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THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

THE ENGLISH
MIDDLE CLASS

BY

R. H. GRETTON

FORMERLY DEMY OF MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD; AUTHOR

OF "the king's GOVERNMENT," "a MODERN

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE,"

ETC.

LONDON

G. BELL AND SONS, LTD.

1917

CHISVVICK PRESS: CHARLES WHllTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

■-^ MO

PREFATORY NOTE

HAVING volunteered for the Army on the
raising of the military age-limit, I have been
unable to give any attention to the final stages of
the production of this book. That it appears now at
all is entirely due to the devoted attention which my
wife has given to the reading and correcting of the
proofs. I could not possibly allow the work to be
published without acknowledgement of the very great
improvement which it owes to her. Its early stages
had her encouragement and help. Without her the
final staofes could not now have been reached. Alike
in matter and in form the debt is larger than can
be indicated here. It can only be confessed,

R. H. G.

Pendennis Castle,
Falmouth.

November, igiy.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. Introduction — Definition of the

Middle Class ..... i
II. The Eleventh and Twelfth Cen-
turies— The Gilda Mercatoria —
Special Position of London . . 14

III. The Thirteenth and Fourteenth

Centuries — The Effects of In-
creasing Wealth .... 29

IV. The Fifteenth Century — The Craft

Gilds' M isuse of Currency— Middle
Class Ideals ..... 63
V. Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

— The Middle Class as Landowners 9 1
VI. The Seventeenth Century — The
Middle Class under the Common-
wealth and Restoration — Finance
— Banking and Foreign Trade . 121
VI 1. The Seventeenth Century continued
— The Middle Class becomes tran-
sitional— Decay OF Municipal Life 144
VIII. The Eighteenth Century — Predomin-
ance OF THE Middle Class — Trad-
ing Monopolies . . . .158
vii

viii CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

IX. The Factory System — The Wealth

OF Nations . . . . .183
X. Class Characteristics of the Eigh-
teenth Century .... 202

XI. The Nineteenth Century — Indus-
trialism . . . . . .210

Index ........ 233

THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION — DEFINITION OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

THERE are few subjects upon which it would
be less justifiable to enter without an attempt
at definition than the subject of the English Middle
Class. It need hardly be added that there are few
in which definition is more difficult. The term
implies social distinctions ; and these are of all dis-
tinctions the least permanent. It has, moreover,
an inherent vagueness; the very name "Middle
Class " suggests a stratum of society which, though
obviously in existence, and calling for a descriptive
label, was so lacking in marked characteristics or
qualities that it could only be described as lying be-
tween two other classes. In one sense this label
has been singularly successful. It has served equally
well whether the other two classes have been re-
garded as most characteristically lords of the soil
and labouring men, or great nobles and rabble, or
wealthy and poor, or cultured and uneducated, or
capitalists and artisans. At different periods of our
history these differing oppositions have served their
turn; and at each period the name of "Middle
Class " has carried a sufficient content for all prac-
tical purposes. Nothing could display more clearly

B

2 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

than this the lack of exactitude in the name. To
be equally in its place with such varying kinds of
social classification, a term must be essentially a
negative one; its inclusions can be nothing but the
exclusions of the two other terms. The fact that the
other classifications vary in description implies that
at different periods, or in relation to different aspects
of thought, the meaning they carried was inapplic-
able or insufficient. The fact that this one title is
unvarying implies that it has no inseparable mean-
ing, but only a meaning relative to the particular
connection in which it is used. It follows that it
would be hopeless to attempt any definition of our
subject on the lines of these social distinctions. The
definition would have to be re-made with every cen-
tury— at some periods with every decade.

Another reason for the difficulty of definition is
that the word " middle" must, in anything as mobile
as human society, mean also "transitional." A middle
class must, at both ends of its scale, be merging into
the neighbouring class ; and, since the merging is at
the one end intentional, and at the other a.confession
of failure, it is a delicate matter to draw the line at
either end. Even though this might be done pass-
ably well at any given moment in history, we should
again be confronted with the need for perpetually
re-making the definition. The rank of life which
could be labelled " Middle-Class " in the fourteenth
century would be found to contain, in the sixteenth,
large numbers of people whom there would be no
valid reason to exclude from the ranks of nobles or
lords of the land. The difficulty increases so much

DEFINITION OF MIDDLE CLASS s

with later periods that it might be said (and indeed
is generally held) to be impossible at the present
moment to delimit any section of the community in
an effectual way as middle class.

Some might even go a step further, and say that
such delimitation is not only next door to impossible,
but is also unnecessary. So long as the label con-
veys, in any particular connection, a sufficient mean-
ing, so long as we know practically what we have
in mind when we think of the middle class of the
Elizabethan dramatists, of Walpole's financial out-
look, of the Chartist agitation, or of Matthew
Arnold's irony, what need is there for attempting
any exact characterization of the people included
under that label at various periods ? This argu-
ment, however, is but an expression in different
words of that deliberate vagueness in the phrase
*' Middle Class." It amounts only to saying thatf'
this class is sufficiently defined by clear definition
of the two other classes; and that if the attitude, ]
the pursuits, and the social condition of those two [^
classes are made plain, those of the Middle Class j
can be deduced or conjectured. They will depend
on the approximation or inclination of the Middle
Class to one side or the other.

It should hardly be necessary to labour the point
that this is a position neither scientific in spirit
nor satisfactory in result. The effect of it is that^
in the normal writing of history, the Middle Class
makes sudden and unrelated appearances in the
narrative. It crops up here and there, when any
political or social event occurs which obviously has

4 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

its roots neither in the aristocratic theory of gov-
ernment, nor in popular pressure. It crops up also
when considerations of trade seem for the moment
to dominate the national policy. It is hazily cre-
dited with the establishment and progress of local
government. Since it is thus only observed at
crucial moments, and in operations as a rule
successful, it comes to be regarded as a solid,
well-conditioned body, free to a large extent from
the prejudices and conflicts of the more distinctly
characterized classes, intervening with weight and
judgement at the right time, and for the most part
minding its own business. Now such a view as
this can only be confirmed or corrected by some
continuous observation of the class to which it
applies. There might, indeed, be continuous ob-
servation without any precise definition. It would
be quite possible to proceed on the admission that
at any given period we can speak of a Middle Class
with a general, if shadowy, agreement as to the
people indicated. But to reach a scientific, as well
as a satisfactory, result, it w^ould be better to be
able to proceed on some hypothesis as to the
mental standpoint and the practical philosophy of a
Middle Class. In no other way can we come to dis-
tinct conclusions as to its relation to the national
life, or its influence upon aftairs.

This is, indeed, such a truism that, if we examine
the matter closely, we shall see that the ordinary
historical view of the Middle Classes does actually
proceed on a hypothesis; but one of such a kind that
a renewed consideration of it is the more necessary.

DEFINITION OF MIDDLE CLASS 5

The hypothesis virtually comes to this — that what '
the people of the Middle Class are now, they have;
always been. Soundly educated, cosmopolitan in out-\
look, well-knit into the body politic, and capable in
their own affairs as they are at present, they are re-
garded as possessing all those qualities in the past
(though, of course, in different degree), and as exer-
cising them upon policy. Probably this again is partly
due to that adaptability of the label which has made
it more permanent than any other phrase of social
terminology. No one would suppose that he could
proceed in any historical study on the assumption
that a landowner of the twelfth century possessed
qualities and an outlook differing only in degree
from those of a landowner of to-day; or that the
political attitude of a weaver of the fifteenth century
could be even remotely gauged by the standpoint
of a Lancashire artisan of to-day. The changing
conditions of feudalism. Royal autocracy, Parlia-
mentary government, free education, and the ballot,
have reflected themselves in the differing categories
of opposition applied to the upper and lower classes
of the nation. The use of an unchanging term for
the classes between has led to assumptions in their
case that would never be made in the other cases.

There is, perhaps, this justification for the com-
mon hypothesis as to the Middle Classes — that in a
sense the historian has had to create these classes
in the earlier periods out of his knowledge and ex-
perience of later periods. It is doubtful whether any
observer of political or social conditions was aware
of the Middle Class as a separately observable

6 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

section of the community before the end of the six-
teenth century; and it can hardly be said to have
been a clear political entity before the latter part of
the eighteenth century. Yet without doubt people
of this class existed long before they were placed
in a category. In the puzzled references of Piers
Plowman to the rack-renters and buyers of advow-
sons, in Crowley's bewildered dislike of the " grete
rych man " who buys lands, and the men that
" have no name " but " have so many occupations
and trades that there is no one name mete for you,"
we can discern the early Middle Classes. But we
discern them by the light of later experience; and
there is, consequently, something quite compre-
hensible in the tendency of historians to read back-
wards into the early Middle Classes the leading
qualities of the Middle Class of later times, and
to proceed on this assumption without attempting
to arrive at a scientific historical assumption.

Yet in the very fact that the Middle Classes were
only thus vaguely descried during the earlier cen-
turies— were felt as a mysterious affection of the
national health rather than perceived — we may
find a clue to a possible definition of the Middle
Class. If we enquire what convention of human
society, what commodity of civilized existence, was
least understood, but at the same time most vitally
important to national life in those centuries (and,
indeed, in later ones), the usual answer of the
historian would be that it was money. Money
was vitally important, because the most profound
political changes of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and

DEFINITION OF MIDDLE CLASS 7
fifteenth centuries were based in no small desfree , «,

upon the employment of money. Feudalism began . (' ', ^
to break up, largely because by the use of money
the lord could dispose of the produce of his manor
with profit in other ways than by the keeping of
a large retinue, and because by this means he
[could translate services into rent; while at the samel ^^

time this translation into rent began to make the! 'V^-\
tenant gradually less dependent upon the lord's will!,.- "^^''^^
and pleasure.^ Meanwhile the effect of the use of t^*^'^ ji
money upon questions of taxation and subsidies was "X^"-"^
to regularize by degrees the relations of the Crown
and Parliament. But with all this importance, money
was, of all commodities, the least understood.
Statute after statute was passed, attempting in the
most unscientific ways to deal with the problems
raised by currency and coinage. From legislative
regulation of market prices to prohibition of export
of the precious metals, from despotic seizures of
treasure to reluctant revisions of the gold and silver
standaiids, these financial efforts ranged, and ranged
unceasingly. The forces at work were never en-
visaged and never understood.

Now when we find, during the same long period
of our history, certain classes of the community that
were also never envisaged, and never understood,
but were dimly felt to be exercising influence in the
nation, it is not altogether fanciful to think that
there may have been some real and discoverable
connection between these two. If so — if we can
find, in the period in which the Middle Class was be-
^ See " Wealth of Nations," bk. iii, c. iv.

8 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

coming a separate section of the community, another
matter which was introducing new compHcations and
causing a fundamental disturbance of social condi-
tions— it is possible that we may discov'er, in a con-
nection between these two things, a formula for
categorizing the Middle Class, and for reducing
it to a definition not less serviceable than any
historical definition of the aristocrat or the wage-
earner. Such a definition would seem to be that
the Middle Class is that portion of the community
to which money is the primary condition and the
primary instrument of life.

A complete defence of this definition can only
emerge from the study pursued in the following
pages. But some general considerations may be
advanced to suggest that it does exclude other
classes, and does include broadly all those who, at
any given tim.e, would naturally come under the
head of the Middle Class.

Firstly, itjobviously excludes both the landlord as
a landlord, and the peasant. It is conceivable that
these two classes might even to-day return to condi-
tions in which neither of them used money. Service
o-iven in return for certain riorhts in the soil and
the produce of the soil would provide a possible
means of existence for both of them. Secondly, it ex-
cludes both the shopkeeper as a shopkeeper and the
artisan. Money is in their case more necessary, as
a symbol of exchange and a means of carrying on
time-dealings; but it is not the primary necessity or
the primary instrument. On both sides the primary
condition is the possession of a certain skill, and

DEFINITION OF MIDDLE CLASS 9

certain material obtainable in return for the exercise
of skill. In these two groups are all the essentials
of existence for a society of human beings ; add to
them a king and public servants of the Crown, fed,
clothed, and lodged by services rendered by royal
domains and feudal lieges; add also a defence of
the realm maintained by the same kind of services;
and you have a picture of all that was primarily
necessary to Norman England.

On the other hand, the definition obviously in-
cludes the merchant, in the broadest sense of that
Word, and the capitalist manufacturer. For to them
money is the primary necessity. Their occupation
is not to exchange skill against material, but so to
employ money upon both skill and material, that it
shall produce more money. The test is this — that
the shopkeeper and the artisan, strictly as such, can
only with great difficulty, if at all, employ them-
selves in another skill or another material; whereas
the particular skill or material dealt with is a matter
of indifference to the merchant and the capitalist
manufacturer. His money is equally good for any
trade that offers it an opportunity; and it is thus
clear that the money is his primary instrument. In
the cases of banking, insurance, and the whole pro-
fession of investment, the definition applies so ob-
viously as to need no comment. The case of those
who are generally described as the professional
classes are rather more difficult; but they will also
be found to come under the definition. It is true
that in their case skill appears at first sight to be
the primary condition and instrument of life. But

10 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

on consideration the matter is not quite so plain. It
is conceivable that a lawyer or a doctor might barter
his knowledge for food, clothes, and lodging, render-
ing his services almost as a villein rendered service
to his lord. We will leave aside for the moment
the consideration that the manorial services were
rendered in the very materials of living and equip-
ment, though that is for our purpose a real distinc-
tion. It is more conclusive to observe that, in so
far as such a barter could be made, the learned pro-
fessions would not belong to the Middle Class at
all, but to the artisan class. In the same way a civil
servant, or a military or naval officer, might do his
work in return for a diet and lodo-inof at court; but
in that case he also would cease to belong to the
Middle Class, and would rank as a dependent re-
tainer. Historically speaking, both these conditions
have occurred; and in those days members of all
those professions took rank, not with any Middle
Class, but with the class opposed to the lords and
the nobles. The only thing that raised them into
the Middle Class was the use of money as the
primary instrument of life, not merely because of the
greater elaboration of the way of living which was
thus made possible, but much more because the
power of purchasing time, which can only be done
by making money the chief instrument, permitted a
his/her degfree of learning; and a skill which could
only exercise itself adequately in that time-contract
which is also dependent entirely upon money. Since,
therefore, it is solely in virtue of our definition of
the Middle Class that the professional classes have

DEFINITION OF MIDDLE CLASS ii . ..

• ^**

come to take rank among them, it may fairly be/ ■ ij^J^
urged that the definition does effectively include; ^
them, and not passively admit them.

There remains the question of those margins at
either end of the Middle Class which appear to
be the most difihcult problem in the path of a study
of this class. It is, in fact, the problem which
renders any attempt to define the Middle Class in
terms of social distinction foredoomed to failure.
It cannot, in such terms, be distinctly separated
from the peerage and the landed gentry at one end,
or from the shopkeeper at the other. The time has
long gone by when rules of heraldry might suffice to
draw a workable distinction between the aristocrat
and the middle-class landowner; or when any rough
consideration of the magnitude of business opera-
tions would draw the same practical distinction be-
tween the trading Middle Class and the shopkeeper.
If we apply our definition to these tasks, it seems at
any rate to survive as little damaged as perhaps
any definition in a sociological subject can expect to
be. It has been remarked already that the definition
excludes the landowner as a landowner. In so far,
that is to say, as he is exercising the qualities of a
landowner, his estates are in a condition in which
money is no more than a symbol of sufficient
work done, and sufficient sustenance and equipment
thereby provided. It is not an external means
of support. If, however, he is a landowner whose
estate accounts are of secondary consideration to
him, he belongs (with a few exceptions chiefly due
to accidents arising from other people's use of

|> THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

money) to that margin of the Middle Class which
has thrust itself upwards. Similarly it has been re-
marked that the definition excludes the shopkeeper
as a shopkeeper. In so far as he is using his know-
ledofe of orood and saleable articles of a certain kind
in combination with a knowledge (often inadequate
enough) of how to sell them, money is to him only
a symbol of acknowledgement on his part of the
craft and time expended in the making of the goods,
or an acknowledgement to him of the requirements
he has met. If, however, he depends chiefly on
his knowledge of how money can be commanded by
a man of energy, but of no more skill than is re-
quired to select subordinates, then he is primarily
dependent upon money, and attaches himself to the
other margin of the Middle Class.

These are but a few o-eneral considerations such
t as may be offered before entering upon more de-
/ tailed investigation. At any rate a certain unity
seems to emerge from the subject, a distinct theory
V of living, and a consistent impact upon affairs on the
^art of the Middle Classes, by associating with them
— and with them alone in the community, a limita-
tion which should, of course, be made if the defini-
tion is to pass muster — a conception of money as
more than, and in due time quite other than, a
token of exchange of services. It is the Middle
Class that we find first becoming aware of the
power of the precious metals to reproduce them-
selves, in so slender a relation to trade that buying
and selling become subordinate to this power, and
pursued largely for its sake. It is in this class again

DEFINITION OF MIDDLE CLASS 13

that we find first the conception of the poHtical
influence of money, from the cruder forms of the
purchase of charters and liberties to the more subtle
ways in which politics were made to subserve the
reproductive qualities of money. Finally, it is to
this class that we owe the more sweeping concep-
tions of money, in which the actual coin becomes an
almost invisible part of the whole structure.

But it is thoroughly characteristic of the English
Middle Class that in every one of these cases the
supreme touch to the half-perceived theory, the
provision of the key-idea required to make the
whole work smoothly and at its highest efficiency,
came either from another nation, or from members of
our own nation who were not, strictly speaking, of
the Middle Class.

CHAPTER II

THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES THE GILDA

MERCATORL\ — SPECIAL POSITION OF LONDON

NO characteristic signs of a Middle Class can
be discerned in England during the eleventh
and twelfth centuries. It is necessary for the mo-
ment to suspend the definition of a Middle Class,
which has been suggested in the previous chapter.
The currency was so primitive and so small in
quantity, confining commerce to little more than
barter and peddling, that a definition dependent
upon the conception of money can have no opera-
tion in this early period. At the same time, by sus-
pending the definition, we shall be applying to it an
effective test of truth; since if, in a period to which
it obviously has no relation, there should appear to
have been a Middle Class in existence, the definition
must fall to the ground. On the other hand, if no
Middle Class can be distinctly discerned until the
progress of social life was such as to admit of a first
conception of the meaning of money, the definition
will receive at least a preliminary sanction.

It will be agreed that there are only a limited
number of directions in which we could look for a
Middle Class under the Norman and Angevin kings.
Firstly, there were the freemen of the manors, who
may have been a middle class of agriculturists.

14

THE XIth and XIIth CENTURIES 15

Secondly, there were the inhabitants of towns, who
may have been a trading middle class. Thirdly,
there was a certain stratum of educated men, earning
a livelihood by virtue of their education, who may
have been the beginning of a professional Middle
Class. Theoretically there were, of course, only
three estates in the realm, the Crown, the manorial
lords, and the liege dependents of these two estates;
just as, constitutionally, there was only one form of
political or social existence, namely, that of service
rendered to the feudal superior. But theory never
covers the whole ground; and it will be proper to
consider whether, behind these theories, there did
actually exist a class of people not wholly amenable
to them.

The case of the freemen of the manors may be
dismissed on the broad ground that they had no
mobility of existence. It is essential to the idea of
a Middle Class that it should be independent — or at
least capable of independence — in regard to the cir-
cumstances of its life. The freeman of the manor
was tied to the manor. If he left it, he could not
enter another manor as a freeman. Therefore, in
spite of his freedom from prescribed services, he
was in fact bound to the feudal system, and his in-
terests lay with the system. His liberty in general
has tended to shrink in the light of recent in-
vestigations. He was not, as the mere classification
of him might imply, in a better position, either
financially or socially, than the villein. He was
often in possession of a smaller holding of land than
the villein; he was of less account to the lord; and.

i6 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

performing no duties in the demesne, he drew from
it no material support. It is not to the freeman, but
to the man who gradually converted service into
rent, and rent into freehold by purchase, that we
must look for the origin of the yeoman of a later
period.

If we take next the case of the educated people
we fmd it difficult to see in them, either, the embryo
of a Middle Class. Education was wholly in the
hands of the Church. The only callings of this early
time which correspond to our modern professions
were the law, the Church, and the occupations now
known as the Civil Service. Medicine as a pro-
fession did not exist. Now these three callings were
all appanages of the Church, because they naturally
depended upon the sole source of supply of edu-
cated men. But the Church cannot be regfarded as
forming a Middle Class. In so far as it was a class
at all — in so far, that is to say, as its widely differing
social units can be envisao-ed as a single whole — the
Church was on the same level as the manorial lords.
As individuals the priests and the monks might be
either sprung from the nobility or from the peasan-
try; but when they had acquired the differentia of a
learned education they became, not a separate class,
but portions of a corporate manorial lord. Both the
civil law and the civil service were duties devolving
upon the Royal Household. The Chancellor was
an ecclesiastic; and his staff, even when, after some
time, it began to separate into two distinct branches
for the administration of justice and for carrying on
the other affairs of the kingdom, was composed of

THE XIth and XIIth CENTURIES 17

clerics. They were dependents in the Royal House-
hold, receiving emoluments in the shape of board,
lodging, and clothing at Court exactly as the de-
pendents of a manorial lord lived upon him at his
castles. Moreover, when salaries first began to be
paid to the rank and file of the service, they took
the form of preferments to ecclesiastical benefices or
dignities.^ In other words, those who pursued what
we should now call middle-class professions were
actually either dependent inmates of a great estab-
lishment, or individuals composing a manorial cor-
poration. Thus they fall into the two regular ranks
of the Norman organization, and do not in any sense
create a third class.

There remains the case of the trading population
of the towns ; and, even if we cannot find in it any
of the qualities of a Middle Class occupation, it will
nevertheless be worth attention, because, when a
Middle Class began to appear, it rose upon the
basis of the commercial habits and traditions already
in existence. These had displayed from quite an
early date certain marked tendencies; and it will be
easier to understand the social and political develop-
ment of the Middle Classes after some consideration
of the trade of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
It was regulated by two main factors, one the con-
trol of the right of holding markets by confining the
power of granting a market to manorial lords and
heads of great religious houses ; the other, the in-
vention and creation of the Gilda Mercatoria. Now
neither of these factors really introduced a new con-

^ For references see "The King's Government," pp. 8-16.

C

i8 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

ception into the state. Obviously the former did
not. The inabiUty to hold a market otherwise than
by the express grant of a feudal superior simply
meant that no accident of the collection of popula-
tion in a town, with the consequent ease of barter
and trafficking, was to interfere with the unity of
the Norman conception. Just as the rustic popula-
tion was responsible to the lord for its labour and
profits, so the craftsman and w'orker of the town
must acknowledge his power to demand account of
them for their doings, to administer the kind of
justice which these doings might call for, and to
take toll of their trade. The Gilda Mercatoria was,
as it were, the answering attempt of the towns to
make the feudal conception operate In their particular
conditions. The rural tenants of the manor had their
compensation for being bound to service in the fact
that they composed a single body, free from outside
interference or competition. The people of the
towns, in so far as they also held and cultivated
their fields, were not, of course, on very difterent
footing from the people of the villages. But as soon
as they obtained market rights, they began to find
that a door had been opened to strangers. A trader
might come to a town on market days and pursue
his business without establishino- himself there in
any way which would render him liable to manorial
dues. A stranger could not enter into agricultural
occupation without becoming resident on the manor;
and the process of becoming a resident was accom-
panied by heavy fines to the lord. But any man
might bring his pack to market, paying perhaps

THE GILDA MERCATORIA 19

stallage dues, take his money, and depart again.
The Gilds were designed to prevent this. They
made of the trading population of towns a corpora-
tion with rights enforceable against the stranger,
such as rights of pre-emption over his goods, and of
imposing special taxes for the privilege of putting
up a stall, and for the passage of roads and bridges.
Thus the Gilda Mercatoria was, in its origin, a
perfectly comprehensible growth within the feudal
system. It did not signalize the rising of a new
class, it was merely the extension of the normal
privileges of manorial tenants to circumstances ot
town life. It was not, indeed, universal in England,
nor was it of very rapid growth. Only one Gild —
that of Burford, in Oxfordshire — is definitely known
to have existed before the end of the eleventh
century, and some twenty-eight others are dated
as of the twelfth century.^ But this fact rather
supports than weakens the belief that those Gilds
do not imply at this period the existence of a new
class of the community. No particular level of the
population felt at any one moment a pressure of new
difficulties. The Gilds came gradually into exist-
ence as one town after another perceived the effect
of the market in infringing the exclusive unity of
the manor. Moreover, it is fairly clear from what
we know of the Gilds, that in constitution, as well
as in origin, they represented no new class. One of
the earliest rolls of members of a Gilda Mercatoria,
that of Shrewsbury in 1209, has been examined by
Professor Cunningham; and he comes to the con-
^ Gross, "Gild Merchant," i, 9-20.

20 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

elusion that this Gild must have included nearly
every householder in the town.^ Only one person
appears who could be described as a wholesale
dealer — " Richard the Grocer." The rest would seem
to be all small craftsmen and artisans, with the ex-
ception of the twelve " mercers," who would keep
httle shops for the sale of goods by the small scales.
Gilds so comprehensive as this cannot be described
as in any sense revealing a Middle Class. It may per-
haps be urged in this connection that the usual trans-
lation of Gilda Mercatoria as Gild Merchant is
rather misleading. The word " merchant " conveys to
us inevitably an impression of trading upon a con-
siderable scale, and still more an impression of trading
based upon some sort of theory of credit operations.
In point of fact neither of these is characteristic of
the Gilda Mercatoria in its palmiest days. It would
be safer to translate the words into " Market Gild,"
since that gives a picture of stalls set up in the
streets of a little town, laden with petty quantities
of goods for sale, garments and cloth, butter and
eggs, meat and provisions, all adapted for purchases
on a very small scale; and a picture also of the
people of the countryside coming in to buy and sell,
and of local authorities keeping order and exercising
superintendence. During the greater part of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries there would be very
few, if any, shops in these small towns.^ The people
who sold goods at the periodical markets would be
mostly artisans and craftsmen who had made the

' Royal Hist. Society's Transactions, vol. ix.

^ Cunningham, " Growth of English History," i, 3.

THE GILDA MERCATORIA 21

things in the intervals between the markets. They
would have but the most limited stock of goods at
any stated time, being mainly occupied in working
up material given to them for that purpose by their
customers. Households would very largely supply
their own needs, and the markets would only be
occasions for obtaining things rather more elaborate
than those usually made at home, or articles brought
from abroad, like pepper, for which there were no
regular shops.

Once, however, it becomes clear that the Market
Gilds belong to a stage before the development of
a Middle Class, they may be studied not without ad-
vantage to our subject, as displaying certain qualities
which will shed some light upon that development
when it took place. First of all, we can perceive
the origin of the narrow conception of the operation
of commerce which for so long hampered English
traders. The necessity for balancing the privileges
of the feudal superior by the establishment of some
rights of exclusive profit-making predisposed traders
to a system of local " protection " which before very
long almost strangled the towns under the command
of a Market Gild.^ It would be unfair, of course, to
judge the outlook of these early traders by later
standards, and condemn their policy offhand as be-
nightedly selfish. They were imprisoned as yet in
a national organization which had no reference to
trade — to the systematic and organized exchange of
commodities. The feudal theory viewed the nation
as a number of self-contained units, whose solidity
' Gross, "Gild Merchant," i, 52.

22 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

resided in the common responsibility of their over-
lords to the Crown, not in any common interests of
their own. It would have been impossible for a trader
in this period to have had any notion of the mutual
advantage of flourishing trade in different centres.
He could not be expected to see that the profits of
a tradesman in another town were of any value to
him. His duties and responsibilities were so sharply
localized that he could not help setting his whole
mind to localizing also the turnover of commerce.
That all this gave rise to habits of commercial
timidity is beyond question. For a long time to
come merchants were impelled, by the traditions
which had come down from the first town organiza-
tion, towards all kinds of protectionism. Partly by
local regulations, partly by monopolistic combina-
tions, they continued to act on the principle that
one man's gain must be another man's loss. But
some excuse may be found for them in the con-
ditions under which tradinsf was carried on in the
Norman and Angevin periods.

It is not possible to discern even in London at
this time any broader conception of what commerce
might mean. Yet London must to some extent be
excepted from general statements with regard to the
Middle Classes. For here the agricultural basis of
the feudal system never really applied. Every other
town in the kingdom was more or less an accidental
occurrence in some manor or other. People hap-
pened to be congregated in certain spots in such a
way that some pursuits other than those of agri-
culture were open to them; but, as has been re-

SPECIAL POSITION OF LONDON 23

marked above, this fact did not at first interfere
fundamentally with the authority of the feudal su-
perior. These other pursuits were adjusted to the
system. But London was, from the very beginning
of the Norman rule, a place apart. As the capital,
it was largely occupied by people who did not there
fulfil — because they were fulfilling elsewhere — the
feudal conditions of residential tenure. Consequently
distinctions which held orood elsewhere did not exist
here; and a class of people who would have had no
standing in the country districts appears quite early
among the Londoners to have been a political force.
The subject is very obscure; but it is difficult to in-
terpret in any other way than this certain passages
in the Chronicles concerning the reign of Stephen.
Thus when Matilda was gathering support at Win-
chester, the Londoners were summoned to appear
there; and in maintaining their demand for the re-
lease of Stephen they had the voice of all the barons
then present " qui in eorum communionem jamdu-
dum recepti fuerant." ^ This may perhaps be only a
phrase anachronistically applied ; as it stands it can
mean nothing but that the Londoners who had no
feudal rank had some kind of corporate existence.
That this existence was at least unofticially recog-
nized is to be concluded from a phrase used by the
Papal Legate when he reproached the Londoners,
who were regarded " quasi proceres," for fostering
those who had deserted the kinof in battle. Now
when we have made all possible allowances for the
nature of the population of a capital, when we have
^ Malmesbury, ii, 576.

24 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

recognized to the full the fact that there must have
been many residents in London who were in their
own part of the country feudal lords of the regular
type, entirely unconcerned with trade, there remains
in the passages which have been quoted the clear
distinction between the barons and the " communio "
of Londoners into which they had been received;
and there remains also the Lesfate's remark that the
Londoners were regarded " as a kind of nobility,"
obviously implying that he had before him people
who were not of those normally included in the
nobility of the Norman system. They must have
been traders, and of course, traders on a scale un-
known in the rest of the country.

