Gneist, after deciding that the number of the unfree population "erscheint nicht ubergross," admits that the dependent stratum of the population must needs always increase, "as a result of the land system. In time of war the cla.s.s increased through the ruin of the small holdings; in time of peace through the increase of the landless members of families. The favourable effects of a new acquisition through conquest and booty were a gain only to the possessing cla.s.s" (_Geschichte des englischen Self-Government_, 1863, p. 7). He concludes that "the social structure of the Anglo-Saxons appears to be on the whole unchanging, advancing only in the multiplication of the dependent cla.s.ses." Among the symptoms of degeneration may be noted the retirement of nearly thirty kings and queens into convents or reclusion during the seventh and eighth centuries. This was presumably a result of clerical management.
In Normandy itself, however, half a century before the Conquest, there had arisen a state of extreme tension between the peasantry and their lords; and a projected rising was crushed in germ with horrible cruelty.[998] William"s enterprise thus stood for a pressure of need among his own subjects, as well as for an outburst of feudal ambition; and in making up his force he offered an opportunity of plunder to all cla.s.ses in his own duchy, as well as to those of other provinces of France. Domesday Book, says one of its keenest students, "is a geld book"--a survey made to facilitate taxation on the lines of the old Danegeld.[999] William was repeating a Roman process. His invasion, therefore, hardly represented the full play of the existing forces of civilisation. These, indeed, had to be renewed again and again in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the conditions of the Conquest were important for the direction of English political evolution. Its first social and psychological effect was to set up new cla.s.s relations, and in particular a marked division between aristocracy and people, who spoke different languages. This involved a relation of distrust and close cla.s.s union. When the people"s speech began to compete with that of their masters, and the n.o.bles separately began to be on good terms with their people, there would arise wide possibilities of strife as between neighbouring n.o.bles and their retainers; and in Scotland the weakness of the crown long gave this free play. But in England, especially after the period of anarchy under Stephen, when the early baronage was much weakened and many estates were redivided,[1000] the strength of the crown, rooted in military custom and constantly securing itself, tended to unite the n.o.bles as a cla.s.s for their own aggrandis.e.m.e.nt and protection. King after king, therefore, sought the support of the people[1001] against the baronage, as the baronage sought their help against the king; while the Church fought for its own share of power and privilege.
The history of Christendom, indeed, cannot be understood save in the light of the fact that the Church, a continuous corporation owning much property as such, is as it were a State within the State,[1002]
representing a special source of strife, although its non-military character limits the danger. What the Church has repeatedly done is to throw in its lot with king or n.o.bles, or with the democracy (as in Switzerland and Protestant Scotland), according as its economic interests dictate. The famous case of Becket, transformed from the king"s friend into the king"s antagonist, is the most dramatic instance of the Church"s necessary tendency to fight for its own hand and to act as an independent community. And it is in large part to the check and counter-check of a church, crown, and baronage, all jealously standing on their rights as against each other, that the rise of English const.i.tutionalism is to be traced; the baronage and the Church, further, being withheld from preponderance by the strifes arising within their own pale. For even the Church, unified at once by its principle, its celibacy, its self-interest, and the pressure of outside forces, exhibits in its own sections, from time to time, the law of strife among competing interests.[1003]
The mere strife of interests, however, could not evolve civilisation in such a polity without a constant grafting-on of actual civilising elements from that southern world in which the ancient seeds were again flowering. Mere mixing of Norman with Saxon blood, one Teutonic branch with another, could avail nothing in itself beyond setting up a useful variability of type; and the element of French handicraft and culture introduced in the wake of the Conquest, though not inconsiderable,[1004]
could ill survive such a pandemonium as the reign of Stephen. Like Henry I, Stephen depended on the English element as against the baronage; but the struggle brought civilisation lower than it had been since the Conquest. With the accession of Henry II (1154) came a new influx of French culture and French speech,[1005] albeit without any departure from the monarchic policy of evoking the common people as against the n.o.bles. Thenceforward for over a hundred years the administrative methods and the culture are French, down to the erection of a French-speaking Parliament by the southern Frenchman Simon de Montfort.
The a.s.sumption that some inherent "Teutonic" faculty for self-government shaped the process is one of the superst.i.tions of racial and national vanity.
