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SPENCE'S PLAN AND FULL BELLIES YOU ROUGUES

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 10:57:29 +0000

Malcolm Chase – The People's Farm, English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840 Breviary Stuff Publications, ISBN 978-0-9564827-5-4

Now published by Breviary Stuff Publications is The People's Farm by Malcolm Chase. It traces the development of agrarian ideas from the 1770s through to Chartism, and explains why, in an era of industrialization and urban growth, land remained one of the major issues in popular politics. This book considers relationship between ‘land consciousness’ and early socialism; attempts to create alternative communities; and contemporary perceptions of nature and the environment. Far from being an anachronistic, utopian, and reactionary movement, agrarianism was an integral part of the working class experience and of radical politics. This book also provides the most extensive study to date of Thomas Spence, and his followers the Spenceans.

Thomas Spence was one of the leading English revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the centre of Spence's work was his Plan, known as Spence's Plan. The Plan has a number of features, including:

• The end of aristocracy and landlords
• All land should be publicly owned by 'democratic parishes', which should be largely self-governing
• Rents of land in parishes to be shared equally amongst parishioners
• Universal suffrage (including female suffrage) at both parish level and through a system of deputies elected by parishes to a national senate
• A 'social guarantee' extended to provide income for those unable to work
• The 'rights of infants' to be free from abuse and poverty

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Also back in print in a new, extended edition is the pamplet from The Thomas Spence Society, The Hive of Liberty, The Life & Work of Thomas Spence (1750-1814). Edited by Keith Armstrong, with an introduction by Professor Joan Beal and a new essay by Malcolm Chase. It is available directly from The Thomas Spence Society.

Recent Publications

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 08:37:43 +0000

John E. Archer – 'By a Flash and a Scare', Arson, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East Anglia 1815-1870 Breviary Stuff Publications, ISBN 978-0-9564827-1-6

‘By a Flash and a Scare’ illuminates the darker side of rural life in the nineteenth century. Flashpoints such as the Swing riots, Tolpuddle, and the New Poor Law riots have long attracted the attention of historians, but here John E. Archer focuses on the persistent war waged in the countryside during the 1800s, analysing the prevailing climate of unrest, discontent, and desperation.

In this detailed and scholarly study, based on intensive research among the local records of Norfolk and Suffolk, Dr Archer identifies and examines the three most serious crimes of protest in the countryside — arson, animal maiming and poaching. He shows how rural society in East Anglia was shaped by terror and oppression in equal measure. Social crime and covert protest were an integral part of the ordinary life of the rural poor. They did not protest infrequently, they protested all the time. Read more…

Roger Ball – Tolpuddle And Swing, The Flea And The Elephant
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #12

In 1834, six Dorset farm labourers were tried and condemned to transportation to Australia for joining an early Trade Union. Since then the 'Tolpuddle Martyrs' have become an iconic part of modern British History. Three years before the events in Tolpuddle, much of rural England was rocked with a massive uprising of farm labourers known as the 'Swing Riots'. This pamphlet analyses why 'Tolpuddle' has taken its place in the popular memory and the far more significant events of 'Swing' have been distorted and forgotten. Read more…

Andrea Button – Bristol's White Slave Trade, Indentured and Enforced Labour In The 17th Century
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #13

Bristol’s role as a supplier of labour to the American and West Indian colonies in the eighteenth century is associated with the African Slave Trade however, this trade was not officially open to the Bristol merchants until 1698. The indentured white servant system, operated in Bristol during the seventeenth century, were used by merchants to meet demand for labour in Britain’s new colonies until the Bristol merchants were legally able to compete in the lucrative transatlantic trade. This pamphlet reveals the extent of this ‘white slavery’ and its links to Bristol. Read more…

No Quarter 5

Includes A Somali Pirate Story by Jordan Zinovich (with Hans Plomp), an interview with Gabriel Kuhn, author of Life Under the Jolly Roger, Reflections on the Golden Age of Piracy, Anarchist Commune at Nootka in 1911? by Larry Gambourne, A Couple More Things About New Hazelton by David Tighe, John Oswald: Atheist, Vegetarian, Revolutionary by N. N., Somali Pirates by Peter Lamborn Wilson, book reviews, and a reading list, all interspersed by some nice black and white imagery. Read more…

Breviary Stuff Publications launches …

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:47:45 +0000

The first title from Breviary Stuff Publications is now in print. It is Buchanan Sharp's scholarly study, In Contempt of All Authority, Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660. On its first publication, (University of California Press, 1980), Christopher Hill remarked, "I have rarely recommended a book with more confidence in its quality. It is quite first class."

