The Age of the Reformation Part 42

The capitalistic attack on communistic agriculture took two princ.i.p.al forms. In some countries, like Germany, it was the consequence of the change from natural economy to money economy. The new commercial men bought up the estates of the n.o.bles and subjected them to a more intense cultivation, at the same time using all the resources of law and government to make them as lucrative as possible.

[Sidenote: Inclosures]

But in two countries, England and Spain, and to some small extent in others, a profitable opportunity for investment was found in sheep-farming on a large scale. In England this manifested itself in "inclosures," by which was primarily meant the fencing in for private use of the commons, but secondarily came to be applied to the conversion of arable land into pasture[3] and the subst.i.tution of large holdings for small. The cause of the movement was the demand for wool in cloth-weaving, largely for export trade.

{544} [Sidenote: Complaint against inclosures]

Contemporaries noticed with much alarm the operations of this economic change. A cry went up that sheep were eating men, that England was being turned into one great pasture to satisfy the greed of the rich, while the land needed for grain was abandoned and tenants forcibly ejected. The outcry became loudest about the years 1516-8, when a commission was appointed to investigate the "evil" of inclosures. It was found that in the past thirty years the amount of land in the eight counties most affected was 22,500 acres. This was not all for grazing; in Yorkshire it was largely for sport, in the Midlands for plowing, in the south for pasture.

The acreage would seem extremely small to account for the complaint it excited. Doubtless it was only the chief and most typical of the hardships caused to a certain cla.s.s by the introduction of new methods.

One is reminded of the bitter hostility to the introduction of machinery in the nineteenth century, when the vast gain in wealth to the community as a whole, being indirect, seemed cruelly purchased at the cost of the sufferings of those laborers who could not adapt themselves to the novel methods. Evolution is always hard on a certain cla.s.s and the sufferers quite naturally vociferate their woes without regard to the real causes of the change or to the larger interests of society.

Certain it is that inclosures went on uninterrupted throughout the century, in spite of legislative attempts to stop them. Indeed, they could hardly help continuing, when they were so immensely profitable.

Land that was inclosed for pasture brought five pounds for every three pounds it had paid under the plow. Sheep multiplied accordingly. The law of 1534 spoke of some men owning as many as 24,000 sheep, and unwittingly gave, in the form of a complaint, the cause thereof, {545} namely that the price of wool had recently doubled. The law limited the number of sheep allowed to one man to 2000. The people arose and slaughtered sheep wholesale in one of those unwise and blind, but not unnatural, outbursts of sabotage by which the proletariat now and then seeks to destroy the wealth that accentuates their poverty. Then as always, the only causes for unwelcome alterations of their manner of life seen by them was the greed and heartlessness of a ring of men, or of the government. The deeper economic forces escaped detection, or at least, attention.

During the period 1450-1610 it is probable that about 2 3/4 per cent.

of the total area of England had been inclosed. The counties most affected were the Midlands, in some of which the amount of land affected was 8 per cent. to 9 per cent. of the total area. But though the aggregate seems small, it was a much larger proportion, in the then thinly settled state of the realm, of the total arable land,--of this it was probably one-fifth. Under Elizabeth perhaps one-third of the improved land was used for grazing and two-thirds was under the plow.

[Sidenote: Spain: the Mesta]

In Spain the same tendency to grow wool for commercial purposes manifested itself in a slightly different form. There, not by the inclosure of commons, but by the establishment of a monopoly by the Castilian "sheep-trust," the Mesta, did a large corporation come to prevail over the scattered and peasant agricultural interests. The Mesta, which existed from 1273 to 1836, reached the pinnacle of its power in the first two-thirds of the sixteenth century. [Sidenote: 1568] When it took over from the government the appointment of the officer supposed to supervise it in the public interest, the Alcalde Entregador, it may be said to have won a decisive victory for capitalism. At that time it owned {546} as many as seven million sheep, and exported wool to the weight of 55,000 tons and to the value of $560,000, per annum.

[Sidenote: Wheat growing]

Having mastered the sources of wealth offered by wool-growing, the capitalists next turned to arable land and by their transformation of it took the last step in the commercializing of life. Even now, in England, land is not regarded as quite the same kind of investment as a factory or railroad; there is still the vestige of a tradition that the tenant has customary privileges against the right of the owner of the land to exploit it for all it is worth. But this is indeed a faint ghost of the medieval idea that the custom was sacred and the profit of the landlord entirely secondary. The longest step away from the medieval to the modern system was taken in the sixteenth century, and its outward and visible sign was the subst.i.tution of the leasehold for the ancient copyhold. The latter partook of the nature of a vested right or interest; the former was but a contract for a limited, often for a short, term, at the end of which the tenant could be ejected, the rent raised, or, as was most usual, an enormous fine (i.e., fee) exacted for renewal of the lease.

