Prince Rupert challenges Sir Malachi Shelgrave:
"...you people prate so much of freedom -' He waved toward the hireling workers in the fields. 'How free are they? No lord looks after them. You're free to let them go in beggary across the gashed and smoky land you'd make.'" (p. 13)
They walk in silence, controlling their tempers. What would I say to Rupert?
Is it freedom to be looked after by a lord?
Did lords "look after" their serfs?
Wage workers are free to organize.
Later, Shegrave looks forward to:
"'...a day when power does not grow from birth or sword, but out of mills and furnaces.'" (p. 14)
The power from mills and furnaces is first the power of their owners but secondly the power of workers to challenge and ultimately to dispossess the owners.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Well, except for a few technical remnants, serfdom in England was pretty gone by 1640. So what Prince Rupert probably meant was that a decent landlord treated both tenants (who had rights and claims to portions of an estate), and salaried workers (who could be let go more or less at once).
As for serfdom when it was still a living institution, a decent lord would be careful to treat his serfs reasonably. Moreover, serfs had certain rights and claims a lord was legally bound to respect. Such as a serf being required to work X number of days per week or month on his lord's demesne lands. Or serfs were required to only a fixed portion of his harvest to the lord in rents, and so on. Many of these claims, exemptions, mutual obligations, etc., lingered on after serfdom was mostly gone. And these matters of customary law were among the things the Puritans wanted to sweep away.
What I'm saying is, as so often, it was not as simple or one sided as some might wish.
Ad astra! Sean
Wage workers free to organize? Not in the 17th century, they weren't!
What Rupert is talking about is traditional manorial society; which generally gave ordinary peasants both property rights of their own, and a substantial degree of local communal self-government, as well as a system of mutual obligations (albeit highly unequal ones), with the lord of the manor.
Traditionally, a manorial tenant was not an employee. He had land of his own from which he couldn't be evicted as long as he met his obligations. If he owed labor service (that varied) the lord could direct his labor on the demesne, the land the lord worked directly, but day-to-day he was effectively self-employed on his own hereditary plot, or at a craft like being a miller or blacksmith (and village craftsmen usually had a smallholding too).
The manorial court and other offices -- the bailiff, reeve and so forth -- were chosen from among the tenants; the tenants sat as jury in the manor-court, which enforced manorial custom as law; and the tenants jointly decided most of the day-to-day business of the community. When the strips in the common fields would be plowed or harvested, for instance; when the community would "beat the bounds" (patrol the borders), who would be allowed to graze how many beasts on the common, who could collect deadfall timber in the woodland for fuel, etc.
As a way of life, it gave the ordinary peasant a good deal of security and collective autonomy, but not much in the way of individual freedom.
By the 17th century it had already broken down to a large degree, but it cast a long shadow in terms of assumptions and customs.
For example, the Elizabethan "law of settlement" gave everyone born in a parish a right to subsistence from the 'parish rates' (taxes) if they couldn't work for one reason or another. This stemmed from the ancient assumption that the local community, the manor and its parish, had an obligation to support its members if they were down on their luck, sick, crippled or whatever.
The New England town-meeting system of government was basically the traditional English village structure with the genry removed from the picture.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for your always interesting mini essays. Your comments here fleshed out what I had too vaguely in my own mind. Esp. the bits about how manorial courts and village councils were directly ancestral to the old New England town-meeting system of gov't. And, if New England had been settled a century or more earlier, a quasi feudal gentry might have evolved as well, to handle matters of defense and war.
Ad astra! Sean
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