It concerns two of the most common types of popular disorders in late Tudor and early Stuart England: the food riots and the anti-enclosure riots in royal forests. Particular attention is paid to the Western Rising of 1626-1632, a series of massive anti-enclosure riots which took place in Gillingham Forest on the Wiltshire-Dorset border, Braydon Forest in Wiltshire and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. Concurrent riots in Leicester Forest, and Feckenham Forest, Worcestershire, and lesser known disorders in the Western forests which took place during the English Civil War are also investigated.

The leaders and most active participants in riot were rural artisans — skilled men working in non-agricultural employments. These artisans, particularly those in the major industries of seventeenth-century England located in the forested West, were largely wage-earners. Virtually landless cottagers, who relied on the market for food, clothworkers and other artisans frequently engaged in food riots and attempted insurrections during times of depression or harvest failure. These artisans exploited the common waste of the royal forests. Enclosure of the forests by the Crown threatened the livelihood of the workers who depended on the forests for raw material and pasturage.

The most striking demonstration of continuity is to be found in the identities of a number of the rioters and in the nature of the leadership. Twelve of the participants in the riots of 1643-45 had been fined in the Star Chamber for their part in the disorders of the 1620s; eight were artisans, one was a mercer, two were husbandmen, and one was of undetermined status. Four of them were noted as notorious offenders in the 1640s, including a fuller who acted as drummer and John Philips, tanner, who took over leadership of the riots in 1644 from Richard Butler, a poor linenweaver. It is clear from the examinations of witnesses that Butler had been the leader of the riots in 1643 until he was apprehended and brought before the Lords. His opinions, as reported by a number of witnesses, show considerable contempt for Parliament and for Elgin's agent, Thomas Brunker. At the beginnning of the disorders in 1643 he went into a shop to buy gunpowder. When told it cost 1s. 6d. per pound, "hee sayd his monie would not hold out to have soe much, but desired her to lett him have 2 pennyworth and sayd it would be enough to serve Tome Brunker and for his proclamation I care not a fart of mine arse."

Extract from Ch. 9., A Second Western Rising: Riot during the Civil War and Interregnum

Buchanan Sharp's conclusions challenge the dominant modern view that work in rural industry was merely the by-employment of members of peasant households. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation that disaffected men of standing were generally behind disorders such as the Western Rising, manipulating popular grievances for their own ends, In Contempt of All Authority concludes that in times of economic and social distress or political dislocation (such as the Civil War) the “lower orders” of Tudor and Stuart England were provoked into self-organised direct action by very basic issues of food supply, employment, and common rights. In the course of such actions they manifested an intense hatred of the gentry and the well-to-do, whom they held responsible for existing conditions.

The Breviary Stuff Publications offering is the first paperback edition, in an oversized format (191x235mm, 204pp), with a RRP of £12.00. It is available from all good bookshops, online retailers, such as Amazon, and directly from the Breviary Stuff Publications website, www.breviarystuff.org.uk.

Two radical history pamphlets, old and new

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:56:43 +0000

Two radical history pamphlets; the former supposes a high level of prior knowledge of its subject, whereas the latter serves as an introduction.

Historical Geography Research Series No. 1, 1979
Andrew Charlesworth – Social Protest in a Rural Society : The Spatial Diffusion of the Captain Swing Disturbances of 1830-1831 (78pp.)
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/cornwall/academic_departments/geography/HGRG/Research%20Series.html

1830 was a year of revolution in France and Belgium. In England it saw the revival of agitation for parliamentary reform, sustained partly by the examples of Paris and Brussels and undoubtedly encouraged by the success in Ireland the previous year of O'Connell's Catholic Association. 1830 was a year of tax potests and of widespread industrial unrest. And in the autumn and early winter of that turbulent year, whilst the first steps towards the making of the First Reform Bill were being taken, there swept across southern and eastern England a massive series of protests by agricultural labourers.

