Customs in common, p.6
Customs in Common, page 6
The Lab’ring Poor, in spight of double Pay,
Are saucy, mutinous, and Beggarly.1
Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination Consider’d (1724), p. 80. See Christopher Hill, “Pottage for Freeborn Englishmen: Attitudes to Wage Labour in Sixteenth and Seventeenth century England”, in C. Feinstein (ed.), Socialism, Capitalism and Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1964).
The most characteristic complaint throughout the greater part of the century was as to the indiscipline of working people, their irregularity of employment, their lack of economic dependency and their social insubordination. Defoe, who was not a conventional “low wages” theorist, and who could on occasion see merit in higher wages which increased the consuming power of “manufacturers” or of “artificers”, stated the full case in his Great Law of Subordination Consider’d; or, the Insolence and Insufferable Behaviour of Servants in England duly enquir’d into (1724). He argued that through the insubordination of servants:
Husbandmen are ruin’d, the Farmers disabled, Manufacturers and Artificers plung’d, to the Destruction of Trade. . . and that no Men who, in the Course of Business, employ Numbers of the Poor, can depend upon any Contracts they make, or perform any thing they undertake, having no Law, no Power. . . to oblige the Poor to perform honestly what they are hir’d to do.
Under a stop of Trade, and a general want of Work, then they are clamorous and mutinous, run from their Families, load the Parishes with their Wives and Children. . . and. . . grow ripe for all manner of mischief, whether publick Insurrection, or private plunder.
In a Glut of Trade they grow saucy, lazy, idle and debauch’d. . . they will Work but two or three Days in the Week.
Paternalist control over the whole life of the labourer was in fact being eroded; wage assessment fell into desuetude; the mobility of labour is manifest; the vigour of eighteenth-century hiring-fairs, “statutes” or “statties”, proclaim the right of the rural (as well as urban) labourer to claim if he so wished, a change of master.1 Moreover, there is evidence (in the very refusal of labourers to submit to the work-discipline demanded of them) of the growth of a newly-won psychology of the free labourer. In one of Defoe’s moralistic anecdotes, the JP summons the cloth worker upon a complaint from his employer that his work was being neglected:
See A. Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1981); R. W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1780 (1981), pp. 71-4; Michael Roberts, “‘Waiting upon Chance’: English Hiring Fairs”, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. I (1988).
Justice. Come in Edmund, I have talk’d with your Master.
Edmund. Not my Master, and’t please your Worship, I hop I am my own Master.
Justice. Well, your Employer, Mr E —, the Clothier: will the word Employer do?
Edmund. Yes, yes, and’t please your Worship, any thing, but Master.1
Defoe, op. cit., p. 97.
This is a large change in the terms of relations: subordination is becoming (although between grossly unequal parties) negotiation.
The eighteenth century witnessed a qualitative change in labour relations whose nature is obscured if we see it only in terms of an increase in the scale and volume of manufacture and trade. This occurred, of course. But it occurred in such a way that a substantial proportion of the labour force actually became more free from discipline in their daily work, more free to choose between employers and between work and leisure, less situated in a position of dependence in their whole way of life, than they had been before or than they were to be in the first decades of the discipline of the factory and of the clock.
This was a transitory phase. One prominent feature was the loss of non-monetary usages or perquisites, or their translation into money payments. Such usages were still extraordinarily pervasive in the early eighteenth century. They favoured paternal social control because they appeared simultaneously as economic and as social relations, as relations between persons not as payments for services or things. Most evidently, to eat at one’s employer’s board, to lodge in his barn or above his workshop, was to submit to his supervision. In the great house, the servants who were dependent upon “vails” from visitors, the clothing of the mistress, the clandestine perquisites of the surplus of the larder, spent a lifetime ingratiating favours. Even the multiform perquisites within industry, increasingly being redefined as “theft”, were more likely to survive where the workers accepted them as favours and submitted to a filial dependency.
On occasion, one catches a glimpse of the extinction of a perquisite or service which must have induced a shock to paternal control out of all proportion to the economic gain to the employer. Thus when Sir Jonathan Trelawney, as Bishop of Winchester, was seeking to increase the revenue of his see, he employed as Steward one Heron, a man strongly committed to ruthless economic rationalization. Among accusations brought against Heron, in 1707, by tenants and subordinate officials of the Bishop’s Courts were that:
He breakes old Customes. . . in Minute and Small matters, which are of Small value to your Lordshipp. . . he has denyed to Allow five Shillings at Waltham to the Jury att the Court. . . to drinke your Lordshipps health, a Custome that has beene used time out of Mind. . . he has denyed your Lordshipp’s Steward and Officers a small perquisite of haveing theire horses shoo’d att Waltham According to an Antient usage which never Exceeded above Six or Seven Shillings. . . he denied your Lordshipp’s Tennants Timber for the repaire of Severall Bridges and Common pounds.