Dr. C.H. Pearson"s reiteration of the old "race" dogma (_History of England during the Early and Middle Ages_, i, 277) is its sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_. In the English manner, he connects with old _Welsh_ usages of revenge the late _Irish_ tradition of "lynch law" that has been "transplanted to _America_"--as if it were Irishmen who are to-day lynching negroes in the southern States. He explains in the same way "the contrast of French progress by revolutionary movements with the slow, const.i.tutional, onward march of English liberty." On his own showing there was not progress, but deterioration, as regards liberty among the Saxons; and the later history of the English common people is largely one of their efforts to make revolutions.
In France the revolutions were rather fewer. In Denmark and Germany, again, there was long relapse and then revolution. For the rest, Mr. Pearson has contrasted Welsh usage of the _sixth_ century with Saxon usage of the _eleventh_, this while admitting the lateness of the latter development (pp. 275, 276). We should require only to go back to the blood-feud stage in Teutondom to prove the ineradicable tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon to the _Faustrecht_, which in Germany survived till the sixteenth century, and to the fisticuffs which occurred in 1895 in the English Parliament. The reasoning would be on a par with Mr. Pearson"s.
Mr. J.H. Round"s way of taking it for granted (_The Commune of London_, 1899, pp. 138-40) that a tendency to strife is permanently and "truly Hibernian," belongs to the same order of thought.
Irishmen are represented as abnormal in inability to unite against a common foe, when just such disunion was shown through whole centuries in Saxondom and in Scandinavia and in Germany; and they are further described as peculiar in leaving their commerce in foreign hands, when such was the notorious practice of the Anglo-Saxons.
One of the most remarkable reversions to the racial way of reasoning is made by Mr. H.W. C. Davis in his _England under the Normans and Angevins_ (1905). After setting out with the avowal that the Anglo-Saxons at the Conquest were "decadent," he reaches (p. 223) the conclusion that the Teutonic races "climb, slowly and painfully it is true, but with a steady and continued progress, from stage to stage of civilisation," while the Celtic, "after soaring at the first flight to a comparatively elevated point, are inclined to be content with their achievement, and are ... pa.s.sed by their more deliberate compet.i.tors." How a Teutonic race, given these premises, could be "decadent," and be surpa.s.sed and finally uplifted by a "Latin civilisation" (_id._ p. 2), the theorist does not attempt to explain.
To no virtue in Norman or English character, then,[1006] but to the political circ.u.mstances, was it due that there grew up in island England, instead of an all-powerful feudal n.o.bility and a mainly depressed peasantry, as in continental France, a certain balance of cla.s.ses, in which the king"s policy against the n.o.bility restrained and feudally weakened them, and favoured the burghers and yeomen, making sub-tenants king"s liegemen; while on the other hand the combination of barons and Church against the king restrained him.[1007] A tyrant king is better for the people than the tyranny of n.o.bles; and the destruction of feudal castles by regal jealousy restrains baronial brigandage. Regal prestige counts for something as against baronial self-a.s.sertion; but aristocratic self-esteem also rests itself, as against a reckless king, on popular sympathy. On the other hand, the town corporations, originating in popular interests, became in turn close oligarchies.[1008]
Even the cla.s.s tyranny of the trade gilds, self-regarding corporations in their way,[1009] looking to their own interests and indifferent to those of the outside grades beneath them,[1010] could provide a foothold for the barons in the town mobs, whom the barons could patronise.[1011]
What was done by the Parliaments of Edward III to allow free entrance to foreign merchants was by way of furthering the interests of the aristocracy, who wanted to deal with such merchants, as against the English traders who wished to exclude them. Yet again, the yeomanry and burghers, fostered by the royal policy, develop an important military force, which has its own prestige.
Nothing can hinder, however, that foreign wars shall in the end aggrandise the upper as against the lower cla.s.ses, developing as they do the relation of subjection, increasing the specifically military upper cla.s.s, and setting up the spirit of force as against the spirit of law.
