, 1536 and 1546.86

Of course, some incidents stand out: Kett's rebellion,

launched in Norwich in 1549, began as an enclosure riot. Because it found a determined

leader it became a six-week demonstration in defiance of the county.87

The final article

of Ketts Demands, includes Kett's requestthat the wealthier gentry should not be

86Fletcher, Anthony and MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Tudor Rebellions, 5th ed. Pearson Education:

Edinburgh, 2008 (43).87Ibid. 70


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allowed to 'graze nor fede eny bullocks or shepe . . . but only for the provicion of his

howse.88 For Fletcher, this is indicative of [Ketts] determination to challenge the

whole practice of large scale sheepfarming in the county, as well as the tenurial system

which made it possible.89

The most violent resistance to enclosure generally came from Catholics or low-

church radicals; members of these groups were increasingly excluded from the emerging

order, in which both church and agriculture were increasingly regimented and uniform

(we might understand uniform quite literally here, as in Acts of Uniformity). For

instance, the Pontefract Articles, which were authored in 1536 by a group of rioting

peasants in Yorkshire, combine reactionary Catholicism and anti-enclosure sentiments:

Article Two demanded to have the supreme head of the church touching cure animarum

to restored unto the see of Rome, while Article Nine proposed, for inclosors and

intacks to [be] put in execution, and that all intaks inclosors to be pulled down except

mountains, forest and parkes.90

Ketts Demands also includes a rejection of the

Church of Englands authority: We pray that prests or vicars that be not able to preche

and sett forth the woorde of god to hys parisheners may be thereby putt from hys

benyfice, and the parisheners there to chose an other or else the pateron or lord of the

towne.91

The most famous Catholic critic of enclosure is of course the martyred Thomas

More, a brilliant canon lawyer and Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII. In his masterwork,

Utopia (1516), his wanderer Raphael Nonsenso, newly returned from his journeys to

88Quoted in Fletcher, 71.

89Ibid. 71

90 Quoted in Fletcher, 127-128.91 Quoted in Fletcher, 157.


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Oriental paradises, excoriates the (apparently rampant) practice of forcible enclosure. His

remarks bear a lengthy quotation:

But thats not the only thing that compels people to steal. There are other

factors at work which must, I think, be peculiar to your country. Andwhat are they? asked the Cardinal. Sheep, I told him. These placidcreatures, which used to require so little food, have now apparently

developed a raging appetite, and turned into man-eaters. To put it moreplainly, in those parts of the kingdom where the finest, and so the most

expensive wool is produced, the nobles and gentlemen, not to mentionseveral saintly abbots, have grown dissatisfied with the income that their

predecessors got out of their estates. Theyre no longer content to leadlazy, comfortable lives, which do no good to societythey must actively

do it harm, by enclosing all the land they can for pasture, and leaving nonefor cultivation. Theyre even tearing down houses, and demolishing whole

townsexcept, of course, for the churches, which they preserve for use assheepfolds [] turning every scrap of farmland into a wilderness92

In 1581, the aforementioned drama by William Stafford criticized the practice of

enclosure. In the opening pages, the Husbandman laments, These Inclosures doe undoe

us all; for they make us to pay dearer for our lande that we occupy, & causes that we can

have no lande in manner for our money to put to Tyllage, all is taken up Compbynt of

Inclosures by for Pasture ; for Pasture eyther for Sheepe, or for Grasinge of Cattle.93

Interestingly, he espouses the common (and almost certainly mistaken) view that

enclosure was the cause of rising prices, rather than vice versa. He continues, By these

Inclosures many doe lacke livings, and be ydle.94

The Artificer agrees, and relates that

the great rise in prices has prevented him from keeping apprentices, and has even led to

great poverty and desolation in Cityes which were heretofore well inhabited and

wealthy.95 Nonetheless, the Kinight defends himself, saying, Many of us are

92More, Thomas. Utopia. Trans. Paul Turner. Penguin Classics: New York, 2003 (p. 25).

93Stafford, William. Compendious or briefe Examination of certayne ordinary Complaints (1581).

Ed. Frederick J. Furnivall. N. Trubner & Co.: London, 1876 (15).94 Ibid. 1695 Ibid.