The labourers' protests took many forms. In some areas there were demands for higher wages and for tithe reductions, although the two were not always associated. Other areas saw the overseers of the poor attacked; in a few places workhouses were the target of the crowd. In central-southern England forced levies of money by the protestors were common, but even more widespread were the detruction of threshing machines. And as a background to the collective protests there was the firing of barns and ricks and the receipt of threatening letters, often signed by the mythical 'Captain Swing'. Finally, after earlier concessions, order was brutally restored.

Such, in brief and bare outline, were the Captain Swing protests of 1830. In the most detailed study of the the protests so far, Hobsbawn and Rudé maintain that:

One thing can be said with some confidence: they [the protests] were essentially a rural and local phenomenon. That is to say their diffusion had nothing to do with national lines of communication and very little to do even with the local towns. Over most of Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire, for instance, the movement spread across such main roads as there were from London to the coast of from one town to another … The path of the rising … followed not the main arteries of national or even county circulation, but the complex system of smaller veins and capilliaries which linked each parish to its neighbours and to its local centres.
[E.J. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London 1969; rev. ed. 1973) 159]

It is contended that these conclusions are at variance with the evidence. In fact, the diffusion of the protests had a great deal to do with national lines of communication. Moreover, it is argued that this altered perception of the spread of the revolt opens up new questions and possibly affords new insights into the world of the agricultural labourer. The new findings challenge not only Hobsbawn and Rudé's views on the spatial patterning of the protests but also their conclusions on the unpolitical motivations of the labourers' actions.

Thus the first part of the monograph sets out to identify the channels along which the disturbances spread. In so doing, although we can identify pathways of the rising different to those indicated by Hobsbawn and Rudé, simple contagion models of diffusion are still inadequate to explain why the major routeways of southern and eastern England guided the spread of the revolt. In the second part of the monograph, therefore, the diffusion of the protests is explained in the light of the work of such historians as Charles Tilly and E.P. Thompson. Their perspective on social protest places more emphasis on the 'political' and organisational aspects of collective action, rather than on economic motivation and on the spontaneity of the outbreak of disturbances. It seeks to place collective protest within its historical context, the spread of crowd turbulence reflecting the political crisis of the day rather than the ever present hardships of the common people.

Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #11, 2009
Steve Mills – A Barbarous and Ungovernable People! A Short History of the Miners of Kingswood Forest (20pp.)
http://brh.org.uk/publications.html

"A barbarous and ungovernable people" is a bit of a strong condemnation of a community. Especially considering that at the time the community in question was situated on the outskirts of a vibrant city in Britain. The people of Kingswood Forest supplied the south west of England and the industries of Bristol with coal, and it is fair to say that without the Kingswood Forest coal Bristol would not be the city it is today. However, the relationship between the two communities was strained to say the least.

By the time of the English Civil War 1642-1649 squatting on the common land of Kingswood Forest had become more widespread and many people exercised their age-old right of eking out a living from the raw materials that their environment provided them with. Following the Restoration of 1660, the Crown sought to reassert its authority in the old Royal Forests, Kingswood Forest included. The residents were not prepared to give up their rights easily and over several generations they resisted through petitions, physical force, tearing down of tollgates, smashing of looms, roadblocks, rioting and other means.

This pamphlet tells the story of the misunderstanding and mistrust which, from time to time, blew up into full scale conflagration.

Bristol Radical History Group at the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:44:33 +0000

Last weekend I went along to the Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival. (For those who have never heard of the Tolpuddle Martyrs: "On February 24th, 1834, six farm labourers from Tolpuddle [Dorset, UK] were arrested on a charge of taking part in an ‘illegal oath’ ceremony. The real offence was that they had dared to form a trade union to defend their livelihood. For this they were sentenced to seven years’ transportation to the penal colonies of Australia. The sentences provoked an immense outcry, leading to the first great mass trade union protest. The campaign won free pardons and the Martyrs’ return to England. It was an historic episode in the struggle for trade unionists’ rights in Great Britain.")