In particular, the king"s power is always aggrandised when n.o.bility and people alike are led by him to foreign war.[1012] Edward III, indeed, had to make many legislative concessions to the Commons in order to procure supplies for his wars; and the expansion of commerce in his reign,[1013] furthered by the large influx of Flemish artisans[1014]
encouraged by him,[1015] strengthened the middle cla.s.ses; but all the while the "lower orders" had the worst of it; and the jealousy between traders and artisans, already vigorous in the reign of John, could not be extinguished. And when, after nearly eighty years without a great external war, Edward I invaded Scotland, there began a military epoch in which, while national unity was promoted, the depressed cla.s.s was necessarily enlarged, as it had been before the Conquest during the Danish wars;[1016] and the poor went to the wall. Instinct made people and baronage alike loth at first to support the king in wars of foreign aggression; but when once the temper was developed throughout the nation, as against France, the spirit of national union helped the growth of cla.s.s superiority by leaving it comparatively unchecked. In the period between the Conquest and Edward I the free population had actually increased, partly by French and Flemish immigration in the train of the Conquest; partly by Norman manumissions; partly through the arrivals of Flemish weavers exiled by domestic war;[1017] partly by the new growth of towns under Norman influence; partly by reason of the development of the wool export trade, which flourished in virtue of the law and order at length established under the Angevin kings, and so stimulated other industry. But from the beginning of the epoch of systematic national war the increase was checked; and save for the period of betterment consequent on the destruction of population by the Black Death, the condition of the peasantry substantially worsened.[1018] Frenchmen were struck by the number of serfs they saw in southern England as compared with France, and by the stress of their servitude.[1019]
An apparently important offset to the general restriction of freedom is the beginning of a representative parliamentary system under the auspices of Simon de Montfort (1265). It is still customary to make this departure a ground for national self-felicitation, though our later historians are as a rule content to state the historical facts, without inferring any special credit to the "Anglo-Saxon race."[1020] As a matter of fact, Simon de Montfort"s Parliament was the application by a naturalised Frenchman, under stress of the struggle between his party in the baronage and the king, of an expedient set up a generation before by the Emperor Frederick II in Sicily, and a century before in Spain.
There, and not in England, arose the first Parliaments in which sat together barons, prelates, and representatives of cities. Simon de Montfort, son of the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, may well have known of the practice of Spain, where in the twelfth century the householders in the cities elected their members. But he must at least have been familiar with the details of the system set up in Sicily, to which English attention had been specially called by the effort of Henry III to obtain the Sicilian crown for his son Edmund; and Simon imitated that system in England, not on any exalted principle of justice, but because the smallness of his support among the barons forced him to make the most of the burgher cla.s.s, who had stood by him in the struggle. He may even, indeed, have taken his idea proximately from the practice of the rebels in Normandy before the Conquest, when deputies from all the districts met in general a.s.sembly and bound themselves by a mutual oath.[1021] Thus accidentally[1022] introduced, under a French name,[1023] the representative system is one more of the civilising factors which England owed to Southern Europe; and, as it was, baronage and burgesses alike failed to maintain Simon against the power of the crown, the monarchic superst.i.tion availing to divide even the malcontents, as had previously happened after the granting of Magna Carta by King John.
Reiterated claims had secured in the eighteenth century the general acceptance of the view that England "set the example" of admitting cities to representation in national diets (so Koch, _Histor. View of the European Nations_, Crichton"s tr. 3rd ed. p. 46). But as to the priority of the inst.i.tution in Spain, see U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume"s ed. i, 370; and Prescott, _Hist. of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk"s ed. 1889, p. 10 and refs. As to its existence in Sicily (_circa_ 1232), see Milman, _Hist. of Latin Christianity_, vi, 154, proceeding on Gregorio, _Considerazioni sopra la Storia di Sicilia_, 1805 (ed. 2a, 1831-39, vol. ii, cap.
v); and Von Raumer, _Geschichte der Hohenstaufen_ (Aufg. 1857-58, B. vii, Haupt. 6, Bd. iii, p. 249). Cp. Von Reumont, _The Carafas of Maddaloni_, Eng. tr. 1854, p. 61, and refs. Frederick"s a.s.semblies, too, were called _Parlamente_. He in turn had, of course, been influenced by the practice, if not of Spain, at least of the Italian cities, which he wished his own to rival.
