This argument may be developed by considering the way that alleged criminals were prosecuted. There was no clear relationship between the seriousness of an offence and the degree of punishment which it would attract. A complex assortment of variables was responsible for the rate – and vigour – of prosecution. Two of them require particular attention. First, those who administered the law were local, unpaid amateurs. Parish constables were either appointed or elected annually. These people had to live in the community and tended to treat trivial offences quite lightly, influenced as they were by community opinion and community values. They might not share the opinions of the upper classes of the seriousness of an offence. Consequently, no fewer than a third of those prosecuted for crimes against property in Surrey between 1736 and 1753 were acquitted.21 Second, the punishment of crime was an informal matter, depending upon personality and circumstance. It was the eagerness of individual JPs to prosecute the mass of petty crime that came before them, the view they took of the offence and the offender and the prosecution strategy they intended to adopt that determined the rate of prosecution rather than the seriousness of the offence. Indeed, in cases that did not involve victims, such as prostitution, the energy of informers and parish officers was the principal factor. Certainly, JPs sought strenuously to utilize a variety of devices, including mediation and negotiation, and did not automatically reach for the most severe punishment. The influence of magistrates could be decisive. The influence of the two Fielding brothers, Henry and John, on patterns of crime enforcement in London was considerable. Henry was a Westminster magistrate between 1749 and 1754, John from 1751 to 1780. Their constant energy in the apprehension and sentencing of criminals, in the use of ‘runners’ and informers and in the professional marshalling of scarce resources set a standard that was not to be matched until the following century.
None of this means that we cannot make some kind of estimate of the pattern of crime in the eighteenth century. During the first half of the century the incidence of crime appears to have been fairly stable, perhaps slightly diminishing in rural areas, slightly increasing in urban areas. In the second half of the century, probably because of population pressures, it began to increase, particularly in the towns. Contemporaries believed that they were living in the middle of a crime wave, influenced perhaps by the extraordinary contemporary media interest in crime and criminals. The poverty of large numbers of the population and their sheer vulnerability to economic recession meant that there was no rigid separation between a presumed criminal ‘class’ and the mass of the population. In time of dearth, crime, especially crime against property, would inevitably increase as a consequence of unemployment, low wages and high prices. Furthermore, it has been suggested that there was a link between the incidence of crime and warfare.22 According to this argument, the recruitment of tens of thousands of young men may have artificially reduced the rate of crime during the years of war. Correspondingly, the demobilization of large numbers of soldiers at the end of the war would give rise to the severe increase in the rate of crime which occurred at the end of every war in which Britain took part during the long eighteenth century. Although doubts have been expressed about this phenomenon – especially on account of the small size of samples taken, the low levels of crime and the capacity of a relatively small number of cases to bias the figures – it does not seem possible to eliminate it entirely.
What was the significance of the law and the legal system in this period? Goldsmith’s aphorism, ‘Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law,’ makes the obvious point about inequality but, as we have seen, the argument only begins there. To depict the law as the exclusive agent of class power is a grotesque simplification. Even when every account has been taken of cynicism and abuse, it remains true that the political and social elite was expected to observe and to administer the law; that the law was available to everyone; that although the rich were bound to have advantages over the poor, even they expected – and were expected – to obey the law. If the law was used by the elite to protect its own position and its own property, it was also used by the middling orders to protect their own position and their own property and, as we have seen, by some members of the poorer classes, too. The operation of the legal system, moreover, served to involve many men of small property in the official arrangements of a legally minded society. In this sense, the law acted to integrate individuals and communities. The legal system also did much to reconcile divergent interests and groups, thus serving important stabilizing functions. Insofar as the legal system may have enjoyed the confidence of the broad mass of the people it may have facilitated some general degree of acceptance of the social structure of Hanoverian Britain. Whether it was more or less important in doing so when compared to some of the other great integrative forces – such as patriotism and Protestantism – is a matter for discussion. But the law, surely, did not replace these established forces or overwhelm them in significance. What a study of the law and crime reveals and reminds us of are the limitations of central government, the autonomy of the localities and the constant process of negotiation and accommodation between the localities and the centre. In this way, the tentacles of the law extended throughout Britain, strengthening and uniting a diverse and decentralized body politic.
