The Long Eighteenth Century

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The Long Eighteenth Century Page 5

by Frank O'Gorman


  Gender and family relations were dictated by the prevailing Christian ideology of male superiority. This ideology reduced women and children to a status of near-servility, but in practice, a variety of personal, practical and religious influences did something to soften the harshness of its impact. There were already signs in the later seventeenth century that the prevailing constructions of gender were being contested and a somewhat more generous attitude towards women was beginning to emerge. Gender relationships, however, did not exist in isolation. People did not define their identities solely in terms of their gender and their families; they took very seriously their place on the social ladder. To this aspect of our inquiry we now turn.

  SOCIETY

  In the attitude of men and women towards each other, we have observed significant differences between theory and practice. How did people view the society of which they were a part and how did they conceive of their own place within it? To what extent did that mental picture conform to the social realities of the later seventeenth century? Most contemporaries believed that Britain was a society of orders, a ladder of social hierarchies. This belief arose from the old Christian cosmology of a ‘Great Chain of Being’, the idea of God’s universe as a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, stretching down from heaven to earth. Society was ordered in small gradations, like rungs on a ladder. There were no massive, mutually exclusive social chasms between one rung and the next. These gradations were the product of history, convention and custom. It is difficult to define them with any precision. They were made up variously of birth and inherited title, of wealth and property, of occupation and, only in some cases, of legally defined status. Every place on the ladder had its own advantages and its own disadvantages.

  Contemporaries were battered with propaganda in catechisms, sermons and the printed word extolling the virtues of this method of social organization. The virtues of obedience and conformity were widely accepted. Inequality was built into the social system; it was natural, inevitable and desirable. The only alternative to it was thought to be anarchy. This conception of society was more than just a theoretical construct: it was confirmed by the everyday experiences of the people. Its inequalities were reflected in dress and deportment, in education, speech and manners and, not least, in leisure and cultural pursuits. These distinctions were also reflected in seating arrangements, especially in church, but also in graded seating at political and social events and in ritual celebrations and processions, whose structure and organization reflected the social hierarchy.

  This model of the social order should not be accepted without a little caution. It is, perhaps, an idealized version of a society in which people knew – and were content to stay – where they belonged. Further, economic change constantly threatened the credibility of the model, creating new occupations, new crafts and subdivisions of old ones. At the same time, new developments in science and philosophy were beginning to transform the old Christian cosmology on which this hierarchical theory of the social order rested. Nevertheless, the idea of a society of orders must be treated as the dominant model of the social order which contemporaries employed both to envisage and to make sense of the world around them, and which to a very considerable extent conditioned their behaviour. Indeed, people derived their sense of personal identity, their conception of ‘self’, less from their own personality than from their place in the social order, which might itself vary according to circumstances of family, education and occupation.

  At the summit of late-seventeenth-century society stood a rural ruling elite of perhaps 5,000 aristocratic and gentry families.9 This rural elite had a significance out of all proportion to its size. It owned perhaps two-thirds of the landed acreage of England. The peerage sat proudly at the top of the social pyramid, the most exclusive of all social groups. The possession of huge landed estates and the hereditary right to sit in the House of Lords gave the peers enormous economic and political power. The spiritual lords also enjoyed seats in the House of Lords; many of the bishoprics owned large tracts of land and other forms of property. These rural paternalists ran their estates and interested themselves in the welfare of the local community. The peers, while technically superior to the gentry, had much in common with them. They rented their lands to tenants and commanded the welfare of their estate and the local community. As a leisured elite, they were able to cultivate a reasonably common lifestyle; they went to the same schools and universities and they exhibited a common code of honour. They indulged in striking displays of conspicuous consumption in, and conspicuous expenditure on, their (often magnificent) country as well as town houses and gardens. Because of their small numerical size it was possible for them to know, or to try to know, everybody of significance within their order. They tended to intermarry and to choose wives and heiresses with the very greatest care in view of their interest in – indeed, intense preoccupation with – estate enlargement and dynastic continuity. These family groupings extended horizontally and vertically through society. Their links with their relations, distant and near, their friends and associates, their servants and, not least, those who depended economically upon their purchasing power, constituted living roots of dependence.

  Beneath the aristocracy and gentry, social divisions were much more complex. There was no unified ‘middle class’, rather a number of ‘middling order’ groups who frequently had little in common and who hardly experienced the sentiments of social unity. Freeholders, farmers and tenants often constituted 30 per cent of the population in some areas, an independent and respectable body who were at times able to stand up to their superiors. The ‘middling orders’ also included professional men, including the clergy, office-holders, military and naval officers, while merchants and manufacturers – some of them prosperous enough to purchase landed estates – were becoming an increasingly visible part of both urban and rural society. These professional and mercantile men did not conceive of themselves separately from the orders immediately above them. Many of them – clergy, attorney, surveyors, bankers, horticulturalists – serviced the gentry and aristocracy and reflected their social values. Many merchants, too, whether wholesalers, dealers or suppliers, also depended upon the custom of the great families of England. Such dependence could create resentment, especially if bills remained unpaid or if social snobbery caused offence; nevertheless, they knew where their interests lay. These vertical links between the landed and the middling orders did much, quietly and unspectacularly, to cement these middling and upper ranks of society more firmly together.