As to Simon"s object in summoning burgesses, Hallam admits (_Europe during the Middle Ages_, ed. 1855, iii, 27) that it "was merely to strengthen his own faction, which prevailed among the commonalty,"
though the step was too congruous with general developments not to be followed up. Compare the admissions of Green, pp. 151-53; Stubbs, ii, 96, 103; and the remark of Adam Smith (_Wealth of Nations_, bk. iii, ch. iii) that the representation of burghs in the states-general of _all_ the great European monarchies originated spontaneously in the desire of the kings for support against the barons. Freeman"s statement (_General Sketch of European History_, p. 184) that under Simon we find "the whole English nation, n.o.bles, clergy, and people, acting firmly together"
against the king, is quite erroneous. Cp. Gneist, _Geschichte des Self-government in England_, 1863, p. 143. Dr. Gardiner (_Student"s History_, p. 245), speaking of the presence of city burgesses and knights of the shire in the same Parliament under Edward III, writes that "in no other country in Europe would this have been possible." He seems to have been entirely unaware of the Spanish practice.
As the roots of the temper of equality are weakened, the relative prestige of the king is heightened,[1024] provided that in a turbulent age he is strong enough for his functions; though, again, he runs new risks when, in peace, he is weak enough to make favourites, and thus sets up a source of jealousy in the act of surrendering some of his own special prestige. Then he doubles the force against him. History has generally represented favourites as unworthy; but there is no need that they should be so in order to be detested; and whether we take Gaveston, or Buckingham, or Bute, we shall always find that the animosity of the favourite"s a.s.sailants is so visibly excessive as to imply the inspiration of primordial envy quite as much as resentment of bad government. Whether it is n.o.ble denouncing favoured n.o.ble or Pym impeaching the Duke, there is always the note of primary animal jealousy.
-- 2
A very obvious and familiar general law, here to be noted afresh, is that the constant and extensive employment of energy in war r.e.t.a.r.ds civilisation, by leaving so much less for intellectual work. Some sociologists have arrived at the optimistic half-truths that (1) warfare yields good in the form of chivalry, and that (2) great wars like the Crusades promote civilisation by setting up communication between peoples. But it is not asked whether the good involved in chivalry could not conceivably have been attained without the warfare, and whether (as before noted) there could not have been commerce between East and West without the Crusades.[1025] The ancient Phoenicians had contrived as much in their day. Even the expansion of Italian commerce which followed on the Crusades went on the lines of a trade already in existence, as is proved once for all by the mere numbers of the vessels supplied to the crusaders by the Pisans, Genoese, and Venetians;[1026] and inasmuch as these republics fought furiously for the monopoly, each grabbing for special privileges,[1027] till Genoa overthrew Pisa, the total expansion must have been small, and the political disintegration great.
Nor was it on the whole otherwise with the spirit of chivalry, of which Guizot[1028] gives such an attractive picture. It was with the Church-made code of chivalrous morals as with the Church"s code of Christian virtue: the ideal and practice were far asunder. As a matter of fact, the rules of chivalry were in part but the rules of prize-fighters,[1029] without which the game could not continuously be played; and they in no way affected the relations of the prize-fighters with other cla.s.ses, or even their moral relations with each other save in the matter of fighting. To the "common herd" they were not only brutal but base,[1030] recognising no moral obligations in that direction. So too the Crusades represent a maximum of strife yielding a minimum of intercourse, which (save for the spirit of religious hate which wrought the strife) could have been attained in peace in tenfold degree by the play of the energy spent in preliminary bloodshed.
It is, of course, idle to speak as if the age of warfare might have been different if somebody had anachronistically pointed out the possibilities; but it is worse than idle, on the other hand, to impute a laudable virtue to its impulses because other impulses followed on them.
The task of the sociological historian is first to trace sequences, and then to reason from them to the problems of his own age, where most are praise and blame profitable exercises. The lesson of early English history is neither that chivalry is good nor that the feudal knights and kings were ruffians; but that certain things happened to r.e.t.a.r.d civilisation because these had their way, and that similar results would tend to accrue if their ideals got uppermost among us now. Thus we have to note that during the long period of frequent dynastic and other civil war from the Conquest to the reign of Henry II there was almost no intellectual advance in England, the only traceable gain arising when the king was fighting abroad with his foreign forces. There was no such cause at stake as thrilled into fierce song the desperately battling Welsh; and though in the reign of Edward III we have the great poetic florescence of which Chaucer is the crown, the inspiration of that literature had come from or through France; and with the depression of France there came the Nemesis of depression in English culture.