Of particular interest to me were a couple talks delivered by the Bristol Radical History Group, which were perhaps the most controversial thing there. These were about the large scale Captain Swing riots "that swept across the south of England 3 years before the events in Tolpuddle." These were controversial in the sense that they were carried out by the so-called ignorant rural peasants. As the speaker pointed out, whereas The Tolpuddle Martyrs were innocent, the Swing Rioters were guilty and they were defiant in their guilt. They recognised their rights as people, despite what the law and the law-makers would have to say on the matter. It is the innocent/guilty polarity, (amongst other reasons), according to the speaker, which means that today many have heard of the Tolpuddle Martyrs but few have heard of Captain Swing, despite the Captain Swing riots being a much larger movement involving a far greater number of people, and being a far bigger problem for the authorities. I agree. The talk was titled 'The Flea and the Elephant', the flea being Tolpuddle, the elephant Captain Swing.

The Bristol Radical History Group have put on many events, check their website for details of upcoming events. They also publish a series of pamphlets, three of which I picked up whilst I was at the festival:

We Come For Our Own And We Shall Have It, Smuggling In Poole And Dorset
Kevin Davies
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #2
A look at the history of smuggling in Dorset and the government responses to it. This pamphlet examines whether smugglers should be considered folk heroes and to what extent smuggling was a community enterprise.

Yesterday's To-morrow, Bristol's Garden Suburbs
Stephen E. Hunt
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #8
In 1909, the Bristol Garden Suburb Limited was set up to implement the ideas Ebenezer Howard popularised in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, first published in 1898. Garden-City principles inspired promising developments at Shirehampton, Sea Mills and Keynsham chocolate factory, but were diluted in the construction of Bristol's interwar housing estates at Knowle West and Bedminster, Hillfields, Southmead, Horfield, Speedwell and St Annes. Today it's timely to revisit Howard's ideas in the light of several topics of green chatter — transition towns, peak oil and Gordon Brown's intention to promote the construction of eco-towns.

Nicotiana Brittanica, The Cotswolds' Illicit Tobacco Cultivation In The 17th Century
Will Simpson & Jim McNeill
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #9
Four centuries ago a group of farmers from the West Of England decided to see if they could make a living for themselves by growing tobacco. This put them at odds with the English state and its imperial ambition to build a mercantile economy driven by indentured and slave labour. This is their story of resistance.

To date, the Bristol Radical History Group have published 10 pamphlets, see their website for further information.