If we conclude from this that in London a Middle
Class had begun to appear some time before it
showed any signs of existence in the rest of the
country, the reason is not the magnitude of the
trade it must have been carrying on. That would
inevitably be larger than the trade of any other
town; because of the residence in London of all the
great people who were, to each of the other towns,
only so many single persons who drew rather than
spent money. Furthermore, it was only in London
that such people would need to spend money. When
in residence on their manors they could supply by
services of all kinds the necessities of their house-
holds. But magnitude of trade is not a sufficient
differentia of a Middle Class. It could only cause
contemporaries like the Papal Legate to attempt to
rank the Londoners with the feudal nobles. In
order to obtain a real sign of a new force at work

SPECIAL POSITION OF LONDON 2S

-D

we must observe that, as London's trade was in-
evitably greater, so also it was inevitably more
bound up with a coined currency than the trade of
any other town. The resources upon which a feudal
lord could draw when in his own domain, whether
they took the form of a grant of privileges in return
for a certain supply of manufactured goods, or the
form of actual maintenance in payment for work
done, were useless in London. They were not port-
able wealth. Consequently, the lord would have to
depend upon currency in London; and the result
would be that by the nature rather than by the
mere scale of its trading transactions London would
tend to absorb more and more of the available coin-
age. This in its turn would react upon the feudal
lords. The necessit}^ for money would gradually
lead them to commute manorial services for money
payments, firstly in the relation between themselves
and their tenants, in order that they might have
more to spend ; and, secondly, in the relation be-
tween themselves and the Sovereign, in order that
they might, by exchanging military responsibilities
for cash payments, be the more free to disregard
any effect which their policy on their own estates
might be having upon the character of the armed
service they were theoretically bound to provide.
This again would have its effect upon the policy of
the Crown. The feudal service had always been
clumsy, and was from time to time a double-edged
weapon in the King's hand. It did not provide a
very efficient fighting force, since delays, jealousies,
and animosities were always interfering with the

26 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

muster of an army. Moreover, the maintenance of
armed men by the great nobles was often a source
of uneasiness. Therefore from every point of view,
when currency began to accumulate in any bulk, as
it was bound to do in the nature of London's com-
merce, the time was ripe for a new use of money,
and a new regard for it.

Yet, though we can thus make an approach to a
definition of the Middle Class at this date, it can
be no more than an approach. A new regard for
money does not necessarily involve a new conception
of its nature and possibilities; and until the new con-
ception began to operate the traders must be regarded
as rather passive than active instruments of change.
It was, indeed, through them and the kind of work
they carried on that currency became more in de-
mand, and tended to accumulate in quantities be-
yond the mere necessities of the exchange of goods.
But such accumulation was not made an active and
reproductive force as yet. On the whole, in what-
ever way it was used by traders, the main idea was
the simple one of purchase. In some cases towns
obtained Market Gild charters b)^ payment; and
the confirmations of such charters by the Crown
were entirely obtained by payment. London, which
had no Market Gild, was constantly obtaining
security for its precarious, but obstinately main-
tained, liberties in the same way. It paid heavy
fines to Matilda, to Henry II, and to Richard. But
all such operations, though dependent in the broad
sense upon the power of money, are mere extensions
of the simple idea of sale and purchase. They were

SPECIAL POSITION OF LONDON 27

transactions carried through by a number of men
jointly, exactly in the fashion of a transaction carried
through by any one of them at the moment, with no
sense that a combination of men can be, economi-
cally speaking, not merely more effective than, but
something positively different from, a single in-
dividual.

One further point remains to be considered before
leaving the twelfth century — the Saladin tithe of
1 1 88; for this looks, at first sight, like a distinct
recognition of the growth of a new class in the
State. The Saladin tithe imposed the first tax on
movables ; it was, that is to say, the first recogni-
tion of a kind of property which had not till then
paid its contribution to the Royal Exchequer. Some
change was taking place whereby individuals were
enriching themselves beyond and outside the feudal
theory of the subject's position and opportunities.
But again, as in the case of the Londoners, it will
be better to keep a clear line of division between
recognition of a new form of wealth, and the pro-
duction, by circumstances of wealth, of a new class.
The tax on movables in 1 188 was part of a general
tithe, and it was apparently paid by the traders
without any more subtle evasion than such as might
be compassed by concealment of goods or false
declaration.^ They had not yet perceived that their

^ The extent of this kind of evasion can be gathered from the
provision inserted in the regulations for the tax of 1225 that every
person not an earl, baron, or knight, must swear to the value of
his own movables and those of his two nearest neighbours
(Dowell, "History of Taxation," i, 71).

28 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

increasing command of the currency, together with
the increasing need of the Royal Exchequer for
coined money, wherewith to pay for all that the
feudal system was ceasing to render as service, put
them into a position unlike that of any other
members of the community. Their goods were
literally valued and tithed; they were not assessed.
In the difference between the two processes lies the
whole distinction between persons who merely hap-
pened as individuals to have, in quantities sufficient
to be taxed, goods of a kind previously unknown in
such quantities, and a Middle Class introducing into
a community new ideas of money both for public and
private purposes.

We come, then, to the close of the twelfth century
without perceiving anything more than the existence
of people ready to compose such a class, but as yet
unconscious of the fundamental differences that were
growing up between them and the rest of the nation.
In so far as they began to feel any differences, as in
the dangerous possibilities of open markets, they
had no other idea than to obtain from the feudal
superior some privileges that should do for them
something of what the protecting exclusiveness of
tenure did for the rural portions of the manor. In
so far as the Londoners felt the power which wealth
was bringing to them, their idea was to ally them-
selves with nobles, and in some sense take rank
with them.

CHAPTER III

THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES THE

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH

THE next two centuries, the thirteenth and
fourteenth, though they differ greatly in sig-
nificance for a Study of the Middle Classes, may
best be considered together; because it is only in
the lio:ht of the sudden changes of the fourteenth
century that the processes taking place during the
thirteenth can be properly understood. With the
beginning of the fourteenth century there can no
longer be any doubt of the existence of a class in
the community distinctly separable from the rest in
its aims, its pursuits, its methods, its purposes, and
its share in the national existence. Its appearance
in this defined form has been generally regarded by
historians as curiously abrupt. Some consideration
of the trading classes during the thirteenth century
may serve to show how it came about that there
were people ready to take shape suddenly as a new
fqrce; and at the same time it will appear that the
precipitating agent, so to speak, of this new crystal-
lization affords us the first great step towards justify-
ing our definition of a Middle Class.

Two external signs of change during the thirteenth
century are obvious. The first is the tendency to-
wards a more independent position for the towns;

29

so THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

and the second an increase in the wealth of indi-
viduals in the towns. We have seen that the first
foreshadowings of town liberties were really far from
a movement towards independence. They were, as
Professor Cunningham puts it/ contracts with the
manorial lord, which had their origin in the desire
of the trader to be in the same kind of clearly defined
position as the agriculturist enjoyed, for the protec-
tection of himself and his profits. But during the
thirteenth century, the towns evidently began to en-
visage new possibilities. They secured, by pay-
ments to the Exchequer, royal sanction for these
contracts with the lords. The inevitable result was
that gild charters of this kind opened the door to
a certain independence of the lords. Derived as
they were from the supreme authority they could
easily become (though they were not necessarily so
in themselves) a means of maintaining, against later
lords, privileges granted in very different circum-
stances by their predecessors. The strongest proof
of this is that the Market Gild has been held to be
of more importance in the towns under a manorial
lord than it was in the royal towns. "^ With the in-
crease of trading there was a growing tendency to
resist the authority of a lord in town management,
and his exaction of dues. An organization like
the Market Gild, which afforded a rallying point
against the lord, naturally stimulated the energies
of the citizens in its support; and thus the Market
Gilds in such towns became stronger, because of

^ "Growth of English Industry and Commerce," i, 134.
^ Gross, "Gild Merchant," i, 92.

THE XIIIth AND XIVth CENTURIES 31

more vital importance to the several communities,
than they were in towns which had no such im-
mediate conHict of interests. The towns were, of
course, only taking their share in the general break-
up of the feudal system. But the fact that the form
which the breaking up took in their case was that
of corporate action and corporate existence is most
important. In the agricultural portions of the manor
the result of the decay of feudalism was all to dis-
solve the manorial organism, to make a beginning
of various individual relations between lord and
tenant. In the town portions the result was rather
to create a new organism, the very purpose of which
was to prevent and stand in the way of such indi-
vidual relations. To the men working on the land
independence meant freedom from personal service,
and the power to translate into money payments
duties of a certain fixed and definite kind. To the
traders independence meant the power to stand to-
oether in order to limit exactions which, being levied
upon pursuits and industries that had not been con-
templated in the original constitution of the manor,
had no clearly defined basis for translation into rent,
and were therefore open to capricious increase as
trade developed. Moreover, the towns were ob-
viously an easier source of revenue to the lords and
the Crown. The currency was slowly enlarging in
quantity; and just as, in the earlier days, it had
tended to concentration in London, so the first
effects of its wider use would be felt in the towns
rather than in the villages of the country-side. The
limits of profitable exaction would soon be reached

32 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

in the agricultural parts of the community, whose
wealth was almost entirely in kind. They would be
much less easily reached in the towns, where pay-
ment could be demanded in coin or in valuables
more portable than those of the farmer.-^

Hence the town populations began to attach more
and more importance to such instruments of united
action as they possessed. In some cases these were
already real liberties. I pswich had a common seal and
a form of corporate government as early as 1201;^
and other instances of the liber biLrgus occur during
the century. Although modern research 'has tended
to minimize the connection between the Market
Gilds and the process of incorporation of towns,
and to deny the theory that the former were cor-
porations in embryo, yet it may be maintained that
in towns which had no municipal liberties the Gild
did nevertheless serve the purpose of providing a
kind of united life and a basis of united action.^ It
would throw up, in the persons of its ofhcials and
principal members, the men who would be gaining
experience in town affairs, and would therefore be
on the look-out for more extensive and more inde-
pendent powers as opportunity arose. Their grow-
ing wealth, combined with the increasing need of the
Crown and the lords for the particular form of wealth
which the town-life tended to produce, gave them
their opportunities. Bit by bit, and almost entirely
by purchase, towns obtained ever extending liberties.

^ Cf. Dowell, "History of Taxation," i, 18.

' See Gross, " Gild Merchant," i, 97.

^ Cunningham, " Growth of English Industry," i, 225.

THE XIIIth AND XIVth CENTURIES 33

It was remarked in the previous chapter that the
mere purchase of Hberties cannot quite be held to
show characteristic signs of a Middle-Class outlook.
It was a straightforward and uncomplicated trans-
action. But even before the thirteenth century a
conception had made its appearance which is essen-
tially different from affairs of purchase. This was
the Firma Btcrgi, the arrangement by which towns
in the royal demesnes paid lump sums in taxation,
as communities, instead of taxes levied direct upon
each individual householder. The important point
to notice is that the lump sums thus paid were not
totals of individual assessments, but were, so to
speak, contract sums agreed upon between the lead-
ing townsmen and the Royal Exchequer. In other
words, here emerges a distinctly monetary concep-
tion. The Firma Burgi is practically a recognition
of the principles of discount and present value. In
consideration of being saved the trouble and the
delay of a house-to-house collection of tallages, the
Exchequer agrees to accept a defined sum and leave
the raising of it to the town community. The towns
on their side gained something which they hence-
forth continued, in the face of many different kinds
of taxation, to defend jealously— the power of keep-
ing the true details of their wealth more or less to
themselves. In the rough, the extent of their
prosperity must, of course, be gauged by the royal
commissioners. But it was much to them at this
early time, and it became more and more as trading
progressed, to be able to keep their own counsel as
to detailed assessments.

D

34 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

Of course their power to do so was not won
outright by this single form of arrangement with
the Exchequer. One of the most interesting docu-
ments of the thirteenth century is, in point of fact,
the product of an assessment of exactly the kind
which the towns did their best to avoid. It is the
assessment roll of the town of Colchester, for the
tax of one-seventh levied upon property by Edward I
in 1297, and attached to the Rolls of Parliament as
a specimen instance of the process of assessment.^
Every sort of property appears in it, from the
trader's stock to the appointments of his table — the
coal-dealer's brass cauldron, as well as his sea-coal;
the tanner's personal garments and stack of wood,
as well as his leather ; the dyer's spoons, as well as
his cloth. Yet such inquisitions as this were in
practice little more than a method of enforcing from
time to time revision of the town's contribution to
the Exchequer, and of preventing too much conceal-
ment of wealth. After every assessment the towns
always found means to return to the lump sum
arrangement, and reduce the assessments to a form.

While recognizing in the Firma Burgi and its
sequels a monetary conception which betrays the in-
stincts of a trading Middle Class, we must note that as
yet this " farming" of taxes was only in a primitive
sense a financial process. Itwas, if the distinction may
serve, rather a source of advantage and convenience
than a source of profit. The lump sum may in some
instances have been provided by a certain number
of citizens, who afterwards collected from the rest
' "Rot. Parlt.,"i, 228.

THE XIIIth AND XIVth CENTURIES 35

of the community the money advanced; but more
probably it was collected before it was paid. There
are no signs of an idea that sums of money could
be handled so as to yield a profit to the handler.
The same is true of the first operation in which
traders took an active, and not merely a passive,
concern in customs duties. In 1275 the first Parlia-
ment of Edward I granted additional tolls at the
ports on wool and leather " ad instantiam et rogatum
mercatorum." ^ This again was merely a transaction
of simple purchase. The Crusades had produced a
revival and an extension of trade; and the merchants
wished for a strengthening of the English fleet
which should afford them a better guarantee of safe
passage for their wool across the Channel. The in-
creased tax was, in fact, a kind of insurance payment.
However, if we do not as yet discern any grasp
of what financial processes might be, it is certainly
clear that the trading class was acquiring wealth in
a degree which would very soon open its mind to
such ideas. The simple fact that the wool mer-
chants actually proposed to pay more customs duties,
and the more indirect inference, from the anxiety
for town liberties and corporate payment of taxes,
that there were increasing grounds for the traders
to look after their private interests, are significant.
Nor are material evidences lacking. The thirteenth
century was a period firstly, of extension of town
boundaries and the rise of new towns; secondly, of a
higher sense of town amenities, as is shown, for ex-
ample, by the transference of the whole town of Sarum
' Dowell, " History of Taxation," i, 84.

36 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

to a site possessing better facilities for such accommo-
dations as the water-supply ; and thirdly, a period of
more substantial buildingf, when stone houses bepfan
to replace the old structures of wood, and two-storied
buildings became common.-^ The same conclusion
may be reached from such knowledge as we have
of the home life of a trading burgess. The Col-
chester assessment reveals to us the coal dealer
with his two silver cups, and a mazer-bowl, the
butcher with silver spoons, the tanner with a silver
cup. More remarkable are the statutory exemptions
from the assessments of 1294, 1295, 1296, and 1297,
under which each man was allowed to have untaxed,
besides a suit of clothes for himself and his wife, a
bed, a ring, and a buckle of gold or silver, a girdle
of silk in ordinary use by each of them, and a cup
of silver or mazer from which they drank. If it was
possible to allow exemptions for all these posses-
sions, it is obvious that the burgess must in very
many places have had quite considerable posses-
sions, and valuable appointments. In Colchester,
indeed, a bed seems to have been rare. But a good
deal of precious metal had gone into cups, spoons,
and buckles; and gowns and furs and silks were
almost the ordinary equipment of a trader of any
comfortable position. His house as yet would be
rather cheerless, with an earthen floor, very little
furniture beyond a bench or two and a trestle table,
the meat served on the spits on which it was cooked,
and no glass in the windows.-

^ See e.^., " Munimenta Gildhallae," i, xxxi.
^ Turner, "Domestic Architecture," i, 97-104.

THE XIIIth AND XIVth CENTURIES 2>7

It is probable that, even if our sources of informa-
tion were more complete than they are, we should
not find during the fourteenth century any very
great alteration in these material conditions of the
life of the trading^ class. The extent of the change
which suddenly made this class a vitally important
factor in the state is to be gauged rather by other
indications. The first and most obvious of these is
undoubtedly the position which mercantile m.ethods
and operations begin to occupy in the Statute Book.
Professor Cunningham has remarked that Royal
power after the Conquest, legislative action under
the Edwards, and citizen aims in the fifteenth cen-
tury seem to have been the motive forces that come
most strikingly into play " in the development of
national life in England." ^ But if we consider the
prevailing character of " legislative action under the
Edwards " we shall certainly have to attribute to
the fourteenth century that rise of the Middle Class
which this reference to " citizen aims " would post-
pone till the fifteenth. By far the greater part of
the Statute Book of the fourteenth century consists
of laws reo;ulatinQr trade and commerce. Two out-
standing characteristics may be discerned in these
laws. The first is the attempt, visible in such
statutes as the various Ordinances of the Staple, to
set up a new relation of direct responsibility be-
tween the merchant and the State. The second is
the equally persistent attempt to suppress the whole-
sale dealer and the middleman.

It is, of course, natural and usual to regard the
^ "Growth of English Industry," i, 21.

38 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

Ordinances of the Staple as mainly designed for
revenue purposes. The only way to secure to the
Crown the proper payment of export duties was to
establish statutory centres for the accumulation of
wool and leather, with official arrangements for seal-
ing and weighing the bales, statutory routes to the
sea-coast, and statutory ports of lading. The trade
had to be run through channels in which it could be
checked and tolled. But this is merely an explana-
tion of what happened ; it is not a discovery of the
principle at work, which was a new one. Hitherto
the responsibility for securing to the needs of the
Crown a due proportion of the resources of the
country had been essentially a local responsibility.
Even the direct taxation by the Crown which was
initiated in the tax on movables was not in fact an
exception to this rule. The assessing juries were
m.ade up of local residents, the payments into the
Treasury were made by county officers. It was
altogether a piece of finance designed on the lines
of bringing into the old system the new forms of
wealth, not a new system adapted to those forms.
The Ordinances of the Staple were a new system
in that they traversed completely the feudal principle
of localized responsibility for taxation, laying im-
posts on certain national sources of wealth, wherever
obtained.

This would of itself be enough to reveal to us
that the mercantile class had become an element in
English life which it was no longer possible to digest
into the old organization. But there is a further,
and even more significant, aspect of the Ordinances.

THE XIIIth and XIVtii CENTURIES 39

Hitherto a trader had been answerable for his trad-
ing methods and principles to a system of local con-
trol. It was the Market Gild of his town, or the
particular craft gild in his town to which he belonged,
that enforced his observance of certain rules of con-
duct in his business, a certain standard of honesty
alike in craftsmanship and in the materials he em-
ployed, and a regard for the rights of fellow-trades-
men. A Merchant of the Staple, however, had
passed beyond this local control. The body to which
he was answerable was national, and the community
to which he belonged, in his mercantile capacity,
was not a town, but a distinct part of the population
of the whole country. In other words, a class has
emerged into view, distinguishable not merely by
the fact that the individuals composing it are en-
gaged on pursuits too large for the financial com-
petence of the feudal system, but still more by the
fact that their trading interests are those of a class
and not of a town.

The chief Staple was, of course, the Staple of
Wool ; the wool trade was the chief factor in the rise
of this new class. But the second main character-
istic of the commercial legislation of the fourteenth
century reveals to us a new conception of business
in general which was tending to consolidate the new
class. This is the perpetual recurrence of statutes
asfainst enerossinof, or wholesale trading^. While the
Ordinances of the Staple give us some measure of
the importance and weight of the new class, the laws
against engrossing give us the key to the methods
and ideas which had raised this class out of the

40 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

mass of the community, and inserted them, so to
speak, between the two strata of manorial lords
and manorial tenants. As long as the trader was
also a workman, as long as his differentia from other
inhabitants of the manor was no more than the exer-
cise of skill upon material brought to him to be made
up for a payment, or bought by him to be made up
and sold, instead of exercise of skill upon the land,
he remained capable of classification under the old
heads by a stretching of the manorial conception.
But he had soon passed out of those limitations.
The conception of profit began to replace that of
payment for the exercise of skill. Among the actual
workers at a trade the weavers probably set on foot
the change. Some of them, instead of weaving the
wool brought to them, and then handing it over to the
fuller and the dyer, would conceive the idea of buying
wool, weaving it, paying the fuller and the dyer to
work upon the fabric, without handing over posses-
sion, and finally taking it back to sell at an inclusive
price which was not merely the cost of the three pro-
cesses.^ In other branches of trade the chanofe was
slightly different. It consisted of going behind, so to
speak, the normal proceedings of open market. It
would occur to some one that, instead of the country-
man or countrywoman coming in with a supply ot
poultry to sell individually, the poultry might be
bought in the mass, and then retailed so as to pro-
duce a profit on the transaction. Similarly with the
farmer's crops; instead of waiting for corn to be
brought thrashed to market, a townsman might buy
' Ashley, " Woollen Industry," p. 60.

J

THE XIIIth AND XIVth CENTURIES 41

it on the farm, use what he required, and retail the
rest. That such operations were actually being carried
out in the thirteenth century is clear from the Court
Rolls, for instance, of Norwich/

Now here we have at work a clearly financial'^
conception, that of trading profit. It depended upon ^
a new idea of the power of money. To put the case
baldly, the possession of money by one man was
seen to be an opportunity for taking advantage of
another man who had none. This was a change,
distinct, even if slight, from conditions in which the
only advantage had been that one man had the
power to buy while the other had the need to sell.
For that position is always rectified in some degree
by the advantage which the possessor of an article
has over the man who wants to acquire it. When
money, as money, begins to enter into trading trans-
actions, the difference is that the buyer is handling
a fluid resource against a rigrid resource. He has
no need to buy any specific thing. As long as the
old system prevailed, the grower of wool knew that
the weaver required his goods, and the tanner knew
that the cordwainer required leather. Consequently
the seller had an absolute need to work upon for
securing his price. But when a man arrived who
proposed to buy either wool or leather in quantity,
not in order to work it up for sale as finished goods,
but in order to sell it again, the wool-grower and the
tanner knew that, if either refused to sell, the offer
of purchase would not necessarily be pursued but
might be transferred to some other class of goods, or
^ Hudson, "Leet Jurisdiction in Norwich," pp. Ixxiv, 12, etc.

42 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

merely withheld. True, it would still be open to the
wool-grower or the tanner to deal with the weaver
or the cordwainer. But here the general advance of
trade came in upon the side of the middleman dealer.
Everything- was being done upon a larger scale.
The supplies of raw material were increasing fast,
and consequently the possessors of them would
have to work harder to retail them unless the middle-
man saved them from the necessity of waiting for a
craftsman customer. At the same time manufacture
was increasing, and the craftsmen were ready for a
change whereby they could purchase material in
greater bulk than the individual trader could supply.
The statutes against engrossing, upon which we
are proceeding, do not, indeed, concern such trans-
actions as these. They relate almost entirely to
food supplies. The reason for this is fairly clear.
While both sides to transactions in material for
manufacture mio-ht derive benefit from the middle-
man, only one side could find a convenience in such
operations in connection with food supplies. In the
case of manufacturers, the consumer of material was
ready to buy in bulk ; in the case of food the con-
sumer had no such requirements. To him therefore
it was entirelv a disadvantacre that someone should
intervene between him and the seller, especially if
the intervention amounted to a monopoly, as in the
small towns of the time it must often have done.
Hence the Statutes deal almost exclusively with
food supplies. But it cannot be supposed that deal-
ing in these would be the only form of employment of
capital. We shall come later on to specific proof that

THE XIIIth AND XIVth CENTURIES 43

the middleman existed in the wool trade, and it is
reasonable to suppose that he made his appearance
in all forms of trade about the same time.

Why, it may at this point be asked, did he appear
at all? i\s Miss Alice Law put the question, in an
inquiry into " The English Nouveaux Riches in the
Fourteenth Century,"^ "How did the insignificant
peddling English traders of the eleventh, twelfth,
and early thirteenth centuries so suddenly develop
into the important political plutocracy of the four-
teenth, a plutocracy so powerful that at one time it
threatened to furnish the English constitution with
a fourth estate, that of the merchants?" The answer
given by Miss Law, and supported by other his-
torians, is singularly significant for our purpose. It
is, in effect, that the expulsion of the Jews and the
downfall of the Templars brought out into circula-
tion a great quantity of hoarded money. Hitherto
an actual lack of coined money had been, she re-
marks, the chief difficulty in the way of trading on a
considerable scale. The removal of the Jews and
the Templars not only liberated this money, but also
removed the chief repositories for money. The only
organizations which could take their place were
the municipalities and the gilds. Both these kinds
of organizations were composed of traders ; and the
consequence was that money, as it accumulated, was
in its accumulated, as well as its circulating, form at
the disposal of the trade. In other words, we are
on the way now to a conception of credit, as well
as of wholesale cash transactions.

^ Royal Hist. Society's Transactions, ix, 49.

44 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

We come, then, to this coincidence — that at the
period at which legislation is so largely concerned
with a single kind of national activity as to force us
to the conclusion that a new class was embodying
itself in the community, there was a great increase
in the currency of money. We have also this coincid-
ence— that the appearance of the new class, from
whatever point of view it is regarded, has always
struck the historian as a sudden chano-e in English
life, and that the increase in the currency was ex-
tremely sudden, resulting as it did not from any
progress or gradual development of policy, but from
such drastic action as the expulsion of the Jews and
the dissolution of the Knights Templars. There is
surely more than an accidental connection between
such striking circumstances as these. It would seem,
on the face of it, to amount to a real foundation for
our definition of the English Middle Class. Some-
thing had certainly happened to enable the people
who had long been tending towards a new political
and social attitude to take form and character as a
class; some new instrument of activity had been
provided. Clearly we find such an instrument in
/ current money. No other circumstance of the moment
suffices to account for a great enlargement of trade
and trading methods. There had been no remark-
able political changes ; as we have already seen, the
slow decline of feudalism had not really thrown up
a new class, but had rather brought about a certain
formlessness and vagueness of outline which had
prevented such a development. There had been no
particular advance in education or general intellig-

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH 45

ence; it is not until a later period, when the char-
acteristics of the Middle Class were quite definitely
marked, that the possession of some artistic as-
pirations and interests begin to appear. Wealth
preceded, and did not follow, the cultivation of
intelligence. Again, there had been no great ad-
vance of inventiveness, of skill in handicraft, or of
new ideas in the material of trade. There had, of
course, been some development in those respects.
The quarrel with Flanders, and the consequent pro-
hibition of the export of w^ool to that country, had
led to a more extensive and more successful estab-
lishment of weaving in England. The tendency of
the upper classes towards a greater luxury had, no
Idoubt, produced a better market for elaborate per-
gonal appointments and all kinds of food supplies.
The Crusades had introduced finer notions of what
mio-ht be brougrht from distant lands to make idle
lives more comfortable and more highly flavoured.
But none of these developments would account for
the suddenness of the rise of the trading class, even
if they could be held to account for that rise in itself.
The sudden thing had been the liberation of hoarded
/money. It was equally the operative influence in
the change. For whatever advances may have oc-
curred in skill, or in market supplies and demand,
the point for which we have to account is the way in
which the trader is now to be found dealing with
these. It is not merely a more extensive way. It is,
in the conception of wholesale commerce. Staples,
and customs, a different way; and the instrument
which made it different was money.

46 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

There are two curious considerations to be ad-
duced in support of the belief that the new instru-
ment, and not any new ideas, caused the rise of the
Middle Class. The first is that this Class had loner
established itself in the community before any such
idea as joint-stock trading occurred to it. The char-
acteristic combination of traders in the fourteenth
century is not the Market Gild (which was already
declining in importance) nor even the Craft Gild;
but the Social Gild. The returns furnished in com-
pliance with Richard II's proclamation, requiring
information as to the rules, duties, liberties, and pos-
sessions of the oilds throuo-hout the kingdom, show
that the majority of them date from the latter half
of the fourteenth century, a few, such as those at
Norwich and Lynn, dating from the earliest years
of that century. These gilds had no ostensible
trading purposes. Their rules and formulas were
those of a kind of friendly society. The members
met periodically for " a time of drynkyn "; they were
under certain obliorations to maintain lights in the
parish churches, to arrange for burials of deceased
members and masses for their souls, and to subscribe
towards the support of impoverished members. No
doubt, at the meetings there would be discussion of
trading affairs and of the town markets and shops;
but these gilds were not in any sense trading cor-
porations. They may possibly have served also as
repositories for a member's surplus money; but as
the money would in that case be idle, this is a retro-
grade rather than a forward movement. In fine, so
far as the fourteenth century trader had any widely-

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH 47

spread notions of combination, he combined not to
employ his money but to find a certain social and
charitable outlet for it. The supply of money, in
fact, found him without any real conception of what
capital meant, except in the most direct sense as a
hoarded possession.

The second consideration is that the possibilities
of the foreign exchanges were completely mis-
apprehended. Nicholas Oresme, writing about the
year 1373, propounded the theory that the coinage
is the property, not of the sovereign, but of the com-
munity; so that, while the sovereign's right to manu-
facture the coinage is unquestioned, he has no right
to make a gain out of it. Oresme had in mind, not
only actual tampering with the fineness of the cur-
rency, but also the sovereign's command of the
business of money-changing. This depended upon
the principle that, as it was the business of the Crown
alone to mint money, all foreign money coming into
the kingdom and exchanged there must come directly
into the possession of the Crown to be re-minted.
The fact that such a principle was in existence shows
how primitive were the general views of money at
the period of the rise of the Middle Class. It was
regarded as bullion, pure and simple. Foreign
money was so much silver for coining. In one sense
the traders of the fourteenth century had laid hold
of a notion of what foreign exchanges might mean.
The statutes by which the right of money-changing
was made a monopoly of the Crown show that others
were engaged in the business. The English trader
took his ideas on the subject from the foreigners —

48 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

chiefly Italians — upon whom the Crown had been
depending for large financial operations, and who
finally made way for the rising English trader after
the downfall of the Bardi and the Peruzzi in 1345.
But he took the ideas at their simplest form. All
that he did was to see that coined money could be
made a subject of sale and purchase, just as any
other material could. He did not see — and for many
generations yet failed to see — that this was not a
true trading conception of the exchange. He led
the finances of his country into almost inextricable
difficulties from time to time by the imperfection of
his grasp of the subject. He seemed to himself and
to others to be pursuing a financial idea, when he
was in fact pursuing only a new kind of peddling.
Again he showed that he had acquired the facile use
of money, before he had arrived at any wide estima-
tion of its potentialities.

But if the fourteenth-century trader had acquired
no intellectual grasp of the meaning of money, it is
at least clear that he had become aware that he had
in his control something which might be turned
entirely to his advantage. The Crown and the
nobility, it is true, had the use of money, just as the
middle class had. But the real circulating area of
money, the reservoir to which it always flowed back,
was trade. Money was drawn downwards to some
extent by the producers of goods and food-supplies ;
but from them it speedily went either to the upper
classes in payment of rent, or to the traders at the
markets. It was drawn upwards by taxation or by
borrowing ; but again it returned to the middleman

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH 49

who provided the necessities and luxuries of life.
The muscular organ of the monetary circulation
was, even at this early stage, the Middle Class. We
have already seen, in the case of the Firma Burgi,
one instance of the readiness of the tradingf asso-
ciations to lay hold on their opportunities. Another
may be found in the way in which, after the first
few assessments for the tax on movables, the towns
managed to compound with the Royal Exchequer
for a fixed payment/ This was nothing less than
an expedient for dodging taxes. The well-to-do
burgess, fully aware of the rate at which his per-
sonal wealth was increasing, was naturally apprehen-
sive of the tax on movables. His increased wealth
synchronized with a decline in the wealth of the
nobility;'^ and the obvious prospect was that taxa-
tion would be aimed more and more at his kind.
If the original system of assessment by Royal Com-
missioners had continued unaltered, the towns must
have paid more and more toll to the Exchequer.
But again, as in the case of the Firma Bicrgi, the
townsfolk were clever enough to see that, in the
possession of coined money, they had a valuable
lever for shifting taxation. The assessment was a
lengthy and cumbrous process; while the need for
money, when it arose, was usually urgent. For the
sake of receiving lump sums without difficulty, the
Exchequer was willing, therefore, to compound with
the towns. The assessment became a dead letter.
The amount that the town was to contribute was

' Cunningham, "Growth of English Industry," i, 295.
^ Ibid., p. 384.