The triumph of Edward over France was, broadly speaking, a result of financial rascality, inasmuch as he succeeded by means of the money which he had borrowed from the Florentine bankers, and which he never repaid.[1031] He was thus well equipped and financed when the French were not; and he was able to buy off the princes of the Empire on the north and east of the French frontier. But though the enterprise thus begun was continued by means of a home revenue raised mainly on the wool trade, the English attempt to dominate France ended in the inevitable way of imperialism, the humiliation of the victors duly following on the misery and humiliation of the vanquished. Only the depopulation of the Black Death prevented extreme misery among the English population; and the conquering king ends his life, as William had done before him, in isolation and ignominy.
It may or may not have been a gain that Edward"s victories over France practically determined the adoption of the middle-cla.s.s, gallicised English speech[1032] by the upper cla.s.ses, who had hitherto been French-speaking, like the kings themselves. An Anglicising process, such as had been interrupted at the advent of Henry II, had set in when Normandy was lost (1204), to be again interrupted on the accession of Henry III, and resumed in the civil wars of his reign. But Edward I habitually spoke French, and so did his n.o.bles. They had hitherto looked with true aristocratic scorn on the pretensions of the bourgeoisie--"_rustici Londonienses qui se barones vocant ad nauseam_," in the fashion satirised in all ages, down to our own; but in their new relation of hostility and superiority to Normandy and to France, they insensibly adopted the language that had been framed by that very bourgeoisie out of Saxon, and French and French idioms translated into Saxon.
Cp. Pearson, _Fourteenth Century_, pp. 222, 233. Prof. Earle"s quasi-theory of the cause of the recovery of the native tongue (_Philology of the English Tongue_, 3rd ed. pp. 44, 66) is purely fanciful. In the end, as he admits, it was not any native dialect, but the artificial composite "King"s English," much modified by French, that survived. It is noteworthy that many locutions which pa.s.s in the Bible for specially pure archaic English, as "fourscore and ten," are simply translations of a French idiom, itself ancient Celtic translated into Romance. (Cp. the _Introduction to the Study of the History of Language_, by Strong, Logeman, and Wheeler, 1891, p. 393.)
The Rev. W. Denton, in his learned and instructive survey of the subject (_England in the Fifteenth Century_, 1888, pp. 1-7), remarks that "from some cause, now difficult to trace, great encouragement was given to French in the reign of Henry III.
Probably the foreign tastes and partialities of the king had something to do with this" (p. 4). They certainly had. As soon as he could wield power, "hordes of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were at once summoned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial and administrative posts about the Court" (Green, _Short Hist_., ch. iii, -- 5, p. 140), as had happened before under Henry II. Mr. Denton rightly notes (p. 6) how "in the reign of Henry III the descendants of Norman barons, and the sons of Anglo-Norman fathers, were proud of the name of Englishmen, and took up arms against the king"s Norman and Angevin favourites, whom they despised as foreigners." This is the true line of causation. There is doubtless something in the theory that the general resort to the use of English in the schools was a result of the Black Death--the majority of the clergy being destroyed and the new teachers being unable to instruct in French (Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_, 1893, p. 202); but there were certainly other causes involved. Mr.
de Montmorency (_State Intervention in English Education_, 1902, pp. 19-23) develops Gasquet"s argument with much force, noting further that many of the foreign priests who survived forsook their charges. It might be added that the native peasantry necessarily counted for more in a social as in an economic sense, after the great fall in their numbers. But the fact that the Death came in the period of the successful French wars of Edward III is clearly of capital importance. But for the moral reaction from these wars, the tendency would have been to procure new relays of French priests.
It is indeed conceivable that, but for hostilities with France, French would have steadily gained ground through literature, depressing and discrediting the vernacular. On this view it was the continuance of resistance by the Welsh that probably prevented the absorption of the Saxon speech by that of the conquered British; and it is similarly arguable that it was the relation of hostility between the Carlovingian Franks and the more easterly Germans that determined the supremacy of the Romance speech in French. The point is worth psychological investigation.