  Distinctly below the professions and the merchants came two groups quite similar in size and status: the shopkeepers and tradesmen, on the one hand, and the artisans and handicraftsmen, on the other. The retailing sector consisted of tens of thousands of small men engaged in selling one product or one small group of products. It included grocers, mercers, booksellers, drapers, ironmongers, jewellers, tobacconists and hosiers and dozens of others. The latter group were small producers who often displayed quite complex internal hierarchies. They included many traditional small crafts such as shoemaking, baking and tailoring as well as newer trades such as printing, instrument-making and various types of manufacturing. Such small concerns were entirely typical of the ‘pre-industrial’ economy. The average size of the enterprises in which goods were manufactured remained small; the master craftsman might have a couple of apprentices and employ one or more day labourers (journeymen).

  Below these groups lay the enormous mass of labourers, those who worked for other people and not for themselves. This vast and heterodox grouping, comprising perhaps one-quarter of the population was entirely dependent upon wage income and whatever perks and pickings that might come their way. What affected their income and condition of life was a combination of the market value of their skills and the casual nature of their work. A labourer who had acquired a much-needed skill as, for example, a carpenter or as a blacksmith, might enjoy a very decent regular income. An entirely unskilled person might only be abl
e to secure seasonal work at harvest time in the fields. Women were much in evidence in this sector of the market, notably in fruit picking, milk selling and fishmongering and, even more widely, working as shop assistants and as non-resident servants. Modern research has estimated that the income of a labouring family towards the end of the seventeenth century might reach £15 per annum, only a pound or two more than the estimate of their expenses and outgoings. As Keith Wrightson has concluded, ‘On whatever estimate we employ, the glaring fact is that the life of the labourer was a constant battle for survival.’10

  Such dismal conclusions need to be qualified. Certain stages of life – the early years of marriage, for example, when both husband and wife might be working and earning – could be relatively comfortable. There were pathways out of poverty, even if it took an unusual combination of personality and circumstance to follow them. To begin as an apprentice might lead to employment as a skilled journeyman; it might even be feasible to consider setting up as a small master. Even a farm labourer might have pretensions to becoming a husbandman. Some trades, moreover, had traditions of collective solidarity which prevented the worst forms of exploitation; some were even protected by statute. The life of the trades had a cultural as well as an economic context. Many had their own job rituals, of initiation and retirement, and their own annual festivities, parades and sports. Some servants may have been poorly paid, but they received their bed and board and often a number of perks and profits which went with the job.

  Finally, in this survey of the social structure, we come to the last (and the largest) great segment of the population – those who were described by contemporaries as cottagers and paupers. In the later seventeenth century, these people numbered perhaps 1,300,000, almost one-quarter of the population. Cottagers, unlike husbandmen, had no land of their own. Their estimated income of £6 10s. per annum was well below subsistence level. They were casually employed, rarely to be found in steady or permanent employment. At some times of the year, particularly in the winter, there might well be very little casual work to go round. As for paupers, they could be poor widows, orphaned children, the sick, the old, the insane and the feckless. These were the people with no defences against the cycle of the year, the accidents of the harvest or occasional downswings in employment. Although mass famines were a thing of the past, local food shortages were still common. The existence of these people was bleak, softened only by religion and by occasional acts of philanthropy on the part of their social superiors.

  To what extent were the English social forms described above to be found in other parts of Britain? In Wales, the situation was not markedly different. Some of the older Welsh landed dynasties were beginning to die out, to be replaced by English (and in some cases, Scottish) families. Even so, at the start of this period there were perhaps thirty landed families in Wales with incomes of over £3,000 per annum. Lower down the scale, there would be a score or two families in each county enjoying incomes of between £500 and £1,000 per annum; they formed the backbone of the local bench and quarter sessions. As in England, landed families rented out their lands to tenant farmers who, in turn, employed labourers to work the land. As in England, close economic and social links were appearing between the urban middling orders and the rural gentry. At the lower end of the social scale there was possibly less specialization of labour than there was in England, farm labourers in Wales turning their hands to weaving or mining in the winter months.

  Partly because of its geographical divisions, Scotland was more complex. In some ways, its social system appeared to be like England’s, with over 1,000 substantial landowners, hereditary aristocrats and Highland chieftains alike. Around 1,500 smaller landlords were perhaps gaining ground against them, but they were markedly poorer than the English gentry, most of them on less than £50 per annum. Furthermore, Scotland did not possess anything to compare with the English freeholders. In the Highlands, traditional forms of social relationships existed through which land was leased and subleased from the clan chief. Consequently, holdings tended to be small. In the Lowlands, farming households leased their land, as many of their English counterparts did, but they too tended to sublease it in a variety of ways to small families beneath them. As a consequence, the size of the holdings of the 8,000–9,000 ‘bonnet lairds’, small owner occupiers who constituted the broad majority of the Scottish landed class, remained tiny. Furthermore, the Scottish middling orders were much less numerous than their English counterparts. Outside Edinburgh and, to a lesser extent, Glasgow they were few and far between, concentrated in the merchant guilds of the royal burghs. Most Scottish towns were very small and most Scottish industries remained rural.