THE RETREAT FROM THE CONFESSIONAL STATE, 1756–1820
Anglicans and Evangelicals
During the second half of the long eighteenth century the British confessional state began to weaken under the pressure of internal divisions and external challenges. During this period the Church of England experienced two serious internal divisions. It had to cope with the rapidly growing strength of the Methodists, their schism from the Church of England and the subsequent competition between the established church and its new rival. It also experienced the Evangelical revival, a movement which initially attracted and involved notable members of the ruling establishment, such as Hannah More and William Wilberforce. For decades the struggle for the soul of the Church of England weakened and dissipated its unity. During this period, too, the confessional state was forced to withstand two serious challenges from without: from the Protestant Dissenters and from the rapidly reviving forces of Roman Catholicism. Before turning to these challenges, however, we need to examine more closely the situation in which the church found itself in late Georgian Britain. Why was it not able to meet more successfully the challenges to which it was exposed? Why was it not better able to maintain its status as an established church? The traditional explanation has emphasized that the church steadily weakened from within, its organizational structure outdated, its vigour wilting because of its subjection to the political establishment and its vitality sapped by secularization.23 An alternative case, recently propounded by Jonathan Clark, has argued that there was little seriously wrong with the church. What destroyed the confessional state was the sudden and dramatic events of the 1820s, culminating in the legislation of 1828–9 which repealed the Test and Corporation Acts and which granted a measure of greater religious freedom to Catholics. ‘What changed was not the theoretical validity or potential success of Anglicanism in an urban or industrial society, but the emergence of that society very largely beyond the pale of the traditional Anglican parochial structure.’24
The argument I shall present here is that these assaults, challenges and problems would not have worn down the Church of England had it not already been weakening from within because of its status as an established church. In other words, the Church of England was largely responsible for its own decline. Its complacency in the face of mounting problems resulted from its continuing inability to initiate its own solutions to its problems, which in turn resulted from its willingness to allow the state to defend it and to safeguard it. It was surely not beyond the wit of the late-eighteenth-century church establishment to have developed the parochial structure in a manner more suited to the new urban and industrial populations. As Clark concedes, ‘The Church did not act swiftly to extend her parochial ministrati
ons to such areas’ and only responded ‘after the problem had become acute ... and on an insufficient scale’.25 That was indeed the case. Between 1810 and 1820, 152 new Anglican churches were built; in the same period no fewer than 15,601 non-Anglican places of worship were either built, adapted or licensed. In the next two decades the respective figures were 943 Anglican churches compared to 18,007 non-Anglican places of worship. The comparison is devastating. Furthermore, such Anglican churches as did exist were distributed according to the population patterns of earlier centuries. There were 10,000 parishes in the archdiocese of Canterbury but only 2,000 in that of York. At the end of the eighteenth century some of the parishes, especially in the north of England, were huge, stretching over many townships. Prescot, near Liverpool, contained 15 townships, Manchester 19 and Leeds 13. Ecclesiastical provision in such places was hopelessly inadequate to deal with the needs of such populations. Moreover, it was very fortunate that the populations in such towns did not go to their local Anglican church, because the available seating would have accommodated less than half of them, sometimes much less. In London the situation was spectacularly worse. The parish of St Pancras had 50,000 inhabitants in 1815, but its church could have accommodated only 200 of them. We need to be clear that it was the established status of the church which was in large part responsible for this state of affairs. To create a new parish, to amend parochial boundaries or to build a new parish church required legislation – an expensive, complex and daunting process. On the other hand, to found a new Dissenting chapel all that was needed was the hire of a hall and a magistrate’s licence. The church responded to these problems by building new ‘chapels of ease’ and was able to provide accommodation for parishioners in some places. Even in Manchester it built eight new churches. But even these responses failed to meet the overall challenge of population increase.
Furthermore, the Anglican church was a prisoner of several further features of its own established status that made it almost impossible to reform itself. Political recommendation to ecclesiastical office may have been almost inevitable in a society in which church and state were so closely bound up with each other, but some worrying features remained. As we saw earlier, no fewer than half of church livings were under lay patronage (the number of livings under aristocratic patronage actually increased from 1,200 to 1,400 between 1780 and 1830), one-tenth were with the crown and only the remaining 40 per cent under the direct control of the church itself. This does not imply that large numbers of priests were inadequate; it does mean that it was difficult for the church to confront its own economic problems. Pluralism, moreover, was inevitable where clerical incomes were low and where the state of rural parsonages was often deplorable, many of them verging on the uninhabitable. A large minority of incumbents saw very little of their benefices. In Derbyshire, for example, between 1772 and 1832 one-third of clerical incumbents had either no, or very little, contact with the benefices to which they had been appointed. In the early nineteenth century, indeed, over half of Anglican benefices had no resident priest. The church simply did not have enough priests. Peter Virgin has shown that of every 100 ordained priests only about 50 actually held a benefice in England. The others drifted into other professions, especially teaching, or emigrated, or suffered early death. Only one-fifth found a benefice within five years of ordination.26 One immediate solution to this crisis was the employment of stipendiary and assistant curates. These men ‘lived a life of peripatetic poverty with few incentives, little supervision, an absence of like-minded company and an element of rural boredom’.27 They were indispensable to the church and, until the Stipendiary Curates Act of 1813, miserably paid for their efforts.