Though, however, Chaucer"s own new-English work is part of the result, the intellectual gain stops there for the time being. No nation, from Rome to Napoleonic France, ever helped its own higher culture by destroying other States.[1033] The French wars of Henry V were not less injurious to English civilisation[1034] than the desperate civil wars which followed them, when English medieval culture reached, relatively to the rest of Europe, its lowest point.[1035] And these wars, it is always important to remember, were the result of the young king"s acting on the doctrine (doubtfully ascribed to his father, but in any case all too easily acquired by kings) that whereas peace gave headway to domestic sedition, foreign war unified the ma.s.s of the people and fixed them to their leader. The shameless aggression on France did so unify them for the moment, as imperialism among an unmoralised public may always be trusted to do; and it left them more demoralised and divided than ever, in due sequence. In all likelihood it was the new bribe of foreign plunder that first drew men away from Lollardism, considered as an outcome of economic discontent, thus preparing the collapse of the movement on its moral side.[1036] One man"s egoism could thus sway the whole nation"s evolution for evil,[1037] setting up for it the ideal which haloed him, and which survived him in virtue of the accident that the Nemesis of his course fell upon his successors rather than on him.
-- 3
In the matter of plebeian subjection, the second half of the fourteenth century supplies the proof of the tendency of the period of war. The great gain to the serfs in that period was the result of the depopulation caused by the Black Death (1348-50)--a relation of cause and effect which is still ignored by some writers, in their concern to insist that English labour was once better off than at present. But it was later in the same half-century that the rising of the "Jacquerie,"
which appears to have been in its origin strictly a revolt against taxation,[1038] was so bloodily repressed. The manner of the revolt sufficiently proves that the peasantry had gained new heart with the improvement in their lot which followed on the pestilence, in spite of laws to keep down wages;[1039] but even this improvement could not strengthen them sufficiently to make them hold their own politically in 1381 against the aristocracy, gentry, and middle cla.s.s, now hardened in cla.s.s insolence. It would seem as if those who rose to the status of tenants[1040] after the depopulation sought in their turn to keep down those who remained landless servitors. After the southern and eastern risings had been crushed, the men of Ess.e.x were told by Richard, who had given them charters of freedom and immediately afterwards revoked them, inclined as he was to protect the serfs in a measure against their masters, that "bondsmen they had been and bondsmen they should remain, in worse bondage than before"; and the following Parliament declared that the landowners would never consent to the freeing of the serfs, "were they all to die for it in a day." It is noteworthy, on the side of economics, that despite this temper serf.a.ge did gradually die out, the people being for long unable to multiply up to the old level, by reason of restraint, ill-usage, civil war, the decline of tillage and the grouping of holdings, and the high death-rate. Jack Cade"s rebellion, in 1450, indicated the persistence of the democratic spirit, contending as it did for the suppression of the system under which the n.o.bles plundered the kingdom while the king was imbecile.
The question as to the rate at which the population recovered from the Black Death has been discussed by Prof. Thorold Rogers, Mr.
Seebohm, and Prof. Cunningham (see the latter"s _Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, 1891, i, 304). Prof. Rogers, on the one hand, maintains that by 1377, when the tax rolls seem to give a population of about two and a half millions (cp. Dunton, _England in the Fifteenth Century_, p. 130), the population had recovered all it had lost in the Plague, he being of opinion that the England of that age could not at any time support more than two and a half millions. Mr. Seebohm, with whom Dr. Cunningham substantially concurs (see also Pearson, _Fourteenth Century_, p. 249, and Gasquet, _The Great Pestilence_, 1893, p. 194), thinks that the return of the Plague in 1361 and 1369, and the unsettled state of the country, must have prevented recuperation; and, accepting the loose calculation that the Plague destroyed half the population (Mr. Pearson says "one-half or two-thirds"; Dr. Gasquet endorses the general view that "fully one half" were destroyed), he concludes that the population before 1348 may have been five millions.
The truth surely lies between these extremes. That the population should not at all have recovered in twenty-five years is extremely unlikely. That it should have restored a loss of thirty-three per cent in twenty-five years, which is what Prof. Rogers"s position amounts to, is still more unlikely (see his _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, pp. 223, 226, where the mortality is estimated at one-third). It is besides utterly incongruous with Prof. Rogers"s own repeated a.s.sertion that "during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries the population of England and Wales was almost stationary" (_Industrial and Commercial History of England_, pp.