The revolution was facilitated by, if it did not in part consist of, the acquisition of the land by the new commercial cla.s.s, resulting in increased productivity. New and better methods of tillage were introduced. The scattered thirty acres of the peasant were consolidated into three ten-acre fields, henceforth to be used as the owner thought best. One year a field would be under a cereal crop; the next year converted into pasture. This improved method, known as "convertible husbandry" practiced in England and to a lesser extent on the Continent, was a big step in the direction of scientific agriculture. Regular rotation of crops {547} was hardly a common practice before the eighteenth century, but there was something like it in places where hemp and flax would be alternated with cereals.

Capitalists in the Netherlands built d.y.k.es, drained marshes and dug expensive ca.n.a.ls. Elsewhere also swamps were drained and irrigation begun. But perhaps no single improvement in technique accounted for the greater yield of the land so much as the careful and watchful self-interest of the private owner, as against the previous semi-communistic carelessness. Several popular proverbs then gained currency in the sense that there is no fertilizer of the glebe like that put on by the master himself. Harrison's statement, in Elizabeth's reign, that an inclosed acre yielded as much as an acre and a half of common, is borne out by the English statistics of the grain trade. From 1500 to 1534, while the process of inclosure was at its height, the export of corn more than doubled; it then diminished until it almost ceased in 1563, after which it rapidly increased until 1600.

During the whole century the population was growing, and it is therefore reasonable to suppose that the yield of the soil was considerably greater in 1600 than it was in 1500.

[Sidenote: Export of grain after 1559]

It must, however, be admitted that the increase in exports was in part caused by and in part symptomatic of a change in the policy of the government. When commerce became king he looked out for his own interests first, and identified these interests with the dividends of small groups of his chief ministers. Trade was regulated, by tariff and bounty, no longer in the interests of the consumer but in those of the manufacturer and merchant. The corn-laws of nineteenth-century England have their counterpart in the Elizabethan policy of encouraging the export of grain that was needed at home. As soon as the land and the Parliament both fell into the hands of the new {548} capitalistic landlords, they used the one to enhance to profits of the other. Nor was England alone in this. France favored the towns, that is the industrial centers, by forcing the rural population to sell at very low rates, and by encouraging export of grain. Perhaps this same policy was most glaring of all in Sixtine Rome, where the Papal States were taxed, as the provinces of the Empire had been before, to keep bread cheap in the city.

[1] From the Latin _ministerium_, French _metier_, not connected with "mystery."

[2] For the substance of this paragraph, as well as for numerous suggestions on the rest of the chapter, I am indebted to Professor N.

S. B. Gras, of Minneapolis.

[3] Although some of the inclosed land was tilled; see below.

SECTION 2. THE RISE OF THE MONEY POWER

[Sidenote: Money crowned king]

In modern times, Money has been king. Perhaps at a certain period in the ancient world wealth had as much power as it has now, but in the Middle Ages it was not so. Money was then ignored by the tenant or serf who paid his dues in feudal service or in kind; it was despised by the n.o.ble as the vulgar possession of Jews or of men without gentle breeding, and it was hated by the church as filthy lucre, the root of all evil and, together with s.e.x, as one of the chief instruments of Satan. The "religious" man would vow poverty as well as celibacy.

But money now became too powerful to be neglected or despised, and too desirable to be hated. In the age of transition the medieval and modern conceptions of riches are found side by side. When Holbein came to London the Hanse merchants there employed him to design a pageant for the coronation of Anne Boleyn. In their hall he painted two allegorical pictures, The Triumph of Poverty and The Triumph of Wealth.

The choice of subjects was representative of the time of transition.

[Sidenote: Revolution]

The economic innovation sketched in the last few pages was followed by a social readjustment sufficiently violent and sufficiently rapid to merit the name of revolution. The wave struck different countries at {549} different times, but when it did come in each, it came with a rush, chiefly in the twenties in Germany and Spain, in the thirties and forties in England, a little later, with the civil wars, in France. It submerged all cla.s.ses but the bourgeoisie; or, rather, it subjugated them all and forced them to follow, as in a Roman triumph, the conquering car of Wealth.

