The economic organisation of England

HE ECONOMIC

ORGANISATION

OF ENGLA

WILLIAM JAMES ASHi f

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THE ECONOMIC ORGANISATION
OF ENGLAND

The Economic Organisation
of England

An Outline History

By

William James Ashley

M.A., M.COM., PH.D.

Professor of Commerce in the University of Birmingham ;

Late Professor of Economic History in Harvard University;

Sometime Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford

Third Impression

Longmans, Green and Co.
39 Paternoster Row, London

Fourth Avenue & 30th Street, New York

Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras

1916

All risfhts reserved

First Edition, June 1914.
New Impressions, March 1915 and September 1916.

PREFACE

The following lectures are printed substantially as
they were delivered in the fortnight before Christmas
1912, as part of the "general lecture system" attached
to the Colonial Institute of Hamburg. They are on
the lines of a brief course which I have been in the
habit of giving for the last few years at the University
of Birmingham.

For the purpose which I have had in view, I hope
the brevity of this book will be regarded as a merit.
I venture to think it may be of some advantage to
those who approach for the first time the subject of
English economic history, to be furnished with a
narrative which gives them a general notion of a great
part of the ground to be covered and of many of
the topics they will have to consider.

Edgbaston, April 1914.

CONTENTS

LECTURE

I. The English Agrarian System : the Manor
AS Starting Point

II. The Stages of Industrial Evolution : the
Gild as Starting Point ....

25

III. The Beginnings of Modern Farming : the

Break-up of the Manor .... 44

IV. The Rise of Foreign Trade : the Advent

OF Capital and Investment ... 68

V. Domestic Industry and Tudor Nationalism 88

VI. Agricultural Estates and English Self-

Government . . . . . . Iig

VII. The Industrial Revolution and Freedom

OF Contract 140

VIII. Joint Stock and the Evolution of Capit-
alism 173

Appendix —

Suggestions for Further Reading . . . 193

Index ..,...,. 207

The Economic Organisation
of England

LECTURE I

l!he Etiglish Agrarian System: the Manor
as Starting Point

In this course of lectures I propose to direct your
attention mainly, though not exclusively, to the forms
of economic organisation, as illustrated by English
development. Economic history, the history of man's
economic activity, is the history of the utilisation by
man of his environment, to obtain therefrom subsistence
and the satisfaction of those material wants which are
bound up with subsistence. But his activity in this
direction, from the very dawn of history, has never
been entirely individualistic ; never altogether the
operation of absolutely isolated individuals. Some
form of association has always been in existence, it
would appear, since man became man ; and this has
involved some sort, however rudimentary, of distri-
bution of functions — some form, in short, of organi-
sation. Economic history is an exceedingly wide
and complex subject, even for one nation for a
few centuries of its career. We cannot hope to deal

I A

Economic Organisation

satisfactorily with it in a short course : much indeed of
it is still so imperfectly known to us that we could
hardly hope to deal with it quite satisfactorily, in the
present state of our knowledge, however many lectures
were assigned to it. But by taking for our special
theme the forms of organisation and their changes, we
may find threads which will guide us, at any rate
through that part of the labyrinth which I am going to
ask you to tread.

I shall begin with agricultural conditions ; and this
for two reasons. The first is that, like all the rest of
western Europe, England, until a couple of centuries
ago, was an almost exclusively agricultural country.
One of our tasks will be to show the way in which
England, from being an agricultural country, supplying
itself with food, has become primarily a manufacturing
country, dependent upon importation for its sustenance.
The other reason is that hitherto the agrarian develop-
ment of England has been unique in western Europe.
All over western and central Europe, in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, the land was cultivated by
serfs bound to the soil. Outside England, the descend-
ants or representatives of these serfs still remain on the
land, in all but a few districts ; either as " peasant pro-
prietors," owning the acres they till, or as small tenant
farmers with something closely approaching in practice
to permanence of tenure. In Germany, as a whole,
between two-thirds and three-quarters of the land is
still owned and cultivated by peasants : peasant pro-
perties occupy from two-fifths to two-thirds of the area
even of those provinces east of the Elbe which most
nearly resemble England in the predominance of large

2

English Agrarian System

owners ; while in the south-west of the empire peasant
properties monopohse ahnost the whole country. In
France large estates are distributed more evenly
over the several provinces ; but in that country, also,
quite one-half of the whole land is still in the hands of
peasant owners. In England, on the contrary, by far
the larger part of the cultivable area has come to be
owned by comparatively few " landlords." There are
still, it is true, a very large number of separate owners :
counting urban and rural together, there are said to be
as many as a million in England and Wales. But very
many of their properties are quite small, and make up,
in the aggregate, but an inconsiderable proportion of
the total area. Before the recent " agricultural depres-
sion," from which the country is now emerging, it was
calculated — and no substantial change in the situation
has, as yet, taken place — that 4,200 persons owned
between them considerably more than half the soil of
England and Wales, and that the owners of the other
half, so far as it was really agricultural land, numbered
no more than 34,000.

We realise even more distinctly the uniqueness of
modern English conditions when we learn that the
peculiarity of England extends beyond the actual
ownership of the soil. It consists in "the three-fold
division of agricultural interests," — the fact, that is, that
three classes are usually associated with the cultivation
of the land, and expect to derive an income from it
— landlords, tenant farmers, and agricultural labourers.
The landlord is hardly ever a merely passive receiver of
rent : he provides farm houses, barns and sheds, fencing,
and usually a good deal of drainage. He charges himself

3

Economic Organisation

not only with upkeep, but also, from time to time, with
extensive improvements ; and though there are doubt-
less impoverished landlords here and there who do
very little, the average expenditure for these purposes
on what is called a well-managed estate commonly
amounts to a quarter or even more of the gross rent.
The owner lets the bulk of his land in comparatively
large holdings — 150 or 200 acres being perhaps the
more usual size in the centre of the country — receiving
a rent determined in the main by competition. The
tenant farmer provides his own stock and implements
and working capital, and, compared with most of the
peasant cultivators abroad, is something of a "capitalist ;"
and he employs agricultural labourers, who may indeed
rent cottages on easy terms, and have the use of gardens
or allotments, but nevertheless depend chiefly on their
wages. Each of these classes may be paralleled from
one or other province of France, Germany, or Italy.
In some districts there are great landlords ; but then
they usually, as in eastern Germany, cultivate the
greater part of their estates themselves, personally or
through bailiffs ; or, as commonly in Italy and in cer-
tain departments of France, they let them out in small
holdings to peasant cultivators, who employ little
labour outside their own families. These peasant
tenants are very frequently what are known as
metayers, paying, in lieu of a money rent, some frac-
tion, ordinarily one-half, of the annual produce.
There are districts again, as in the north of France,
where tenants may be found, superficially not unlike
English farmers in their position : but they usually
have a smaller command of capital ; they obtain less

4

English Agrarian System

from their landlords in the way of repairs and capital
expenditure ; and their landlords are frequently towns-
men, who are altogether urban in their outlook and
chief interests. And, finally, in most districts abroad
there are agricultural labourers ; but most of them are
engaged by employers who are themselves, whether on
a large or a small scale, the proprietors of the land on
which they work. Hardly anywhere on the Continent
can one find on the same land all three classes, each
participating, as in England, in the task of production.
And to discover when, and, if it may be, why, Eng-
land diverged in this important respect from the rest
of Europe furnishes one of the main interests of
English economic history, and a reason for beginning
with the agricultural side of it.

The characteristic figure for the last couple of cen-
turies, if not longer, has been "the squire" of the
village. There are signs, as an eminent English
statesman has recently remarked, that the squire is
now beginning to pass away. But certainly he has
for a long time been firmly rooted in English soil.
And for what the squire has meant let us turn to the
following description by Lord Eversley of "the ideal
of the English land system " — the ideal, that is to say,
in the eyes of the land-owning gentry.

Writing some twenty years ago — and since then
things have altered but little — he tells us : — " The
ideal of the English land system ... is that of a large
estate where the whole of one and often of several
adjoining parishes is included in it ; where there is
no other landowner within the ring fence ; where the
village itself belongs to the same owner as the agri-

5

Economic Organisation

cultural land ; where all the people of the district—*
farmers, tradesmen, labourers — are dependent, directly
or indirectly, on the one landowner, the farmers holding
their land from him, generally on a yearly tenancy, the
labourers hiring their cottages weekly or yearly either
from the landowner or from the farmers ; and where
the village tradespeople are also dependent largely for
their custom on the squire of the district, and hold
their houses from him. It is believed that this ideal
has practically been attained in more than half the
rural parishes of England and Wales, in the sense
that all the land and houses within them substantially
belong in each to a single owner. In a very large
number of cases a single landowner possesses the
whole of several adjoining parishes or of several
parishes in different parts of the country."

It is not my present business to, endeavour to sum
up the relative merits and demerits of such an agrarian
system from the social point of view. It is sufficient
to say that, before it encountered the competition of
the virgin soil of the new world, it was associated with
methods of agriculture which competent foreign ob-
servers held up as models to be imitated by their own
countries. There can be no doubt whatever that it
did actually promote production. " English agricul-
ture, taken as a whole," wrote the highest French
authority in 1854, "is, at this day, the first in the
world ; and it is in the way of realising further pro-
gress." In spite of an inferior soil and climate, the
gross produce, he reckoned, per acre was at least twice
as great in England as in France. The chief German
authority has been equally emphatic. " England, the

6

English Agrarian System

country most evidently characterised by large landed
estates, was/' he tells us, "justly regarded from the
end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth
century, as the High School of agriculture." Moreover,
though it is hardly possible to deny the advantages
which a country derives from the presence of a
peasant proprietary, it is easy to paint the material
position of such a class in modern Europe in colours
somewhat too rosy. The drawbacks may be easily
discerned in what is still the best general account
of their position, the two eulogistic chapters in the
Political Economy of John Stuart Mill. What we have
now to do, however, is simply to trace the origin and
development of the modern English system. The
basis on which it was built was feudal : it grew out
of the manorial system, which was a fundamental
part of European feudalism in the period when
feudalism reached its highest development. In a
sense it is a survival of feudalism ; and England,
though it plumes itself on the absence of a noble caste,
may be not inaptly described as more feudal to-day
than France or Germany. But France and Germany
also had their manorial system in the Middle Ages.
The remarkable fact is that squiredom in England,
though it rested on the feudal basis of the manor,
was built up to its modern completeness very largely
as the result of forces which we commonly regard as
non-feudal, viz. Commerce and the Reformation and
Parliamentary Government. How this happened we
shall have to see later. We must now look at the
foundation, the manorial system itself.

For this purpose I shall not go further back than

7

Economic Organisation

the thirteenth century. It is quite certain that by that
time, whatever may have been the case before, the
whole of agricultural England was divided into areas
known as "manors," though these were of very un-
equal size : and over the larger part of England,
especially the Midlands and the South, there was a
remarkable similarity in their constitution, so that, in
reference to these districts at any rate, we are justified
in speaking of a "typical " or "normal" manor. The
typical manor consisted of a village, with the lands
surrounding it which the villagers cultivated. Every
manor had a lord, either a lay lord or an ecclesiastical
corporation, though sometimes a manor was divided
between two or more lords. And the manor was the
unit of land management. A magnate might possess
scores of manors in various parts of the country ; two
of the kinsmen of William the Conqueror, for instance,
were given more than four hundred manors, and one
almost double that number. But all such great estates
were thought of as still made up of a number of sepa-
rate manors, each with its own internal arrangements
and its own separate system of associated husbandry.
There were, it is true, certain large complexes of
property, known as "baronies" and "honours."
These would be under the supervision of "seneschals "
or "stewards," who made periodical circuits to see
that the local estate officials were doing their duty.
In some cases the several manors sent each year pre-
scribed quantities of provisions to the monastery or
to the "head manor" where their lord, whether cor-
porate or individual, resided. But all this left un-
touched the internal working of each several manor,

The Manor

U'hich continued complete and self-contained within
itself.

The position of affairs, so far as landlordship was
concerned, seems at once intelligible to the modern
Englishman, because the mediaeval lord of the manor
is evidently represented by the modern squire of
the village. Many great landlords of to-day own,
each of them, all the land of several parishes,
which are often widely separated : while in many
villages the position of squire is occupied by the
Ecclesiastical Commissioners, by the colleges of
Oxford and Cambridge, and by the great hospitals,
just as that of lord of the manor was held in
the thirteenth century by cathedral or monastic
foundations. But there are two great differences
between the mediaeval and the modern state of
affairs — one external, and relating to the theory of
landholding ; the other internal, and relating to the
methods of husbandry.

To take the external first. To-day we apply the
term " tenants " only to those who have hired land of
a landlord ; and whatever may still be the theory
of English law, we do, in fact, regard landlords as
absolute owners of their land and as tenants of no
man. But in the Middle Ages the lords of manors
themselves were " tenants." As the Latin original of
"tenants" implies, they were "holders" of land from
a superior. All land was held ultimately of the king,
except of course the king's own estates ; but the con-
nection was not necessarily an immediate one. It has
been calculated that, at the time of the Domesday
Survey (1086), there were about eight thousand lords

9

Economic Organisation

of land who were sub-tenants, holding of some lord
intermediate between themselves and the king ; while
there were only about fourteen hundred persons
holding directly of the king — or, as they were called,
" tenants in chief " ; many of them, no doubt, great
lords, lay or ecclesiastical, but many, also, holders of
but one or two manors. Somewhere about one-fifth
of the land of the country was then retained in the
hands of the crown ; rather more, perhaps three-tenths,
was held by ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical bodies ;
and the other half was divided between lay lords.
Little change in these proportions would seem to have
taken place during the Middle Ages. And all the
lay holders of manors, at any rate — not to com-
plicate the subject by considering the ecclesiastical
owners — held their manors on condition of per-
forming certain services to their lord, whether the
king or some intermediate superior, and of submitting
to certain conditions incidental to their tenure. The
service due was mainly military service ; so that they
were said to be " tenants in chivalry " ; and the chief
other " incidents " of this tenure were submission to
the lord's rights of wardship over an heir while under
age, and of providing for an heiress in marriage —
rights which were originally of considerable pecuniary
value. The theory of " tenure " was a fundamental
part of medieval feudalism ; but it has since ceased
to have any real meaning. Military service, as a con-
dition of landlordship, passed away completely in the
seventeenth century, when a paid army came into exist-
ence ; it had long been a mere shadow of its former
self. And the other incidents of tenure in chivalry

10

The Manor

were abolished by the parliaments of the Common-
wealth and Charles the Second, and the loss to the royal
revenue compensated for by " the hereditary excise."

The lord of the manor, in the course of his transfor-
mation into the squire of the village, has thus been
freed from his dependence upon a superior lord. We
have now to follow what has happened within the
manor itself ; and for that purpose some further de-
scription is necessary of its internal constitution in
the thirteenth century.

The usual manor of the Midlands and South of
England consisted of a village, or " town," with several
hundreds of acres of arable land surrounding it. In
this village lived all the cultivators of the soil : the
isolated farm-house we are now accustomed to is a
comparatively late innovation. Beyond the arable
fields lay considerable stretches of pasture and waste,
and of woodland where the swine foraged for food : if
there were a stream near by, there would also be a
tract of permanent meadow. It was an organisation
primarily for tillage — for arable husbandry ; pastoral
occupations were for a long time altogether secondary
and subsidiary ; and the use of meadow and pasture
and waste was regarded as " appurtenant " to the use
of the arable fields. There have been certain geo-
graphers in recent years who have thought that, over a
large part of the area of England, tillage was physically
a mistake ; and that the laying down of cornfields to
pasture, which took place so widely in Tudor times
and again in recent years, was but a belated concession
to a damp climate. Whether this be so or no, the
manorial system, in the complete form which is here

II

Economic Organisation

being described, was never thoroughly at home in the
western side of England, where pasture farming was
dictated by soil and rainfall. This, and not any
Celtic origin of its inhabitants, is probably the reason
for the absence, over a large part of the western
counties, of the compact and substantial village with
its wide arable fields — the so-called " nucleated " village
— and the presence, in its place, of tiny hamlets and
scattered homesteads.

To return, however, to the normal manor. It had
three remarkable characteristics. One was the divi-
sion of the whole arable area into two portions —
that part (perhaps a third or half of the whole) which
was kept in the hands of the lord and cultivated under
his direction, or that of a bailiff or reeve representing
him, for his direct and exclusive benefit ; and the rest
of the land, which was in the hands of tenants. The
former part was universally known as the "demesne";
the latter was known by various names, of which
"land in villeinage" was the most common. The
term " demesne " survives in a somewhat similar sense
in Ireland ; and we have no difficulty in thinking of
it as similar to the modern " home farm," which a
landlord keeps in his own possession and manages
himself or through a bailiff ; though the demesne
constituted as a rule a far larger portion of the manor
than the home farm does of a modern " estate."

But now we come to a second and more significant
characteristic : the fact that the labour necessary for the
demesne was provided by the tenants of the rest of
the manor. Besides extra services, commonly known
as " boondays," at harvest time and other seasons of

12

The Manor

exceptional pressure, and also a good deal of com-
pulsory carting, the main body of the tenants — those
known as " villagers " par excellence (for that is what
" villeins " seems originally to have meant) — were
bound to work (or provide a substitute) on two or
three days a week all the year round on the lord's
demesne. This was the so-called " week work " ; and
it will be at once realised what an immensely impor-
tant factor such an obligation must have been in the
whole of rural life. The services can, if we like, be
described as the "rent" paid to the lord for the use
of the land ; or the use of the land can be described
as the " wages " paid by the lord for the villein's
services : in truth, neither " rent " nor " wages " are
appropriate to the circumstances, since, among other
reasons, the arrangement rested much more on custom
and status than on competition and contract. It
should be added, for completeness' sake, that the
tenants were often bound to make certain small
periodical payments in kind, such as poultry or eggs ;
but, by the side of the labour dues, obligations such as
these were quite inconsiderable.

The third characteristic is even more remote from
anything with which we are now familiar. It was
that the holdings of the villeins were made up, not
of compact " fields," each several acres in extent, such
as we are now accustomed to, but of a number of acre
or half-acre strips, scattered over the whole of the
tilled area. This tilled area was divided into two,
three, or four — most commonly three — great expanses,
known in later times as " open " fields, because over
the whole of each there was no hedge or ditch or wall

13

Economic Organisation

or fence to obstruct the view, and the strips were only
separated by low " balks " of unploughed turf. The
division into two, three, or four " fields " was for the
purpose of a systematic fallowing, — one half, third, or
fourth, as the case might be, being left untilled each
year, — and to permit of a rude rotation of crops. On
the three-field plan, which was by far the most usual
in the thirteenth and subsequent centuries in England,
one of the fields would be sown in the autumn with
rye or wheat (the bread crop), one in the spring with
barley (the drink crop), or with oats or beans or peas
for the cattle ; while the third was left fallow. The
rotation in each manor was absolutely compulsory on
all sharers in the open field. In Germany, where the
open field is still widely prevalent, there is a convenient
technical term, Feldzwang, "field compulsion." In
mediasval England there was no similar term, doubt-
less because the rule was so much a matter of course
that it did not need to be named.

And in each manor there was, at this time, a usual
or characteristic size of villein's holding, known by
various significant names, such as "husbandland,"
"living," and the like, but most commonl)', from the
measuring rod or yard (virga), as a " yardland " or, in
Latin, as a "virgate." Its size varied from place to
place very considerably ; but certainly by far the most
usual size was thirty (scattered) acres : in a three-field
village the "full villein" would have approximately
ten acres in each field, no two being contiguous. The
"acre" was seldom of precisely the extent of the
modern statute acre, but varied according to local
custom, the nature of the soil, and the lie of the land.

14

The Manor

Originally an "acre" — as its German equivalent Mor-
geii still implies — must have been the area which could
be ploughed with the implement and team of the time
in one day, or rather in a long morning ; in the after-
noon the oxen which drew the ploughs would be driven
to the pasture. But in England, as over a large part of
western Europe, its shape came somehow to be fixed,
at an early date, as that of a narrow rectangle, ten times
as long as it was broad. The length was the length of
a furrow, hence known as " a furlong " ; and this was
commonly forty times the measuring rod or pole. But
for a long time there was great variety in the length of
the local measuring rod ; and it was only slowly that it
came to be generally fixed at 5I times the small "cloth-
yard." The breadth of the rectangle was four times the
local measuring rod. Inasmuch as a strip forty rods
long and one rod wide made up "a rood" (locally
known very generally as " a land "), the acre may be
described as four roods lying side by side. Yet we
may fairly suppose that in stiff soils less ploughing
would be got through in a morning than where the
soil was lighter.

There is a further fact to be borne in mind. The
great open fields, as we know them in mediaeval and
modern times, were broken up into a number of lesser
units, each consisting of a group or, so to speak, a
bundle, of acre or half-acre strips, all lying the same
way and parallel to one another. These stretches of
land were known as shots, flats, or still more commonly
as furlongs, doubtless because they were a furrow-
length in width. It may be that the expanse known
as "a field" was consciously divided, at some time or

15

Economic Organisation

other, into these separate stretches (which were then
further partitioned into parallel acre strips), in order
to obtain as many such strips as possible by fitting
them into the shape of the field. Or, as some con-
jecture, the furlong (in this sense), composed of a
number of strips all lying the same way, may repre-
sent the piece of land freshly brought under cultiva-
tion, at some particular time, in a single (joint)
undertaking ; and thus the later great " fields " may be
merely the result of the bringing into cultivation, one
after the other, of several pieces of the waste lying in
the same direction. But, whatever the origin of the
arrangement may have been, it must have been much
easier to make most of the acres of a uniform, com-
paratively narrow, width, than of a uniform, compara-
tively long, length. Accordingly it is in length rather
than in width that the customary or nominal acres
differed, by excess qt defect, from the normal size.
But whatever in each manor may have been called an
acre, it was, as I have said, thirty of these acres that
went, as a rule, to the yardland. With the holding of
the whole or a fraction of a yardland went appur-
tenant and proportional rights of user in the common
pasture and meadow. Where, as was commonly the
case, the meadow was limited in area, the hay harvest
was frequently apportioned among the tenants by lot
or rotation ; and similarly pasture rights, if " stinted "
at all, depended on the si'ze of the arable holding.

It should be added that the demesne itself was not
apart from the common or open fields. It also was
composed, more or less completely, of acre and half-
acre strips, lying in the open fields, intermingled with

i6

The Manor

the strips of the villeins. The gradual withdrawal of
the demesne from the communal system and its con-
solidation in compact closes near the manor-house was
one of those silent developments of the later centuries
of the Middle Ages of which we know very httle.

In order not to complicate the exposition, no men-
tion has hitherto been made of the other classes that
undoubtedly existed outside the villein-group. There
were a certain number of " free-holders " and also of
"socmen," who were tenants of the manor, but on
conditions which were regarded as more "free" than
those of villeins. There were also in some districts a
dwindling number of persons who, whether called
"slaves" or not, occupied an extremely servile posi-
tion. The relations of these classes to the villagers
proper or villeins is an exceedingly obscure subject ;
but it is pretty clear that, over a large part of the
country, they were comparatively subordinate appen-
dages to the manorial machinery. There was, how-
ever, a more important class, that of " cottars." These
were perhaps as numerous as the villeins ; and the
compendious classification by Burns of the rural
population of the Scotch lowlands, "the laird, the
tenant, and the cottar," would have applied equally
well to mediaeval England. The cottars held, as a
rule, but two or three acres of land— at most five ;
and probably many of them worked, for a large part
of their time, for the more prosperous villeins. His-
torically, the class is of great interest ; for it was cer-
tainly one of the chief sources from which has been
derived the modern class of " agricultural labourers."
But evidently the centre of the whole system was the

17 B

Economic Organisation

group of virgate-holders, or " yardlings " ; and it is
upon these that we are bound to concentrate our
attention.

The status of the " yardhng " and of the cottar be-
neath him is described with sufficient accuracy by the
modern term " serfdom." The whole organisation of
agriculture, that is to say the organisation of by far the
larger part of the economic activity of the time, was,
we may fairly say, based upon " serfdom." The word
" serf " is, of course, a mere Englishing of the Latin
word for slave, viz. servus. But "serfdom" means
something very different from " slavery " to a modern
ear, and quite properly. We mean by it a condition
of dependence, in which the dependant was bound to
the soil and subject to onerous burdens, but in which,
whether technically " free " or not, he enjoyed an inde-
pendent home life, and could not be sold away from
his family and his holding ; and in which, also, he
possessed rights of property, at least in such movable
wealth as he might acquire by his labour. This descrip-
tion is sufficiently applicable to the English peasant of
the Middle Ages : even though we find it impossible
to extract from contemporary lawyers, in any of the
mediaeval centuries, a definition of his status, in terms
of freedom or unfreedom, which quite fits into the
actual conditions of life. Understood as I have ex-
plained it, serfdom evidently occupies an intermediate
position between slavery and freedom. All sweeping
historical generalisations need large qualifications and
exceptions to make them exactly accurate : historical
evolution never moves quite regularly in any one
direction : there are ups and downs, advances and re-

i8

The Manor

trogressions. But, in a broad and general way, we may
say that in the ancient classical world economic society
rested on slavery. Slavery, we may recall, is taken for
granted by Aristotle as a necessary constituent of a civil-
ised community. And the modern world rests, for-
mally at any rate and in theory, on individual liberty
and freedom of contract. So that mediaeval serfdom
we may regard as representing, on the whole, an ad-
vance in social development.

But when we seek to go behind this generalisation,
and to discover how, precisely, mediaeval serfdom came
into existence, we find ourselves at once in the midst
of controversy. I began with the thirteenth century,
because the abundant evidence from that period leaves
us in little doubt as to the broad features of villeinage
and of the manor as then constituted. And from that
secure starling point, we can follow the subsequent
development without troubling ourselves, unless we
wish, with the question of origins. But I cannot leave
so tremendous a problem without at least a few sen-
tences of comment. I say "tremendous," because it
is one that vitally concerns the whole of western and
central Europe ; and it has busily engaged continental
historians, and especially German historians, as much as
or even more than English. The distinction between
the demesne and the rest of the " manor," " seigneurie,"
or " Rittergut " ; the existence of a normal peasant
holding, very commonly of some thirty acres ; the week
work of two or three days all through the year ; the
compulsory rotation of crops and fallow, — these were
as universal and as uniform over the whole of western
and central Europe as the theory of feudal tenure, or

19

Economic Organisation

the ideas of chivalry, or the constitution of the church :
in eastern Germany they survived into the nineteenth
century.

When serious attention was first turned to this
subject, some sixty years ago, the creation of the
manor and of its continental parallels was explained
as due to the depression of village groups of freemen.
One widely prevalent view made these supposed origi-
nal freemen the corporate proprietors, as a body, of the
land which they tilled, and regarded the later lord of
the manor as taking the place of a preceding communal
ownership. This was the form of the " primitive
free man" view which was known as the "mark" or
free village community theory ; mark being a German
. term interpreted as the area owned by the group. But
against this view it was urged that over large parts of
Gaul the later seigneuries apparently grew, without
any break of continuity, out of those estates of large
proprietors, cultivated by semi-servile tenants, which
we know to have existed in the later centuries of the
Roman rule ; and it might therefore be conjectured
that its origin was directly, or indirectly by imitation,
the same elsewhere. As such an estate was commonly
called a villa, this may be briefly labelled "the villa
theory." It was next pointed out that neither the
Teutonic invaders of the Roman Empire, nor the
Celtic peoples whom the Romans found in possession,
and who may have survived, in greater or less pro-
portion, after the Teutonic immigration, consisted
entirely of free men : there were probably at least as
many slaves as freemen among them. There are
accordingly, for what is now England and France and

20

The Manor

western Germany, at least four possible groups of
factors to be considered : (i) social conditions among
the Celtic inhabitants, before and during the Roman
rule ; (2) social conditions in the completely Romanised
districts ; (3) social conditions among the Teutonic
immigrants ; and (4) the forces at work within the new
kingdoms of the west, between the period of the
Barbarian invasions and the time when our evidence
unmistakably shows us full-grown serfdom and mano-
rialism. It is probably true to say that no historical
scholar of to-day holds either the " mark " view or the
"villa" view in an exclusive form. There is likely
now to be pretty general agreement in the proposition
that the Teutonic (including the Danish) invasions led
to the settlement, over large parts of what is now
England, of a considerable number of "common
freemen," who settled down singly or in small groups
to cultivate the land. On the other hand, it is tending
to be recognised that the Roman agrarian system, the
"villa" with its slaves or peasants bound to the soil,
is not likely to have altogether disappeared in Gaul,
and that it may even have survived in parts of Britain.
In the process of manorialisation, which was a long
one and occupied centuries, the example of the Roman
serf-group may conceivably have had a large influence
even in the districts which started, in the main, with
a quite free population. We are, however, still a long
way off the final and satisfactory adjustment, in an
intelligible and convincing statement, of all the various
elements which are clearly involved in the problem.

These elements may be summed up under two heads
— communal and seigneurial. The communal features

21

Economic Organisation

of manorial life were all bound up with the system of
intermixed holdings in the open fields : for that inter-
mixture itself involved or led to a large amount of co-
operation and common action. Because the holdings
were intermixed, the several cultivators had to observe a
common rotation of crops. For the same reason, and
because of the absence of hedges or fences between the
strips, the several tenants had to submit to the exercise
by their fellows of certain " rights of common." The
cattle of all the tenants must be turned out to graze
freely over the stubble, as well as over the one great
field whose turn it was to lie fallow that particular
year. The common pasture or waste remained un-
divided, because for centuries it was too extensive to
make it worth while to cut it up ; and it was natural
that men who were accustomed to act together in the
cultivation of their acres should employ in common
a village herdsman, shepherd, and swineherd. We
may conjecture that the intermixture of holdings was
originally designed to bring about a fair distribution
of the land among all the occupiers, and to give each
tenant his fair proportion of good and bad soil. .And
this purpose .we may fairly suppose to have been very
distinctly present to men's minds at a time when it
was practically impossible to improve poor land. In
the absence of artificial grasses there was little hay,
and what there was was not supplem_ented by " roots."
Accordingly there were few cattle, and these exceed-
ingly puny ; so that there was little manure available as
fertiliser. We may conjecture further that the stripwise
arrangement was the outcome, at some early period,
of a system of co-operative ploughing ; acre strips

22

The Manor

being naturally allotted to one member of the group
after another because an acre was the extent of a day's
ploughing. Evidence derived from Wales of a con-
dition of things probably prior in development to the
manor indicates that each of the villeins came to hold
the same number of these scattered acres because each
alike contributed a yoke of oxen to the eight-ox team.
But why the acres should be of that shape ; why thirty
acres should be the common amount of holding ; why
the arable fields should so commonly be three — all
these points are still obscure. How far they were due
to free choice or imitation, going back to pre-
manorial or "tribal" times, how much to coercion
or pressure of some kind from above, has yet to be
determined.

The seigneurial elements, on the other hand, were
those specially bound up with the position of the lord
of the manor : his authority over the land and those
upon it : in particular the large share he possessed,
under the name of demesne, of the tilled land (whether
in separate closes or intermixed with the strips of his
tenants), and his recognised right to exact labour
services from his tenants as the necessary means of
getting his demesne cultivated. It was in order to
preserve undiminished the labour force upon the manor
and tie it to the soil, that restrictions were put upon
the personal freedom of the villeins ; and it was in
maintaining the due succession of able-bodied tenants
and compelling them to render their accustomed
services that that important part of the system which
can only be barely alluded to here, the manorial court,
found its most constant occupation.

23

Economic Organisation

It is clear that an open-field husbandry could have
existed without any such division of the use of the
land between lord and tenants as is found in the
manor ; and, on the other hand, that lords could have
exercised a large authority, could indeed have exacted
labour rents, even had there been no open-field system.
This analysis of the manorial organisation may perhaps
indicate the directions in which we shall have to look
for a solution of the problem of its origin. In any case,
it will be a help in following the history of its decline.

24

LECTURE II

The Stages of Industrial Evolution : the Gild
as Starting Point

As, in tracing the history of the agricultural side of
English life, I began with the thirteenth century in order
to avoid controversy, so with the same object I shall
begin an account of the manufacturing or industrial
side with the fourteenth century. Long before that
time a number of towns had firmly established them-
selves ; and in those towns trade and manufacture
were carried on to an extent considerable in itself,
though still quite small in comparison with agricultural
employment. And, towards the end of that century,
the men who carried on the several industries were
organised, in every town, in what it has become usual
to speak of as " the gild system." Starting as late as
this, I am compelled to omit much that is of extreme
interest. The gild system, as I have already stated,
was characteristic of industry in the towns ; and in-
deed, with the exception of the arts of the village miller
and the village blacksmith, and here and there a little
mining and quarrying, all economic activity that was
not directly agricultural was now, and for some time
to come, centred in the towns. We ought, therefore,
did time allow us, to deal with the tangled problem of
the origin of the towns and of their constitution. The

25

Economic Organisation

growth of the towns means the appearance of non-
feudal and non-agricultural forces in society ; the rise
of a non-servile middle class ; the appearance of ideas
of contract as opposed to custom, and of payment in
money as contrasted with payment in kind or in service.
And developments like these had a significance not
limited to the towns ; they exercised, as we shall see
later, a slow but profoundly disintegrating influence
on the feudal society of the " open country " around.

One would like, therefore, to point out the origin of
many of our English towns in the needs of defence ;
the county town being the central fortress and garrison
for the surrounding shire or county. The whole of
the Midlands must, at some time or other, have been
artificially cut up into sections — for "shire," like
"section," means simply a piece shorn or cut off —
and in the midst of each section was planted a strong-
hold. Other towns sprang up owing to the presence
of the king's court, or the needs of a great cathedral or
monastic establishment, or the great fairs at places of
religious pilgrimage. I could like to enter into the
question of the origin of the municipal constitution,
whether in the manorial organisation or in market
privileges, whether unconscious or conscious, gradual
or rapid ; and to consider how it was that the body
of burgesses were able to acquire certain rights of
self-government, and to establish their own municipal
tribunals. And after insisting on specifically munici-
pal characteristics, I should have to comment on the
surprisingly agricultural character, after all, of many of
the smaller towns down to a comparatively late period ;
so that the burgesses often continued to be almost as

26

The Gild System

much interested in open fields and rights of common
as ordinary villagers.

All this, however, I have now to pass over. I can
only just touch upon one development which was
especially bound up with town life, and that is the
beginnings of commerce as distinguished from manu-
facture. Earlier by a generation or more than the
appearance of any numerous body of English crafts-
men, a good deal of trading had sprung up in such
native products as wool and woolfels, or in luxuries,
such as fine "cloth or silks or spices or wine imported
from abroad. In every town the men who engaged
in such trade were organised, as early as the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, in what were known as " mer-
chant gilds." The one exception, curiously enough,
was London. A document has indeed recently come
to light which implies that in the capital also there was
once a gild merchant. Yet the phrase here used is
probably only the repetition of a current formula ; and
we have no other trace of the existence of such a body.
But this was probably only because its objects were
obtained there in other ways. The merchant gilds
doubtless contributed largely to the formation of the
mediaeval municipal government ; a trace of this influ-
ence remains in the common designation of the town
hall in our older boroughs as the "guildhall." And
the organisation of the merchant gilds probably served
as a model for the earlier craft gilds. But the exact
nature of the relations between the merchant gild and
the craft gilds is still a subject of controversy ; and I
am reluctantly obliged to content myself with a bare
allusion to a large and fascinating field of inquiry.