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enforcedto purchase some Farme of other mens landes, and to store it with sheepe, or

some other cattell, to help make up the decay of our revenewes, and to maintain our oulde

estate.96

Marking perhaps the far extreme of radical Protestant resistance were Gerard

Winstanley and his Diggers, principally composed of former Puritan revolutionaries in

Cromwells army. In 1652, as the Protectorate proved increasingly authoritarian, and the

rule of Parliament rapidly disintegrated into the rule of Cromwell, Winstanley launched a

short-lived movement to demand a radical redistribution of land, which in his judgment

was the only way to complete the Revolution. As he insisted in hisLaw of Freedom,

In parishes where commons lie, the rich Norman freeholders, or the new(more covetous) gentry, over-stock the commons with sheep and cattle; so

that inferior tenants and poor labourers can hardly keep a cow, but halfstarve her. So that the poor are kept poor still, and the common freedom of

the earth is kept from them, and the poor have no more relief than they hadwhen the king (or conqueror) was in power.

97

Winstanleys program relied on a largely mythical account of English history, positing a

period of communistic bliss that was rudely ended by the eleventh century Norman

Conquest, which issued in a continuous regime of agrarian oppression. Winstanley thus

links sixteenth and seventeenth century political discourse: the former was the domain of

fiery indictments of the economic revolution occurring all around, while the latter

consists largely in attempts to impose some order upon the chaos that had beset English

history by deploying partisan mythologies. For, as Barrington Moore has argued, The

social struggles that erupted in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century have

96Ibid. 19

97 Winstanley, George. The Law of Freedom and Other Writings. Ed. Christopher Hill.

Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006 (281).


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their origins in a complicated process of change that began several centuries earlier.98

His diagnosis recalls that of Marx: A modern and secular society was slowly pushing its

way up through the vigorous and much tangled overgrowth of the feudal and

ecclesiastical order.99

The origins of seventeenth century conflict lay in fact in the fifteenth century

Wars of the Roses, which, argues Moore, were for the landed aristocracy a social rather

than a natural catastrophe [] that severely weakened them, and accelerated the rise of

royal absolutism.100

They broke the power of the great noble houses, and, for a time,

subordinated both the Lords and the Commons to an increasingly absolutist monarch

under the Tudors. However, through the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, the

King was increasingly dependent upon the Commons, which, though without any power

to pass legislation, had tremendous political clout because of the gentrys crucial role in

collecting tax revenue from the countryside. Indeed, J.G.A. Pocock characterized the

origin of the Commons [] as an aspect of the transition from a feudal to a freeholding

society.101

Traditionally, the Lords was composed of the Peers Spiritualuntil the

suppression of the monasteries in 1539, abbots, priors, bishops, and archbishops;

afterward, the bishops and archbishops aloneand the Peers Temporal, the great landed

dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons. The Commons, by contrast, was

composed of the landed gentryminor nobility a step above yeoman by virtue of the

98Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Beacon Press: Boston, 1966

(4).99

Ibid.100

Ibid. 5-6101Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge University Press:

1957 (115).


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leisure and wealth they acquired by leasing land to tenantsand the urban burgesses;

both the gentry and burgesses were elected (by other men of property) from each county

or borough to represent the interests of their communities in London, and as Moore

writes, this large and somewhat diffuse body below the peerage and above the

yeomanry, in other words, the gentry was the main rural body whose more enterprising

members adapted successfully to the methods of improved agriculture.102

In the sixteenth century, argues Moore, Despite some help, now and then, from

the monarchy, the dike, the social institutions that restrained new economic modes,

began to crumble. In the language of the day, sheep ate men.

103

But as great as the

earlier changes were, the waters the broke through in the sixteenth were but a trickle

compared to the rush that came after the Civil War had destroyed the dike.104

The

conflict that overwhelmed seventeenth century England fundamentally opposed the new

order, represented by the mercantile interests and the Country party, the powerful

landholders who for generations had profited from and advanced the progress of

improved agriculture, including enclosure, and the old order, of the King and the House

of Lords.

