The Many-Headed Hydra
Page 6
Similarly, in America, settlers claimed and cleared the ground for agricultural colonies. In Virginia, “the spade men fell to digging, the brick men burnt their bricks, the company cut down wood, the Carpenters fell to squaring out, the Sawyers to sawing, the Soldier to fortifying,” as cooperative labor built the first settlements. The colonists were at first unfamiliar with the broadax and the felling ax, but after the Pequot War, which opened the way westward, they soon learned to saw, fell, cleave, split, and rive, making timber and its products the basis of an export economy to Barbados and other parts of the West Indies. Servants and slaves hacked away at the rain forest of Barbados, slowly clearing the lands for plantations and sending home to England the new settlements’ first cash crop: timber. When the English took possession of lands overseas, they did so by building fences and hedges, the markers of enclosure and private property.11
An American landscape hewn and enclosed, with Native Americans canoeing by. Patrick Campbell, Travels in the Interior Inhabited Parts of North America in the Years 1791 and 1792 (1793).
Another major work of expropriation was the draining of the fens. An Act of Parliament of 1600 made it possible for big shareholders in the fens to suppress the common rights that stood in the way of their drainage schemes. New plans and works, requiring unprecedented concentrations of labor, proliferated. King James organized hundreds in the draining and enclosure of parts of Somerset in the early seventeenth century, turning a commoning economy of fishing, fowling, reed cutting, and peat digging into a capitalist economy of sheep raising. Coastal lands were reclaimed and inland peat moors drained in the Somerset “warths.” Some eleven thousand workers were required to drain the fens around Ely during the 1650s, when drainage engineers from Holland, “equipped with a literally world-changing technology,” diverted rivers to create artificial watercourses as large as any since Roman times, leaving in their wake an entirely new landscape of straight ditches and square fields. A poet of the area, Michael Drayton, described the land as “plump-thigh’d moor and full flank’t marsh.”12
The “battle of the fens” began in 1605 between capital owners such as Lord Chief Justice Popham (“covetous and bloodie Popham”) and the fowlers, fenmen, and commoners. The terms of battle ranged from murder, sabotage, and village burning on the one hand to protracted litigation, pamphleteering, and the advanced science of hydraulics on the other. Sporadic outbursts of opposition to the drainage grew into a sustained campaign of action as commoners, often led by women, attacked workmen, ditches, dikes, and tools in Hatfield, on the Isle of Axholme, and elsewhere in the late 1620s and 1630s. Oliver Cromwell, who became a commissioner for draining the Great Level, sent a major of his own regiment to suppress the rioting commoners and received in return two hundred acres of drained land. A poet who equated common rights with theft celebrated the victory in verse:
New hands shall learn to work, forget to steal
New legs shall go to church, new knees shall kneel.
In 1663 Samuel Pepys passed through the “most sad fennes, all the way observing the sad life of the breedlings,” as he called their inhabitants. The sadness was the consequence of a specific defeat. Thomas Fuller wrote in 1655, “Grant them drained, and so continuing; as now the great fishes therein prey on the less, so the wealthy men would devour the poorer sort of people . . . and rich men, to make room for themselves, would jostle the poor people out of their commons.”13 Another result of the contradictory process whereby dispossessed commoners labored to dispossess others was the creation of the idyllic “English countryside,” in which, again, the toil of those who made it possible was rendered invisible.14
The second labor of the hewer of wood and the drawer of water was building the ports for long-distance trade, a task that, like the clearing of the land for commercial agriculture, was essential to the new capitalist order. John Merrington has drawn attention to the first political economists, who emphasized the rigid division of land into town and countryside in the transition to capitalism.15 Of special significance within this larger division was one particular kind of city and one particular kind of countryside: the port and the plantation. The early seventeenth century was the critical formative moment for each.
In 1611 John Speed published his atlas in four volumes, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain, in which he depicted the bridges, palisades, towers, bastions, gates, walls, and outworks of the harbors and ports of England, Ireland, the Mediterranean, West Africa, the West Indies, and North America. “The pestilent marsh is drained with great labour, and the sea is fenced off with mighty barriers,” wrote Adam Ferguson in explaining the progress from rude nations to the establishment of property. “Harbours are opened, and crowded with shipping, where vessels of burden, if they are not constructed with a view to the situation, have not water to float. Elegant and magnificent edifices are raised on foundations of slime.”16 London and Bristol had long been port cities, but both expanded as the hewers and drawers laid the stone and built the wharves to accommodate their new bulk trades. Liverpool, incorporated in 1626, grew quickly after the midcentury. In Ireland, Belfast (1614) was built on reclaimed land, using the giant oaks felled by Carrickfergus hewers; Dublin became a “Bristol beyond the seas” as its workers exported grain and built ships; and Cork and Waterford grew behind their channels, islands, and winding rivers, while Wexford prospered with the fishing trade. Derry, both port and plantation, was rebuilt in the early seventeenth century, after British conquest, by the labors of the conquered natives. In Scotland, Glasgow’s merchants were slowly making their first connections with the tobacco fields of Virginia. Mediterranean ports also played a role in commerce, from the shallow crescent bay within the walls of Tripoli to the port of Algiers and the Sallé in Morocco, all built in part by European slaves captured upon the high seas. In West Africa, Cape Coast Castle was erected in 1610 by the Portuguese, operated by the Dutch, and finally taken by the English in 1664; the Dutch were also busy off Dakar, establishing, with the labor power of African and European workers, the slave-trading port of Goree Island in 1617. The earliest European trading factory on the West African coast, Elmina, was rebuilt in 1621. West Indian ports—Bridgetown in Barbados and Port Royal and Kingston in Jamaica—were constructed to handle the tobacco and eventually the sugar produced on the plantations. On the North American mainland, Boston flourished behind its numerous harbor islands; New York and Philadelphia evolved from Dutch and Swedish origins to become major anglophone ports; and Charlestown, founded in Carolina in 1670, became the largest port in the South.