E

50 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

fixed, and the inhabitants virtually assessed them-
selves to raise it. What this meant behind the
scenes may be judged from one or two cases of a
rather later date in which we have some oppor-
tunity of comparing a man's wealth and his con-
tribution to taxation. John Hall was an extremely
wealthy citizen of Salisbury in the fifteenth century.
He built himself a house of which one magnificent
portion still remains. He owned three manors, be-
sides his property in the town; and his personal
possessions were of great value. In 1444 he con-
tributed to the city's assessment of ^40 the sum of
6s.; and in 1449, being then Alderman, he contri-
buted to an assessment of ^66 the sum of ^i 6s. 8d.^
At Totnes, in 1449, when the citizens were spending
money upon a new bell-tower for the church, there
were only three people in the town who paid as
much as 15. Sd. for the tax of that year.-

It is indeed probable that the social gilds flour-
ished almost as much by reason of their usefulness
in the dodeins: of taxation as for their ostensible
purposes. The proclamation of Richard II, to which
we owe so much knowledge of the gilds, was not,
of course, issued without a cause. The Crown would
have had no particular interest in details about these
organizations, unless there had been ground for sus-
picion that citizens were depositing with the gilds
property which they did not wish to declare to the
world at large. If a Royal Commissioner happened
to visit, it was convenient for the burgesses that

' Duke, "Prolusiones Historicae."

' Mrs. J. R. Green, "Town Life," i, 160.

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH 51

the town should not, as a community, be seen to
be In possession of more than a moderate wealth.
Individuals, too, found it useful to have some back
door, so to speak, through which money, which they
did not wish to confess to, might be withdrawn. The
gilds suited both purposes. The principal people
of the town would belong both to the town corpora-
tion and to the gild. As the town corporation they
would take care to own no more than they could
help. As the gild they would hold the rest of their
property comfortably secure. Probably, too, the
gild served the same kind of purpose in connection
with the religious duties of the members. The
Church would make a good many demands upon
townspeople, in proportion to their wealth. The
keeping of lights burning at the altars, the support
of the poor, and other such items of expense would,
in the absence of gilds, have fallen more or less
proportionately upon individual members of the
community. Rich individuals really escaped doing
their fair share by membership of the gilds. Each
gild undertook to keep certain lights burning, and
to perform other charitable acts ; and no doubt the
richer members, who might have done more, would
take shelter behind the duties they assisted to carry
out as members of gilds.

A good deal has been said about the charitable
aspect of these organizations; but this is certainly
not the only aspect in which they should be con-
sidered. They do, indeed, cast no small illumination
upon the mind and outlook of the earliest Middle
Class. The usual regulations provided, beyond the

52 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

religious duties of maintaining lights and attending
certain services, for periodical meetings (generally
called "times of drinking") ; for the assistance of
sick members and the maintenance of those who
had fallen into poverty ; and for the seemly burial
of dead members and the purchase of masses for
their souls. Women, whether married or unmarried,
were admitted to the gilds on equal terms with
men. There were rules ao-ainst enterinp; " the ale-
chamber" except at the times of drinking; and in
some cases, as at Cambridge, there were arrange-
ments for assisting members, in cases of theft or
robbery, to bring the delinquent to justice, ^

Now we can perceive, behind all these formulas,
a class carving out its own position, and doing so
(this is the important point) on its own lines and its
own authority. Such formalities as the constitution
of the town, the right to hold a market, and so on,
were not rebelled against; the new class was prob-
ably too clever for that. It avoided direct conflicts
with overlords. But it devised quite early the idea
of reducing a formality to a mere formality. We
have seen it doing so in the case of the tax on
movables. Instead of quarrelling with the principle,
the Middle Class reduced that assessment to an
empty form. It proceeded to do the same thing
with its management of local affairs. It obtained
its charter with due appearance of humility; but it
proceeded to set up organizations whereby the town
council became a formal instrument, the real wealth
residing in private combinations, and the real power

^ See "English Gilds," edited by Toulmin Smith, passim.

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH 53

in the meetino- of those orofanizations. A Sfood in-
stance of the truth about town o-overnment can be
found in the Court Rolls of Norwich.^ These Rolls
record the presentations before the Court Leet of
offenders ao^ainst the various statutes forbiddine
engrossing and forestalling, offenders against the
Assizes of Bread and Ale, etc., etc. The same
offenders constantly appear. Almost every well-to-
do housewife baked and brewed, and was fined for
breaking the assize. The fish sellers, the poulterers,
the tanners turn up again and again for a fine of
two shillings, or four shillings, for forestalling. Very
frequently indeed the fines are remitted; and this
happens so often at the instance of people known to
have been notable in Norwich that Mr. Hudson
comes to the conclusion that a body of substantial
citizens sat as a kind of court of assessors, of which
the Bailiffs of the Manor formed the executive
portion.^ Now what does all this repeated impos-
ing of fines, with frequent remission, convey to us?
Simply that, while avoiding open rebellion against
the Statutes governing trade, the Middle Class
quietly reduced them to a formality. The fines
were levied, but were transformed into a sort of
licence duty for continuing the operations. "It
seemed," as Mrs. J. R. Green has remarked, "be-
yond the wit of man to put English traders into a
difficulty which was not by their very touch turned
into a new opportunity for gain."^

It is possible to perceive in these developments,

^ " Leet Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich," by Wm. Hudson.
* Ibid., p. xcii. ' "Town Life," ii, 215.

54 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

as some writers have done, the signs of a shrewd-
ness, a patience, and a capacity for compromise in
the Middle Class which were to issue in a Q-Ut for
local government, and, by way of that training
ground, an honourable place in national politics.
But this is rather too kindly a view to take. It is,
of course, impossible to deny the exhibition of
shrewdness. But the whole outlook of the trading
class at this time had one prevailing characteristic
which prevents our regarding it as inspired by
anything like a broad conception of policy ; it was
pre-eminently secretive, jealous, and apprehensive.
We discern in the Middle Class at its origin a
quality which it has never wholly lost, in spite of
many modifications. Its instinct was to live in a
narrow circle, to keep trading profits in the hands
of a group, to make town administration a closely
limited entity, to do anything rather than throw
experience into the common stock. This atti-
tude, it is but fair to remember, was not entirely
the fault of the trader. The vagueness of the
system of taxation, which amounted to something
not much better than getting, b}- any means, all
that could be got; the perpetual interference by
Parliament with new methods of trading that had
too many possibilities of profit to be abandoned,
■even at the behest of statutes ; the bewildered
annoyance of a mass of labouring people and
artisans, who found the old order, with its sharply-
defined regulations, giving place to a new world of
competition in which money carried the day — all
this constituted a situation in which the trader, the

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH 55

new factor in the community, felt that wariness was
his most urgent need. The corollary of this need
was to localize all his affairs, all his responsibilities,
and all his interests, as far as possible; to keep them
immediately under his eye. The result in some
directions was about as stupid as could be. The
very men who are credited with shrewdness in the
origin of local government were maintaining local
partisanship to a degree at which it became dis-
astrous. The very men who were quietly com-
promising the statutes that interfered with their own
wholesale trading were keeping alive an exclusive-
ness of local markets which in the end practically
killed the trade of a great many towns. Besides
the laws against engrossing, the Statute Book of
Edward Ill's reia^n contains several laws directed
against "people of the cities, boroughs, ports of the
sea, and other places " who cause inconvenience to
subjects of the realm by preventing foreigners from
bringing in "wine, aver du pois, and other livings
and victuals," or only allowing such goods to be
sold to members of gilds, who, of course, made
their own profit on the re-sale. This kind of thing,
combined with the tendency to coalesce into social
gilds, really gives the measure of the early Middle
Class. It had no brains for anything that hap-
pened outside the limits of a known group of per-
sons.

We have already seen that the expansion of
general prosperity among trades in the fourteenth
century was due chiefly to a great liberation of
coined money, rather than to any new ideas of

56 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

trading methods or any new conception of the
merchant's business. It remains to be noted that
the wealthiest men of the country owed their riches
simply to the more or less accidental possession by
England of vast supplies of a certain raw material —
wool. The Englishman dealt with this resource in
the most uninspired way. As early as the thirteenth .

century Italians were carrying on operations here of I

a kind that had never occurred to the Engflishman.
They were arranging the purchase of wool from
something like two hundred monastic establishments,
and sending the material in bulk to their principals
in Italy.' The Englishman had not advanced be-
yond the idea of sending his wool to the Staple,
and selling it there, more or less piecemeal, to the
buyer. When we pride ourselves upon the great-
ness and magnificence of our wool merchants, we
are apt to forget how much greater cause for pride
there would be in those nations which, lacking the
wealth of material, had the commercial genius that
enabled them to buy it. By contrast with them, the
magnificent Englishman becomes almost as passive
as his own sheep; he merely handed out the sup-
plies from his wool-sheds. He could hardly help
making money.

That is the main key to the position of the
Middle Class at this period. It was not only the
wool-merchant who could hardly help making
money. For one reason or another — partly because
there was more money to spend, partly because
foreign trade was at last developing and the impulse
' See the "Hundred Rolls," i, 353, 357, 396; ii, 4, 15.

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH 57

left by the Crusades was taking full effect, largely
because a taste for luxury in food and all the ap-
pointments of life had grown up ' — the general trader
must have been on the whole not far behind the wool-
merchants, if a few famous cases of wool-merchant
princes be excepted. Before the end of the fourteenth
century the people of the Middle Class had be-
gun to take a part in affairs of State. They had
begun rather reluctantly, still under the instinct to
keep the knowledge of their wealth as much to
themselves as possible. When a subsidy of 30,000
sacks of wool was voted to the Crown in 1339, and
the King offered the purchase of the wool first to
English merchants, hardly anyone came forward.
Fifteen men purchased but 3,000 sacks. Then a
group of merchants, prominent among whom were
Walter of Chiriton and John of Wesenham, undertook
the whole business. Their profits were probably
large enough (they had bought at 7 J marks the sack)
even before the price of wool was raised by statute
in 1343 to 12 or 13 marks a sack. Miss Alice Law
thinks that the group which finally came to terms
with the King did so on the more or less express
condition that he should abandon the Italian finan-
ciers— the Bardi and the Peruzzi — upon whom he
had hitherto relied, and carry on fiscal operations
for the future by the medium of Englishmen.' This
may be so; but from all we know of the English

^ See, for instance, the statute " De Cibariis Utendis," lo
Edw. Ill, St. iii, dealing with the mischief arising from extra-
vagance in food, so that rich men could not help their liege lord
or themselves in time of need.

^ Royal Hist. Society's Transactions, ix, 49.

58 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

merchant at this time, it would seem more probable
that the Crown, or its Exchequer officials, who
knew what the Italian genius for money had been
able to do, persuaded the Englishmen to make the
venture, by opening their eyes to the use that the
Italians would make of it. The EnoHshman was
afraid of anything that might reveal his possession
of money. We have the well-known story of the
Crown borrowing from certain Italians, and discover-
ing afterwards that the money had really been pro-
vided by Englishmen, who were ready enough to
take the profits, but would rather share them with
foreigners than come forward openly. This attitude
was, of course, bound to break down. Some few
men would have the intelligence to abandon it
frankly; and these may have schemed to supplant
the Italians in the confidence of the Exchequer.
For the rest, in all the prosperity of the fourteenth
century it would gradually become impossible to
pretend to lack of means. But traces of the attitude
can be found even when the burgess had bes^un to
take a share in Government. In the early part of
the century the merchants had made grants to the
Crown independently of Parliament, such as the
grant of 4s. a sack on wool in 1343, and the tunnage
and poundage of 2s. a tun on wine and 6d. a pound
on goods in 1347. In 1372 we have the curious
incident of the Black Prince retaining the city and
borough members of the Parliament of that year,
after the knights of the shire had departed, and in-
ducing them to renew the tunnage and poundage of
1 37 1. The Parliament as a whole was indignant;

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH 59

but in the end confirmed the grant for three years.
There were, of course, certain reasons for the action
of the Black Prince. The repeal in 1344 of the
ordinances fixing the price of wool had left the price
to be a matter for adjustment between the seller
and the buyer. Consequently the merchant could
put upon the grower's shoulders the incidence of
any tax ; with the result that the merchants raised
no objection to taxes, while Parliament, as a whole,
strongly opposed them in the interests of the wool-
erowers. But while allowance may be made for
these facts in the case of wool, the general influence
at work in the relation of the Middle Classes to the
Crown would be that same secretiveness which was
evident in their local affairs. They would prefer to
offer subsidies and arrange taxes behind the back of
Parliament, because by so doing they kept within
that narrow circle of known people and known
affairs which they hated to leave. They felt safe in
anything that they dealt with directly. Taxation
questions in open Parliament they would avoid if
they could.

It is probable that even their greatest movement
in this century was not altogether free of the prevail-
ing- taint in their outlook. Full credit must indeed be
given to them for the origins of a more general
education in England. The fourteenth century wit-
nessed the foundation of grammar schools in many
parts of England. At Thetford (1328), North-
allerton (1327), Exeter (1332), Melton Mowbray
(1347), Hereford (1384), Wotton - under - Edge
(1385), Penrith (1395), and Oswestry (1399) new

6o THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

scholastic foundations made their appearance.' Now
it would appear from our detailed knowledge of a
later date, that such schools were under the con-
trol of town gilds ; ^ and we know of one case,
very shortly after the period with which we are now
dealing, of a school founded with the express pro-
vision that the master was not to be in holy orders.^
It is not too much to conclude that the Middle
Class instinct for keeping to its own circle was at
work in this direction also. Hitherto education had
been the appanage of the Church; the process of
education for a poor man's son had meant that he
learned to become lettered, when he placed his
services either with some lord, or with the friars.*
There could hardly have been any reason why this
sort of education should not have suited those of
the Middle Classes who wished to have their
children educated; the curriculum at the schools
they did set up would not have been different from
that of the church schoolmasters. But to send their
sons to these masters would have been to open their
carefully guarded community of interests to the eyes
of another class, a class essentially connected with
the nobility and the Crown ; and the Middle Classes
preferred to originate their own educational system.
This, it should be admitted, does not in any
serious way derogate from the admirable nature of

^ See Furnival's Preface to "Manners and Meals."
^ Leach, "Educational Charters," p. 376; "Early Education
in Worcester," pp. 176-7.

' Leach, " Educational Charters," xxxvii.
* See Piers Plowman, "Crede."

EFFECTS OF INCREASING WEALTH 6i

the work thus set on foot. The foundation of the
Grammar Schools is, indeed, one great indication
of the extent to which the Middle Class was settling
for itself its place in the national life, laying the
foundations broad, envisaging a characteristic exist-
ence owing nothing to the hereditary nobility or the
Church, and deciding for itself what the extent of its
duties and responsibilities should be. Its presence,
and the nature of its action, in Parliament, has sig-
nificances which have already been noted. There re-
mains one matter of the social standing of the Middle
Class which, though in itself slight, is not to be passed
over, since it marks the beginning of movements
with which we shall be much concerned in succeed-
ing centuries. By the end of the fourteenth century
we come upon the earliest memorial brasses with
effieies of civilians. The earliest of all is that at
Wimington, Bedfordshire, a brass of 1391 represent-
ing John Curteys, Mayor of the Staple, and his wife,
under a double canopy. At Northleach there is one
of uncertain date, but probably circa 1400, to a
woolman and his wife; while at Chipping Campden
there is the famous brass of 1401 to William Grevil,
"the Flower of the wool-merchants of all England."
In their day these brasses must have caused almost
as much talk as did the buying up of a blue-
blooded nobleman's country estates by a wealthy
tradesman in the early nineteenth century. Lords
and kniehts had longr had their effiories ; the first
men to hand themselves down to posterity, not in
mail and plate-armour and heraldic surcoats, but
frankly in the plain furred gown of the civilian,

62 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

with an inkhorn in place of a sword, and a sheep
and a woolpack at the feet instead of a lion,
must have been men very proud of their position,
very self-confident, and perhaps not a little self-
assertive. Their brasses at least convey to us how
securely the Middle Class was establishing itself in
the State.

CHAPTER IV

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY — THE CRAFT GILDS' MISUSE
OF CURRENCY MIDDLE CLASS IDEALS

W /'E have now reached a period at which the
VV development of the Middle Class began to
affect the national life profoundly in many ways.
Yet since there was no startling manifestation of
change — since England never produced a Jacques
Cceur, who had eighteen houses in different parts of
France and spent 100,000 crowns on a single one of
them — the significant, and, in some matters, the
dangerous, tendencies of the INIiddle Classes in the
fifteenth century have hardly been properly ap-
praised. Trading wealth increased, towns settled
down under corporate government, the great London
Livery Companies and the Companies of Merchant
Adventurers gave commerce a stately and credit-
able appearance ; and for the most part history has
taken these facts at their face value. The period is
one in which the historian certainly has plenty to
deal with in other directions. He can but discern
in the main stream of constitutional struggles and
foreign politics the mere outlines of social affairs.
But the processes which were at work beneath the
obvious prosperity and advancement of the trading
classes will be found, upon more detailed considera-
tion, to have involved an attitude on the part of

63

64 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

these classes which had serious consequences for
the nation.

The first and, in some respects, most far-reaching,
characteristic of middle-class development during "^
the fifteenth century was that a kind of labour/^
entirely dependent upon employment by capitalists
is for the first time clearly discernible. If we rely
chiefly upon the conditions of the wool trade for our
facts, the reason is that this trade was by far the
most flourishing and highly organized; and we
therefore have more knowledge concerning it than
we have in any other connection. Broadly speaking,
the system in the thirteenth century, which lasted
in the main into the fourteenth, was that the original
owner of the wool sold it to the spinner; the spinner
sold his yarn to the weaver, and the weaver sold his
cloth to the clothier. In other words, each operation
was an independent source of profit and an inde-
pendent area of competition. With the increase of
money during the latter half of the fourteenth
century, a difierent system had come into vogue.
The clothier began to buy wool wholesale, delivering
it by weight to the spinners, whom he paid for their
work upon it, receiving back irom them by weight
a quantity of yarn which he then handed on to
the weaver, from whom he received cloth. Now
this change, though a considerable one, left the
spinners and weavers in some degree masters,
though of a subordinate kind. The change of the
fifteenth century was that the capitalist clothier
owned the looms upon which the cloth was made,
and the weaver sank to the status of a hired man.

THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY 65

As long as he possessed his own loom he could
work independently; when he used one of a number
of looms belonging to the clothier he had entered
upon the factory system.^

The great reality of this change is to be traced
in the profound difference between the gilds of the
fifteenth century and the earlier gilds. We have
already seen that the earlier gilds were remarkable
for their inclusion on equal terms of practically all
the working inhabitants of a town. It is impossible
to find in them any distinction of status between a
trader, a master, and a journeyman. That there
were differences between members we can discern
from such provisions, for instance, as that of the
Gild of St. Katherine at Lynn, which laid cer-
tain duties upon those brothers and sisters that
were lettered, and others upon those that were not.^
But we can discern no gradations of standing, and
no drawing of lines between one form of occupation
and another. With the fifteenth century, on the
other hand, we find such lines sharply drawn ; and
troubles begin to arise which have all the character
of disputes between capital and labour. Of the
actual creatine of distinctions we can have no better
instance than that of the Gild Merchant of New-
castle, which excluded from membership anyone
who had "blue nails" (these being a proof that the

^ This had actually begun as early as 1339 in isolated instances,
like that of Thomas Blanket of Bristol (see Cunningham, "Trade
and Industry," i, 437); but it can hardly be dated as a system
before the fifteenth century.

' " English Gilds," p. 20.

F

66 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

person worked with his own hands at dyeing) or any-
one who hawked his wares in the street. These are
obvious erections of barriers between the master-
man and the artisan. But even without such definite
regulations as these, we should have been able to
trace the serious change in the gilds from the
nature of the controversies that arose.

During the fourteenth century the gild merchant
had practically ceased to exist. The typical town
gild, as we have remarked in the last chapter, was
the social and semi-religious gild. But there also
came into being a number of craft gilds, formed
for the regulation of various trades. These were at
first the object of a good deal of suspicion and op-
position on the part of the substantial townsmen.
They controlled trade in several directions, ordain-
ing the price at which members were to sell goods,
the number of apprentices to be kept, the hours of
work, etc., etc. Yet they were probably in origin
not far removed from the spirit of the gild mer-
chant, or at least nearer to that spirit than to the
later capitalist spirit. This point has, indeed, been
a subject of controversy. It has been held by one
school that the craft gilds really marked the down-
fall of the old domestic system of trade and manu-
facture, the end of the household as a unit, and the
rise of the factory idea.^ Another school, however,
maintains that the craft gild was an organization^
more appropriate in character to the domestic than
to the capitalist system.' The truth may, perhaps,.

^ See, e.g., Unwin, " Industrial Organization."

" See, e.g., Cunningham, "Trade and Industry," i, 497.

ii\P

# ^\

GILDS' MISUSE OF CURRENCY 67

be that in the actual constitution of the gilds there
was nothing inherently inimical to the domestic
system; but that they contained latent germs of
the developments which were to overthrow that
system. Both schools of thought are, in fact, right ;
the former from the dynamic and the latter from
the static point of view. That there was no deliber-
ate intention of setting up a new system may be
concluded from the probability that in a good many
cases the craft gilds were practically subdivisions
of the gild merchant. This specifically happened
at Reading in the sixteenth century, when the gild
merchant was divided into five companies ;i and in
all likelihood it happened in effect in most of the
gilds merchant. It appears, indeed, an inevitable
process. As trade increased, its various branches
would tend to become more highly specialized.
Competition would also increase ; and the net result
would be that the weaver could no longer adapt
himself to rules that applied to a tanner, or the cord-
wainer to rules that suited a spinner. Yet at first
those craft gilds would have in view no purpose
essentially different from that of the gild merchant.
The main objects would be the same limiting of
competition, the same localizing of profits, the same
attempt to prevent undercutting. That they did
not start as capitalist organizations may fairly be
deduced from the early dislike of them manifested
either by the gild merchant, where that body still
survived, or by the town authorities in places which
had passed from the gild merchant to a form of in-
' Gross, "Gild Merchant," i, 118.

68 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

corporation. For these latter bodies, of whichever
kind they were, would be composed of the substantial
members of the town, who would have no objection
to gilds which practically consisted of themselves in
another capacity. It is to be concluded that the
craft gilds were so composed of masters and in-
dependent workers and journeymen as to cut across
the growing tendency of the older organizations
to represent the combined interests of money, pure
and simple, rather than the pursuits in which the
money was made.

But a curious change came over the relations of
the gilds and the town authorities. As Mr. Hudson
briefly puts it, in the fourteenth century the trade
gilds were objected to, as a form of private regula-
tion of industry which interfered with the interests
of the general community, whereas in the fifteenth
century no one could be a citizen unless he was a
member of a trade gild.^ This is a remarkable re-
versal of opinion. Partly it may have been due to
that settling down of the towns under corporate
government, which was mentioned at the beginning
of this chapter. The authorities came to see that
the gilds might afford them a useful machinery for
keeping order, for collecting dues, for the proper
controlling of the markets, and so on." But from
the rapidity with which the character of the gilds
began to change it would appear that a reason of at
least equal importance was that the master-men and
capitalists had been shrewd enough to see in the

^ " Leet Jurisdiction in Norwich," p. xxxviii.
^ Mrs. Green, " Town Life," ii, cap. 6.

GILDS' MISUSE OF CURRENCY 69

gilds the means of consolidating their position. It
must not be forgotten that the increase of wealth
and the general advance in trade must have affected
not the masters alone, but also the men. With so
much employment, the workmen no doubt began to
acquire means in a small way; while at the same
time the expansion of the markets meant openings
for more and more masters. Now if the trade gilds
had remained for the most part representative strictly
of the working trades — if a man qua capitalist tended
rather to combine with his fellows in some fashion
apart from the gilds — then the latter would have
become unions of men with an eye to the trade in-
terests solely, and the larger and smaller men would
have remained side by side with the workmen.
Combination for their trade interests would have
been the chief consideration in face of a town organ-
ization endeavouring to break the rinof in the in-
terests of the consumer. But what would this have
involved inside the gild? There would have been,
with the growing prosperity, a perpetual rise of
workmen into masters, with a consequent enlarge-
ment of the area of profit-making; the work would
have been spread over a field of fairly sharp com-
petition. Probably something of this kind had already
happened ; and the capitalist turned his attention to
it. Instead of displaying hostility to the gilds he
pursued the subtler method of capturing them; and
regulations begin to appear which are obviously de-
signed to prevent easy passage from the working
ranks to those of the masters. The fees charged to
apprentices who wished, on the termination of their

70 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

indentures, to become free of the gild, were one
safeguard. A more effective one, probably, was that
which forbade anyone to take up the freedom who
had not ceased to work at his craft with his hands
for a year and a day ;^ this, with its obvious corollary
that the only way to freedom of the gild was to
possess enough money to spend a year in idleness,
must have limited pretty severely the passage up-
wards. Again, there were strict provisions as to the
number of apprentices a master might keep. In the
same spirit the masters began to welcome those
foreign immigrants of whom, in earlier times, they
had been so ready to make jealous complaint. For
the foreigner could hardly hope ever to enter the
market; there were statutes enough against his trad-
ing on his own account, and strict statutes, more-
over, enforcing residence in the house of his master.
It becomes, therefore, markedly characteristic of
the trade gilds in the fifteenth century that they
created a class of men virtually confined to the lower
ranks of labour, prevented from becoming free of
their craft, and constituting " a skilled but dismiss-
ible body." " Having first established their position
as against the Crown and the nobles, by processes we
have already examined, the Middle Classes now set
themselves to establish it against the lower ranks of
those with whom they had hitherto stood shoulder
to shoulder. The first opposition was that of skill
and the power to earn current money, against owner-
ship of the soil and the power to command feudal

' " English Gilds," p. cvii.

^ Mrs. Green, "Town Life," ii, cap. 4.

GILDS' MISUSE OF CURRENCY 71

services. The new opposition was that of the power
to accumulate current money against the mere pos-
session of skill. Thus, on both sides, money was
established in a thoroughly entrenched position. H ow
successfully the trenches had been made against
those who had first been allied with the risinsr
Middle Class may be seen in almost any published
study of municipal life in the fifteenth century. Take,
for instance, one of the most recent and most scholarly
— Miss Maud Sellers's edition of the " York Memo-
randum Book."^ Here is a complete municipal organ-
ization, working quite efficiently in its own way, and
with a highly developed gradation of citizenship.
Affairs were in the hands first of " the twelve," then
of " the twenty-four," then of " the forty-eight,"
with a broad classification for more general purposes
of the bo7is gents. Now who were all these people,
and how did they come to take rank ? The twelve
seem to have been of the wealthy merchant class,
principally mercers, though other traders were not
technically excluded. The twenty-four were mostly
of what Miss Sellers calls "mercantile crafts" —
goldsmiths, mercers in a smaller way, vintners, tan-
ners, skinners ; and the forty-eight mostly of manu-
facturing crafts — sadlers, hatters and cappers, taw-
yers, etc. There is no indication that election by
the general body of citizens had any part in con-
stituting these classes. The mayor and the bons
gents seem to have made appointments, and the
bons gents to have kept up their numbers by co-
optation. In a word, the towns, which had first been
^ Published by the Surtees Society, 191 2.

72 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

th.Q poini d' app2ii of the trading communities at large
against the lords of the soil, had by now become the
fortresses of a wealthy middle class. The skilled
workman, who had in the thirteenth century be-
longed to the broad classification of trader, as opposed
to the manor and its rural tenants, was now deposed
into a classification by himself. For the first time,
but not for the last, the Middle Classes, having cut
the trench that was to assert their position against
the landowner, turned their spades to the rear, and
cut another trench there. " No man of the people
could hope for (municipal) office. The ' rank of a
mayor ' and the ' rank of a sheriff' were recognized
things. So was the rank of ' good and sufficient
men.

London, as we have already had occasion to note,
was in all middle-class developments ahead of the
country, for obvious reasons. There the Companies
of Mercers, Grocers, Fishmongers, Drapers, Vintners,
had become, even before the end of the fourteenth
century, organizations virtually composed of rich
master-traders. They had ceased to pretend to con-
trol industry in the interests of good craftsmanship,
which was the primary object of the craft gilds,^ and
practically confined themselves to keeping labour well
in hand by rules as to apprentices and journeymen,
and increasingly hard stipulations as to qualifica-

^ Mrs. Green, " Town Life," ii, 249.

" E.g., the stipulations as to quality of material, amount of
work to be done in a specified time, prohibition of night work (as
apt to be secret), etc. (Cunningham, "Trade and Industry," i, 342;
" Munimenta Gildhallae," ii, Ixiv).

GILDS' MISUSE OF CURRENCY

/ o

tions for freedom of the Company. The consequence
is that the first labour troubles arose in London; a
proclamation against " congregations and convent-
icles " of workmen in hostility to the masters of
their crafts shows the kind of difficulty that was
arising, and shows too how completely the Middle
Class had succeeded in its quietly ingenious method
of capturing, rather than suppressing the craft gilds.
Indications of another kind may be found in the
sporadic attempts to found organizations entirely of
workmen. At Coventry early in the fifteenth century
the masters and the workmen came to an agreement
whereby the journeyman had a fraternity of their
own, paying a shilling a year, as a kind of acknow-
ledgment of the agreement, to the Weavers' Guild.
The journeymen tailors at Bristol also founded a
fraternity.^ These facts show that what had first
taken place in London was now taking place all over
the country. The workman was being thrust into a
class by himself. The old fellowship of the craft,
which had been his as much as his master's, had
split into two, the upper one an organization of
capital, and the lower one a mass of labour which
was sometimes allowed an organization, more or less
under suspicion, but was usually prevented from
any form of combination. Nothing shows more re-
markably the firm establishment of the Middle Class
than the fact that it could manoeuvre the working

^ It is interesting to note, as showing how distinctly this pro-
clamation was aimed at workmen, that it is the earliest known
proclamation in English.

" Cunningham, " Trade and Industry," i, 444.

74 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

men into a position in which any attempt on their
part to act as a craft union became illegal.