Nonetheless, in the Civil War, class alignments were far from clear105: the

regicide of Charles I seems to have been inspired principally by the strata below the

gentry, very likely urban journeymen and peasants106

, while Charles I did his very best

to court the gentry, and there is evidence that he succeeded on a very wide scale;

102Moore, Barrington. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Beacon Press: Boston, 1966

(15).103

Ibid. 12104

Ibid.105Ibid. 17106 Ibid 16


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Moore explains this uneasiness thus: Despite Stuart opposition to enclosures, the support

of many wealthy gentry for the royal cause is scarcely surprising. One would scarcely

expect men of substance to have an easy conscience about kicking over two of the main

props, king and church, that supported the social order.107

On the other hand, cautions Moore, the policy of the leaders of the rebellion

was clear and straightforward.108

The drawn from the landed elite, these rebels opposed

interference with the landlords property rights on the part of the king and on the part of

the radicals from the lower orders. In July 1641, the Long Parliament abolished the Star

Chamber, the main royal weapon against enclosing landlords.

109

In hisAncient Constitution and the Feudal Law, J.G.A. Pocock describes a

peculiar feature of seventeenth century political discourse, common to absolutists and

Parliamentarians alike: the belief that the common law, and with it the constitution, had

always been exactly what they were now, that they were immemorial [] This is the

doctrine or myth of the ancient constitution, which bulked so large in the political thought

of the seventeenth century.110

The strange fate of history seventeenth century English

political discourse marks something of a halfway point between the diachronic politics of

the Middle Ages, and the a-historical, subjective politics of the eighteenth century. That

is, while medieval arguments about politics were almost always arguments about

historya fact most evident in the succession dispute, the archetypal form of medieval

politicking, in which the justice of a political outcome is wholly dependent on the

strength of an historical claimthe common lawyers appealed to history not, in the

107Ibid. 17

108Ibid.

109Ibid.

110Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge University Press:

1957 (36).


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manner of their antecedents, as a living tradition, continuity with which required the

exercise of prudence and justice, but rather as a seamless monolith wholly circumscribed

by the intellect. Paradoxically, immemorial custom represents an a-historical history, a

mythical pre-history by definition hidden from any probing gaze. And Pocock observes,

as the [seventeenth] century progressed assertions that the law was immemorial tended

to be replaced by assertions that parliament, and especially a house of commons

representing the property owners, was immemorial.111

Pocock cites Edward Coke (1552-1634) as an exemplar of this line of thought.

Coke was a member of the lesser gentry, a Parliamentarian, and, for three years under

James I, Lord Chief Justice of England. However, his repeated assertion of the supremacy

of the common law over the authority of the sovereign led to Jamess de-frocking him in

1616. As Pocock describes it, "By Coke's time the increasing activity of a nearly

sovereign monarchy had made it seem to most common lawyers that if a right was to be

rooted in custom and rendered independent of the sovereign's interference, it must be

shown to be immemorial in the full sense of 'traceable to no original act of

foundation'"112

, because such a foundation would be indicative of a founding, and so

would make the custom in fact written law, originating from a king. "Once men had

appealed to the immemorial, the laws must be either absolutely immemorial or subject to

an absolute sovereign -- there seems to have been no idea of a middle way.113

This disintegration of history into polemical myth is a symptom of the breakdown

of English society during the revolution in landholding, commodity prices, trade, and

religion that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As England increasingly

111Ibid. 49

112Ibid. 37113 Ibid. 52


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became a society of entrenched and paranoid factionswith royalists, the gentry, and the

landless poor all equally suspicious of one anotherappeals to a common history

increasingly declined with respect to appeals to mythical histories that privileged the

position of a particular social group. England had become a stranger to herself.

Perhaps the most incisive contemporary diagnosis of this condition was set down

in the opening of Shakespeares Coriolanus, which addresses the chaos that ensues when

a society loses its sense of the common good. The play opens with a riotous crowd of

starving plebeians (the disenfranchised, landless poor of Rome), determined to kill the

noble Caius Martius and have corn at our own prices (I.1.10), for the leanness that

afflicts us [] is as an inventory to particularize their abundance; our sufferance is a gain

to them (I.1.19-21). Indeed, the First Citizen defies Menenius Agrippa, a sort of press

secretary for the patricians, with this accusation:

[The nobles] suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed withgrain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any

wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercingstatutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor (I.1.79-83).

Shakespeare borrowed the tale ofCoriolanus from PlutarchsLives, and in many

respects the Bard simply recapitulates the initial telling. However, he makes a telling

deviation in his placement of Meneniuss Fable of Belly, with which he seeks to calm

the rioting plebeians. In Plutarch, the plebeians riot twice: first regarding their anger at

the practice of moneylenders, and second regarding a famine that ensued because of a

great scarcity of grain.114 In his essay, Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus,James

Holstun argues, While the fable of the belly serves quite well in Plutarch as an argument

against a plebeian rebellion inspired by usury, it is an almost contemptuously

114 Plutarch.Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans Vol. IV. Trans. Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb

Classical Library: 1916 (130, 146).