27

Economic Organisation

Craft "gild" and "gild system" have become the
common modern terms for the industrial organisa-
tion of the later Middle Ages ; and they are satisfac-
tory enough if we understand just what they stand for,
and realise that, in the sense in which we now use
them, they are modern and not contemporary expres-
sions. By the end of the fourteenth, or early in the
fifteenth century, every occupation involving even a
slight degree of skill gave rise to a systematic grouping
of the men engaged in it ; and a corporate organisa-
tion grew up, substantially similar in its main features
in every industry and every town, which played a large
part in the life of the time and was destined to exert
a real influence for centuries later. But in the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries these groups were
commonly known as " crafts," or, by a word of
Anglo-French origin which had originally nothing
" mysterious " about it, as " misteries " (French :
metiers), which had precisely the same meaning. The
" craft " or " mistery " of " cappers," or makers of caps,
for instance, in fourteenth century speech, meant not
only the skill of the cappers, but also and more im-
mediately the group of cappers themselves, looked
upon as a body possessing certain common rights
and responsibilities, and capable of acting together.

As the fifteenth century went on, these bodies came
more and more to be designated by the term that
has clung to them ever since in London, viz. "com-
panies." Some of them, like the companies of
weavers in several towns, were, it is true, of very
early origin, and dated from as far back as the first
half of the twelfth century. These early craft bodies

28

The Gild System

had been actually known originally as " gilds," and kept
the word as part of their official and formal title.
But by the fifteenth century the word itself, as applied
to craft companies, had passed out of popular use ;
and in the sixteenth it was applied, almost if not
quite exclusively, to religious fraternities.

The controversy which has raged, and has not yet
come to an end, as to the origin of the gild system,
refers almost entirely to the earlier craft "gilds,"
actually so called. Their influence on the subsequent
development has, I cannot help thinking, been some-
what exaggerated. By any one who looks dispas-
sionately at the evidence of the fourteenth century,
the appearance and universal extension of the craft
organisation is seen to issue spontaneously out of the
conditions of the time, and to require no explanation
from earlier and obscurer periods. The gild system
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, speaking
broadly and generally, was no result of a sudden
uprising, of a class-conscious effort on the part of the
craftsmen to secure autonomy, or even of a selfish
striving after the gains of monopoly ; it was the
gradual and almost unconscious result of the coales-
cence of two groups of forces — forces from below,
tending towards association and union, and forces
from above, especially the pressure of the municipal
government, tending towards corporate responsibility.
Both these forces need some further explanation.

It was the universal practice for the men of each
particular occupation in mediaeval towns to live close
together in the same quarter, practically monopolising
particular streets and localities; this is sufficiently indi-

29

Economic Organisation

cated by the street names of our older towns. They
therefore naturally attended the same parish churches.
And just as rich individuals created endowments to
provide for religious services on the anniversaries of
their deaths, endowments known as " chantries," so it
became the practice for the men of particular crafts,
accustomed to stand or kneel in the same corner of
their churches, to form " brotherhoods " or " frater-
nities " to provide for services on the occasion of the
death of one of their number, or for the commemo-
ration of all their departed on the festival of their
patron saint. Such fraternities were simply religious
clubs, and may be briefly described as "co-operative
chantries" : in essence they were just like the nume-
rous other religious brotherhoods formed by their side
by other groups of men not all belonging to the same
craft. It is easy to understand how a religious frater-
nity, when composed of most of the men of the town
following a particular trade, would come to interest
itself in purely trade affairs. It is not impossible that in
some instances the fraternity was, from the first, a con-
scious veil for trade purposes ; but the main explanation
of the fraternities within the crafts is to be found in the
religious usages of the age and in local propinquity.

In an age which laid so much stress on the religious
duty of almsgiving, these religious clubs would natu-
rally assist their members in distress. Moreover, when
the practice grew up of performing pageants or re-
ligious plays in the streets of the towns on certain
great festivals of the Church, the craftsmen would, of
course, desire to take a part. It became usual for
the men of each craft to charge themselves, year after

30

The Gild System

year, with the performance of part of the sacred story ;
if possible of that particular episode which was most
akin to their own daily occupation. Thus the vintners
would present the Marriage at Cana, the chandlers the
Star in the East, and the shipwrights the Building of
the Ark. Some of the " mistery plays," as they came
to be called from being performed by misteries or
crafts, have come down to us, such as those of York
and Chester and Coventry. They are among the
sources of the drama which flowered so rapidly under
Elizabeth. And the long lists of the plays show how
numerous were the occupations carried on in every
town of any size.

But while these religious and social impulses
were spontaneously drawing the several groups of
craftsmen together, they were being made conscious
of their community of interests in another and very
difTerent way. There was a strong public opinion
in favour of protecting purchasers against fraudulent
or defective workmanship. Occasionally, though
perhaps not frequently, the men of a particular
trade, finding that their craft was " badly put in slan-
der," as it was said, by the roguery and falsehood of
its members, themselves went to the town magistrates
and asked for the appointment of authorised "over-
seers" or "assayers." But whether the men of the
several misteries were desirous of regulation or no,
the municipal authorities came to insist with more
and more emphasis that there should be an adequate
supervision, or, as it was then called, a "view," of
every craft, in order to detect and punish " false "
work. Accordingly we find group after group of

31

Economic Organisation

workmen admonished by the municipal authorities to
choose from among themselves persons who should
be responsible for the work and behaviour of their
fellows. From time to time general directions were
issued to the same effect, as in the following London
ordinance : —

" It is ordained that all the misteries of the City of
London shall be lawfully regulated and governed, each
according to its nature in due manner, that so no
knavery, false workmanship, or deceit shall be found
in the said misteries, for the honour of the good folk
of the said misteries and for the common profit of the
people. And in each mistery there shall be chosen and
sworn four or six, or more or less, according as the
mistery shall need ; which persons, so chosen and
sworn, shall have full power from the Mayor well and
lawfully to do and to perform the same."

Being obliged in this way to come together and elect
overseers or wardens, the crafts took the opportunity to
draw up rules for the government of the trade. These
rules were at first of the most modest character, and
did little more than prescribe certain simple standards
of honest workmanship. But they soon went on to
regulate apprenticeship and admission to the trade.
The " Articles," " Ordinances," or " Points " were
then presented to the Mayor and Alderman for confir-
mation and enrolled in the municipal registers. The
edifice was completed in the fifteenth century and
subsequently by the acquisition of charters from the
crown, definitely "incorporating" the bodies which
had thus gradually and almost insensibly constituted
themselves*

32

The Gild System

The history of the several trades shows very con-
siderable divergencies between one craft and another,
and between one town and another, and the separate
institutional elements are hard to disentangle. In
some cases, the craft, as such, provided for religious
services and for the relief of sick or impoverished
members. In other and more numerous instances,
we can clearly trace the separate organisation of a
religious fraternity within the industrial group, but
apart from the trade machinery. But, in every case,
both spontaneous tendencies towards religious and
social co-operation and compulsory regulation by the
municipalities contributed towards the creation of a
sense of craft solidarity. And the result, by the middle
of the fifteenth century, was a substantial uniformity
both in craft organisation in all English towns, and in
the municipal constitution which rested upon it. This
uniformity, like the uniformity of the manorial system,
extended to the whole of western Europe. The craft
societies of London, Paris, Nuremberg, and Florence
were fundamentally alike in form and functions ; and
the same is true, with necessary qualifications, of the
smaller urban centres. The more backward countries
of the north and east did, indeed, imitate their wealthier
neighbours — Scotland following England, and Poland
and eastern Germany following the Rhineland. But I
do not know that there was much direct copying among
the peoples of western Europe, nor do we need it to
account for the facts. Apparently the same institutions
everywhere grew up in much the same way, owing to
the operation of the same causes. These causes were
the uniform intellectual, social, and economic condi-

33 c

Economic Organisation

tions. Everywhere industry could only secure shelter
and could only create a market in the towns ; every-
where natural gregariousness drew the men of each
craft together ; everywhere public opinion demanded
supervision and regulation ; everywhere production
was on a small scale ; everywhere it was carried on
in small workshops, by from one to four persons,
without the aid of machinery ; everywhere skill and
reputation were more important than capital. The
gild system would seem, indeed, to be a neces-
sary stage in the development of industry ; and
the Chinese gilds of to-day show the ideas and
machinery of the gilds of mediaeval Europe still
actively at work.

Much labour has been spent, and profitably spent,
on the attempt to distinguish between stages in in-
dustrial evolution. I say profitably, because one of the
best ways to penetrate into the essential characteristics
of a particular state of affairs is to have some other
state of affairs with which to compare it. We must
take care not to allow our classification to become too
rigid ; but that ought not to be difficult. Allowance
must be made for the possibility, and indeed the pro-
bability, of transitional and intermediate arrangements.
And of course we must not suppose that every country,
or even every occupation, must necessarily pass through
all the several stages. New countries, like our own
colonies, will naturally begin at the stage reached
already in old countries, if the necessary conditions
are present ; and new industries, as we shall see later,
like the cotton industry, will begin their career with
the organisation which the contemporary but older

34

Stages of Industrial Evolution

industries have reached only after long centuries of
development.

With these cautions we may roughly distinguish four
stages in the history of industry during mediaeval and
modern times. It will be wiser for the present to leave
the ancient world out of account.

First, there is that stage of affairs when there is no
separate body of professional craftsmen at all ; where
all that can be called " industry," as distinguished from
agriculture, is carried on within the household group,
for the satisfaction of its own needs, by persons whose
main business is the cultivation of the land or the care
of flocks. The main activities of all except the fighting
class are still in this stage preponderatingly agricultural;
but the cultivators of the soil make their own clothes
and furniture and utensils, and there is practically no
outside " market " for their manufactures. It repre-
sents a long step in evolution when professional crafts-
men come into existence : men who, though they may
have small holdings of land which they cultivate, and
may indeed receive their remuneration in the shape, to
some extent, of these holdings, are yet primarily crafts-
men— primarily, for instance, weavers or smiths. Such
a specialisation alike of agriculture and industry affords
one of the earliest and most striking examples of
division of labour, and it brings with it some of the
advantages which Adam Smith sets forth in his cele-
brated chapter. Production in this stage is still on a
small scale ; it takes place either at the customer's
home or in a small workshop or room or shed within
or adjoining the craftsman's own dwelling : and there
is no intermediary between producer and customer.

35

Economic Organisation

The producer either works on the customer's own
materials ; or, if he buys his own material and has not
only " labour " but a " commodity " to sell, he deals
directly with a small neighbouring circle of patrons.
There is a " market " in the modern business or econo-
mic sense, but it is a small and near one, and the pro-
ducer is in direct touch with it ; though, indeed, it may
sometimes consist not of the ultimate consuming public,
but of fellow artisans in some other mistery. The next
stage is marked by the advent of various kinds of com-
mercial middlemen, who act as intermediaries between
the actual makers in their small domestic workshops
and the final purchasers : the widening of the market
being both the cause and the result of their appearance.
And, finally, with the advent of costly machinery and
production on a large scale, we have the condition
of things to which we are accustomed in our modern
factories and works, where the owners or controllers
of capital not only find the market, but organise and
regulate the actual processes of manufacture. To these
several stages it is difficult to give brief designations
which shall not be misleading. It is common to speak
of them as (i) the family or household system, (2) the
gild or handicraft system, (3) the domestic system or
house industry, and {4) the factory system. But we
can dispense with labels if w^e can remember the
essential traits. Of the third and fourth we shall have
much to say at a later point. For the present we
have to do with the second, where there is a separate
industrial class and a market or group of customers,
though but a limited and local one. " Gild system "
will indicate it accurately enough if we bear in mind

36

Stages of Industrial Evolution

that the gild was merely the form of organisation that
was bound to be assumed under the conditions of the
time, as soon as there came to be a number of pro-
fessional craftsmen and these craftsmen were prac-
tically all collected in the towns.

Let us look now more closely into the company
organisation. The craft company was not simply an
association among men of a town engaged in a parti-
cular occupation ; it was the association, in idea and
approximately in fact, of all the men so engaged. That
means that, as soon as the company was solidly estab-
lished, no man who did not belong to it could carry
on the trade in the borough. Compulsory member-
ship was the necessary consequence not merely of
self-interest but also of the public duties which were im-
posed upon the group ; the representatives of the several
trades could only be expected to be responsible for the
good behaviour of those who had placed themselves
under their authority. Compulsory membership is the
same thing as monopoly. But — as this way of putting
it implies — the character of such a monopoly depends
on the ease or difficulty with which competent persons
can secure admission. Undoubtedly in later centuries
the craft companies used their privileges in the worst
sense of monopoly. We all know, for instance, how
in the middle of the eighteenth century James Watt was
prevented by the Corporation of Hammermen from
establishing himself as an instrument-maker within the
town of Glasgow, and found refuge in the precincts of
the University. But it does not seem that in the
earlier periods of their history the craft companies
were exclusive in any markedly harmful sense. Quite

37

Economic Organisation

early, indeed, they may have put obstacles in the way
of men entering the occupation who came from other
towns as adult craftsmen. But then in those periods
there was, in fact, very little desire to move from one
town to another.

Within the ranks of those occupied in the several
industries there grew up in England, as elsewhere in
western Europe, a sharp division into three orders.
There were first the " masters," i.e. the full members
of the society, who were authorised to set up shop
on their own account. These were not necessarily
masters in the modern sense, i.e. employers, since very
many of them worked by themselves and employed
no one. There were the " apprentices " (French :
apprentis) ; boys and young men who were learning
their trade, and whose term of service came to be
generally fixed at seven years, in accordance with
"the custom of London." This institution of a
uniform and relatively long period of apprenticeship
for all trades seems to be characteristic of England ;
certainly it was not found in France. And then there
were the "journeymen," i.e. men paid by the day
(French : journee), and not, like the apprentice, bound
for a long period of indenture. Gradually the rule
grew up that even to work as journeyman a man
must have served a seven years' apprenticeship. It is
the less necessary to dwell upon these distinctions,
because the terms apprentice and journeyman, and the
ideas associated with them, have survived in some
occupations and places down to our own time, in spite
of profound changes in the general situation. But it
is perhaps well to make it quite clear that in none of

38

Stages of Industrial Evolution

the mediceval craft companies was there anything in
the nature of a joint-stock or any associated trading on
the part of the craft as a body. The nearest approach
to it was the rule in some crafts that opportunities of
buying material on advantageous terms were to be
shared by all the members who cared to benefit by
them. With this exception, the several masters were
left free to carry on their trade each on his own
stock and responsibility and for his individual profit :
the gild authority •'* regulated " — to use a term promi*
nent in a later age — individual enterprise, and did not
replace it.

In the midst of the labour troubles of the nineteenth
century there have been many who have looked back
with regret to the gild system of the Middle Ages and
have dreamt of its restoration. The gild system, as
we shall learn later, was half destroyed in the six-
teenth century by the advent of capital and the
extension of the market, and its ruin was completed
in the eighteenth by the introduction of machinery
and, with it, of the factory system. Its restoration
was economically impossible. Not only was this so :
the admirers of the past have undoubtedly viewed the
mediasval handicrafts in much too romantic, and even
sentimental, a spirit. There was a good deal more
selfishness about than is commonly allowed for, and
more friction between the immediate interests of
various classes, and occupations. Yet no one can
turn over the gild records from the fourteenth to the
sixteenth centuries without seeing that a fair ideal did
float in a vague sort of way before the more reflecting
men of the time. This ideal we may sum up as the

39

Economic Organisation

maintenance of just and reasonable conditions of pro-
duction and sale, in the interests alike of producers
and consumers. The master craftsman combined, in
many trades, the functions of the manufacturer with
those of the merchant ; or, if " merchant " be too fine
a term, of the manufacturer with those of the dealer
or shopkeeper. He bought his own materials, and his
apprentice ofTered for sale to the public as they passed
by in the street the goods made inside the shop,
as Sir Walter Scott depicts in The Fortunes of Nigel
Of course there were some trades where, from the
nature of the case, this was impossible, e.g. the build-
ing trades. The master craftsman, again, usually com-
bined the functions of employer and skilled workman :
when he employed apprentices or journeymen or
both, he commonly worked by their side on the finer
parts of the job, when not engaged with a customer.
What the public desired, above everything else,
was that the wares should be of good or standard
quality. This was the main purpose of the whole
system of regulation by gild wardens and town autho-
rities. And many of the regulations which remind
us of our modern humanitarian factory legislation,
such as the prohibition of working at night, were
designed, not in the interests primarily of the worker,
but in the interest of the public ; in order, that is,
to facilitate the necessary supervision or to prevent
a public nuisance. It does not seem that regulation
extended, as a rule, to the determination of prices;
but it was a fundamental article in the moral teaching
of the church of the time, and in the opinion of the
governing classes in the towns, that for every article

40

Stages of Industrial Evolution

there was a "just price," which ought neither to be
fallen short of nor exceeded. And when there seemed
to be need, as in the case of the bakers and innkeepers
and vintners, to protect the public, the public authority
did not hesitate to step in and enact a scale of prices
not to be exceeded except under severe penalty.

As to entry into the trade : we must bear in mind
that, throughout the Middle Ages, population was only
very slowly expanding. So long as the industrial
workers increased only in the same proportion as the
general population, and did not outstrip the purchas-
ing power of the community, the average apprentice
might expect, as a general thing, after he had served
his articles and had worked for a few years as a
journeyman, to be able to set up for himself and
to earn the kind of livelihood that was commonly
felt to be appropriate to his class. Meanwhile the
^ relations between employer and employed, within the
small shops, were of a family or patriarchal character.
We cannot say that there was in fact any complete
and universal practice of fixing journeymen's wages
by regulations of the gild or of the municipality. But
that was simply because it was not found to be
necessary. The principle, however, that wages should
be just or reasonable — the belief that for each kind
of labour there was some just or appropriate remu-
neration which could be ascertained, and, if need be,
enforced — was as universally held as the principle
of "just price," of which, indeed, it was but a part.
And the craft authorities, with the approval of the
municipalities, or the municipality alone when the
craft was slow to act, did, as a matter of fact, inter-

41

Economic Organisation

vene and regulate the wages of journeymen in a good
many particular instances.

Can we say that there already existed a "labour
question " ? Thai depends altogether on what we
mean by "labour question." If we mean the problem
how best to adjust the relations between a large num-
ber of persons who have only their labour to offer
and a relatively small number of persons who employ
them, in circumstances in which the successful carry-
ing-on of production involves the presence of con-
siderable quantities of capital of which the employers
alone have the control — if that is what we mean by
labour question, then, speaking broadly and generally,
we may say it did not exist in the Middle Ages. But
obviously in another sense it did exist, or existed in
germ ; for there must be a labour question, in a sense,
as soon as one person comes to be employed by another.
And in that sense, we may say that the gild system, so
far and so long as it was true to its ideals, "solved
the labour question."

But if, after stating these ideals, we turn to the actual
history, and expect to find some well-marked epoch
during which they were effectively realised, we are
likely to meet with disappointment. The gild organisa-
tion itself was of slow and irregular formation. It was
a long time before the necessity of apprenticeship, the
sharp distinction between apprentice and journeyman,
the regular election of wardens and the systematic
supervision of processes, took quite clear and definite
shape. And almost as soon as they did so, the little
groups of masters began to show an inclination towards
monopoly, and friction began to arise between them

42

Stages of Industrial Evolution

and the journeymen. Hardly, we are inclined to say,
has the gild system been perfected before it begins to
break down. It is perhaps more accurate to say that
the gild ideals were in constant process of realisation
and decay throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, six-
teenth, and even seventeenth centuries. And that is
because of the width and variety of the field of their
operation. New industries were growing, old indus-
tries decaying, and the smaller towns were constantly
catching up with the larger ones and repeating their
experience. Hence the spirit of monopoly might very
well make its appearance in some gilds long before
there was anything seriously at fault in others. In this
sense, therefore — as a policy which, for varying, periods
in varying trades and varying towns, did actually
succeed, to a large degree, in controlling industrial
activity to the general satisfaction alike of the general
public and of " the workers " — we may fairly say that
the gild ideal was actually realised.

43

LECTURE III

The Beginnings of Modern Farming : the
Break-up of the Manor

We must now return to the condition of the agricul-
tural population. It must be carefully borne in mind
that, interesting as is the early development of manu-
factures and trade, England continued, until well into
the eighteenth century, to be mainly an agricultural
country ; and the fortunes of its peasant cultivators
form, until quite recent times, the centre of its econo-
mic history. We must concentrate our attention on
the changes in the position of the yardlings and cottars,
who constituted the bulk of the rural population. What
we shall say will apply primarily to central and southern
England ; of the eastern counties and the western it
will be true only with modifications.

The conditions under which most of the land was
held by its peasant cultivators were, as we have seen,
determined not by definite contract or bargain but by
custom. They held indeed "in villeinage" or "in
bondage," as the manorial records put it, but "according
to the custom of the manor " ; and while lawyers were
perplexing themselves with the theory of their status,
the essence of the real position of affairs is indicated by
the introduction and spread of the term " customaries "
or " customary tenants " as their everyday designation.

44

Beginnings of Modern Farming

Now medizeval " custom " is rather a deceptive thing :
it is difficult to give it enough weight in our thoughts
without giving it too much weight. On the one side
there was certainly a strong and constant tendency to
get into a groove ; on the other hand changes were in
actual fact made from time to time ; and when once
made, the new arrangement tended, in a curiously short
time, to be itself regarded as of immemorial antiquity.
And so we find that, though custom and habit were con-
tinually operating to keep things as they were, changes
did take place — at first sporadically and slowly, and
then generally and quickly — which profoundly modi-
fied the whole situation. For, by about the middle of
the fifteenth century, that vitally important feature of the
manorial system, the services of the customary tenants
for the cultivation of the lord's demesne, had almost
entirely passed away, and their place had been taken
by money payments.

This is the largest and most widespreading and most
significant example of the transition which has been
conveniently expressed in German as a movement
from NaUiralwirthschaft to Gcldwirthschaft. For this
antithesis we have no satisfactory translation, for
" natural economy " and " money economy " can
hardly be called English ; we can only more clumsily
speak of a transition from a condition of things in
which economic relations take the form of services
and payments in kind to one in which they take
the form of payments in money. But however we
formulate it, the transition was of the utmost im-
portance in the history of mankind. For it not only
brought about, as we shall see in a moment, an

45

Economic Organisation

improvement in production ; it prepared the way for
the complete break-up of the old organisation. The
use of a currency may indeed go on side by side for a
long time with the dominance of custom : the force of
usage may be so strong as to prevent, for an indefinite
period, any modification of prices and wages which
have once been arranged : but the inherent tendency
of the use of a currency is to weaken custom. For it
suggests valuation, in a way that the customary render
of commodities or labour will never do. It prompts the
inquiry whether a satisfactory value is being given or
obtained ; and accordingly it strengthens any disposi-
tion to change there may happen to be on either side
of a connection.

The process of " commutation " of services for money
is worthy of careful study, in relation both to its con-
ditions and to its motives. The conditions were, first,
that the manorial lord and manorial tenants should be
familiarised with the idea of money payments. This
was brought about by the extension of trade — first in
the great fairs and in the towns, and then in the
markets which sprang up during this period in every
substantial village. It is significant that the earliest
account rolls, drawn up by the bailiffs in charge of
the demesnes, date from the middle of the thirteenth
century. They show that the selling of produce and the
hire of labour to supplement the villein services were
becoming ordinary parts of a bailiff's work. Secondly,
it required the actual existence of a sufficient and suit-
able metallic currency ; such as was furnished by the
issues and mint reforms of Henry III, Edward I, and
Edward III. Thirdly, it needed a power on the part of

46

Beginnings of Modern Farming

the customary tenants to obtain some surplus produce
from their fields over and above what was necessary
for their own subsistence, which they could take for
sale somewhere so as to obtain the coins to be offered
to their lords. Fourthly, it involved the presence of a
demand for this surplus produce, such as the towns
were coming to furnish as their population grew beyond
the resources of the fields just outside their own walls.
The commutation of peasant dues for money is only
explicable as the reflex result of a contemporary growth
of industry and commerce. And, accordingly, it took
place early in precisely those parts of western Europe
where trade and town life first flourished. That it
should take place early in England was due in the last
resort to the causes which brought about an early
growth of trade — not very considerable, perhaps, when
compared with the Rhineland or the Netherlands or
northern Italy, but considerable in comparison with
central or eastern Europe. Among these causes are to
be reckoned not only the physical advantages possessed
by England, such as the abundance of harbours and
navigable rivers, but even more the peace and order
secured by the strong government of the Norman and
Angevin kings.

So much, then, for the conditions or prerequisites of
commutation. Now for its motives. Why did people
want to pay money or to receive money instead of
services ? Much light is thrown on this problem by
what happened in times much nearer our own in
other parts of Europe. Labour services, precisely
similar to those we have observed in England in the
thirteenth century, continued to be rendered over a

47

Economic Organisation

large part of eastern Germany down to the later years
of the eighteenth century, and in Poland, Hungary, and
Russia down to the middle of the nineteenth. The
effects of compulsory service (Frohnden) were ob-
served and commented on by many an agricultural
expert of the time. The opinion of all of them was
that it exercised the worst possible influence upon
production. This was most clearly evident in modern
times to the landlords. A peasant who was called off
from his own holding to work upon demesne land, in
the produce of which he was not to share, was " natur-
ally," said intelligent observers, a "reluctant labourer."
" When long prescription has engendered a feeling that
he is a co-proprietor, at least in the spot of land which
he occupies, the reluctance to be called from the care
of it to perform the task of forced work elsewhere is
heightened by a vague sense of oppression, and he
becomes dogged and sullen." It was alleged, with per-
haps a certain exaggeration, that "in Austria in the
eighteenth century the labour of a serf was equal to
only one-third that of a free hired labourer." And
though things were not so bad on the peasant's own
holding, since there he had the stimulus of self-interest,
the prior claim of the lord on two or three days of
every week, and an additional claim just at those
seasons, such as harvest time, when the tenant would
be most anxious to get in his own crop, must have had
a very depressing effect. It should, indeed, be remarked
that the obligation did not always rest upon the tenant
personally : his duty in England, at any rate in the
fourteenth century, was defined, not as that of appearing
himself, but as that of " finding a man to labour." Still,

48

Beginnings of Modern Farming

a great many peasants were probably so circumstanced
that they had to furnish the labour with their own arms ;
and in any case the obligation would be an irksome
and irritating one.

Such were the conditions and motives of commuta-
tion of labour obligations for money payments. And
this commutation we can trace in England from its
early and slow beginnings in the thirteenth century,
through all its stages — " from the stage," as Maitland
has put it, " in which the lord is beginning to take a
penny or a halfpenny instead of each (day's) ' work ' that
in that particular year he does not happen to want,
through the stage in which he habitually takes each year
the same sum in respect of the same number of works,
but has expressly reserved to himself the power of ex-
acting the works in kind whenever he chooses, to the
ultimate stage in which there is a distinct understanding
that the tenant is to pay (a round sum as) rent instead
of doing work." Or rather, I would add, to the final
stage when not only the week work but the extra services
or " boons " in harvest times and other busy seasons —
which were long retained after the week work had been
parted with — are all ultimately exchanged for cash.

Commutation was frequent but not general when
the great Plague devastated the country in 1349, and
returned, though with less virulence, in 1361 and
1369. In 1 38 1 took place the Peasants' Revolt. The
connection between Plague and Revolt is frequently
misunderstood. A conjecture of Thorold Rogers in
his earlier works became a confident assertion in
his later, and was made the basis of William Morris'
Dream of John Ball. It was to the effect that, com-

49 D

Economic Organisation

mutation having taken place, over the country generally,
a generation or so before, and the Black Death having
brought about a rise of wages, so that the commutation
payments no longer purchased anything like the same
amount of free labour, the lords of land sought to
compel their tenants to return to labour rents, and
thereby awakened an indignation which ultimately
broke out in revolt. The revolt, in this view, was the
reply of the tenants to an attempt of the lords of land
to reverse the process of agrarian development. But
for this view there is no evidence ; and, besides, it
implies that commutation had taken place on a much
larger scale than we now know to have been the case.
What happened was rather this. The Great Mortality
made the tenants more conscious than before of the
value to the lords of their services. Where — as was the
usual case — the services had not yet been commuted for
money, if the lord could not retain his tenants and their
works he could not get his demesne cultivated at all.
Made aware that they were indispensable, they began
to press for the relaxation of their labour dues, or for
the complete substitution for them of small round
sums of money. But to such demands the landlords
did not feel themselves in a position to accede. Free
hired labour, as a result of the Black Death and the
consequent dearth of available hands, had permanently
risen in price some fifty per cent. This was in spite
of the Proclamation which had been issued by the
government directly after the Mortality and of the
Statute passed in the next year, making it an offence to
pay or demand more than the previously accustomed
wage, and of the elaborate machinery of local "justices

50

Beginnings of Modern Farming

of labourers " which was called into existence to enforce
the statute. The lords were likely, on the contrary, to
cling only the more firmly to any labour still custom-
ably due ; and where commutation was still recent,
and the lord had expressly, reserved to himself the
option of labour, — which, as we have seen, was some-
times the case, — he would doubtless exercise it. And
in their need for cash the lords would certainly use
any decent opportunity that presented itself for getting
ready money. Such an opportunity was given them
by the manorial courts in which the tenants were
bound to appear, and in which they could be fined
for real or supposed breaches of duty. Under these
circumstances the tenant peasants became more and
more restive. This was the more natural because the
doctrine of human equality was in the air. Popular
preachers, chiefly of the Franciscan and Dominican
orders, were going about asking :

"When Adam dalf and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman ?"

Among such popular orators are certainly to be
included Wyclif's "poor preachers." These were
likely enough to make a very rough and ready use of
their master's famous doctrine of " Dominion founded
on Grace." All dominion or lordship, said Wyclif —
and that included the authority of a manorial lord
— was granted by God in return for service to Himself —
that service which was involved in being in a state of
grace. It was easy for the hearers of Wyclif's popular
preachers to draw the conclusion that lords of land
who refused to grant their demands could hardly be

5^

Economic Organisation

in a state of grace, and that tenants were justified
in refusing to carry out their usual obHgations. What-
ever the impulse, there is no doubt that a large number
of the peasants did " withdraw their services " ; and the
coercive measures which followed led to the Revolt.

The Revolt brought about no sudden change ; but
in the years which closed the fourteenth century and
during the early decades of the fifteenth, commutation
went on much more rapidly than before, and that on
terms favourable to the peasants ; since it usually took
place at the prices for the several works which had been
customary before the Pestilence. And the reason was
that, unless they consented to grant favourable terms,
the lords could not keep their tenants ; and, if the
tenants went away, the lords would be left without
either services or rent. The wholesale desertion of a
village, at that stage of agrarian history, still involved,
as for centuries before, the total destruction of the
value of the estate ; and, short of that, every single
tenant lost and not replaced diminished its value pro-
portionally. The situation was very different from
what it came to be a century later. Then, as we shall
find, the landlords were often only too glad to get rid
of their customary tenants, because it left more scope
for the extension of sheep-farming ; and as this was a
general movement on the landlords' part, a tenant who
lost his holding in one manor was unlikely to find
one elsewhere. But now the arrival in a village of
a peasant willing to take up land would usually be
welcome ; so that a lord knew that, if he lost a tenant,
some other lord would be glad enough to shelter him.
Moreover, there was often room for newcomers in the

52

Beginnings of Modern Farming

growing industries of the towns : we learn of fugitive
serfs who became tailors, shoemakers, weavers, and
tanners. The outcome of the forces, not initiated but
strengthened by the Pestilence, was, therefore, by about
the middle of the fifteenth century, the practical dis-
appearance, over the larger part of the country, of
labour dues, and the substitution of money rents which
soon, in their turn, became fixed by custom. This
meant a heightened sense of personal dignity and
independence on the part of the peasants, and the
increased efficiency of all rural labour. And this latter
improvement not only meant greater comfort to tenants
and cottars ; it furnished, also, the food required by a
growing urban population.

But of almost equal importance was another change
that we find taking place. During the last half of the
fourteenth century occasionally, and during the fifteenth
century with greater frequency, we find it becoming
the practice of manorial lords to let their demesnes
for a short term of years, together with the rights and
perquisites connected therewith, including the peasants'
services or rents. Hitherto, so far as any individuals
could be said to direct the traditional agriculture of
the country, it was the lords of land who did so,
personally or through their agents, their stewards and
bailiffs. From this task, if it was a task, they begin
now to extricate themselves, and the actual conduct
of farming operations gradually passes out of their
hands. The historical significance of this development
was obscured to us until recently by our having
forgotten the sharp and clear distinction in the typical
manor between the demesne on the one side and the

53

Economic Organisation

villein or customaiy land on the other. A fixed pay-
ment in lieu of varying receipts or profits was known
in the Middle Ages as a "ferm" (Latin : firma) ; and
the lessee of a demesne for a term of years was accord-
ingly known as a "firmar," "fermor," or "farmer."
In the fifteenth or sixteenth century we may say with
some confidence that "farmer," when used in an
agricultural sense, most commonly meant a person who
had taken on lease a demesne or part of a demesne ;
it was much later that it was extended to include every
person in charge, on his own account, of an agri-
cultural holding. Now, as we have already said, the
characteristic of English agriculture in recent centuries
has been the position of the capitalist farmer — the man
cultivating as tenant a relatively large holding and
himself supplying at least that part of agricultural
capital that is necessary for the ownership of the stock
and farming implements and for the payment of his
labourers. In the farmers of the demesnes in the
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries we find
one of the chief historical sources of the modern
farmer class. But they differed at first from modern
farmers in that they did not possess anything like so
much capital. And the reason was that they were often
men who had themselves acted as bailiff or reeve of the
manor. Now that, with the increase of wages, the culti-
vation of the demesne had become much less profitable,
it might naturally seem that a man on the spot, who
had the incentive of personal interest and a minute
knowledge of the capacities of the land, could make
more out of it. Some such enterprising reeves might be
relatively well-to-do : the reeve described by Chaucer

54

Beginnings of Modern Farming

was a better business man than his lord, had quickly
put together a little capital (" ful riche he was a-stored
pryvely ! "), and knew how to get his lord's thanks by
lending him what was really his own. But few such
men could at once find the stock required for so large
a holding as a whole demesne ; and it was the most
natural thing in the world that at first the lord's stock
on the demesne should be let with the land itself and
the other appurtenances. Such an arrangement seems
to have gone on and the lease been renewed from time
to time for about half a century after the plan had been
adopted on any particular estate. This suggests that
in about fifty years the farmers of the demesne lands
usually managed to acquire sufficient capital to buy
their own stock. By that time, also, the larger de-
mesnes were probably getting broken up into smaller
holdings, which would not call for so large a capital.

It is to Thorold Rogers that we owe our knowledge
of this stage in English agrarian evolution. He realised
that "farming capital," of which we are accustomed
to speak so easily as a thing that explains itself, requires
to be historically accounted for ; and he perceived
that what he called " land and stock leases " furnished
the earliest opportunities for its creation. But his
comparison of such a lease with the metayer system
of the Continent has proved misleading. With that
system the only feature it had in common was the
provision of stock by the landlord ; and under the
metayer plan even that was neither universal nor
uniform. The "farmer" of the English Middle Ages
contracted for a fixed money rent ; the essential feature
of metayer tenancy is the payment to the landlord

55

Economic Organisation

of an agreed or customary proportion of the produce,
commonly a half (whence, indeed, the name). More-
over, the Enghsh "farmer's" holding was from the
first comparatively large ; that of the metayer has
almost universally been small. The former, in fact,
replaced the lord on the demesne ; the latter developed
out of (or occupied the place of) the small, villein,
tenant. And close as may seem the connection be-
tween giving the landlord half of the serf's produce
and giving half of the serf's working week (whichever
may be the earlier), I know of no evidence for a
metayer stage in this country.