To this Heron replied, somewhat testily:
I own, I affect sometimes to Intermit those minute Customs as he calls them because I observe that your Predecessor’s favours are prescribed for against your Lordship & insisted on as Rights, & then your Lordship is not thanked for them; Besides though they are Minute, yet many Minute Expences. . . amount to a Sume at the end.1
Hants CRO, Eccles. II, 415809, E/BI2. See also Whigs and Hunters, pp. 126-30.
In such ways economic rationalization nibbled (and had long been nibbling) through the bonds of paternalism. The other leading feature of this transitional period was of course the enlargement of that sector of the economy which was independent of a client relationship to the gentry. The “subject” economy remained huge: not only the direct retainers of the great house, the chambermaids and footmen, coachmen and grooms and gardeners, the gamekeepers and laundresses, but the further concentric rings of economic clientship — the equestrian trades and luxury trades, the dressmakers and pastry cooks and vintners, the coach makers, the innkeepers and ostlers.
But the century saw a growing area of independence within which the small employers and labourers felt their client relationship to the gentry very little or not at all. These were the people whom the gentry saw as “idle and disorderly”, withdrawn from their social control; from among these — the clothing workers, urban artisans, colliers, bargees and porters, labourers and petty dealers in the food trades — the social rebels, the food or turnpike rioters, were likely to come. They retained many of the attributes commonly ascribed to “pre-industrial labour”.1 Working often in their own cottages, owning or hiring their own tools, usually working for small employers, frequently working irregular hours and at more than one job, they had escaped from the social controls of the manorial village and were not yet subject to the discipline of factory labour.
Gwyn Williams in Artisans and Sansculottes (1968) writes of “the brief, bawdy, violent, colourful, kaleidoscopic, picaresque world of pre-industrial society, when anything from a third to a half of the population lived not only on the subsistence line but outside and sometimes against the law”. That is one way of seeing a part of this population: and this is confirmed by several studies in P. Linebaugh, The London Hanged (1991). However, another part of this population should not be stereotyped as bawdy, colourful and criminal: upward revisions of the numbers engaged in industry (including rural industries) — see especially P. H. Lindert, “English Occupations, 1670-1811”, J. Econ. Hist., 40, (1980) — the rediscovery of the “cottage economy” and of an English peasantry — see David Levine, Reproducing Families (Cambridge, 1987) and below p. 176 — and the whole body of work and discussion around “proto-industrialization” have all served to emphasise the substantial and growing sector of the eighteenth-century economy independent of gentry control.
Many of their economic dealings might be with men and women little higher in the economic hierarchy than themselves. Their “shopping” was not done in emporiums but at market stalls. The poor state of the roads made necessary a multitude of local markets, at which exchanges of products between primary producers might still be unusually direct. In the 1760s,
Hard-labouring colliers, men and women of Somersetshire and Gloucestershire, travelled to divers neighbouring towns with drifts of horses. . . laden with coals. . . It was common to see such colliers lade or fill a two bushel coal sack with articles of provisions. . . of beef, mutton, large half stript beef bones, stale loaves of bread, and pieces of cheese.2
J. Mathews, Remarks on the Cause and Progress of the Scarcity and Dearness of Cattle (1797), p. 33.
Such markets and, even more, the seasonal fairs provided not only an economic but a cultural nexus, and a major centre for information and exchange of news and gossip.
In many regions, the people had not been shaken altogether from some sketchy tenure of the land. Since much industrial growth took the form, not of concentration into large units of production, but of the dispersal of petty units and of by-employments (especially spinning) there were additional resources for “independence”. This independence was for many never far from mere subsistence: a bountiful harvest might bring momentary affluence, a long wet season might throw people onto the poor rates. But it was possible for many to knit together this subsistence, from the common, from harvest and occasional manual earnings, from by-employments in the cottage, from daughters in service, from poor rates or charity. And undoubtedly some of the poor followed their own predatory economy, like “the abundance of loose, idle and disorderly persons” who were alleged, in the time of George II, to live on the margins of Enfield Chase, and who “infest the same, going in dark nights, with Axes, Saws, Bills, Carts and Horses, and in going and coming Rob honest people of their sheep, lambs and poultry. . .”1 Such persons appear again and again in criminal records, estate correspondence, pamphlet and press; they appear still, in the 1790s, in the agricultural county surveys; they cannot have been wholly a ruling-class invention.
Memorial of John Hale, Clerk of Enfield manor court, to George II n.d. Cambridge Univ. Lib., Cholmondeley (Houghton) MSS, 45/40.
