The Economic Causes of the English Civil War

Freedom of Trade and the English Revolution

George Yerby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000517644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This is a coordinated presentation of the economic basis of revolutionary change in 16th- and early-17th century England, addressing a crucial but neglected phase of historical development. It traces a transformation in the agrarian economy and substantiates the decisive scale on which this took place, showing how the new forms of occupation and practice on the land related to seminal changes in the general dynamics of commercial activity. An integrated, self-regulating national market generated new imperatives, particularly a demand for a right of freedom of trade from arbitrary exactions and restraints. This took political force through the special status that rights of consent had acquired in England, based on the rise of sovereign representative law following the Break with Rome. These associations were reflected in a distinctive merchant-gentry alliance, seeking to establish freedom of trade and representative control of public finance, through parliament. This produced a persistent challenge to royal prerogatives such as impositions from 1610 onwards. Parliamentary provision, especially legislation, came to be seen as essential to good government. These ambitions led to the first revolutionary measures of the Long Parliament in early 1641, establishing automatic parliaments and the normative force of freedom of trade.

1 The Basis of Change

The Early Breach of the Manorial Stasis in England; the Coming of the Commercial Yeoman Farmer; and the Increase of Opportunity—“The Exceeding Lucre They See Grow”¹

Lucy Hutchinson noted that the interest of the people “had been many years growing”. James Harrington pinpointed some of the reasons behind this development. He cited three statutes from the reign of Henry VII whereby the prospects of the middling sort had been improved. The best known was the Statute of Retainers, which was the first significant step in the extended campaign of the Tudor monarchs to reduce the independent regional power of the great magnates, and it did indeed result in the devolution of local authority towards the middle ranks of society. The Statute of Alienations tended in the same direction, loosening the exclusive grip of the landlords by providing a freedom to sell or entail land. But perhaps most interesting is Harrington’s view of the Statute of Population. Tudor governments are usually thought to have failed in their regular attempts to resist the enclosure of the common lands, and the depopulation that it was believed to cause. But Harrington perceived that the provisions of this and other statutes for protecting the integrity of smallholdings with over 20 acres, tended to promote the survival, and often the extension of the larger copyhold farms. In some cases at least it helped the dweller to avoid the status of a mere cottager and become “a man of some substance that might keep hinds [or wage labourers] and servants”. In effect, this encouraged the creation of commercial units. It placed “a great part of the lands to the hold or possession of the yeomanry or middle people, who living not in a servile or indigent fashion were much unlinked from dependence on their lords”.² Tudor laws and courts may not have done much to stop the erosion of rights on the common lands, but they did assist some of the more substantial copyholders to transcend it.

Perhaps the single most important platform of change, however, was the development recorded in another early seventeenth-century text—the history of the Berkeley family compiled by their steward John Smyth. He described and explained the widespread alienation of manorial lands to tenants, which became a distinctive feature of the English scene in the early fifteenth century. The collapse of the population level in the fourteenth century had led to a decline in the demand for tenant land, an acute shortage of labour, and a fall in the market price for arable produce. The first response of landlords was to exploit their customary rights over tenants more rigorously, because the relative value of the dues and services that they owed was now higher.³ But the accumulated resentment at this oppressive stance was a significant cause of the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, which in turn produced a change of policy. In effect, landlords sought a more secure way of maintaining their income. John Smyth recalled that it was “much occasioned by the insurrection of Wat Tyler, and generally by all the commons in the land” that the family began to lease out their estate. “Then instead of manuring the demesnes with his own servants … this lord began to … tack in other men’s cattle onto his pasture … and to sell his meadow grounds … let out by the year still more and more … sometimes at racked improved rents”.⁴ It became general in fifteenth century England for lords to sell, or lease out their demesne lands. This broke the link of obligation and restraint between the manor and the village that had maintained an essential stasis in medieval society. The working character of both the lord’s estate and the tenant’s land was radically altered. Their relationship came to be determined by commercial rather than feudal considerations. The farmer depended on the market rather than the manor. The land was necessarily leased out at market value, that is to say the level at which it would be profitable to the farmer. Since it had been the lord’s land it had no dues or services upon it, and it tended to be physically of a more coherent shape than could readily be made of the scattered strips in the open fields. In essence, this created a new class of independent, commercialising farmers, which played a crucial part in putting English history on a markedly different course from that of other neighbouring kingdoms. An important aspect of the change was that to some extent the form of tenure ceased to matter—the decisive factor was simply whether a farmer could acquire the use of enough workable land to make a substantial profit in the market. A good example was the background of the mid-sixteenth-century churchman Hugh Latimer. He described his father as “a yeoman, and held no land of his own … tilled as much as kept half a dozen men. He had a walk for a hundred sheep”.⁵