In the second half of the fifteenth century began a
movement altogether different from anything that had
been seen before. Since the advent of skilled weavers
from the Low Countries in the reign of Edward III,
England had ceased to be dependent upon the Con-
tinent for its supply of the better sorts of woollen
cloth, and the manufacture had begun to grow with
rapidity. This caused a more widespread demand
for wool ; and as hired labour continued to be dear,
and pasture farming required far fewer hands than
tillage, a movement began in the direction of sheep-
farming, which soon went far to change the face of the
country. For the keeping of sheep involved the fencing
of the lands on which they were turned out to feed ;
and as those lands, whether tilled fields or pastures, had
hitherto lain open, the process became known as " en-
closure." In some counties there was plenty of stone
at hand wherewith to build walls ; but in the centre
and south of the country no stone was easily obtain-
able, and the enclosures took the form of hedges. And

56

Break-up of the Manor

it was then that rural England began to acquire its
present aspect.

Now the introduction of sheep might be the work of
several different sets of people — of small freeholders, or
even of the larger customary tenants ; but our evidence
makes it clear that it was chiefly the work of the manorial
lords. Again it might take place on different parts of a
manor : if it took place on the common pasture it might
possibly hamper the tenants in the enjoyment of their
own customary rights, but do no more. But, under
the circumstances of the time, it could hardly take place
on a large scale without encroaching on the arable fields.
These usually stretched for hundreds of acres immedi-
ately around every village ; and if they had to be left
undisturbed, the remaining available land would often
be insufficient and difficult of access. Many of the
acres scattered up and down the open fields still in many
places belonged to the lord's demesne ; in earlier times,
as we have already seen, the bulk or even the whole
of the demesne had lain intermixed with the yardlands
of the tenants in the open fields. By the middle of
the fifteenth century the lords had succeeded, in large
measure, in disentangling their demesne from the open
fields and getting it together in compact areas. If a
lord so placed chose to use his enclosed demesne for
sheep rather than for crops, he could please himself
and injure none except the cottars whom he no longer
needed to employ, or the tenant to whom he may
previously have let part of it. But where the demesne
still lay in the open fields, the lord could do nothing
with separate acre or half-acre strips : to be able to
enclose spaces of convenient size he must somehow

57

Economic Organisation

get into his hands the adjacent strips of his tenants.
For this and other reasons, we find that enclosure
very commonly meant, in practice, the disappearance
of a number of customary holdings in the open fields.
It was now that the process started which I began by
saying we should find one of our main subjects of
attention in English economic history — viz. the removal
from the land of that class of small peasant cultivators
which is still so conspicuously attached to it in France
and Germany.

The legal character of the changes in question has
been the subject of much discussion, and cannot even
yet be said to be satisfactorily determined. My own
opinion is that they w^re greatly facilitated, in the
earlier stages of the enclosure movement, by the un-
certain state of the law as to customary tenancy.
The villeins of the thirteenth century were technically
said to hold " at the will of the lord, according to the
custom of the manor." In the course of time the
second half of the clause had come to be understood
as limiting the first half : so long as a tenant per-
formed his customary services, the general feeling was
that he should not be disturbed. In not a few cases,
indeed, it had come to be the practice, when a new
tenant was being admitted, to make the grant expressly
one " for life." Where that had been done, a lord
who wanted to resume such a tenement had but to
wait till the occupier died. It was certainly the
custom, even when the tenancy was distinctly for life,
to admit the son of the last holder ; but evidently
in this case no legal claim could be put forward
and the custom could be disregarded. Where no

58

Break-up of the Manor

such limitation to a life or lives bad been expressed
in the admission of the tenant, the next heir might
seem to be safe in his appeal to custom when he
sought admission. But the lord had a recognised
right to receive a " fine," or payment on admittance.
It was generally recognised that the fine should be
"reasonable." But it was not till far in the reign of
Elizabeth that this principle received judicial con-
firmation, and still later that the reasonable fine was
fixed at twice the rental. It is highly probable that
in many cases the lords got holdings back into their
hands by the simple plan of demanding an impossible
fine. But we can go still further : there is a good deal
of evidence that, in the earlier years of the movement,
a certain amount of actual eviction took place of
sitting tenants. Listen to the account given in his
Utopia by Sir Thomas More in 1516. He has been
explaining, through the mouth of an imaginary foreign
observer, how it was that there were so many thieves
in England. After mentioning causes common to
England and the Continent, he goes on: "There is
another cause which, as I suppose, is peculiar to you
Englishmen alone. . . . Your sheep, that were wont
to be so meek and tame and so small eaters, be
become so great devourers and so wild that they eat
up and swallow down the very men themselves. . . .
For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the
finest and dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen,
yea and certain abbots . . . leave no ground for
tillage ; they enclose all into pastures : they throw
down houses, they pluck down towns," i.e. villages,
"and leave nothing standing, but only the church to

59

Economic Organisation

be made a sheephouse. . . . That one covetous
cormorant . . . may compass about and enclose many
thousand acres of ground together within one pale
or hedge, the husbandmen he thrust out of their own,
or else either by covin and fraud or by violent
oppression they be put beside it, or by wrongs and
injuries they be so wearied that they be compelled
to sell all. By one means, therefore, or another,
either by hook or crook, they must needs depart
away. . . . Away they trudge, I say, out of their
known and accustomed houses, finding no place to
rest in." We must not suppose, because this de-
scription of the England of his own time was prefixed
by way of a foil to his account of the happy state of
Utopia, that More was a mere literary idealist. He
was a trained lawyer and administrator : seven years
later he became Speaker of the House of Commons,
thirteen years after, Lord Chancellor. The language
in the next reign of Bernard Gilpin, the model parish
priest, is to a like effect. Speaking of certain landlords,
"for turning poor men out of their holds," he says,
" they take it for no offence ; but say the land is their
own." The same conclusion is forced upon us by
the evidence given before Royal Commissioners in
1 5 17 of wholesale enclosures here and there : three
hundred acres in one place and three hundred in
another, with the refrain in each case "and the in-
habitants have departed." Nay, in one case, that of
Stretton Baskerville in Warwickshire, where "twelve
messuages and four cottages" were "decayed," and
six hundred and forty acres of land enclosed, " so that
eighty persons there inhabiting were constrained to

60

Break-up of the Manor

depart thence and live miserably," the clearance seems
to have taken place all on one day, which almost a
quarter of a century later the people of the district
remembered to have been the sixth day of December
in the ninth year of Henry the Seventh.

At a later time, it is true, the " tenant by custom "
was protected by the king's courts. Brian, Chief
Justice, is reported as saying as early as 148 1 that
"his opinion hath always been and ever shall be that
if a tenant by custom paying his services be ejected
by the lord, he shall have an action of trespass against
him" ; and by 1530 this dictum got into the standard
legal text-book. It is highly probable, however, that
when the enclosure movement began, the national
law courts were only just beginning tentatively to re-
cognise a right of property in the customary tenant,
and that many a man was ejected who, even half a
century later, would have had too well recognised a
right to his holding to be disturbed.

At some period not yet quite satisfactorily deter-
mined, customary tenants came to be known as " copy-
hold " tenants, since they were said to hold by copy
of the court roll on which their services were regis-
tered. And undoubtedly copyholders have been
secure in their holdings from the early part of the
seventeenth century. " Now," wrote Sir Edward
Coke, the great authority on the common law in the
reign of the first Stuart, in a special little treatise on
the subject, "copyholders stand upon a sure ground ;
now they weigh not their lord's displeasure ; they
shake not at every sudden blast of wind ; they eat,
drink, and sleep securely ; only having a special care

61

Economic Organisation

of the main chance, to perform carefully what duties
and services soever their tenure doth exact and custom
doth require : then let the lord frown, the copyholder
cares not, knowing himself safe and not within any
danger. For if the lord's anger grew to expulsion,
the law has provided several weapons of remedy ; for
it is at his election either to sue a subpcena or an
action of trespass against the lord. Time hath dealt
very favourably with copyholders in divers respects."
Recent investigations have begun to show us how
this security was probably established by the action of
the royal courts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
But these investigations have also shown us that time
and the courts " dealt favourably with copyholders "
by a sort of winnowing process. The term " copy-
holder" was apparently, for some time, applied very
loosely to almost any kind of customary tenant, in-
cluding even tenants for life or lives. But it was only
"copyholders of inheritance," as the favoured class
came to be called — holders of "good and perfect
copyhold lands," as another contemporary phrase de-
scribed them — who could appeal to the king's courts
with any confidence. Some figures recently published
go to show that when the courts did begin to bestir
themselves, there were about as many manors in which
copyholders were understood to have no "estate of
inheritance" as there were in which they were more
fortunate.

But whatever the legal character of the change may
have been in any particular case, the economic effect
was the same. In the language of Lord Chancellor
Bacon — looking back on the changes which began

6?

Break-Up of the Manor

indeed a century before his time, but had continued
to be warmly discussed — "arable land was turned
into pasture ; and tenancies for )'ears, hves and at
will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were
turned into demesnes," i.e. were brought into the
lord's own possession.

Loud complaints about enclosures from writers of
every class abound in our sixteenth-century hterature :
they seem to indicate an agrarian revolution ; and we
know that they caused the gravest concern to our states-
men, and called forth repeated legislative acts and
strong assertions of executive authority. To these we
shall return. Yet certain recent writers have urged,
with a good deal of apparent force, that the transfor-
mation actually effected was nothing like as great as
has been commonly supposed. Basing their con-
clusions upon certain contemporary evidence before
royal commissions, they have shown pretty conclusively
that in this first period — from, say, 1450 to 1610 —
enclosures were confined mainly to the midland
group of counties : Leicester, Northampton, Rutland,
Warwick, Bedford, Berks, Bucks, Oxford, and Middle-
sex. But when they go on to reckon that even in
these counties less than one-tenth of the soil was
affected, they seem to press their evidence beyond
what it will bear, and to forget certain important
considerations. My own minimum estimate for the
above-named counties would be that about one-fifth
of the arable land was affected ; and this was certainly
quite enough to occasion considerable alarm. More-
over this estimate does not include the demesne land
laid down to pasturage ; great distress might be

63

Economic Organisation

caused thereby among the cottars who had previously
lived chiefly by wages, and now had to abandon their
cottages and patches of land and move elsewhere,
even though no " yardling " or " half-yardling " families
were disturbed in their holdings.

All the developments we have been following — the
transformation of labour-rendering into rent-paying
customary tenants, the removal of many of the cus-
tomary tenants in consequence of enclosures and the
introduction of sheep-breeding in the place of tillage,
the growth of a class of large "farmers" on the
demesnes, gradually accumulating their own farming
capital — all these had new and greater consequences
at the time of the Reformation. The Reformation in
religion, whether for good or for ill, was an expression
of individualism ; it emphasized the direct relation to
God of the individual soul. But religious individualism
was but a part or aspect of a universal tendency in the
direction of freeing the individual from tradition and
usage and stimulating him to think and act for himself.
And this took shapes both good and bad : it showed
itself in greater individual enterprise and improved
methods of production, and it showed itself in more
obvious selfishness and self-seeking ; what contem-
porary writers call " private affection," " private profit "
and "singular lucre." In all the economic relations
of human beings with one another, it meant more of
what we now call "competition/' with all that it
involves.

Now it would be absurd to depict the earlier centuries
as a time when self-seeking did not exist. But there
can hardly be any doubt that in the sixteenth century

64

Break-up of the Manor

self-seeking became more general, more alert, more
unabashed ; and of course this manifested itself very
clearly in men's relations to land, which was still the
basis of national life. English land even to-day — if
we compare our prevailing practices and feelings with
those current in America or Canada or Australia —
is only partially commercialised. Men do not in
England, even yet, commonly think of land as a
source of profit exactly in the same way as they think
of a cotton mill ; and English economists still prefer
to distinguish "land" pretty sharply from "capital."
Yet English land, though not completely, is largely
commercialised : and it was in the period of the
Reformation that this commercialisation first made
headway. " Farms," for instance {i.e. farms of demesnes
or portions of demesnes), came to be looked upon as
sources of profit ; would-be tenants came forward to
offer higher rents, or to buy the reversion when the
term of the sitting tenant should expire. Money made
in trade in the towns turned in this direction for in-
vestment, and city business men competed for farms with
countrymen. Landlords naturally took advantage of the
opportunity to increase their incomes, and were roundly
abused by the preachers and pamphleteers of the time
as " rent raisers " and " rent enhancers." Bishop
Latimer declared in one of his sermons that for a farm
for which his yeoman father had paid a rent of three
or four pounds by the year, his successor was now
paying sixteen pounds or more ; and in another place,
referring to farms on a larger scale, that "that which
heretofore went for twenty or forty pounds by the year
is now let for fifty or a hundred pounds by the year."

65 E

Economic Organisation

And an additional impulse and excuse was given by
the rise of prices which followed upon the debasement
of the currency in the later years of Henry VIII and
under Edward VI.

To the new feeling concerning land a greatly wider
scope was inevitably given by the dissolution of the
monasteries in 1536 and 1539. It has been reckoned
that about one-fifth of the land of the country now
passed, by gift or easy terms of sale by the crown, into
the hands of lay lords and gentry, in addition to what-
ever they held before. " Those families," wrote Hallam
in 1827, "within and without the peerage, which are
now deemed the most considerable, will be found, with
no great number of exceptions, to have first become
conspicuous under the Tudor line of kings ; and, if we
could trace the titles of their estates, to have acquired no
small portion of them, mediately or immediately, from
monastic or other ecclesiastical foundations." This is
true not only of several of the great Whig houses of
the eighteenth century, " the great civil and religious
liberty families," of whom Disraeli gives the typical
history in Sybil ; it is true also of many of the sub-
stantial country gentlemen, like the family to which
Oliver Cromwell belonged, who formed the strength of
the Puritan and parliamentarian party in the seventeenth
century. It is not my business here to discuss the
question whether or no this was the best disposition
of the wealth of the monasteries under the circum-
stances of the time and in the interests of the future ; it
is sufficient to call attention to the facts themselves. Of
the suppressed smaller monasteries the number is said
to have been three hundred and seventy-six ; of the

66

Break-up of the Manor

greater, probably about two hundred and fifty ; some
six hundred and twenty-six in all. Probably in at
least five hundred parishes the dissolution involved the
substitution of a layman for an ecclesiastical body in
the ownership of the whole or a considerable part of
the manor. Now it is the universal experience — not
in England only — that ecclesiastical and similar cor-
porate bodies are conservative in their policy and easy-
going in their demands. The rentals paid to the
monasteries by the farmers of demesne land and the
fines on renewal paid by the customary tenants were
probably, as a rule, relatively low. But now came the
new owners, moved by the new spirit of gain. They
enhanced rents, converted in many places arable into
pasture, and tried to bully customary tenants to accept
leases for lives or periods of years. We must not
exaggerate the extent of these changes ; after a period
of disturbance, the new owners settled down on their
estates, and rents — having been adjusted to the new
conditions of agriculture and the new range of prices —
tended once more to become stationary. Moreover
very many customary tenants did survive under the
new name of " copyholders," with a legal security of
tenure. Even the open field, with its compulsory
rotation, remained over the larger part of rural England,
though in a less complete and symmetrical form. Still
the beginnings had been made of the new system of
capitalist farming ; and many of the peasant cultivators
had disappeared from the land.

67

LECTURE IV

The Rise of Foreign Trade: the Advent of
Capital and Investment.

In turning now to consider the beginnings of England's
foreign trade, we must steadily bear in mind that, though
the interest of the subject is great, both for the light it
casts on the conditions of the time and also because
of the dominant part which foreign trade was destined
ultimately to play in English development, its bulk was
relatively very small throughout the Middle Ages, in
comparison with the total economic activity of the
nation. England remained on the whole a self-sufficing
country : export carried away only such surplus raw
produce as the land did not itself require, especially
wool ; and import brought chiefly luxuries, such as
silks, furs, fine and dyed woollen cloth, and French
wines, purchased by a very limited upper class, to-
gether with the spices which rendered more palatable
the food and drink of the well-to-do. Probably the
only imported article in general use among the masses
of the people was the Norwegian tar which was em-
ployed as dressing for sheep in cases of scab : this
seems to have been introduced at the end of the
thirteenth century. Down to the close of the Middle
Ages, England was far inferior to certain other parts

68

Foreign Trade

of Europe, — to the Rhineland and the great cities of
north and south Germany on the one side, to the
ItaHan republics, such as Genoa and Venice, on the
other, — in manufacturing skill, in accumulated capital,
in commercial enterprise, in knowledge of the arts of
navigation and of accounting, and in the possession of
shipping. It was really only in the seventeenth century
that England began to compete with the other nations
of western Europe on anything like equal terms, and
only in the eighteenth century that it took the place of
Holland and became the great carrying and entrepot
nation of the world.

I shall group what I have to say on this subject
around two problems, which were closely connected.
When our story begins, the foreign trade of England |
may be described as of the "passive" kind. Imports!
were brought to our shores almost exclusively in t
foreign ships by foreign merchants, and exports were
carried away in foreign ships by foreign merchants.
It was a position of affairs similar to what exists in
China to-day and existed even in Russia a century ago.
Chinese goods hardly come to Europe on Chinese
ships at all ; as late as the middle of last century Russian
merchants only conducted one-ninth of the import and
one-forty-fourth of the export trade of their own land.
From a position like this we have to see how English
foreign trade became " active," and how not only the
distribution of imports and the collection of exports
within the land, but the undertaking of the actual
business of import and export was assumed by English ',
hands. The second problem is the organisation of
this new branch of activity, its relation to the form of

69

Economic Organisation

organisation that had already grown up for internal
trade and industry, and the gradual development of
new forms to meet the peculiar needs of foreign
undertakings.

To begin, then, with the state of affairs when our
foreign trade was practically entirely in the hands of
foreigners. In some respects foreignness may be said
to have had nothing to do with nationality ; and in
strictness I ought rather to speak of "alien " merchants
when I mean merchants from other countries. For in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, "foreigner"
(from forinsecus) meant simply an outsider, a man from
a distance : it was applied as freely to a man from another
town in the same country as to a man from another
country ; and in some important aspects all " foreign-
ers," whether aliens or not, were treated alike by the
townsmen to whom they came. They were welcome
so far as they gave business to the resident burgesses
of the towns to which they came : so far, that is,
as they brought things which the burgesses could sell
for them, or took away goods which the burgesses could
buy for them. But they were most unwelcome when
they tried to deal directly with non-burgesses or to sell
retail. For the conception of a " national " trade was
only beginning to grow up ; and the unit of com-
mercial life was still the town and not the nation. Of
course foreigners who were also aliens were doubly
foreign : their speech bewrayed them. And at a time
when law was not yet completely " territorial " but
was still largely " personal " ; when, that is to say, a
man, wherever he might travel, was thought to have a
right to be tried by the laws to which he had been

70

Foreign Trade

accustomed, it was inevitable that alien merchants in
England — a country still relatively barbarous — should
live a somewhat separate life. They were very much
in the position of the communities of European mer-
chants until recently in China. Like them, they were
restricted to a few ports and trading centres, and not
allowed to penetrate freely into the interior. And
they were watched with anxious concern to see that
they did not defraud the simple-minded native burgess,
or invade his monopoly either of the collecting or of
the distributing trade in the country itself.

Particular bodies of foreign merchants were able to
purchase for themselves valuable trading privileges and
to secure the right to trade with England on paying only
moderate duties. Of these the most important were
the German merchants known as the Teutonic Hanse,
and the merchants of Italy, above all those of Venice.
The Teutonic Hanse was a great confederation of
German towns, inspired throughout by what were
conceived to be the interests of their traders. "To
navigate is a necessity for us, to live is not " {Navigare
necesse est : vivere non est necesse), was its proud motto.
In its earlier history its leader was Cologne, owing
especially to its eminence in the manufacture of cloth ;
later the Baltic towns, led by Liibeck, came to the
front, owing to the immense importance of the herring
fisheries which they then controlled. Some one has
rather bitterly said that the herring and the clove
(the chief object of Eastern trade) have caused more
bloodshed than anything else except the Christian
religion. Into the historical importance of the herring
I cannot here enter. Suffice it to say that, during the

71

Economic Organisation

fourteenth century, the Hanseatic towns, banded to-
gether in opposition to the Danish monarch who sought
to control the entrance to the Sound, grew into some-
thing very much hke a federal republic ; though each
of the city-states which constituted it was subject nomi-
nally to the Emperor, and many of them also to some
nearer territorial prince. Of the settlements of their
merchants in foreign countries, the most important
were the four "counters " at Bruges, Bergen, Novgorod,
and London : in the last-named city they possessed a
settlement, surrounded by a strong wall and compris-
ing warehouses, residences, a fine hall and a pleasant
garden, which was known as the Steelyard, and which
occupied a site on the Thames bank now taken by
Cannon Street railway station. At first practically the
whole trade between England and Germany was in
their hands ; to the end of the sixteenth century they
succeeded in excluding Englishmen from entering into
direct commercial relations with north Germany and
the Baltic. They always paid export duties lower than
other aliens, and usually somewhat less than were paid
by Englishmen themselves. In the relations of inter-
national trade, the Steelyard served much the same
purpose as the famous settlement of South German
merchants in Venice known as the Fondaco dei
Tedeschi, with this important difference, that the
Italian republic was not in the earlier and more
primitive stage of commercial development still occu-
pied by England. Perhaps a closer analogy may be
found in the mediaeval "factories" of the Italian
merchants in the Near East, and of the English
East India Company later in the Far East.

72

Foreign Trade

Equally characteristic of the time were the privileges
and tariff preferences granted by the English govern-
ment to Venice for the benefit of her merchants.
After various experimental arrangements earlier in the
fourteenth century, intercourse between the two states
settled down in its closing years into a regular system
which survived well into the sixteenth century. Every
year Venice despatched a great fleet of galleys, with
Bruges, the busiest centre of the trade of western
Europe, as its ultimate destination. These " Flanders
galleys," as they were called, visited on their way
Syracuse, Majorca and the ports of Spain and Portugal,
and then struck north for the English Channel. A
part of the fleet usually turned off to Southampton,
while the rest went on to the Low Countries. Arrived
at Southampton, the Venetian traders remained doing
business for several weeks, until it was time to rejoin
their consorts and return home. The fleet, be it ob-
served, was a public undertaking. The ships belonged
to the state of Venice, which appointed the commander
of the whole flotilla and provided captains and crews
and fighting men. The right of freighting a ship was
put up to auction ; and though the trading was all
done by individual merchants or small partnerships,
and there was no general joint-stock, the character
of the cargoes and the places and periods of trade
were all carefully regulated by the government, and
no one was allowed to send goods to England except
in this annual fleet. No doubt the rulers of Venice,
who were themselves merchants, were right in thinking
that it was very expedient to keep their ships and men
together ; in this way they could provide the more

73

Economic Organisation

completely for their safety, maintain stricter discipline
and a higher standard of commercial morality, and
make better terms with the several foreign governments.
The policy of the Venetian government was precisely
similar to that of the Hanse : it was directed to two
ends : to securing a good market in England and the
Low Countries for the commodities, both of home pro-
duction and obtained from the East, in which they
traded, and to gaining all the profit that could be
derived from their position as the sole source of
supply for Mediterranean countries of English, French,
and Flemish commodities. All outsiders, including
the citizens of the countries where they themselves
enjoyed large privileges, were absolutely excluded from
the whole of the Mediterranean under their control.

But, obviously, such one-sided arrangements as these
with the Hanse and Venice could not permanently
survive when a number of Englishmen made their
appearance, anxious and capable themselves to take
part in foreign trade. The remarkable thing is that
the privileges of the foreigners were retained by them
so long after well-organised bodies of English rivals
had begun to call their monopoly in question.

The first of these were the so-called Merchants of
the Staple or Staplers. By " staple " was understood
a fixed or appointed market. From quite early in the
fourteenth century it was the settled policy of the
English government to appoint certain fixed places
at which all sales of wool, the chief product of the
country, should take place, and to which accordingly
all English merchants who dealt in wool were bound
to resort. The frequent changes of location — some-

74

Foreign Trade

times one, sometimes several, places in England itself
being chosen for the staple, sometimes a place on the
Continent, usually Bruges — give an appearance of
vacillation to the policy which does not really belong
to it. The policy itself was throughout consistent : it
was to mark out regular channels through which the
stream of trade should flow, so that it might with
facility be both protected and taxed. At last the
choice of the government fixed permanently upon
Calais, which combined the advantages of a con-
tinental situation with those of English rule ; and
there the staple for wool remained for a century
and a half — from 1399 until the town was lost to
England in 1558.

We can discern the gradual consolidation of
the group of English wool-staplers into a definite
organisation — the Mayor and Company of the Staple
— on exactly the same lines as the craft companies.
Like the craft companies, it resulted from the con-
junction of two forces — the impulse towards fellow-
ship spontaneously felt by men engaged iii the same
business, men having the same interests and running
the same risks, and the need of regulation and control
felt by the government, partly for fiscal reasons, but
partly, also, from an honest desire to safeguard
national interests. And this body necessarily, under
the circumstances of the time, enjoyed a monopoly
as against other Englishmen. Whether this mon-
opoly was in practice irksome would depend upon
whether it was exercised in an exclusive spirit, and
whether there really were any number, worth speaking
of, of competent merchants excluded from member-

75

Economic Organisation

ship. These questions we do right probably in
answering, for the earher part of the company's
history, in the negative.

We might have supposed that a body of EngHsh-
men engaged in the export of wool would have
speedily come into conflict with the privileges of the
foreign merchants, since wool was the main export
article of the " Hansards " and a chief export article
of the Italians. But the staplers were limited by
their own government to Calais : from Calais, through
the foreign merchants who resorted thither to meet
them, they were able apparently to supply a con-
siderable market in the Netherlands and the north
of France ; and this seems on the whole to have
satisfied them.

Far different was the state of mind of a younger
English body of traders, the Company of Merchant
Adventurers. Their very name indicates the con-
scious growth of a new spirit among Englishmen.
These merchants aimed at going further afield and
engaging in foreign trade across the seas outside the
limits of English territory ; they aimed also at find-
ing a market abroad for the new manufactured com-
modity which England was beginning to produce on
a large scale, viz. woollen cloth. In both these ways
they were looked upon as peculiarly enterprising and as
undertaking a distinctly greater risk or "adventure"
than the staplers. True, the gregariousness and sense
of common interest even among these Adventurers was
so strong that they too soon began to form themselves
into a company, organised like one of the great city
companies of London. Moreover, though the whole

76

Foreign Trade

world was before them, the foreign market into which
they really desired to press was just the other side
of the Channel and the North Sea. And there they
were forced, if not by governmental regulation by
the circumstances of the time, to make some one
particular town their "staple," and establish them-
selves in an imposing and commodious House. They
could not get the right of settlement or the right to
trade — which alone made settlement worth while —
except by a licence from the local prince ; they could
only offer attractive terms to a foreign prince by
agreeing to come together at some one place ; and
only in this way, also, could they protect their
common interests when the settlement had taken
place. They naturally sought first to establish them-
selves at Bruges, the then centre of the trade of
western Europe. But Bruges was itself a seat of
the manufacture of cloth, and was allied to Ghent
which carried on that manufacture on a still larger
scale. On their famous woollen cloth rested the pros-
perity of all the Flemish towns : the manufacturing
interests were much too jealous and too strong to
allow Englishmen to invade the local monopoly ; and
accordingly the Merchant Adventurers were com-
pelled to turn elsewhere. In 1407 they established
themselves for the first time at Antwerp, by the favour
of the Duke of Brabant. Antwerp was then quite a
small town, insignificant in comparison with Bruges ;
and the Duke, who wanted to benefit by the duties
the English importers would pay him, could afford
to disregard the remonstrances of the few weavers
and cloth merchants there might happen to be in

n

Economic Organisation

his capital. For a good many years the Adventurers
were not quite satisfied with Antwerp as their centre,
and made various attempts to get a footing in some
busier place ; but after 1444 they settled down at
Antwerp for good, and remained there till the town
was ruined by the religious troubles of the next
century and the disastrous siege of 1584. Their
presence certainly contributed to the astounding
growth of Antwerp in wealth and population and
trade, a growth which by the middle of the six-
teenth century placed it in a position in relation to
western European markets as strong as that which
Bruges had occupied in previous centuries. But
although the English Adventurers might seem to
be as definitely localised as the Staplers, and there
might appear to be little difference in their methods
of business, they really breathed a more independent
and enterprising air. They were not bound by
governmental regulations to the same extent as the
Staplers ; the cloth export was an expanding busi-
ness, while the woollen trade was a stationary or
declining one ; and when the great era of geogra-
phical discovery began at the end of the fifteenth
century, it was the Merchant Adventurers who were
most eager and able to push out into new directions.
Out of their circle arose all the Tudor companies for
adventuring into distant parts for purposes of trade
— the Russia Company, the Levant Company, and,
greatest of all, the East India Company ; so that they
may be regarded in a very real sense as the founders
of English foreign trade.

The appearance and progress of the Merchant

78

Capital and Investment

Adventurers indicate the advent on a considerable
scale of a new factor in English economic development,
the factor of Capital (as distinguished from Land and
Labour) ; and the advent also of the phenomenon,
historically inextricable from Capital, which we call
Investment. By Capital the business world has always
meant — whatever the economists may have tried to
mean — wealth which its owner can employ for the
purpose of gain ; and by Investment we meant partly
the external, or business, fact that there really exist
openings for the use of wealth in directions which will
bring an income or "revenue," over and above the
return of the sum employed ; and partly the internal,
or psychological, fact that its owners are actually
desirous of using it in such directions. And the early
history of the Merchant Adventurers shows us how
this trading capital came into existence in England.
It did not arise out of the revenues of the great
landlords, as some have conjectured ; the younger
sons of the lesser gentry might go into business but
they certainly carried no capital with them. More
was probably made at first out of the profits of tax-
collecting ; and it is possible that some of the townsmen
who earliest engaged in trade were enriched by their
ownership of land made valuable by the growth of
an urban population. But the chief source, it would
appear, of the capital now turning in the direction
of foreign enterprise was the wealth already acquired
by merchants, whether of native or foreign extraction,
in the home trade, and especially in the importation
into England and the sale there of foreign commodities
in demand among the upper and middle classes.

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Economic Organisation

In dealing in an earlier lecture with the craft gilds
I probably gave the impression that they were all com-
posed of comparatively humble handicraftsmen ; and
this was perhaps unavoidable. But early in the
fourteenth century we notice that out of the multitude
of crafts or misteries a few companies had already
become conspicuous for the wealth and influence
of their members, both in London and in the other
chief trading centres of the realm.. In London —
where before the end of the reign of Edward III there
were as many as 48 " misteries " sufficiently organised
to send representatives to the Common Council — some
twelve " great companies " are soon conspicuous above
the rest — viz. the Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fish-
mongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant Tailors,
Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vintners, and
Clothmakers. Now all these trades required a certain
amount of capital. The Goldsmiths, for instance, used
an expensive raw material ; and though the master
goldsmith continued to work with his own hands at
the more delicate operations — as we may see him
represented in engravings of a somewhat later period
— the prosperous men of the craft naturally occupied
a superior social position. Much the same is true
of the Tailors, at a time when the upper classes
dressed so expensively. The Fishmongers needed
capital for their fishing smacks ; and so on. And the
three companies which were early placed at the head
of the list, the Mercers, Grocers, and Drapers, and
which make their appearance in each of the larger
towns as well as in London, were all composed of men
who were exclusively traders and not manufacturers at

80

I

Capital and Investment

all. The Drapers arose perhaps out of the Shearmen,
who actually prepared the cloth for use ; but they soon
left the work of shearing to others, and confined them-
selves to purchase and sale : the importance of their
company testifies to the rapid extension of the manu-
facture of cloth in England. The Grocers, on the
other hand, were quite clearly from the first either
importers, or else dealers in imported commodities.
Their wares were all kinds of spices and drugs, and
their very name (Grossiers) implies that their operations
were wholesale. The Mercers, likewise, who traded in
" merceries " — linen, canvas, and above all silk fabrics
— derived their name from the fact that they were
dealers and handled "wares" {mercinionia). From
several of these companies the Merchant Adventurers
were recruited : each Adventurer continued to belong
to his own city company — and indeed they were bound
to belong to one of the misteries if they wished to
enjoy the municipal franchise — while engaging in the
new foreign enterprise. But it was with the Mercers
that they were most closely associated. And how
much capital a successful Mercer might accumulate we
can gather from the story of Whittington, "thrice
Lord Mayor of London," in 1398, 1407, and 1420.

There had, it is true, been wealthy merchants and
financiers in London long before, and they had formed
a conspicuous element in the civic oligarchy. They
were, however, largely of foreign origin ; some were
Gascon, like the Mayor of Bordeaux in 1275 who
became Mayor of London in 1280 ; others were
Italian, like the leading men among the Pepperers,
the forerunners of the Grocers. Merchants of English

81 F

Economic Organisation

descent were only beginning to make their way into
considerable operations, and they were commonly
connected in business with aliens controlling a larger
capital who could supply them with imported goods
on credit. But by the middle of the fourteenth
century the situation had changed. English-owned
capital now made foreign capital unnecessary for the
home trade ; and Englishmen had sufficiently large
resources, as well as sufficient courage and sufficient
knowledge how to deal with foreign tariffs and foreign
currency, to venture upon overseas trade on their
own account.

It is often said that the teaching of the mediaeval
Church with regard to Usury, enforced as it was by
secular legislation and by the law courts, failed to
recognise "the productive character of capital," and
put obstacles in the way of the progress of trade.
Such assertions show ignorance of the historical de-
velopment. During the later Middle Ages, what we
know as "capital" was only beginning to come into
existence : the world, that is to say, was only beginning
to see accumulations of wealth which could be invested
in any direction in trade and industry, and to realise
that opportunities for such investment actually existed.
Now any investment in which the owner of capital
actually "adventured" his property and took a real
risk, in the hope of obtaining some return over and
above the sum he put in, was regarded by theologians
and the ecclesiastical (or " canonist ") lawyers as per-
fectly legitimate. So that, instead of retarding the free
growth of trade, the Church may be even said to have
stimulated it, by employing its influence to turn the

82

Capital and Investment

disposable wealth of the time away from mere loans to
impecunious rulers or extravagant grandees or mis-
managing monasteries — loans which might fairly be
described in most instances by the modern term " un-
productive " or the mediaeval term " barren " — into
the more productive paths of commercial venture.
This point of view is clearly expressed in the speech
with which Morton, the Cardinal Archbishop of
Canterbury, who was also Lord Chancellor of England,
addressed one of the early parliaments of Henry VII.
"His Grace (the King) prays you," he says, "to take
into consideration matters of trade, as also the manu-
factures of the kingdom, and to restrain the bastard
and barren employment of moneys to usury and un-
lawful exchanges ; that they may be, as their natural
use is, turned upon commerce and lawful and royal
trading."