Nor was this the only advantage they secured
from their policy of " peaceful penetration " of the
gilds. They also accustomed the legislating classes
to the idea of trade combination so successfully that
a completely new kind of trade monopoly was estab-
lished without any apprehension of the dangers it
involved. Monopoly of a certain kind had, indeed,
been inherent in all early trading; it had been at the
very root of the development we have traced hitherto.
But it had always a specious reasonableness. The
old monopoly of the Market Gild had been deduced
from the old exclusiveness of the manorial system;
the monopoly of the Craft Gild had originally had
the appearance of a regulation of industry in the
interests of good work and public order. But with
the incorporation of the Merchant Adventurers in
1407 we see the Middle Class inventing a monopoly
that had not even the appearance of public interest.
The absence of any opposition to the incorporation
may have been partly due to the slow familiarizing
of the Crown and the upper classes with the idea of
trading Gilds, and partly perhaps also to the exist-
ence of the Wool Staple. The particular object of
the Staple — namely, the convenience of the system
for purposes of customs — would very likely be for-
gotten ; all that would be considered would be that,
if the wool merchants of different localities were
united in a form of trading combination, there was
no reason why merchants of other kinds should not
also unite. The Merchant Adventurers certainly

MIDDLE CLASS IDEALS 75

carried on the analogy; they set up in Hamburg,
and at other places in the course of time, a body re-
presentative of their interests which must have worn
much the same external appearance as the govern-
ing body of the Staple at Calais. But whereas there
was a good reason of public policy why the wool
traffic should pass through a known and circum-
scribed channel, for the collection of dues, there was
no such reason why every merchant should be for-
bidden to trade abroad except by joining the Mer-
chant Adventurers or paying a fine to them for all
his cargoes. This was a pure invention of monopoly.
No credit is now given to the idea that, without the
advantages conferred by monopoly, merchants could
not have carried on an overseas trade, or combined
their capital to venture cargoes. There had been,
and would have continued to be, combinations of
capital; partnership had long been a recognized form
of trading. One recent authority on economics says
point-blank that free enterprise always preceded the
chartered company.^ This being so, the incorpora-
tion of the Merchant Adventurers can mean only
one thing — that the Middle Class, which had from
the first displayed an instinct for localizing profits,
had, in its great development, and its greater degree
of class consciousness, perceived the possibility of
another kind of localizing of profits, keeping them,
not to this or that town so much as to a certain
stratum of the community.

Thus we already discern, behind the flattering
external appearances of the progress of trade during
^ Hewins, " Trade and Finance," p. xiv.

76 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

this century, two germs of evil — one, the creation
of a wholly dependent working class, and the other
the sanction of trading monopoly. When we pro-
ceed to consider the relation of the new Middle
Class to the affairs of national life, we perceive a
fresh source of danger. It had been essential to the
early development of this class that it should dis-
sever its interests from those of the traditional
masters of the realm. Its object, whether confronted
with the lord of the manor, or the Crown and the
officials of government, was to hold itself aloof. If
it was consulted about taxes, it was to be most
considerately consulted by itself. If it were to have
authority in local affairs, it would exercise it by
means of its own organizations. Now, in the fifteenth
century, while the Middle Class gave much of its
energy to establishing its position in its business
matters, it was partly enabled to do so by the sin-
gular completeness with which it had succeeded in
remaining, so to speak, outside the State while
existing inside the nation. This is not to sav that
there was not a certain amount of commercial legis-
lation, or that the authority of the Crown became a
dead letter. But the commercial legislation remained
in effect what it had always been hitherto — a spas-
modic attempt, renewed from time to time, to make
the trader the servant of the consumer. It was
dictated by the old belief that trade was a minor
activity of the communal life, directed to supplying
certain necessities felt by those who were really im-
portant, the landowner and his dependents. There
is an extraordinary air of futility about the continued

MIDDLE CLASS IDEALS ^^

statutes against engrossing, the regulation of the
price of fish, the prohibition of speculative purchase
of "futures" in wooV and the statutes against
usury. The most probable explanation of this futility
is that the Middle Class was as yet taking no part
in legislation. No doubt middle-class men were not
allowed to take much part. Such representatives
of the class as may have been in Parliament by this
time would not have, even if they wished to, much
voice in its decisions. But, judging by the usual
mental attitude of the traders, they would not wish
to take any active part in such matters. They had
discovered, as we have seen, how to meet com-
mercial legislation in the way that would make no
show of opposition, but would get behind the in-
tention of the law. They would continue to inflict
nominal fines, and regard these as a purchase of
permission to disregard the law. Moreover, in
matters of taxation, they pursued the line of conduct
they had already marked out. The renewed at-
tempt in 1463 to carry out an assessment of mov-
ables and to collect the tax by means of royal com-
missioners was met in the same way as the first
assessments. The towns repeated their policy of
offering a lump sum in commutation of the assess-
ment; and thus once more prevented the Crown
from obtaining, in the assessment returns, a real
hold upon the resources of the rich bourgeoisie.^

In such matters as these the new Middle Class
was deliberately keeping aloof from the system of

^ E.g.^ 4 Henry VII, c. 11.
^ Dowell, "Taxation," i, 149,

j2> THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

the State, and, either from nervous apprehension or
from a utiHtarian kind of acquiescence, accepting
the general failure to perceive in itself a new estate
of the community. One of the striking facts about all
the political writing, the songs and satires of the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, is that there is
no apparent recognition of the merchant class. The
realm consists of King and lords, and the Church;
yeomen and peasants. Somewhere hovering on the
flanks of these good men is a mysterious, gener-
ally dishonest, sly person, who perhaps stretches
cloth, or lends money upon usury. He is not re-
garded as belonging to any class ; but appears as
a kind of unexplained renegade from uprightness.
The idea that a real problem for statesmen was
arisinof in a class of men who were eno-ao^ed hon-
estly in pursuits, of which only the dishonest mani-
festations were thus attacked, entered no man's
mind.

Yet all the time, besides the subtle evil of the
abstention of the Middle Class from the activities
and duties of national life, there was a more press-
ing evil in the effect which the purely selfish and
parochial outlook of the merchants had upon the
currency. The fifteenth century was a period of
most urgent need for a proper comprehension of the
meaning and nature of money. America not having
yet been discovered, the supply of the precious
metals had undergone no development to meet
the enormous expansions of trade. Consequently,
problems that were already pressing in the fourteenth
century were, throughout the fifteenth, in a continual

MIDDLE CLASS IDEALS 79

condition of crisis. Gold coinage, which had been
in use in Italy as early as 1252, had not made its
appearance in England until some time later. But
by 1339 the existence of two precious metals in the
currency had caused trouble in the English Parlia-
ment. The principle of a ratio between gold and
silver being entirely unknown, the trading countries
of Europe simply fought one another for gold by
arbitrary fixing of standards. A good noble coined
at the silver ratio of 12.61 to i would be refused; it
would gravitate inevitably to a country where it
could be bought at a ratio of 11. 11 to i, which
France fixed in 1346. Again, there was the possi-
bility of clipping. A good English noble could be
"sweated" of some of its metal, and still be sold
abroad at a profit on the English ratio.

Parliament made various attempts to deal with
the difficulties of a perpetual drain either of gold or
silver. But all the attempts practically took the
form of merely forbidding the export of coin — a
rule which, considering the ease of concealing coin,
was impossible to enforce. In 141 1 it took the
bolder step of ordering a re-coinage, which made
the ratio 10.33 to i. France replied by a further
lowering of her ratio, and gold continued to disap-
pear almost as fast as it was coined. A statute of
1429 shows that merchants were actually refusing to
take silver in payment for goods, insisting upon hav-
ing nobles, half-nobles, or quarter-nobles, which they
promptly sold abroad at a profit of 2Qd. per noble. ^

^ I am indebted for these passages to W. A. Shaw's " History
of Currency."

8o THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

To the end of the century the difficulties remained
unsolved.

Now how do these facts affect our view of the
Middle Class? It had risen to power and wealth
solely by dint of the use of currency. Until money
became comparatively plentiful, trade was but pedd-
ling. Yet the Middle Class entirely failed to grasp
the elementary principles of its own most useful in-
strument. " Throughout," says Mr. Shaw, " there
was in existence one class who grasped the fact,
without any knowledge of the theory, and profited
by it — the merchant exchangers.^ Their operations
were merely arbitrary, and had no relation to the
ebb and flow of commerce. In fact, the trader
simply saw in the coinage one more opportunity for
private gain, and took advantage of it. He seems
to have had no understanding of currency as a
national concern. When a Parliamentary enquiry
was held, in response to a petition to Parliament in
1381, no help came from the people who should
best have known what suggestions to make. A few
witnesses, goldsmiths, and the like, urged that im-
ports should be made to balance exports, so that
no money need pass between different countries.
Others attacked the Pope's collectors of ecclesiastical
dues, and advised that the collectors should be
Englishmen, and payment be made in goods, not in
coin.^ No one perceived the root of the difficulty in
the two-metal standard. Nor did anyone perceive
that the difficulty was an indication of a new in-
fluence in national affairs. The legislator, like the

^ "History of Currency," p. 64. ^ Ibid., p. 51.

MIDDLE CLASS IDEALS 8i

writer of political songs, believed the realm still to
consist of its old estates, and was distracted by the
extraordinary behaviour of coined money. He had
not learned that, whatever he might do, there was
a powerful force at work which really had attracted
into its veins all the essential life of the nation.
Money was to him a convenience; to the trader it
was a saleable article, and it was bound to go where
a price could be given for it. But since the area of
its real activity was, so to speak, an unperceived,
almost subterranean one (and carefully kept so by
the shrewd preference of the Middle Class for keep-
ing themselves to themselves) Parliament was left
snatching here and there at eddies on the surface.
Those who caused the eddies kept out of sight.

It may perhaps be objected that it is unfair to
expect a display of public spirit in a class of men
whose position in the national life was quite unre-
cognizefd. But the real blame for their attitude to-
wards currency problems lies not so much in lack of
public spirit as in their mishandling of their most
useful instrument of advancement. They had no
conception of the dependence of trade and manu-
facture upon the existence of coined money. They
were quite willing to denude the country of currency,
if at any moment the national coinage could be sold
at a profit abroad. They had, in the end, to be
taught by a foreign nation the principle of using a
currency advantage as a lever for profitable trading
in general goods. Their only notion was to use it
directly for profitable trade in the mere metals of
currency.

G

82 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

One other considerable influence which the Middle
Class was by this time beginning to exert upon the
national life began to be perceived, though not fully
realized, by the end of the fifteenth century. Middle
Class men were becoming extensive landlords. What
this meant to the health of the body politic we shall
better be able to perceive w^hen we come to deal
with the succeeding century. For the present it will
be enough to give some instances which show to
what an extent trading wealth was being expended
in this way. The earliest extant English wills are
rich in such instances. Take such a will as that of
John Credy in 1426,^ in which he bequeaths "land
that Weston, draper, and I purchased in Frankyng-
ham and other places in Surre," together with parts
of lands and manors in Somerset, and lands and
tenements in Exeter. John Perfay, draper, of Bury
St. Edmunds, leaves in 1509 two closes and four
acres, 120 acres of land and meadow, a tenement
(not the one he lived in) with 28 acres of land and
meadow, six tenements with appurtenances, another
close, and various odd parcels of land, all of which
he specifically mentions as having been bought by
him." William Honyboom, dyer, of Bury, leaves in
1493 two tenements he had bought from John Smith,
a gentleman. John Nottingham, grocer, of Bury,
leaves a number of houses, granges and gardens in
Bury, and a manor near by.^ John Hall of Salisbury
had three manors near Southampton.* John Baret,
cloth merchant, of Bury, leaves houses in neigh-

' " Earliest English Wills." '" Bury Wills."

^ Ibid. * " Prolusiones Historicae," p. 310.

MIDDLE CLASS IDEALS S^

bouring villages, with some hundred acres of land,
and a tavern, besides various messuages in the
town.^ From these few instances, chosen at ran-
dom, it would not be rash to deduce that, upon the
whole, town property was beginning to accumulate
in the hands of the wealthy Middle Class, so that
the artisan, besides being brought under a new in-
dustrial system by the engrossing of looms, was also
being brought under a new social system by induce-
ments to part with his small freehold and become a
tenant by rent. The still wealthier people, three or
four perhaps in each town, were buying also manors
and demesne lands in the rural districts, but were
not, so far as we can discern, living in them at pre-
sent. John Hall, John Perfay, and John Baret all
lived in good-sized houses in the towns wherp they
traded. In other words, they did not buy manors
as yet in order to make themselves gentlemen, but
purely as sound investments — a fact which, while
admirable enough from one point of view, was to
have some rather disastrous results later on.

At the same time the older forms of accumulated
wealth had not gone out of use. These early wills
reveal an astonishing quantity of Middle Class
possessions in the precious metals. Sometimes
they are hoarded coin; John Nottingham details
monetary bequests in pounds sterling amounting to
;^40, in marks amounting to 384^^ marks, and in
shillings amounting to 207 shillings — a truly remark-
able hoard.- Yet such bequests of coin are as yet
rather rare; if a rich man had a few pounds or a
' " Bury Wills." ' Ibid.

84 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

few score marks to leave to the Church for masses
he would be well content. Silver utensils and orna-
ments are a far more common form of wealth. Thus
John Bathe of Bristol leaves in 1420 a silver beaker
with a blue enamelled knob, several chased silver
cups, a silver-gilt spice dish, some gold rings, and
two or three dozen silver spoons.^ John Baret
leaves, besides, spoons, cups, plates and dishes, and
*' a silver fork for g-reen p;inofer," two silver collars
" of the King's livery." Evidence of a different kind
is afforded by a foreign visitor who has left us his
impressions of England about the year 1500.^ He
remarks that there is no innkeeper, however poor
and humble, who does not serve his table with
silver dishes and drinking cups; and, in describing
the extraordinary display of wrought silver in
London he is careful to add that it " is not occa-
sioned by the inhabitants being noblemen or gentle-
men, being, on the contrary, persons of low degree
and artificers."

From the national and civic point of view the
rising Middle Class does not present itself during
this century in any very favourable light. It plays,
as we have seen, persistently for its own hand. It
had inserted itself between the landed aristocracy
and the labouring people, it had taken possession of a
domain filched equally from the rights of those two
classes. It refused all responsibilities that did not
tend to its own profit, and those which it undertook
in local government were manipulated to its own

' " Earliest English Wills."

^ "Relation of England," pp. 31, 42.

MIDDLE CLASS IDEALS 85

ends. But when all that has been said, it is necessary
to recognize the two ways in which the new Middle
Class worked for good. One has already been re-
ferred to — the foundation of the grammar schools.
During the fourteenth century the idea of education
had not, as a rule, progressed beyond the fee system.
The mark of the fifteenth century is the foundation
of endowed schools, and the conversion of fee-schools
into schools of free education.^ The list of founda-
tions of this century is a long one; but an even
more significant fact is the foundation of such
schools as Winchester and Eton. For these founda-
tions show that the Middle Class educational move-
ment, which was (as we have seen) partially, at
least, dictated by a determination to free the trading
classes as much from the Church's influence as they
were free already of aristocratic control, had by this
time alarmed the Church into a parallel movement.
Wykeham's foundation of Winchester, and the eccle-
siastical impulse towards the foundation of Eton,
are sufficient proof of the force and success of an
idea which had originated with the Middle Class.

The other great legacy of the early Middle
Class may be regarded as having arisen, less con-
sciously, but quite as really, from its detached and
self-centred position. The English cathedrals and
churches are rightly regarded as the great glory of
the English merchant. If we ask how they came to
be built in such richness and splendour two considera-
tions occur. Firstly, we see men of the Middle Class

^ E.g., at Stratford-on-Avon; Leach, "Educational Charters,"
p. xxxviii.

86 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

in possession of great wealth, proud of their wealth,
but still living in town houses which, even when they
were as magnificent as that of John Hall,^ afforded
but limited opportunities for expense. Secondly,
it is to be remembered that these men, keen of
brain in their own affairs, energetic, ambitious, were
barred from, or had kept themselves clear of,
political or Court or diplomatic interests. Such
active men were bound to find interests besides
those of their business pursuits, and they began to
find them in the direction of art. Civic pride, local
patriotism, launched the great buildings; the energy
and efficiency of business men turned itself to mak-
ing the structures fine. A class which had tended to
an amalgamation with the aristocracy would have
had less, alike of money and of ideas, lying idle for
such purposes. Their wealth would have gone
rather into the building of country houses or houses
in London; their ideas would have been frittered
away upon amusing pursuits, or engrossed in the
nation's military adventures. As it was, men of the
Middle Class reached the period of established leisure
with all that they had of money and brains upon
their hands, so to speak; and they found in church-
buildine an outlet for both — a orratification of their
pride, and an admirable opportunity for justifiable
ostentation.

There is one early will which, in its curiously

intimate revelation of a rich cloth-merchant's mind,

seems to let us into the secret of such activities as

these. It is the will of that John Baret, which has

^ " Prolusiones Historicae."

MIDDLE CLASS IDEALS 2>7

already been quoted. An amazingly long document,
it sets before us a Middle Class man of the fifteenth
century with a startling, and sometimes pathetic
vividness. Baret was evidently one of the new kind
of middle-class employers ; he had, adjoining the
garden of his house in Bury St. Edmunds, " a spin-
ning-house," where he would employ labourers at
his own looms. He was a believer in the value of
house property; he owned a good deal in Bury, and
had built another house himself " my newe house
with iii turrys of chemeneyes"; the mention of
chimneys shows that it must have been an up-to-
date house. He owned land which brought in a
rental of 1035". 4^. a year. His household gear was
good ; he had a number of beds, coverlets, blankets,
and sheets ; trenchers, dishes, and saucers of " old
vessell," and silver plate. He must have been
either unmarried or a childless widower, since he
provides for no relations but a nephew and niece.
Here we come to a curious side-light upon the
middle-class people of the time. They were still (in
these country towns at any rate) so far from adapt-
ing their mode of life to that of their betters that
Baret leaves his house to his nephew with a stipula-
tion that the niece shall have two rooms, with the
use of the kitchen, access to the garden, etc. A
man who owned so many houses (including a small
cottage in the garden which would have seemed
suitable for the niece) might have been expected to
make some rather more comfortable provision for
these relations. Evidently it never occurred to him
that they should live in any more spaciousness than

8S THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

he had hved in himself. The details of the arrange-
ments he made are enough to show that, rich as
such men mi^ht be in lands and houses and silver

o

plate, they did not yet think of living otherwise
than as tradesmen lived.

There are, however, one or two references in the
will which suggest that wealthy men of this class
were beginning to look above them. Baret ordains
that he shall be buried, not in the orave in St.
James's Church which he had already bought for
himself, but in a place close to it " near by where
Lady Schardelowe was wont to sit." There are
other sentences about this lady, upon which a little
romance might be woven ; Baret evidently had
had a tenderness for her, and it sounds as if he was
not sorry to leave in his will a record of his aspira-
tion towards a great lady. He has, indeed, himself a
signet of gold, with his arms. But at this period it is
necessary to be cautious in drawing deductions from
a merchant's mention of " his arms." There was
not, as yet, much inclination to pretend to gentility,
and the "arms" in such cases would often be the
arms of the Staple of Calais or some company of
traders, not a private coat-of-arms.^

Baret remembers his duty as a citizen ; he leaves
money for the repair of Rysbygate, but he hopes
that the side-pillars will not be moved, as they are

^ See "The Brasses of England," p. 172. Even in such a book
as the Black Prince's accounts, which would be written by a man
who should have had knowledge, the Prince of Wales's feathers,
which are only a badge, are referred to as "arms." So a trades-
man might have called a badge or a merchant's mark his "arms."

MIDDLE CLASS IDEALS 89

quite sound — an echo, no doubt, of some controversy
in the Council Chamber of the Bury Corporation.

It is in his bequests to the Church that Baret
really reveals the effects upon the Middle Class of
leisure, ample means, and energetic individuality.
He leaves money for a painted window in memory
of some friends of his, to be inscribed with verses
he has made ; for an image to be placed on the
pillar by which he used to sit in church ; and for
many embellishments of St. Mary's altar — a new
crown of gilt metal, mirrors to be placed between
the figures on the reredos, and money for the repair
and upkeep of " the chimes " and the altar. He
was most anxious that the chimes should never fail,
and if he had not left enough money for them, his
nephew was to pay more. The sexton receives a
bequest "so he do the chymes sing the Reqtcieni
Aeternam " for thirty days after Baret's death. The
reredos and retable of St. Mary's altar are to be re-
painted "with the balladys I made therefor." And,
finally, if an aisle were made in the church (evidently
a project under discussion) all kinds of precautions
were to be taken to preserve St. Mary's altar and
the pillar by Baret's tomb.

Have we not, in this unimportant instance, a clue
to the impulses behind the building of the famous
English churches? We can see Baret, comfortably
well off, stimulated from time to time by foreigners
with whom he came in contact, or perhaps spending
leisure moments after mass, talking in the church
to some artistic and enthusiastic priest. We can see
him at home, with little outlet for thoughts or ideas.

90 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

not dreaming of expressing them in much adorn-
ment of his house, since he was a merchant not a
gentleman ; but turning them in a direction in which
he could spend money on decorative arts without
beine lauehed at. And if, at the back of his mind,
was the feeling that he was also making glorious
the place " near by where Lady Schardelowe was
wont to sit," he is, perhaps, not less typical of his
age. The Middle Classes had won wealth, leisure,
and security. There was a brief pause at this height
before they risked security in order to advance them-
selves socially. But in the pause they occasionally
glanced in new directions, just as John Baret let
his eyes rest upon Lady Schardelowe.

CHAPTER V

FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES THE

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS

JOHN BARET died in 1463. For twenty years
after that time the aristocracy and landed gentry
were cutting one another's throats, and desperately
embarrassing their estates in the Wars of the Roses.
The Middle Class went on making money, and
avoiding- all such unprofitable occasions for spending
it. When another twenty years, in which exhaustion
had brought about peace and quiet, had given time
for recovery, the nation awoke suddenly to the
fact that new masters had arisen in the land. The
political songs, dialogues, and discourses of the six-
teenth century are one long attempt to comprehend
and grapple with a complete disturbance of the
balance of the body politic, a drastic shifting of the
centre of gravity.

The most obvious and most serious change was
that the land of England belonged now very largely
to the new moneyed men ; and these men remained
essentially Middle Class. Some of them, no doubt,
aimed at turning themselves from merchants into
country gentlemen ; but on the whole, the land was
to them strictly an investment — a new form of
trading. Or, perhaps, in view of certain contem-
porary statements to be quoted later, it might be

91

92 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

more true to say that there was probably in all
cases an ultimate idea of transition into a more
exalted state of life ; but the trading instinct was
not to be easily eradicated. Let us consider the
middle-class landed proprietor as the populace saw
him in the sixteenth century.

First of all, having none of the traditions of the
old landed class, which, although feudalism had long
since disappeared, yet preserved the habits of a
great establishment and the responsibility of main-
taining dependents on the proceeds of manorial
possessions, the new owners came to the land with
their own shrewd, simple ideas of household estab-
lishments.

An unreasonable ryche man

Dyd ryde by the way,

Who, for lack of menne,

Had wyth hym a boye.

And as he paste by a pasture

Most pleasaunte to see,

" Of late I have purchased

Thys grounde, Jacke," quod he.

" Mary, maister," (quod the boye)

"Men saye over alle

That your purchase is greate

But your householde is smal."

"Why, Jacke," (quod this riche man)

"What have they to do?

Woulde they have me to purchase

And kepe greate house to?" ^

Secondly, the new men were not content with
buying such estates as might be offered, or with
just so much land as might make pleasant places

^ Crowley, "Epigrams" ("Of Unsatiable Purchasers").

XVth and XVIth centuries 93

for their retirement from trade. They were grasping
for land, and squeezed and jockeyed out of posses-
sion the old type of landlord, who might, but for
their inducements, have been content to go on in
the old way.

So soon as they have ought to spare
Beside their stock that must remain,
To purchase lands is all their care,
And all the study of their brain.
There can be none unthrifty heir
Whom they will not smell out anon,
And handle him with words full fair
Till all his lands is from him gone.^

Thirdly, and most grievous of all, the new man
broucrht to the land his relentless notions of profit
and loss, screwed up rents, and levied fines.

But syth they take fermes

To let them out agayne

To such men as must have them

Though it be to theyr payne,

And to leavye greate fines

And to ower ^ the rent,

And do purchayse great landes

For the same intent.

We must nedes cal them

Members unprofitable.^

I cannot tell what it doth mean
But meat beareth a great price,
Which some men thinke is by the meane
That farms be found such merchandise.*

^ Crowley, " Last Trumpet " (" The Merchant's Lesson ").
^ I.e., raise, enhance.

' Crowley, "Epigrams." See also Brinklow's "Complaint,"
p. 10.

•- " The Last Trumpet " (" The Merchant's Lesson ").

94 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

More unprofitable still appeared the middle-class
men who did not even buy the lands, but used
them for even less responsible purposes of specula-
tion :

" There be certain tenants not able to be land-
lords, and yet after a sort they counterfeit landlords,
by obtaining leases in and upon grounds and tene-
ments, and so raise fines, incomes, and rents." ^

Brinklow complains that fifty or sixty years before
his time such leases were not known. ^

Fourthly, the land in the possession of these new
men was but a portion of their general business.
They recognized no more right on the part of ten-
ants to exist on their land than their workmen had
to use their looms; the one as much as the other was
subject to mere business rules of rent and employ-
ment. The manor was no longer a separate entity,
but profits from it went into the owner's general ac-
count.

You are called on to live

After twenty pounds by yere,

And after that rate

You shoulde measure your chere;

Tyll God did encrease you

By his merciful wayes,

By encreasing youre corne

And youre cattell in the layes;

Which encrease with your landes

You are bounde to employe

To the profite of all them

That do dwell you bye.^

^ " Imprecation against the Oppressors."

^ " Complaint," p. lo.

' Crowley, "Epigrams" ("The Usurer").

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 95

There still lino-ered In Enoland the sense that an

owner of land held it on certain responsibilities

morally to be acknowledged, even if legally the

feudal structure had vanished. The complaint

against the new men was that they claimed the

power to do exactly as they liked with what they

had bought.

For thys thynge, he sayde,
Full certayn he wyste,
That vvyth hys owne he myghte
Always do as he lyste.^

Yet it must be admitted to have been a good
thing for England that the middle-class man was
ready at this period to purchase land. Besides
the general consideration that money so invested
became national wealth, in a sense in which mere
trading capital never was, there is the particular
fact that the great days of the wool trade were over.
Money no longer flowed into the landowner's or
sheep-farmer's pockets, almost without effort on his
part. There were riches still in the land, but only
for those who were quick to see that, in a country
with a rapidly growing town and industrial popula-
tion, the provision of food supplies was the secret
of a new rural policy." No one was more likely to
grasp this truth than the people concerned intimately
with that industrial population. At the same time
the new policy would call for harder business heads
than the older conditions; profits would be cut finer.
There can be little doubt that the purchasing of

^ Crowley, " Epigrams " (" The Surveyor of Lands ").
* Cunningham, "Industry and Commerce," II, i, 103.

96 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

land by the Middle Class saved England from what
might have developed into an appalling stagnation
of farming. A very different effect of this purchasing
may be traced in the completeness and rapacity with
which the dissolution of the monasteries was carried
out. It would, indeed, be tempting to attribute the
origin of that policy in no small degree to the in-
cursion of the Middle Class into the ownership of
land. This revealed new possibilities of wealth in
landed estates, whether for those who had them for
sale, or for those who bought them, and thus created
a situation in which from both these points of view
there were plenty of men ready to instigate and to
support a policy which dispossessed some of the
greatest owners of land in the kingdom, and trans-
ferred that land to speculators.

The changed conditions of rural life showed most
obviously the effect of the new power of money.
Once this had been envisaged, people began to dis-
cern in various other directions the existence of
individuals who appeared to their bewildered eyes
to be mere parasites upon the community, attaching
themselves, by processes of the interchange of coin,
to the solid producers of goods. The preamble of a
statute of Henry VI had already complained, in
1455, that "in Norfolk, Suffolk and Norwich there
be fourscore attornies or more, the more part of them
having no other thing to live upon but only his gain
by the practice of attorneyship."^ Naturally the
steady purchasing of land rapidly increased such
practice; and Brinklow saw men who started with
' S3 Henry VI, c. 7.

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 97

" nothing but pen and ink, and within a Httle space
shall purchase as much as twenty, forty, fifty, nay,
two hundred or three hundred marks a year." ^ The
lawyer produced nothing, imported nothing, and
the sixteenth-century inquirer did not understand
why the now common use of coined money should
enable a man to buy a livelihood with brains not
occupied in the making of some marketable com-
modity.^

Accompanying this land speculation — perhaps
partly caused by it — was a further change in the
character of the craft gilds and town life. Hitherto
the ambition of the middle-class man had been on
the whole confined to standing well with his gild,
and attaining to one or other of those classifica-
tions of the burgesses which were mentioned in the
last chapter. But now the old town life began to
loosen its limitations. This was partly due to the
rise of the Merchant Adventurers' Companies, which
made competition much wider and much keener;
but it must also have been partly due to the fact
that entry upon the business of the land, and owner-
ship of rents, at once introduced elements which
were outside the range of the gilds. A cloth-mer-
chant in the older days would be content to be a
rich cloth-merchant; his gild, while it was of service
to him in the conduct of his trade and the control of

^ " Complaint," p. 24.

^ Piers Plowman (Pass. 8) had expressed this feeling. In writing
of the lawyer he says :

" To buy water, wind, nor wit
Is against holy writ."
H

98 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

his workmen, also commanding in some measure the
manner of his Hfe and the nature of his expenditure.
But a cloth-merchant who owned and managed
country estates had affairs outside the range of his
Q-'ild. The p-ilds did not on that account cease to
exist; they were still too useful to the manufacturer.
But they became more and more councils, so to
speak, of wealthy employers for a part of their busi-
ness interests. The capitalist had become bigger
than his gild. In some respects this was a serious
matter for the towns. A statute of Henry VIII had
to be passed to repeal a law of Edward II to the
effect that no city officers charged with the assizes
of wine and victuals should be merchants of wine or
victuals in gross or retail. It was pleaded now that
the cities were "so fallen in decay" that there were
hardly any merchants, the inhabitants being mostly
bakers, brewers, vintners, and other victuallers. So
the new statute provided that, in place of forbidding
such persons to be officers of the assizes, the rule
should be that they should have " two discreet per-
sons " as assessors for their duties.^ Again, one of
the chief political writers of the times complains of
the dirt and dilapidation of the towns, and the decline
of civil order." Now we have not to conclude from
this that the rich middle-class men had departed
altogether from the towns ; on the contrary. Brink-
low expressly speaks of the burgesses elected to
municipal offices as *' the rich jolly crackers and brag-
gers," and " bearers of some office in the country."^

' 3 Henry VIII, c. 8. ' Starkey, " Dialogue."

^ " Complaint," p. 13.

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 99

Town accounts and records of the period give us
names that we know to be those of the wealthy
traders and manufacturers.^ The difficulty of the
cities arose from the same cause as the change in the
gilds. The richer Middle Class had other interests,
and town affairs had become only a part of their
life. It is therefore a mistake to regard the Tudor
legislation in matters of local government as an
over-riding of municipal independence, or as wholly
dictated by a passion for centralization which was
bad for the free o^rowth of the borouo^hs.- There had
practically been no free growth, and no municipal
spirit in any modern sense of the words. As we
have seen, the worthies of the gilds had early cap-
tured the seats of power. It was simply in their
interests — and probably largely at their dictation,
since they were by now occupying a considerable place
in Parliament — that " the iron discipline invented
at Westminster and enforced by a selected company
of Town Hall officials " ^ came into being. The
more cut-and-dried local administration became, the
more free these men were to enlarge and multiply
their money-making pursuits.