Thus the independence of labour (and small master) from clientage was fostered on the one hand by the translation of non-monetary “favours” into payments; and on the other by the extension of trade and industry on the basis of the multiplication of many small units of production, with much by-employment (especially spinning) coincident with many continuing forms of petty land tenure (or common right) and many casual demands for manual labour. This is an indiscriminate picture, and deliberately so. Economic historians have made many careful discriminations between different groups of labourers. But these are not relevant to our present enquiry. Nor were these discriminations commonly made by commentators from among the gentry when they considered the general problem of the “insubordination” of labour. Rather, they saw beyond the park gates, beyond the railings of the London mansion, a blur of indiscipline — the “idle and disorderly”, “the mob”, “the poor”, the “populace” — and they deplored —
their open scoffings at all discipline, religious as well as civil: their contempt of all order, frequent menace to all justice, and extreme promptitude to tumultuous risings from the slightest motives.1
Herald, or Patriot-Proclaimer, 24 September 1757. Even within the park gates the gentry complained of indiscipline. Thus, the servants in the great house were accused of intimidating house-guests by lining the hall on their departure and demanding tips or “vails”: see A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend, concerning the Custom of Giving and Taking Vails (1767).
It is, as always, an indiscriminate complaint against the populace as a whole. Free labour had brought with it a weakening of the old means of social discipline. So far from a confident patriarchal society, the eighteenth century sees the old paternalism at a point of crisis.
IV
And yet one feels that “crisis” is too strong a term. If the complaint continues throughout the century that the poor were indisciplined, criminal, prone to tumult and riot, one never feels, before the French Revolution, that the rulers of England conceived that their whole social order might be endangered. The insubordination of the poor was an inconvenience; it was not a menace. The styles of politics and of architecture, the rhetoric of the gentry and their decorative arts, all seem to proclaim stability, self-confidence, a habit of managing all threats to their hegemony.
We may of course have overstated the crisis of paternalism. In directing attention to the parasitism of the State at the top, and the erosion of traditional relations by free labour and a monetary economy at the bottom, we have overlooked intermediate levels where the older economic household controls remained strong, and we have perhaps understated the scale of the “subject” or “client” areas of the economy. The control which men of power and money still exercised over the whole life and expectations of those below them remained enormous, and if paternalism was in crisis, the industrial revolution was to show that its crisis must be taken several stages further — as far as Peterloo and the Swing Riots — before it lost all credibility.
Nevertheless, the analysis allows us to see that ruling-class control in the eighteenth century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power. To say that it was “cultural” is not to say that it was immaterial, too fragile for analysis, insubstantial. To define control in terms of cultural hegemony is not to give up attempts at analysis, but to prepare for analysis at the points at which it should be made: into the images of power and authority, the popular mentalities of subordination.
Defoe’s fictional cloth worker, called before the magistrate to account for default, offers a clue: “not my Master, and’t please your Worship, I hope I am my own Master”. The deference which he refuses to his employer overflows in the calculated obsequiousness to “your Worship”. He wishes to struggle free from the immediate, daily, humiliations of dependency. But the larger outlines of power, station in life, political authority, appear to be as inevitable and irreversible as the earth and the sky. Cultural hegemony of this kind induces exactly such a state of mind in which the established structures of authority and modes of exploitation appear to be in the very course of nature. This does not preclude resentment or even surreptitious acts of protest or revenge; it does preclude affirmative rebellion.
The gentry in eighteenth-century England exercised this kind of hegemony. And they exercised it all the more effectively since the relation of ruler to ruled was very often not face-to-face but indirect. Absentee landowners, and the ever-present mediation of stewards and bailiffs apart, the emergence of the three-tier system of landowner, tenant farmer and landless labourer, meant that the rural labourers, in the mass, did not confront the gentry as employers nor were the gentry seen to be in any direct sense responsible for their conditions of life; for a son or daughter to be taken into service at the great house was seen to be, not a necessity, but a favour.
And in other ways they were withdrawn from the polarities of economic and social antagonism. When the price of food rose, the popular rage fell not on the landowners but upon middlemen, forestallers, millers. The gentry might profit from the sale of wool, but they were not seen to be in a direct exploitive relation to the clothing workers.1
Even in the West of England, where clothiers were becoming gentlemen, a strong sense of distinction was still felt in the first half of the century. An “Englishman” wrote to Lord Harrington in 1738, to complain of “the contrivances and pride of the clothiers, as living in luxury, neglecting their business, trusting servants with the care of their affairs”, “beating down the wages of the poor”, and paying them in truck. The remedy (he suggested) lay in a commission of enquiry made up of “men of great fortunes”, who would be sufficiently independent to attend to the evidence of poor weavers: PRO, SP 36.47.
In the growing industrial areas, the gentlemen JP frequently lived withdrawn from the main industrial centres, at his country seat, and he was at pains to preserve some image of himself as arbitrator, mediator or even protector of the poor. It was a common view that “whenever a tradesman is made a justice a tyrant is created”.2 The poor laws, if harsh, were not administered directly by the gentry; where there was blame it could fall upon the poor-rate-paring farmers and tradesmen from among whom the overseers came. Langhorne presents the idealized paternalist picture; exhorting the country justice to —