In the south of Europe the capitalist organisation
which sprang up to meet the new needs of trade was
the Societas, the partnership or company (we may call
it either) trading on a joint-stock ; either in its simple
form, where all the partners alike took part in the
management, or in the special form adapted to the
needs of sea-going enterprise, known as the cominenda,
and reappearing in England in these recent years in
what is known as " limited partnership." But in
England the habit of forming gilds was too all-pervasive,
and satisfied for a long time too completely all the needs
of the situation, to allow the joint-stock plan to appear
until much later, and then not as the accompaniment of
a societas on south-European lines, but as the inevitable
but tardy creation of the gild or fellowship itself, trading

83

Economic Organisation

in distant regions. No doubt there were occasionally,
even in England, family partnerships ; and there were
also occasionally quite large partnerships formed for
various enterprises within the country, such as the
development of mines. But there is no trace of any
such large partnerships among Englishmen engaged in
foreign trade ; and indeed the rules of the fellowship of
Merchant Adventurers, which, like all other industrial
and commercial gilds, insisted upon a regular appren-
ticeship for each of its members, might easily stand in
the way. So long as a fellowship of traders (or " com-
pany " in the English sense) was able to come to terms
with foreign princes, and from the common subscrip-
tions, or possibly from contributions in proportion to the
individual trade done, was able to provide the necessary
establishment or " house " in the staple town, it sufficed
that the Adventurers should trade on their individual
stocks. But when in 1553 a number of " adventurers "
created "the mystery and company of the Merchant
Adventurers for the discovery of regions, dominions,
islands, and places unknown " at a great distance — to
wit, in Russia — and their agents had to reach that
country by way of the White Sea, and then penetrate
for hundreds of miles inland to the capital, it was
evident that individual trading was out of the question.
The year 1553, therefore, saw the formation of the
first true joint-stock company : and it is interesting to
notice that the number of members or shareholders
was 240, and the shares £^2^ each. The example thus
set was imitated by several others of the companies
engaged in business overseas, and above all, half a
century later, by the East India Company, But the

84

Capital and Investment

transition to the new corporate plan was not complete
even yet. For the joint-stock in the case of the Russia
Company, as afterwards in that of the East India Com-
pany, was hmited to each separate voyage, and the
profits were divided after each voyage in proportion
to the investment. It took some time to learn by
troublesome experience that the business of each voyage
could not be kept completely apart and separately
accounted for ; and that a permanent joint-stock, not
periodically repaid, was the only convenient arrange-
ment.

We are, however, rather outstripping the point we
have reached in the narrative. The great expansion of
England's foreign trade in the fifteenth century, and the
first half of the sixteenth, was the work of the Merchant
Adventurers, and they never reached the point of having
a common stock. As time went on, the tutelage in
which the merchants of the Hanse and of Italy sought
to hold the trade of this country became more and
more irksome. The English Adventurers sought to
enter into the geographical spheres of monopoly or
influence which the Hansards and the Venetians kept
jealously for themselves. Demands for reciprocity
fell on deaf ears ; and the inevitable outcome was
only delayed by the fact that the English monarchs
hesitated to give up the revenue they derived from the
foreigners, and to endanger the political friendship
of the powers they represented. First the Venetians
lost their privileged position in 1534 : they had obsti-
nately refused to let the English merchants enter the
Levant to share their trade in Malmsey wine and cur-
rants. Within half a century, with the favour of the

85

Economic Organisation

Sultan, who was ready enough to favour the rivals of
his ancient enemies, the Venetians, the Levant Com-
pany was regularly established in the eastern Mediter-
ranean, and supplying England with the commodities
for which it had been previously dependent on Venice.
With the Hanse the bickering went on much longer.
While the Venetians were being driven to give up
their annual visits, the German merchants in the
Steelyard still maintained their proud position. When
Holbein came to England he found employment in
painting the leading members of the community ; and
the pageant he designed for them on the occasion of
the coronation procession of Anne Boleyn cast into
the shade all the like productions of the city com-
panies. Their complete satisfaction with themselves is
illustrated by the allegorical picture they commissioned
Holbein to produce for their hall : side by side with
the mediaeval conception of "The Triumph of Poverty"
it displayed the modern and commercial conception
of " The Triumph of Wealth," with all her appropriate
train of virtues. It was not till 1597 that the German
merchants, refusing definitely to let English traders
into their German preserves, finally lost their privileges
and left the Steelyard. But by that time the old unity
of the Hanse was already breaking up. What the
Adventurers could not obtain from the Hanse as a
whole, they were able to obtain from one of the
constituent towns. The year 161 1 saw them, after
many vicissitudes, finally established in Hamburg and
in the possession of lucrative privileges. From this
time dates the close connection between Hamburg
and England, which was so important a branch of the

86

Capital and Investment

trading relations of this countiy during the seventeenth
and the early part of the eighteenth century. From
Hamburg the Merchant Adventurers were able to find
a market for their cloth over the whole of northern
Germany; and there the "English Court" remained,
until it was broken up by the orders of Napoleon in
1806.

87

LECTURE V

Domestic Industry and Tudor Nationalism

We have already seen the fundamental importance of
the woollen industry for English economic develop-
ment. It furnishes the explanation of the far-reaching
agricultural changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries : it provided the commodity with which
England first entered actively into the world's com-
merce. Its significance can hardly be overestimated.
It was the first of the great manufactures of England ;
it created a basis for English activity and wealth before
iron and cotton ; and in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries it accounted for more than two-
thirds of our exports. Its power is shown by the
remarkable fact that it was able to bring about a
complete reversal of the trade policy of the country.
The export of English wool, which had once been
the pivot of the government's finance and the chief
occasion for commercial intercourse with foreign
countries, was from 1660 to 1825 absolutely pro-
hibited. It remains now to look at the internal
organisation of the industry ; and here again we
shall find that it presented phenomena of the utmost
interest. In the centuries before improvements in
transportation made it possible for Europe to provide
itself with the cotton of Asia or America, at a time

88

Domestic Industry

when the use of furs and silks was necessarily con-
fined to the wealthier classes, woollen fabrics were the
common, over large areas practically the only, wear of
the great mass of the people. The organisation of their
production had accordingly a typical significance : it
exemplified, in all countries and in well-nigh every
district, and in a clear and unmistakable form, the
shapes which industrial relations were bound to take
under the varying conditions of the time. As soon as
specialised industrial workers made their appearance,
occupied mainly in manufacture and grouped together
for the most part in the towns, the shape was what we
now know as the gild system, and of this we have already
noticed the leading characteristics. There is much
that is still obscure in the municipal history of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries ; but it is surely not
uninstructive that in all the large towns of western
Europe gilds of woollen weavers should have arisen
and made themselves conspicuous during that period,
and that only second to them in prominence should
have been gilds of fullers and dyers engaged in other
and later processes in cloth manufacture. The appear-
ance of such societies, a century or more before many
other craftsmen began to draw together in fellowship,
can only be explained by their greater number — itself
due to the more primary character of the want which
their products satisfied.

But as the woollen industry was the first, on any
considerable scale, to take the gild form, it was the first
to break away from it ; and this for the same reason —
the extent of the demand. England was capable of
producing large supplies of wool, of good quality.

89

Economic Organisation

What was first lacking was technical skill. Whatever
may be the case to-day, the economic history of earlier
centuries fully bears out the contention of Frederick
List that the creation of " productive powers " is more
important for a nation than the mere possession of
" values in exchange." And England owes its pro-
ductive powers very largely to the alien immigrants
who have made their way to her, with or without wel-
come. The necessary skill in handicraft in the woollen
industry came to the country from the Netherlands
chiefly during two periods. There was a considerable
migration from the Low Countries during the reign of
Edward III, and again some two centuries later, during
the early years of Elizabeth. In the one case they were
driven from home by internal dissensions — by the con-
test between the great weaving cities of Ghent and
Ypres and their count, and by the collision of interest
between the large towns and the surrounding country
districts. In the second case they were driven away
by the religious persecutions of Alva. It is with the
first of these migrations that we have now to do ; for
the change in the organisation of industry made itself
clearly manifest long before the time of Elizabeth.

A rough and rude cloth was apparently produced
at one time in every town in the country. The
weaver would usually come into direct contact with
his customer or employer : I add "employer," because
undoubtedly it was often the practice for the weaver to
work up an employer's yarn. But with the improve-
ment here and there in the weaver's art, the manu-
facture, at any rate of the better qualities, would tend
to concentrate itself in particular localities. Sheep,

90

Domestic Industry

again, were raised all over the country ; and we have
seen that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the
inducement to grow wool was strong enough to bring
about enclosures in most of the Midland counties. In
time the natural advantages of the downs and moors
and of counties like Leicester and Lincoln would make
them the homes of the larger flocks ; and accord-
ingly wool merchants (or "wool staplers") became
even more necessary than before to collect the raw
material and convey it to users elsewhere in England
or abroad,, or to foreign merchants in London and
other ports. Nor was this all : as early as the four-
teenth century we can trace the rise of a body of
dealers in cloth, numerous enough in the country
generally to need a market provided for them in
London at Blackwell Hall in 1397, and rich enough
in London and the other great towns to take rank
among the wealthiest of the city companies. Doubt-
less these dealers, or " drapers " as they were called,
were engaged not only in collecting cloth for sale in
parts of England at a distance from the place of pro-
duction, but also in collecting it for export abroad.
What their presence indicates is the growing distance
between the producer and the consumer, and the need
for commercial middlemen.

But as the market widened, the opportunity for
middlemen and their services to production would
become even greater. Such a widening of the market
came with the growth and extension of the foreign
market for cloth, and we can ascribe this roughly to
the second half of the fifteenth century.

If we can regard the number of pieces on which the
91

Economic Organisation

Hansards paid duty as an index of the whole trade of
the country, we may conclude that the export of cloth,
which grew comparatively slowly — perhaps by fifty per
cent. — during the first half of the fifteenth century,
actually trebled itself during the second half. And
during that period we find four vital changes in in-
dustrial organisation taking place. First, the weaving
of cloth and the allied branches of the manufacture
are leaving the towns and establishing themselves in
villages and hamlets and isolated cottages over the
countryside ; secondly, with the abandonment by the
workpeople of the towns, the gild association also
drops asunder in the woollen industry, though the
State still, as we shall see, enforces the rule of
apprenticeship ; thirdly, the industry concentrates
itself in certain particular districts — " the shires
which use cloth-making," as a contemporary his-
torian calls them — those shires being chiefly Nor-
folk, Suffolk, and Essex in the east, Wilts, Somerset,
and Devon in the west ; and finally, a new class of
entrepreneurs appear — the "clothiers," as they are
called, who now control the whole process of produc-
tion. Their essential function, as the great Elizabethan
Statute of Apprentices phrases it, was to " put cloth to
making." An Act of 1465 reveals conditions precisely
similar to those which were found still in existence
more than three hundred and forty years later by the
famous parliamentary Committee of 1806 : the clothier
" delivering the wool " to be carded and spun, then
giving out the yarn to the weaver to be woven into
cloth, and then placing the cloth in the hands of the
fuller, " walker," or " tucker " to be felted and cleansed.

92

Domestic Industry

This remarkable transformation raises more ques-
tions than we are at present able to solve. Where,
we may ask, did the capital and enterprise come
from, which are indicated by the advent of the
clothiers ? Probably from many directions, but espe-
cially from among the ranks of the drapers or cloth-
dealers : it was natural that men engaged in selling
cloth should undertake to procure its manufacture by
themselves purchasing the wool and getting the yarn
spun, and providing poor weavers with the necessary
materials. Where did the country weavers come
from ? Probably from the less successful craftsmen
and, especially, from among the discontented journey-
men of the towns, now becoming a separate industrial
class, and unable to look forward to finding places for
themselves in the narrow circle of " masters." How-
ever it may have been brought about, we have reached,
it will be seen, the third of the stages we have already
distinguished in the evolution of industry — the stage
marked by the dominance of a commercial middleman
who finds material and employment for the artisan.
Economists are accustomed, we have already noticed,
to call this condition of things by the not very satis-
factory terms, " domestic system," or Hmis-industrie,
from the fact that — in contrast with "the factory
system " that followed — the process of manufacture
still took place at the workman's own home. What-
ever we call it, there is evidently to be discerned here
an intermediate or a transition stage between the gild
system with its independent handicraftsmen and the
factory with its mass of congregated workpeople.
Capital first accumulated in trade now turned back,

93

Economic Organisation

so to speak, on industry, and began to take the
control of the manufacturing operations. And the
appearance of the same system in the textile industries
of other countries — as, for instance, the linen manu-
facture of Holland and Silesia and the silk manufacture
of France — and indeed in all considerable manufac-
tures that sprang up before the advent of machinery,
such as Sheffield cutlery in the seventeenth century
and the English hat and boot trades in the eighteenth,
seems to indicate that it was the natural consequence
of the economic forces at work. When goods were
made by small masters in little workshops, the only
way in which manufacture could be quickly stimu-
lated to meet a rapidly growing demand was for
capitalists to come forward, provide the materials, and
undertake the business of finding a market.

The economic situation in England, as elsewhere,
was complicated by the fact that, while the large new
industry grew up with its new organisation in the
villages of certain districts, many of the old trades,
supplying only local or limited demands, continued
for a long time to be carried on in the towns by
independent master artisans, associated in companies
which were the direct representatives and descendants
of the mediaeval gilds. They continued to exist, but
they are no longer typical of the wider occupations
of the country. And it is significant that when in
171 2 a pamphleteer drew the character of an English-
man under the name that has since stuck to him
of "John Bull," he depicted him as a clothier, whose
ordinary talk was of "the affairs of Blackwell Hall,
and the price of broadcloth, wool, and bays."

94

Tudor Nationalism

It is, however, now time to introduce a factor which
can hardly escape the notice of any careful student of
the Tudor period : and that is the part played by
the regulating power of the national State. England,
from the time of the establishment of the strong rule
of her Norman kings, had never so completely escaped
from the control of a central government as some of
the continental countries. The legal and administra-
tive machinery elaborated by Henry II and his suc-
cessors, the legislative activity of Parliament under the
third Edward, these had brought the whole country
in large measure within the scope of a single all-
embracing political system. Over large parts of the
Continent, in the later Middle Ages, central national
authority was non-existent or exceedingly weak ; and
its place in the regulation of economic life was taken
by the authorities of the various towns and cities.
The unit of industrial and commercial relations was
the town, and neither the nation nor, as later in Ger-
many, the " territory " or principality. England, in
this as in other economic respects — such as the pre-
valence of the manorial system and the appearance of
the gild — was not unlike the rest of western Europe.
In England also we may characterise the period of the
later Middle Ages as a period of "town-economy."
Yet the several municipalities were never quite so free
from external control as in Italy or Germany ; and
we have already seen examples of the far-reaching
influence of the central government in certain direc-
tions, e.g. in the regulation of the staple.

But when we come to the age of the Tudors the
hold of the central government over the economic life

95

Economic Organisation

of the people becomes far more clear and unmistakable.
This was the natural outcome in the economic sphere
of the wonderful outburst of the spirit of nationality
which characterises the latter part of the epoch. The
nation felt itself to be one, as never before ; having
this feeling of unity it was natural that it should wish
to see its ideals carried out over the whole country ;
and to do this it turned to the government as repre-
sentative of the national will.

The machinery of Tudor rule was threefold. First
there was the Parliament to give legislative force to
national policy. The period is marked by a series of
great statutes vitally affecting the organisation of econo-
mic life : the two most outstanding examples being what
was called in later ages the Statute of Apprentices, soon
after Elizabeth came to the throne (1563), and the great
Poor Law, almost at the end of her reign (160 1), which
brought to a definite conclusion a series of experiments
in the way of legislation stretching over more than sixty
years. We cannot, indeed, attribute to Parliament dur-
ing this period any really independent initiative apart
from the monarch and his advisers. Parliament existed
to give information about the needs of the country, and
to give the support of national agreement and acqui-
escence to the measures already decided upon by the
wisdom of the government. It was only its usefulness
for this purpose which enabled it to survive during the
absolutism of Henry VIII. For the greater part of
the period, the real pivot, on which everything turned,
was that second part of the mechanism of government
— the Council. The Council both dictated legislation
and enforced it when it had been passed. It is very

96

Tudor Nationalism

significant that while the prayer for the High Court of
Parhament was not composed till the stormy times of
Charles I's first parliament, and was not made a regular
part of the English Church service till 1662, the Book
of Common Prayer contained, from its earliest form
as drawn up in 1549, two prayers for the Council — one
in the Litany and one in the Communion office. This
sufficiently illustrates the place which it occupied in
the public eye. And the third great element in the
Tudor system was the local executive machinery —
that of the Justices of the Peace, acting individually,
or in association with their fellows in Quarter Sessions.
The office of Justice of the Peace had been growing
up ever since the reign of Edward III, and with it had
been incorporated the office of Justice of Labourers
which had been created to carry out the labour legis-
lation called forth by the Black Death. But it was
not till the Tudor period that it reached its definitive
form.

The place which the Justices of the Peace took hence-
forward in the political and social system of England
is altogether unique ; and of this English public men
were fully aware. " It is such a form of subordinate
government for the tranquillity and quiet of the realm,"
wrote the great Chief Justice, Sir Edward Coke, "as
no part of the Christian world hath the like." Else-
where national governments, in the machinery at their
disposal for the administration of the provinces, were
limited to one of two alternatives. Either local ad-
ministration had to be left to local magnates — these
in the country districts, of course, being the larger
landlords — and this meant the survival of feudalism.

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Economic Organisation

Or the central government planted in the several
districts a number of professional officials, who were
sent down from the capital and who, if they had
no local partialities and interests, had also no local
affections or influence : and thus was constituted
a bureaucracy. England alone — for good or for ill,
we must not hastily say which — was able in large
measure to combine the virtues of both methods. The
Justices were, in fact, the local squires, with all their
local knowledge and weight ; but they derived their
authority from a royal commission, and they carried on
their work under the inspection and control of the
Council at the centre of government.

The drawback to the system — and every system
has its drawbacks — was that the agency through
which the government was compelled to act was an
agency with an inevitable class bias. Yet it was not
till, in the latter half of the seventeenth century,
the effective supervision and, if need were, coercion
by the Council were withdrawn, that the defects of
English adminstrative machinery began to outweigh
its merits.

Let us now look at the policy pursued by the Council,
confirmed by Parliament and enforced through the
Justices ; or rather at the principles at the back of it.
These principles were those of the great thinkers of the
Middle Ages, now applied to the whole country and
enforced by a national authority. They started from
the idea not of liberty but of order. A State should
be well ordered ; and by well ordered was understood
a grouping of its subjects in due ranks, each with its
proper duties and responsibilities.

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Tudor Nationalism

" The heavens themselves,"

Shakespeare, in the last months of Elizabeth's reign,
makes one of his characters say, in Troiliis and
Cressida,

"the planets and this centre
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order."

And he goes on to express the current view of the
thoughtful men of the time that even "enterprise" —
by which he means the proper activity of citizens in
their several positions — was dependent on the main-
tenance of " degree."

" O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick ! Hovvf could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The premogeniture and due of birth.
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string.
And hark, what discord follows."

And so in the Catechism, set forth in 1549 to be learnt
by every child, high or low, before he was brought to
be confirmed by the bishop, the compendium of duty
ended with the statement that it behoved everyone
"to learn and labour truly to get mine own living,
and to do my duty in that state of life unto which it
shall please God to call me " — not, be it observed, " hath
pleased God," as shown merely in the fact of birth.
The men of Tudor times supposed, no doubt, that for
most people their " state of life " was practically settled

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Economic Organisation

by their birth ; but they never beheved in rigid
castes, and they always recognised that a man might
be called by God to a state of life other than that
in which he was born. But in whatever state or
degree he found himself, of that degree he was to
do the duty.

But to do it he would need training. And that
training it was believed to be the duty of the govern-
ment to see that he got. Hence the great Statute of
Apprentices of 5 Elizabeth, cap. 4, which extended to
the whole nation and to all manufacturing industries,
the seven years' obligatory apprenticeship which had
hitherto been enforced by the several misteries backed
up by the municipalities. " It shall not be lawful to
any person, other than such as do now lawfully exercise
any occupation, to exercise any craft now used within
the realm of England and Wales, except he shall have
been brought up therein seven years at the least as
apprentice . . . nor to set any person on work in such
occupation, being not a workman at this day, except
he shall have been apprentice." The use of the word
" now " — " now used within the realm " — was certainly
not intended as a limitation : but the judges in the
eighteenth century ruled that the effect of it was to limit
the statute to industries already established in 1563 ; so
that (and this is an important fact) the new cotton trade
and the new iron trade which came into existence in the
eighteenth century were never subject to any statutory
prescription as to apprenticeship, however common —
in the cotton trade in particular — the practice may in
fact have become in imitation of the usage in other
trades.

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Tudor Nationalism

Having been properly trained, every man, it was
assumed, could find suitable employment. How it
was proposed to deal with cases where that assumption
was falsified by events, we shall learn in a moment.
Finding employment, it was generally held that men
should receive a suitable wage ; and to this conviction
the government sought to give effect by the system
of Justices' Assessments, under the control of the
Council. Ever since the Black Death, Parliament had
attempted to determine the rates of remuneration for
agricultural labour. We must be careful not to inter-
pret this policy as the outcome merely of selfishness on
the part of the landlords. The public opinion of all
educated men was on the side of the public authorities
in applying to labour the general principle of "just
price." It seemed as evidently immoral to ask for
higher wages because the ranks of labour were thinned
by pestilence, as (to take an instance which actually
occurred) to try to get a higher price for tiles because
the town was unroofed by a tempest. To leave such
things to the operation of the Supply and Demand of
the moment was to abandon the duty and task of
government. The attitude in this matter of William
Langland, who wrote his Vision of Piers the Plowman
about 1377, is highly significant. It is usual to con-
trast Langland with Chaucer, the man of the people
with the man of the court. J. R. Green, for instance,
describes him as " the gaunt poet of the poor." And
yet Langland has no sympathy with

" labourers landless, that live by then hands,"

and, not content with "worts a day old," " penny ale,"

lOI

Economic Organisation

and " a piece of good bacon," clamour for " fresh
flesh or fish " :

" He must highly be hired, or else will he chide,
Bewailing his woe as a workman to live . . .
He curses the King and his Council after,
Who license the laws that the labourers grieve."

Langland warns them harshly that a time of dearth
will soon come and reduce them to a more patient
frame of mind.

The difficulties, which were always considerable, in
enforcing the statutes of labourers were increased in the
middle of the sixteenth century by the rise in prices,
due first to the debasement of the currency during the
government of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and then
by the influx of silver from the newly discovered mines
of America. Yet these difficulties were far from induc-
ing the government to leave wages to free contract :
their effect was only to lead the government to substi-
tute scales of wages varying with the cost of living for
the rigidly fixed rates of earlier statutes. The great
statute of 1563 (5 Eliz., cap. 4), already referred to,
began by confessing that the existing laws with regard to
wages could not " conveniently " — " respecting the ad-
vancement of prices " — " be put in due execution with-
out the greatest grief and burden of the poor labourer
and hired man." What was therefore necessary, it
went on to say, was legislation which would " yield unto
the hired person, both in the time of scarcity and in
the time of plenty, a convenient proportion of wages."
Accordingly it enacted that the Justices of the Peace of
every shire or town, at every Easter Sessions, " calling
unto them such discreet and grave persons ... as

102

Tudor Nationalism

they shall think meet, and conferring together respect-
ing the plenty or scarcity of the time," should " have
authority to rate and appoint the wages " of all labour-
ers, artificers, &c. These rates they were to certify to
Chancery ; " whereupon it shall be lawful for the Lord
Chancellor, upon declaration thereof to the Queen . . .
or to the Lords or others of the Privy Council ... to
cause to be printed and sent down proclamations con-
cerning the several rates appointed." " If " in any
year "it shall happen that there be no need of any
alteration, then the proclamation for the year past shall
remain in force."

It was " pollitiquely intended " — i.e. consciously
aimed at as a matter of State policy — as a later statute
puts it, that the regulation of wages should extend to
all manual occupations. But doubts were raised as to
whether the statute was intended to cover persons em-
ployed in " domestic " industry, like the weavers work-
ing for clothiers ; first, because the original act seemed
to lay stress only on workers in husbandry and on the
particular crafts which had previously been regulated,
and, secondly, because it had implied that the wages
were to be time wages, while in the woollen industry,
in the form it had now assumed, payment was gener-
ally made by the piece. Accordingly, by a statute of
1597-8 (39 Eliz., cap. 12), the authority of the Justices
was expressly defined to include the rating of wages
"of any labourers, weavers, spinsters and workmen
or workwomen whatsoever, either working by day,
week, month or year, or taking any work, at any
person's hand whatsoever, to be done," i.e. as piece-
work. That there was felt to be some need to inter-

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Economic Organisation

Vene for the protection of the domestic weavers is
shown by the fact that an act of 1603-4 (^ J^^v cap.
6) not only confirmed this definition of the Justices'
authority, but went on to enact that " if any clothier
or other shall refuse to obey the said assessment of
wages, and shall not pay so much or so great wages to
their weavers, spinsters, workmen or workwomen as
shall be appointed . . . that then every clothier and
other person so offending shall forfeit for every such
offence, to the party grieved, ten shillings." As an after-
thought it occurred to the legislators that many of the
clothiers had prospered so far as to be made Justices
themselves, and that these clothier Justices might have
too much influence in Quarter Sessions. A separate
section was accordingly tacked on to the act with this
significant proviso, "that no clothier being a justice
of peace . . . shall be any rater of any wages for any
weaver, tucker, spinster or other artisan that dependeth
upon the making of cloth."

The clear implication of a clause like this helps us,
I think, to arrive at a conclusion as to the character
of the legislation as a whole. It has been represented
by some writers as a huge conspiracy of the employ-
ing classes to keep down wages. I cannot agree
with them. I think it was an honest attempt to
secure for every employed person what should be a
fitting wage, and a wage that should vary with the
cost of living ; although it is quite obvious that in
deciding what was "a convenient proportion of
wages," i.e. wages suitable to the position of "the
hired person," the Justices of the Peace would not be
likely to err on the side of extravagance. And the

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Tudor Nationalism

case of the clothier Justices shows that the govern-
ment were fully aware of the possibility of selfish
bias, and would do what they could to counteract
it. It is another question how far the act was
obeyed by the Justices, and still another how far
the assessments were observed. When the subject
began to be discussed, some thirty years ago, only
about a dozen assessments of various dates between
1593 and 1684 were known to exist. But since
then more than a hundred others have come
to light ; sufficient to prove that, throughout the
seventeenth century, the annual assessment was part
of the ordinary business of every Easter Sessions.
There is much also to suggest that on the whole the
assessments were conformed to by employers. But
how far or how long the assessments kept pace with
the cost of living we have as yet hardly enough evi-
dence to decide. The comparisons sometimes insti-
tuted between the movement of assessed wages and
the movement of the price of wheat are not quite
conclusive ; because the Justices would properly take
into account the whole range of a labourer's wants
and not the single article of wheaten bread. As the
Essex Justices declared in 1651, it was their duty
to have "special regard and consideration to the
prices at this time of all kinds of victuals and apparel,
both linen and woollen, and all the necessary charges."
It is only in the last year or so that statisticians have suc-
ceeded in constructing " index numbers " to show the
variation in the cost of living of working-people in the
twentieth century : for the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries the index numbers have still to be calculated.

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Economic Organisation

In the first half of the eighteenth century, the prac-
tice of assessment gradually fell into disuse. So com-
pletely was it disregarded in the cloth industry that in
1756, on the petition of the woollen weavers of Glou-
cester, an act was passed giving the Justices authority
to fix wages by the ell, regardless of the fact that they
already had that power by the unrepealed statute of
Elizabeth. In 1757, on the petition of the clothiers,
the act was repealed, and with it, by implication, the
wage assessment clauses of the act of 1563, so far as
the woollen trade was concerned, since it was now
enacted that wages should in future be settled by free
contract between the parties. The reason assigned
was that a prescribed weaving wage per ell, or unit
of length, was incompatible with the great variety in
the width of various kinds of cloth and in the weight
of the yarn employed. The abandonment in 1757
of State regulation of wages in what was then the
one really great industry of England is very signi-
ficant. It shows that the system of regulating wages
was abandoned long before the advent of machinery
or the factory. It was thrown off by employers in
an industry still in the domestic stage and still
making no use of "power." And the excuse given
was not without a certain force. With the multi-
plication of varieties of product, a wage list to be
appropriate must become proportionately detailed and
elaborate. This is what is being discovered to-day
in all attempts to settle rates of wages either by joint
agreement or by statutory boards. It is likely enough
that the Justices in the eighteenth century had not
the necessary technical knowledge.

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Tudor Nationalism

In the years which followed 1757, the only serious
attempt to regulate wages by the authority of the
Justices is to be found in the so-called Spitalfields
Acts which were passed in 1773 for the benefit of
the London silk-weavers, and were tolerably success-
ful, though restricted in their operation to London
and not affecting the cheaper silk manufactures of
Coventry and Macclesfield. The legislation was effec-
tive, partly because the article produced was of the
nature of a luxury, partly because the Justices allowed
themselves, in the rates they fixed, to be guided by
agreements between employers and employed. So
successful on the whole was the arrangement in this
particular case that the Spitalfields Acts were suffered
to remain unrepealed till 1824, in spite of the fact that
the act of Elizabeth for the regulation of wages gene-
rally had been repealed in 181 3. The powers of the
Justices in respect of wages certainly left no bitter
memories behind them. For in the distress of the
Industrial Revolution it again and again occurred to
various bodies of workpeople to appeal to the act of
5 Elizabeth and petition that it should again be en-
forced. The reply of Parliament to these embarrassing
requests was to abrogate the act altogether.

Not quite a century afterwards, legislation began to
retrace its steps. By the act of 1909, Trade Boards
were established by the State to "fix minimum rates
of wages " in certain trades popularly spoken of as
"sweated " : in the language of the act, trades in which
" the rate of wages is exceptionally low." The Boards
are composed not only of an equal number of repre-
sentatives of employers and workers, but also of such

107

Economic Organisation

a number of "appointed members" as the Board of
Trade may think fit, short of half that of the repre-
sentative members, and they are presided over by an
"appointed" chairman. The numbers of the "ap-
pointed " members in the first five Boards have been
3 out of a total of 15, 3 out of 35, 3 out of 19, 5 out of
2T, and 3 out of 11 respectively. They are all persons
of approved tact, and doubtless they seek by patient
diplomacy to obtain the largest possible measure of
agreement : but it is perfectly clear that they hold the
balance of power. In 191 2 a much longer step was
taken, and statutory machinery set up to "settle"
" minimum rates of wages," together with the neces-
sary "district rules," for all the underground workers
in the coal mines of the country. That machinery con-
sists in the last resort of the individual chairmen of the
several Joint District Boards, inasmuch as they are
directed themselves to settle the rates and rules, if
any Board fails to reach an agreement ; and these
chairmen are appointed, in default of agreement, by the
Board of Trade. Wages under these acts are just as
much " regulated by the State " as ever were those fixed
by the Justices' assessments. They are State-regulated
in two senses : in the sense that they are not determined
by free contract between the parties concerned (either
individuals or associations), but by an authority which
derives its power from the State ; and in the sense
that this authority in the last resort lies in the hands
of persons nominated by the executive of the State.
To control wages through local bodies with statutory
powers, even if they are in some degree representative,
is as much State control as to do so directly from

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Tudor Nationalism

Whitehall. The more immediately practical problem
to-day is not whether free contract shall be superseded
by State control, but what are the wisest methods of
exercising State control. I may add that before we
criticise the vague language — "a convenient propor-
tion of wages " — of the act of Elizabeth, we may ask
ourselves whether the legislation of Edward VII and
George V is even equally explicit as to the principles
on which the determination shall rest. In directing
the authorities to get information about " the plenty
or scarcity of the time," the legislation of 1563 at any
rate recognised that consideration as to cost of living
which the legislation of 1909-12 passed by in silence.
To return, however, to other features of the Tudor
policy. Having been properly trained and being
secured in a "convenient" wage, it was everyone's
duty to work ; and it was assumed by statute after
statute that employment could be found by everyone
who cared to take it. The vagrancy of sturdy beggars
was sternly prohibited, in a series of statutes of ever-
growing severity. Such persons were to be openly
whipped (said a statute of 1598) " until his or her body
be bloody, and forthwith sent from parish to parish
the straight way to the parish where he was born if
the same way be known, and if not, to the parish where
he last dwelt one whole year, there to put himself to
labour as a true subject ought to do." If he had no
parish " settlement," as it was called, he was to be
conveyed to the house of correction (whose establish-
ment the act authorised), " there to remain and be
employed in work until he shall be placed in some
service."

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Economic Organisation

But all the destitute were not "sturdy," i.e. able to
earn their living if they chose. It was gradually borne
in upon the minds of the men of the sixteenth century,
that, besides " idle and loitering persons and valiant
beggars," there were " impotent, feeble and lame, which
are the poor in very deed." These must be assisted ;
no worthy person should be allowed to starve in a
well-ordered State ; and accordingly for the relief of
the " poor in very deed," the Tudor government gradu-
• ally built up the Poor Law, which reached its definite
form in the statute of 1601. The real starting point
was the act of 1536, which imposed on the several
parishes the duty of relieving their own destitute poor.
Notice in passing that this was one, and the most im-
portant, of those statutes which made the ecclesiastical
division of the country, the parish, i.e. the area attached
to the village church, the unit of administration for
civil purposes. The authority of the local Justice and
the machinery of the parish now began to take the place
in the life of the people which the lord of the manor
and the manorial court had previously occupied : and
this was the easier because in rural districts the parish
and the Justice in a large proportion of cases were
only the manor and its lord under other names. And
the explanation of the use made of the ecclesiastical
parish is largely to be found in the history of the Poor
Law. The Poor Law grew out of a plan to regulate
voluntary charity. At first it was thought to be
enough that the churchwardens of every parish should
take "discreet and convenient order, by gathering
and procuring of charitable and voluntary alms of
the good christian people within the same with boxes

no

Tudor Nationalism

every Sunday, holyday, and other festival day and
otherwise," and that the parsons "in all and every
their sermons ... as in time of all confessions and
at the making of wills should exhort, move, stir and
provoke people to be liberal " ; and it was expressly
laid down that, when voluntary alms would not
suffice, the parishioners were not to be " constrained to
any such certain contribution but as their free wills and
charities shall extend." But organised charity broke
down then, as it has so frequently broken down since.
In 1555 it was enacted that any parishioner who refused
to make a suitable contribution should be " gently ex-
horted " by the parson and churchwardens, and if he
was obstinate he should 'be sent for by the bishop and
talked to. In 1563 it was recognised that even the
eloquence of the bishop might fail ; and it was pro-
vided that an " obstinate person " should be summoned
before the Justices (or mayors in towns), who should
lay an assessment upon him. And finally, in 1572, the
Justices were empowered to make a direct assessment,
and to appoint overseers of the poor to take charge
of the whole business.

The relief of the poor thus fell under the super-
vision of the Justices. Sed quis ciistodiet cnstodes
ipsos f — who would supervise the Justices ? The
answer is the Council. It is a very striking fact that
until quite recent years England has been distinguished
from the countries of the Continent in the possession
of a systematic national provision for the destitute.
And this is the more remarkable because England
by no means led the way in this matter. It did
but follow in the wake of the Low Countries, of

III

Economic Organisation

France and Germany. The principles involved had
been clearly stated, among Protestants by Luther and
Zwingli, among Catholics by the humanist Vives ;
they had been discussed and accepted by the highest
theological tribunal of the western world, the Sor-
bonne ; and they had attracted universal attention
when they had been carried out by the enlightened
municipality of Ypres. It is curious that one Flemish
city, Ypres, should have led the way in the reform of
the relief of the poor, and another, Ghent, should
occupy the same honourable position in our own
time with regard to unemployment insurance. But
the continental poor-relief measures, for various reasons
still rather obscure, did not succeed in permanently
establishing themselves. The outcome was different
in England, because here the Privy Council had
sufficient hold upon the country to force the Justices
to do their prescribed work. And, curiously enough,
it seems to have been during the period 1 629-1 640,
when Charles I tried to dispense with a parliament, and
the Privy Council was quite exceptionally vigorous in
dragooning the country gentry, that the Poor Law
finally took firm root in English soil. The policy of
"Thorough" was successful in this one direction,
whatever it may have been in others.

