Agriculture was of the greatest importance to British society in the later seventeenth century. It supplied most of the country’s wealth, moulded the social structure and provided employment and sustenance for the majority of the people. Indeed, English agriculture was in the early stages of what used to be called an ‘agricultural revolution’. Historians used to date that ‘revolution’ from the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century. More recent research has established not only that the chronology of such a ‘revolution’ is inaccurate – a long period of agricultural improvement may be dated from around the middle of the seventeenth century – but also that the term ‘revolution’ gives a misleading impression of what was in practice a series of often unconnected, undramatic and very long-term local developments.11 We can be confident that agricultural productivity began to improve after the middle years of the seventeenth century. Harvests were good, the population increase of the previous century was slackening and consequently prices, and possibly rents, may even have fallen slightly. These pressures to greater efficiency were increased by localized surges in demand. These were produced by a number of factors. One was urban development, especially the rapid rise in the population of London in this period. Another was attempts by landowners themselves, not least by former royalist families still suffering from the losses of the Interregnum period, to repair their fortunes. More generally, improvements in animal feeding, better methods of fertilization and more intensive and efficient crop-growing methods – many of these popularized and communicated through the activities of the Royal Society – enabled English agriculture to respond to increasing demands. By the end of the century, England was feeding herself fairly comfortably and had even begun to export grain. Few reliable statistics exist for the decades before the Glorious Revolution, but the evidence of wills and probates reveals increased wealth, improved machinery and a willingness to invest in new techniques.
The role of the enclosure of common fields in promoting agricultural improvements after 1660 has been much debated by historians in recent years. Currently, they are inclined to scale down its significance.12 Enclosure had been proceeding steadily for centuries. Its rationale was clear: unenclosed land was uneconomic; its haphazard distribution in huge open fields made it difficult to undertake experiments in crop rotation and even in animal breeding. By 1660 only 50 per cent of English farm land remained to be enclosed. The other half had already either been enclosed or had never been farmed under the open-field system. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly half the remainder was enclosed, almost twice as much as was to be enclosed during the eighteenth century! Here again, we may identify a steady process rather than sudden and abrupt change. What was novel in the later seventeenth century was the complete abandonment of any attempt by the government either to regulate or even to enquire into what was now recognized to be a matter of private agreement among local landowners. Consequently, enclosure by Act of Parliament remained uncommon until the eighteenth century.13
Britain was a rural society but one in which industry was rapidly developing, albeit closely related to the servicing of agriculture and agricultural products. In many villages, domestic industry was almost as common as agriculture. In some counties, such as Gloucestershire, the number of men engaged full-time in agriculture was less than 50 per cent and over the country as a whole may not have been more than 70 per cent. Furthermore, industrial production was not merely local. Regional industrial clusters were emerging by the second half of the seventeenth century; metal production in the West Midlands, iron production in Sussex and Kentish Weald and textile production in several different regions, including East Anglia, the West Riding of Yorkshire and the South West of England.
The closing decades of the seventeenth century, with stable prices and higher real incomes, saw sustained industrial development based on rising demand: for building materials, household utensils and leather goods and, above all, for clothes and other textile products. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century, industrial production may have increased by about 15 per cent. The biggest industry was the woollen cloth industry. Like most other industries, it was organized on a domestic basis in small units. Large-scale production units were to be found in the late seventeenth century, but these were less likely to be factories than dockyards, paper mills and iron-industry slitting-mills. Important technological breakthroughs occurred, notably in the mining and metallurgical industries, but profits were to be made less through industrial innovation than through the use of traditional techniques and the harnessing of traditional sources of power such as wind and water. Economic growth was also fostered by the negative fact of the declining influence of the guilds. The medieval guilds had traditionally controlled recruitment to a craft and laid down standards of production and had even regulated wages. Few new ones were created in the second half of the seventeenth century, and existing guilds were unable to keep pace with new developments. They were often rented by division and weakened by their inability to exert influence over the small shops and small masters of the growing villages and market towns. Their continued demise signalled new opportunities for skilled and unskilled artisans, interlopers, entrepreneurs and others to pursue the path of profit and of self-advancement without social or economic hindrance.
Even if the day of the guilds was passing, most contemporaries believed that the state still had a principal role to play in securing economic prosperity and in generating economic development. After 1660 there are signs that government intervention in the economy was beginning to weaken, but it did so only slowly. The Long Parliament of the 1640s had abolished the old, much-hated monopolies (i.e. the exclusive privilege granted by the crown to an individual, group or company to produce or market a product), but the government still retained the right to issue franchises or privileges (or ‘incorporations’) to groups and companies like trading, mining and even livery companies. The state could also intervene in the economy by offering bounties to promote a particular commodity, such as those offered to cereal-growers after 1670. Together with restrictions on foreign imports of corn, the bounty did much to stabilize agriculture, to stimulate corn production and, ultimately, to safeguard England from the threat of national famine. Bounties on industrial products were to make their appearance in the eighteenth century. Both before and after the Glorious Revolution, then, economic and financial objectives continued to be legitimate objects of state regulation and intervention, their objective to secure national self-sufficiency and strategic power. In a period when Britain was involved in three wars against the Dutch (1652–4, 1665–7 and 1672–4), this was perfectly understandable.