[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie uses monarchy]

The one other power in the state that was visibly aggrandized at the expense of other cla.s.ses, besides the plutocracy, was that of the prince. This is sometimes spoken of as the result of a new political theory, an iniquitous, albeit unconscious, conspiracy of Luther and Machiavelli, to exalt the divine right of kings. But in truth their theories were but an expression of the accomplished, or easily foreseen, fact; and this fact was due in largest measure to the need of the commercial cla.s.s for stable and for strong government. Riches, which at the dawn of the twentieth century seemed, momentarily, to have a.s.sumed a cosmopolitan character, were then bound up closely with the power of the state. To keep order, to bridle the lawless, to secure concessions and markets, a mercantile society needed a strong executive, and this they could find only in the person of the prince.

Luther says that kings are only G.o.d's gaolers and hangmen, high-born and splendid because the meanest of G.o.d's servants must be thus accoutred. It would be a little truer to say that they were the gaolers and hangmen hired by the bourgeoisie to over-awe the ma.s.ses and that their quaint trappings and t.i.tles were kept as an ornament to the gay world of sn.o.bbery.

[Sidenote: And other agencies]

Together with the monarchy, the new masters of men developed other instruments, parliamentary government in some countries, a bureaucracy in others, and a mercenary army in nearly all. At that time was either invented or much quoted the saying that {550} gold was one of the nerves of war. The expensive firearms that blew up the feudal castle were equally deadly when turned against the rioting peasants.

[Sidenote: To break the n.o.bility]

Just as the burgher was ready to shoulder his way into the front rank, he was greatly aided by the frantic civil strife that broke out in both the older privileged orders. Never was better use made of the maxim, "divide and conquer," than when the Reformation divided the church, and the civil wars, dynastic in England, feudal in Germany and nominally religious in France, broke the sword of the n.o.ble. When the earls and knights had finished cutting each others' throats there were hardly enough of them left to make a strong stand. Occasionally they tried to do so, as in the revolt of Sickingen in Germany, of the Northern Earls in England, and in the early stages of the rising of the Communeros in Spain. In every case they were defeated, and the work of the sword was completed by the axe and the dagger. Whether they trod the blood-soaked path to the Tower, or whether they succ.u.mbed to the hired a.s.sa.s.sins of Catharine, the old n.o.bles were disposed of and the power of their caste was broken. But their places were soon taken by new men. Some bought baronies and t.i.tles outright, others ripened more gradually to these honors in the warmth of the royal smile and on the sunny slopes of manors wrested from the monks. But the end finally attained was that the coronet became a mere bauble in the hands of the rich, the final badge of social deference to success in money-making.

[Sidenote: Plunder the church]

Still more violent was the spoliation of the church. The confiscations carried out in the name of religion redounded to the benefit of the newly rich. It is true that all the property taken did not fall into their hands; some was kept by the prince, more was used to found or endow hospices, schools and asylums for the poor. {551} But the most and the best of the land was soon thrown to the eager grasp of traders and merchants. In England probably one-sixth of all the cultivated soil in the kingdom was thus transferred, in the course of a few years, into the hands of new men. Thus were created many of the "county families" of England, and thus the new interest soon came to dominate Parliament. Under Henry VII the House of Lords, at one important session, mustered thirty spiritual and only eighteen temporal peers.

In the reign of his son the temporal peers came to outnumber the spiritual, from whom the abbots had been subtracted. The Commons became, what they remained until the nineteenth century, a plutocracy representing either landed or commercial wealth.

Somewhat similar secularizations of ecclesiastical property took place throughout Germany, the cities generally leading. The process was slow, but certain, in Electoral Saxony, Hesse and the other Protestant territories, and about the same time in Sweden and in Denmark. But something the same methods were recommended even in Roman Catholic lands and in Russia of the Eastern Church, so contagious were the examples of the Reformers. [Sidenote: 1536] Venice forbade gifts or legacies to church or cloisters. [Sidenote: 1557] France, where confiscation was proposed, [Sidenote: 1516] partially attained the same ends by subjecting the clergy to the power of the crown.