These, then, were the main outlines of the Tudor
system of government. It assumed that normally
every able-bodied subject willing to work could find
employment on satisfactory terms. This assumption
was likely to be realised in a more or less static
society ; a society in which there was little change in
the volume and distribution of employment, or in

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Tudor Nationalism

which the changes were so gradual that the labour
force could readily adjust itself to altered circum-
stances. But, as a matter of fact, the demand for
labour was violently disturbed during the period in
more ways than one. To begin with, it was seriously
diminished in the country districts by the enclosures
for sheep farming ; " for one shepherd or herdsman,"
wrote Sir Thomas More in 151 6, "is enough to eat
up that ground with cattle, to the occupying whereof
about husbandry many hands were requisite." For
this reason, if for no other, the Tudor government
could not hesitate to interfere and try to stop the
enclosure movement. And it had two other reasons,
which are clearly set forth in Lord Chancellor Bacon's
History of Henry VII. Bacon's whole political attitude,
be it noted in passing, was based on a consistent theor-
ising of the Tudor policy ; and, according to Bacon,
enclosure was prejudicial alike to the king's revenue
and to the king's military power. When, says he in
the passage from which a few words have already
been quoted, " enclosures began to be more frequent,
whereby arable land, which could not be manured,"
i.e. worked or cultivated, " without people and families,
was turned into pasture, which was easily rid by a
few herdsmen ; and tenancies for years, lives, and at
will, whereupon much of the yeomanry lived, were
turned into demesnes ; . . . the king knew full well
that there ensued upon this a decay and diminution
of subsidies and taxes ; for the more gentlemen, ever
the lower books of subsidies." Moreover, " it hath
been held," he continues, " by the general opinion of
men of best judgment in the wars . . . that the prin-

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Economic Organisation

cipal strength of an army consisteth in the infantry or
foot. And to make good infantry, it requireth men
bred, not in a servile and indigent fashion, but in some
free and plentiful manner. Therefore if a state run
most to noblemen and gentlemen, and the husbandmen
and ploughmen be but as their workfolks and labourers
or else mere cottagers, which are but housed beggars,
you may have a good cavalry, but never good stable
bands of foot. And this is to be seen in France and
Italy, and some other parts abroad . . . inasmuch
as they are enforced to employ mercenary bands of
Switzers, and the like, for their battalions of foot."

Hence the several statutes to check sheep farming ;
and especially the most important of all, that of 1489,
which prohibited the " letting-down " of houses of hus-
bandry which were used with twenty acres of ground
or upward. This, as Bacon explains, would serve, if
enforced, for both purposes — to maintain a substantial
yeomanry and to provide employment : " the houses
being kept up did of necessity enforce a dweller ; and
the proportion of land for occupation being kept up
did of necessity enforce that dweller not to be a beggar
or cottager, but a man of some substance, that might
keep hinds and servants and set the plough a-going."
Hence a series of Royal Commissions of enquiry, be-
ginning with one in 15 17 of which Sir Thomas More
was a member ; with others in 1548, 1566, 1607, and
then in rapid succession in 1632, 1633, and 1636. Here
again the Council of Charles I tried to carry through a
policy of Thorough in the teeth of enclosing land-
owners ; and one of the reasons for the unpopularity of
Archbishop Laud with the squirearchy was his vigour-

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Tudor Nationalism

ous efforts to " lay open enclosures." I cannot help
thinking that the action of the government, spasmodic
as it was, and apt to be hindered by the selfish interests,
from time to time, of certain great lords on the Council
(as in the minority of Edward VI), did do a good deal
to check the enclosure movement.

But England was now becoming a manufacturing
country as well as an agricultural one ; and to the long-
continued dislocation of agricultural labour was now
being added the periodical depression due to fluctua-
tion in the demand for manufactured goods. Occa-
sional over-production is the inevitable concomitant of
all manufacture carried on for a wide market, when
there is not sufficient knowledge and concerted action
among manufacturers to adjust supply to demand. We
have seen that the woollen manufacture was the first,
and for centuries the only, English industry to obtain a
foreign market ; we have seen that this extension of the
market was in part the cause, and in part the effect, of
the appearance of the new classes of capitalist middle-
men, viz. the clothiers and of capitalist exporters, viz.
the Merchant Adventurers. And as soon as a foreign
cloth trade had been created, it began to suffer from
grave periodical depression and lack of employment
— due usually to a temporary loss of the foreign market
owing to various causes, political or economic. The
government was not inclined to look on passively ;
both because its whole social policy rested on the
assumption that the willing workman could always get
paid employment, and also because weavers out of
work were apt to be turbuleni and a danger to the
public peace. And the policy of the Council was

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Economic Organisation

precisely the same in this respect from the days of
Cardinal Wolsey to the days of Charles I. In 1528,
1586, 1622, 1629, they did just the same thing. They
sent to the Justices of the counties affected, and
directed them to summon the clothiers before them
and urge them to continue to give employment. Such
measures are intelligible when we find that, in the time
of James I, a really prosperous clothier — and there
were many such — was reckoned to find work for some
five hundred persons. " We may not endure," wrote
the Council in 1622, "that the clothiers should, at
their pleasure and without giving knowledge thereof
unto this Board, dismiss their workpeople, who, being
many in number and most of them of the poorer sort,
are in such cases likely by their clamours to disturb
the quiet and government of those parts wherein they
live." The clothiers commonly replied that they
could not find a market for their cloth at Blackwell
Hall : the London merchants, they alleged — especially
the Merchant Adventurers, who had a monopoly, as
against other Englishmen, of the export cloth trade —
would not buy from them. Thereupon the merchants
were sent for and severely talked to, and threatened
with the loss of their privileges if they did not take the
accumulating bales off the clothiers' hands.

The fluctuation of employment was likely to be even
greater under the domestic system than under the
factory system. For under the latter the manufacturer
has a strong motive — in his fixed plant, which would
otherwise remain idle, and in the rent and rates and
other general charges which must run on but little
diminished — to keep his works going as long as

116

Tudor Nationalism

possible, and to manufacture for stock. But under the
domestic system the clothiers had no works or plant
to be kept going.

It was apparently deemed a reasonable answer to the
remonstrances of the Council for the clothiers to point
out that the merchants had ceased to take their goods.
Could the merchants have done otherwise ? Cardinal
Wolsey evidently thought they could : " When the
clothiers do daily bring cloths to your market for your
ease, to their great cost, you, of your wilfulness, will
not buy them." To behave so was to behave "not
like merchants but like graziers" — a byword for
selfishness in those days of enclosure. It is interest-
ing to note how surprised statesmen were, or feigned
to be, at the naked manifestation of commercial
self-interest. Perhaps there was even then enough
capital in the hands of the merchants to enable them
to anticipate to some extent the reopening of the
foreign market, temporarily closed by international
complications ; a little pressure from the Council may
have been salutary. But it must be remembered that
the exporters traded on their individual account : the
only plan by which the risk of buying ahead of
demand could be fairly distributed would be to raise a
joint stock to which they should all contribute ; and
this was apparently done at least once, in 1586.

But, if it came to the worst, there was the Poor Law
to fall back upon. " If there shall be found a greater
number of poor people," wrote the Council to the
Justices in 1622, "than the clothiers can employ, we
think it fit, and accordingly require you, to take order
for putting the statute in execution, whereby there is

117

Economic Organisation

provision made ... by raising of public stocks for
the employment of such as want work." This is an
aspect of the Elizabethan Poor Law which is often
left out of account. The Overseers of the Poor, ran
the act of 1601 — repeating legislation which went back
to 1572 — were to provide " a convenient stock of flax,
hemp, wool, thread, iron and other stuff, to set the
poor on work." The full history of this policy is still
to be written. Perhaps the need diminished as time
went on ; but for half a century or more the parish
authorities did, as a matter of fact, try in many places
to provide work for the unemployed. The attempts
were doubtless often ill managed and badly organised.
We are not told how the parish authorities managed
to dispose of the output ; but, on the other hand, we
certainly are not sufficiently acquainted with contem-
porary circumstances to condemn the Tudor policy
off-hand.

118

LECTURE VI

Agricultural 'Estates and English Self-
Government

In this lecture I intend to deal with the distribution
and cultivation of agricultural land in England during
the centuries since the Revolution of 1688. We are
compelled to take that starting point, though we should
like to go further back, because we there get some
sort of statistical basis in the calculations of the con-
temporary statistician, Gregory King. According to
his estimate, there was then a population in England
and Wales of five and a half millions. Out of these,
more than four and a half millions, if we may trust
his calculations, were still maintained by agriculture,
and not half a million by manufacture and internal
trade. Some three-quarters of a century later, Arthur
Young, the celebrated author of the agricultural Tours,
writing in 1769, estimated the population as being
then at least eight and a half millions, and of these
he ascribed hardly more than three millions to agri-
culture, and just three millions to manufactures.
Neither of these estimates is likely to be very close ;
but if they at all approximate to the truth, they indi-
cate not only a very great increase in the manufactur-
ing population, but also a considerable decline, positive
as well as comparative, in the rural population.

119

Economic Organisation

But 1688 is also, in itself, a date of the utmost
significance for our present purpose. It marks the
definite estabhshment of ParHamentary Government
in England. Whatever power, for a century and a
half to come, monarchs might continue to exercise,
they had to obtain through their influence in Parlia-
ment. And Parliament reflected the interests of the
landlord class, reinforced or mitigated, from time to
time, as the case might be, by those of the merchants.
It became impossible for an English monarch, even had
he desired it, to pursue a policy not in line with the
views represented in Parliament. Now the investiga-
tions of Knapp and his disciples have proved beyond
a doubt that in Germany the maintenance of peasant
cultivators over a great part of country was due,
very largely, to the policy of "peasant protection"
followed by Frederick the Great and other paternal
princes of the eighteenth century. They insisted
on the retention of the existing number of peasant
holdings on the estates of the lords of land ; and this
for precisely the same reasons as Lord Chancellor
Bacon, as we have seen, assigned for the measures of
Henry VII. In their judgment, the absorption of the
customary peasant holdings in the lords' demesnes
was injurious both to the revenue and to the army.
And, like the Tudors and early Stuarts, they fixed
their attention on the keeping up, de facto, of the
number of peasant households, and avoided the ques-
tion of the legal right to the property. But with the
fall of the independent power of the Council, nothing
of this kind was any longer possible in England.

Moreover, in the years immediately preceding and
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Self-Government

succeeding the Revolution in England, the crown
lands passed almost entirely into private hands. Such
a change was naturally favoured by political thinkers
who wished the crown to lose all sources of supply
outside Parliament. Yet it was precisely on the
crown lands, more conservatively managed, as they
commonly were, than other properties, that in more than
one of the larger German states customary tenancies
survived, right down to the time, towards the end of
the eighteenth century, when governments came to be
inspired by a pro-peasant policy and set about con-
verting tenancies into ownership.

The course of English political development was
confirmed by the ecclesiastical changes which accom-
panied or followed the Reformation. The country
where to-day peasant proprietorship is most universal is
perhaps Bavaria. There the Counter- Reformation was
triumphant, and the Church retained its estates. And
this contributed in the long run to the extension of pea-
sant properties in two ways, negatively and positively.
Negatively, because the unenterprising ecclesiastical
lords allowed their customary tenants to remain ; so
that, when, in the nineteenth century. Church lands
were secularised, there was a body of cultivating peasants
still in occupation who could easily be converted into
owners. Positively, because the large subsidies which
the sovereigns obtained from the ecclesiastical assem-
blies saved them from dependence on a parliament of
squires. We have seen already how in England the
dispersal of the monastic lands into lay hands under
Henry VIII enlarged the area within which the ordinary
motives of landlordship would be likely to operate

121

Economic Organisation

energetically. But it should also be noticed that the
abandonment by Convocation in 1662 of the right of
granting clerical subsidies was an important step in the
process which finally deprived the English king of all
chance of pursuing an independent social policy.

And now let us look more closely at the rural popu-
lation in 1688. There can be little doubt that by that
time the class of large landowners already occupied, at
least in some districts, the position in which we now
find them. What Lord Eversley calls " the ideal of the
English land system " was already in large part realised.
Sir Roger de Coverley, the baronet of Worcestershire
described by Addison in the Spectator in 171 1, was
" landlord," he tells us, " to the whole congregation "
in the parish church, as well as patron of the living.
When the sermon is finished, the knight walks down
from his seat in the chancel between a double row of
his tenants, who stand bowing to him on either side.
He " is a justice of the quorum ; he fills the chair at
quarter sessions with great ability, and three months
ago gained universal applause by explaining a passage
in the Game Act." He is, in fact, already " the
squire " of English fiction — the squire of Fielding and
Washington Irving, of Trollope and Mrs. Humphrey
Ward. Yet the " ideal " of which Lord Eversley
speaks was not yet by any means completely realised.
There were many villages not yet dominated by a single
great landowner ; there were still a considerable number
of small landowners — either freeholders or copyholders
with a security of tenure amounting practically to com-
plete ownership. These were the famous " yeomen "
of England, at a time when "yeomen" was something

122

Self-Government

more than a picturesque literary term. There were, for
instance, at least two of them among Sir Roger's near
neighbours ; and the Spectator came up with them as
they were riding to the assizes : one is described as "a
yeoman of about a hundred pounds a year," who "has
been several times foreman of the petty jury ; " and the
other was left by his father fourscore pounds a year,
but had lost so much in consequence of his litigious
temper that he was not then worth thirty. With these
figures of yeomen's incomes may be compared a passage
which implies that the income of Sir Roger himself
was at least ;^5oo a year. How many such yeomen
can we suppose there to have been, about this time ?
Well, Gregory King gives the following estimates : i6o
temporal lords, with average incomes of ;^3200 ; 800
baronets, with average incomes of ;£88o ; 600 knights,
with average incomes of £(iS^ ; 3000 esquires, with
average incomes of ;^45o : practically all of these must
have owned whole parishes, in many cases several
parishes. Then King goes on : 12,000 gentlemen, with
average incomes of ;^28o : the contemporary use of the
word " gentleman " implied the ownership of landed
estate ; 40,000 " freeholders of the better sort," with
average incomes of £()i ; and 120,000 "freeholders of
the lesser sort," with average incomes of ;^55. Accord-
ing to these figures, the total income of the lesser land-
owners was still almost five times that of the esquires
and other large proprietors.

A century later — as we learn from Arthur Young,
writing in 1793 — "small properties" in England were
"exceedingly rare" ; and the general impressions we
get from his writings have lately been confirmed

123

Economic Organisation

by statistical inquiries based upon the Land Tax
Assessments. The amount of land in twenty-four
Oxfordshire parishes held in properties of less than
100 acres diminished between about 1600 and 1785
by two-thirds ; in ten Gloucestershire parishes by
four-fifths ; and much the same " consolidation of
estates and shrinkage in the number of small owners "
can be shown to have taken place over the rest of
the country. If we may generalise from a few known
cases, the building up of the very large estates pro-
ceeded most rapidly between about 1720 and 1785.

Now how did this take place ? Mainly by purchase.
This would be recommended to their employers by
up-to-date stewards. The agent to the Duke of Buck-
ingham, Edward Laurence, in a well-known treatise.
The Duty of a Steward to his Lord (1727), advises the
steward not to forget " to make the best enquiry into
the disposition of any of the freeholders, within or
near any of his lord's manors, to sell their lands, that
he may use his best endeavours to purchase them at
as reasonable a price as may be, for his lord's advan-
tage and convenience." The small owners were offered
prices in excess of the capital value of their properties
as sources of income, and were glad to get the money
to pay off their debts, put into trade, or even to stock
larger farms as tenants. Where did the buyers obtain
the purchase money they so freely offered ? Mainly
from wealth gained in trade. The last quarter of
the seventeenth and the first quarter of the eighteenth
century were marked by an extraordinary expansion of
English oversea trade, as illustrated by the struggle
over the privileges of the East India Company, so

124

Self-Government

graphically described by Macaulay, side by side with
a great enlargement of the woollen industry, which
furnished the chief article of export, and the establish-
ment of new trades, especially silk-weaving, by the
Huguenot refugees. It was the money made in
trade which enabled the government to contract a
great pubHc debt, and it was in return for a loan that
a body of public creditors were granted the privileges
of a banking company and so created the Bank of
England. A " moneyed interest," as the political writers
of the time termed it, came into existence ; or rather
grew into so much larger proportions as for the first
time to balance the "landed interest." To writers
who clung to the ideals of the past it was a subject
for lament that, in the language of Swift, "power
which was used to follow land " had " now gone over
to money." But owing to the peculiar character of
English nobility, and the peculiar system of English
government, it inevitably became the dearest wish of
the moneyed interest itself to join the ranks of the
landed, and there were no such obstacles in the way
as existed in some other countries. Men enriched by
trade bought estates and tried to " found families " ;
and men of old county families "married into the
city," and strengthened their position in the country
by the use of the fortunes of heiresses. Once ob-
tained, great estates were kept together by the device
of " Family Settlements." This requires some ex-
planation.

In England there is now no such thing legally as
" entail " ; i.e. land cannot be indefinitely tied up in
such a way, by any single deed or conveyance, that

125

Economic Organisation

its ownership must necessarily pass henceforward in
a certain prescribed hne. At one time, certainly,
entails were authorised by the statute De Donis of
1285 : according to that statute, land granted to a
man and the heirs of his body could not be per-
manently parted with by the grantee, and after his
death it necessarily passed to his lineal heirs. But,
in course of time, means were found for evading the
act ; especially by the device of a fictitious lawsuit,
called a "common recovery," which enabled the life
tenant (or, as we should say now, the life owner) to
free himself from the restriction, and obtain the
right of selling or otherwise disposing of the estate.
Taltarum's case in 1472 approximately marks the time
when the contrivance was fully allowed by the courts.
The great lords, including the king, might wish to
secure the reversion of the estates they had granted
to their vassals, by insisting that possession should
be limited to descendants in the direct line, and that,
when the line failed, the land should escheat to the
superior lord ; but the great body of the landed gentry
were evidently too strong for them, and insisted on
disposing of their lands as they pleased. It is the
more remarkable that about the middle of the seven-
teenth century the process of legal construction should
in effect be exactly reversed, and that legal ingenuity
should be turned, and with success, to the invention
of means by which estates, when once obtained, could
be " kept in the family." An accurate account in any
brief shape of the legal steps involved in a "strict
settlement " is beyond the wit of man to compose :
the whole business is immersed in a sea of technicalities

126

Self-Government

in which only lawyers, and but few of them, can swim
with safety. But the effect of what happens is that
by a series of legal arrangements, repeated in every
generation, commonly at the marriage of the heir, the
ownership of the estate is always settled for a genera-
tion ahead. Primogeniture is secured from generation
to generation, and the nominal proprietor is never
more than a " life tenant." " Primogeniture " indeed,
as an authority has well said, who himself belonged
to one of the Whig houses, " is accepted by the whole
nobility, the squires of England, the lairds of Scotland,
and the Irish gentry of every degree, as almost a
fundamental law of nature, to which the practice "
of settlement "only gives a convenient and effectual
expression."

The credit for having added the last completing
touches to the necessary legal procedure is ascribed
to Orlando Bridgman, a famous conveyancer of the
Commonwealth period, who became Lord Keeper
under Charles II ; and it is commonly supposed that
the object of the device was to secure landed families
from the forfeiture of estates during the troubles of
the Civil Wars. It is curious to find that the arrange-
ment known as " Fideicommiss," which in Germany
achieves precisely the same object as the English
strict settlement, though in a somewhat different way,
is also traced to a contemporary and not dissimilar
period, that of the Thirty Years' War. But while it
was estimated, in the middle of last century, that in
tLngiaad the estates under settlement exceeded two-
thirds of the kingdom, the Fidcicunnnisse in Prussia,
as late as 1895, only covered some six per cent, of

127

Economic Organisation

the area of the state, and even in Silesia did not
amount to fifteen per cent. Of late years, however,
their number has been growing so rapidly as to attract
a good deal of attention. The explanation is to be
found in the number of men who have recently
acquired great fortunes in business and in finance,
and who now seek to found country families for the
sake of the social consideration, the sport, and, it
would appear sometimes, the titles of nobility, which in
a country like Prussia large landed estate is supposed
to bring with it. The old aristocracy complain that
" good old-fashioned landlordism suffers from the
invasion of the Berlin Bourse," and cry out for a
law which shall prohibit the formation of Fideicom-
misse by recent purchasers.

All this helps to explain the fresh vitality poured
into the landowning class in England in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries from the circles of
trade and finance. For why did wealthy Englishmen
seek to accumulate estates and then to keep them
together ? Partly, no doubt, because they were held to
be peculiarly safe investments. But in new countries
like America it does not occur to millionaires to create
great country estates. The reason, as Toynbee pointed
out, is to be found in the character of the contemporary
political system. To begin with, landed estate of a
sufficient size practically secured for its owner, if he
was not quite exceptionally stupid or drunken, the
position of Justice of the Peace. Such a position
gave dignity and secured respect, as well as substantial
power.

Gneist, the most distinguished German conslitu-
128

Self-Government

tionalist of the last generation, wrote a famous history
of the poHtical system of England, to which he gave
the title Sclf-Govenunent. The very name implied
praise ; and it was meant by Gneist to indicate the
superiority of the English administrative system, which
he held up for the imitation of his countrymen, over
the bureaucratic system of France. And his concep-
tion of " self-government " he thus defines : " internal
administration of the country by unpaid magistrates,
having control, for the purpose, of local rates." But
this means simply that administration of the country
by the Justices, and especially by the corporate
authority of Quarter Sessions, which remained in
their hands until it was taken away from them and
transferred to elected County Councils in 1888. I
remember when I was a student at Gottingen — some
years before, but at a time when the inevitable change
was already looming in the distance — hearing a lecture
by the distinguished German historian, Reinhold Pauli.
He ended his course on English constitutional history
by giving a glowing account of the fabric of local
government. But as we left the lecture room he said
to me, " I haven't the heart to tell them that what I
have been describing is passing away." And with all
its great merits — merits in itself in spite of the jests
about "Justices' justice," and, still more, merits as the
alternative to a bureaucracy — the English system of
local " self-government " was one of the main reasons
for the desire to build up large landed estates.

The other main reason was the character of the
central government, — the Parliamentary oligarchy.
The power of the Whig ministry rested on the control

129 I

Economic Organisation

of votes in Parliament. Large landed property gave
its owners great local influence in determining the
elections. Those who controlled the elections could
demand a share of ministerial patronage. And as the
settling of estates left the younger sons of the landed
gentry to be otherwise provided for, they must be
quartered on the army, the church, and the public
services. Large estates, local administration, parlia-
mentary government, patronage, and primogeniture
were thus all inseparably associated.

It should not be forgotten that it was not only
yeomen, accustomed to put their own hands to the
plough, who were induced to sell out. In certain
parts of the country — and especially in the west, where
the substantial village and widespreading manor of
the Midlands had not been the rule — there were in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a considerable
number of small landowners, who, whatever their
origin may in reality have been, were accounted gentry
by the heralds of the period, with the right to armorial
bearings. In their Visitations of Devon between 153 1
and 1620, the heralds enrolled fourteen "gentle"
families whose names began with A, forty-seven begin-
ning with B, sixty-three beginning with C. Of the
A families only one remains among the landowners
of to-day ; of the B and C families only five under
each letter. The rest have disappeared, and their
lands passed into other hands, chiefly to new families
coming out from the towns. And it is interesting
to observe that, the more commercial England in fact
became, the more general was the contempt for trade
among the landed gentry who were themselves largely

130

Agricultural Estates

its offspring. It is probably with perfect accuracy
that a well-known writer, who has an extensive know-
ledge of the genealogies and traditions of the west
country, attributes the " irruption of false pride relative
to 'soiling the hands with trade'" to "the great
change that ensued after Queen Anne's reign." "Vast
numbers of estates changed hands, and passed into
the possession of men who had amassed fortunes in
trade ; and it was among the children of these rich
retired tradesmen that there sprang up such a con-
tempt for whatever savoured of the shop and the
counting house." Certainly the Elizabethan and
Jacobean monuments to be found in parish churches
record the origin of many a squire's wealth in his
prosperity as " Citizen and Mercer," " Citizen and
Haberdasher," of London or some other town, in a
way for which it would be hard to find parallels on
the mural tablets of a later date.

But while actual purchase will explain the dis-
appearance of a great many of the small separate
properties, which were actually "freehold," and of
those copyholds which were distinctly recognised to
be "copyholds of inheritance," it does not account
for the development of landlordship in another and
perhaps even more important direction. It explains
it extensively, but not intensively. We have seen that
the result of the enclosures of the sixteenth century
was not greatly to diminish the number of peasant
families except in certain districts. Most of them had
stayed on their customary holdings in much the same
material condition as before ; but with many of them a
change had been effected in their legal status. They

131

Economic Organisation

had been induced to "surrender their copies/' which
so long as they retained them might perhaps have
given them a secure heritable estate, in return for
leases for lives or for terms of years. Fitzherbert
concluded his vi^ell-known book on Surveying, printed
in 1523, with a frank piece of advice and a remark-
able prophecy. Let the lords of manors encourage
the tenants to exchange their strips one with another,
so that each may enclose " one little croft or close
next to his own house," by offering to grant to each
of them a lease at the same rents and services as
before, " to have to him and to his wife and to his
children, so that it pass not three lives, then being
alive and named." "The lords, meseemeth, can do
no less than to grant them these three lives of the old
rent, remembering what profits they may have at the
end of the terms, they know not how soon. For, un-
doubted, one set day cometh at last, and though the
advantage of the lords come not anon, it will come at
length. And therefore saith the philosopher : Quod
differtur non auferiur : that thing that is deferred is not
taken away." Some of the new owners of monastic
lands were not inclined to be so patient. " Making
us believe that our copies are void," the tenants are
represented as complaining, " they compel us to sur-
render all our former writings, whereby we ought to
hold some for two and some for three lives, and to
take by indenture for twenty-one years." How far
such extreme measures went we cannot say, but we
have reason to believe that Fitzherbert's more moderate
and cautious advice was frequently followed. A
definite agreement that the lease should be renewed

132

Agricultural Estates

on the same terms, which was sometimes made, was
not always complete security. Thus we know that on
certain royal estates in Elizabeth's reign, the tenants
accepted leases for forty years, renewable at the option
of the holder, on payment of a fine of two years' rent,
instead of their " copies and customary estates " ; but
when one of the estates was sold to the servant of a
courtier they were in great alarm, "perceiving that
they were likely to have their lands and tenements
after the expiration of their leases taken from
them." And well in the eighteenth century Laurence
is heard teaching the same lesson to his readers as
Fitzherbert : " Noblemen and gentlemen should en-
deavour to convert copyhold for lives to leasehold for
lives."

Now all this does not mean that as soon as the
leases expired, the holding at once became a yearly
tenancy at a competitive or rack rent. As a fact
the leases — especially of larger farms — were very
commonly renewed time after time on payment of
a lump sum known as a fine. In many cases the
convenience of occasionally receiving a good round
sum — especially where the landlord was a corporate
body and the fine was divided among its members —
was a powerful reason against converting the holding
into a yearly tenancy. But the change from copyhold
into leasehold, when there was no express right of
renewal, had this effect : it turned the landlord into
the absolute owner, with a legal right to dispose of
the land as he pleased, instead of being a partial
owner only, sharing the property in it with a tenant
who enjoyed an heritable right — in other words, it

133

Economic Organisation

destroyed the semi-proprietorship of the peasant copy-
holder. It was sometimes asserted in the eighteenth
century that leases for Hves or for long terms of years,
renewable on paying a fine, ought in justice to be
regarded as constituting a certain tenant right : that
the son or other representative of the previous tenant
ought to have "a renewable right," even without
express stipulation in the lease, on payment of a fixed
fine. But this contention was never supported by the
courts. And thus almost insensibly, as the result of a
change from copy to lease which to very many tenants
might seem purely formal, the old tenant-right passed
away. Only a few copyholds, and they copyholds of
inheritance, remained as exceptional curiosities ; and
no new tenant-right arose in England like that which
managed to form itself in Ulster.

So much then for the ownership of land : the growth
in extension of landed estates, and the intensification
of the landlord's ownership within the several manors.
We may suppose both to have gone on briskly during
the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. We
have now to look at a second but closely connected
series of changes — the amalgamation of farms. This
was also one of the measures advised by Laurence
in 1727: "the steward should endeavour to lay all
the small farms, let to poor indigent people, to the
great ones." But he recommends patience, and that
the landlord should wait till farms fell in by death ;
and it seems to have been in the latter part of the
century that the policy began to be generally carried
out. When it came, it was the concomitant of the
second and much more sweeping movement of en-

134

Agricultural Estates

closure ; and this again was largely the consequence
of a great wave of interest in agricultural science.

An enthusiasm for agricultural improvement took
possession of a few great landlords early in the
Hanoverian period. The pioneer was Lord Towns-
hend, who about 1730 turned away with disgust
from political intrigue and devoted himself to his
estates. The great achievement by which he earned
the honourable title of "Turnip Townshend" was
the field cultivation of turnips and clover. This
rendered unnecessary the customary triennial fallow,
and so rendered possible the so-called Norfolk or
four-course system of agriculture, which became the
model for the rest of England ; and which, by making
it possible to keep stock in large numbers, increased
the supply of manure and so resulted in richer crops.
A little later, Bakewell in Leicestershire revolutionised
the art of the grazier, and showed how the ox and sheep
might be grown for food and not for draught and wool.
As Townshend led the way in producing grain for the
coming millions, so Bakewell produced beef and mutton
for the millions. The oxen and sheep in the Smithfield
market were from two to three times as heavy at the
end of the eighteenth century as at the beginning.

Soon after the accession of George III, the passion
for improvement became general among landlords.
The way was led by Coke of Holkham, who possessed
large means which he could devote to the enrichment
of the soil and to the introduction of new crops and
artificial cattle-foods on the farms he took into his
own hands from tenants who refused to accept leases
at increased rentals. His rent-roll increased from

135

Economic Organisation

some ;^2ooo in 1776 to some ^^20,000 in 1816 : but
this was the result of a bold and lavish expenditure
of capital, as well as of untiring personal application
to the management of his estate.

The consequence of these and similar improvements
all over the country was a vast increase in the produc-
tion of food. And this increase rendered possible the
expansion of our population, which was stimulated by
the growth of the factory industries, offering employ-
ment to children, and by that most mistaken policy
with regard to poor relief which was adopted generally
by the Justices at the end of the eighteenth century,
and which made it a paying speculation for the rural
labourer to marry early. We are accustomed now to
think of English manufactures as being exchanged for
foreign food supplies : it must be remembered that
well into the nineteenth century this could not take
place. It was impeded no doubt to some extent by
the protective tariff ; but it was impeded also by the
long Napoleonic wars ; and even if the freest importa-
tion of corn had been permitted, there were no foreign
supplies available to feed the rapidly growing English
population until the virgin soils of the New World
were made accessible, in the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century, by improvements in transportation.
Indeed, during the worst years, when prices were at
their height, from 1795 to 1802, importation under
the operation of the sliding scale was, in fact, almost
fiee. The English population certainly went through
hard times : but it was at any rate kept alive, and
enabled to increase fifty per cent, between 1750 and
1800 and a hundred per cent, between 1800 and 1850.

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Agricultural Estates

Under these circumstances there was every motive
to augment the productivity of the soil. The object
appealed to the immediate self-interest of the landlords,
since it would increase their rents ; and it might well
seem a patriotic duty, since it would find food for
the growing population and enable England to resist
the world domination of Napoleon. And what obvi-
ously stood in the way was the open-field system of
farming with intermixed strips which still prevailed
over perhaps half the arable area of most parishes in
central and southern England. It was uneconomical
and prevented improvement, and hence reformers like
Arthur Young, who began his celebrated tours in 1767,
were never weary of calling for its abolition, and with
it of the common pastures. Enclosure had never
absolutely ceased since Tudor times, but now it began
again with fresh ardour ; and between 1760 and 1850,
by means of Enclosure Acts, practically all the re-
maining open fields and most of the commons were
swept away.

We cannot doubt that the change was associated
with a vast improvement in agricultural methods and
in the production of food ; and Jeremy Bentham,
the utilitarian philosopher, had some justification in
thinking the spectacle of an enclosure "one of the
most reassuring of all the evidences of improvement
and happiness." The high price of wheat in the later
years of the eighteenth and the early years of the
nineteenth century furnished both a stimulus and an
excuse for the enclosure movement, just as the demand
for wool had done in Tudor times ; for wheat could
be grown much more profitably on enclosed farms.

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Economic Organisation

A chart which registers the number of enclosure
acts and the price of wheat per quarter shows that
they moved together : the higher the price, the greater
the number of enclosure acts pushed through. And
it seems to have been proved recently that the amount
of injustice in the reapportioning of the rights in-
volved was less than has often been supposed. The
small open-field farmer, however, and still more the
cottager were often more injured by the enclosure of
the waste or common, inasmuch as it prevented his
keeping cows or pigs, than by the throwing together
of the acres in the open fields : and two-thirds in extent
of the land enclosed was in fact common or waste.

The agricultural reformers of the time believed not
only in enclosed farms but in relatively large farms.
And here, as soon as the economists made their appear-
ance in the first half of the nineteenth century, the
agricultural writers had the supposed authority of poli-
tical economy on their side. Farming on a large
scale, it was supposed to be demonstrated, was more
economical than on a small : its gross produce might
not be greater, but its net produce certainly would be.

This was probably true enough for cereal farming,
which made large wheat crops its main object. Ac-
cordingly, M'Culloch, the permanent economist of the
Edmhurgh Review, vigorously advocated large farming
as the best means of promoting national well-being.
" If a country were generally divided into small farms,"
he wrote in 1838, " a much greater number of labourers
would necessarily be engaged in the cultivation of the
soil, and there would be a proportionally smaller
quantity of its produce to dispose of to others." While

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Agricultural Estates

in France, he asserted, two-thirds of the people were
employed in agriculture, in England less than one-
third sufficed to carry on an infinitely superior system
of cultivation. " Here is the powerful spring that has
contributed more, perhaps, than any other to enable
us to carry our commercial and manufacturing pros-
perity to its present unexampled height, and which
makes us advance in the career of improvement. Let
us not, therefore, by giving the smallest countenance
to any scheme either for dividing estates or for building
cottages on wastes, do anything that may tend to
increase the purely agricultural population. The
narrower the limits within which it can be confined,
the better will be our agriculture, and the greater will be
the surplus produce with which to feed the other classes,
on whose numbers and prosperity the wealth, power
and glory of the country must ever mainly depend."

The conjunction of the self-interest of the landlords
who in the nineteenth century were mostly Tories,
with the supposed science of the economists who were
mostly Radicals, had the natural result. Small farms
of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty and sixty acres were thrown
together to form large farms of from a hundred and
fifty to two hundred acres ; and on many a large farm
of to-day the small farm-houses of an earlier period
are still standing, divided into labourers' dwellings.
And thus the large capitalist farm system which had
arisen first on the demesne lands was extended finally
to the lands once held by small customary tenants :
and the social gulf between farmer and labourer was
left bridgeless over the larger part of the country.

139

LECTURE VII

The Industrial Revolution and Freedom of
Contract

"The Industrial Revolution" has come to be the
generally accepted designation for a certain period of
English economic history. It owes its present vogue to
its employment by Toynbee as the title of his lectures,
pubhshed in 1884 J ^^d its place in economic literature
has been confirmed by its adoption as the title of the
elaborate and substantial treatise of a French scholar,
M. Mantoux, two and twenty years later. The term
was not absolutely original with Toynbee. Several
years before, Jevons in the book on the Coal Question
which aroused so much attention, had remarked in
passing that " writers of the eighteenth century enter-
tained most gloomy anticipations concerning the
growing debt, and they were only wrong in under-
valuing the industrial revolution which was then pro-
ceeding " ; and it is highly probable that other writers
had used the same descriptive term even before Jevons.
Yet it was Toynbee's use of it which drove home the
idea that the events of the period to which he referred
did indeed involve a change so complete and so rapid
as to be properly designated " a revolution."

With the term as Toynbee and Mantoux employ it,
no fault can be found. But in this case as in others —

140

The Industrial Revolution

for instance, that of "the Renaissance" — the progress
of historical science consists first in introducing em-
phasis and constructing large generaHsations, and then
in going on to readjust the proportions and give due
weight to qnahfications. This is the more necessary
because what to Toynbee and Mantoux was "the
industrial revolution of the eighteenth century" has
become in the mouths of their popularisers "the
industrial revolution."