The later decades of the seventeenth century may not have been of unusual significance in the industrial development of Britain, but they were of outstanding importance in her commercial development. The domestic market was steadily growing as rising demand for consumer products affected not only the gentry and aristocratic classes but also the middling orders and artisan ranks.
The substitution of regular retail outlets for intermittent fairs, and the fact that by 1650 small-town mercers and even village shopkeepers could supply most if not all the goods available for consumption on the seventeenth-century market wrought profound changes in the consumer behaviour of the provincial well-to-do, who had probably learned the new habits from direct or indirect contact with London.14
Familiarity with new consumer products was generated locally through the retailing outlets of the great provincial centres such as Bristol, Norwich and York, and, in turn, through the cycle of fashion experienced at county towns and emerging leisure towns like Bath, Tunbridge Wells and the other spa towns. More and more of the population was being drawn into the market for consumer goods, but as yet, its extent should not be exaggerated. In the later seventeenth century, at least, few people from the lower orders could have entered the new market for consumer goods unless more than one person in a household was earning. It is difficult to take seriously the possibil
ity that many members of the labouring masses in the later seventeenth century had access to Delft pottery, pewter, glass, cutlery and worsteds.
It was in international trade that the most staggering developments were experienced; between 1640 and 1700 English exports roughly doubled; re-exports increased twentyfold. The development of new markets in the Eastern Mediterranean and, especially, of new protected markets in North America helped to ensure continued growth. These trends were stimulated by the introduction of new textile products for both domestic and international markets, but especially for the latter. Even non-cloth manufactures exported to the colonies doubled between 1660 and 1700. How far these trends may be attributed to the Navigation Acts is not clear. The acts, passed in 1651 and 1660, were directed against the trade of England’s greatest commercial rival, the Dutch. They provided that trade between England and her colonies should be carried exclusively in British ships and that the main items exported by the colonists had to be shipped to British destinations. There can be little doubt that the acts consolidated and enhanced the expansion of British commerce, but they were not the only catalysts. By 1688 Britain had the largest merchant marine fleet in Europe (up from 2 million tonnes in 1660 to 3.4 million in 1686), some of the best commercial facilities in Europe within the City of London and a metropolitan, mercantile community which was trading with all corners of the globe. If not yet a world power, England was strongly positioned at the centre of a worldwide commercial network.
In all parts of Britain, the difficulties in the way of transporting goods and people remained one of the greatest obstacles to her economic development. The cheapest method of moving goods from one place to another was by water, either by river or by coastal shipping. (As late as the 1840s, coastal shipping moved three times as much tonnage as shipping to ports overseas.) This was particularly relevant to supplying the needs of London: it was estimated that it was twenty times more expensive to move goods from Newcastle to London by land than it was by sea. The seventeenth and early eighteenth century was a period of improvement to river navigation; by the 1720s over 1,000 miles of river navigation had been improved. Not much more could be done with existing technologies to further improve river navigation. At the same time, some much-needed improvements to the state of the highways came in the form of turnpikes. The income from tolls on the users of roads went to the upkeep of the roads; they were administered either by Justices of the Peace (JPs) (after the passage of the first Turnpike Act in 1663) or by private citizens (after the passage of an act in 1706 permitting private turnpikes).
Steady advances in agriculture, commerce and transport were not confined to England. The Welsh economy was being closely bound up with the English market. English towns like Shrewsbury and Bristol commanded their regional hinterlands. Partly because of these pressures, much of the lowland area of Wales had already been enclosed. Here and elsewhere, cattle and sheep were raised to satisfy the growing food demands of the English market. Nevertheless, agriculture in Wales remained in some important respects more backward than in England. Farming in strips was still common and sheep farming continued unchanged in many highland regions of Wales. Estate management was never as advanced in the principality as it was in many parts of England. Land was still regarded, in many parts of Wales, as a means of subsistence rather than a capital investment. Primogeniture existed only on the larger estates; partible inheritance on the smaller estates restricted the scope for improvement. Even if it had not, the capital required to modernize agricultural methods was not available.