46, 49; _Six Centuries of Work and Wages_, p. 337; _Economic Interpretation of History_, p. 53). How could a medieval population conceivably stand for half a century at a given figure, then, having been reduced by one-third, replace the loss in twenty-five years, and thereafter continue to subsist without further increase for two centuries more?
On the other hand, there is a natural tendency in every suddenly depleted population to reproduce itself for a time at a quickened rate; and in the England of the latter half of the fourteenth century the conditions would encourage such an effort. The lack of house-room and settlement which normally checked increase (cp.
Stubbs, -- 493) was remedied for a large number of persons; and the general feeling would be all in favour of marriage and repopulation (cp. Rogers, _Six Centuries_, p. 226, where, however, evidence obviously bad is accepted as to multiplied births), though just after the Plague there would be a great stimulus to the extension of pasture, since that needed fewer hands than tillage.
On the whole, we may reasonably surmise that the population before 1348 was, not five millions, but between three and four millions (so Green, ch. v, -- 4, p. 241, who, however, takes the somewhat excessive view that "more than one-half were swept away," and further, p. 239, that the population "seems to have all but tripled since the Conquest"), and that it was prevented regaining that figure in the next century by the economic preference of sheep-farming to tillage. Mr. Rogers expressly admits (_Six Centuries_, p. 233) that "the price of labour, proclamations and statutes notwithstanding, did not ever fall to its old rates," and repeatedly a.s.serts that "the labourers remained masters of the situation." On his own principles, this goes to prove that their numbers remained lower than of old. He infers a "considerable loss of life" in the famine of 1315-16 from the immediate rise of agricultural wages (from 23 to 30 per cent), of which on the average 20 per cent was permanent. Here there is a presumption that even before 1315 the population was greater than afterwards. Yet again he states (p. 326, etc.) that "the _fifteenth_ century and the first quarter of the _sixteenth_ were the golden age of the English labourer"--a proposition which staggers credence. Cp. W.J.
Corbett, in _Social England_, ii, 382-84.
It is impossible, however, to attain demonstration either on that head or as regards the numbers of the population in the periods under notice. Mr. Rogers"s claims to give decisive evidence show a serious misconception of what const.i.tutes proof; and there is special reason to distrust his conclusion that population was no greater at the end of Elizabeth"s reign than in that of Henry IV.
Cp. Mr. Gibbins"s _Industrial History of England_, pp. 107-108.
Prof. J.E. Symes (in _Social England_, iii, 128, 129) decides that a "great increase of the population undoubtedly took place in the reign of Henry VIII," adopting the estimate that the total at the death of Henry VII was about two and a half millions, and at the death of Henry VIII about four millions. As to the population at the Conquest, see Sharon Turner"s _History of the Anglo-Saxons_, bk. viii, c. 9, vol. iii, and Dunton, as cited, pp. 128-29. It was then probably below two millions; and in the reign of Edward II it may well have been over three millions; for Bishop Pec.o.c.k about 1450 (cited by Dunton, p. 130 _note_) speaks of a long-continued decrease, such as would be caused by the wars in France and at home. But the a.s.sertion of Tyndale in 1532 (_id._ _ib._), that the population was then less by a third than in the time of Richard II, must be dismissed as a delusion set up by the phenomena of agrarian depopulation in certain districts. On this see below, p. 405.