Smyth’s commentary also puts the Peasants’ Revolt in a new perspective. It has sometimes been regarded as inconsequential because the uprising was suppressed, and the promised commutation of dues and services was subsequently forgotten. But it seems that in fact there were indirect, long-term consequences that could scarcely have been more significant. Although the revolt failed, the scale and force of it, in an unusually compact kingdom, was a severe shock to the political establishment. At both manorial and central government level there was a transition towards a more circumspect approach to labour relations. The ill-judged initiative of the poll tax was not repeated. There was no further attempt to load the burden of taxation onto the shoulders of the general body of husbandmen smallholders. The English peasantry thereby escaped the fate that was overtaking their continental counterparts. The policy being pursued by other European monarchs at the time was to establish a standing army to support a system of collecting tax arbitrarily from the poorer classes, while the nobility was left largely exempt. The classic example of this kind of development was France.⁶ In England, by contrast, the principal general tax, the parliamentary subsidy, fell mainly on the landowning class that could afford to pay it. This had several crucial effects. It allowed the commoners and smallholders a special and beneficial degree of freedom from fiscal burdens. It has been calculated that in some places in England in the sixteenth century, only one person in every twelve was paying tax of any kind. Equally important, this “progressive” distribution of financial obligation gave the English gentry a powerful vested interest in sustaining and extending both the practice and the principle of a right to consent to the provisions of public finance. In this way too, England was embarked on a distinctive course, and most of the classes in English society were acquiring a stake in a specific kind of economic liberty.

A recent study of landholding patterns in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Norfolk has confirmed the consequences of the changing balance in creating a new class of independent, commercialising village farmers.

The significance of the period between 1440 and 1580 … lies in the freedom, prosperity and … the lack of landlordly interference experienced by the rural population, and in the fact that an economy generated by small landholders unburdened with heavy exactions by state or landlord could promote the development of capitalism.⁷

Since the alienation of manorial land took place in a nationwide perspective, the net effect on the country’s economic performance was considerable. Robert Allen has found that it was the emergence and success of a distinctive class of yeoman farmers that laid the basis for the doubling of crop yields that was the measurable product of the agricultural revolution that took place in early modern England.⁸

The Growth of Opportunity and Profit in an Integrated Economy: How the Rise of the Cloth Trade Encouraged Sheep Farming and Made “Notable Rich Men by the Doing Thereof in Brief Time”

The spread of farms of sufficient size and compactness to be put on a commercial basis was the main vehicle of agricultural advance. But the vital accompaniment of this transition, and in a sense the pre-condition, was a raised level of market opportunity, which enabled the yeoman farmers to make full use of their position and their freedom. In fact, it is possible to pinpoint the character of the development that constituted the principal incentive and provided the initial substance for what Lucy Hutchinson called the “extraordinary progress” of the people. There was a qualitative change in the nature and scale of economic activity in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

In general terms this took the form of an extension of regional trading links, transcending the localised limits of medieval markets. In the words of Jan de Vries, the crucial change involved “a specialisation pattern when the English and the Dutch in particular began to trade bulk products over longer distances”.⁹ In England the leading example of regional specialisation and exchange came with the emergence of the cloth trade in the later decades of the fifteenth century. This was the kingdom’s first manufactured export, and its rise was dramatic. By 1513 the Venetian Ambassador could hail English kerseys as “one of the most important foundations of trade in the world”.¹⁰ The cloth trade maintained a period of strong expansion through to the middle of the sixteenth century, and it brought a new dimension to the economy as a whole. The manufacturing and agricultural sectors now developed in mutual reinforcement on a national basis. There was a very substantial extension of sheep farming, which had all the more effect because it was taken up by the tenants as well as by the landlords. As Brailsford said, the new leaseholders who were farming the old demesne lands “were often graziers, who possessed some capital, and belonged to the new age of commercial agriculture”.¹¹ They were indeed men like Hugh Latimer’s yeoman father, who “held no land of his own” yet “had a walk for a hundred sheep”.¹²

Contemporaries were very aware of the exceptional profits that were to be made from sheep farming. This may have provided the impetus for agricultural “improvement” in more ways than one. For instance, it probably lay behind the emergence of agricultural literature, focusing on the means by which the advantages could be maximised. It was at the height of the expansion of the cloth trade that Fitzherbert produced his pioneering books of husbandry and surveying. His farming advice was very comprehensive—he believed that it was essential to combine arable and pasture. But he recognised that sheep were “the most profitable cattle a man can have”, and concentrated on how to improve the methods of sheep rearing. One definite recommendation was to provide them with enclosed pastures.

