Christopher Hill - Liberty Against The Law, Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies
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Christopher Hill - Liberty Against The Law, Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies
[Allen Lane 1996]
What mirth doth want when beggars meet?
A beggar's life is for a king. In the plays and popular folklore of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are many such expressions of liberty against the law. Taking this literary theme as his starting point, Christopher Hill examines how seventeenth-century society and its laws looked to the mass of landless and lawless classes. The colourful beggars and highwaymen of The Jovial Crew and The Beggar's Opera voice the paradoxical claim that beggars are more free than people of property. These fiercely satirical plays show the crafty beggar as no worse than the eminent politician or courtier. The ballads of Robin Hood, at their height of popularity, personify the opposition between liberty and property, the freedom of the outlaw in the greenwood versus the constraints of power, money and society. Other groups opted out too: there are stories of ladies eschewing material comforts to go with the gypsies; colonists in North America 'went native'; and the idea of the 'noble savage' dates from this period. With their rejection of the state church, religious dissenters also challenged the prevailing orthodoxy, and so the law of the state. The hero-worship of the 'outlaw' reflects vast social and economic changes. The lives of the peasantry were irrevocably altered, and Christopher Hill considers how they were affected by enclosures, the loss of many traditional rights and draconian punishments for minor transgressions. However, the time when discontent would be expressed in political action was still far in the future. These expressions of contempt for the law challenge the equation of law with property that came about in the Glorious Revolution. They begin to pose the question, 'Freedom for whom?'
Contents
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Mon, 29th Jan 2007 9:46:20 +01:00
Christopher Hill's Liberty Against The Law, Some Seventeenth Century Controversies, touches upon several aspects of English societal and intellectual development in the 1600s and seeks to redress the balance of the dominating bourgeois interpretation and presentation of history. He has a marxist agenda and through that, or despite that, he provides a necessary service for the common people, (the silenced and silent majority), in keeping the attention on, and bringing the attention to, figures and events that are too readily brushed under the carpet in an (often successful) attempt to eradicate them from the standard bourgeois version of events that are portrayed as history in schools and the media — the relatively unknown folk heroes that are less easily assimilated into so-called civil society.
He writes…
[…] Parliament represented this minority [the gentry and the better-off merchants] and its assertion of freedom for property through the law has been treated by many historians as though Parliament were representative of the whole population. It was not.
So if our first question is, 'Who makes the law?', the second must be 'Liberty for whom to do what?' Our answer to the first question is factual — a minority of the upper propertied class; the answer to the second is similar: liberty for the ruling class to have secure ownership of property and guaranteed opportunities for acquiring more. This depends on the effective subordination of the lower classes, by force if necessary, but preferably by convincing them that they have as much freedom as is compatible with the good of society and the will of God. William Penn, both a Quaker and a member of the propertied class, put it succinctly in 1679: 'If we would preserve our government, we must endear it to the people.' If the navy is to win battles for us and extend the empire, it cannot be recruited and disciplined by impressment and the lash alone.
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The proverb says 'give me the making of the songs of the people; I care not who makes their laws.' How true was this, and for how long? The ballads of Robin Hood put liberty before the law. The growing efficiency of the state machine in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped to depersonalise 'justice', and ultimately led to the victory of law over the songs of the people. The proverb ceased to be applicable as local communities lost their coherence, as they were disrupted by what in short hand I have called 'enclosure'. ('Improvement' was the euphemism employed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and still by some historians; 'modernization' is preferred by economic historians who shrink from using the word 'capitalism'.) The communities survived for a long time, but in the long run 'enclosure' won.