These nodes of the Atlantic nautical networks were built by workers who hauled the rubble to create a breakwater—a mole, or jetty, or pier—to protect the anchorage; hewed the stone, transported it, and arranged it on the seabed; and piled rocks to form retaining walls, or seawalls, with drainage and weepholes. They hewed the wood, carried it, and secured it upon the stone foundations in cribworks of timber. They dug and hauled the dirt for the aprons, quays, and basins. As John Ruskin observed in The Stones of Venice, “There is no saying how much wit, how much depth of thought, how much fancy, presence of mind, courage, and fixed resolution there may have gone to the placing of a single stone. . . . This is what we have to admire,—this grand power and heart of man in the thing; not his technical or empirical way of holding the trowel and laying mortar.”
The “grand power” thus displayed was the power of cooperation among numerous carters and diggers, spalpeens and barrowers, who used rudimentary tools such as shovels, picks, axes, spades, pots, jugs, pails, and buckets to lay the foundations of the port cities.
The third labor of the hewer of wood and drawer of water was maintaining the life supports for communities on land and at sea, from chopping and gathering to pumping and toting. On ships as on plantations, in families as in entire cities, wood and water were the basis of life. Early Jamestown, Virginia, was known for its “fresh and plentie of water springs” and its “wood enough at hand.” Dixcove, an Englis
h fort in Ghana, was called in 1692 “a good place for corn and at wooding and watering.”17 Fort slaves brought these life supports to ships, which were often “in distress for wood and water.” A boat a day, for example, carried water to the Dutch slavers anchored at Shama, west of Elmina; indeed, even at Elmina rainwater cisterns were not built until 1695.18
If the hewers of wood were male, the drawers of water were almost inevitably female. Adam Clark’s biblical commentary about drawers of water (1846) drove home the point: “The disgrace of this state lay not in the labouriousness of it, but in its being the common employment of the females.” In his novel Barnaby Rudge, Dickens in the 1840s looked back upon the Gordon Riots, with their insurrectionary and democratic danger, and introduced a servant woman with the pronouncement that “if she were in a more elevated station of society, she would be gouty. Being but a hewer of wood and drawer of water, she is rheumatic. My dear Haredale, there are natural class distinctions, depend upon it.” John Taylor wrote as truthfully in 1639, “Women are nothing but your drudges and your slaves. . . . A woman’s work is never at an end.” Pepys collected testimony of revolt: “Other women’s husbands can rise in the morning and make their wives a fire, fetch them in water, wash shitten clouts, sweep the house, scour the Andirons, make the Bed, scrape Trenchers, make clean chooves, rub Stockings, air Apparel, and empty the Pot.”19 Bridget Hill has emphasized the drawing of water as the foundation of housework.20 A drudge or “slavey” fetched the water and carried out the slops in the Victorian household, while “endless trips by the mother and older children with jugs, basins or buckets” provided water for daily reproduction.21
The drawing of water was part of state-sponsored science in the seventeenth century, not least because agriculture and mining depended on hydraulics, whether to drain the fens or to pump water from flooded mines. The latter need stimulated Thomas Savery, John Calley, and Thomas Newcomen to develop the steam engine. An eighteenth-century theorist wrote:
Men have already invented mills for grinding of corn, by the wind or water, the sawing of boards and the making of paper; the fire engine for the raising of water, the draining of mines, etc. and thus relieving mankind from drudgery: and many more engines, of this general kind, may doubtless be constructed, and should employ the thoughts of inventive and mechanical philosophers, in order still farther to ease mankind from too severe bodily labor, and the exertion of mere brutal strength: for even hewers of wood, and drawers of water, are men in a lower degree.22
In actuality, mechanization increased the number of hewers and drawers of water, as did technological changes in water-delivery systems. At the end of the fifteenth century, when water was drawn to London through wooden pipes from Islington or Tyburn, the Fellowship of the Brotherhood of Saint Christopher of the Waterbearers of London did most of the hauling from the conduits. Water was free. In 1581 this changed as the first privately owned, pumped water supply was constructed at the London Bridge. “We have water companies now instead of water carryers,” wrote Jonson in 1598. Indeed, in 1600 “the whole company of the poor Water Tankard Bearers of the Cittie of London and the suburbs thereof, they and their families being 4000 in number,” petitioned Parliament against the private quills, as water pipes were known. Privatization nonetheless continued with the New River Company, chartered in 1619, which brought water from Hertfordshire to Clerkenwell reservoirs, through wood pipes and then from lead pipes to private subscribers. By the 1660s the era of free water by right had ended—another commons expropriated. The poor were thrown back on the wells and gravity-fed conduits to obtain water for themselves.