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inappropriate choice for an argument against a rebellion of plebeians starved by

aristocratic hoarding.115 Indeed, in Plutarch, Menenius offers what we might consider an

early apology for trickle-down economics, insisting that, though the rich seem to

accumulate all wealth, they pass on its benefits in manifold ways through lending.

However, as appropriated by Shakespeare, the metaphor takes on a rather sickening

irony: Menenius reminds the plebes that the stomach, the storehouse of the body,

sends [food] through the rivers of your blood (I.1.137-39). However, that is precisely

the disputed fact! Note that Menenius never makes the simple claim that would resolve

the issue: I am starving too! I have no food, either!

Now, though the corn riot is of course taken up from Plutarch, Shakespeare could

not have employed it as a dramatic device without a full awareness of the resonances to

the many riots in response to grain shortages under both Elizabeth and James I: as Phillip

Brockbank has argued, Food shortages in the towns and peasant discontents in the

country were commonplace [] owing to the displacement of tillage by pasture and to

the widespread enclosure of common land.116

There is widespread agreement that

Coriolanus is in some respects a political allegory of contemporary discord, whether in

the Midland Revolt of 1607, or the Oxfordshire Rebellion of 1596.

The Midland Revolt boiled across Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, and

Leicestershire beginning in April 1607, drawing thousands of angry peasants into

effortssometimes with the cover of darkness, sometimes in furious marches in

daylightto tear down the numerous enclosures that had transformed their way of life. In

115Holstun, James. Tragic Superfluity in Coriolanus.ELHVol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn, 1983), p.

487.116Brockbank, Philip. The Tragedy of Coriolanus. Coriolanus. Penguin Books: New York, 1976

(26).


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June, matters came to head at Newton in Northamptonshire, when private forces raised

by the local gentry clashed with peasant rioters; nearly 50 were killed, and the leaders

were handed and quartered.117

The Oxfordshire Rebellion began when the harvest failed, and a carpenter and a

miller, named Bartholomew Steer and Richard Bradshaw respectively, spoke to [their]

neighbors of rebellion, pulling down enclosures, breaking open rich mens barns, and a

merrier world to come.118 As Allen Boyer relates, when the rabble was dispersed and the

ringleaders arrested, none other than Sir Edward Coke interrogated (and, according to

some, ordered the torture of) the prisoners in London, and later had them executed (257).

Though Coke spent much of the next year prosecuting landowners who abused enclosure

and hoarded grain, his sympathies seem to have been more pragmatic than humanitarian

(indeed, we might read him as a Menenius-figure of sorts). Boyer quotes his darkly-

worded rationale for the prosecutions: It would be wrong to foster enclosures, he told

the House, God knows in these tumultuous times of what dangerous consequences it

might be.119

The crucial introductory scene establishes the dramatic tension ofCoriolanus,

which consists in the inevitable breakdown of a social order in which the two principal

classes had become irrevocably estranged. Meneniuss fable seems is so incongruous in

context because its tellerand those he representsis not truly interested in the health of

the body; his organic allegory is macabre precisely because its concern for the justice of

one part is not thought out in terms of the common good, the health and security of all.

117Cf. Gay, Edwin F. The midland revolt and the inquisitions of depopulation of 1607. Read May

19, 1904 to the Royal Historical Society (pp. 212-216).118

Boyer, Allen. Sir Edward Coke and the Elizabethan Age. Stanford University Press: Palo Alto,

CA, 2003 (p. 256).119 Ibid. 258


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When Menenius finishes, he asks, What say you tot! (I.1.144); the First Citizens wry

response is pitch perfect: It was an answer. How apply you this? (I.1.145). The Fable of

the Belly is a failure as political speech not for a poor delivery or fallacious reasoning,

but because the community it describes has only a mythical relation to the starving poor

crowding the streets.