In other words, the rising Middle Class had again
dug an entrenchment for itself. It had first united
the town against the landlords ; then united the
master-men against the labourers. Middle-class
men now guarded themselves against the town or-
ganizations of which they had previously been the

^ E.g., The Burford Account Book, 1 542-1 602.
'■^ See, e.g., Mrs. Green's " Town Life," ii, 447-8.
' Ibid.

loo THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

champions by the simple process of putting the
towns in their pockets. Their habit of treacherous
performances of this kind appears in several ways.
As long as they saw in the gild organization a
weapon against the workmen they were cunningly
loyal to the gilds, to the point of entirely taking
possession of them. Now that their mere capital
gave them power, they began to undermine still
further the essential qualities of the gilds. Statutes
appear, forbidding, for instance, the manufacture of
cloth outside the towns of Worcester, Evesham,
Droitwich, Kidderminster, and Bromsgrove.^ Simi-
larly there were prohibitions of the manufacture of
coverlets outside the city of York and of ropes out-
side the town of Bridport ; " and of the manufacture
of cloth in the Stroud valley.^ Such statutes betray
the fact that the capitalist employer was beginning
to be irked by the rules and restrictions of a gild.
He wanted to get behind the limitations of the num-
ber-of apprentices and journeymen he might have,
and the forbidding- of nio-ht-work, and the over-see-
ing of the measures he took to keep discipline. So
he withdrew from the sphere of influence of the gild
into regions where he could do as he liked. Prob-
ably the attempt would have been successful had it
not been that the Crown really depended upon the
towns for the bulk of its taxation. The complaints
of those manufacturers who remained in the towns
would probably not have availed to produce legisla-

' 25 Henry VIII, c. 18.

^ Cunningham, " Industry and Commerce," i, 519.

' Mrs. Green, " Town Life," ii, 88.

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS loi

tion if the Crown had not had a very potent reason
for objecting to any considerable profit-making out-
side the towns.

It follows from all this that we have now reached
a period at which the Middle Class is beginning to
split up into several grades. There was the upper
rank of large capitalists, the capitalist clothiers, the
Merchant Adventurers, the wholesale mercers and
grocers, all of them by this time landowners as
well as merchants. There was the lower rank of
traders, still mainly occupied with their business in
the towns, holding the minor municipal offices, and
forming the bulk of the gilds. There was also a
class of those who, taking advantage of the new
facilities for education, were in different ways pick-
ing up the crumbs of the new money-making. The
lawyers, as we have seen, were the most prominent
of this class. Others would be the secretaries of
noblemen, clerks of the rich traders, etc. These
men, on the whole, did form a distinct new grade.
They were not, for the most part, sons of traders
(who would more naturally go into the family busi-
ness) but sons of country people — stewards of the
manors, small farmers, etc. — who were given a good
education with the object of starting them in a higher
rank of life.^ Until the end of the fifteenth century
there was practically only one kind of Middle Class
— a middleman class. Whether as merchants, capital-
ist employers, small manufacturers, or shopkeepers,
they all stood together in their gilds, with differ-

^ See, e.g., "Manners and Meals," p. x; Hall, "Elizabethan
Society," pp. 17, 40.

102 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

ences in quantity of possessions and in local import-
ance, but with the same interests. The sixteenth
century sees the old social town, and craft jealousy
and secretiveness being translated into the sheer
competitive individualism which was increasingly to
characterize the Middle Class. But it was the same
secretive spirit in a new form.

Of course, the steady decline of the gilds into
mere machines for the service of capitalists tended
to increase the subjection of labour. So far as the
apprenticing system still operated, legislation could
intervene. Occasional statutes appear to prevent
capitalist masters from keeping the gilds to them-
selves by levying heavy fines and entrance fees
upon apprentices desiring the freedom of the gild.^
Other statutes forbid the taking oath of apprentices
not to keep shops without licence of the fellow-
ship.^ But the truth is that by this time apprentice
labour was but a very small part of the whole,
and a more or less privileged part. Indentures were
beginning to be expensive, largely because the
growing prosperity of the trading classes, following
upon the exhaustion and impoverishment in the
Wars of the Roses of a nobility which had long
been declining in wealth, had led noblemen and
gentlemen to enter their sons to trade. We begin
to find younger sons of such families as the Corbets
of Shropshire entered apprentices, and becoming

' JS.g., 2 2 Henry VIII, c. 4, fixing 2s. 6d. as the apprentice's
fine for entering the fellowship, and 3^. 4^. as the fine for taking
up the freedom.

' E.g., 25 Henry VIII, c. 18.

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 103

merchant tailors.^ One of the features of English
Hfe in the early sixteenth century which most struck
a foreign observer was that everyone, however rich,
sent their children out, bound to service, at the age
of eight or nine years.^ Now in earlier days the
children of nobles and gentlemen had usually been
sent away from home as pages in other gentle houses,
chiefly with a kind of educational purpose; they
were supposed to learn the profession of arms
and knightly duties better in another house. But
those days had passed. Schools had arisen in which
education could be obtained, and knightly duties
were no longer the chief purpose of life. This uni-
versal custom of binding children to service must have
meant a very general movement, on the part of the
better-born, to have some share in the mercantile
prosperity, or at least, to take advantage of that
prosperity in order to provide for younger sons.
Again, the fact that the same foreign observer could
remark on the usualness of apprentices marrying
into their masters' families probably points in the
same direction; a rich master would not marry his
daughter to an apprentice unless the latter, either by
reason of gentle birth, or by reason of connection
with another rich trading family, had some advan-
tages to offer. It follows that on the whole appren-
ticeship had become part of the capitalist preserve.
There can be little doubt of the classes from which
apprentices were drawn, when we find the Gild of
Merchant Adventurers at Newcastle deciding that a

^ Hall, "Elizabethan Society," p. 32.
'"^ "Relation of England," pp. 24, 25.

I04 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

fine of ^3 6s. 8^., together with the loss of a year's
indentures, was insufficient to restrain apprentices
from misbehaviour, and resolving to raise the fine to
/;i3 6s, Sd' ^

Wage-earning labour had, by the same tendency,
become still further depressed. We have statutes
referring to the oppression of the poor by rich
clothiers, who kept "unskilful persons" to work
their looms ; -^ and the still more significant statutes
forbidding workmen to conspire together to fix a
rate for work or hours of labour, or to refuse to do
one another's work.^ Such enactments, combined
with the indications that manufacturers were tending
to work outside the towns, in order to be free of
corporate government, mean that the industrial
hands were now completely outside the gilds, and
at the mercy of employers. Equally significant is a
fact which, in one way, tends rather to the credit
of the Middle Class. In 1555 the Norwich capital-
ists, finding that russets, satins, and fustians were
being largely imported from Naples, joined together
to provide looms and weavers to introduce their
arts into England. This is referred to by Professor
Cunningham as " the first venture of capitalists to
import the necessary plant and necessary skill so as
to introduce a new trade." * But at the same time it
shows how completely the capitalists had the power
in their hands. A century or two earlier there would

^ " Newcastle Merchant Adventurers," i, 27.
'" 2 & 3 Philip and Mary, c. 11.

* 2 & 3 Edward VI, c. 15.

* "Industry and Commerce," i, 525.

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 105

have been far too much gild jealousy to permit
such importation. The cottage industry and the
small manufacturer would have had sufficient in-
fluence to prevent it. We have travelled a long way
from the violent opposition to the Crown's intro-
duction of Flemish weavers in the twelfth century.

For purposes of constitutional history the marked
feature of the early sixteenth century is the effect of
the weakening of the great nobles in permitting
Henry VIII to establish the power of the Crown.
The Council and Parliament became instruments in
his hands. But for our present purpose it is more
important to note that this process almost inevitably
involved a further advance on the part of the Middle
Class. For it was a corollary of the more independ-
ent power of the Crown that official administration
should increase in importance. Instead of powerful
territorial supporters and advisers, the Crown re-
quired capable servants, and these it naturally found,
not among those brought up to a life of leisure, but
among the business portion of the community. For
the first time we find at the right hand of the Throne
a man who has reached that position not by exalted
birth, nor by the translation of brains into a kind of
princeliness or nobility through the medium of eccle-
siastical dignity, but a man of thoroughly middle-
class antecedents — Thomas Cromwell. The Civil
Service begins at this period for the first time to
emerge as something recognizably like the Service
of our own day; and it was, of course, composed
of middle-class individuals, since the old restriction
of education to the sphere of the Church had long

io6 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

passed away.^ The Tudor centralization of govern-
ment was bound to produce and to foster a class of
men engaged in administration under orders, edu-
cated, capable, but without family advantages, look-
ing to their brains alone for their success.

It has already been suggested that the fever of
land speculation may have had an effect perhaps not
yet fully appreciated upon the policy of dissolving
and dispersing the monasteries in England. In the
more remote causes of that policy we have certainly
to allow largely for the character of the Middle
Class and the influence of its continued rise and
permeation of the national life. It had, as we
have seen, successfully defeated one attempt after
another to take adequate toll for the Crown of the
increasing mercantile wealth. Meanwhile the ques-
tion of supplies was becoming more and more of a
problem to the Sovereign. Whatever reasons of
higher purpose and more honest policy may have
been mixed up in the medley of impulse which
brought about the dissolution of the monasteries,
the Crown's financial needs were a strong determin-
ing factor; and for those needs the Middle Class was
very largely responsible. Such devices as the poll-
tax had been of little more value than the tax on
movables. The poll-tax of 15 13 merely imposed
the same levy as that of 1379, in which the Lord
Mayor of London ranked with the earls and paid
;^4; the aldermen of London and the mayors of
other towns ranked with the barons, paying £2;
great merchants with knights, paying £\ ; and other
^ Cf. "The King's Government."

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 107

substantial merchants paid 135-. /[.d. To reproduce
the same rates in 1513^ showed a complete surrender
to the obstinate secretiveness of the merchant class.
These poll-taxes were reckoned on a basis of land-
values, and the Middle Class had again managed to
have its own way in the assessment. There was a
debate in Parliament in 1522, in which all the citi-
zens and burofesses voted on one side, and all the
knights of the shire on the other. It ended in a
decision that ^50 of goods should be assessed as
equal to ^50 of land; which proves, firstly, that up
to this time the merchant had actually managed to
obtain a lower value-for-value assessment, and,
secondly, that even now he scored by allowing an
apparent victory to the other side, since obviously,
as wealth, ;^50 of goods should have been more
heavily assessed than ^50 in land. Nor was it only
the basis of assessment that was wrong. As late as
1592 Cecil remarked in Parliament that in the whole
City of London no one was assessed at above ^200
of goods, and only five or six men at as much as
that.^ This, at a time when Gresham was turning
over money by the hundred thousand pounds, and
when the City numbered plenty of rich men with
knights' titles and great estates, gives an almost
startling measure of the shamelessness with which
the Exchequer was cheated. Again, in the whole
county of Gloucester, with all the rich merchants of
Bristol established in country estates, only seventy-
nine persons appear on the roll assessed at more

^ The only change was to raise the great merchants' tax to 30^-.,
a negUgible increase in the circumstances.
^ Dowell, " Taxation," i, 191.

io8 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

than ^lo; one only is rated at ;^50, five at ^40,
and four at ^30. The Commissioner himself appears
assessed as a justice of the peace at £6 ; his fortune
may have been anything, but the technical descrip-
tion provides him with a means of avoiding declara-
tion, false though it would in any case have been.^

Thus, both by their starving of the Exchequer and
by their opening of a speculative market in land,
the Middle Class must be held in two indirect
ways to have stimulated, if it did not actually bring
about, the dissolution of the monasteries. Middle-
class men also were the principal gainers. A good
many of the older nobility and landed gentry took
some profit from the great spoliation. But the
richest spoil would necessarily go to those who could
offer for it, not merely the influence, the support, or
the interested loyalty which would be the most usual
bid of the great families, but the hard cash accumu-
lated in a successful business, or gained by rapid
dealingr in the confiscated lands. Hence the charac-
teristic effect of the Dissolution was to throw up
into the ranks of rich landed proprietors men of the
Middle Class like the Russells. Men of better birth
might gain a little extension of their lordships here
and there, but the men who made the big fortunes
were those who, having the business capability which
secured their appointment as Commissioners, used
it in their official operations to buy cheaply from the
Crown, taking advantage of the perpetual inclination
of the Exchequer to look rather at immediate cash
payments than at possibilities of future profits.
' Dowell, "Taxation," i, 198.

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 109

The entry of the Middle Class upon extensive
ownership of land was so marked as to form a staple
subject for all political writers. The core of the
problem, dimly perceived by some of these, was,
how far would that class go towards undertaking
responsibility in national affairs? This, though not
fully expressed as a question, must have been at the
root of such a remark as that in Edward VI's tract
" A Discourse about the Reformation of many
Abuses " : "I think this country can bear no mer-
chant to have more land than £100." The ordinary
political writer only perceived that the land was
passing into the hands of men who used it mainly
for personal profit, and had no tradition of making
their estates support a retinue. But King Edward's
comment has a more profound bearing. It may be
read in conjunction with a phrase in one of the pro-
clamations of his reign, issued in connection with his
scheme of a re-coinage, in which reference is made
to " the malice and naughty nature of a certain kind
of people who go about to eate and devoure as wel the
state of the nobilitie as the lower sorte." To the states-
man's eye the Middle Class was ousting the noble-
man and landed gentry from their position in the
State; and if we inquire why this should have caused
alarm — why it should so seriously matter that a rich
landowner should replace a comparatively poor one
— the answer must be that the older landowners
had, even if imperfectly, existed practically for no
other object than public affairs, whereas these were
very far from being the object of the Middle Class.
What was to happen if the soil, instead of support-

no THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

ing men for the Privy Council and Parliament and
the magistracy, supported men who cared for nothing
but their own business, and could not be relied upon
for public functions?

It was too early as yet to observe that the central-
izing of administration was already partly answering
this question by providing openings which only the
Middle Class as yet attempted to fill. In other ways
the alarm of statesmen was justified, because the
Middle Class was in a state of transition of which
the end could not be perceived. It had certainly
come much more forward into national life. The
general character of its development during the
fifteenth century, which was one of securing of pre-
viously gained ground, and quiet enrichment on
the old lines, with comparatively slight changes
either in manner of life or close association with
fellow men, gave place to a more ostentatious
and individualistic advance. Yet, true to its old
habits, the Middle Class moved forward now very
cautiously. It still was inclined to regard with
suspicion the class with which it was beginning
to take rank. We have just had occasion to see
how, on a matter of taxation, the burgesses in Par-
liament voted all one way, and the knights of the
shire the other way. That reveals the survival of a
tendency on the part of the merchants to hang
too-ether, and not allow their new dignities as land-
owners to dazzle them. A curious confirmation of
this view of their mental condition is afforded by
accounts of the funerals of great City men.^ Rich
' Mackyn's " Diary " is full of instances.

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS iii

merchants who had achieved the honour of knight-
hood, and had practically passed from the trading
rank to that of the squires, made nevertheless as
much display of their mercantile connection as of
their acquired honours. In their funeral processions
officers of the College of Arms would carry the
knightly standard, and pennons of the dead man's
arms, and would hang up in the church a shield, a
crested helmet, and a surcoat of arms. But with all
this the coffin would be attended by the members of
the Company of Merchant Adventurers, the Grocers,
the Clerks, the Fishmongers, or whatever the trade
might be. This lack of any sense of incongruity
between the heraldic fiction and the commercial fact
is very curious. Even when the funeral took place
in the church of the dead man's country estate, where
presumably he had always been more the squire
than a grocer or a draper, the trade representatives
would be in the procession.-^ It is clear that the
wealthy traders had not yet quite made up their
minds whether to form, in effect, a new class in the
State, or whether to replace quietly the old titled
and landed class. The decision was bound to be
most important for the country. If they formed a
new class it would be with the old trading traditions
of aloofness from politics, as such, and of confining
their concern with legislation to accepting it out-
wardly, and then adjusting it to their own purposes
until, in so far as it interfered with these, it lost all
its strenofth. In other words, leofislation would have
been a crippled attempt to weld into the body politic

^ For many instances of these customs see Mackyn's "Diary."

112 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

a class of men whose whole purpose was bent on
keeping outside it and pursuing their own course.
If, on the other hand, such were decided to replace,
by a quiet permeation, the failing noble and landed
classes, they would enter into the traditions of those
classes, and would, with whatever modifications of
outlook and whatever new centres of gravity, take
their place as an integral part of the national
machine, and sink their individual interests to some
extent in public affairs.

This century passed without quite witnessing the
decision made. Yet the Elizabethan epoch made it
sufficiently clear in which direction the Middle
Class was tending. If we had no other proof of
this we might find it in the growing official under-
standing of currency problems. These remained
acute for the greater part of the sixteenth century.
But as early as the time of Wolsey's power a change
is discernible in the attitude of the authorities. It
was seen, for one thing, that the old method of pro-
hibiting the export of precious metals was futile.
As long as ratios fluctuated in different countries,
so long would the profit of arbitrage be large enough
to make men run all risks. Wolsey's idea in 1524
of sending Commissioners to the Low Countries, to
require that all monies valued too highly should be
reduced to a real rate, was an attempt, if a crude one,
to handle the problem in the right way. Political
writers of the Tudor period are all for an inter-
national understanding as to coinage ratios.^ Eliza-

^ See, e.g., " Discourse of the Common Weal," and Raleigh's
^' Select Observations."

MIDDLE CLASS AS LAiNDOWNERS 113

beth's policy of re-coinage at a real value, and main-
tenance of a steady ratio, did very much for the
enlargement of the currency basis; and it has been
suggested, by authorities on the subject, that the
greatness of her reign may have been largely due to
this cause. ^ In any case, the more practical char-
acter of the dealing with the currency may be taken
as a sign of the more direct participation of the
Middle Class in national affairs. For arbitrage
had been a great source of profit to members of
this class, and in earlier times they had shown
every inclination to pursue their profit at the cost
of national embarrassment. Probably even now
they may have been moved less by patriotic con-
siderations than by the fact that, as their mercantile
policy became more and more enlarged, the profits
of arbitrage were insufficient to compensate them
for the cramping effect of a shortness of coin. Allow-
ing, however, for that possibility, we have to re-
cognize that they were admitting new financial con-
ceptions marked by more of public spirit than their
old attitude had been.

Yet here again middle-class development was as
mixed as middle-class social position at this time.
It is possible that a certain amount of corruption is
inseparable from the handling of public money; but
when one considers the condition of the public
finances durino- the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, one is inclined to dwell at some length
on such a case as that of Sir Thomas Gresham.
For it suggests that what became really an estab-
^ Shaw, " Currency," pp. 132-133.
I

114 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

llshed tradition of corruption may well have had its
seed in the persistent tendency of the Middle Class
to give only half its allegiance to public affairs, and
the other half to its private profit. Gresham could
bring to the public service a knowledge of finance
which really made the success of the Elizabethan
re-coinage; he could even, if the story be true, con-
tribute far more than any other single individual,
more even than Cecil or Drake, to the failure of
the Spanish Armada, by so "cornering" bills of
exchangfe at the time of the outfit of the Armada
that the great fleet set out discouraged by short-
ness of every kind of necessity. Yet he could at the
same time so mishandle public funds as to attempt
to defraud the Exchequer of tens of thousands of
pounds.

The glory of such an epoch as the Elizabethan
age is not, of course, to be reduced to its constituent
elements by any process of analysis. But it does at
least seem to be clear that it rested in the main
upon the development of the Middle Class. Apart
from such a distinctly commercial detail as the
steadying of the monetary ratio, there is the broad
fact that trading interests had provided the frame-
work upon which the national life passed, In the per-
petual civil war of the fifteenth century, from the old
state of things to a new one. The shattering of the
old landed system revealed the presence of a section
of the community capable of taking its place, and
providing a link between the Crown and the mass
of the people. With the character of the link we are
not at this point concerned; it was vastly different

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 115

from the old one. The essential feature is that be-
tween the widely generalized outlook which must
occupy a Government, and the merely day-to-day
outlook of the peasant and the artisan, there should
have been that midway outlook of sufficiently long-
sighted prudence, that sense of the necessity of
keeping things together, which we are accustomed
to regard as the result of having " a stake in the
country." Let it pass for the moment whether any
fundamental difference is made by the degree of
self-interest in this prudence. The Middle Class
certainly took its stand by a stake in the country
when the old landed classes had for various reasons
lost their hold.

But we have further to note that, besides thus
providing a kind of solid core, at a period of flux and
transition, the Middle Class prepared the way for
the Elizabethan glory by introducing a new ideal of
national progress. This came very largely from the
habit of keeping aloof for so long from politics.
The old order of things was almost inevitably
bound up with ideals which involved more or less
incessant hostility with France. The traditions of
a system instituted at the Norman conquest had
been inextricably involved with the instinct to re-
gard parts of France as belonging, we will not say
to England, but to those to whom England be-
longed. The feudal lieges of men who were un-
doubtedly sovereign lords of Normandy, Anjou,
Poitou, and so on, could not but regard the lordship
of another king over those provinces as an inva-
sion. The Middle Class had no such shackles of

ir6 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

memory and tradition. It freed the national policy
from the trammels of this old limitation of its pur-
view. Traces of it, of course, remained. So deep-
rooted a feeling was not to be extirpated easily. But,
speaking generally, it was largely the freedom of the
new men in national affairs from this ancient pre-
judice which set England on her own feet as a
Power. She had, of course, had her share before
this in Continental politics; but it had always been,
so to speak, a part-share. She had only appeared
in conjunction with one or other of the sectional
interests of France. The middle-class influence,
in addition to the separating effect of England's
attitude at the time of the Reformation, immensely
reinforced Henry VIII's policy, and therefore con-
tributed largely to that new sense of nationality
which was welded into being by the policy of Spain.
It was no longer the interests of Poitou, or jealousy
of the Kingr of the Isle of France and his vassals
which directed our relations with Spain (in the one
case towards hostility, in the other towards friendli-
ness), but the vitality of our own concerns.

Again, it was due to the Middle Class that this
vitality was an expanding vitality. That of the old
system had not been really expansive. Its territorial
ambition had been a revolt of memory against
changing conditions, a traditional regret for former
possessions. The ambition of the Middle Class
was not in essence territorial at all. It mattered
little to it who owned the soil of a foreign country,
so long as there was money to be had there, or
merchandise promising a profit at home. But at

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 117

the same time this was an ambition capable of coin-
ciding with the desire for territorial acquisition when
new lands were discovered which, not being oc-
cupied by people accustomed to trade, were worth
acquisition for the purpose of planting in them
people who were so accustomed, and which proved,
moreover, to be rich in materials which would foster
trade. The soil and the silver ore of the New
World had proportionately at the time of their dis-
covery as much value as they ever have had since.
This immediate value was due to the trading classes,
who had created a state of things in which wealth,
and not the extent of fighting resources, was the
key to power. It was by their ideals that the struggle
with Spain was worth carrying on to the extreme
point.

To proceed from such recognition of the influence
of the Middle Class upon the age of Elizabeth to
remarking that in the expression of the glory of that
age, in the representation of it to the world at large,
they had very little share, may seem to be passing
from the vitally important to the comparatively
superficial. Does it really matter, it may be asked,
that Algernon Sidney and Raleigh and Drake,
Shakespeare and Surrey and Pembroke, were not
men of the Middle Class ^ — that Knole, Penshurst,
Hatfield and their like were not built for men of the
Middle Class — so long as the material foundations
of national well-being which alone provides the

^ Raleigh, Drake, and Frobisher, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson
all came from the small landed class of the feudal type, not from
the new land-buying class.

ii8 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

freedom of spirit necessary for the highest artistic
expression were laid by the Middle Class? The
answer is that it does matter; because in the fact of
this difference, between the source of the material,
and the source of the expression of the magnificence,
of the Elizabethan age, we have the light in which
the subsequent development of the Middle Class
must be constantly regarded. In a word, the incur-
sion of that class into national affairs produced a
separation between true national consciousness and
the instinct of " a stake in the country " — a separa-
tion of which far too little account has yet been
taken. Broadly speaking, the merit of the Norman
and Plantagenet system was that it welded together
the two instincts. This was the spiritual secret of
the holding of possessions by service. It created a
unity of consciousness which was able to survive the
translation of services into rent and taxation. Now,
as we have seen, it was a deeply ingrained instinct
of the Middle Class to hold itself aloof from any such
conception. Middle-class men founded their muni-
cipal independence upon a revolt against it (if any
movement so subtle and veiled can properly be called
a revolt) ; they contrived to keep the new form of
wealth which they introduced free from the attempts
to bring it under the old conception of liege service
by making the tax on movables not a due at the
Crown's disposal, and therefore a due in detail, but
a grant agreed upon in gross, and thereiore essenti-
ally at the owner's disposal. The individualism
which had won its way against their own gilds ac-
companied their entry into public affairs. As the

MIDDLE CLASS AS LANDOWNERS 119

old landed class, to which rent and taxation had
been a genuine translation of the old services, dimin-
ished and declined in importance, those two pro-
cesses lost completely the ancient associations, and
had merely the aspect which the new men had im-
posed upon them. These men had never had a
national consciousness. The fact that their stakes
were all in the same country produced an apparent
unity which masked the lack of this consciousness.
Their absence, therefore, from the expression,
whether in art or warfare, of the glory of the age is
not an unimportant fact. It is, just as much as the
ingenuous peculations of Sir Thomas Gresham, a
very significant sign-post upon the road of their de-
velopment. National consciousness is from this
time onwards in national history a quality to which
individual members of the Middle Class might attain,
after several generations of assimilation to the sur-
vivals of an old tradition, and for the rest a quality
inherent in the remnants of an old landed class and
in the mass of the people, among whom it was in
time to be regarded by the cultured as insular pre-
judice. But the bulk of the Middle Class has never
come nearer to it than a sense of the correlation and
interdependence of their individual stakes in the
country. And that is a totally different thing.

With the ostensible glories of this great age, then,
we have no more to do. The cities of Eno-land had
their loyalty, and turned out to cheer the Queen on
her progresses, to offer her purses of gold (as they
could very well afford to do), and to produce second-
rate pageants in her honour. Townsmen and the

I20 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

new buyers of land built houses in the taste which
the aristocrat favoured. Burbage, Hemmings, and
Condell made a sound second-rank to the resources
of the stage. But the great names were for the most
part of other classes; and this, not merely for the
reason that the sixteenth century saw the Middle
Class in transition, and therefore imperfectly devel-
oped, but for the less accidental reason that it was
of its peculiar genius to permeate the national life
without committing itself to it in the unreserved
spirit which alone could rise to the supreme heights
of artistic and patriotic expression.

CHAPTER VI

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY — THE MIDDLE CLASS UNDER

THE COMMONWEALTH AND RESTORATION FINANCE —

BANKING AND FOREIGN TRADE

THE seventeenth century witnessed the one
positive mistake that the Middle Class ever
made in English history. Perhaps the great change
in its position during the preceding century had
confused it; or the advance in administrative organ-
ization under the Tudors may have misled as to
the tendencies of constitutional development. At
any rate, it suddenly altered its course of develop-
ment, and swung from the extreme of avoiding all
concern with government to the extreme of attempt-
ing to monopolize government.

It would, of course, be wrong to suggest that the
Civil War was an entirely middle-class movement.
Yet in the lone run that was what it more and more
became. Moreover, the conditions that led to it
were so largely brought about by the influence of
the Middle Class in the State that indirectly, as well
as directly, that class seems to be at the root of the
war. In view of all that we have hitherto had to
say about the attitude of the Middle Class towards
taxation, a fairly obvious point is to be made of the
fact that the immediate precipitating cause of the
war was a question of taxes. But that point can, after

122 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

all, only be made with caution. By this time the
Middle Class view had become much more than a
traditional obstinacy. It was almost a constitu-
tional tenet that taxes were a grant of the subject,
not a right of the Crown; and that tenet had been
evolved from the persistence of the mediaeval
traders in countering the attempts of the Crown
to obtain by assessment a knowledge of their pos-
sessions. They had seen to it that the principle of
the Domesday Book — the right of the Sovereign to
exact knowledge of his subjects' possessions — was
never transferred from land to that form of wealth
in personalty which came to be of importance later
on. This right to knowledge was only a corollary
of the right to exact dues. The Middle Class, not
aware, perhaps, in the beginning of the extent of
its own ingenuity, had pursued its invariable method
of avoiding frontal attacks on a principle of govern-
ment. By merely undermining the corollary it secured
the collapse of the main proposition.

However, at the period of the disputes between
Charles I and his Parliament the revised tenets of
taxation were so fully established that it would not
be fair to lay great stress upon them as an indication
of the middle-class character of this dispute. Besides,
the questions of taxation were only the immediate
cause, and it is of more importance to observe, in
the broad lines of opposition which really gave the
war its scope, the effects of the middle-class advance.
These were real and serious; and if we examine
them we shall see that the Civil War had its origin
in a contest, not between a part of the nation desir-

THE XVIIth century 123

ing an absolute monarchy and another part desiring
a constitutional monarchy, but between two modes of
thought equally desiring a nominally absolute mon-
archy, but differing in their interpretation of that
principle. It is impossible to believe that on a mere
question of taxes the country would have been
driven into war. As far as that went, the nobles and
the older landed gentry would not have been difficult
to'^tach'Trom the Crown. What kept_them_ on_the_
side of the Crown was their natural jealousy and
distil^e~oniTe"processes"6f the preceding century,
which had entirely replaced the old dependence of
the Sovereign on his council of nobles by a new
independence baaed upon the administrative capacity
of the Middle Class. When they saw the Crown at
last embroiled with that very class over matters of
taxation, they perceived the possibility of recover-
ing their own old position. If Charles had won,
there must have been a return to the conditions
preceding the Tudor regime. The Council, so long
a machine of administration, would have become
again a governing body virtually concurrent with
the Crown's authority, and at need controlling it.

The object of the Parliamentarians, on the other
hand, was, at the beginning, to render absolute the
administrative ..machine. They, as much as the
Cavaliers, contemplated the preserving of the mon-
archy; but it was to be in the last resort dependent
upon, and not supreme over, the machine. Their
rapid development during the preceding century,
their command of a moneyed leisure liberating them
for a wider outlook, their high stage of education,

124 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

and their dawning sense of international finance, had
all helped to render possible the contemplation of
such a limited absolutism. It was just this possibility
which the nobility and the older landed gentry were
able to perceive; and that perception was the secret
of their attitude. For this reason, far more than for
any reason connected with taxation, the Civil War
became a strucrcrle of the Middle Class against the
Court. All the tendencies that emphasized this
character of the struggle — the pious protestations of
the one side against the profligacy of the other, the
opposition of sober dress and cropped hair to laces
and lovelocks, the frequent contrast between the
spirit of the towns and that of the castles — were but
accidental accretions upon the main antagonism.
It was because the Parliamentary movement was so
essentially sprung from middle-class tendencies that
it took on all these middle-class aspects.