Improvements were slowly coming. The operation of Queen Anne’s Bounty was beginning to increase the incomes of some of the poorest benefices. Those concerned, however, were located principally in the east of England and in Wales rather than in the Midlands and the north. Other benefices, especially in the Midlands and eastern counties, benefited from the enclosure of common land, as a consequence of which the tithe was normally commuted into land. Thereafter, some clerics became small or medium-size farmers. In this way the social position of some sections of the clergy did improve a little during the second half of the eighteenth century. The church, therefore, tended to become a more rather than less desirable career for younger sons. As we have already noticed, the number of clerics who acted as magistrates rose very steeply after 1760. Such developments, however, did nothing for popular piety. Indeed, by the early nineteenth century the church was becoming increasingly identified with the secular establishment and with some of its most unpopular features: enclosures, the Poor Law and the courts.28
Parallel developments could be seen in Scotland. The Act of Union of 1707 had confirmed the Presbyterian church as the established church of Scotland, but it had been racked by disputes over lay patronage throughout the eighteenth century. The consequence was a series of splits and secessions, that of the Sandemanians in the 1720s, the Secession Church in the 1730s and of the Relief Presbytery in the 1750s. Nevertheless, under the ‘Moderate’ party the Presbyterian church survived, diluting the fiery Calvinism of the previous century and thus rendering the church acceptable to the Scottish middling and upper classes. The price that was paid, however, was an aloofness to popular piety that was to be disastrous to the Scottish Presbyterian church.
By the early nineteenth century, the theory of a confessional state – the theory that, as Burke put it in 1792, ‘In a Christian Commonwealth the church and the state are one and the same thing, being different integral parts of the same whole’ – no longer corresponded with reality. In the early nineteenth century the number of practising Anglicans began to fall behind the number of practising non-Anglicans in England and Wales. In 1750 the demographic basis of a confessional state could still be maintained. About 90 per cent of all churchgoers worshipped in the established churches. (The Episcopal churches in England and Ireland and the Presbyterian church in Scotland). By the early nineteenth century the base was shrinking. Many millions of British people existed outside the boundaries of the confessional state. Already in 1801, merely half a million people took communion in the Anglican churches of England and Wales, less than 10 per cent of the population aged 15 and over. One survey has shown a decline of 25 per cent in the numbers of those taking communion between 1738 and 1802 in 30 Oxfordshire parishes. Even worse, as early as 1811, according to a return made by Anglican bishops, there were already more Dissenting chapels than Anglican places of worship by a ratio of 7 to 5. No wonder, then, that in 1810, Lord Harrowby confessed to the House of Lords that the country was drifting towards ‘the most alarming of all situations, in which the religion of the Established Church would not be the religion of the majority of the people’.29 In Ireland it had not been for two centuries. In 1815 only one-sixth of the Irish people were Anglican. By 1851, indeed, the established church in Scotland attracted only one-third of worshippers. On the most optimistic reckoning, the numbers of practising Anglicans may have increased very slightly between 1740 and 1831, a period, however, when the population of England and Wales rose from 5.5 to over 13 million.30
Moreover, the theoretical justifications of the confessional state were beginning to alter even before the middle of the eighteenth century. For example, one of the most popular Anglican writers of the century, William Warburton, had published his The Alliance between Church and State in 1736. Warburton’s classic eighteenth-century defence of the church establishment was one of the most influential expressions of church–state relations. He argued that the church was a separate institution, with its own social contract, as a consequence of which every person had the right to express his or her religion freely. The church was connected to the state through a further contract for their mutual advantage in their very different spheres of life, the church receiving the benefits of the protection of the state, including public provision for its clergy and the further protection of religious tests. This was
a much more individualistic view of religion than would have been acceptable in 1688–9. Towards the end of the century, moreover, Anglican apologists began to turn away from their former preoccupation with ecclesiastical and political authority, their origins and character, towards a concern for social theory and an investigation of the roots of social order, discipline and restraint. In particular, Josiah Tucker and William Paley can be seen to shift their arguments away from the theological towards secular justifications of the confessional state.31 By the middle of the 1790s, probably because of the impact of the war against France, Anglican political theory was preoccupying itself with the social rather than theological legitimations of power. Such a shift undermined the specific and unique qualities of Anglican supremacy. As Dr Hole remarks, the theoretical direction taken by these Anglican writers of the 1790s ‘fatally undermined the case for an Anglican monopoly of state power’.32
The Anglican church may have found itself incapable of maintaining its status as a confessional church, but it nevertheless continued to foster powerful currents of religious health and even elements of religious revival. As early as 1760 it is possible to distinguish a score or more of Evangelical ministers who launched local Evangelical revivals within their own parishes. Henry Venn (1725–97), curate of Clapham and later the vicar of Huddersfield, had already spread the Evangelical message throughout the West Riding in the 1750s. John Newton, an ex-slaving ship master, was similarly influential in London. These ministers operated within the parochial framework, most – but not all of them – in quiet country districts, usually independently and without the benefit of collective action. Like the Methodists, these early Evangelicals emphasized the need for individual conversion and placed their trust in a vital, personal faith, in the individual’s communion with God and in the Bible as a source of wisdom and everyday inspiration.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 58