No Quarter publications

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 09:26:17 +0000

	No Quarter #4 Issue number 4 of No Quarter, the publication sometimes described as "a zine about radical history", has been released. This issue contains The "Illegalists" by Doug Imrie, reprinted from Anarchy: a Journal of Desire Armed. Illegalism is the anarchist philosophy which embraces criminality as a method of reappropriation of wealth. This article is primarily concerned with the actions of French illegalist Marius Jacob and his band of illegalists who were active between the late 1800s and early 1900s. Following on from this is Why I Was A Burglar by Alexandre Jacob, (reprinted from Fifth Estate, #370), where we can read a personal account of an illegalist. Also in this issue is an interview with a founding member of Past Tense and the South London Radical History group on his motivations and experiences. This is followed by two pieces on Anna Trapnel, seventeenth century Fifth Monarchist prophetess and Roger Crab, seventeenth century hermit, ethical vegetarian, and political writer, (besides other epithets). The life of Franklin Rosemont, poet, artist, historian, street speaker and surrealist activist, who died shortly before this issue went to print, is heralded. No Quarter #4 finishes up with a review of Anja Kirschner's 2008 film, Trail of the Spider and several book reviews.
	No Quarter #4.5 The Politics of Carnival This half-issue of No Quarter was produced in a limited edition as a fundraiser for the 2009 Calgary Anarchist Bookfair. It contains an audio CD which has an eclectic mix of music which relates to No Quarter's areas of interest. It seeks to promote carnival as subversion, as a coming together of the people under their own rules and their own organisation, as opposed to carnival as social control. From a British perspective you might illustrate that by saying that it is juxtaposing the free festival scene of the late 20th century with Glastonbury festival as it is now. Its packaging is such a good solution and shows the innovation needed by small scale fanzine producers.
	No Quarter Pamphlet Series #2 : Trevor Bark – Crime Becomes Custom, Custom Becomes Crime Author's abstract: The British Marxist Historians (BMH) were involved in the study not only of protest and social movements, but of what was and was becoming crime. The enclosures, the change from wages in kind (perquisites) to the wage form itself (Linebaugh 1991), wood gathering, nutting and so on that were previously peoples custom were criminalized and fought politically by the disposessed. Thompsons 'moral economy' theses was based upon the study of bread riots, and this in turn became part of what is known as the social crime debate (Douglas Hay et al, 1975) Rather than economic crime and protest being central to the poors' lives, crime became marginalized and left to the professionals or a marginalized lumpen element in the Fordist era. Into the late modern era we have seen the growth of crime often linked to high unemployment and 'flexibility', and the growth of social movement protest. The themes of the BMH about a militant participation in the present, a political Marxism, and reconstructing theory are important ones. To that end we involve ourselves in the social movements, whether that is a rediscovery of the mass tobacco and alcohol smuggler, other informal economic activity in the city, or the emerging anti-capitalist movement. I am presenting a case for the development of the social crime concept by testing whether the key characteristics can be found today, and also politically reassessing the nature of crime itself. Originally (Hay et al, 1975) said it wasn't possible to distinguish between 'good' criminals here and 'bad' criminals there, and this all blurred into the labouring poor; Linebaugh (1991) notes payment of wages was often years behind. The distinction between the respectable/unrespectable, non-deserving and deserving poor manifested itself in the political development of the Labour movement and Marxism, and can be found within the anti-capitalist movement. Following "No Logo" and its emphasis on the trademark brand names in the shops I will present analysis about shoplifting and whether the politics of part of the anti-capitalist movement has had any effect on shoplifters choices. I will ask the question about how you go about destroying the brand most effectively, and outline the liberalism found within "No Logo". 'Crime' is now a central feature of the social movements large manifestations and also for a significant section of the general public.
	No Quarter Pamphlet Series #3 : Omasius Gorgut – Poor Man's Heaven, The Land of Cokaygne: A 14th Century Utopian Vision "In most if not all the corners of Europe, in their mythologies, folk tales, popular songs and festivals, the poor of the Middle Ages dreamed up a land where their sufferings were reversed, where people lived in harmony and plenty without having to work. The lives of the poor in medieval times were viciously hard – oppressed and exploited by the rich and the church, terrorised by their hired soldiers, forced to work all their lives without hope of any change in their situation. On the one hand they were told constantly by the Church that they could not expect and should not dream of a better existence in this life; on the other that a paradise existed for them somewhere in another. People were also “much more directly aware than they are today of the tyranny of necessity, the essential hardness in the nature of things. Man was so far from being the master of his environment that he was always prone to feel that it was his master. He depended on the weather not only because bad weather is unpleasant, but because a bad season might mean absolute famine. And, under the very best conditions, long hours and a bare living were still a necessity from which he could see no possible way of escape.” (A.L. Morton) Not surprising then that their frustrated dreams should create a place where everything was free, where life was easy, where the weather was always fine, where all desires came true – and where the rich could never hope to come. Their dream of a Utopia of the poor appears as the English Cokaygne and the French Coquaigne, as Pomona or the pagan Island of Apples, where “all is plenty and the golden age ever lasts. Cows give their milk in such abundance that they fill large ponds in milking. There, too, is a palace all of glass, floating in the air and receiving within its transparent walls the souls of the blessed." (Baring-Gould) It is the Irish Hy Brasil, where "milk flows from some of the rivulets, others gush with wine". In medieval German legend it is Scharaffenland, or Venusberg, the mountain of delight and love, where Lady Venus held her court, leading a fantastical life of pleasure in the company of carefree spirits of the air, together with fair nymphs of woodland and water, and heroes seduced there from the world above. In Holland they imagined Cokaygne as Luikkerland, where “All you loafers always lying about, Farmer, soldier, and clerk, you live without work, Here the fences are sausages, the houses are cake, And the fowl fly roasted, ready to eat.” The dream is expressed as the Country of the Young, as Lubberland; as the Poor Man's Heaven and the Rock Candy Mountains. These fantastic lands shared the same characteristics: an earthly and earthy paradise, an island of magical abundance, of eternal youth and eternal summer, of joy, fellowship and peace. “Brueghel painted it in a picture that has many of the most characteristic features: the roof of cakes, the roast pig running round with a knife in its side, the mountain of dumpling and the citizens who lie at their case waiting for all good things to drop into their mouths… It is the Utopia of the hard-driven serf… for whom the getting of a bare living is a constant struggle.” In 14th Century England, this image of a free earthly paradise emerged in a popular song, The Land of Cokaygne. Many versions existed, varying from area to area; and it was anonymous, a product of many minds, an expression of the subversive desires of a class." This text is an updated version of that originally issued by Past Tense.
Further information on No Quarter publications can be found on the No Quarter website: anarchistpirates.blogspot.com