It is quite possible that the ultimate stages of the
movement were not at all foreseen by the mass of
those concerned in it. They would probably be
quite unaware of that feeling in the Court party
which welcomed the probabilities of a struggle; they
would probably not realize the existence of a party
still clinging to the hope of returning to conditions
in which the Middle Class was of small importance
outside its own station in life. Superficially there
was little to remind them now of any Court party.
They seemed themselves to have penetrated suc-
cessfully into its remotest sanctuaries or even to
have occupied its place. To the possession of land
and the rank of knighthood the Middle Class had

THE XVIIth century 125

quietly added all the other insignia of Court dis-
tinction. James I's sale of honours laid every title,
up to that of an earl, open to the purse of the
moneyed man. The records of the Heralds' Visita-
tions in the seventeenth century point in the same
direction. Mercers, grocers, lawyers, customs comp-
trollers, goldsmiths, merchants, attorneys, and mayors
of provincial towns appear as county gentlemen
with their coats of arms. Yet it is to be noted that
the old tradition of being frankly Middle Class had
not been destroyed. Just as the knighted land-
owning citizens of the sixteenth century had their
trade banners carried at funerals with their knightly
pennons, so the succeeding generations openly bought
their titles, or laid before the heralds the facts as to
the family's trading pursuits. Only a very few veil
these details in a vague statement of descent from
some ancestor " of London," without further descrip-
tion.^ That is to say, the Middle Class regards
itself, not as merging in some other class, but as
occupying in its own acknowledged capacity the
-^lace which that other class, from poverty or from
failure of heirs or from the exhaustion of old dynastic
struggles, was leaving vacant. Moreover, in so far
as the aristocratic class survived, it appeared to be
admitting the extent of this change by going into
trade. The complaints as to the costliness of ap-
prenticeship, and especially complaints as to the
new habits of apprentices in "affecting to go in
costly apparel and wear weapons " for the very
reason that they were " often children of gentlemen
^ See, e.g., the " Visitations " of Berks, Kent, Cheshire, etc.

126 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

and persons of good quality " are significant.^ Why
should the Middle Class imagine that, when it made
its protest against Charles's proposed taxation, it
would find itself embarked upon a struggle for power
with a class which it seemed to have already over-
come by its customary processes of subtle permea-
tion ?

Perhaps it was the unexpected nature of this dis-
covery which drove the Middle Class to its mistake.
For the first time it made a frontal attack, and its
temporary success only makes the more conspicuous
later failure. For once, it went to a logical conclusion.
If this was to be a struo^ole between the Court and
the Middle Class, then everything must go which
was not, or could not be made, a middle-class insti-
tution. Everything in the history of the Common-
wealth bears the impress of this kind of forced con-
clusion. There having been no genuinely considered
theory of middle-class control, the Sovereign was
replaced by an individual with no hereditary honours
and a plain name; Parliament, summoned in the old
fashion, remained a place in which the middle-class
men tried to avoid committing themselves. There
was really nothing new, only a translation of the old
into middle-class terms. The failure of it all can be
traced to qualities we have found inherent in the
Middle Class. The mass of the people very soon
came to hate the experiment because of its inex-
pressiveness. There was no sense of nationality left.
That lack of expressive power which we have noted
in the Middle Class in connection with the Eliza-
^ Stow, "Survey," v, 329.

UNBER THE COMMONWEALTH 127

bethan age now became a positive danger to the new
regime. The Middle Class could stand for nothing,
because it had always stood for itself alone. The
more serious cause of failure was the discontent of
the traders with the Commonwealth. In the old
days war might interrupt some processes of money-
making, and might drain the country's resources. But
in the end the merchant, keeping cannily aloof from
the centre of the whirlpool, sucked his profit here and
there upon the edge of it, and made the best of what
he could not alter. But when he found war beincr
carried on, and trade disturbed by the rdgime which
he imagined to be his own creature, when he found
the ports closed for the more rigorous enforcement
of customs dues, not to be evaded by any means of
Court corruption, he could not settle down to take
what profit he might, but had to declare himself in
petitions, and ultimately in sullen resentment such
as vastly eased the way towards the Restoration.

For the time being the Middle Class had wholly
lost sight of the bent of its peculiar genius, which
had always been not to attack institutions, but to
handle them in such a manner as to find a sheltered
area for personal profit under them. After the
Restoration it never repeated this mistake. Instead
of ever attempting again to set up middle-class
institutions, it devoted itself to insinuating new in-
terests and habits into the shell of old institutions.
It abandoned the attempt to make a middle-class
state, and successfully proceeded to make the State
Middle Class.

One point in connection with the Civil War

128 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

remains to be considered, namely, the position and
attitude of the Church. How was it that, if the
ParHamentary side in the Civil War had on the
whole a middle-class aspect, the Church was, as a
whole, on the Court side? The answer is that here
aofain that class made a mistake in attackino- the
principle of an institution instead of permeating the
institution without concern for the principle. The
change which had been brought about by the Re-
formation had not been fully understood, and the
Middle Class tended to regard the Church still in
its princely and autocratic aspect. To that it was
helped by the ecclesiasticism of Laud. We get,
indeed, a good deal of light upon the virulence of
the dislike of Laud by remembering the Middle
Class tendency to keep, even in the old days, as free
as it dared to be of the Church's power. That
which, in days of no religious liberty, had ex-
pressed itself in the foundation of the grammar
schools, had come now, through the exaggerations
of the Reformation, to full growth. The first effects
of the separation from Rome had not made the
Church Middle Class. The bulk of the clergy would
still be drawn, as in former days, from the sons of
rustics — small farmers and small squires — with a
sprinkling of men of gende birth. When the trans-
mission of a kind of Royal rank from the Papal
authority, or of land-owning rank from the position
of the monasteries, was withdrawn, the particular
allegiance to the Sovereign as Head of the Church
of England, would continue to operate, in the eyes
of the Middle Class, as making a privileged com-

UNDER THE COMMONWEALTH 129

munity of the clergy. Probably with the lapse of a
little more time, the growth of the Middle Class
would have caused it to modify by permeation
the character of the Church. But since its on-
slaught upon national institutions happened to come
before it had entered the clerical profession to
any great extent, and since the autocratic demands
of Charles in State affairs were paralleled in Church
affairs by the theories of Laud, the Church was
identified with the Court in the minds of the Middle
Class, and its nonconforming attitude during the
Civil War was rendered inevitable.

The first half of the seventeenth century, there-
fore, while in one sense a period of very remarkable
middle-class activity, was in the more profound
sense not a period of middle-class development at
all. We perceive that class, advanced in no respect
beyond the lack of political conceptions, the class
jealousy, the reluctance to commit itself in affairs of
policy, and the avoidance of patriotic responsibility,
which characterized it in the expansiveness of the
sixteenth century, suddenly put into a position in
which it mistakenly believed itself to be the repository
of constitutional idealism. It emerged from this ad-
venture less damaged than it mio-ht have been, for
the simple reason that it had remained essentially
its own self, all through, and had therefore taken
very little part, after all, in the policy of the Common-
wealth. Cromwell and his Council of State had
carried on the national business much as any King
and Council would have carried it on. If the Middle
Class had had any genuine political theory behind

K

I30 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

it, in the victory of the Civil War, it would have
been so far committed to carrying it out as to have
found itself, in the hour of commonwealth failure, dis-
credited and disorganized. In point of fact, satisfied
for the moment when it had put Middle Class names
to old institutions, it had simply returned to its own
affairs. One instance of the truth of this may suffice.
The origin of banking, in any modern sense, is to
be found in the system which was instituted by Lon-
don goldsmiths during the Civil War of collecting
rents for those who, being on active service, could
not well attend to their affairs, holding the money
till required, and paying interest on it meanwhile.^
Another form of the same kind of operation arose
from the fact that wealthy people felt it to be un-
advisable to use much plate, at a time when it was
so liable to be commandeered for coining. The
goldsmiths received plate, melted it down, and cre-
dited the depositor with the value.

This makes it possible to understand how it was
that, when the Restoration was accomplished, the
Middle Class almost at once started upon the true
line of its development, which had been for a time
unwisely abandoned. Incidentally, we can also
arrive at a better understanding^ of the condition of
the nation duringf the reig^n of Charles II. The
Middle Class, having learned its lesson had, to an
almost excessive degree, retired from publicity.
The nation, as a visible entity, consisted once more
of Court and Commons. In the return of that ex-

^ Cunningham, " Industry and Commerce," ii, 142, quoting a
tract published in 1676.

UNt)ER THE RESTORATION 131

pressiveness of life which the Middle Class had
never beei able to achieve, it mattered compara-
tively littfe what form the expression took. The
licentiousness may have been a revolt from the op-
pression of Puritan severity; but the general toler-
ance of that licentiousness was due to the feel-
ing of satisfaction at a return of vigour to the
national vitality. Defeats at sea under Charles II
were even more tolerable than victories under the
Commonwealth, because the nation felt that it had
recovered shape and elasticity.

The Middle Class, in its way, had recovered no
less. Take first the case of State administration.
It returned ostensibly to its old order, and forth-
with began to undergo astonishing development.
Departmental government started at once upon that
advance in complication and organization which
gives us for the first time a recognizable Civil
Service.^ The reason was simply that, accepting
the institutions as they were, the Middle Class be-
gan to occupy these in force, leaving all the osten-
sible positions of power and authority to the nobles
and the gently born. The system of sinecures, which
grew into such an amazing burden upon the revenue,
is traceable to this middle-class instinct. As lone
as the Government offices provided quantities of
clerkships for the Middle Class, the ornamental
heads might remain as they were.

Take next the case of the revenue. We must,
indeed, begin by admitting that here the Middle
Class had actually succeeded in modifying the
^ Cf. "The King's Government."

132 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

institution itself. The theories of taxation on which
the Civil War was provoked, were, as we have
pointed out, moulded entirely by Middle- Class ideas.
How completely the practice, as well as the theories,
had been affected may be seen from the instance of
the property tax of 1697. This tax, originally in-
tended to be levied strictly upon assessed property,
was at once changed to a fixed sum. The rate of
one shilling in the pound was reckoned to produce
^494,671. This sum was portioned out and charged
in fixed contributions upon towns and counties — a
repetition for the last time of the old middle-class
evasion of the mediaeval taxes on movables.^ The
Crown had very little more knowledge than before
of the real amount of wealth in the country; it only
knew what the Middle Class chose to confess to.

But other great changes in national finance were
now taking the fancy of the Middle Class, Some
adviser of Charles II (Montagu perhaps) per-
ceived the considerable possibilities latent in the
goldsmiths' system of receiving money on deposit.
The goldsmiths made their profit very largely by
selling abroad at a good price the heavy money they
received. But that by itself would not have sufficed
to yield them a profit, after paying interest on the
deposit; so they were also in the habit of lend-
ing out, at a higher rate of interest, the money
they received. Charles 1 1 began to take advantage
of this system, not with any new conceptions of
finance, but simply in order to escape the tedious
delays between the voting of a tax in Parliament,
^ Dowell, "Taxation," ii, 51.

FINANCE 133

and the receipt by the Exchequer of the money
voted. That was a slow process for an extravagant
Court. By depositing with the goldsmiths the Ex-
chequer tallies, or by the looser process of issuing
Exchequer Bills, money could be drawn from the
deposits. Moreover, repayment was not an exacting
process. The notes which the goldsmiths issued to
depositors were accepted as value. It followed that
the tallies and bills could be regarded as value, and
so long as the goldsmith held these, he would not
be urgent about the cash they represented. Thus
the Crown was able both to borrow on the strength
of a Parliamentary vote, and also to use the coined
money paid in to the Exchequer.

At one moment the Middle Class in Parlia-
ment took alarm at this process. It appeared to
open the door to a loosening of middle-class hold
upon taxation. If the Crown could borrow thus,
it might become too free to keep, for instance,
a standing army. A statute was passed, there-
fore, forbidding the lending of money upon Ex-
chequer tallies. But it was a momentary alarm.
The Middle Class was quick to see that a new
avenue of profit had been opened, and that hav-
ing secured control of the basis of taxation, it might
now erect upon this a structure of the money-
making kind so dear to itself. The loans of the
goldsmiths to the Crown had been but a more or
less accidental development of their business, and
had been also very expensive. The system, in-
evitably rather suspect in the case of an extravagant
Court like that of Charles II, had been highly specu-

134 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

lative for the goldsmiths, who might at any time
find the talHes on their hands repudiated by Act of
Parliament; consequently the discount on the tallies
was heavy, and thus the taxes, when they came in,
had already lost much of their total value. At the
same time, although this kind of borrowing had had
its origin in a not very admirable desire for fore-
stalling taxes, it gradually began to be seen as con-
taining the germ of a useful system. It was obvious
that if, by any means, the gathering of money into
the Exchequer could be eased, the trade of the
country would benefit by the less rigid locking up
of a mass of currency. Moreover, if the loan could
be obtained on less speculative terms than those of
the goldsmiths, the system would really be an
economy. Sums voted by Parliament, if obtainable
at once on reasonable terms, would represent, even
after the deduction of the interest, more real value
than the same sums paid slowly into the Exchequer,
and only available in fragments. These considera-
tions would represent the view of certain enlight-
ened statesmen. Now the view of the middle-class
public would meet these half-way. We can see,
from the number of trading ventures on a vast
scale, like that of the East India Company, the
Muscovy Company, and others of this period, that
wealth had undergone an enormous increase. The
influx of the precious metals from the American
Continent had coincided with better ship-building
and greater international communications to produce
a vast expansion of trade. Consequently every op-
portunity for the employment of capital was wel-

FINANCE 135

corned, and, when the officials of the Exchequer con-
templated systematizing the borrowings on Parlia-
mentary votes, they were met by this readiness to
provide capital.

In this way the Bank of England came into
being. It is notable as illustrating a real difference
between the English Middle Class and the trading
classes of other countries. The English Middle
Class had never understood currency. Conse-
quently it had never had an institution like the
Bank of Amsterdam. This Bank had been purely
a currency instrument. In the perpetual disturbances
of coinage, which had been the most acute difficulty
of trade for so many hundred years, the Dutch had
perceived that, if they accumulated money on de-
posit at a fixed standard, and gave the depositor a
note of acknowledgement, the actual coin need not
return into the perils of circulation. They could
afford to fix the standard high, because, so long as
it was hieh, there would be the less likelihood of
the notes being exchanged for the deposit money,
since with them could be bought a greater face
value of other monies. They thus set up a drain of
bullion into their own coffers, where it was kept.
For the Bank of Amsterdam differed in this essential
point from the other primitive banking operations,
like those of the English goldsmiths, that it held
the deposits always against its notes, whereas the
English goldsmiths frankly issued their notes as a
promise to pay a sum equal to a deposit, without
any pretence of keeping those deposits always at
command. Their business was not to steady the

1^,6 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

exchanges or to make a reserve of coinage, but
simply to take a profit as loan-brokers.

Thus, while the origin of banking in one sense
may be credited to the Dutch, in another sense (and
one more vitally leading up to banking as a pro-
fession) the English must have the credit of it.
Yet not the English Middle Class, for the moving
spirit in the promotion of the Bank of England, the
man who really formulated its principles and steered
it through the perils of early opposition was Charles
Montagu. The foundation of the Bank shows that,
in the long run, the English failure to deal with
currency problems was counterbalanced by a kind
of mercantile sense which provided in the end the
most lasting solution of those problems. The first
Bank of England was a company of men of mer-
cantile renown, all of the Whig party, who made
themselves responsible in 1694 for a loan to the
Government of ^1,200,000. They could, without
doubt, have paid the whole sum in cash. But by
arrangement with the Exchequer they paid 60 per
cent, in cash, and the remaining 40 per cent, in
Bank bills. Thus only ^220,000 were withdrawn
from trade, the remaining ^480,000 being left in
circulation. Thus the bank-note system of Amster-
dam was boldly translated into a completely new
principle. Notes became an issue, not squared with
reserves, but as a part of liabilities balanced against
assets, plus shareholders' capital.

The consequences of this financial operation were
in time to provide remarkable proof of the fact that
middle-class development proceeded most success-

BANKING AND FOREIGN TRADE 137

fully on lines remote from political theory, by in-
genious adaptation of existing facts. But these con-
sequences will be more clearly seen in a later
chapter. For the present, the foundation of the
Bank may fitly be seen as the final product of a
century which was marked by a singular tendency
on the part of the merchant class to mercantile
theorizing and the philosophy of trading economics.
Not only do we find such a document as the petition
to Cromwell in 1655, against the war with Spain,
setting forth that "the English trade with Spaine is
driven and upheld in a circular motion as well by
creditors as by the real stock of the nation";^
but we also have the confidential clerk of a mer-
chant in Newcastle, dio^ressinor from an account of
his master's life to a brief discourse upon foreign ex-
changes, and the opportunities for profit therein.'^
The theory of " the balance of trade " began in the
seventeenth century to obtain that complete hold
upon the Middle Class which Adam Smith ulti-
mately set himself to loosen. Thus the petition of
1655 argued that we had from Spain iron, oil,
cochineal, raisins, silk, wool, etc., and that since we
exported to that country manufactured goods we
drew in the end " great store of monies," not only
in direct import of coin paid for our manufactures,
but indirectly also by the working of our position as
creditor, which forced money from Spain to Italy
and Turkey "for the better advancement of our
merchants' affairs," and also to the East Indies. On

^ "Thurloe Papers," iv, 135.

■^ "Memoirs of Ambrose Barnes," pp. 39, 40.

138 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

the other hand France was a manufacturing country,
requiring Httle from us, so that trade with her ended
in a drain of coined money/ The same contrast
was drawn in other connections between Portugal
and France.' Probably this theory, that the balance
of trade was in England's favour when she drew
coin from a foreign country and against her when
she had to pay coin, was about as far as mercantile
theory could have been expected to go at this time.
It followed naturally upon all the acute currency
difficulties. These would have been early days to
discern the fact that the difference, for instance, be-
tween the " bank coin " of Amsterdam and the
current coin might make an apparent exchange
against England when the true balance of trading
debit and credit was in her favour.^ But the fallacy
of supposing that trade involving the payment of
coin by English traders was carried on at a loss was
responsible for much unwise legislation. So per-
sistent were the old illusions about the currency that
even the repeal, under Charles II, of the statutes
forbidding the export of bullion, was not whole-
heartedly enacted; the traffic in bullion was fre-
quently interfered with by proclamation.^ It is too
early yet to see in this repeal the triumph of mer-
cantilist over bullionist.^ All middle-class men
were still really bullionists; the only difference that
had arisen was that some of them began to see that

^ " Thurloe Papers," iv, 135.

- Hewins, "English Trade," p. 121.

^ Cf. Adam Smith, " Wealth of Nations," bk. iv, cap. iii.

■* Shaw, "Currency."

^ As Cunningham does, "Industry and Commerce," ii, 177.

BANKING AND FOREIGN TRADE (I39

operations of trade might affect the international
command over coin more than legislative enactments
did. They had not ceased to regard the exchanges
as entirely a question of bullion.

With this recovery of its true line of develop-
ment in the State, and the immediate success that
attended it, the Middle Class gave another ex-
hibition of its innately selfish habits of thought.
We have seen it first, as a body united against
the landlords and standing with the workmen; next
as a body strong enough to drop the workmen ;
next, with an advance in wealth, turning upon its
own organizations, and proving disloyal to the spirit,
and then to the letter, of trade gilds. We now see
a further advance in wealth rendering the more
powerful middle-class men disloyal to all concep-
tions of unity in the trading class. For a time the
events of the reign of Charles I and the Civil War
delayed this exhibition of their disloyalty. Pressure
of circumstances drove the Middle Class into a
compact whole for the time being; indeed, it even
drove it back upon association with the artisan.
The towns as a whole made common cause for a
while. But when the Restoration, liberating the
Middle Class from the burden of ostensibly up-
holding a political theory, left it to pursue its
own bent, the old tendency to entrench capital
against the rest of the community displayed itself at
once. This became now a far more powerful and
dangerous tendency. The merchants had so much
to offer that they were able to draw the Court circles
into their camp. The process had, indeed, begun

(I40 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

some time back. The Elizabethan adventurers had
interested supporters in high circles; and the second
joint-stock enterprise of the East India Company in
1 617 included among its subscribers 15 dukes and
earls, and 1 3 countesses and other titled ladies, as well
as the 313 merchants and the 214 tradesmen.^ The
history of Enghsh commerce becomes for some time
now a history of great monopolistic trading com-
panies. The trade with virtually all the countries
which were worth trading with was in the hands of
privileged groups of men. The Muscovy Company
had Russia, the Eastland Company had Norway,
Sweden, and the Baltic; the Merchant Adventurers
had the coast ;of Europe from the Cattegat to the
Somme; the Levant Company had the Mediter-
ranean and as much of the Near East as the Turkey
Company did not control; the Guinea Company,
the East India Company, and the South Virginia
Company explain themselves; the Plymouth Ad-
venturers had Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New
York, and New England, and so on. Moreover,
these companies were a more exacting form of
monopoly than had been known before. The old
Companies did at least admit new members on pay-
ment of a fine; the new Companies were closed to
all but actual shareholders.

Interest in these ventures entirely replaced con-
cern for internal trade and manufacture. The real
evil of the commercializing of England's policy was
not the mere introduction of considerations of trade,
but the fact that this introduction was mainly in-
' Hewins, " Trade and Finance," p. 60.

BANKING AND FOREIGN TRADE 141

spired by men with the bad as well as the good
elements of the Middle Class spirit. What this
meant in foreien affairs we shall see later. What it
meant at the moment in home affairs was an op-
pression of the small trader in the externals of his
business, and a complete disregard for his behaviour
in the internal conduct of his affairs. In some re-
spects, indeed, the small trader was more free. The
statutes against regrating and forestalling had fallen
practically into abeyance; and in London the capi-
talist was too busy upon large schemes of foreign
trade to interfere with the retailer. But in the
country towns and ports the small man was still
harried by the monopolist bodies. The gilds,
shadowy as they had become in one sense, yet
existed sufficiently to be perpetually persecuting men
for selling in the open market when they were not
members of the Fellowship, or for trading beyond
seas when they were not enrolled Merchant Ad-
venturers.^ As for a man's conduct of his business,
apprenticeship had become, in the higher grades, a
form of preliminary to partnership ; ' and in the
lower grades a form of forced labour which virtually
evaded the law (as having previously been a gild
affair) and, with the decline of the gilds, was under
no practical control at all. There is little actual
appearance of change in the seventeenth century;

^ See, e.g., "The Newcastle Merchant Adventurers," /fl:^«>«.

- At any rate, it is difficult to see any other explanation of the
prices given by Stowe as paid for indentures in the reign of James I ;
or of the fact that Newcastle apprentices were fined ;^ioo for
misbehaviour in 1635 ("Newcastle Merchant Adventurers," p. 27).

142 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

but the outbreak of riots of workmen early in the
eighteenth century shows what had been taking
place. Disturbances like these, with the breaking of
looms in London, Gloucestershire, and elsewhere,
must have been the slowly developed outcome of
long exasperation.

The events both of 1660 and of 1688 were very
largely determined by Middle Class considerations.
Just as the Restoration had been rendered possible
by the dissatisfaction of the trading community with
the position in which the Civil War had placed
them, so its success was due to the fact that the
Middle Class never allowed its ostensible dislike
of licentiousness to blind it to the advantao^es it
reaped from the new conceptions of policy for which
it was able to gain the support of Charles II. A
king who would appoint a Committee of the Privy
Council for Trade and Plantations, and would con-
clude treaties upon a commercial basis with foreign
countries, was not to be deposed for any faults in
his moral outlook. This is probably the real ex-
planation of the apparently curious way in which
the solid part of the nation accepted the excesses
of the Restoration Court. Why, then, it may be
asked, should the Revolution of 1688 have occurred,
if the attitude of the Middle Class was the deter-
mining factor }

The answer is that, while morals make very little
difference to trade, religion could, in those days,
make a great deal. From quite early times, as we
have had more than one occasion to remark, the
Middle Class had had a suspicion of the Roman

BANKING AND FOREIGN TRADE 143

Church. It had cautiously but persistently with-
drawn from that church's influence all the essen-
tial accompaniments of daily life that it could. It
had developed its resources and position in the
State enormously since the Reformation. Now, at
the moment when it seemed to be at the heiofht of
its policy of permeating- State affairs with its influ-
ence, while taking but the smallest and most formal-
ized share of responsibility, it perceived the danger
of a reaction. The rule of James had seemed likely
to bring England back into that particular form of
relation with foreign countries which the Middle
Class had just succeeded in supplanting by a new
one. Instead of treaties of commerce the country
would be making alliances on quite a different basis.
Foreign policy would again be involved with the
territorial interests of Rome; and national affairs,
which had been brought to the position of being
controlled by " considerations of revenue rather than
those of power," ^ would revert to a control with
which trade would have little to do. This was the
real danger of Roman Catholicism. The popular kind
of fear — whether it took the crude old form of " the
fires of Smithfield," or the more sophisticated form
of patriotic dislike of allegiance to the Pope " — was
a force that had to be stirred up to be effective.
The inducement to stir it up was the apprehension
engendered in the Middle Class by the prospect
of this dangerous interference with the foreign policy
it had set on foot, and with the commercial struc-
ture beginning to be erected upon it.

^ Cunningham, "Industry and Commerce," ii, 401.

CHAPTER VII

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY CONTINUED — THE MIDDLE
CLASS BECOMES TRANSITIONAL DECAY OF MUNI-
CIPAL LIFE

THAT class of the population which was thus
modifying the character and trend of English
public life is easily recognizable as having developed
from the original IMiddle Class — the trader of the
towns. But during the seventeenth century the
Middle Class began to display one of the charac-
teristics that chiefly distinguishes it in modern
times; it became ''Middle" in the sense of tran-
sitional. Hitherto, however vigorously middle-class
men had developed, they had retained one peculiar
quality; the distinctions at which they aimed were
distinctions of their own class and their own way
of life. Just as, in the mediaeval towns, the am-
bition was to be one of the bons ge^its — the men of
substance — so down to the end of Elizabethan times
the ambition of the merchant practically limited
itself to being a knighted dignitary of the Fellowship
of his trade or merchandise. He bought lands, and
built a country house; but the complaints of the
Tudor pamphleteers and verse-writers show that he
did not attempt, in his new circumstances, to behave
himself with the feudal lavishness of a gentleman.
The verse-writers, it is important to notice, made

144

XVIIth century continued 145

complaints, not satires ; the pamphleteers wrote
serious disquisitions about the new economic con-
ditions, not sarcastic attacks upon nouveaux inches.

The comedies of the Restoration eive us siofns of
development. In them we come upon the moneyed
merchant, the City man and his wife, making their
bungling and befooled entry upon high life. They
affect the company of young blades and elderly
ratios of the Court; they have mincing manners and
a self-satisfaction that blinds them to ridicule of
their pretensions. They are despoiled by gambling
rakes and extravagant great ladies. They put on
airs and graces, and try to conceal their City connec-
tions behind country estates and purchased coats of
arms. The same tendencies can be observed in the
sober records of the College of Heralds. The various
Visitations of 1623 and 1665-6 are full of matter for
the satirist. Names obviously plebeian, like Gunter,
Backhouse, Baker, Blower, Mundy, Packer, assume
territorial affixes ; and Gunter of Reading, Backhouse
of Swallowfield, Bigg of Haines Hill, Packer of
Shellingford, are inscribed upon the Heralds' rolls.
Tooker of Abingdon, a lawyer in 1623, has in 1665
a punning coat of arms, blazoned with hearts ; Tout
Coeur is its significance. Sir John Davis of Bere
Court, Eman of Windsor, Jones of Wei ford, Nelson
of Chiddleworth, veil their origins under vao^ue refer-
ences to a father or grandfather as " of London."
Only those who are themselves the first generation
in the new process, so to speak, frankly confess to
beine "Citizens and Mercers" or "Citizens and
Merchant Taylors " of London. A single remove

L

146 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

from the original change is enough for dropping the
name of citizen and the trade description of the
father. More significant still of what was going on
are the disclaimers. In the Berkshire visitation of
1665-6 no fewer than 127 people, in this single
county, disclaimed the right to bear arms and the
title of " esquire " and " gentleman." In other words,
this number of people had been pretending to be
o-entlemen with coats of arms ; and having- been
summoned by the Heralds had had to confess their
inability to prove any right to their pretensions. In
the Warwickshire visitation of 1682-3, among an
equally large number of disclaimers, are such persons
as saddlers, cutlers, clerks, and smiths at Birmingham.
Evidently the ambition of the rich middle-class man
now had ceased to be merely to stand well in his
trade. His first idea when he made money was to
pose as a gentleman, and forget his trade connec-
tions.

Such changes could not occur in the outlook of
the richest portion of the Middle Class without
affecting the other portions. A new standard of
expenditure was bound to accompany pretensions to
gentility; and this would give an opening to all those
members of the Middle Class who had discovered,
two or three centuries earlier, that money was to be
made by the employment of brains on other subjects
than trade. The lawyer, the civil servant of the
Crown, and the doctor, began to have new conceptions
of the fees that could be exacted for their work. Ac-
quiring more money, they in their turn had the idea
of making themselves gentlemen. Lawyers, clerks

XVIIth century continued 147

of the Signet and the Privy Seal, officials of the
High Court, doctors, officials of the Ro3^al House-
hold, appear in the seventeenth-century Visitations
with claims to coats of arms. These professions had
developed with an extraordinary, yet quite compre-
hensible, rapidity. The old order had given them
but little opportunity. In so far as they served the
old nobility and landed classes, they could never be
more than dependents of the household. The clerk
who kept a lord's accounts, the doctor who occasion-
ally attended him, would live of his substance; little
coined money would come in their way, since, so far
as the old landed classes possessed coined money, it
would be used to procure luxuries. In so far as the
professional classes were concerned with the traders
they would, until the end of the sixteenth century, be
able perhaps to acquire more money, since the trader
had no habit of keeping a dependent household.
Yet the highly organized system of town govern-
ment by the men of substance would have precluded
any assumption of social position by those who made
money by their wits solely.

The individualism which succeeded the breaking-
up, during the sixteenth century, of practically all
the systematized life of England — the church, the
manor, the gild, the great household — swept away
the barriers that had hitherto confined the learned
professions. A clerk of the Royal service no longer
looked to some ecclesiastical preferment as the
ultimate reward of his services; a merchant's clerk
no longer lived of necessity and by gild rules under
his master's roof. The lawyer, gaining his first great

148 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

profits from all the trafficking in land, saw a new
future opening in commercial disputes which the
gild or the company had lost the power of settling.
At the same time, the discovery of America had
vastly increased the bullion resources of Europe;
and the habit of payments in coin would tend to
emphasize individualist development. Hence we
find, as early as 1648, a doctor of Bury St. Edmunds
making a will in which he appears as the owner of
a manor, and of houses and lands in various parts of
Suffolk and Essex, and as the mortgagee of two
other houses upon which he has lent sums of ;^8oo
and jCyoo. Hugh Barker, of New Windsor, a doctor,
bears arms in the Visitation of 1665-6. Just as the
Middle Classes first appeared, in the persons of
the town tradesmen, founding their distinct position
upon the use and circulation of coined money, so
when money becomes the instrument of social ad-
vancement, and the possession of land for the most
part only an indication of the command of money,
we find the professional men definitely taking rank
in the Middle Class, and displaying its characteristic
quality of development. This quality was an in-
dividualism protected by privileged combination.
As soon as the law and medicine became avenues
to wealth they became opportunities for monopol-
istic union on the lines of those trading combinations
which had been developed out of the old gilds.
The Inns of Court, instead of being merely con-
venient inventions for keeping under supervision
the apprentices to the law, became authorities with-
out whose licence no one could make money at the

XVIIth century continued 149

law. The surgeons obtained from Henry VIII a
charter for incorporating themselves on the Hnes of
one of the City companies ; and transformed that
combination into a College, imitated by the Physic-
ians, which equally protected the individual power
of its members to make money.