[Sidenote: Bourgeoisie]

Among the groups into which society naturally falls is that of the intellectual cla.s.s, the body of professional men, scientists, writers and teachers. [Sidenote: Bribes the intelligentsia] This group, just as it came into a new prominence in the sixteenth century, at the same time became in part an annex and a servant to the money power. The high expense of education as compared with the Middle Ages, the enormous fees then charged for graduating in professional schools, the custom of buying {552} livings in the church and practices in law and medicine, the need of patronage in letters and art, made it nearly impossible for the sons of the poor to enter into the palace of learning. Moreover the patronage of the wealthy, their a.s.sertion of a monopoly of good form and social prestige, seduced the professional cla.s.s that now ate from the merchant's hand, aped his manners, and served his interests. For four hundred years law, divinity, journalism, art, and education, have cut their coats, at least to some extent, in the fashion of the court of wealth.

[Sidenote: And subjugates the proletariat]

Last of all, there remained the only power that proved itself nearly a match for money, that of labor. Far outnumbering the capitalists, in every other way the workers were their inferiors,--in education, in organization, in leadership and in material resources. One thing that made their struggle so hard was that those men of exceptional ability who might have been their leaders almost always made fortunes of their own and then turned their strength against their former comrades.

Labor also suffered terribly from quacks and ranters with counsels of folly or of madness.

The social wars of the sixteenth century partook of the characteristics of both medieval and modern times. The Peasants' Revolt in Germany was both communistic and religious; the risings of Communeros and the Hermandad in Spain were partly communistic; the several rebellions in England were partly religious. But a new element marked them all, the demand on the part of the workers for better wages and living conditions. The proletariat of town and mining district joined the German peasants in 1524; the revolt was in many respects like a gigantic general strike.

[Sidenote: Emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs]

Great as are the ultimate advantages of freedom, the emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs cannot be reckoned as {553} an immediate economic gain to them. They were freed not because of the growth of any moral sentiment, much less as the consequence of any social cataclysm, but because free labor was found more profitable than unfree. It is notable that serfs were emanc.i.p.ated first in those countries like Scotland where there had been no peasants' revolt; the inference is that they were held in bondage in other countries longer than it was profitable to do so for political reasons. The last serf was reclaimed in Scotland in 1365, but the serfs had not been entirely freed in England even in the reign of Elizabeth. In France the process went on rapidly in the 15th century, often against the wishes of the serfs themselves. One hundred thousand peasants emigrated from Northern France to Burgundy at that time to exchange their free for a servile state. However, they did not enjoy their bondage for long. Serfs in the Burgundian state, especially in the Netherlands, lost their last chains in the sixteenth century, most rapidly between the years 1515 and 1531. In Germany serfdom remained far beyond the end of the sixteenth century, doubtless in part because of the fears excited by the civil war of 1525.

[Sidenote: Regulation of labor]

In place of the old serfdom under one master came a new and detailed regulation of labor by the government. This regulation was entirely from the point of view, and consequently all but entirely in the interests, of the propertied cla.s.ses. The form was the old form of medieval paternalism, but the spirit was the new spirit of capitalistic gain. The endeavor of the government to be fair to the laborer as well as to the employer is very faint, but it is just perceptible in some laws.

Most of the taxes and burdens of the state were loaded on the backs of the poor. Hours of labor were fixed at from 12 to 15 according to the season. {554} Regulation of wages was not sporadic, but was a regular part of the work of certain magistrates, in England of the justices of the peace. Parliament enforced with incredible severity the duty of the poor and able-bodied man to work. St.u.r.dy idlers were arrested and drafted into the new proletariat needed by capital. When whipping, branding, and short terms of imprisonment, did not suffice to compel men to work, a law was pa.s.sed to brand able-bodied vagrants on the chest with a "V," [Sidenote: 1547] and to a.s.sign them to some honest neighbor "to have and to hold as a slave for the s.p.a.ce of two years then next following." The master should "only give him bread and water and small drink and such refuse of meat as he should think meet to cause the said slave to work." If the slave still idled, or if he ran away and was caught again he was to be marked on the face with an "S"

and to be adjudged a slave for life. If finally refractory he was to be sentenced as a felon. This terrible measure, intended partly to reduce lawless vagrancy, partly to supply cheap labor to employers, failed of its purpose and was repealed in two years. Its re-enactment was vainly urged by Cecil upon Parliament in 1559. As a subst.i.tute for it in this year the law was pa.s.sed forbidding masters to receive any workman without a testimonial from his last employer; laborers were not allowed to stop work or change employers without good cause, and conversely employers were forbidden to dismiss servants "unduly."