The first systematic analysis of the economy in general, A Discourse of the Commonweal, published in 1549, also regarded it as axiomatic that sheep farming offered an exceptional means of high profit. Men were attracted to it because of “the exceeding lucre that they see grow”. It was, moreover, quite special in this regard. “They see that there is more advantage in grazing and breeding than in husbandry by a great deal … what should better encourage them thereto than to see them that do it become notable rich men by doing thereof in brief time?”¹³ In fact, the Discourseunderstood the new power of the profit motive, and was the first text to recommended that the way forward was to channel and accommodate it. Sheep farming had all the attributes for maximising profit margins. It was lightly taxed, and unlike the corn trade, it was not subject to export restraints when prices reached a certain level. It was associated with an area of rising production—a steadily growing cloth market that created manufacturing capacity as it went along. Grazing was in general a less precarious exercise than arable husbandry, and it required only a minimum of labour, at a time when labour costs were still relatively high. The Discourse summed up these comprehensive advantages with the thought that the products of grazing involved “small charge and small labour” and had “free vent to be sold both on this side and beyond the sea at the highest penny”.¹⁴ The benefits of these freedoms were found to be so clear that they should be extended to other fields. So the way to “cherish” the production of corn was not to artificially control or protect the market, but to give it the same freedoms, or “allurements and rewards” that were enjoyed by the pastoral farmers. To “make the profit of the plough to be as good rate for rate as the profit of the grazier”.¹⁵

The Great Tudor Inflation: The Beneficial Balance of the General Increase in Opportunity, Population and Prices; and the Basis of Agricultural Improvement

Arable farming was in fact to become a very profitable exercise in its own right in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction: Recovering the Economic Context of History
• 1 The Basis of Change: The Early Breach of the Manorial Stasis in England; the Coming of the Commercial Yeoman Farmer; and the Increase of Opportunity— “The Exceeding Lucre They See Grow”
• 2 Dynamics of Change: The New Shape of Interregional Trading; the Mutual Benefits of Specialisation and Exchange; and the Growth of a National Land-market
• 3 The Structures of Change: The Displacement of the Open Patterns of Occupation on the Common Lands; the Timing and Effects of Enclosure; the Significance of Consolidation Without Enclosure
• 4 New Patterns of Work: From Smallholders to Wage Labourers; and the Role of Industrial Activity in Undermining the Commons
• 5 The Higher Profile of Architectural Form
• 6 A Changing Ethos: From Conditional to Absolute Property; the Rise of Individualism and a Self-Sustaining Market; and the Growing Demand for a Right of Freedom of Trade from Arbitrary Restraints
• 7 Economic Roots of Political Change: The Merchant-Gentry Alliance Against Prerogative Customs Dues; the Central, Long-Term Challenge to the Crown—“To Have a Certainty”
• 8 New Definitions of Good Government: “Parliament” versus “Patent”; the Opposition to Monopolies; Freedom of Trade as the Economic Policy of the Commons; and the Unsatisfied Demand for Parliamentary Legislation
• 9 Economic Aims of Parliament’s Foreign Policy: Elizabeth I as the Embodiment of the National Enterprise; the Dynastic Preference of James I for the National Enemy
• 10 The Religious War of Charles I Against His Scottish Kingdom; and the People of England “Left Now Only to Expect an Opportunity”
• 11 The First Revolutionary Measure of the Long Parliament: The Triennial Act of February 1641—a “Course as May Not Be Eluded”; and the Relevance of the Rise of the Gentry
• 12 The Triumph of Freedom of Trade: The Throwing Down of Monopolies; and the Ending of Prerogative Customs Dues
• 13 The Support of the Middle Sort: Parliament’s Broad Base of Allegiance Among the Substantial Freeholders and the Merchants and Traders in the Commercial Centres—“Which Said Order Is Remaining in the Town Chest”
• 14 Commercial, Political and Religious Connections in Parliament’s West Nottinghamshire Heartland—“To Know a Law and Have a Certainty”
• 15 A Middle Sort of Aristocracy: William Pierrepont and the Course of the English Revolution
• 16 The Socio-Economic Limits of the Revolution: Parliament, the People and the Poor; and on Whose Side Were the Levellers?
• 17 The Economy of the State—The First Fully Capitalist Society
• Appendix: Locations of Civil War Allegiance in Nottinghamshire
• Index