In summary, the hewers of wood and the drawers of water built the infrastructure of merchant capitalism. They clear-cut the forests, drained the fens, and created the fields for capitalist agriculture. They built the ports for capitalist trade. They reproduced the households, families, and laborers for capitalist work. The labors of hewing and drawing were usually carried out by the weakest members of the demographic structure: the dispossessed, the strangers, the women, the children, the people in England, Ireland, West Africa, or North America mostly likely to be kidnapped, spirited, trepanned, or “barbadosed.” Terror was inherent, for such work was a curse, a punishment. The formless, disorderly laboring class had been given a new form, and a productive one: whether waged or unwaged, the hewers of wood and the drawers of water were slaves, though the difference was not yet racialized.
TERROR
In England the expropriation of the peasantry was accompanied by systematic violence and terror, organized through the criminal sanction, public searches, the prisons, martial law, capital punishment, banishment, forced labor, and colonization. Magistrates used cruel and pitiless legislation to whip, dismember, brand, hang, and burn thousands; privy searches rounded up thousands more masterless men and women. The judicial decision known as Gateward’s Case (1607) denied common rights to villagers and propertyless commoners.23 Despite these cruel expropriations, a residue of paternalism remained: it was still expected that, to quote from Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair (1614), Justice Overdo would “give puddings to the poor, . . . the bread to the hungry, and custards to his children.”
The real-life equivalents of Justice Overdo routinely sent the poor, the hungry, and the young to prison, an institution that was central to the regime of terror in England. Thomas Dekker listed thirteen “strong houses of sorrow” in London alone. Bridewell became a prison in 1553 for orphans, vagrants, petty offenders, and disorderly women. Houses of correction were erected across England—in Essex, for example, in 1587, 1607, and 1609. The prisons and bridewells forced labor upon thousands of the men, women, and children who passed through them. The combination of pain and work entailed was described by one inmate in 1596: “Every dayes taske is to bunch five and twenty pounds of hempe or els to have no meat. And then I was chayned nyne weekes to a blocke and a month besides with it and five monthes without it in Little Ease and one of the turretts which is as bad, and fiyve weekes I went in the myll and ten dayes I stood with bothe my handes stretched above my heade againste the wall in the standinge stocks.” The prison thus joined punishment to production to create work-discipline.24
Capital punishment embodied the ultimate, spectacular power of the regime of terror, whether expressed by the provost martial who executed summary death upon the vagabond or by the slower-moving criminal justice system. Edmund Spenser remembered the execution of Murrogh O’Brien in Limerick: “I saw an old woman which was his foster mother took up his head whilst he was quartered and sucked up all the blood running there out, saying that the earth was not worthy to drink it, and therewith also steeped her face and breast, and tore her hair, crying and shrieking out most terribly.” For Spenser, the woman’s behavior, far from being justified, furnished proof of Irish barbarity.
London, whose suburbs housed the unprotected, rebellious workers of the putting-out system, was itself ringed by reminders of the death penalty. To the south, the heads of malefactors were stuck on pikes and lodged for display at the southern end of London Bridge. To the east, pirates were hanged at a gallows erected at Execution Stairs, or drowned in Wapping by the rising tides of the Thames. To the north, at Smithfield, the “fires” martyred many Protestants during Queen Mary’s reign, though after 1638, when the market was established, it was principally cattle that were consigned to slaughter there. Finally, to the west, standing near what is now Speaker’s Corner, was the Tyburn gallows, which remained active until 1783. To “go west” became proverbial for death.
Hangings were staged throughout the realm: seventy-four persons were hanged in Exeter and another seventy-four (coincidentally) in Devonshire in 1598. In all the forty English counties, some eight hundred went to the gallows in each year of the seventeenth century, according to James Fitzjames Stephen, the Victorian historian of criminal law. Of the 436 people hanged in Essex between 1620 and 1680, 166 were burglars, 38 were highway robbers, and 110 were thieves. In the 1630s thieves were hanged f
or stealing goods valued at as little as eighteen pence. Edward Coke concluded in the Third Institute, “What a lamentable case it is to see so many Christian men and women strangled on that cursed tree of the gallows, insomuch as if in a large field a man might see together all the Christians that, but in one year throughout England[,] come to that untimely and ignominious death, if there were any spark of grace or charity in him, it would make his heart to bleed for pity and compassion.” If Coke felt pity, the “water poet” John Taylor believed in “the necessitie of hanging,” and wrote more than a thousand lines of verse in praise of it:
Of Hangings there’s diversity of fashions