Greedy, Thieving Bastards

Mon, 25 May 2009 09:55:17 +0000

It is said that public confidence in politicians is at a very low ebb following the Telegraph's leaking (and subsequent reporting by most newspapers) of the majority of politicians' questionable expenses claims. Claiming for second homes, piano tuning, clearing of a moat (£2,115), an ornamental duck house (£1,645), swimming pool maintenance (several claims), mortgages that don't exist (£15,000+), double-claims for council tax, a trouser press (more than one claim), home cinema system, removal of wisteria, trimming hedge around "helipad" (£609), leather rocking chair (£1,200), food, toilet seat, eye liner, biscuits, and so on, and so on, ad nauseum.

Politicians from all the main three parties have been exposed. Most give the appearance of being humbled in the media now that they have been found out, however, some, (the Tory gentry, as you may imagine), have appeared indignant that they should have to answer to the lower classes. An example of this is Anthony Steen, MP for Totnes in Devon, who claims that we are all just jealous of his million pound home: "I've done nothing criminal, that's the most awful thing, and do you know what it's about? Jealousy. I've got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It's a merchant's house of the 19th century. It's not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely."

What is surprising, or perhaps unfortunate, is that it takes something like this exposé in the media to lower the public's confidence in MPs when just a quick browse through history will show that they have been stealing from us for years. Most people would face fines or imprisonment for theft, but these MPs just give an apology, pay a little back and feel exonerated.

There have been heated, angry public debates where politicians are confronted by their constituents, resulting in some MPs being in denial about the feelings of the people whom they are supposed to represent. One wonders if this could be the spark to ignite the summer of discontent of which there have been murmurings of in the press. There is a long history of social protest in the UK, as you can imagine (if you don't already know). Let us take the act of incendiarism as an example and quote from John E. Archer's 'By A Flash and A Scare', where he asks Why Incendiarism?:

East Anglia had a history of social protest prior to 1830 and the combatants involved in the riots, marches and demonstrations had learnt to their cost that open displays of protest brought in their wake punishments ranging from the death penalty at worst, to imprisonment at best. One has to remember the traumas and psychological impact that these sentences had on small village communities. In the village of Withersfield, for instance, with a population of 500, it must have been painful to witness the transportation of six labourers, who were later joined by their wives and children. In all, a short-lived riot permanently thinned this small village of well over twenty inhabitants. Many of these open confrontations were also unsuccessful in achieving their desired aims, the riots of 1835-36 especially so. Therefore there was little incentive to organize or protest if the ringleaders were to be singled out and given harsh sentences while points of grievance continued to exist. Open confrontation was also hindered by the increase in population, since employers held the whip hand on the employment market. Thus one major avenue of rural protest was closed up and the alternatives of individual terrorist action became a more viable proposition. Practicality was a strong driving force; fear of detection, fear of punishment, fear of association, all created a climate of secretiveness. The army, the yeomanry and the special constables were all powerless against such night-time attacks on property. To this extent Hobsbawm and Rudé were correct to view incendiarism as an active response to defeat.

If incendiarism was, as often argued, so detrimental to the economic interests of labourers, why then did it develop to such an extent before 1850? Farmers before 1830 were probably not insured and the fires would have caused financial hardship, but after that date insurance protected the majority and the fires were not so economically devastating. But was the main purpose of incendiarism to cause financial loss to property holders? The answer was considerably more complex than simple economics. Incendiaries never aimed to kill or injure property holders and their choice of targets was often discriminatory. That much we can be sure of. These acts of protest should be placed into a similar category as 'ceffyl pren' of Wales and the 'rough music' of rural England. It was a psychological weapon with a great deal of impact in the small communities. The sufferer was a target of hatred and he and the rest of the community knew as much. The victim had been singled out for special treatment and the fire was there to publicize the fact that he, more than any other person, had transgressed against someone or some custom. One labourer made the telling remark of an incendiary victim: 'the sooner he's out of the country the better.' In another case, Peck of Congham (Norfolk), although insured, claimed another incendiary fire 'would oblige him to relinquish business altogether.'