Tradition and Individualism: The Politics of Enclosure in John Locke

In an interesting aside, Pocock remarks, "Nearly every [seventeenth century] thinker

noted for his contribution to political theory in its usual sense[] only Locke appears

to be an exception among notable writersdevoted part of his pages to discussing the

antiquity of the constitution.120

By the late seventeenth century, the notion of a common

English history binding its people to the pursuit of a common good had become virtually

unintelligible, devolved as it was to a set of counter-assertions among political factions.

In this welter, Locke found a more excellent way, a means of asserting the supremacy of

Parliament and triumphing (in the realms of theory and polemic, at least) over the

absolute monarch and the wearisome strictures of tradition. Locke's theory turned the

organic, integrated vision of a community preserving itself in time into a flattened,

"spatialized"121

matrix of individuals who band together for, suggests Taylor, "security

and prosperity.122

Again, Pocock puts it well:

120 Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge University Press:

1957 (46).121

To borrow Catherine Pickstock's epigrammatic encapsulation of the modern imagination:

During the period of early modernity [] space becomes a pseudo-eternity which, unlike genuine

eternity, is fully comprehensive to the human gaze, and yet supposedly secure from the ravages of time []

The attempt to bypass the intervention of human temporality and subjectivity [] via an apparently

unmediated apprehension of objective and given facts (After Writing, Blackwell: Cambridge, 1998

(48).122Taylor, Charles.A Secular Age. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 2007 (166).


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In Locke the ultimate guarantee against sovereign will is located inprinciples of nature and reason which lie outside history and do not change

with its changes: a fact which was to influence the English attitude to thepast. Locke's whole cast of mind led him towards a non-historical theory

of politics.123

In his political theory, Locke attempts an a-historical overcoming of the failure of history

(or rather, of the disintegration of culture); but, strangely, even Lockes abstract

liberalism relies in the end on a mythical history, and succeeds only insofar as it

marginalizes or ignores the less desirable dimensions of Britains consuming historical

dilemmas. And this rebellion against history was in great measure carried out to cut men

free from the constraints of tradition and transcendent order, to set them out upon an

equal plain, free to explore the possibilities afforded by ever-expanding production and

acquisition.

From this vantage, Lockes politics is itself a kind of enclosure movement, a

carving out of a realm of individual autonomy from the crowded domains of the

common. Or, still more, we might regard Locke not merely as a metaphorical encloser,

but as in a sense the apotheosis of the enclosure movement to his day: Locke most clearly

projected a vision of the politics of enclosure, in the service of which he cleverly

dissembled the movements true history.

Like many contemporary political writings, the Second Treatise is an explicitly

polemical work, intended, according to Locke in the Preface (added when the Treatise

was first published in 1689), to establish the throne of our great restorer, our present

King William; to make good his title, in the consent of the people.124

Locke likely

123Pocock, J.G.A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge University Press:

1957 (236).124 All references to the Second Treatise are from the 1980 Hackett edition (Indianapolis, IN). All

section numbers refer to the text of the Second Treatise.


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penned the Two Treatises shortly after his return to England into the thick of the

Exclusion Crisis (1680), in which Lockes employer, the proto-Whig Lord Shaftesbury

led a movement to prevent James, brother of then-King Charles II and himself a recently-

outed Catholic, from inheriting the throne. Locke was intimately involved in this struggle

(indeed, he had spent the prior four years in France after Parliament had launched an

investigation into the authorship of an anonymous anti-Carolingian tract likely authored

by him), which suggests that at least in part these works were polemics designed to

arouse public opinion against the growing specter of absolutist rule, and particularly to

subvert the influence of two worksPatriarcha and Freeholders Grand Inquest

written by Sir Robert Filmer in the 1640s and recently re-published by Tories

sympathetic to Charles II.125

Lockes political theory was the most cogent and innovative defense of the

Parliamentary cause offered in the seventeenth century, and as such, the most

thoroughgoing assay of the logic of enclosure to that point. The political theory outlined

in the Second Treatise seeks to establish the individuals freedom to produce and

contract, unfettered by transcendence or tradition. Political society is founded by a social

contract to secure each individuals property; Political power, Locke writes, is

a rightof making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all lesspenalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing

the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in thedefence of the common-wealth from foreign injury; and all this only for

the public good (3).

Property, however, is not narrowly understood as material belongings, but rather as life,

liberty, and estate, each of which a man possesses singularly and wholly (87).