The qualification which now needs calling attention
to is that the changes between, let us say, 1776
(when Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations
and James Watt perfected the steam-engine) and 1832
(the date of the first Reform Bill), did but carry
further, though on a far greater scale and with far
greater rapidity, changes which had been proceeding
long before. No great period is in actual fact sharply
cut off from that which precedes and follows it ; and
for our present purpose it is perhaps more important
to view the development in the reign of George III
as a culmination of movements already on foot than
as creating something entirely new.

The primary force that was at work was Capital, and
the capitalistic spirit — the desire of Investment for the
sake of gain — which was bound up with it. Long
before 1776, by far the greater part of English industry
had become dependent on capitalistic enterprise in the
two important respects that a commercial capitalist
provided the actual workmen with their materials and
found a market for the finished goods. The workmen
continued to work in their own homes or in sheds
or outhouses attached to them ; and for this reason

141

Economic Organisation

the system may be spoken of as domestic, (German :
Haushidustrie). I think this is on the whole the most
convenient practice, and I have followed it in the
previous lectures. As it happens, however, the term
domestic system, when it was first used in England,
in the 1806 Report of a Committee of the House of
Commons, was applied to somewhat different con-
ditions. It was applied especially to the organisation
of the woollen industry in Yorkshire ; where the
cottage manufacturer bought his own wool and then
got it spun for himself, and hence was no mere wage-
earner, but the producer of a commodity which he
himself sold to the merchants at the cloth hall or
otherwise. Some of the witnesses sharply distin-
guished this system from the system of the West of
England, where the workman never owned the material
and therefore never owned the goods, and was simply
paid wages by the clothier who employed him. The
same distinction between cottage manufacturers selling
their product and cottage workmen selling their labour
is to be found in the industrial history of other
countries, and French and German writers have made
various attempts to invent a suitable terminology. In
German the word most commonly used for the latter
conditions is Verlagsystem. Verleger is a term still in
common use for a merchant who gives out work to
be done in the employe's own workshop or workroom :
the English term which most nearly covers the same
meaning is factor, Verlag is the building whence
material is distributed and where the finished goods are
stored : warehouse is perhaps the nearest equivalent.
I remember that when I was wandering once around

142

The Industrial Revolution

the " small forge " district of the Thuringian forest, a
smith looked up from his anvil to ask me if I was
the Verleger from the neighbouring town. If we are
to invent a new term, perhaps factor-system might
sen/e ; although the employing capitalists in England
were only in certain small trades actually called
"factors." Commission-system.^ which has been pro-
posed, is obviously inaccurate, because the work was
not done on commission, either by the employing
capitalist or by the cottage workman.

A good deal of discussion, too, has turned upon
the relation between the two forms of organisation,
and between each of them and what preceded and
followed. It has been argued that it is mistaken to
group them together ; that " the domestic system " of
Yorkshire, and forms like it, were really more closely
akin to the handicrafts of an earlier period : the differ-
ence consisted simply in its diffusion over rural districts,
and the disappearance in Yorkshire (and commonly
in similar cases elsewhere) of the gild organisation
binding the several master craftsmen together. On
the other hand, "the system of the clothier of the
west of England," like similar arrangements in other
trades and other lands, where the cottage workmen
were simply wage-earners, has been said to be more
closely akin to the factory system. In this case the
manufacture itself, it is urged, had become capitalistic,
and not simply the "merchanting" part of the business :
and the factor-system, leading to production on a
large scale — large from the whole industry though not
in the individual shop — and supplying a wide national
or even foreign market, was merely an earlier stage of

143

Economic Organisation

that grande industrie of which the factory is the
later form.

The difficulty is that, though cases may actually be
found which do indeed answer well enough to these
characterisations, they are not sufficiently universal
to serve the purposes of classification without a good
deal of caution. To begin with, the difference between
I being paid a price for goods sold and being paid a
wage for work done may in practice almost disappear,
so far as either the sense of independence or the
material well-being of the workman is concerned.
And the total output of an industry working under
the former conditions and the market ultimately
reached by it through various capitalist intermediaries,
may be — and in the Yorkshire case actually were —
very considerable.

The question of classification and terminology, how-
ever, so far as England is concerned, may be passed
over with some equanimity because in the period
between the gild and the factory it was that more
completely capitalised form which involved the pro-
vision of material by the capitalist and the payment
by him of wages which was by far the most widely
prevalent. That this was the case with the clothiers
of the south and west of England throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is beyond all ques-
tion. The rising woollen trade of Yorkshire instead
of being typical in this respect was exceptional ; and,
in consequence perhaps of the subsequent concentra-
tion of the woollen industry in the West Riding, and
the picturesque description by Defoe, it has been
assigned a larger relative importance than it deserves.

144

The Industrial Revolution

To that I shall return : the point I want just now
to emphasize is that the plan of giving out material
and paying wages was characteristic of every other
important industry in the eighteenth century. The
proof is to be found in the legislation against embezzle-
ment of material. If we turn to the article " Manufac-
turers " in Postlethwayt's two great folios, The Universal
Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, published in 1755,
we shall find that it sets forth " the principal laws of
England relating to manufacturers and artificers,"
and that these are concerned entirely with this char-
acteristic evil of the prevalent system. There was
first the temporary act of 1702, reciting that "many
frauds are daily committed by persons employed in
the working-up of the woollen, linen, fustian, cotton
and iron manufactures, by embezzling and purloining
of the materials with which they are entrusted," and
providing certain penalties. In 1710 it was made
perpetual. The act of 1740 extended its provisions
to persons employed " in cutting or manufacturing
gloves, breeches, leather, boots, shoes or other goods."
This "proving deficient," in 1749 the workpeople
affected were classified anew, as "any person hired
to make any felt or hat, or work up any woollen,
linen, fustian, cotton, iron, leather, fur, hemp, flax,
mohair or silk manufactures." In all these cases
the dominance of the capitalist middleman was due to
the fact that, as things then were, he was needed to
organise the manufacture and to assume the risk which
was involved in advancing the necessary capital, in view
of a market which was too distant and uncertain for the
individual artisan to cope with. The craftsman was

145 K

Economic Organisation

not yet necessarily " divorced from the instruments of
production " — to use the phrase of certain modern
writers : he commonly owned his own loom in the
woollen and silk trades, just as many a sweated semp-
stress of our own day owns her own sewing-machine.
It was not the instrument of production, but access to
the market that he was cut off from by circumstances.
And the essential similarity between industrial condi-
tions then and under the subsequent factory system is
shown by the fact that we already come across combi-
nations of cottage workpeople against their merchant
employers and movements for higher wages.

Before going further we must pause for a moment
to consider the exceptional conditions in the cloth
industry of the West Riding. Those conditions are
thus described by the Report of 1806: "The manu-
facture is conducted by a multitude of master manu-
facturers, generally possessing a very small and scarcely
ever any great extent of capital. They buy the wool
of the dealer ; and in their own houses, assisted by
their wives and children, and from two or three to
six or seven journeymen, they dye it (when dyeing
is necessary) and through all the different stages work
it up into undressed cloth. . . . The manufacturer"
then " carries it on the market day to a public hall
or market where the merchants repair to purchase.
Several thousands of these small master manufacturers
attend the market at Leeds, where there are three halls
for the exposure and sale of their cloths ; and there
are similar halls at Bradford, Halifax, and Hudders-
field." And like similar small manufacturers elsewhere,
we are further told that "a great proportion of the

146

The Industrial Revolution

manufacturers occupy a little land, from three to
twelve or fifteen acres each."

Three questions suggest themselves : first, why did
capital play this relatively minor part in Yorkshire,
when in the production of woollen goods of much
the same kind {i.e. "woollen" as distinguished from
" worsted ") it was so much more prominent elsewhere ;
second, how were the goods marketed ; and third,
how long did these conditions survive. To the first
question, the answer is probably that the capitalist
mercantile clothier did not make his appearance in
Yorkshire until some considerable time after the in-
dustry had risen to importance in that county in the
seventeenth century, because the West Riding was a
relatively poor district, far behind the fertile counties
of the south in agricultural wealth, and a long way
off from the capitalists of London and Norwich.
Capital did not come forward because in that district
it did not exist. To the second question the answer is
given by the public markets. In the beginning these
were in the open air ; on the bridge at Leeds and then
in Briggate, at Huddersfield alongside the churchyard.
Then, as the numbers increased who frequented the
market, covered halls were provided : in Leeds in 171 1,
in Halifax and Wakefield a year or so before. When
the domestic industry was at its height, from 1750 to
1780, every town of any size in the district erected from
one to three spacious buildings of this kind. Such
meeting-places for merchants and manufacturers, where
goods could be gathered together and displayed, were
necessary features in domestic industry of this type ;
and the buildings of this sort still standing in many

147

Economic Organisation

localities of western Europe testify to its former preval-
ence. Here the smallest manufacturer, who could
bring in only one piece a week, could spread out his
cloth on the boards with as good a chance to dispose
of it to the merchants who came thither as his most
prosperous rival. On the third question, how long such
conditions lasted, a good deal of light has been thrown
by the recent publication of some letters of a Halifax
cloth-factor for the year 1706. It is clear that, as
early as this, no small part of the business of exchange
was being taken away from the public market. Cloth
merchants had established permanent connections with
particular makers, and now gave them direct orders.
Moreover, there was a class of agents or factors, giving
orders on commission either for London merchants
or for merchants of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Ham-
burg, and making little use of the pubHc market.
And when, under the first two Hanoverian sovereigns,
the worsted manufacture, hitherto the monopoly of
the Norwich area, was introduced into the Bradford
district, the new branch of business was almost from
the first carried on by men of larger capital, resembling
more nearly the clothiers of the west country. For this
two reasons have been assigned which would seem
to be adequate : the materials were more expensive
and needed more capital for their purchase, the work
was less difficult and required less skill on the part
of the weavers and the other operatives. Capital took
control and operative skill became subservient.

From this digression let us return to the general
English movement. Conditions approached more
nearly to the later factory system when the capitalist

148

The Industrial Revolution

" undertaker " owned the necessary instrument of pro-
duction and let it out to the workman — as, for instance,
in the hosiery industry with its knitting-frame. There
has been a great deal of discussion as to the distinction
to be drawn between the "tool" and the "machine" :
the one, it has been said, can be owned by the work-
man, the latter is too expensive. If this distinction is
valid, then the handloom and the knitting-frame, like
the sewing-machine of to-day, were midway between
the two. They were not beyond the means of some
workpeople : but they were relatively so expensive that
under certain circumstances there was an opportunity
for a capitalist to step in and supply them.

An even closer approximation to the factory of later
days would be reached when the capitalist thought it
expedient to gather a body of workpeople together in
one place, under one roof. An organisation of this kind
Karl Marx christened " manufacture," as distinguished
from the factory system dependent on machinery ; and
he laid down that it was " the prevalent characteristic
form of the capitalist process of production throughout
the period from the middle of the sixteenth to the last
third of the eighteenth century." The word " manufac-
ture " was certainly not limited in England, during that
period, to this particular sense, and it would be difficult
to introduce it now as a technical term : but the name
would not matter if the fact were as Marx stated. But
it is equally certain that though occasional examples
may be found, as in the pin manufactory described by
Adam Smith, the aggregation of workpeople under the
control of capitalists was not the " prevalent char-
acteristic" of the period. That is surprising, both

149

Economic Organisation

because something of the kind can be found in the
EngHsh woollen industry in the first half of the
sixteenth century, and because what may seem like
a case can be made out for such a stage in continental
development.

John Winchcombe of Newbury, who died about
1520, and soon became legendary as the greatest of
English clothiers, was said by later tradition to have
employed a hundred looms in his house. Another
rich clothier, soon after the dissolution of the monas-
teries, is reported by an eye-witness to have filled
every corner of the lodgings of Malmesbury Abbey
with looms, and he was in negotiation for the buildings
of Osney Abbey for a like purpose. Moreover, the
Weavers' Act of 1555 complains that certain clothiers
had set up divers looms in their houses and worked
them by journeymen and unskilful persons. Why
these experiments were given up it is impossible at
present to say. We can hardly explain their abandon-
ment by the act I have mentioned, which forbade
any weaver outside a town to have in his house or
possession more than two looms, or any "person
using the feat or mistery of cloth making " — i.e., I
presume, any clothier — also outside towns, to have
more than one. The act remained on the statute
book as late as the beginning of the nineteenth century,
and the Committee of 1806 reported that "it is highly
valued, and its repeal strongly opposed by a very
respectable class of petitioners." But this could not
have prevented such establishments being set up in
the market towns, like Tiverton, where in fact most
of the clothiers lived. We may conjecture that it was

150

The Industrial Revolution

the policy of the Tudor government to frown upon
undertakings of that kind : for an act of 1585, relating
to a coarse cloth made in Cornwall and Devon, ex-
clusively for the Breton market, expressly limits the
number of looms in that business to three in one
house, whether in town or country. But whether it
was legislation which brought them to an end or
simply the discovery that such aggregations were after
all not particularly profitable, and that more could
be made with the same capital in commerce overseas,
phenomena of this kind did altogether disappear from
the woollen industry and the other staple trades until
a very short time before the introduction of machinery.
During the Stuart period, it is true, large works
were established from time to time for various manu-
factures. Among these were glass, soap, and wire.
Their history has still to be written : but the veiy fact
that it is obscure shows that they could not have
flourished to any very large extent. And in the next
century the similar attempts made in the staple trades
were few in number and evidently not particularly
successful. There is an interesting passage in one of
Arthur Young's Totirs describing what he found in
Yorkshire in 1768. At Boynton, he says, " Sir George
Strickland was so obliging as to shew me his woollen
manufactory ; a noble undertaking, which deserves
the greatest praise. In this country the poor have no
other employment than what results from a most
imperfect agriculture ; consequently three-fourths of
the women and children were without employment.
It was this induced Sir George to found a building
large enough to contain on one side a row of looms

151

Economic Organisation

of different sorts, and on the other a large space for
women and children to spin. The undertaking was
once carried so far as to employ a hundred and fifty
hfmds, who made very sufficient earnings for their
maintenance ; but the decay of the woollen exportation
reduced them so much, that now those employed are,
I believe, under a dozen."

In attributing so much importance to "manu-
facture," in the special sense he assigned to it, Marx
would seem to have been generalising from France.
The "manufactures royales," which were large estab-
lishments enjoying special governmental favours in
the way of subsidies and exemptions from taxes, and
the "manufactures privilegiees," which were similar
establishments enjoying a monopoly of certain branches
of the trade, are said between them to have turned out
at one time two-thirds of the cloth produced in France :
and in other industries similar establishments had a like
period of success. But all the advantages enumerated
by Marx as flowing from co-operation in labour would
not have succeeded in establishing these " manufac-
tures" without the active support, and even in many
cases the initiative, of the government. This was one of
the great achievements of Colbert. When the govern-
ment withdrew its assistance, the "manufactures"
at once began rapidly to decline ; and it seems very
doubtful whether their existence vitally affected the
subsequent development of industry. In England,
the efforts of the government in this direction under
the early Stuarts were wrecked by the outcry against
monopolies : under the later Stuarts the monarchy
was not in a position to carry out a strong industrial

152

The industrial Revolution

policy of its own, and there was no minister like
Colbert to attempt it.

Without special governmental favours, the advantages
which the collection of his workpeople in a single
building would give an employer were usually too
slight and too dubious to encourage any large move-
ment in this direction. Where the work could be
broken up into a number of separate operations, as in
the manufacture of pins, it would doubtless greatly
facilitate that type of division of labour to bring
together under one roof a sufficient body of men for
each to be assigned a specialised job. But where, as
in the woollen industry, division of labour could not
go beyond the processes of combing, spinning, dyeing,
weaving, fulling, &c., there would be no such gain
in a mere aggregation of workpeople, performing
the same operation. The only advantages that I
can discern would lie in the better supervision of
the quality of the work and in the greater regularity of
output. Against these had to be set the cost of pro-
viding the building as well as of the necessary super-
vision. Accordingly the only successful introduction
of the textile factory, on a considerable scale, before
the last quarter of the eighteenth century, was in the
silk-spinning industry ; and here the explanation is
to be found in the introduction of machinery which
required "power" (in this case supplied by water)
beyond that producible by human muscle. It is only
because the spinning of silk was, after all, a relatively
small trade that the advent of the factory on the
Derwent in 171 8 did not transform English industrial
life as the subsequent cotton factories did.

153

Economic Organisation

The appearance of the factory is therefore the
characteristic feature of the industrial revolution of
the later years of the eighteenth century, even though
it had actually come into existence sporadically half
a century earlier. It meant a new forward step in
the evolution of capital : the assumption, on a large
scale, by the owner or controller of capital of a
further function besides that of the mercantile inter-
mediary— the function of actually directing and super-
vising the manufacturing process itself. And this, if
it did not produce absolutely new phenomena, im-
mensely intensified the effects of the capitalist control
already established. The effects, I hasten to add,
were good as well as bad. For the advent of capital
brought about a vast enlargement and cheapening of
production. This should never be lost sight of, though
it is so obvious that one sometimes forgets it.

The cotton " factory " was so much the most
striking example of the new conditions, that " factory
system " is on the whole the most expressive term to
describe the new organisation. But of course the
essential feature of the phenomenon is the aggregation
of a body of workpeople in one workplace, drawn
together by the necessity of attendance upon power-
machinery, and directed by capitalist employers.
This was to be seen in the coal-mine and in iron
or engineering works just as much as in the tex-
tile factory. Undoubtedly it was the necessary
outcome of the great mechanical inventions. Of
these there may be distinguished two parallel series —
one in the textile sphere and one in the allied spheres
of coal, iron, and steel. I do not propose to give an

154

The Industrial Revolution

account of them : it is easily found in many a book.
It is well to bear in mind in studying them what
Jevons has remarked as to the three conditions of
invention. There must be, first, the discovery of a new
principle for the accomplishment of some mechanical
task. That principle may be discerned centuries before
the idea is actually realised, because the other two
conditions are absent. Secondly, a method of con-
struction must be invented by which the principle
can be carried out. And thirdly, a strong practical
purpose must present itself, for which the new
mechanism is urgently needed. Thus in the history
of the steam-engine, the business motive was furnished
by the desire to get rid of the water which began to
trouble coal miners as shafts became deeper ; and in
the textile series, the business motives were, first, the
desire to get abundant cotton yarn in order to supply
the recently improved handlooms, and then the desire
to improve the loom still further in order to make
rapid use of the now cheapened and abundant yarn.
Throughout, the growth of population, and the im-
provement of transportation (by turnpike roads, canals,
and later by railways), accompanied the progress of
manufactures. It is impossible to say that either was
simply the cause or the effect! of the others. All three
stimulated and promoted one another.

Recalling what we have already seen as to the
function of capital while industry was still in the
" domestic " or " factor " stage, it is clear that its assist-
ance would be even more necessary when machines had
to be purchased and works erected. Besides Jevons'
three pre-requisites, there was, accordingly, another

155

Economic Organisation

which had to be realised before manufacture could pass
into the machine era : viz. the provision of capital. The
manufacturer might conceivably borrow it : in our
own day, as we all know, manufacturing activity, as
well as mercantile, is greatly forwarded by the organi-
sation and extension of credit, through banks and
discount houses. In the Industrial Revolution also
this factor must be assigned a share : for it is signi-
ficant that country banks, which had previously been
very few in number, increased quite rapidly from
about the time of the American war ; and Adam
Smith closed his chapter on banking by a paragraph
designed to show that " the late multiplication of bank-
ing companies, by which many people have been
much alarmed," was all for the best. Competition, he
argued, would compel them to be "more circumspect,"
while it would also "oblige all bankers to be more liberal
in their dealings with their customers." But while
overdrafts might supplement capital, and the discount-
ing of bills might enable manufacturers to turn over
their capital more quickly, they would not actually
provide, in the first instance, the requisite resources.
The mechanism of the limited liability company, by
which capital is contributed both by shareholders out-
side the actual management and also in the form of
debentures or bonds, was, of course, in 1776 three-
quarters of a century away.

Ricardo and the " classical " economists, therefore,
were simply giving expression to the facts around
them when they wrote as if the men who directed
manufactories were themselves, as a rule, the owners
of all or almost all the capital they made use of, and

156

The Industrial Revolution

when they started the habit, which has survived till
to-day, of speaking as if the capitalist and the employer
were necessarily the same person. Even in 1848
John Stuart Mill observed that "the control of the
operations of industry usually belongs to the person
who supplies the whole or the greatest part of the
funds by which they are carried on."

We have still to explain the self-owned capital of
the earlier generations of factory owners. And recent
discussions of this question have taken us back with a
renewed appreciation to the phrases of contemporary
economists. " Capitals," says Adam Smith — and it is
instructive that he uses the word in the plural — " are
increased by parsimony and decreased by prodigality ; "
and he contrasts the unproductive expenditure of the
rich on " idle guests and menial servants," with " the
maintenance of productive hands " " by what a frugal
man annually saves." Senior, in 1835, introduced the
term " abstinence," as more fitly expressing the source
of capital. All that his argument required was the
purely negative sense which makes abstinence mean
simply non-consumption ; yet he characterised abstin-
ence as implying "self-denial," and declared that "to
abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power"
is "among the most painful exertions of the human
will." Phrases like these have occasioned no little
mirth : it is hard to discover self-denial or parsimony,
as the world understands those words, in the processes
by which modern capital is most largely accumulated.
But as applied to the beginnings in the eighteenth
century of modern manufacturing capital, the terms
are exact and appropriate. To a great extent it was

Economic Organisation

in actual fact the result of " parsimony " and " absti-
nence," as the plain man uses the words.

That the new manufacturing middle class was largely
Nonconformist is a very familiar fact. But what have
not been sufficiently noticed are the economic conse-
quences in the eighteenth century of Nonconformist
conceptions of religious duty. I need not now discuss
how far those conceptions were due to the individu-
alism of their theology, an individualism which in
Calvinism and later religious movements had gone a
good deal beyond the individualism of the earlier
stages of the Reformation : nor how far it was due to
the political and social circumstances in which the
Dissenters found themselves. Whatever may have
been the causes, certain ideas became dominant among
them, which had not indeed been altogether absent
from the Christianity of earlier centuries, but had
then been moderated in their operation by other and
conflicting opinions. Among these ideas we may
single out the following : business as a divine "call-
ing " ; the sinfulness of pleasure-seeking ; the lawful-
ness of material gain. " If God," replied Richard
Baxter in 1673 to the enquiries of his congregation,
"shew you a way in which you may lawfully get
more than in another way, if you refuse this and choose
the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your
calling, and you refuse to be God's steward." Pecuniary
means, acquired by assiduous application to business
and the prudent choice of the gainful way, naturally
accumulated when there was no expenditure on amuse-
ments or on interests outside the business, the family,
and the religious " connection." To a shrewd and scru-

158

The Industrial Revolution

pulous observer like John Wesley, this was a matter for
grave alarm. " Religion," he wrote, " must necessarily
produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot
but produce riches. . . . We must exhort all Christians
to gain all they can and to save all they can : that is,
in effect, to grow rich." " But as riches increase, so
will pride, anger, and love of the world." The only
remedy in his opinion was for " those who gain all they
can and save all they can " to " likewise give all they
can." It is not uncharitable, however, to conjecture
that, with ordinary humanity, the natural way to dispose
of savings, which could not be used for display or self-
indulgence, was in business investment. And here we
have doubtless the explanation to a large extent of the
way in which capital was found in middle-class business
circles to finance the new inventions.

The establishment of the factoiy system would
inevitably have been attended by great social dangers
and difficulties even if the social situation had been
altogether satisfactory in every other respect. In the
closing years of the eighteenth century and the open-
ing years of the nineteenth, this was, I need hardly
say, by no means the case in England. There was
the great war which involved heavy taxation ; and
there was a recently elaborated system of out-door
Poor Relief which, however benevolent in intention,
was in actual working exceedingly demoralising. But
let us concentrate our attention on the industrial posi-
tion. We have there to deal with two absolutely
different sets of facts. There was, first, the effect of
the competition of the new machine-made goods with
similar goods made by hand. The supersession of a

^59

Economic Organisation

widely extended handicraft by mechanical methods
of production involves a problem which no country
so far has had the wisdom to solve satisfactorily :
in England it was the long-drawn agony of the
handloom weavers (when the new machinery, first
applied to the rising cotton trade, was introduced into
the deep-rooted and widespread woollen industry) which
added so greatly to the gloom of the Chartist period.
And secondly — and it is this that specially concerns
us here — there were the conditions produced within
the machine-using industries themselves. In all of
them the cost of the machinery necessarily created
a wide social cleavage between employers and em-
ployed. Although what we may call "patriarchal"
conditions of intimacy and mutual knowledge survived
far more than is commonly supposed, and survive even
to-day, the personal tie tended to be replaced, wher-
ever large bodies of workpeople were brought together,
by a purely " cash nexus." This was not, as Carlyle
might lead us to suppose, due to any peculiar hard-
ness of heart on the part of the employers : it was
due to the necessities of the situation. And as the
personal tie weakened, employers were likely to press
more strenuously their right — and even, as they might
urge, their duty — to be governed by profit-making con-
siderations, and to be more intent on buying their
labour as cheaply as possible. The absence of com-
bination among the workpeople put them at a dis-
advantage in their bargaining for remuneration ; while
the like absence of combination among employers
forced the more benevolent among them to follow the
lead of the more " business-like." Meanwhile, in the

i6o

Freedom of Contract

textile industries there were even graver immediate
causes of evil. The new machinery rendered the work
physically so light that it became possible to employ
women and children in large numbers ; and the
sinking of capital in costly machinery made it seem
the interest of employers to work that machinery as
continuously as possible. Neither the employment
of children nor excessive hours were absolutely new
phenomena. Both had been seen in the domestic
workshop. But the employment of children was now
systematised and extended on a vast scale ; and exces-
sive hours, instead of being an occasional episode,
say once a week, became a regular thing, every day
in the week.

The country was the slower in dealing with the
situation because of what had now come to be the
prevalent belief, not only in business circles but also
in the minds of the intellectual leaders of public
opinion, that control or regulation by the State was
an antiquated and irrational policy ; that the State
ought to limit its functions to the maintenance of
what was called " law and order," and that the liberty
of the individual to pursue his own interest in his own
way — what was denominated " freedom of contract "
— was not only socially expedient, but also a natural
right. It is interesting to observe how in this matter
the pressure of business interest went side by side with
the elaboration of an abstract social theory. For a
century after the Revolution of 1688, the Whig party,
which found its theoretic justification in John Locke's
doctrine of natural rights, was also the party of the
mercantile or moneyed interest. And this interest,

161 L

Economic Organisation

though it demanded protection and privilege in foreign
trade, found the existing State regulation of industry
at home very much in its way. Listen to the frank
utterances of Sir Josiah Child, the great East India
merchant, in his celebrated and oft-reprinted Discourse
of Trade, first published in 1698 :

" All our laws that oblige our people to the making
of strong, substantial (and, as we call it, loyal) Cloth,
of a certain length, breadth and weight, if they were
duly put in execution, would, in my opinion, do more
hurt than good, because the humours and fashions of
the World change, and at some times, in some places
(as now in most), slight, cheap, light Cloth will sell
more plentifully and better than that which is heavier,
stronger and truer wrought ; and if we intend to have
the trade of the World, we must imitate the Dutch,
who make the worst as well as the best of all manu-
factures, that we may be in a capacity of serving all
Markets and all Humours.

I conclude all our laws limiting the number of
Looms, or kind of servants, and times of working, to
be certainly prejudicial to the Clothing-Trade of the
Kingdom. . . .

I conclude that stretching of Cloth by Tenters,
though it be sometimes prejudicial to the Cloth, is
yet absolutely necessary to the Trade of England, and
that the excess of straining cannot be certainly limited
by any law, but must be left to the Seller's or Ex-
porter's discretion, who best knows what will please
his Customers beyond the Seas."

The period of Whig supremacy has been appro-
priately christened the period of "parliamentary Col-

162

Freedom of Contract

bertism." Its objects were the same as those of the
strong paternal government of Louis XIV under his
great minister Colbert ; but the policy was shaped,
not as in France by the independent, if mistaken,
views of the crown and its chosen advisers as to the
well-being of the nation as a whole, but by the
immediate interests of the mercantile classes as ex-
pressed through Parliament. Unlike the Tudor policy,
it fixed attention on the foreign market, on imports
and exports, and allowed the whole system of internal
regulation — justices' assessments of wages, appren-
ticeship, supervision of processes, &c. — to fall into
abeyance. And when Adam Smith, continuing and
developing the individualism which characterised all
the philosophic speculation of the eighteenth century,
turned the argument for individual liberty directly
against the prevailing commercial restrictions, he did
not hesitate to be consistent and denounce the surviv-
ing remnants of industrial restriction at home as also
contrary to the principle of natural liberty. Starting
with the well-known Whig doctrine of Property as
set forth by Locke, the philosopher of the Revolution
settlement, he gave it an industrial application, a propos
of the law of apprenticeship. " The property which
every man has in his own labour, as it is the original
foundation of all other property, so it is the most
sacred and inviolable. The patrimony of a poor man
lies in the strength and dexterity of his hands ; and to
hinder him from employing this strength and dexterity
in what manner he thinks proper without injury to his
neighbour, is a plain violation of this most sacred
property. It is a manifest encroachment upon the

163

Economic Organisation

just liberty both of the workman and of those who
might be disposed to employ him."

Under the influence of this belief the whole Tudor
code as to wages and employment was swept away in
1813 (wages) and 18 14 (apprenticeship). "The reign
of Elizabeth," said the member in charge of one of
these bills, "though glorious, was not one in which
sound principles of commerce were known."

In a very few years the country began once more to
build up again piecemeal a new industrial code, con-
trolling the free play of individual action even more
effectively than the code of Elizabeth. I have not
time to enter into the details of the factory legislation
by which England, as it preceded the rest of the
world in its industrial evolution, set an example also
for the rest of the world in coping with some of the
gravest evils it produced. Let us indicate simply the
leading stages. The hours of labour of children and
young persons in cotton mills were limited in 1819 ;
in 1833 this restriction was extended to all the textile
trades, and a beginning was made in the creation of a
stafif of Inspectors to see that the acts were enforced.
The Central Government, through the departments
then existing or subsequently created of the Home
Office, the Board of Trade, the Local Government
Board, and the Education Office, resumed the task of
enforcement of a social code which had dropt, a cen-
tury and a half before, from the hands of the Stuart
Council. In 1842 the State proceeded to interfere with
the labour of adults, by excluding women from under-
ground mines. In 1844 women were included with
children and young persons in the limitation of factory

164

Freedom of Contract

hours. Those who advocated the measure did so with
the knowledge that it would, in effect, limit the hours
of employment of adult men in textile mills, and pro-
moted it with that purpose — " fighting," as was said,
" behind the women's petticoats." But the legislature
did not take the next long step and directly regulate
the hours of labour of adult men for almost half a
century; until in 1893 it made a fresh departure by
permitting the Board of Trade, on representation to it
of excessive hours worked by railway servants, to bring
a certain very gentle pressure to bear on the railway
companies to revise their time schedules. Fifteen years
later, in 1908, it took the gigantic step of limiting the
number of hours to be worked by all underground coal
miners; and this measure had been delayed so long
only because the miners themselves had not been
altogether unanimous in its favour.

Meanwhile, as early as 1844, the State had begun to
enforce certain regulations with regard to safety by in-
sisting on the proper fencing of machinery. Twenty
years later, in 1864, the legislature proceeded to em-
power the Secretary of State to issue special rules
regulating processes in dangerous trades ; but again
these were designed only for the protection of women
and children, and it was not till thirty years afterwards
that power was given, in 1895, to impose special rules
in regard to workshops in which men only were
employed. It is true that since 1850 the inspection
of coal mines had been undertaken by the State, and
every great catastrophe has since been followed by new
rules to promote safety ; and as early as 1875, freedom
of contract as between seamen and shipowners had

165

Economic Organisation

been limited by the enactment of the Merchant Ship-
ping Act, which prohibited the loading of ships be-
yond the Plimsoll line : but these invasions of the
responsibilities of employers were long regarded as
altogether exceptional, and as justified by the peculiar
helplessness of men who leave the surface of the solid
earth to go down into its bowels or to traverse the sea.
Looking back on the history of the century 1813-
1913, it is now evident that the development of indus-
trial legislation has taken place chiefly in two periods.
These are, first, the period of bitter struggle over the
Factory Acts. In this struggle the economists were, as
a body, in favour of freedom all round — in industry
as well as commerce. The leaders of the Free Trade
movement, and especially John Bright, strenuously
opposed the proposed Factory Acts as "contrary to
all principles of sound legislation." Sir Robert Peel,
the son of a Lancashire cotton spinner, who became
the idol of the free-traders, was the bete noir of Lord
Shaftesbury, the champion of the cotton operatives ;
and the great Ten Hours' Act of 1847 ^^^ passed by
the Tory country gentlemen, partly from honest con-
viction, and partly in revenge for the repeal of the
Corn Laws by the representatives of the manufacturing
interests in the previous year. But by 1850 the main
lines of factory legislation were settled. Henceforth,
for many years, the movement was of the nature of a
very slow and cautious extension of its principles to
industries allied to the textile group and to non-textile
factories and workshops. During this period, when
the principle of commercial free trade was accepted by
both great political parties, it was also a matter of

166

Freedom of Contract

general agreement that freedom of industrial contract
should be the general rule, and any "interference of
the State " altogether exceptional : the presumption
was held to be against it. And as it happened, the
most formidable of the critics, from the historical side,
of the individualist philosophy of the economists.
Sir Henry Maine, in his work on Ancient Law, pub-
lished in 1861, seemed to put the principle of free
contract on an even firmer basis than before by repre-
senting it as the inevitable outcome of an age-long
historical evolution. From Status to Contract came in
to supplement Laissez Faire.

It was not till the 'nineties that really large new de-
partures began to be made. The difficulties of Irish
land tenure had opened the eyes of the political party
which had been most closely identified in the past
with the principle of individual liberty to the necessity
of interfering with free contract between landlord
and tenant at least in Ireland ; but the old Political
Economy could hardly be "banished to Saturn" in
the case of Ireland without losing some of its vitality
in England. Moreover the movement of European
thought which, starting from Locke, had made men
in the eighteenth century regard the State as a mere
constable, whose only duty was to keep the ring within
which individual competitors should fight out their
battles, had, long before this, taken with Hegel another
turn. Among the English thinkers who gave expres-
sion to a more trustful view of the State may be
specially mentioned one who deeply influenced many
of the young men who afterwards came to the front —
the Oxford philosopher Thomas Hill Green. In a

167

Economic Organisation

modest pamphlet printed in 1881 he drew a far-
reaching distinction between " mere freedom from
restraint " and " freedom in the higher sense — the
power of men to make the best of themselves." In
this latter sense, freedom might actually be forwarded
by greater restraint.

At one time it seemed as if the influence of Herbert
Spencer's writings would bring fresh strength to the
declining forces of individualism. But Spencer's anti-
pathy to State action was hard to reconcile with his
view of society as an organism, and went to extremes
which robbed him of the support of practical men.
Somewhat more effect was produced by Darwinism ;
it was seriously argued by certain devotees of science
that because " the struggle for existence " led to " the
survival of the fittest" in the biological sphere, no
restraint of any kind should be laid upon economic
competition. But here, again, the doctrine involved
too complete a reversal of modern civilisation to carry
weight with legislators : and it was never accepted by
Darwin's effective populariser, Huxley. And when
the period of stagnation in economic thought passed
away, which followed upon the mid-century domina-
tion of Mill, and a new and more fertile period began,
Jevons in 1882 broke away from the traditional pre-
sumption in favour of Laissez Faire and declared that
every case must be considered on its merits.