There remains one profession, and it presents
some curious difficulties — the profession of the
Church. How far is it to be regarded at this period
as a middle-class profession? Up to the time of the
Reformation, as we have more than once remarked,
the Church took rank, not by the family origin of its
dignitaries and priests, but by its corporate exist-
ence, which was in political theory of royal or
princely rank, and in sociological fact of the position
of a great landowner. The first sixty or seventy
years after the Reformation may be said to have
been a period of no new social development in the
Church and no new social attitude towards it. This
was largely because the development of the Middle
Class was still upon the old lines. There was no
need to regard the Church in any new way. It had
always been mainly dependent upon the land, and it
continued to be so, the only difference being that,
instead of a large landowning corporation, it had
become a body of small landowning individuals. It
was not to be thought of as belonging to a new
class.

But when all the other forms of gaining a living
by the mere results of education began to be seen as
avenues to personal consideration and social position,
the Church was likely in its turn to be seen in the

I50 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

same light. Since the withdrawal from Rome had
left its ordained members to stand by their own
origins and capacities, and since the origins con-
tinued to be what they had always largely been — of
the humblest kind — the Church became the way to
social advancement for those of least social position,
who could attain to education. For a time a false
appearance of middle-class development took place.
The effect of the Puritan movement and the Civil
War was to emphasize individualism in the clerical
profession, and to make of the profession a power in
public affairs. But it lacked the true middle-class
quality. It was not dependent upon the use of
coined money. Its remuneration had, by the sequels
of the Reformation, been stereotyped in a mediaeval
form, not left open to the modifications which were
affecting the rest of society. Its tithes remained
tithes, and were not translated into rent. Hence for
a long time to come, the Church was in a peculiarly
equivocal position. It again came to take rank less
by the origins and character of its ordained mem-
bers than by its corporate nature. Clergymen might
be, and increasingly were, drawn from obviously
middle-class families. Yet they were not as a whole
of the Middle Class. This may be seen in the
social treatment of them. A great lord or landed
gentleman might, or might not, invite a wealthy
middle-class man to his table. But if he did invite
him, the middle-class man would rank for all pur-
poses as an accepted guest. The parson of the
parish would be invited for a part of the meal, would
be treated as a dependent, and expected to with-

XVIIth century continued 151

draw before the meal was over. The middle-class
man of as little wealth or education as the ordinary
parson would not be invited at all; but in the circum-
stances that would be a situation of more dignity, if
of less consideration. The conclusion is that for the
present the Church cannot be regarded as a middle-
class profession. It was, as it had always hitherto
been, rather difficult to place in any social category.
But whereas, before the Reformation, it had charac-
teristics which make it placeable, for all practical
purposes, in the feudal and governing class, it has in
the seventeenth century characteristics which rather
thrust it down towards the peasant class. It main-
tained relations with its social superiors, not by being
of the class of transition, but by the very fact that it
was not of that class. The parson could be invited
to great tables because there was no possibility in
his case of social confusion.

The rise of the wealthier middle-class people into
the ranks of the landowners and politicians had,
besides its direct effect upon English public life, an
indirect effect upon social conditions. In the old
days there had been stratifications of a very definite
kind. The only ladder of advancement from the
lower grades of society to the higher had been the
Church. On the whole, the tradino^ classes had not
used that ladder; the poor men who became great
ecclesiastical dignitaries, and thereby great political
forces, had for the most part risen, not from the
intermediate stages, but from the peasantry, the
yeomen farmers, and the skilled labourers. But
when, with the failure of the Commonwealth, the

152 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

rich merchant class finally took its direction, not
towards a new form of an upper class, but towards
an assumption of the old form by new men, the earlier
stratification of society, while it remained in appear-
ance, had in reality disappeared. The path by which
the princes of the East India Company rose to emin-
ence was open to any man in the kingdom.

Now this had a double result. It made merely
transitional the objects which had previously been
of sincere ambition to the trader, and it produced, in
a man's conduct of his business, the beginnings of the
rampant individualism which was to become so grave
a problem during the nineteenth century. The first
of those results is most clearly to be seen in town
government. Formerly, whatever corruptions might
creep in, municipal affairs honestly engaged the
ambition of the Middle Class. To stand well with
the town, to make it prosperous and happy, to keep
it out of trouble, were the objects of men of the
type of John Baret and John Hall. The grammar
schools, the town lands, the charities were handled
with a living interest, and, if not always wisely, at
any rate vigorously. But in the seventeenth century
municipal life began to suffer from dry-rot. The old
convention of the bons gents reached its lowest level.
The records of a provincial town at this period show
that everything was in the hands of a comparatively
small group of men, who did not take the trouble to
exercise any real supervision. The same people
year after year were elected to office. Each year
the list of burgesses is recorded; but a corporate act
is rarely to be found. The accounts of funds display

BECOMES TRANSITIONAL

DO

a complete lack of thought and enterprise. No
matter what moneys were in hand, the burgesses
appear to think that they had done their duty when
certain salaries were paid, and the barest necessities
of repairs had been attended to. Very often no
proper account is kept of balances. In one year, for
example, the receipt of school funds may be ^^4.0,
and against that will be set a schoolmaster's salary
of perhaps ^20 and a carpenter's bill for j^i 6s. Sd.
Next year the accounts will display the same re-
ceipts, with no mention of a balance carried over.
The town lands are let to burgesses, as a rule, with-
out any effort made to see if a higher rent could be
obtained elsewhere. The charity accounts are con-
sidered adequate if a list of doles is entered, without
much relation between the total of this and the total
of receipts.' All this does not necessarily mean de-
liberate corruption. But it certainly has the wider
meaning that what had once been the object of
honest ambition had become only a formal stage on
the way to a different kind of life. To stand well
with the town now meant only that a man was on
the way to becoming a gentleman, or to making his
sons gentlemen. In some cases the spirit would be
even worse than that. The feeling would be that, as
the richest rank of the Middle Class had risen to
a point at which they had left behind them their
previous standards of comfort and ease, the second
rank should now take those standards and treat
them as, in their way, the equivalent of gentlemanly

^ I have for this subject chiefly used the archives of Burford,
kindly placed at my disposal by C. T. Cheatle, Esq.

154 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

leisure. Not having the wealth, or the possibility of
wealth, to raise them to the degree of land-owning,
they would give themselves by municipal office a
kind of self-importance to mark them off from mere
trade. That would reduce municipal office to a
mere symbol, and burgess-ship to a mere condition
of privilege.

Marked individualism was the other result that
was bound to ensue from the new position of middle-
class life as an avenue to rank and station. The
evil had, indeed, beo^un some time earlier. As soon
as the control of workmanship and prices by the
gild was undermined by the increasing standard of
personal comfort, which an enlarged currency made
possible, the conception of trade and manufacture as
affairs with masters on one side, and men on the
other, began to creep in. The invention of open
joint-stock enterprises, such as the East India
Company, produced a further change. Previously
the uses for money outside a man's own business
had been limited. He might buy land, or take mort-
gages, or equip himself with plate. But all these
were comparatively unspeculative uses of money.
They might lead a man some distance towards ad-
vancement; but they necessitated a considerable
degree of advancement to begin with, if they were
themselves to be at all effective. Small purchases of
land or of plate had ceased to open any avenues.
But small purchases of stock in the early days of
such ventures might lead a man almost anywhere.
With this new kind of opening for money, the master
manufacturer would soon begin to regard his trade

BECOMES TRANSITIONAL 155

merely as the source of wealth, not as an enterprise
in which he was concerned in the same manner,
though in different degree, with his workmen. He
became concerned in a wholly different manner.
The money he made bore to him no longer a rela-
tion to the work that was being done by his men ;
its sole relation was to the possibilities of using it
in other directions. Waees were no lonofer even in
the remotest sense a participation in profits; they
became the tiresome but necessary basis for the
machine that produced money.

This economic individualism was, of course, all of
a piece with the moral and political individualism of
the Middle Class. Middle-class men had, from the
nature of their rise in the State, grounded them-
selves always upon the belief that what they had was
their own.

The original feudal conception had been that no
man's property was his own, in the sense that he
could do exactly what he liked with it. That would
have destroyed the unity of physical force by which
what each had had became his. To this concep-
tion the Middle Class had, in the days of its
origin, opposed the corresponding idea of the gild;
a trader made money not solely by his own skill
and efforts, but by the protection of unified force.
However, this was always realized as a merely
intellectual conception, in the last resort. The
truth always came out in such matters as counter-
ing of taxation ; successful refusal to be assessed by
royal commissioners was an assertion that traders'
possessions were individual, and not in any consti-

156 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

tutional sense the Sovereign's. This attitude is
visible in two directions during the Commonwealth
and the Restoration. The lukewarmness of the
middle-class men to the Commonwealth was a sign
that they mistrusted a political organization which
tended, however slightly, to assume rights over the
proceeds of commerce. In a minor way, the diaries
and memoirs of dispossessed ministers are full of the
same feeling. Nearly every one of these men had
gained a cure of souls by the expulsion of someone
else. But when he was in turn expelled, each one
raises an outcry. No sense of responsibility for
corporate failure can be found in them. The com-
plaint is always that a possession, a piece of per-
sonal ownership, has been taken away.^ Through-
out the seventeenth century the absence of a sense
of national responsibility in the Middle Class be-
comes more pronounced, even at the very time
when it is entering largely upon national affairs.

It was, in fact, the secret of the final trend of
middle-class development in the direction of main-
taining old forms, rather than creating a new kind of
public life. Snobbery was not the only, or the most
important element in this decision. Individuals may
have been influenced by the pleasantness of having
titles, lands, and the command of deference. But
the class as a whole moved on an obscure policy
that it was better to leave the screen of old forms
and appearances in front of their operations for their
own interest. If they had made new constitutional

^ See, e.g., "Yorkshire Diaries," /a^i^/w, and "Adam Martin-
dale."

DECAY OF MUNICIPAL LIFE 157

forms and a new social organization, then their
political acts would have been, without concealment,
the political acts of traders and merchants. If, on
the other hand, they left the old forms ,standing,
then the nation at large would continue to regard
political movements as the movements of Lords
and Commons ; and the virtual identity of these
august bodies with the rich mercantile community
would not be noticed. The duality could even be
turned to active account. The merchants could at
any given moment appear as merchants to influence
public affairs, if in their capacity as Lords or
Commons they had failed to carry a point. It was
the most triumphant achievement of the ingrained
middle-class secretiveness.

CHAPTER VIII

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY PREDOMINANCE OF THE
MIDDLE CLASS TRADING MONOPOLIES

D

URING the eighteenth century the Middle
Class reached its highest point of develop-
ment. It did not, indeed, occupy so large a place in
the community as it came to occupy during the nine-
teenth century. It had not reached the point at
which it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to
mark off a middle-class area in the social organiza-
tion. But it had arrived at the stage at which it
entirely coloured the national outlook, and virtually
controlled policy. It regulated itself almost entirely
by the standard which it best understood — the^
standard of money; and only gave advancement to
brains in so far as they were emplo3'ed upon affairs
of money. Finally, it was at its highest degree of
conimand of the two other classes in the State. The
upper class had become predominantly Middle Class
in ""substance; and its surrender to the increasing
scale of expenditure made it in effect dependent
upon trade and speculation. The lower class — the
v^ workmen, artisans, and labourers — were securely
enchained. Administration was in the hands, or at
least at the service, of the masters of trade and in-
dustry; the ancient rights and safeguards of the
workman had been deliberately allowed to become

THE XVIIIth century 159

obsolete, and he had no means of obtaininof new
rights save^'siich as his masters could satisfactorily
condemn as breaches of the peace. At the same
time, the capitalists had not yet arrived at the stage
which was in the end to prove a trap for them.
They had not entered upon that rapid advance in
the use of machinery which was to bring them pro-
fits so large as to blind them to the danger of col-
lecting in single towns immense aggregations of
workers. Combination among workers had not yet
been made easier by such aggregation ; it was
sporadic, and therefore comparatively simple to sup-
press. The Middle Class reaped now the full re-
ward of shrewdness in abandonino- its mistake of
the seventeenth century. By returning, from the
brief error of the Commonwealth, to the canny
maintenance of old forms, it preserved, among other
things, the rough and elementary franchise which
had been based originally on the landowning and
noTlihe mercantile conception of the State. Thus
it was able to pursue commercial ends secure from
any responsibility save to those who profited by
such pursuits. In general, a man must have ad-
vanced some way upon money-making before he
could become an elector; or, if he owed his vote to
I hereditary tenure of land, his only criticism of policy
would be concerned with differing aspects of what
was, and, what was not, profitable trade. To both
kinds of elector the internal details of commerce,
the conditions of work and wages and so on, would
be of no concern.

It was, of course, essential both to the preserva-

i6o THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

tion of form and to the maintenance of their power
that those members of the Middle Class who had
attained to the rank of a governing class should
avoid that dilutipn of their privileged position which
would be likely to ensue from the sweeping away of
the old barriers. Anyone might now rise in the
world; but it was necessary that not every one
should rise. The change in the social fabric had not
yet proceeded so far as to leave no barriers at all.
One certainly remained which proved efficacious for
some time to come. The ownership of land on a
large scale was different from every other position
in the social system. It was a position no longer
easy to reach. Those whose families had not been
able to avail themselves either of the opportunities
of the Tudor period, when the decline or extinction
of old families coincided with a vast increase of
wealth among merchants, or of the later opportunities
of the Civil War, could have no hope of entering
into the circle now, except by the control of far more
money than sufficed to obtain entrance at those
earlier times. They might, indeed, become small
landowners; and the Heralds' Visitations show how
very many people were doing so during the seven-
teenth century. But that was all to the good of the
new aristocracy. For the whole object of the small
landowner in buying land would be to rank him-
self as far as possible among the gentry — in other
words, to appear to coincide with the new aris-
tocracy— while the smallness of his estate would
prevent him from actually entering the circle of real
power.

THE XVIIIth century i6i

At the same time, the continuance of this fictitious
position of landowning would make an effective
barrier against the next rank of the Middle Class
— that which was still actively engaged in wholesale
or retail sale of merchandise. The uppermost of these
persons had already discovered ways of drawing an
income from commerce to supplement their rent-
rolls. Not all, of course, needed this supplementing.
The golden periods of estate-buying had allowed
many to acquire, by the application of commercial
methods, a translation of considerable trading for-
tunes into new terms in which there were equally
large fortunes. But even if rent-rolls were inade-
quate, the great joint-stock enterprises of merchant
companies were there to give the profits, without the
stigma, of trade. Nor was the joint-stock principle
confined to oversea enterprises. As early as 1631,
when Charles I gave a charter of incorporation to a
London Society of Soap Boilers, to exploit a new
method, the complaint had been made that "many
citizens of London were put out of an old trade, in
which they had been bred all their time, by knights,
esquires, and gentlemen never bred up to the trade,
upon pretence of a project and new invention."^
This complaint throws a good deal of light back-
ward upon the famous debate in Parliament on
monopolies in 1601, from which an incredibly long
list might be drawn up of articles which might only
be sold by privileged persons — salt fish, currants,
iron, gunpowder, playing cards, potashes, aniseed,

' From a contemporary pamphlet quoted by Cunningham,
" Industry and Commerce," ii, 307.

M

i62 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

vinegar, sea-coal, steel, saltpetre, aqua vitae, brushes,
lead, oil of blubber, are but a few items.

The practical explanation of the existence of all
these monopolies is, of course, that the venturing of
capital had become necessary, while the idea of
speculation was still so far undeveloped that the
owners of capital would not risk it in open competi-
tion, but demanded the closed market of a privileged
association. The rich Middle Class, advancing into
a new sphere of importance, carried with it its old
narrow ideas of making money by keeping^other
people out; they translated into world-wide enter-
prises the primitive old principles on which they
had, four or five centuries earlier, closed their town
markets to strangers. The " Knights, Esquires, and
gentlemen" of 1601 would be very largely the new
men of mercantile wealth, in whom these old prin-
ciples were instinctive. These were the chief com-
ponents of that upper circle which was setting on
foot a new exclusiveness, and perpetuating, by dint
of getting into the highest land-owning class and
maintaining the appearances of aristocracy, social dis-
tinctions which might otherwise have been swamped
in the spread of the same pursuits by which they
had themselves risen. This was not done entirely
by deliberate resolve or for economic reasons. The
same ambitions which had gradually made of their
land purchases the gateway to a new sphere of
importance would tend to make their possessors
wish to lose nothing of that importance by widen-
ing of the circle. They enjoyed rather more than a
hundred years of unchallenged supremacy, before

TRADING MONOPOLIES 163

the rise of machinery, introducing a fresh class of
weahh, led, by the new commercial ideas involved
in the change, to a slow eclipse of the aristocracy
which had risen to power on older ideas.

An episode in the early history of the Bank of
England requires some examination, as throwing
light upon the currents of upper middle-class de-
velopment at this time. The Bank was at first only
V incorporated for a limited term of years, and was
subject to a good deal of criticism. It was, of course,
one more monopoly. It had the privilege of lending
money to the Government, and its bills were issued
on the credit of the Government. This implied, to
the minds of some critics, that there would before
long be a " corner " in loans for commercial pur-
poses. The licence to combine capital for the pur-
pose of lending to the Government had been so
handled as to leave a large portion of the nominal
capital to circulate in trade. By means of the
Government credit this money could be lent at a
lower rate of interest than the goldsmiths were in
the habit of charging. Hence arose an idea that one
of the objects of the Bank shareholders was to get
all loan business into their own hands, and then
raise the rate of interest to an exorbitant figure.^
This dread of monopolistic tendencies shows that
there was considerable middle-class feelingr ag"ainst
the Bank.

In years after the foundation of the Bank, a
scheme was propounded for establishing a Land
Bank, that is, a Bank which should hold money on
^ Rogers, " Bank of England," p. xiv.

i64 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

deposit and lend money on the security, not of
capital subscribed by shareholders, but of land
owned by members of the corporation. The idea
had a middle-class origin; it was mooted by a
doctor named Chamberlain. But his object, beyond
doubt, was to unite, against the mercantile interest,
the landed interest of such old families as still sur-
vived and of families that were newer, but had dis-
sociated themselves from commercial pursuits and
become landowners pure and simple.

The significant point about this episode is the
complete failure of Chamberlain's scheme. It never
really entered upon existence. For a few years
there was an office of the Land Bank in London,
but it never obtained sufficient support to be in-
corporated, or to start business. This gives a
measure of the extent to which politics were be-
coming subject to the middle-class mind. Much as
the purely landed families would have liked, by this
time, to counter the moves of the mercantile in-
fluence, the Tories themselves were too deeply
penetrated with the commercial instinct to support a
Land Bank. They were able, on the whole, to see
that bills could not be issued on a security not
quickly realizable. Land could never be the sole,
or even the main, security for such purposes.
Therefore, although it is true that the Land Bank
proposals were a sign of the Tory dislike of the
purely moneyed community,^ it is also true that the
Tories themselves displayed, in regard to the pro-
posals, their own middle-class origins.

^ Rogers, "Bank of England," p. ii.

TRADING MONOPOLIES i6

D

The same fact can be discerned, indeed, in most of
the commercial legislation of this century. The old
interference by Parliament in matters of trade had
never wholly died out. There had been, in the late
seventeenth century, a considerable return of such
interference. Thus the East India Company was
forced, by Act of Parliament, to export yearly not
less than ^150,000 worth of English manufactures.^
But the distino^uishinor mark of the kind of inter-
ference that went on during the eighteenth cen-
tury was that it was a particularized interference,
directed to the advantage of some special trade or
form of commerce, at the cost, not of foreign com-
petitors, but of certain interests at home which were
less influential than the people desiring the particular
advantage. Thus the importation of alum for
cloth-dressing was forbidden, because certain people
wished to exploit their own alum in Yorkshire;
tobacco-planting in Ireland was forbidden because
it competed with the interests of the American
plantations. Exportation of wool was forbidden,
ostensibly to starve out foreign weaving; but the
real result was to lower the price of wool to the
English manufacturer, at the cost of the wool-
grower.^

This kind of legislation, involving such conse-
quences as the atrophying of the wool-growing trade,
for instance, shows a complete middle-class domina-
tion of Parliament. It was the surviving of the
original ideas of privileged trading. The career of

^ Cunningham, "Industry and Commerce," ii, 267.

^ 13 and 14 Car. II, c. 18; i William and Mary, i, c. 32.

3

i66 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

most of the great merchant companies displays the
same flaws. The Levant Company practically killed
our trade with the Near East by the narrowness of
its spirit. Cloth could only be exported to the
Near East in the Company's own vessels, and had
to be brought to London to be shipped ; while
membership of the Company was confined to London
and the near neighbourhood. The Russia Company,
by such operations as " cornering " cordage, and
ordering its agents to buy no more for three years,
produced a situation in which the Russian Court
refused to renew the Company's privileges, and so
practically stopped trade, since Englishmen who
were not members of the Company could not enter
into commerce with Russia.-^

Yet for the greater part of the century these old
conceptions of trade remained supreme. There are
two probable reasons for this. One was that the
Middle Class was a^ain making use of its old
shrewdness in dealing with the Exchequer. The
operations of the big companies tended to a certain
ease and simplicity in the collection of customs
duties.^ The other, and more effectual reason was
that the capital of the companies had begun to be
operated with, and the processes of stockbroking
offered to the upper class an opportunity for making
their own profit out of trading enterprises. The
affair of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 shows to
what a pitch this kind of speculation had risen.
Consequently, in spite of the perpetual complaints

^ Hewins, " Trade and Finance," pp. 34, 43, 44.
^ Cunningham, "Industry and Commerce," ii, 223.

TRADING MONOPOLIES 167

against the chartered companies, in spite of the
open hostihty of the House of Commons to the
East India Company/ the great corporations suc-
ceeded in maintaininof themselves.

Hence there began to arise a new kind of division
in the Middle Class. These interests of privileged
foreign trade and stock-jobbing were of com-
paratively little use to the manufacturer. The one
cut his profits by compelling him to carry on his
foreign connections through monopolistic shipping
enterprises ; the other inevitably tended to diminish
the capital available for manufacture. But, on the
other hand, the professional section of the Middle
Class tended to side with the monopolist and
stock-jobbers. The wealth of this section was in-
creasing. Lawyers, doctors, the clerks of the de-
partments of administration, all profited in their
degree by the greater ease of currency which even
the primitive banking methods of the goldsmiths
had introduced. At the same time, in the sweeping
away of social barriers they found themselves, if
only capable in a very limited degree of rising into
the new exclusive circle, at any rate free to consider
themselves as not belonging to the trading circle.
The effect of the older kind of stratification had
been to lump together all educated use of brains as
a form of money-making, and the law and medicine
were no more than a kind of trade. But the virtual
disappearance of the original class of landed pro-
prietor, who regarded education as an affair that
should be left to the sons of rustics, had changed all

^ Cunningham, "Industry and Commerce," ii, 268, 286.

i68 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

this. The new upper class had been constructed by
those whose forefathers had been the first to spread
education in England. Therefore those who found
a livelihood by dint of their education were no
longer looked down upon. They began instead to
look down in their turn; and thus a second rank
of the Middle Class came to append itself to the
uppermost rank.

This tendency would be accentuated by the grow-
ing division between the manufacturing and retail-
ing interests, and those more speculative interests
of the upper class. The division would concentrate
the shop-keeping influence, and thus set on foot a
classification from below as well as from above.
Through the greater part of the eighteenth century
the new concentration is not very obvious. Industry
developed but little until towards the end of the
century. It could not attract capital, because it had
as yet no real use for it. The industrial capitalist
and the shop-keeper remain therefore, through the
contests of Whigs and Tories, a rather indeterminate
mfluence. They were so far outside the circle of
power as to be subjected to much the same kind of
ill-directed regulation of industry as the mediaeval
Parliaments had attempted to enforce. Employers
could still be ordered, during the seventeenth century,
to^go on employing workmen, even when they could
not, from some interruption of the markets, sell
enough to keep up with production.^ Statutory as-
sessment of wages, which had fallen into obsolesc-
ence, was revived in 1726, and again in 1756, after
^ Cunningham, " Industry and Commerce," ii, 53.

TRADING MONOPOLIES 169

riots among labourers had driven Parliament into a
panic.^

Thus it came about that the gradual formation of
what might be called the lower trading rank of the
Middle Class took place under conditions which
tended to make it regard its interests as different
from, and ultimately opposed to, the interests of the
upper rank. The moneyed men of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, it has been remarked,
were merchants rather than manufacturers.^ Hence
the commercial policy of the eighteenth century re-
mained subject to those old ideas of " the balance of
trade " which had first provided the commercial
class with a philosophy of its business. The theory
still was that it was more profitable to trade with
countries from which we imported very little, like
Portugal, than with those which were capable of
sending us merchandise in return, like France. One
of the bitterest objections to the East India Com-
pany was that it began importing textiles; and the
treaty with France in 17 13 was violently opposed
by the Lancashire linen merchants. Walpole's great
tariff reform of 172 1, which removed the duties from
a hundred and six articles of export, though an en-
lightened action in its time, was essentially in the
same spirit. It regarded the exports as the source
of profit, and imports as justly subject to the burden
of taxation.

All this did not matter so much as long as manu-
facture remained, for all practical purposes, on the

^ " English Gilds," clxii.

^ Cunningham, "Industry and Commerce," ii, 6i8.

170 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

old narrow level. Volume of trade was more re-
garded than market prices.-^ But the effect of the
mercantilist outlook was that when the industrial
revolution came, and machinery and subdivision of
labour vastly increased the manufacturing output,
the new capitalists found the whole dead-weight of
the eighteenth century structure against them. They
had been protected, at the cost of narrowing the circle
of the world-market, and hampering the supply of raw
material from abroad.

For the present, however, the day was with the
rich men of the older tradition. They, with the
ineradicable instincts of the rising Middle Class
throughout its career — which had led it perpetually,
as it gained each stage of advance, to entrench itself
in varying forms of exclusiveness — had produced
the combination of landowning and membership of
privileged mercantile companies, which, in effect,
closed up its ranks. There is very little to choose,
in_ any respect, between Whigs and Tories during
the eighteenth century. They disputed with one
another the power of control ; but the purposes to
which the power was put showed little, if any real dif-
ference. The Tories numbered amonof them more of
the purely land-owning class; the Whigs relied upon
the more mercantile element. But both alike directed
foreign policy to , the support and enlargement of
privileged trading enterprises; both alike regarded
the administration as a legitimate source of personal
profit. Each side accused the other of intrigue for

^ Cunningham, "Industry and Commerce," ii, 457.

TRADING MONOPOLIES 171

the spoils of office ; but neither side showed any dis-
position to regard the State service as other than an
exclusive preserve. The long hostility of the Tories
to the House of Hanover was not due to any funda-
mental principle, but merely to the fact that the
Whigs had succeeded in identifying themselves with
the new rSgime to the point of monopolizing influence
over it. The debates on the American colonies,
though they display some difference of opinion in
detail as to the immediate policy to be pursued, are
inspired on both sides by the same essential cling-
ing to ideas of privilege. To the Tory, colonies were
a kind of appanage to their estates; to the Whigs
th^y were a rather unfortunate opening for the diver-
sion of capital from home trading. To neither were
they of the least apparent usefulness if they suc-
ceeded in freeing themselves from the ring of privi-
leged exactions.

In another respect there was little to choose be-
tween Whiofs and Tories. There is no need to
labour the point that now existing titles of aris-
tocracy In England have no great antiquity. Several
authorities have proved that we have practically no
titles older than the early Tudor period. In other
words, the highest class of the eighteenth century
wg,s made up principally of the families which had
risen in the first land speculation of the Middle
J31ass. There remained, indeed, a core of ancient
holders of land, for the most part untitled. But since
these very largely owed the continued possession of
their lands to the fact that the estates were com-
paratively of small extent, or poor in rent, their

172 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

representatives would only appear in the new go-
verning class by becoming so far affected by the
middle-class spirit as to enrich themselves in the
fashion of speculation and investment. Moreover,
those who did not, or could not, do this, began to
decline during this century into another class. The
literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries presents us occasionally with pictures of a
social type very difficult to place exactly. It is a
type of small country squire, most imperfectly edu-
cated, talking the local dialect as broadly as the
peasants, rough in dress, living on the sheep and
other products of his own lands, and served by one
or two retainers. This is the laxid-o.WJQ.er of ancient
line who had not, either from inability or lack of
ambition, put himself within reach of the new forms
of wealth. In the old days he would have acquired
an enlargement of outlook and the opportunity of a
career by going in his childhood as a page to some
great man's house, where he would have received
a kind of schooling, and been able probably to
attach his fortunes to those of a rich lord. But the
middle-class grammar schools had slowly taken the
place of this form of education;^ the purchase of land
by new rich men who did not have the tradition of
keeping large retinues had taken away the profes-
sions of page and esquire. The small land-owner
was left to return, from his perfunctory schooling, to
his own narrow property, where he declined into
little more than a farmer. He was to have another
opportunity before the nineteenth century began;

^ See Furnivall, Preface to " Meals and Manners," p. xi.

TRADING MONOPOLIES 173

but for the present he is hardly distinguishable as a
social element at all.

In the aristocracy of the eighteenth century,
therefore, we discern little but the wealthier Middle
Class. It might, if the events of the seventeenth
century had been other than they were, have de-
veloped by this time out of all relation to its origins,
and have become virtually a real aristocracy. But
the effect of the attempt to make the State an
ostensibly Middle Class concern had been, in spite
of its failure, to assert and accentuate the ultimate
reliance of the new order upon trade. The clearest
proof of this is the complete alteration of financial
policy during the eighteenth century. Even as late
as the Revolution of 1688 there was, quite uncon-
sciously, a strong survival of feudal tradition in the
regions of national finance. The Whigs of that
epoch, even while thinking that they were intro-
ducing a wholly new era in the affairs of the Ex-
chequer, were in fact repeating the old feudal formula
that " the King should live of his own."

True, the formula was modified in outward ap-
pearance. The King had very little left of " his own."
Towns which the Plantagenets and Lancastrians
had tallaged had become chartered boroughs; wide
demesnes had been given away or sold. At the
same time the administration of the State had in-
creased enormously in complexity. The clerks of
the household, who had in the old days sufficed for
the task of foreign correspondence, of keeping tally
of the Crown's resources in cannon and gunpowder,
and for issuing Commissions to tax-assessors, judges.

174 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

municipal authorities, etc., had developed into well-
staffed departments of Government.^ Old dignities
of the Court, such as the offices of Treasurer, and
Lord High Admiral, and positions of authority
formerly given by special commission, like that of
the Masters of Ordnance or the com.manders of
forces, had expanded into permanent offices or com-
missions with their separate staffs.

It was impossible, in the literal sense, to bid the
King in such circumstances, " live of his own." Yet
that was in effect the way in which the governments
of the Revolution attempted to solve the financial
problems which had been so largely responsible
for the events of the seventeenth century. The
Middle Classes had been betrayed into their great
mistake by failure to perceive the reality of the
Crown's financial difficulties. They seized the op-
portunity of the Revolution to attempt to make such
a crisis impossible in the future. They had to recog-
nize that the Crown had insufficient revenues on the
old basis, and they therefore fixed a sum of money
to be voted as an annual payment to the Crown,
adding to its old rights of customs and tonnage and
poundage certain new grants of the same kind.