The publicity factor of incendiarism was important, for some fires were reported to have been visible across forty miles of countryside and they attracted large celebrating crowds, up to 3,000 in one or two cases. It is impossible to quantify the fear of fire but undoubtedly the farmers' fear was considerable. In a letter to Melbourne, the Home Secretary, the Reverend Brett of Congham wrote that 'panic generally prevails' in the county after the large number of fires. Labourers maintained 'nothing scares the farmers like a good fire'. This quite natural dread cannot be emphasized enough as a psychological weapon. Such a 'flash and a scare' provoked a repsonse from employers, often a favourable one, and to that end it has to be considered successful in a limited way.

Labour was adversely affected after a large stack or granary fire, especially if the fire occurred before the threshing season, but the incendiary's hatred transcended such considerations. To him the stacks and barns were symbols of wealth, oppression and power and the fires were a method of 'getting even'. If this was the case then it was more than likely that fires were lit in a less discriminating fashion during periods of greatest distress, because all employers would have been regarded in a similar way as oppressors of labour. Campbell Foster thought this to be the case in 1844 when he wrote:

Can we feel surprised that a labourer out of work half the week, and leaving his home, without having broken his fast … , should return a dangerous man, ready to strike a lucifer match and thrust it into the farmer's stack, who will not give him work, or into any stack, because it is the evidence of wealth and comfort, which, hungered and starving, he hates to see?

While farm work may have been adversely affected by incendiarism on a very localized scale—the individual farms which experienced arson attacks—regionally, employment was created by farmers keen to lessen the possibility of incendiarism in their neighbourhoods. Nightwatchmen were employed extensively during intensive periods of incendiarism. In a number of cases they proved ineffective and in at least two cases nightwatchmen were actually convicted of incendiarism. One labourer reportedly said 'the fires did poor men good, for they now get two shillings a night watching them'. General farm work 'not actually required, that is not immediately beneficial, such as marl and clay carting, cutting down fences, cleaning borders', likewise increased. Arson also halted intended wage reductions and, in some cases, forced them to rise by a shilling or two a week.

Incendiarism was primarily a response by labourers, especially the younger ones, to the oppressive social and economic conditions which they were forced to endure. It is possible to describe the fires as disorganized and uncoordinated acts of protest kindled by a work-force lacking bargaining power and fearful of open confrontation.

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Links
MPs' expenses in detail (The Telegraph)
MPs' expenses on Google Earth (The Telegraph)

Diggers: then is another part of now

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:41:18 +0000

James Holstun's essay Rational Hunger: Gerard Winstanley's Hortus Inconclusus in Pamphlet Wars, Prose in the English Revolution, is refreshing reading. He hits the nail on the head in both the way he exposes certain historians disregard for the historical significance of the Diggers, and in his clear insight into why the Diggers are still relevant today and how the oppression that they faced is still being faced today. It also clarifies that the problems of enclosure don't ever dissipate. It is well worth a lengthy quote:

Four main anti-socialist strategies have emerged for detaching the Diggers from their future. We might characterize them briefiy as snubbing, sneering, periodizing and Stalinizing.

The first technique is a mode of strategic avoidance. In her massive Agrarian History of Britain and Wales, Joan Thirsk spares the Diggers barely a page. There, she agrees with the Diggers' gentry opponents that their communal project constituted a gross affront to local landowners, and that the land they cultivated was poorly chosen anyway — as if the gentry would have found a better-situated commune less provocative. Of their theory of agrarian praxis, she says nothing. Similarly, Kevin Sharpe laments the "disproportionately large number of pages" historians have spent in analysing "minor sects and crackpots," given that "Land and liberty never became the slogan of the English Revolution; radical millenarianism never infected the poor; the radical groups, especially the most important, never appealed to the poor." Never, never, and especially never; except, of course, when they did. So long as raillery and brisk impatience can pass for sober historical judgment, the Diggers will have a hard time assuming their true historical importance in our understanding of the seventeenth century.