Whatever the causes may have been, the last quarter
of a century has seen the enactment of a great code of
compulsory insurance : insurance in fact, though not in
name, against Accidents, by the Workmen's Compensa-
tion Act of 1897, and, both in fact and name, by the In-

168

Freedom of Contract

surance Act against Sickness of 191 1, and the measure
coupled with it of insurance against Unemployment,
at present restricted to three great trades, but doubtless
soon to be extended to the whole field of industry.
At the same time, as we have already seen, a fresh
beginning has been made with the State regulation of
wages by the Trade Boards Act of 1909 and by the
Minimum Wage Act for miners of 191 2. If the spirit
of Burleigh, the great statesman of Elizabeth, could
have heard what was said in the Commons when the
legislation of his mistress was swept away in 1813-14,
and could then have listened to what was said in the
same chamber in 1908-12, he would have smiled with
a grave satisfaction.

But historical evolution never really returns upon
itself ; there is always a vital difference between new
and old, however much they seem to resemble one
another. The difference between the Tudor situation
and our own consists in the advent, meanwhile, of
democracy. The State which has enacted the great
measures of the last two decades is a democratic State,
working mainly through paid officials ; and that brings
with it dangers just as real as, though different from,
those involved in a monarchical State compelled to act
through a landed aristocracy.

It is, I believe, a mitigation of those dangers that
the modern State, in the matter of wages at any rate,
can to a large extent make use of corporate organisa-
tions representing both sides of the wages contract.
The years which saw the beginnings of State interven-
tion saw also the first efforts of the workpeople to help
themselves by substituting the " collective bargaining "

169

Economic Organisation

of trade unions for the impotence of the isolated work-
man. In earlier centuries combination among work-
men to obtain an increase of wages had been forbidden
by the common law because it was deemed to be the
business of parliament and the justices to regulate the
conditions of employment. When the governmental
regulation of wages had, in fact, passed away, it might
have been supposed that combination among work-
people would have been permitted. On the contrary, in
1 799 combinations amongst workpeople were prohibited
by statute. This law was repealed in 1824-25 ; but the
very Radical who brought about its repeal did so in
the expectation that " if left alone combinations would
cease to exist." Combination long remained under
the ban of the economists : to them it was wrong,
because it was a violation of natural liberty, an inter-
ference with the freedom of each individual to make
what bargains he pleased for himself ; and it was also
futile, according to the orthodox doctrine of wages.
From Free Traders of the Manchester school it received
no sympathy : " combinations," said John Bright as late
as i860, " must in the long run be as injurious to the
working man as to the employer." Yet, as we all know,
trade unions succeeded in establishing themselves in
all the staple industries of the country, not without
bitter struggles, in which there was often violence and
folly on one side as well as ignorance of human nature
and short-sightedness on the other. And by 1894 the
Royal Commission on Labour was able to report that
in the staple trades of the country there were " strong
trade organisationswhich are accustomed to act together
in masses, and have made the old method of settling

170

Freedom of Contract

individual wages by the haggling of the market impos-
sible, and which have for the most part already caused
the substitution for it of Wages Boards, or other more
or less formal institutions, by which they secure a con-
sultative voice in the division of receipts between
capital and labour." " The most quarrelsome period
of a trade's existence," the Commission remarks else-
where, " is when it is just emerging from the patriar-
chal condition in which each employer deals with his
own men with no outside assistance, but has not yet
fully entered into that other condition in which trans-
actions take place between strong associations fully
recognising each other." And the great engineering
strike of 1897-8, which raised the question of collec-
tive bargaining in a peculiarly difficult form, ended in
an explicit recognition of that principle by the vic-
torious employers in the terms of settlement.

It would be absurd after the upheavals of 191 1 and
19 1 2 to pretend that even the general recognition
of the principle of collective bargaining will alto-
gether solve the labour question. Even if the two
sides come together and are ready to bargain on behalf
of their constituents, they may not be able to reach an
agreement. In this case a chairman or umpire — in the
last resort appointed by the State — may have to decide,
if the two parties can be induced to give him this
authority. But he will be greatly assisted by previous
discussion ; and his decision would be in vain unless
there existed on each side organisations which could
carry his decision into effect. In spite of recent
storms the situation is really far more hopeful than
it was when the combination of the workpeople was

171

Economic Organisation

actually far weaker ; and the remedy would seem to
lie, in part at any rate, in the direction of an even
completer combination of the parties concerned. There
are grave difficulties to be overcome before the problem
is solved of the most suitable organisation on either
side. Just now it is the question of trade union
structure that is uppermost : whether it shall follow
the lines of " crafts " {i.e. single industrial processes),
or "occupations" (i.e. groups of kindred processes),
or " industries " (as indicated by the grouping of
employers). Probably no uniform solution will ever
be possible ; nor to the like difficulties on the side
of employers. But this need not prevent the adoption
of working arrangements which will be sufficiently
effective for practical purposes. The industrial organi-
sation of the future will probably emerge, as did that
of the later Middle Ages, from a union of State
regulation from above with spontaneous combination
from below.

172

LECTURE VIII

yoint Stock and the Evolution of Capitalism

We have seen that the establishment of the factory or
"works" system impHed the advent of large Capital
in the field of manufacture, and the acquisition by its
owners or users of the control over the whole process of
production as well as of distribution. And it is obvious
that what may conveniently and for brevity be called
"Capitalism," i.e. modern methods of production
directed for the profit-making purposes of capital, has
in one respect been vastly successful. Human labour
has been applied in an incomparably more effective way
than before ; science, by means of costly machinery,
has utilised forces of nature to an extent and of a kind
before undreamt of. Commodities in consequence have
been inconceivably multiplied and cheapened ; and, as
a result, a population almost four times as great was
supported on Eiiglish soil in 1901 as in 1801, and in
a state of material comfort which, for the great body
of the people, was undoubtedly superior to that of a
century before. But it is equally obvious that, human
nature being what it is, the capitalistic organisation of
industry under private ownership necessarily brought
with it a certain opposition of immediate interests
between employers and employed, and a constant risk
of industrial conflict.

173

Economic Organisation

This being so, it was natural that lovers of their
kind should look round for some way out of a trouble-
some situation. One idea that occurred to them was
that the advantages of capital might be retained — the
employment of machinery, and production on a large
scale — but its disadvantages avoided if the ownership,
in the case of each factory or works, could be achieved
by its own workpeople. It was, in short, the remedy
of Co-operation, as Co-operation was understood by
those who first applied it to production. Its ideal was
the self-governing workshop, eliminating the individual
" employer " with his " profit," and thus abolishing
"the wage-system." Encouraged by some apparent
successes in Paris and London, in 1848 and the follow-
ing years, John Stuart Mill predicted Co-operation's
ultimate triumph. "The form of association," he
wrote in 1852, in the second edition of his widely-
read textbook of political economy, "which, if mankind
continue to improve, must be expected in the end to
predominate, is not that which can exist between a
capitalist as chief and workpeople without a voice in
the management, but the association of the labourers
themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning
the capital with which they carry on their operations,
and working under managers elected and removable
by themselves." Ten years later, in 1862, Mill declared
that the experience already attained " m.ust be conclu-
sive to all minds as to the brilliant future reserved for
the principle of co-operation." " It is hardly possible
to take any but a hopeful view of the prospects of man-
kind, when, in two leading countries of the world, the
obscure depths of society contain simple working men

174

Evolution of Capitalism

whose integrity, good sense, self-command, and
honourable confidence in one another have enabled
them to carry these noble experiments to a triumphant
issue." The success of co-operation, he added, three
years later, would bring about "a moral revolution in
society ; the healing of the standing feud between
capital and labour ; the transformation of human life
from a conflict of classes struggling for opposite in-
terests to a friendly rivalry in the pursuit of a good
common to all ; the elevation of the dignity of labour ;
and a new sense of security and independence in the
labouring class."

But these anticipations have been grievously disap-
pointed. Hundreds of experiments have been made,
and there is a noble story to tell of persistence and
self-denial in the scraping-together of capital ; but
undertakings for co-operative production in Mill's
sense have without exception failed completely, either
from the business or from the co-operative point of
view. Some would liave failed from stress of circum-
stances however well managed, but most of the failures
were due to mismanagement. The undertakings either
did not secure competent managers, usually because
they were not ready to pay sufficiently high salaries,
or else they quarrelled with them. Industrial self-
government proved altogether incompetent to organise
production and (what is even more important) to secure
a market. Success, where it did come, was equally
fatal ; the small societies of handicraftsmen, such as
most of the early co-operative groups really were, be-
came exclusive if they were successful, and began to
employ outside labour ; the large societies formed

Economic Organisation

later in the cotton-spinning industry became mere
joint-stock companies, in which, indeed, working men
held shares, but in which the employers and employed
ceased to be identical bodies. Capitalism has not, as
a fact, been seriously modified by Co-operation. What
is called Co-operation has had any considerable
measure of success only in the sphere of retail distri-
bution ; the large manufacturing establishments run by
the federation of distributive stores — the Co-operative
Wholesale Society — are carried on in precisely the
same way as any well-managed " private " business.

What is known as "Profit-sharing" differs from
Co-operation in that it proposes to provide all (or, in
its latest phase, " Labour Co-partnership," almost all)
the capital otherwise than by the contribution of the
workers in the several businesses, and to retain, in
the hands of those appointed by the owners of the
capital, the control over the management of the busi-
ness. It proposes, however, to add to the wages of
the workpeople some share of the profits, when profits
are obtained over and above what is regarded as a
proper interest on capital and a proper remuneration
for management. Whether this be but a slight modi-
fication of the ordinary capitalist system or contain
within itself the germs Of a true co-operative system
need hardly be discussed here, in view of the fact that
hitherto its history, like the history of Co-operation
itself, has been a record (in every direction save one) of
repeated failure. The cause of failure in almost every
case, from that in 1875 of Messrs. Briggs, of whose ex-
periment Mill wrote in the most hopeful spirit, to that
of some recent much-discussed proposals, has been the

176

Evolution of Capitalism

apparent incompatibility of profit-sharing with trade
unionism. That incompatibility shows itself even when
the concern which introduces the scheme does not
make — as most of the earlier profit-sharing arrange-
ments made — abstinence from joining a union a con-
dition precedent to the sharing in profit. Employers
have now to reckon with the fact that in any industry
which employs skilled workmen under substantially
similar conditions in a number of establishments, the
workpeople of the several concerns are sure to be drawn
together by a sense of solidarity of interests, and will
certainly endeavour to promote what they deem to be
their interests by joint action. Profit-sharing or Labour
Co-partnership can hardly be worked without tending
to detach the group of men employed in the particular
concern from the general body of the trade. For that
reason it is certain to be opposed by intelligent trade
union leaders. There is only one industry in which it
has been found possible to keep it alive hitherto, and
that is the gas-making business. Following the prece-
dent of Sir George Livesey and the South Metropolitan
Gas Company, companies controlling more than half
the capital invested in the gas business in the United
Kingdom have introduced some element of profit-
sharing. But this is a business in which the labour
employed is almost entirely unskilled, and trade union-
ism has hitherto been very weak, and which is carried
on under other conditions exceptionally favourable to
profit-sharing. Chief among these are the large degree
of local monopoly necessarily enjoyed by the several
concerns, and also the peculiar system of legislative
regulation to which the industry is subject, — a system

177 M

Economic Organisation

which makes an increase of dividend dependent on
a reduction of price to the consumer, and so obviously
and closely associates the interests of shareholders with
the efficiency of the labourers.

So long as these conditions are absent from other
industries, the only application of the idea of profit-
sharing which would be feasible would be some plan
which made the workpeople share in the profit of the
whole mdustry to which they belonged, without regard
to the fortunes of the particular concern by which for
the time they were employed. But even then the diffi-
culty would remain which has been felt in profit-sharing
as applied to particular works, viz. that the principle
that profit should be shared does not in the least
determine how it should be shared. There is no
general abstract principle that can be invoked from
either side to evade the troublesome necessity of bargain
between the parties concerned.

In opposition to the co-operative school, the great
French philosopher, Auguste Comte, maintained — in
the same year, 1848, as saw the initiation of co-
operative undertakings — that " the division " which had
"arisen spontaneously between Capitalist and Work-
men " was not a thing that could be reversed. On
the contrary it was to be regarded, he held, as " the
germ" out of which a future and more satisfactory
organisation of industry was to arise. The true solu-
tion of the difficulty, he declared, was that " the
spiritual power," which he hoped to create, should
" penetrate the employers with a strong and habitual
sense of duty to their subordinates." As it was easier,
he thought, to influence large employers in this direction

178

Evolution of Capitalism

than small, the " tendency to a constant enlargement of
undertakings " was not to be lamented but welcomed.
Comte's hopes, then, were fixed on the "moralisa-
tion " of employers. It cannot be denied that some
improvement has taken place in that direction. The
first generation of factory owners included many
overbearing and narrowly self-seeking natures : there
is certainly now a far stronger sense prevalent of what
employers owe to their workpeople. There has been
a quickening of the employers' conscience ; and to this
the State by its factory legislation and the pressure
of the workpeople themselves through their unions
have both contributed in no small measure. And yet
the vast change that has taken place in business or-
ganisation since Comte's time has evidently tended
towards weakening even further the personal tie between
employer and employed, and towards putting fresh ob-
stacles in the way of any policy on the part of employers
which aims at anything besides commercial profit. My
reference of course is to the introduction of the limited
hability joint-stock company, for which the English
date is 1862. The joint-stock method has facilitated
the provision of capital for business purposes beyond
all expectation : but it has inevitably still further de-
personalised the relations of labour and capital. More-
over, it has made the situation far more difficult in
other ways. Directors feel themselves to be trustees
for the shareholders, and morally bound, as such, to
sacrifice philanthropy to gain. And owing to the
unrestricted transference of shares, high real profits
seem but modest returns to shareholders who have
come in later and paid high prices for their stock

179

Economic Organisation

(simply because dividends were high), not to the com-
pany, but to the previous owners ; so that, however
large the trading profit may really be, the pressure of
all those shareholders who have bought at a high price
tends to be against anything that may possibly reduce
it. The prospect of any moralisation of individual
employers or single employing concerns resulting in a
voluntary sacrifice of profit for the benefit of work-
people is very small under a joint-stock regime.
What, in this position of affairs, is really more possible
to hope for, is that profit-seeking itself should lead
great manufacturing concerns to adopt measures
within their works which will both benefit their
people and directly (through internal economies) or
indirectly (through the force of advertisement and
appeal to the fellow-feeling of the consumer with the
workman) accrue to the employers' benefit. There
is room for much to be done in this direction —
the direction not of self-sacrifice but of enlightened
self-interest. Yet "welfare" programmes, to be per-
manently successful, must be so carried out as to be
consistent with the independence of the workpeople,
both political and economic.

Looking back then on the nineteenth century, we
see that no fundamental modification has taken place
in the organisation of industrial production. It has
continued to be characterised by the dependence of
large bodies of workpeople on the provision of capital
by investors, induced thereto by the motive of profit.
All that state action and labour combination have
been able to do, in those branches of manufacture in
which they have been effective, is to raise somewhat

1 80

Evolution of Capitalism

the plane of competition by enforcing certain standard
conditions of employment. What accordingly we have
now to observe is the evolution of capitalism, moving
in accordance with its own internal laws.

This evolution has taken precisely the same road in
England as in the other great manufacturing countries
of the world. Its movement has been marked by four
characteristics — (i) Concentration, with larger employ-
ment of fixed capital in proportion to labour, and
greater average aggregation of workpeople — so that the
actual number of mills or works increases more slowly
than the number of employes ; (2) Integration ; (3)
Combination and (4) Collective Action in the face of
labour. Let us look at each of these separately.

First as to Concentration. On this head we have
not yet for England any such easily accessible figures
as are provided for Germany and the United States by
the official census. There still survive in this country
widespread industries, such as that of tailoring, not
yet organised on factory lines, but conducted on the
lines of the "domestic" industries of the eighteenth
century. There are even a number of small handicrafts
retaining many of the characteristics of the old gild
industry, though the gilds themselves have long ago
passed away. Moreover, new industries are continually
coming into existence which in their earlier stages can
be carried on successfully in small workshops. The
factory system has not yet won the complete domi-
nance which was prophesied for it half a century ago.
Nevertheless, in the staple industries of the country,
the factory or large "works" is the predominant form
of organisation ; and these works or factories become

181

Economic Organisation

steadily larger and more expensively equipped. Thus
in 1844 the total capital invested in cotton mills and
machinery was calculated at about twice the annual
wages bill ; in 1890 at five times the wages bill ; the
average number of spindles per mill and looms per
mill was also at least fifty per cent, greater at the later
date. And this was in an industry which has notori-
ously moved much less rapidly in the direction of
concentration than some of the other staple trades,
notably the iron and engineering group, and this be-
cause a cotton mill still costs comparatively little to erect
and equip. Thus it has been reckoned that while
there were about four times as many blast-furnaces in
1900 as in 1800, the average "make" per furnace had
increased wellnigh fifteen times. It should be noticed,
however, that this increase in the average size of plants,
with a decrease or at any rate not a proportionate in-
crease in their number, is not necessarily the same
thing as a concentration in the ownership of the
capital involved. Thus the number of breweries fell
from forty-four thousand in 1850 to between five and
six thousand in 1903 ; but with the conversion in the
late 'nineties of brewery firms. into joint-stock com-
panies there went a wide diffusion in the holding of
stock, so that at the later date the share- and debenture-
holders in five alone of the largest brewery companies
numbered some 27,000 persons. About the same time
the capital in the English Sewing Cotton Company
belonged to some 12,000 owners, in the Fine Cotton
Spinners to between 5000 and 6000 ; while Lipton's
great business had as many as 74,000 shareholders.
It has indeed been argued that the diffusion of property

182

Evolution of Capitalism

in joint-stock undertakings is less than has sometimes
been supposed, because a man of means commonly
holds shares in several concerns ; and some evidence
has been adduced in support of the estimate that the
owners of joint-stock properties do not number in all
more than 500,000. But when one reflects that most
of these must be adult males, usually with several
persons dependent upon them, even this minimising
estimate shows how far industrial capital is from being
owned exclusively by millionaires. The industrial
middle class now takes new forms ; it now consists
largely of officials of companies and holders of stock.
But any one who has walked through the residential
suburbs of our great manufacturing cities knows that
it shows no sign of disappearing, in spite of the pro-
phecies of Marx and his school. It may be doubted
whether it was ever relatively stronger than to-day.

The second characteristic of capitalistic evolution,
especially in the last quarter of a century, has been
Integration. This has been peculiarly marked in the
iron, steel, engineering, and shipbuilding group of
trades. By Integration is meant the bringing under a
single business control of a whole series of operations
contributing to a final result which had been previously
conducted entirely apart : for instance, of the whole of
the operations involved in the making and employment
of steel, from the mining of the ore and coal, through
the blast-furnace and steel plant up to the production
of hardware, machinery, or ships. In this direction
the way was led by Carnegie in America and Krupp
in Germany ; but in the 'nineties England rapidly
made up the leeway it had lost, and a dozen or more

183

Economic Organisation

gigantic unifications took place — either in the shape
of actual amalgamation or by means of the purchase
of controlling interests. Thus John Brown & Co. of
Sheffield, owning coal mines, ore fields, blast-furnaces,
and steel plants, and turning out armour plates, boiler
plates, and a whole series of steel materials, amalga-
mated with the Clydebank Shipbuilding Company,
which built battleships and turbine liners. Armstrong
and Co. at Newcastle, beginning with making steel and
ordnance, bought up a great engineering business and
a large shipbuilding concern, and got a controlling
interest in a famous locomotive and marine engineer-
ing works, and in the chief company of torpedo manu-
facturers. About the same time the great concern of
Guest, Keen & Nettlefold in South Wales and Stafford-
shire brought under one management collieries, ore
deposits, blast-furnaces, steel plants, and a whole series
of manufactures of such products as nuts, bolts, and
screws. These are but typical examples. In such
integrating movements the initiative may come from
either direction ; it may start from the relatively finished
manufactures, reaching back to get a secure hold upon
their materials, or from the earlier stages in produc-
tion, reaching forward to get a more secure outlet for
their product. In either case the result is the same.

The third feature of capitalistic evolution — and
again it has characterised especially the last quarter of
a century — has been the tendency towards monopolistic
Combination among concerns engaged in the same
manufacture. " Monopolistic " I use in no necessarily
bad sense, but simply to indicate that the main purpose
of such combinations is to affect price by controlling

184

Evolution of Capitalism

supply. As there is no inherent sacredness in com-
petition, and prices determined solely by competition
have often been disastrous to the best interests of the
workpeople engaged, there is no need to start at the
word "monopoly." The promoters of a combination
often, indeed, put forward " the economies of com-
bination " as their motive, with the resulting ad-
vantages which they make possible to the public. In
most cases this is only a very subordinate motive in
actual fact ; the real motive is the higher price which
absence of competition may of itself be expected to
render possible. But it must be acknowledged that
economies by no means inconsiderable may often be
obtained. Competitive trading is in several ways,
especially in the expenses of advertisement and sale,
an unnecessarily costly method of satisfying public
wants ; so that it is quite possible for a monopoly to
result, at the same time, in a decrease of cost to the
consumers and an increase of profit to the producers.

Combination in Great Britain has taken one of two
forms — either that of an agreement, or the completer
form of a complete amalgamation. Of the former,
one of the most interesting is the agreement which
controls the manufacture of steel rails ; and this be-
cause it rests upon an international alliance among
the steel makers of the United States, England, Ger-
many, Belgium, France, and Russia, each national
combination being given a monopoly of the home
market and an allotted share of the rest of the
world. A similar international agreement is now to
be found in the tobacco business, and also, with
occasional breaks, between North Atlantic steamship

185'

Economic Organisation

lines. Of the latter type, the amalgamations, the
chief examples are to be found in what are called
"Associations," but are really completely amalgamated
companies, created in certain branches of the textile
industries between 1898 and 1900. These are very
considerable concerns. Thus, the Calico Printers'
Association has a capital of 8J millions sterling, the
Fine Cotton Spinners of 7^, the Bleachers of 6|, the
Bradford Dyers of 4|. In each case the amalgama-
tion now controls the whole trade. All of them, it
will be seen, are subsidiary to the main textile pro-
cesses— spinning and weaving ; and it is significant
that while all the chief subsidiary industries are now
syndicated, the main body of each of the two great
textile trades, that composed of the spinning and
weaving branches, still remains subject to an almost
unlimited competition.

It used to be believed by some who disliked both
Trusts and Protection that England was effectually
defended, as they put it, from trusts by its policy of
free trade. But though England has hitherto re-
mained a free trade country, it is no longer quite
devoid of trusts. It is undoubtedly true, whether
it be regarded as an advantage or no, that the com-
mercial policy of this country has somewhat retarded
the formation of trusts and rendered them less secure.
But there are other important factors in the problem,
and chief among these are the technical requirements
of efficient production. With the increasing costliness
of modern plant, competition is continually at work to
reduce the number of competing firms. As soon as
an industry comes to be carried on by a few very large

186

Evolution of Capitalism

concerns, it is easier for those concerns to come to an
agreement ; it is less likely that one of the parties to
the agreement will break away, and an increase of
price consequent upon the agreement is less likely to
call new competitors into the field. When twenty
firms made steel rails in Great Britain no agreement
was permanent ; now that the number has been re-
duced to nine, they apparently find it easy to hold
together. As soon as the number of concerns in a
trade can be counted on the fingers, they are likely to
see their interest in alliance rather than in competition.
And even moderate secure gains are coming to be
preferred to the chances of competition. The nerves
of the business world are growing weary of the strain
of competition, and the human craving for security
is one of the chief forces that are transforming in-
dustrial organisation.

When the trust is safe within the country itself, the
risk of competition from abroad depends largely on
geographical position. It is out of the question when
the work is necessarily attached to a locality — like
Manchester bleaching and Bradford dyeing. And
where competition is still possible, there is increasing
likelihood, in the present stage of affairs, that it will
be warded off by international agreements.

A recent writer has drawn up a list of some eigh-
teen large amalgamations or combinations of a mono-
polistic character — controlling, that is to say, each of
them, the sale and price of some one important com-
modity or group of commodities. This is without
reckoning the Railway and Shipping Conferences by
which competition is removed from rates to facilities

187

Economic Organisation

and conveniences. But the custom of contrasting
monopoly with competition has for some time been
thoroughly misleading. It is not the case that, out-
side the visibly complete monopolies, competition still
reigns unrestricted. The fact is rather that over the
whole of the industrial field there is now a movement
away from unrestricted competition to some greater
degree of stability. It seldom culminates in absolute
monopoly, but absolute competition will soon be
even harder to find.

Moreover, the methods by which the way is pre-
pared for combination by the reduction of the number
of rivals, and by which the remaining rivals, on
coming to terms, are able to prevent encroachment
from outside, are the methods of competition itself.
The Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury, in the famous
Mogul case in 1891, which established the legality of
the rebate device of the shipping rings, remarked that
"if this is unlawful, the greater part of commercial
dealings, where there is rivalry in trade, must be equally
unlawful." Monopoly, that is to say, in restricting
competition, is not relying on authority ab extra, like
the state monopolies of the Stuart period : it is beating
down competition with competition's own weapons.

In my judgment the marked tendency in recent
decades towards the restriction, or even abolition,
of competition is no ephemeral outcome of anti-
social forces. The emergence of the trust is just as
"natural" as the rise of the gild or the factory. It
results from the inherent striving of capital towards
profit ; it proceeds from the good side of humanity,
the impulse toward mutual assistance and the desire

188

Evolution of Capitalism

for stability, as well as from the less attractive side, the
pursuit of gain. I am convinced that to future gene-
rations the era of unrestricted competition, with its
recurring crises, will seem like a malady of childhood.
I view the combination movement with the more hope
because I regard the regularisation of production as
the best hope for the labouring classes, for whom
steadiness of employment is far more important than
the amount of remuneration. But it is obvious enough
that combinations, with all their possible advantages,
involve certain positive risks for the consumer. Not
so great as some people hastily suppose ; for limits
are put by self-interest even to monopoly prices ;
still risks considerable enough ; and I have no sort
of doubt that the State will be compelled after a time
to step in and subject monopoly prices to a certain
public supervision and, if need be, control, just as
the English State already sets limits upon the charges
of railway companies. What we have to do is to
see to it that the modern State is as competent as
may be to discharge its delicate but ultimately un-
avoidable task.

The remaining feature in the recent development on
the side of capital is the growth of the feeling of solidarity
among employers and the steady strengthening of their
organisations for collective action in relation to labour.
The great example of this is the Federation of Engi-
neering and Shipbuilding Employers. Again and
again in the past the workpeople have been better
combined than the employers, and have won their
battle by tackling them singly. It is lamented by some
that that time is now passing away ; that not only will

189

Economic Organisation

the employers in one trade throughout the whole of a
district in future all stand together, but that the whole
body of employers in each great industry all over the
country will be so firmly knit together by a sense of
community of interest as to have a corporate opinion
strong enough to prevent even a great district, let
alone a single concern, from making terms to suit
itself. Just as at an earlier stage the coalowners of
Durham would not permit individual collieries in the
county to yield to trade union pressure without the
consent of the other owners, so in a later stage the
Glasgow employers in the engineering business main-
tained a lock-out long after they were ready themselves
to grant their own men the terms asked, in order to
maintain unity of action with the employers of Belfast.
Undoubtedly this solidarity of employers' interests does
for the time put greater difficulties in the way of trade
unions in the realisation of their immediate objects.
But it is apparently not only the natural response to a
like tendency on the side of labour, but also, in many
cases, the necessary preliminary for any further pro-
gress in the direction of industrial peace. As the diffi-
culties in the docks of London made clear only two
years ago, the great obstacles in the way of industrial
peace are not only the extremists on the labour side,
but also the employers (often comparatively small em-
ployers) who refuse to be bound by an employers'
agreement to which they were not individually parties.
Society is feeling its way, with painful steps, towards
a corporate organisation of industry on the side alike of
employers and of employed ; to be then more harmo-
niously, let us hope, associated together — with the

190

Evolution of Capitalism

state alert and intelligent in the background to protect
the interests of the community. The world has never
yet had complete individualism ; it will never, I
believe, have complete socialism, for the egoistic
sentiment is as permanent an element in human
nature as the social. It has to create a working com-
promise suited for each age ; and we are also begin-
ning to realise that the old antithesis, which Herbert
Spencer in his Man v. The State exaggerated into an
antagonism, no longer exhausts the possibilities of
the situation. A place must be found in our social
organisation, and therefore in our social theory, for
the activity and mutual relation of groups, of divers
kinds and scales and degrees of compactness, inter-
mediate between the individual and political govern-
ment. This is the valuable thought to be discerned
amid the excesses of Syndicalism ; and this is the
lesson of that newer philosophy of social organisms
which is based, as by Gierke, on the study of history.

191

APPENDIX

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

The purpose of the following notes is neither to indicate the
character and extent of the original sources of information
nor to provide a bibliography of the modern literature of
economic history. Their object is simply to inform those who
are entering upon the study where they will find the several
subjects dealt with, more or less competently, in the English
language, and in a readable and not too technical manner.
Many of the works referred to, it will be seen, have appeared
since these lectures were delivered ; and it need hardly be said
that their conclusions are not to be regarded as necessarily
authoritative, though always worth considering.

It should be remembered throughout that there is a vast
amount of information, over the whole range of English
economic history, to be found in Archdeacon Cunningham's
Growth of English Industry and Commerce (1903, 1905). A
few references will be given to the present writer's Economic
History (originally published in 1888 and 1893). This was
published in England as two parts of Vol. I. and in America
as two vols., and will be here cited as Econ. Hist. i. and ii.
Of i. the last edition should be used.

LECTURE I

The beginning of all real understanding of mediaeval agri-
cultural life is to be found in Seebohm's English Village
Community (1883). The student cannot do better than start
with the first 104 pages of that great work, where the author, be-
gmning with a nineteenth-century map of his own township of

193 N

Economic Organisation

Hitchin, traces the main features of open-field agriculture
through the documents of the Middle Ages back to the time
of the Domesday Survey. Whatever may be thought of
Seebohm's own theories, set forth in the later chapters of
that book and in his subsequent Tribal System in W ales {\Z(^^
and Tribal Custom in Anglo-Saxon Law (1902), as to the
origins of mediaeval serfdom, subsequent enquiry has only
confirmed the picture which he drew in the English Village
Community of the conditions to be explained.

The most impressive statement of the theory that the manor
grew out of a free self-governing village community will be
found in Sir Henry Maine's Village Communities in the East
and IVest (iSj i), lectures 3-5; the description of the "com-
mon fields," however, as " divided into three long strips," is,
of course, inaccurate, and shows how completely the open-
field system had been forgotten before it was explained afresh
by Seebohm. For the Teutonic peoples Maine avowedly
based his assertions on the writings of von Maurer; and von
Maurer's evidence will bp found stated and critically examined
in Fustel de Coulanges, Origin of Property in Land (Engl,
trans., 1891), pp. 3-62.

The theory which traces the continental equivalent of the
manor back to the Roman agricultural villa was set forth by
Fustel de Coulanges in a number of works of which none so
far have been translated. A summary view of his general
position is given in the short article Fustel de Coulanges in
Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy, vol. ii. ; and an
independent account of agrarian conditions under the Roman
empire will be found in Pelham's lecture on The Imperial
Domains and the Colonate (1890).

Since the question was reopened by Fustel and Seebohm,
much fresh light has been thrown on the whole subject of serf-
dom by Professor Vinogradoff ( Villainage in E?igland, 1892 ;
The Growth of the Manor, 1905), and the late Professor
Maitland (Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law,

194

Appendix

1895; Domesday Book a fid Beyond, 1897). The trend of the
arguments of both is in favour of the original freedom of the
main stock of cultivators of the soil ; but while the former is
disposed to save a good deal of the "collective ownership"
involved in the " mark " doctrine, the latter is inclined to
minimise every feature of an apparently " communal " char-
acter. The reader will perhaps be unable to devote much
time to these books unless he wishes to make a special study
of the problem of origins. But at any rate he should read the
account of villein tenure in Pollock and Maitland, History 0/
English Law, vol. i. bk. ii. ch. i. § 12, and the brilliant section
in Maitland's Domesday Book and Beyond, pp. 107-128, in
which it is argued that a " manor " meant originally a " house
against which Danegeld was charged." Reviews of a good
many recent works on agrarian history, including those of
Vinogradoff and Maitland, will be found in Ashley's Surveys,
Historic atid Econotiiic {igoo). These may be useful as present-
ing in a brief form most of the main propositions of the works
in question ; but the reader will discern, and be on his guard
against, any bias on the reviewer's part. The most recent
attempt of the same writer to review the present position of
the controversy will be found in the address on Comparative
Economic History and the English Landlord, printed in the
Economic Journal iox June 1913.

A vast mass of information as to the details of mediaeval
English life was obtained by Thorold Rogers from the account
rolls of bailiffs and similar documents, and is presented in his
History of Agriculture and Prices (I. and II., 1866), and in
more popular forms in his Six Centuries of Work and Wages
(1884) and Economic Lnterpretation of History (1888). It is
perhaps best studied in its first and more scholarly presenta-
tion; and chapter ii. of Agriculture and Prices, I., will be
found a characteristic and instructive specimen of his methods,
though some of the statements are open to criticism. But the
relation of the particular facts to one another has only been

195

Economic Organisation

made clear since we have understood the real nature of the
open field ; and the reading of Rogers is best postponed till, by
the help of Seebohm or subsequent works, the main outlines
have been grasped of the agrarian organisation as a whole.

The chief contemporary sources of information on rural
economy is the treatise on Husbandry of Walter of Henley.
This, with some kindred writings, has been translated by the
late Miss Lamond, with an Introduction by Dr. Cunningham
(R. Hist. Soc, 1890). Pp. ix-xviii of the Introduction will
be found suggestive.

The really vital part of the information as to agricultural
methods derivable from Rogers and Walter of Henley is now
incorporated in Prothero's English Farming, Past and Present
(1912). For the place of open-field tillage in the evolution of
agriculture out of "wild field-grass husbandry," as well as for
the facts as to crops and hvestock, Prothero's chapter i.
should be consulted. It should be noticed that "village
farm " is the writer's term for the more or less associated or
joint cultivation of the manor, regarded as a whole.

There is no very good account of manorial courts. A brief
statement will be found in Denton's England in the Fifteenth
Century (1888), pp. 13-16. But the distinction there drawn
between the "court baron" for freeholders and the "court
customary " for villeins has been shown by Maitland and
other recent writers to have been a comparatively late inven-
tion of the lawyers. Maitland's discussion of the various
sources of seigneurial justice in History of English Law,
bk. ii. ch. iii. § 5, is of fundamental importance for the serious
study of the subject, but will be found difficult by those
unacquainted with constitutional and legal terminology.

For the economic self-sufficiency of the manorial group,
reference may be made to Econ. Hist., i. pp. 33-36, and for
a comparison between the modern and mediaeval village to

pp. 40-43-

The quotation from Lord Eversley on p. 5 is from p. 17 of
196

Appendix

his Agrarian Tenures (1893), written by him when he was
Mr. Shaw Lefevre. The French and German authorities
cited on p. 6 are Leonce de Lavergne, Rural Econotny oj
Great Britain and Ireland (Engl, trans., 1855), p. 74, and
Adolf Buchenberger, Agrarwesen und Agrarpolitik (1892),
p. 391. For the relation between Excise and the "incidents"
of feudal tenure, see Dowell, History of Taxation (ed. 2, 1888),
ii. pp. 17-22.