  Ireland displayed some of the most unequal features of the English social structure. Land was unduly concentrated in a very few hands. Over 80 per cent of the land of Ireland was owned by the Anglo-Irish Protestant aristocracy, many of whom were absentees. As in Scotland, there were few freeholders. When leases were granted on reasonably secure terms (usually to Protestant families of the middle rank), the land was not farmed but usually sublet on stringent terms. Because insufficient capital was available for cultivation and development, farming was left to the efforts of single families on small lots. At this period, therefore, most farming in Ireland remained subsistence farming; in many places a money economy did not exist, most payments being made in kind. Most serious of all, about half the entire population of Ireland was made up of landless labourers (or ‘cottiers’) who were probably worse off than their English counterparts and who existed precariously at around subsistence level. The poverty of Ireland and the relative absence of opportunities for picking up casual work left large numbers of people dangerously dependent upon the weather and the harvest.

  It would be a mistake to imagine that variations in the social structure only coincided with national divisions. Everything depended on local circumstances. Some counties, such as Lincolnshire, were almost gentry-free zones, whereas others, notably Cheshire, were packed with gentry families. In general, areas of sheep and corn had larger farms and estates and, to go with them, larger numbers of landless labourers than elsewhere. Areas of dairy farming, by comparison, supported large numbers of small family units with a corresponding variety of casual employment. It would, moreover, be misleading to imagine that the social structure was fixed. Some aspects of it, indeed, were changing quite rapidly. In particular, the middling orders, especially in the towns, were increasing in size and importance. In the countryside, the small yeoman farmer, unable to sustain a sizeable body of debt, was in a steady decline, while in certain parts of the country, the size of aristocratic estates and farms was increasing. Contemporaries tended to exaggerate the force of such developments and to anticipate disastrous consequences. Few men and women could grasp the totality of social relations and calmly conceive of their society in an external, objective sense. To them, their society remained a society of orders, fixed and unchanging in its essentials, and there seemed no imaginable alternative.

  ECONOMY

  In early modern Britain, Country and town were complementary rather than contrasting social and economic entities. They were natural partners in the business of life. Most towns were simply larger villages; they looked like villages and often contained fields and meadows inside their boundaries. In 1700 only around 13 per cent of the population lived in towns of 10,000 or more inhabitants. By 1800 the figure had risen to 24 per cent, a substantial increase but clearly one that should warn us of the danger of exaggerating the speed and extent of urbanization. Nevertheless, the vast majority of people had experience of towns, not least the 750 market towns which promoted trade, social communication and entertainment. The principal function of many country towns was to market agricultural produce. There were no sharp occupational distinctions between those who lived in the towns and those who lived in the countryside; many of the former worked on the land. Dual occupation was still common in many regions. A miner or a weaver might supplement his income with sea
sonal work on the land. Most urban occupations, in fact, were directly related to farming. In no sense, then, were rural ways of life incompatible with urban status. Town- and country-dwellers would mingle together at inns and theatres and, not least, at the great urban festivals of the year. All the while, migration, seasonal or permanent, from country to town decanted a constant stream of rural people into an urban environment.

  The countryside of Britain was dominated by the estates of the aristocracy and gentry. Unlike their French counterparts, the English, Welsh and Scottish (but not Irish) landowners were normally resident and liked to involve themselves closely in the life of the estate and its tenants. Although members of the aristocracy and gentry rented out their estates, they continued to exercise a direct and overriding managerial responsibility for them. This included the careful screening of prospective tenants, regular visits to farms thereafter and the careful enforcement of contracts and covenants. They might also be involved in vital strategic decisions concerning improvements in transport and communications, and even in such activities as the patronage of agricultural shows. Indeed, in their capacities as Justice of the Peace, Lord and Deputy Lieutenant of the county and Custos Rotulorum (head of the county’s legal commissions), many of them displayed a concern for the legal, military and administrative welfare of the community beyond their estates. They never lost this sense of personal involvement, in spite of their tendency to gate and wall off their estates. It was a prosperous and confident landed elite which had been doing well in the later decades of the seventeenth century. The larger estates had tended to prosper at the expense of the smaller. Small owners with less than 300 acres probably still held between 25 per cent and 35 per cent of agricultural land in England, but they were being squeezed by the middling gentry (those with between 300 and 3,000 acres, who held around 45 to 50 per cent of the total land) and the great landed aristocracy (those with over 3,000 acres, who held around 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the total land).

 

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