It is important to note, finally, that it was in the age of raised standard of comfort that there occurred the first wide diffusion of critical heresy in England. Wiclif"s popular Lollardry was one phase of a movement that went deeper in thought and further afield in social reform than his, since he himself felt driven to confute certain opponents of belief in the Scriptures, and at the same time to repudiate the doctrine that va.s.sals might resist tyrant lords.[1041] Had he not done so, he might have had a less peaceful end; but it is clear that many men were in the temper to apply to lay matters the demand for reform which he restricted to matters ecclesiastical.[1042] John Ball"s rising, however, promptly elicited the much superior strength of the feudal military cla.s.s; and though in 1395 there were still Lollards to pet.i.tion to Parliament for the abolition of "unnecessary trades," as well as war and capital punishment and the Catholic practices afterwards rejected by Protestantism, their Utopia was as hopeless as that of the insurgent peasants. Even had the invasion of France not come about to bribe and demoralise the nation at large, turning it from domestic criticism to the plunder of a neighbouring State, the n.o.bility of the period were utterly incapable of an intellectual ideal; and any sympathy shown by any section of them for Lollardry was the merest opportunism, proceeding on resentment of Papal exactions or on a premature hope of plundering the Church.[1043] The moment Lollardry openly leant towards criticism of n.o.bility as well as clergy, they were ready to give it up to destruction; and the determining cause of the fall of Richard II was that, besides alienating the n.o.bles at once by maintaining a peace policy, and by refusing to let them go to all lengths in oppressing the labourers, he alienated the clergy by sheltering the Lollards.[1044] It was the clergy who turned the balance, embracing the cause of Henry IV, who in turn systematically supported them,[1045] as did his son after him. Henry V, the national hero-king, and his father were the first burners of "Protestant" heretics; and it was under Henry IV, in 1401, that there was pa.s.sed the Act suppressing the voluntary schools of the Lollards.[1046] Doubtless it was a push of the Lollards that carried the later Act of 1406, permitting all men and women to send their sons and daughters "to any school that pleaseth them in the realm;"[1047] but the limitation of school-keeping to the Church was an effective means of limiting the education given; and "by 1430 the Church had recovered from the Lollard revolt against her universal authority."
Mr. Lecky, in his theory of the English aristocracy, credits the n.o.bility with an "eminently popular character" from time immemorial, and cites Comines as to "the singular humanity of the n.o.bles to the people during the civil wars" (_History of England in the Eighteenth Century_, small ed. i, 212, 213). The n.o.bility, in the circ.u.mstances, had need to treat the people better than those of France normally did (which was what Comines was thinking of).
Their own wealth--what was left of it--came from the people, to whom, further, they looked for followers. And Comines in the same pa.s.sage (bk. v, ch. xx) notes that the English people were "more than ordinarily jealous" of their n.o.bility. Of course, the difference between French and English practice dates further back, as above noted.
Similarly misleading is Mr. Lecky"s statement that "the Great Charter had been won by the barons, but ... it guaranteed the rights of all freemen." Mr. Gardiner expressly points out (_Student"s History_, p. 182; cp. his _Introduction to English History_, pp. 66-67) that the Charter "was won by a combination between all cla.s.ses of freemen." London had harboured and aided the barons" force; and the clergy were closely concerned. (Cp.
McKechnie, _Magna Carta_, 1905, p. 41.) The representative a.s.sembly summoned by John in 1213 stood for the combination of the three cla.s.ses. Green (_Short History_, ill.u.s.t. ed. i, 242, 243) uses language which countenances Mr. Lecky, but shows (pp. 235-43) the need the barons felt for aid, and the influence of the Church and the traders. Compare the language of his longer history (1885, i, 244), and his express admission as to the depression the baronage had undergone a century later (_id._ p. 300). Dr. Stubbs (_Const. Hist._ i, 571, 583) also indicates that the people co-operated, though he uses expressions (pp. 570, 579) which obscure the facts in Mr. Lecky"s favour. Guizot (_Essais_, p. 282) recognises that the movement was national. Buckle, too, made the point clear long ago (3-vol. ed. ii, 114-20; 1-vol. ed. pp.
350-54). But it is noted even in what he called "the wretched work of Delolme," and was in Buckle"s day a generally accepted truth.
Cp. Ch. de Remusat, _L"Angleterre du 18ieme siecle_, 1856, i, 33.
It is worth noting in this connection that the Magna Carta, considered in itself, is a rather deceptive historical doc.u.ment.
Not only did it need the defeat of John and his German and Flemish allies by the French at Bouvines to enable even the combined lords and commons and clergy to extort the Charter, but the combination was being progressively destroyed by John, by means of his army of French mercenaries, when the barons in despair persuaded the French king to send an invading force, which was able to land owing to the ruin of John"s fleet in a storm. Thereupon John"s French troops deserted him. Cp. Green, pp. 122-26; Stubbs, ii, 3, 9-16; and McKechnie, pp. 53-57, as to the King"s energy and the weakness and inner divisions of the national combination. Thus it was indirectly to French action that England owed first the Magna Carta and then the check upon the King"s vengeance, as it was to the Frenchman, Simon de Montfort, later, that it owed the initiative of a three-cla.s.s Parliament. And, indeed, but for the King"s death, the const.i.tutional cause might well have collapsed in the end.
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