LECTURE II

The most important contribution to the early history of
English boroughs is the section in Maitland's Domesday Book
and Beyond, pp. 172-219. For London reference must be
made to Round, The Commune of LoTidon{\2>()q), pp. 219-251.
An account of recent German and French discussions as
to town life on the Continent is given in Ashley, Surveys:
see especially the article on The Beginnings of Tozvn Life in
the Middle Ages, and the review of von Below. Much of the
recent discussion involves the use of an elaborate technical
terminology; but Surveys, pp. 167-173, will indicate the
general character of the questions involved.

The merit of having established the universality of the gild
merchant in English town development belongs to the late
Professor Charles Gross, and the main facts are clearly set
forth in his Gild Jferchant (iSgo), i. pp. 4-60. A summary
view is given in Econ. Hist., i. pp. 68-76, and a discussion of
the relations between merchant and craft gilds in Surveys,
pp. 213-218, 225-226.

An account of the earlier craft gilds is given in £con. Hist.,
i. §§ 8-1 1. The whole of craft history was there construed
with a somewhat too exclusive attention to its earlier stages :
for a fuller account of the later craft companies, and a version
of their history substantially identical with that in the text,
reference may be made to ii. §§ 31-36.

197

Economic Organisation

The most notable recent work on the subject, especially in
relation to London, is Professor Unwin's Gilds and Com-
panies of London (1908). Any bias of the present writer in
favour of regulation and control and any tendency to em-
phasize the more satisfactory sides of craft organisation will be
abundantly corrected by perusal of the last-named writer, who
certainly gives sufficient prominence to all the monopolistic
and selfish features.

As to the stages of industrial organisation : the first attempt
to set forth in English the classification introduced by German
scholars will be found in Econ. Hist., ii. pp. 219-222. With
this may now be compared Biicher, Industrial Evolution
(1893; Engl, trans., 1901), ch. iv. ; Unwin, Industrial Organ-
isation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1904),
Intro.; and Lloyd, The Cutlery Trades (1913), ch. i.

The doctrine of Aquinas, the most influential of the mediaeval
scholastic doctors, on Just Price, is explained in Econ. Hist,
i. § 16, with which may be compared Cunningham, Growth
of English Industry and Commerce, i. 249-255. For mediaeval
practice in the regulation of prices, see Econ. Hist., i. §§ 20,
21 ; ii. § 27.

LECTURE III

The general course of Commutation is set forth in Econ.
Hist., i. pp. 29-33, and Vinogradofif, Villainage, pp. 178 183.
More exact estimates than had previously been available of
the extent to which commutation took place before and after
the Black Death have been given by Page in his monograph
on The End of Villainage in E^igland (Publications of the
Amer. Econ. Assoc, 1900).

The effects of compulsory labour, as witnessed by contem-
porary observers in central Europe about the end of the
eighteenth century, are stated by Jones, Distribution of Wealth
(183 1 ). The chapters on Feasant Rents, reprinted separately

198

Appendix

under that title (1895), form a most suggestive commentary
on mediaeval English development.

For "land and stock leases" reference should be made to
Thorold Rogers, Agriculture and Prices, i. pp. 24-25, 667-668,
or Six Centuries of Work and Wages, pp. 277-282.

On the relation of the Black Death to the Peasant Revolt,
Econ. Hist., ii. 264-7, should be read in the light of Page,
as above.

On the legal character of villein tenure and its relation to
enclosures, the discussion was opened by Econ. Hist., ii. pp.
272-283. The subject must now be viewed in the light of
the discovery by Savine of instances of the intervention of
the courts: see his article in Quarterly Journal of Economics
(published by Harvard University), xix. (1904). Recent dis-
cussions of the subject, utilising Savine's new facts, will be
found in Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landoivner
(1909), pp. 62-72, and Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in tht
Sixteenth Century (1912), pp. 287-301, and the reviews by the
present writer of the former work in Econ. Journal (19 10), xx.
p. 54, and of the later, ibid. (1913), xxiii. p. 85.

A first rough attempt was made to estimate the geographical
extent of the Tudor enclosures in Econ. Hist., ii. pp. 286-288
(see the notes and map). This must now be considerably
modified in the light of Gay, Inclosures in England in the
Sixteenth Century, in Quarterly Journal of Economics (1903),
xvii. Gay's percentages have been presented in the form of
a map by Mr. Johnson in his book above mentioned ; but see
the criticism already referred to.

A synopsis of the Tudor legislation concerning enclosures
is given in Appendix D to Slater's The English Peasantry and
the Enclosure of the Common Eields (1907); and there is a
valuable account of government intervention and a discussion
of its effects in Tawney's book before mentioned, pp. 351-400.

The quotation from Hallam on p. 66 is from his Constitu-
tional History (8vo ed.), I, p. 79.

199

Economic Organisation

LECTURE IV

The characteristics of the period of " town economy " are

explained by SchmoUer, with special reference to German
development, in The Mercantile System (Engl, trans., 1896),
pp. 1-13 ; and the subject is dealt with at some length in
relation to England in Econ. Hist., i. § 13 ; ii. §§ 24-29.

An account of the Hanseatic Steelyard in London is given
in Pauli's Pictures of Old England (Engl, trans.).

Fresh light has been thrown on the early history of the
London Great Companies, and on the position of the foreign
commercial element in the thirteenth century, by Unwin, Gilds
and Companies of London, chapters iv. to vi. For the four-
teenth and fifteenth centuries a more vivid impression is to be
obtained from turning over the London documents translated
by Riley in Memorials of London and London Life (1868) than
from any modern writings.

The relation of Risk to the mediaeval doctrine of Usury is
briefly stated in Econ. Hist., ii. p. 419, and the subject dis-
cussed more at length in Cunningham, English Lndustry and
Commerce, i. pp. 360-368 ; while the history of the conception
of Capital in business practice and in economic theory will be
found in the article under that head by the present writer in
An EncyclopcBdia of Lndustrialism (1913).

Dr. Scott's Joint Stock Companies to 1720 (1911-12) con-
tains a most valuable collection of material for the commercial
history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which
economists have only just begun to utilise. For the lines
of development converging on the first English joint stock
companies, chapter i. should be read ; and for the peculiar
significance of the Russia Company, chapter ii. With this
may be compared the similar experience later of the East
India Company, as narrated in Hunter's History of British
India (1899), i., chapters vi. and vii.

200

Appendix

LECTURE V

The early development of the English woollen industry is
given at some length in Ecoti. Hist., ii. ch. iii. ; which may
now be supplemented on the technical side by Salzmann,
English Industries of the Middle Ages (1913), pp. 141-156.
The part played by Alien hnmigrants is the subject of a
special work under that title by Dr. Cunningham (1897) : for
the Flemish weavers of the fourteenth century see § 22,
and for the Walloons and Flemings of the sixteenth century

§§ 29-35.

The intention and effects of the Justices' Assessments were
first dealt with, in recent times, by Thorold Rogers ; see for
instance his Economic Interpretation of History, pp. 38-45.
The problem was more dispassionately considered, and fresh
evidence adduced, by Hewins, English Trade and Fitiance,
chiefly in the Seventeenth Century (1892), pp. 82-88, and
Cunningham, English Itidustry and Commerce (1903), ii. § 168.
It is to be hoped that the two most instructive papers on
the subject by Mr. Tawney, in English though published in
the Vierteljahrschrift fiir Social- UJid Wirtschaftsgeschichte
(191 3), will soon be accessible in an English publication.

The early history of the Poor Law is given in Econ. Hist.,
ii. ch. v. ; and its development under Elizabeth and the first
two Stuarts by Miss Leonard, The Early History of Efiglish
Poor /Celief (igoo). The latter book is indispensable for a
just view of Tudor and Stuart conceptions of statecraft, and
for the part played by the Council.

List's view of " productive powers," referred to on p. 90,
is set forth by him in his National System of Political
Economy (Engl, trans., new ed., 1904), ch. xii. The
pamphleteer referred to on p. 94 was Dr. Arbuthnot, whose
History of Johfi Bull is conveniently accessible in Cassell's
National Library.

201

Economic Organisation

LECTURE VI

The best introduction to the agrarian history of the eigh-
teenth century is still Toynbee's Industrial Revolution of the
Eighteenth Century {1884), cheap ed., pp. 13-22, 34-44,
though it can now be supplemented and corrected in detail
by reference to more recent works, such as Johnson's
Disappearance of the Small Landowner, especially pp. 128-150.
The movements for improvement in agricultural methods are
described fully in Prothero's English Farming, Past and
Present, chapters vii.-xi. Two recent and extremely instruc-
tive treatises on the mechanism and consequences of enclosure
are those of J. L. and B. Hammond, The Village Labourer
(1911), and Professor Conner, Common Land and Inclosure.
Their attitude is very different, and they produce different im-
pressions. A useful criticism and comparison of the two by
J. H. Clapham will be found in the Economic Journal, June
191 2, with which may be compared Slater, Making of Modern
England {k)!-^), pp. 37-43. For the effect of the Corn Laws
the reader will do well to turn to Nicholson's History of the
English Corn Laws (1904). The views of agricultural experts
and of economists with regard to the superiority of large over
small farming, and a discussion of the bearing of their argu-
ments on cereal farming in particular, occupy Part I of
Professor Levy's Large and Small Holdings (Engl, trans.,
191 1). An approximation to really significant statistics as to
the size of holdings was made. for the first time in 1914: see
Agricultural Statistics, xlviii, pt. i.

The most readable and compact account of the history of
English land law, up to the devising of the present method of
Family Settlement, is in Sir Frederick Pollock's Land Laws,
chapters iii.-v.

The Whig authority quoted on p. 127 is Brodrick, English
Land and English Landlords ( 1 88 1 ), p. 99 ; and the well-

202

Appendix

known writer of the west country of p. 131 is Mr. Baring-
Gould, Old Country Life (1889), cheap ed., 19 13, p- 15-

LECTURE VII

It would be a mistake to begin the study of the Industrial
Revolution elsewhere than in the pages of Toynbee's book of
that name, chapters ii., iv., vi., viii. ; and for the changes in
mechanical methods Jevons' Coal Question (1865), chapter vi.,
should not be neglected. But after the general view obtained
from these books it will be well to go on to the more thorough
discussion of many of the questions involved in Archdeacon
Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and Commerce
(1903), iii. §§ 242-272.

The effect upon the formation of capital of the religious
ideas of the Calvinists was first pointed out by Max Weber,
and the argument was further elaborated by Ernst Troeltsch.
None of their writings are so far accessible in English. The
same line of thought, however, has been applied to England
by Professor Levy in his Economic Liberalism, ch. v. (Engl,
trans., 19 13); and a few pages by the present writer on the
subject appear in the British Association Handbook to
Birmingham (191 3), pp. 354-358-

Of capitalism in manufactures in the seventeenth century
some examples are given by Levy, Monopoly and Competition
(Engl, trans., 191 1), ch. i. Karl Marx's analysis of what he
calls " manufacture " will be found in Capital, ch. xxiv.

A brief account of industrial legislation in the nineteenth
century is given in Jevons' State in Relation to Labour {18S 2) ;
and a fuller statement in Hutchins and Harrison, History of
Factory Legislation (2nd ed., 191 1) : while the best account of
the early history of labour combinations will be found in
the earlier chapters (more objective, perhaps, in their tone
than the later) of Mr. iind Mrs. Webb's History of Trade

203

Economic Organisation

Unionism (1894). An impartial abstract of the Report of
the Poor Law Commission of 1832, indicating the evils in
the working of the system of relief adopted at the end of
the previous century, will be found in the Report of the recent
Poor Law Commission (1909), pt. iii.

The chapter (vii.) devoted to the problem of what he calls
" trade union structure " in Mr. Cole's World of Labour
(191 3) is one of the most instructive parts of a work which
makes up by its vivacity and width of reading for its onesided-
ness and occasional violence of language.

The Halifax letters referred to on p. 148 are printed in
The Letter Books of Joseph Holroyd and Sam LLill, ed.
Heaton (Halifax, 19 14).

LECTURE VIII

After reading Mill's enthusiastic and hopeful account of pro-
ductive co-operation in his Political Economy^ bk. iv. ch. vii.
§ 6, it is desirable to study the subsequent history of the
experiments in this direction in Potter (Mrs. Webb), The
Co-operative Movement in Great Britain (1891), ch. v., and
Schloss, Methods of Lndustrial Remuneration (ed. 3, 1898),
chapters xxii.-xxiv. An account and estimate of " distribu-
tive co-operation," with its large number of retail stores, its
Co-operative Wholesale Society and the factories which the
latter owns, is given in Price, Co-operation and Co-partnership,
chapters viii.-x. On productive co-operation, in the later form
which it has taken at Kettering and elsewhere, there is a
paper, Co-operation in England (1899), by the present writer,
reprinted in Surveys, pp. 399-404.

The recent experiments in the direction of Co-partnership
— meaning thereby a plan by which the whole or part of the
worker's share of profit is invested in the concern employing
him — are s) mpathetically described by Fay, Copartnership in

204

Appendix

Industry (191 3), ch. iii., and analysed in Mr. Price's work
above mentioned, pp. 220-259. The whole subject of
Profit-sharing and Co-partnership is considered in an article,
Profit-sharings by the present writer in the Quarterly Review
for October 1913-

The views of Auguste Comte on the labour question may
be conveniently studied in his General View of Positivism
(1848), ch. iii., Engl, trans, by Bridges, p. 117.

A quite indispensable collection of facts with regard to the
modern tendency towards capitalistic combination and mono-
poly is Macrosty's Trust Movement in British Industry
(1907); where chapter ii. on the iron and steel industries
and chapter v. on the textile industries bear closely on the
argument of this lecture. The history of railway amalgama-
tions and the extent of combination between the great lines
are briefly treated in Ross, British Railways (1904), chapters
i. and ii. The organisation of the Shipping Conferences is
explained, and the problem considered " in what sense and to
what extent a Shipping Conference making use of the system
of deferred rebates secures a monopoly" in the Report of
the Royal Commission on Shipping Rings (1909). "Existing
monopolist organisations in English industry " are described
in Levy, Monopoly and Competition (Engl, trans., 191 1), ch. ix.,
and the reasons for their growth considered in ch. x.

The facts as to the wide diffusion of the ownership of many
great modern undertakings, and the argument based upon
them, formed perhaps the most striking [)art of the famous book
by Eduard Bernstein, Die Voraussetzu?igen des Sozialismus
(1899), which precipitated the controversy between the Re-
visionist and the Marxian schools of German socialists. They
will be found at pp. 40-54 of the Eng. trans. (1909) under
the title Evolufionaty Socialism.

Professor Olto Gierke's teaching as to the nature of
" Genossenschaften " (Communities and Corporations) was
introduced to English readers by Professor Maitland's trans-

205

Economic Organisation

lation of a portion of his great work, under the title oi Political
Theories of the Middle Ages (1900), preceded by a preface in
which Maitland showed, in passing, its bearing on modern
discussions as to the nature of labour organisations. Since
then the general conception has had a growing influence, and
it has begun to affect political speculation, as may be seen in
Mr. Lindsay's article on The State in Recent Political Theory
in the Political Quarterly for February 1914-

?,ot

INDEX

Italics indicate more or less technical terms, as well as the titles of booh

Abstinence, 157

Accidents, insurance against, 168

Acre, shape and size of, 15

Addison, 122

Adults, restriction of labour of, 164

seq.
Adventurers, Merchant, 76, 84, 85,

IIS, "6
Advertisement, 185
Alva, 90

Amalgamation of business, 185
Amsterdam, 148
Ancient Law, 167
Antwerp, 77, 78
Apprentice, 38

Apprenticeship, 38, 42, 100, 164
Apprentices, statute of, 92, 96, 100,

102 seq. , 164
Appurtenant^ 11
Aquinas, 198
Arbuthnot, Dr., 201
Aristotle, ig
Armstrong & ,Co. , 184
Assessment of wages, 102 ^^y., 107, 164
Associations, 186
Atlantic steamships, 185
Austria, 48

Bacon, Lord Chancellor, 62, 113, 114

Bailiff, 12, 46, 54

Bakewell, 135

Balk, 14

Bank of England, 125

Banks, country, 156

Baring-Gould, S. , 202

Barley, 14

Baxter, Richard, 158

Bavaria, 121

Beans, 14

Bedfordshire, 63

Belfast, 190

Belgium, 185

Bentham, Jeremy, 137

Bergen, 72

Bernstein, E., 205

Biology, 168

Black Death, 49 seq., 97

Blackwell Hall, 91, 94, 116

Blast-furnaces, 182, 184

Bleachers, 186, 187

Board of Trade, 108, 164

Boards, Trade, 107, 169

Book of Common Prayer, 97, 99

Boonday, 12 , 49

Boot manufacture, 145

Bourse, Berlin, 128

Boynton, 151

Bradford, 146, 148, i86, 187

Breeches, manufacture of, 145

Breweries, 182

Brian, C. J., 61

Bridgman, Orlando, 127

Briggs, Messrs., 176

Bright, John, 166, 170

Brodrick, G., 202

Brotherhood, 30

Brown & Co., 184

Bruges, 72, 77

Bucks, 63

Burleigh, Lord, 169

Burns, Robert, 17

Calais, 75, 76

Calico Printers' Association, 186

Calling, 158

Calvinism, 158

Canals, 155

Canonist lawyers, 82

Capital, 79, 82, 141, 148, 155 seq,,

174, 176, 180 seq.; capitals, 157;

fi.xcd, 181 ; ownership of, 182
Capitalism, 173, 181 seq.

207

Economic Organisation

Carlyle, Thomas, i6o

Carnegie, 183

Cash-nexus, 160

Catechism, 99

Chantry, 30

Charles I., 112, 114, 116

Chartism, 160

Chaucer, 54

Child, Sir Josiah, 162

Children, hours of labour of, 164

China, 34, 69, 71

Church, teaching on Usury, 82

Clapham, J. H., 202

Climate, 11

Cloth, woollen, 76, 87, 146, 162

Clothiers, <jiseq., 115 seq., 143, 148,

ISO
Clove, 71
Clover, 135
Clydebank Shipbuilding Company,

184
Coal-mining, 154, 155, 165
Coal Question, 140
Coke, Sir Edward, 61, 97
Coke of Holkham, 135
Colbert, 152, 163
Cole, G. D. H. , 204
Collective action, of capital, 181, 189

seg.
Collective bargaining, 169 seq.
Cologne, 71
Combination, of labour, 160; laws,

170; of capital, 181, 184 5^^.
Commenda, 83

Commissions, Royal, 60, 114, 170
Commission-system, 143
Common Recovery, 126
Common, rights of, 22
Commons, enclosure of, 138
Communal elements, 21, 195
Commutation , 46 seq. , 52
Compensation Act, Workmen's, 168
Competition, 64, 185, 187
Comte, Auguste, 178, 205
Concentration, 181 seq.
Conferences, Railway and Shipping,

187
Convocation, 122
Co-operation, 174 seq.
Co-operative Wholesale Society, 176
Copyhold, 61 seq., 67, 131 seq.
Corn laws, 136, 166
Cornwall, 151
Corporate organisation of industry,

190
Correction, house of, 109

Cost of living, 105, 109

Cottar, 17

Cotton industry, 100, 145, 153, 160, 182

Council, Privy, 96, 103, iii seq., 114

seq., 120, 164
Counter-Reformation, 121
County Councils, 129
Court, manorial, 23, 51, no
Coventry, 107
Craft, 28 ; modern application of

term, 172
Crises, 115, 189
Cromwell, Oliver, 66
Crown lands, 121
Cunningham, Archdeacon, 193, 196,

200, 201, 203
Currants, 85
Custom, 45
Customary tenants, 44

Dangerous trades, 165

Darwinism, 168

Debasement of currency, 66

De Donis, statute, 126

Defoe, Daniel, 144

Demesne, 12, 16 ; letting of, 53 seq.

Derwent, 153

Devonshire, 92, 130, 151

Discourse of Trade, 162

Disraeli, 66

Dissenters, 158

Docks, London, 190

Domesday Survey , 9

Domestic system, 36, 93, 142 seq.,

15s. 181
Drapers, 8r, 91, 93
Dream of John Ball, 49
Durham, 190
Dutch, 162

Duty of a Steward to his Lord, 124
Dyers, 89, 186

East India Company, 84, 124
Economies, internal, 180; of com-
bination, 185
Economists, 79, 138, 156, 170
Edinburgh Review, 138
Education Office, 164
Edward III, 95
Edward VI, 66, 102, 115
Elizabeth, Queen, 133, 164, 169
Embezzlement of material, 145
Enclosure, 56 seq., 114, 137 seq.
Engineering, strike of 1897, 171 ;

Federation, 189
English Sewing Cotton Company, 182

208

Ind

ex

Entail, 125
Essex, 92, 105
Eversley, Lord, 5, 122, 196
Excise, II

Factories ( =tradingsettlenients),72

Factory system, 36, 93, 149, 154, 159
seq., 173; factory acts, 164 seq.,
179, 181

Factors, 148

Factor-system, 143, 155

Family system, 36

Farmer, original sense of term, 54, 64

Farms, large and small, 138 ; amal-
gamation of, 139

Fay, C. R, 204

Federation of Engineering and Ship-
building Employers, 189

Feldzwang , 14

Felt industry, 145

Fencing of machinery, 165

Fertn, 54

Fideicommisse, \'2'j

Field, 13

Fine, on admission to customary tene-
ments, 59 ; on renewal of leases, 133

Fine Cotton Spinners, 182, 186

Fitzherbert, 132

Fixed capital, 181

Flanders galleys, 73

Flax, manufactures of, 145

Flat, IS

Fondaco dei Tedeschi, tz

Foreigner, 70

Four-course rotation, 135

France, peasant proprietors in, 3 ;
apprenticeship in, 38 ; silk industry
of, 94; 112, 114, 139, 185

Fraternity , 29, 30, 33

Frederick the Great, lao

Freedom of Contract, 161

Free- holder, 17

Fro hn den, 48

From Status to Contract, 167

Fullers, 89

Furlong, two senses, 15

Fur manufacture, 145

Fustel de Coulanges, 194

Fustian manufacture, 145

Gaul, 20

Gay, E. F. , 199

Geldwirthschaft , 45

Germany, peasant proprietors in, 2;

labour dues in, 48 ; 69, 95, 112,

I8S

Ghent, 90, 112

Gierke, Professor Otto, 191,205

Gild, mediaeval sense of, 29

Gild merchant, 27

Gild system, 25, 28 seq., 36, 39 seq.

181
Gilpin, Bernard, 60
Glasgow, 190
Glass manufacture, 151
Gloucester, 106
Glove manufacture, 145
Gneist, Professor, 128
Goldsmiths, 80
Gonner, Professor, 202
Grande Industrie, 144
Green, J. R. , loi
Green, T. H., 167
Gross, Professor Charles, 197
Groups, social, 191
Guest, Keen & Nettlefold, 184

Halifax, 146, 148

Hallam, Henry, 66

Halls, cloth, 146

Halsbury, Lord Chancellor, 188

Hamburg, 86, 148

Hammond, J. L, and B. , 202

Handicraft system , 36

Handloom, 149, 155, 160

Hanse, Teutonic, 71 seq., 86. 92

Hat manufacture, 145

Hay, 22

Hedges, 56

Hegel, 167

Hemp, manufactures of, 145

Henry H, 95

Henry VH, 83, 113

Henry VHI, 66, 96, 102, 121

Herring fishery, 71

Hewins, W. A. S., 201

Holbein, 86

Holland, 94

Home Office, 164

Hosiery industry, 149

House industry, 36, 93

Household system, 36

Huddersfield, 146, 147

Huguenots, 125

Husbandland, 14

Huxley, 168

Incidents of tenure in chivalry, 10
Individualism, 64, 167, 168, 191
Industries, 172
Inspectorate, 164
Instrument of production, 146

209

O

Economic Organisation

Insurance Act, 169
Integration, 181, 183 seq.
Intermixed holdings, 21
International agreements in busi-
ness, 185
Invention, conditions of, 155
Investment, 79, 141
Ireland, 167
Iron industry, 100, 145
Italy, 69, 95, 114

JEVONS, W. S., 140, 155, 168, 203

John Bull, 94, 201

Johnson, A. H., 199, 202

joint-stock, 83, 84, 117, 179 seq.

Jones, Richard, 198

Journeymen, 38, 41

Justices of the Peace, 97 seq. ; as-
sessments of wages, loi seq. ; and
poor relief, 1 1 1

Just price, 41, 198

King, Gregory, iig, 123
Knapp, Professor, 120
Krupp, 183

Labour Co-partnership, 176
Labour dues, mediaeval, 12
Labour question, 42
Labourers, characteristics of English

agricultural, 4, 5, 17 ; statute of,

50 ; justices of, 97
Laissez Faire, 167, 168
Land Tax Assessments, 124
Landed interest, 125
Landlords, number of English, 3 ;

characteristics of, 3 ; 134
Langland, William, loi
Latimer, 65
Laud, Archbishop, 114
Laurence, Edward, 124, 133, 134
Law and order, 161
Leases, 53 seq., 58, 67, 132 seq.
Leather industry, 145
Leeds, 146, 147
Leicestershire, 63, 91
Leonard, Miss, 201
Levant Company, 86
Levy, Professor, 202, 203, 205
Limited liability, 179
Limited partnership, 83
Lincolnshire, 91
Lindsay, A. D., 206
Linen manufacture, 94, 145
Lipton's, 182
List, Frederick, 90, 201

Livesey, Sir George, 177

Living, 14

Local Government Board, 164

Locke, John, 161, 163, 167

London, 32, 38, 72, 80, 107, 174, 190

Louis XIV, 163

Low Countries, 56, 73, iii

Lubeck, 71

Luther, 112

Macaulay, 125

Macclesfield, 107

M'Culloch, 138

Machinery, 154 seq., 160 seq.

Macrosty, H. W. , 205

Maine, Sir Henry, 167, 194

Maitland, F. W. , 49, 195, 196, 197,
205

Make, 182

Malmesbury Abbey, 150

Malmsey wine, 85

Manchester, 170, 187

Man V. the State, 191

Manor, 8 seq., no

Mantoux, M., 140

Manufacture, 149

Manufactures , royales and privilC'
giies, 152

Manure, 22

Mark theory, 20, 195

Markets, 46 ; market in economic
sense, 36

Marx, Karl, 149, 152, 183

Master, 38, 93

Maurer, Georg von, 194

Mercers, 81

Merchant Gild, 27

Merchant Shipping Act, 165

Mdtayer, 4, 55

Middle class, 26, 183

Middlesex, 63

Mill, John Stuart, 7, 157, 168, 174

Miners, minimum wage of, 108

Minimum Wage Act, 169

Mistery, 28

Mogul case, 188

Mohair manufacture, 145

Monasteries, dissolution of, 66, 121

Money economy, 45

Moneyed interest, 125

Monopolies, 152, 184, 188, 189 ; mo-
nopoly prices, 189

Monuments in churches, 131

Moralisation of employers, 179 se^.

More, Sir Thomas, 59, 113, 114

Morgen, 15

210

Index

Morris, William, 49
Morton, Archbishop, 83

Napoleonic wars, 87, 136
Natural economy, 45
Naturalwirthschaft, 45
Newcastle, 184
Nicholson, Professor, 202
Nonconformists, 158
Non-textile factoi ies, i66
Norfolk, 92; rotation, 135
Northamptonshire, 63
Norwich, 148
Novgorod, 72
Nucleated village, 12

Oats, 14

Occupations, 172

Open field, 13

Osney Abbey, 150

Overseers of the poor, iii, 118

Oxen, in ploughing, 15, 23; weight

of. 135
Oxfordshire, 63, 124

Page, T. W. , 198

Pageants, 30

Paris, 174

Parish, as unit of administration, tig

Parliament, under Tudors, 96

Parliamentary Government, 7, 120

seq., 129 seq.
Parsimony, 157
Partnership, 83 seq.
Passive trade, 69
Pasture farming, 56 seq.
Patronage, 130
Pauli, Reinhold, 129, 200
Peace, Justices of, 97 seq., 128, 129
Peas, 14

Peasant protection , 1 20
Peasants' Revolt, 49 seq.
Pepperers, 81

Philosophy, social, 161, 167, 191
Piers the Plowman, 101
Pins, manufacture of, 149, 153
Plague, Great, 49 seq.
Plant, cost of, 186
Plimsoll line, i6b
Political Economy, 138, 167, 170
Pollock, Sir Frederick, 202
Poor Law, 96, wo seq., 117, 136, 159
Population in 1688 and 1769, 119;

in i8oi and 1901, 173
Postlethwayt, \lalachy, 145
Power, 153

Price, L. L., 204

Prices, rise of , 66 ; control of, 184;

monopoly, 189
Primogeniture, 127
Productive pozvers, 90
Profit-sharing, 176
Prothero, R. E. , 196, 202
Property, doctrine of, 163
Protection, i86
Prussia, 127

Qi;arter Sessions, 97, 103, 129

Radicals, 139, 170

Railways, 155 ; Conferences, 187

Railway servants, hours of. 165

Reeve, 12, 54

Reformation, 7, 64

Reform Bill of 1832, 141

Report of 1806, 142, 146, 150; of

1894, 170
Revolution of 1688, 119, 120, 161,

163
Revolution, the industrial, 140 seq.,

156
Ricardo, David, 156
Rittergut, 19
Rogers, Thorold, 49 seq., 55 seq.,

195, 199, 201
Roman agrarian system, 20
Rotation of crops, 14, 22
Rotterdam, 148
Russia, 69, 185
Russia Company, 84
Rutlandshire, 63
Rye, 14

Savine, a., 199

Schmoller, Professor, 200

Scott, Sir Walter, 40

Scott, W. R. , 200

Screws, 184

Seamen, contracts of, 165

Seebohm, Frederic, 193

Seigneurial elements, 23

Seigneurie, 19

Self-Governrnent , 129

Sempstresses, 146

Senior, N. W. , 157

Serfdom, 18, 19

Settlement, Parish, 109

Settlements, Family or Strict, 125

seq.
Sewing-machine, 146, 149
Shaftesbury, Lord, 166
Shakespeare, 99

211

Economic Organisation

Shares, transference of, 179
Sheep-breeding, c,6seq., 135
Sheffield, 184

Shipbuilding, 184; Federation, 189
Shipping Conferences, 187
Shoe manufacture, 145
Shot, IS

Sickness, insurance against, 169
Silesia, 94, 128

Silk manufacture, 94, 125, 145 ; spin-
ning, 153
Silver, influx of, 102
Slater, G., 199
Slavery, 18
Smith, Adam, 35, 141, 149, 156, 157,

163
Smithfield market, 135
Soap manufacture, 151
Socialism, 191
Societas, 83
Socmen, 17

Solidarity, sense of, 189 seq.
Somerset, 92
Sorbonne, 112
Sound, the, 72
Southampton, 73
South Metropolitan Gas Company,

177
Spectator, 122
Spencer, Herbert, 168
Spices, 68

Spiritual power, 178
Spitalfields Acts, 107
Squire, the, 5 seq., 122, 131
Staffordshire, 184
Stages of industrial evolation, 34

seq.
Staple, Merchants of the, 74 seq.
State control, 161 seq.
Statutes : —

1285 [De Donis), 126

1351 (Labourers), 50

1465 (Clothiers), 92

1489 (Husbandry), 114

1536 (Poor Relief), no

1555 ( .. .. )■ "I

1555 (Weavers), 150

1563 (Poor Relief), in

1563 (Wages, Apprenticeship),
92, 96, 100, 102 seq., 107, 164

1573 (Poor Relief), in

1585 (Cloth), 151 .

1597-8 (Wages), 103

1598 (Vagrancy), 109

1601 (Poor Relief), 96

1603-4 (Wages), 104

Statutes (continued) —
1702^

' y (Embezzlement), 145

1749J

;7S6[ (Weavers), 106

1773 (Spitalfields), 107

1 813 (Wages), 164

1814 (Apprenticeship), 164
1819 (Factories), 164

\^^r\ (Combination), 170

1833 (Factories), 164
1842 (Mines), 164
1844 (Factories), 164
1847 (Ten Hours), 166
1875 (Shipping), 165
1893 (Railways), 165
1897 (Workmen's Compensa-
tion), 168

1908 (Eight Hours), 165

1909 (Trade Boards), 107, 169

1911 (Insurance), 169

1912 (Minimum Wage) 108, i6g
Steam-engine, 155

Steamship companies, 185

Steel, manufacture of, 183 ; rails, 185,

187
Steelyard, 72, 86
Stock, leased with land, 55
Stock, joint, 83, 84, 179 seq.
Strickland, Sir George, 151
Struggle for existence, 168
Suffolk, 92

Supply and Demand, loi
Surveying, 132
Survival of the JittesI, 168
Sweated trades, 107
Swift, Jonathan, 125
Sybil, 66
Syndicalism, 191

Tailoring industry, 181

Tailors, Merchant, 80

Taltarum' s case, 126

Tar, 68

Tawney, R. H., 199, 201

Team, eight-ox, 23

Tenant, 9

Tenant farmers, characteristics of

English, 4 ; origin of, 53 seq., 64
Tenant-right. 134
Ten Hours Act, 166
Tenters, 162
Territorial law, 70

212

Ind

ex

Textile trades, 164, 165, 186

Thorough, 112, 114

Tiverton, 150

Tobacco business, 185

Tool and Machine, 149

Tories, 139, 166

Tours, 119, 137, 151

7 own ( = village), 11

Towns, early history of, 26

Town-economy , 95

Townshend, Lord, 135

Toynbce, Arnold, 128, 140, 203

Trade, Board of, 108, 164

Trade Boards, 107, 169

Trade Unions, 170 seq., 177

Transportation, 155

Troilus and Cressida, 99

Trusts, 186 seq.

Tucker, 92

Tudor period, characteristics of, 89

seq.
Turnips, 135
Turnpike roads, 155

Ulster, 134

Umpire, 171

Undertaker, 149

Unemployment, 115, 118, 169

Unions, trade, 170 seq.

United States, 185

Universal Dictionary of Trade and

Commerce, 145
Unwin, Professor, 198, 200
Usury, 82
Utopia, 3p

Vagrancy, 109

Values in exchange, 90

Venice, 71, 73. 85

Verlagsystem, 142

Verleger, 142

View of craft , 31

Villa theory, 20

Villein, meaning of, 13

Villeinage, land in, 12

Vinogradoff, Professor, 194, 198

Virgate, 14

Visitations, heraldic, 130

Wages, assessment of, 102 seq., 107,

164 ; Boards, 171
Wakefield, 146
Wales, 23 ; South, 184
Walker, 92

Walter of Henley, 196
Warwickshire, 63
Watt, James, 37, 141
Wealth of Nations, 141
Weavers, immigration of foreign, 56,

90 ; gilds of, 89 ; legislation con-
cerning, 106, 150
Weavers' Act (1555), 150
Webb, S. and B., 203
Week work, 13
Welfare programmes, 180
Wesley, John, 159
West Country, 12, 130
West Riding, 144, 146
Wheat, 14; price of, 137
Whig government, 129 seq., 162;

doctrine, 161
Whittington, 81
Wiltshire, 92
Winchcombe, lohn, 150
Wine, 68

Wire manufacture, 151
Wolsey, Cardinal, 116, 117
Women, restriction of labour of. 164
Wool, 56, 68, 137 ; export of, 88
Woollen industry, 56, 88 seq., 115,

125, 145, 150, 153, 160; report of

1806 on, 142, 146
Workmen's Compensation Act, 168
Works, iron and engineering, 154,

173. 181
Wyclif, 51

Yardland, 14

Ytirdling, 18

Yarn. 155

Yeoman, 122

Yorkshire, 1^2 seq., 147, 151

Young, Arthur, 119, 123, 137

Young Persons, hours of labour of, 164

Ypres, 90, H2

ZWINGLI, iia

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