But essentially this was no real change, and
sprang from no real facing of the situation. The
new arrangement was infected by the characteristic
vice of the Middle Class — the shirking of national
responsibility. This class was, in fact, almost en-
tirely in control of the administrative departments;
but it preferred to leave standing the historical
^ See my book, "The King's Government."

TRADING MONOPOLIES 175

fiction that these were the province of the Crown.
Probably, indeed, it was not fully perceived what
had happened. Civil government had been shaped
in England during the early centuries after the
Norman Conquest very much on the principle that
the kingdom was, in the same kind, though in greater
degree, the estate of the Crown. The sovereign had
his secretaries, clerks, and heads of various depart-
ments of management just as the lord of a great
estate had such officials. That is to say, the Chan-
cellor, the Secretaries, and so on, were not, in our
modern sense, public officials. They were part of
the Royal Household. They received various allow-
ances, and as their work and their numbers increased
most of them were empowered to take fees. But for
several hundred years they had no real salaries.
This was of little account so long as the old theories
of the Crown's position remained unassailed. But
with the developments of the seventeenth century
the Crown ceased to be the national executive. That
change had really become explicit with the Revolu-
tion of 1 688, as far as the ruling infliuences of that
time, with their middle-class instinct of secretive-
ness, allowed anything to be explicit. The rapid
development of the Cabinet reveals the truth of
what had happened. Yet the services of Civil
Government were left as ostensibly a portion of the
duties of the Royal Household.^ There were, of
course, several reasons for this. One was the old
distrust existing between Parliament and the Court.
Parliament had always inclined to keep its hands
^ See "The King's Government."

176 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

free of the administrative services, regarding them
as necessarily under Court influence. The presence
of officials in Parliament would have been taken to
involve an interested attempt to divert affairs into
directions favourable to the Court, at the cost of the
Commons. This was a survival of the old jealousy
felt by the nobles towards the Crown. Other reasons
would be more distinctly of middle-class character.
Besides the instinct to shelter actual responsibility
behind some constitutional fiction, there would now
be the additional incentive of the careers offered
by the civil service. Throughout the eighteenth cen-
tury that service was a mere field for spoils. The
fee- system had been developed to a thoroughly
profitable point; and as long as the whole structure
remained in the semi-private region of Household
appointments it could be exploited with impunity.

This, then, was one of the directions in which the
financial arrangements of the eighteenth century
showed the Middle Class influence. Another and
more striking instance is the systematization of
borrowings by the Exchequer. Hitherto the prac-
tice of raising money for the Crown on the security
of the taxes had been regarded with suspicion, and
had even been forbidden. An Act was passed dis
allowinor the loans from goldsmiths which Charles II
had found so useful. But by the early years of the
eighteenth century the situation had changed so
much that the Bank of England was only prohibited
from lending money to the Crown without consent of
Parliament. The truth was that the upper Middle
Class had realized that the process of taxation

TRADING MONOPOLIES 177

could actually be made to produce money. By sub-
scribing to a public loan they drew interest out
of the national needs — the final triumph of their
many manipulations of the taxes. This kind of sub-
scription, which was the foundation of the Bank of
England's first charter, soon became a regular pro-
cess. In 1 718 a Government loan was floated by
the Bank, not as a specific action requiring chartered
incorporation for its performance, but as a part of
the Bank's business.

The result of the institution of this practice in re-
spect to the national income was finally to make
England a Middle Class State. For the ultimate
security for her finances ceased to be directly the
land or personalty. The security really became
trading credit. The way was open to a National
Debt, as soon as a combination of financial need
and a bold man should arise; and a National Debt
had no tangible security. The actual taxes, of course,
continued to be levelled on land, personalty, and
merchandise. But while these provided a security
for the subscribers to a Government loan, the true
national income depended upon the structure of
credit erected by the subscribers. Of course, the
actual change was slow in operation. But that it
was a real change, and was essentially in the middle-
class spirit, may be seen by putting this point in a
different way. Hitherto the consideration for the
officials of the Exchequer each year had been the
raising of a sum of money conditioned upon the one
side by the requirements of the Crown and upon the
other by an imperfect system of taxation which

N

178 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

diminished the real vahie of the grant to the Crown
by the spasmodic character of the payments into the
Exchequer. It was now discovered that by system-
atizing the pubHc loans the Parliamentary grants
were received at their full value by the administra-
tion without any galling enforcement of the tax-
collecting process.

The history of detailed reforms of taxation during
the eighteenth century shows equally strongly the
middle-class influence, both for good and for evil.
It displays itself now by an advance in efficiency
now by a victory of prejudice, or again by the old
flaw of limitation in outlook. Walpole's general re-
form of the Book of Rates was an admirable expres-
sion of the form of mercantilism current in his day.-^
It was so well designed to stimulate the particular
trading and manufacturing interests of the country
that it must have been the outcome of a fairly
<:ommon accord among the commercial community.
Together with its large removal of export duties
this reform fostered the new trades that were be-
ginning to be carried on upon a large scale, such as
gun-making, glass-making, and paper-making; and
made the capitalist manufacturer very much awake
to the need for new markets. Another reform of
Walpole's, the introduction of the bonded warehouse
system for tea, coffee, and chocolate, was a con-
siderable advance in efficiency; it added ^120,000 a
year to the revenue. But it would hardly have been
established, had it not at the same time been of con-
venience to the Middle Class. The system liberated
^ Cunningham, " Industry and Commerce," ii, 428.

TRADING MONOPOLIES 179

both the large and the small trader from a certain
subjection to uncertain elements in their trade. The
large trader had never in fact paid the duty on such
goods. He had had, for a long time now, a system
of entering into bond with the customs officers, on
removing a cargo, to pay the duty when he sold the
goods to a retailer.^ But the bond was, after all,
rather in the nature of a speculation, and was a
personal liability. The new warehouse system freed
the merchant from that. It also freed the retailer,
who must have been subject very often to arrange-
ments whereby the merchant would impose upon
the retailer a quantity of goods in excess of his re-
quirements, in order to hand on the speculative
burden.

The reform which Walpole failed to effect was,
on the other hand, an occasion for the display of
some of the less shrewd qualities of the Middle
Class. His attempt to erect a system of excise
came to grief, because of the outcry with which it
was received. There were, in fact, two streams of
middle-class influence at work. One object of the
proposal was to abolish the land tax, which Walpole
had already reduced from four shillings to one
shilling. That is to say, the upper rank of the
Middle Class was trying to bring to a conclusive
end the taxes on property to which they had always
objected. But the new tax was an obvious kind of
vexation to another rank of that class. It appeared
to weaken the structure of protection of industries.
Moreover, it might well be suspected of involving a
^ Dowell, "Taxation," ii, 44.

i8o THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

return to that kind of inquisition by officials of the
Crown which traders had always successfully nulli-
fied in the past. An excise duty must have meant a
perpetual supervision of the production of excisable
articles, and thereby an accurate ground for know-
ledge of the wealth of the producers.

Besides these indications of its influence upon
finance, the rise of the Middle Class showed itself in
a curiously unexpected direction. The establishment
of a standing army was not, as might have been ex-
pected, an aristocratic move; nor was it, as some
historians have believed, a triumph for the Crown
and the Court. It was really due to the Middle
Class. It is true that, after the Restoration, the per-
sistence in maintaining a kind of standing army was
attributable to the Court; it was a kind of assertion
of victory over the Commonwealth influences, and
was regarded in that way, with all the ensuing sus-
picion, by the Parliament. But these early stand-
ing armies were comparatively unimportant. The
first really important change was, of course, brought
about by the Jacobite risings. The disturbing
effects of Jacobitism, necessitating the maintenance
of armed forces in a time of comparative peace,
gradually accustomed the nation to the upkeep
of an army. But this, to begin with, was largely
because the ooverningf classes now disliked condi-
tions of uncertainty at home. Herein we have a
measure of the altered quality of those classes.
There had been times when the whole tendency of
the nobility was to live in, and for, breaches of the
peace, when jealousies and struggling ambitions

TRADING MONOPOLIES

ibi

were the only things that justified their way of life,
their retinues, and their state. But in their stead
had arisen a nobility which required stable condi-
tions, ease of transit from market to market and
town to port, and a life in which people could earn
money and would not be afraid to spend it. Thus
the first steps towards a standing army were simplified
by the importance of trading conditions.

But how was it that, when peace at home was
secured, there was no revival of the old distrust of
a standing army? How is it that we can give the
same date to the last internal war in this country
and the first saddling of the national finances with a
permanent armed force? We may find the clue to
the answer in a remark made by a modern authority
upon trade. Professor He wins has said of the
mercantile politics of the eighteenth century: "The
supremacy of the commercial classes was not favour-
able to peace. They were bitter and bloodthirsty in
the competition for new markets. Nations went to
war in the eighteenth century for the sake of com-
merce." ^ That which the Crown could never have
obtained for its own purposes was quietly brought
into being when the Middle Classes could see their
own profit in it. When that happened, a Government
mainly commercial alike in composition and in out-
look, would see that the old idea of an army as a
force raised for a specific purpose, and therefore for a
limited time, was extravagant and wasteful. The army
was put upon a more or less business footing; and
the Middle Class found in it, as it had managed by
^ "Trade and Finance," p. 143.

i82 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

degrees to find in most things to which it had once
objected, sufficient scope for money-making. By
contracting for supplies, and by profit on army loans,
as well as by the exploiting of a new career for its
sons the mercantile England rapidly accustomed
itself to its standing army.

CHAPTER IX

THE FACTORY SYSTEM THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

TOWARDS the end of the eighteenth century
the supremacy of commercial ideals began to
produce an unforeseen effect. The steady fostering
of manufactures was throwing up a further stratum of
wealth, and was opening another of those cleavages
which had characterized from time to time the
advance of the Middle Classes. The result was
two-fold. On the one side the older wealthy rank
leaned more and m.ore upon the circumstances that
emphasized their exclusiveness and marked them
off from the newest wealth — their ownership of land
and their possession of titles. On the other side the
ineradicable middle-class idea that it could do as it
liked with its own affairs made the gulf between
the newer wealth, and the workmen employed to
produce it, perpetually wider. Thus on both sides
the rising manufacturers were separated off; and,
just as had happened when the great merchants
first made themselves felt as a distinct portion of
the community, the rest of the nation suddenly
awoke to a fresh situation created by the power of
money, and to a vague sense of unhealthiness in the
body politic.

183

i84 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

It is to be noted, for our purpose, that the striking
period of the new conditions coincided with a most
important epoch in the history of currency. Hitherto,
although since the early seventeenth century the
nation had been comparatively free from the acute
monetary troubles of earlier days, this was largely
due, not to any real enlightenment upon the subject
of currency, but to the vast increase of bullion which
had gradually ensued from the discovery of America.
Throughout the seventeenth century and the greater
part of the eighteenth the old war of gold and silver
was going on. The Act of 1663 has already been
referred to. It permitted the export of foreign
moneys or bullion of gold and silver; and thus de-
serves in some degree the admiration it has received
as a bold improvement upon the previous determina-
tion to regard such export as illegal, even though it
was in practice impossible to prevent it. But in re-
ferring to this Act it is necessary also to remark
that the removal of the prohibition was constantly
interrupted by proclamation. The truth is that the
Act proceeded from no real improvement of theory
about the working of foreign exchanges. The pre-
amble states that "it is found by experience that
[gold and silver] are carried in greatest abundance
(as to a common market) to such places as give free
liberty for exporting the same." In other words, the
■exchanges were still pure arbitrage. Gold and silver
were not fluid bases of commerce, but articles of
merchandise. Consequently for a hundred years to
come we see the old struggles going on, in the
periodical devices of re-coinage and variations of

THE FACTORY SYSTEM 185

the mutual standard of gold and silver. A steady-
drain during the reign of William 1 1 1 led to the re-
coinage of 1699. Montague, the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, preferred this device to an alteration of
the standard. It was found that the silver called in
was nearly all coined between the reign of Edward VI
and the re-coinage of 1662. The Restoration money
had gone abroad. An alteration of the standard had
been tried in 1698, when the ratio was made i : 15^.
Gold began to come in rapidly from France; but at
the cost of a drain of silver, since the gold importers
made fifteen pence on every guinea.^

The result of the action taken to correct this drain
is very significant of changed conditions. When the
guinea was called down to 2i.y. there followed a
speculative hoarding of silver. The men engaged in
arbitrage operations foresaw that the result of this
artificial interference must be to lower the value of
the guinea; and they kept their silver back to be
ready for the lowering. Now this has two mean-
ing's. There is first the obvious one that the
quantity of silver must have been very greatly en-
larged by this time. Previously the changes of ratio
had always been followed by open movements on
the part of one metal or the other. There had not
been a spare quantity of either, so that the lowering of
one had been sure to bring out stores of the other.
There is also the further meaning that, since the Act
of 1663 had proceeded from no real improvement of
opinion as to the exchanges, men were making a
business of arbitrage apart from anything else. In
^ Shaw, "Currency," p. 228.

i86 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

previous times, whatever currency troubles there
might have been, a certain restraint of speculation
occurred practically, because the handling of money
was very largely effected by merchants, who might
seize opportunities of taking an arbitrage profit, but
had in the end to consider also the interests of their
merchandise. The men who hoarded silver against
the prospect of a lowering of the guinea were cutting
right across the path of trade.

The first real enlightenment is not discernible
until 1774. In that year an Act was passed to the
effect that no tender by silver coin in payment of
sums of over £2^ should be a legal tender at more
than value by weight of 55". 2d. per ounce of silver,
and that no person should be bound to receive silver
as tender on any other terms. This "epoch-making
clause," as Professor Shaw calls it, was the first
evidence of a dawning perception of the mono-
metallic principle, the first approach to a gold
standard, which proved to be the means of that
steadying of the currency which had been sought
for in vain during so many hundred years.

Simultaneously with this steadying occurred pre-
cisely the kind of new activity in the commercial
w^orld which most required such steadiness. The
development of the factory system could hardly have
proceeded with the rapidity which it in fact displayed
unless the material for paying wages on a large scale
had been liberated from the danger of sudden whole-
sale withdrawals to other countries. The first great
change in currency, the mere increase of coined
money in circulation, had in the same way coincided

THE FACTORY SYSTEM 187

with precisely the right kind of need on the part of
the commercial classes. It occurred at a time when
the men who had grown rich in local marketing were
ready to combine for foreign enterprises in which
coined money in quantity was necessary both as a
medium of exchange and as a basis for credit. The
second great change — for indeed no other had
occurred in principle since that early date, the only
new conditions being further increases in quantity ^
— coincided with a commercial movement in which
it was of vital importance to be able to rely upon
a sufficiency of coin in active circulation. As long
as manufactures, though they had in essence under-
gone the change from the domestic to the factory
system, remained in practice and in scale still
almost domestic, the pressure of a drain of coinage
could be distributed. Part payment in kind was
not impossible; and the conditions of the artisan
enabled him to tide over a period of shortness of
coin. It has been noted in a previous connection
that, as the employers grew richer and more powerful,
they tended to withdraw their works from the towns,
largely in order to avoid the supervision of their
relations to their workmen and of the quality of the
work. An incidental result of this tendency was that
the artisan in such circumstances became a combina-
tion of artisan and peasant. He had, besides the
■wages he might draw from an employer, a holding
in the common fields of his village. Moreover, even

^ The use of bills of exchange and the establishment of banks
were, after all, only for the increase of currency by avoiding as far
as possible the withdrawal of coin from circulation.

i88 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

where the manufacturer had not transferred his works
to country places, the artisan was not wholly de-
pendent on his wages. Nearly all the towns still had
common fields. This may, indeed, have had on one
side a bad effect in making the artisan often rather
lazy about his aftairs. With a small piece of land, and
a cow and a pig or two which he had the right to
pasture at common, the artisan-labourer, as Professor
Cunningham calls him,^ would be neither a very good
artisan, nor a very good small-holder. He might
irritate his employer in the one capacity as much as
he irritated Arthur Young in the other. But at the
moment all we have to note is that in these con-
ditions wages might fluctuate, in submission to
erratic currency movements, without any funda-
mental disturbance of manufacture. The workman
could still keep alive.

But the last quarter of the eighteenth century saw
the introduction of new methods. The invention of
the steam engine had opened the way to all kinds of
machinery, and had, by its very principles, neces-
sitated the concentration of hands in large factory
buildings, and consequently in settlements close to
those buildings. The immense amount of capital
awaiting employment and hitherto finding little open-
ing because of exclusiveness of the great trading
companies, the greater elaboration of credit which
was growing up with the final establishment of the
Bank of England and the foundation of an increas-
ing number of private banks, the impulse given to
the development of machinery by the coal and iron

^ " Industry and Commerce," ii, 575.

THE FACTORY SYSTEM 189

interests — all these influences tended to make the
concentration of the new style of industry astound-
ingly rapid.

Another effect of the introduction of machinery
was the subdivision of labour upon the products of
manufacture. The making of anything became a
series of processes performed by different machines;
and the artisans were enslaved to single processes.
Consequently, at the same time that they were losing
the moderate independence which country conditions
had given them, they were losing also such inde-
pendence as might come from their particular skill.
At the worst, if a man could make a knife he had
the chance of being able to sell knives in a small
peddling way if he lost regular employment. But
when he could only perform one operation in the
course of making a knife — could only stamp out the
blade in the rough, or polish a blade, or cut a handle
— he was entirely dependent on the capitalist; for the
capitalist alone carried on the manufacture of knives
in such a way as to have a use for this limited kind
of craftsmanship.

One curious sign of what this meant to the manu-
facturer may be seen in the complete change of his
attitude towards apprenticeship. As long as the
craft gild system had any life, even of the most
circumscribed kind, very jealous watch was kept
upon the number of apprentices. Since they had to
be regarded as master-men in embryo, the tendency
during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth cen-
turies was to prescribe strictly the number of ap-
prentices a man might keep. As time went on this

^^

I90 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

limitation tended to raise the price of indentures until,
as we have seen, apprenticeship became in practice
little more than a privileged form of entry into a
trade for a few rich or well-born people. It was so
handled by the masters as to be one with their own
interests. But subdivision of the processes of manu-
facture very usefully altered this state of things at
the very time when quantities of cheap labour were
required. There need be no fear of apprentices,
partly because no apprentice could expect to become
acquainted with the whole of the various processes,
and partly because, even if he did, he could not
make himself a manufacturer without command of
capital. The old exactions of the gilds in money
payments from the apprentice who wished to be free
of the craft and a master in his own right paled
before the exactions which the new conditions of
commerce imposed upon him.

While apprenticeship had thus become virtually
useless to the apprentice it suddenly acquired a new
value for the master. By its means he could put into
his factory labour that by the express terms of its
employment was bound to him legally for certain
years, could be recovered if it removed itself, had
no right to wages in any real sense, and could by
law be kept practically confined upon the master's
premises. Every legal provision which had once
been the fair guarantee to the master of a return for
what the apprentice gained by the learning of a craft
and the prospect of admission to a privileged means
of livelihood, remained on the Statute Book; and
since the apprentice's ultimate gains had become

THE FACTORY SYSTEM 191

only in fact, and not in theory, obsolete, it occurred to
no one that apprenticeship was an outrage. It was a
common thing, towards the end of the eighteenth
century, for framework knitters or calico printers to
have fifty or sixty apprentices each, and perhaps two
or three journeymen. The cutlery trade in Sheffield
was in much the same state/ Apprentices could be
kept far more under the master's control out of
factory hours than the journeyman artisan could be;
the laws against any combination or acts of violence
on their part were far more stringent, and had, be-
sides, less of the unsatisfactory air of being passed
in the interests of a class than later statutes against
unions of workmen; they had a more specious ap-
pearance of being passed for the general interests of
the community.

Thus, once more, the rising Middle Class was
treacherous to its allies. Just as, several hundred
years earlier, the rich townsmen had cunningly turned
the craft gilds to their own purposes, instead of
openly fighting them, so now the capitalist mis-
handled the apprenticeship laws in order to enrich
himself and weaken the force that might have risen
from the concentration of large masses of workmen.
Just as the trader in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries entrenched his new fortress of capital
against the working man, so now he entrenched Uie
fortress of industrialism against the artisan. \^e
made use of every accidental circumstance of the
new era — the removal of the artisan from the soil,

^ " English Gilds," pp. clxxxiv-vi.

192 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

the subdivision of labour, the unnoticed survival of
apprenticeship laws — to reduce the men he em-
ployed to an abject dependence upon his command
of capital.-^

He forgot, however, that the State was by this
time predominantly Middle Class, and that the very
methods upon which he was thus proceeding were
those which had been employed, and might be ex-
pected still to be employed by the rank of that class
which had already attained to power. The first effect
upon this upper rank of the rise of a new kind of
wealth was to make it more exclusive, more osten-
tatiously aloof from industrialism, more imitative of
the manners of a true aristocracy. \The corollary
of this was that it should tend increasingly towards
political opposition to the movements of the newest
wealth.^ The difference between Tories and Whigs,
which had during a great part of the century been
unreal, turning upon such minor matters as a vague
Jacobitism on the part of the Tories, or an almost
equally vague religious tolerance on the part of
the Whigs — both using their power for much the
same ends when they obtained office — began now to
become a real difference. The core in the Tory party
of old lords of the soil accentuated the insistence of
that party upon landed interests, u^hich in fact they
represented no more than did the Whigs. On the
other hand the greater hold of the Whigs upon
supreme power during a century in which com-
mercial affairs had been the guiding consideration
accentuated their claim to represent commercial in-
terests, upon which the Tories were actually hardly

THE FACTORY SYSTEM 193

less dependent for their riches than the Whigs
were.

These differences would probably not have ap-
peared at this time, had it not been for the rise of
the moneyed manufacturer. He attached himself,
for the reason that has just been given, to the
Whigs; and the Tories fell more distinctly into
opposition to the rising interests. Thus a completely
new situation was created. For the first time the
Middle Classes divided in relation to politics and
national affairs. Hitherto, however imperfect the
union had slowly been becoming during the eigh-
teenth century, these classes, even when different
grades began to appear among them, had been,
roughly speaking, looking in the same direction.
Those who had risen to the governing rank may
sometimes have over-ridden the purposes of those
who remained in the directly commercial pursuits;
but they had not done so from any failure to under-
stand these pursuits. There remained a kind of
mutual comprehension not at all impossible to main-
tain in the face of actual disaorreements. The small
trader might be subject to arbitrary interference with
his methods; but the interference came from those
who had themselves suffered from interference in
their day, and whose own methods, after all, differed
in degree, rather than in kind, from those of the
smaller men.

But at last this mutual comprehension was broken.
The opposition of the Tories to the industrial spirit ,
was accompanied by a real and complete failure to
understand a new commercial outlook with the ap-

o

194 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

proach of new theories of trade. It is not, indeed,
very likely that many of the Whigs understood them
immediately; but they had, if only from opposition
to the Tories, the appearance of sympathy with the
new ideas.

Of these ideas we have, as it happens, a very
comprehensive view. They are the vital constituent
of Adam Smith's " The Wealth of Nations." It
would, of course, be absurd to suggest that, in the
manufacturing capitalist class as a whole there was
anything like the clear and determined envisaging
of new principles of international commerce which
that book contains. The capitalist employer was
probably too much occupied with the direction of
new forces at home, too much, it may be, over-
whelmed by the amazing rapidity of movement de-
veloped by those forces, to work out the question of
his relation to markets which had hitherto been ap-
proached solely in the conditions and for the purposes
of a wholly different kind of commerce. Yet it would
be equally absurd to imagine that Adam Smith's
work was wholly an intellectual theory — that it
had no roots in the commercial outlook of the time.
The instant success of the book, the mark it has left
in our history, and the position it has always held in
controversy, are enough to show that, while perhaps
few of the leaders of the industrial era could have
produced anything like *' The Wealth of Nations,"
they immediately recognized its representative char-
acter, and found in it a kind of charter of their
liberties. Such books are not sudden, unconditioned
inspirations; they are the crystallization, by a brilliant

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS 195

and lofty mind, of the yet fluid constituents of a new
intellectual vigour — the concentration in a channel
laid down by a powerful brain of the currents of
movement in the greneral thoug^ht.

There is no need here to summarize at any length
the propositions of "The Wealth of Nations." It
was in effect a fundamental attack upon all the
trading principles of the Middle Classes up to that
date. At its very core was the destruction of the
venerable middle-class tradition of commerce as
only to be successfully pursued at the cost of rivals —
the rivals being in early days the people of a neigh-
bouring market-town, in later days the people of a
foreign country. Ad^m Smith pointed out that trade
is gain to both sides; and that it is to the advantage
ol a country that the foreign countries with which
it deals should be rich. Another proposition was
that it was always best to buy in the cheapest
market ; and another, that even if gold and silver
went abroad for purchasing from certain countries,
that silver and gold must have been bought by in-
dustry, so that, though the profit on such transac-
tions might not be so great as in cases where the
currency balance was the other way, it was at any
rate foolish to speak of them as involving a loss.

Now these propositions were a complete over-
throw of that theory of " the balance of trade " upon
which the seventeenth century had prided itself,^ and
to which the eighteenth century had been faithful.
The sum of this theory was, as we have already re-
marked, that it was profitable to trade with nations
^ See " Ambrose Barnes," pp. 39, 40.

196 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

which required our manufactured goods, but had
little or none of their own to send in return, so that
they had to pay in coin; but unprofitable to trade
with manufacturing nations, because coin might be
drawn from us to pay them. But clearly the manu-
facturing nations must be richer than the non-manu-
facturing; and, further, their markets must be cheaper
to buy in. Therefore on both the main arguments
of " The Wealth of Nations " the old theory went by
the board. The proposition that the gold and silver
with which we might be called upon to pay could
only be acquired by industry, so that the appearance
of paying for manufactured goods by something else
than our own manufactures was fictitious, did much
to remove the chief basis of the old theory. A
better understanding of the foreign exchanges on
Adam Smith's part did even more. He perceived
that, as long as the currency of one country was in-
trinsically below the value of the currency of another
country, the apparent exchange might be against
the former country, when the actual exchange, the
balance of trading debt and credit, was in its favour.
The same false relation might arise from such in-
stitutions as the banks of Amsterdam and Hamburg,
which had created a standard of bank money higher
than the standard of the ordinary currency.

One further proposition of Adam Smith's had its
effect upon this question of the exchanges. He in-
sisted that, whereas the transportation of com-
modities, when properly suited to the market, is
always attended with a considerable profit, the
transportation of gold and silver, as commodities, is

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS 197

scarcely ever attended with any profit. The day of
mere arbitrage transactions was, in fact, over, when
the wealth of a nation began to be reckoned no
longer in the obvious terms of its possession of
bullion, but in terms of its producing and consuming
capacity.

The real secret of the new theory of trade is to
be found in that regard for consuming capacity, as
much as in anything else. Hitherto the producer
alone had been considered. The whole object of the
mercantilist school had been to extend our manu-
factures, not by improving the methods, and acquir-
ing thereby an enhanced power of competition, but
by depressing the production of rivals. It sacrificed
the consumer to the producer in every way, whether
by regulations such as those which depressed the
price of wool, for instance, or by those which penal-
ized exports to certain countries. Adam Smith stood
boldly for the conviction that the sole end of produc-
tion was consumption, and that anything which in-
terfered with consumption was a misuse of power in
the interests of certain producers at the cost, im-
mediately, of other producers, and, ultimately, of the
national wealth.

This regard for the consumer was clearly a
characteristic of the newly rising rank of the Middle
Classes, the capitalist manufacturer in command of
machinery. The old system, with its comparatively
narrow area of output, and above all its comparatively
small sinking of capital in production, naturally found
its profit in narrowing the channels of trade. The
merchant was the controlling influence, and the

198 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

manufacturer had no other idea than to attach his
interests to those of the merchant, and coincide with
his theories of privileged trading. But the new men
urgently required free consumption and the widest
possible market. They had tied their capital to
factories and machines; they had, in the place of the
more or less casual labour of the old-fashioned manu-
facturer, vast concentrated bodies of workmen to
whom lack of employment in manufacture meant,
not falling back upon the land, but idleness and the
end of their consuming capacity.

It followed inevitably that Adam Smith's work
should assume in parts a very controversial aspect.
The old system was an enemy. " It is," he writes,
" the industry which is carried on for the rich and
powerful that is principally encouraged by our
mercantile system";^ and again: "The capricious
ambition of Kinoes and ministers has not, during the
present and the preceding centur}^ been more fatal
to the repose of Europe than the impertinent jealousy
of merchants and manufacturers." - It was upon such
bases as these that the difference between Tories
and Whigs began to assume new proportions. Not
until the next century did the new Middle Class
begin to be formidable in the State. But already its
existence served, by its greater inclination towards
the Whig side, to introduce into the Tory attitude
the elements of Conservatism as a reaction, partly
social, partly dictated by financial and business pre-
judices against the new trading.

^ Bk. iv, cap. 8.

^ Bk. iv, cap. 3, part ii.

THE WEALTH OF NATIONS 199

Moreover, the difference which, so far as it con-
cerned Whigs and Tories, was merely a differ-
ence between two sections very much ahke in
origin, in poHtical traditions, and in habits of mind,
became now a difference dividing the nation. The
Whigs were not the only party with a newly-risen
class attached to them. A fresh middle-class cleavage LA^
appeared upon the Tory side, in the shape of the
small landowner, the farming squire, the yeoman,
and the tenant-farmer. Hitherto, as we have re-
marked, these men hardly belonged to the Middle
Classes at all. They had been left on one side by
the events of the sixteenth century in the aftair of
landed property, and remained a kind of anomalous
survival of feudalism, impossible to characterize
clearly in a State that had thrown up a middle-class
aristocracy owning land on a large scale. They had
not acquired the conception of currency as the prin-
cipal instrument of life. They still lived largely on
their own produce; and had but the most elementary
notions of rent. The farming system was, in the
main, still feudal in idea. The greater part of the
farmed land of the country was in the old con-
dition of open fields divided into the communal strips
of the self-contained manor.

Now just as the earliest important rise of the
Middle Class, in the latter part of the fifteenth
century, very seriously affected the landed system,
so the new rise had an effect in the same direction.
Partly it was the effect obviously to be expected
from the results of the growth of factories which re-
moved people from the land and concentrated them in

200 THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASS

towns. The supply of food-stuffs to these congested
centres of population completely altered the market
conditions for agricultural produce. An unforeseen
consuming power was introduced, and a demand
which violently stimulated production. But there
was also an indirect effect, concurrent with this.
The new prospect of monetary gain in farming
created a new movement for greater efficiency in
the management of land, and the introduction of a
higher intelligence into agricultural methods. Hence
arose Arthur Young's surveys of the rural districts,
the movement for enclosing open fields, and the
farming experiments and reforms of men like Coke
of Norfolk.

These new ideas meant, of course, more than the
introduction of intelligence. They meant also the
introduction of capitalism into farming. The great
new markets demanded a power to hold crops and
manipulate prices which could only come from the
use of money as more than a symbol of exchange.
The combination of common-field holdings into
large farms, and the scientific working of those
farms, necessitated the outlay of money in a kind of
speculation. The process of enclosure involved the
extinction of the cottage rights, and made the agri-
cultural labourer ultimately as dependent upon
wages, in his removal from the soil, as the factory
worker had become. Thus every result of the change
helped to throw up another kind of Middle Class,
composed of the small landowner and the farmer.

These men's interests lay, on the whole, with the
Tories. For one thing, although in the ownership of

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