Scotland was less economically advanced than Wales. Most areas were still dominated by subsistence farming; the clan system still predominated in the Highlands and feudal tenures were not abolished until 1746. In many parts of Scotland, a version of dispersed strip farming in huge open fields (or ‘breaks’) predominated within which a wide variety of local tenancy customs prevailed. Nevertheless, in some parts of Scotland, notably in the Borders and Galloway, sheep and cattle were reared for the English market and large units were not uncommon. At the same time, the economy of parts of the Highlands was being geared towards supplying the towns of the Lowlands with wool and meat as well as labour. During the 1690s harvest failures led to severe famine. This, together with the Act of Union in 1707, was to stimulate a period of marked agricultural improvement in the form of enclosure for pasture in order to satisfy the Scottish as well as the English demand for food.
In Ireland, the outlook was bleaker. The economy was backward, distorted by religious discrimination and absentee landlordism and dangerously dependent upon the English market. Absentee landlords were content to allow some Protestant tenants something like freeholder status, but they had largely abdicated from the pattern of landlord paternalism towards the lower orders which softened the harshness of social and economic inequality in England. The vast mass of the Catholic peasantry was reduced either to living on very small units of a few acres or, even worse, to the status of landless labourer. Very little agricultural improvement did (or could) proceed in these conditions, and the penetration of consumer goods was considerably more restricted than in England. The Irish rural community remained neglected, poor and in some areas dangerously polarized.
At the end of the seventeenth century, Britain was a pre-industrial economy in which the lifestyles, occupations and the products of country and town complemented each other. The period between 1660 and 1688 was one of development in which many sectors of the economy made progress, but economic growth was unevenly distributed across Britain. This was still a rural society, but a society in which industry was already of acknowledged importance. Although regional variations remained strong – the manufacture and distribution of goods was both specialized and localized – a viable national economy was emerging which, in turn, stood at the centre of a developing international commercial network. A strongly hierarchical society seemed capable of generating a remarkable degree of economic vitality. Whether it could generate a comparable degree of political strength will be the focus of the next section.
POLITICS
In a rural society, landed property was the source of political power and authority. Those with land expected – and were expected – to monopolize political power and influence. ‘Dominion follows property,’ wrote Mandeville. On the whole, the greater aristocracy reserved the greatest offices in the church, in Parliament, in government, in the law and in the armed services for themselves and their dependents, but thousands of other offices remained to be filled with people from lower down the propertied hierarchies. Furthermore, although offices were regarded as pieces of property which could be exploited for profit (the great lawyer Blackstone defined office as ‘a right to exercise a public or private employment and to take the fees and emoluments thereunto belonging’), people sought offices for a variety of reasons, not just for pecuniary gain. These might include the prestige and honour which office carried with it, the holder’s wish to be of service and his ambition to make a career, and even a reputation for himself. Yet, it was not land alone but also various forms of urban property which entitled individuals and families to play a role in the political stage, to beg for favours, to petition for offices and promotions in church as well as state, to sit on the bench, to obtain the good opinion of ministers or the court and, not least, to obtain a seat in Parliament. In this process, the search for a patron to promote a person, a family or a cause was all important: the bigger the patron, the better. As for patrons, they measured their own authority by the extent of their own influence and success in procuring favours and offices. Such influence was known as an ‘interest’ or ‘natural interest’. The greatest patrons of all were the government and the church, with their hundreds of offices to distribute.
Britain was a composite state staffed by only a tiny bureaucracy. She developed the apparatus of ‘the state’ later than most of her continental neighbours. Her standing army was non-existent before the middle of the century and her bureaucracy – no more than 10,000 offic
e-holders by the late seventeenth century according to Gregory King – very tiny, indeed, by European standards. The central government had to rely upon the voluntary cooperation of unpaid local amateurs drawn from the landed classes to govern the country effectively. After the Restoration of 1660, the Privy Council lost the will to exercise vigilance over local government and its officials, and they were left largely to their own devices. The legislation of the Long Parliament was made permanent. Instruments of prerogative rule such as the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission, the Council of the North and the Council in the Marches of Wales were all abolished, thus extending both the writ and the reputation of the common law. This was to a large extent why the king and the Privy Council were no longer able to interfere arbitrarily in local affairs against the wishes of local magnates. Since common law was a mixture of custom and statute, the executive arm of government was unable to override it. Local autonomy was the real beneficiary of the Restoration of 1660.
The distribution of local offices reflected the social structure. It seemed natural for the aristocracy to monopolize the most important offices in local government, especially the Lord and Deputy Lieutenancies, who commanded the militia and appointed the JPs. In turn, the gentry acted as JPs and as sheriffs, while lesser offices such as those of coroner, constable and clerk of the peace were manned from the middling ranks. At the bottom of the local office-holding hierarchy, the parish constables, churchwardens, overseers of the poor, together with those who were liable for jury service, were drawn from the respectable ranks of the yeomanry and craftsmen. Britain was thus governed through a mixture of informal patronage and social expectation, its rulers at all levels motivated by a curious mixture of profit-seeking and voluntary service.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 6