125 Macpherson, C.B. Editors Introduction. Second Treatise of Government. Hackett:

Indianapolis, IN, 1980 (ix).


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Robert Goldwin argued that Locke does not explicitly deny the importance of

excellence or love; he simply disregards them, as they are not essential to his

explanation of the foundation of civil society,126

which is rather the low but solid

ground of self-preservation. The Second Treatise thus opens in a pre-historical state of

nature, a figurative device Locke employs to establish the fundamental dilemma of

human existence (self-preservation) and his fundamental means of solving that dilemma

(mans property in his person, and, by extension, his labor). Lockes account of the state

of nature emphasizes both the gravity of the dangers facing mans fragile existence, and

his boundless ingenuity in overcoming it.

Like Hobbes, Locke employs the state of nature to emphasize the precariousness

of mans striving for security. The state of nature is ever perched to teeter into a state of

war, in which individuals strive against one another for security in an ever-escalating

conflict. Indeed, Locke observes, as a state of war, once begun, continues [] there it is

hard to imagine any thing but a state of war (20). Mans property is consummately

insecure in such a state, for every man is both judge and executioner in cases of

wrongdoing (21). The state of nature for Locke is fundamentally astate [] of

equality, which implies in turn a state of radical individualism: men in this state are

creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages

of nature (4). Lockes promiscuously born illustrates the matter nicely: considered as

a participant in the state of nature, man is simply an individual, abstracted from ties to

kin, clan, or creed, faced with the grim prospect of ensuring his survival.

126Goldwin, Robert A., John Locke.History of Political Philosophy 3rd Ed.. Eds. Cropsey and

Strauss. University of Chicago Press: 1987 (441).


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However, this individuation is still present to some extent even in contemporary

society, though as an existential state more than a social reality. Locke insists, A child is

born a subject of no country or government (118); he cites the possibility of a child

having an English father and a French mother. Locke argues rather that subjection to a

government begins only with a persons free and rational consent (express or tacit) to its

laws (73, 119).

The state of nature is purportedly pre-political, but it bears a striking resemblance

to the chaos that ensues upon the failure of politics. Lockes account of the state of war is

compelling as an actual theory of human relations (from an historical vantage, at least)

only as a description of what happens when political orders fail or clash. In that vein, it is

telling that a central piece of evidence Locke adduces for the state of nature is its

prevalence among the warring princes of the earth.

However, the state of nature is not equivalent to a state of war, for Locke; this

distinction is crucial, for it allows him to posit a more excellent way marked out pre-

politically by the offerings of the law of nature, a process of private cultivation and

accumulation by the industry of individuals. The state of nature is the crucial foundation

of Lockes proprietary republicanism (taking republic as convertible with

commonwealth, the term employed by Locke), which establishes the ostensibly pre-

political conditions of Lockes politics.

Thus, Lockes theory of property is the defining feature of his account of the state

of nature, for it establishes the means by which a government could be erected to defend

the pre-political goods of property (extended seamlessly for Locke along a continuum of

ones existence, ones free choice and contract, and ones self-extension in ownership and


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labor). As mentioned above, the theory of property begins with as a law of nature,

obliging every man to preserve himself, and, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of

mankind (6). Locke defines this prohibition in terms of Gods ownership of men as

their creator: they are his property, whose workmanship they are (6). Suicide then, or

unnecessary killing, is a robbery of God.

Lockes formulation here is revealing in two respects: first, God himself is a

proprietor, who wields his authority on the basis of overwhelming power; he is not the

transcendent plenitude of truth, beauty, and goodness in whose being all creatures

participate. Moreover, he is certainly not the God revealed in Jesus Christ: that is, the

Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, confounding the substance but dividing the

persons. Lockes God is the God of natural theology, an infinite but as-yet-abstract force

to whose initial being might be appended the distinctives of Christian faith. This sort of

theology is important for Locke, because it allows him to posit God as a cosmic

proprietor, whose possession of his creation depends solely on his overwhelming force in

crafting and mastering it, and decisively not on the convertibility of the transcendentals in

his being. In this regard, it is suggestive that Lockes neglects to cite the second part of

Ephesians 2:10: We are Gods workmanship, created in Christ for good works.

Lockes account of property thus begins with a proprietor God whose ownership

of man issues in the principal duty of self-preservation, which in

Documents

Freedom, Tradition, and Property in Early Modernity, by Brendan Case