In a second technique, revisionist historians have tried to enclose Winstanley in an eternal present, in which his prophetic socialism is a mere alibi for his non-ideological pursuit of personal gain and revenge inside a fixed social system. Richard T. Vann led the way by examining Winstanley's pre- and post-Digger career and constructing a psychological explanation for the Digger movement: "The experiment in Digger communism would seem to have come between the ruin of a career as a Merchant Tailor and the scarcely propitious beginning of one as a steward and corn-trader. These few facts about his life seem to invite the interpretation of the radical as one who turns on a system in which he personally has failed." James Alsop has followed up on Vann, investigating Winstanley's business dealings with the dogged ferocity of a delinquent accounts collector. Winstanley's early inability to succeed in the business world led to his resentful radicalism with a sort of fumy necessity, while his later small success in that world confirms with stunning force the insincerity of his Digger days. This seems an unusually coarse example of the genetic or "Whig" history that revisionists claim to find offensive in socialist historians. And it may seem less than generous to fault a poor man for seeking wage labour and some measure of financial security in the 1650s and 1660s; Winstanley's alternative was not a continuation of Digging (the violence of the gentry had made that impossible), but poverty, isolation and starvation.

The third technique encloses the Diggers in a pre-modern past with some such claim as, "Winstanley is a religious thinker, not a social revolutionary." This is a peculiar binary opposition that can survive only inside a hermetic version of the history of ideas. Inside the sociology of religion (or the history of political languages, or social history), however, religion is simply one mode of social practice among others, so a rigorous distinction between religion and society makes about as much sense as one between apples and fruit. Of course, the sociology of religion can and does talk about spheres of religious experience and institutional life within a social totality, but it seems particularly unhelpful to attribute faith in a closed religious sphere to the Diggers, given that they spend so much time attacking the social institutions that made that sphere possible in mid-seventeenth-century England (tithing, the universities, a caste of professional clerics), and also the conceptual oppositions (between spirit and matter, clergy and laity, heaven and earth, contemplation and labour, the millennium and human history) that help to justify and reproduce this sphere. These historians of ideas have been unable to assimilate Sabine's 50-year-old insight: "By what may seem at first sight a paradox, the very universality of religious experience in the life of the saint gives to Winstanley's personal philosophy a tone of secularism. …In short, religion was for him a way of life, not a ceremonial, a profession, or a metaphysic".

The fourth technique is the invention of J.C. Davis in Utopia and the Ideal Society. Davis attacks socialist partisans of Winstanley not by denying their connection to him, but by insisting on it — with a twist. Particularly in The Law of Freedom, he argues, Winstanley reveals an authoritarianism endemic to all socialism; scratch a socialist and find a Stalinist. Davis develops this thesis through two primary distortions. First, he exaggerates the severity of the Digger disciplinary mechanism, saying (with no apparent evidence) that The New Law advocates "slavery" for all those who resist Digger discipline, and that The Law of Freedom threatens them with "judicial slavery" — a rather scary name for the rather familiar phenomenon of penal correction. Second, Davis plays down the extent to which Winstanley's indubitable movement towards disciplinary severity in his final work simply responded to the systematic and violent harassment of the Digger colony from its inception to its demise a year later. The Diggers were subjected to economic boycotts, threats, lawsuits, pullings-down of houses, trampling of crops, and vicious beatings — as a result of which one Digger miscarried, while another almost died. In what Winstanley calls the "pitched battle between the lamb and the dragon", Davis hears only the bleating of the lamb, while the customary coercion practised by English property owners remains silent, natural, part of a picturesque landscape. Jumping the English Channel and 140 years, we might compare Davis to the French revisionists, whose bicentennial paroxysms over the Terror drowned out the far greater economic and political violence of the ancien régime and counter-revolutionary Europe.

It seems to me that the Diggers' hortus inconclusus opens up more readily into contexts other than that of twentieth-century totalitarianism — notably, into the traditions of Quakerism and communist sectarianism, English prophetic literature (Milton, Bunyan, Blake, Whitman), and social utopianism (Bellers, Plockhoy, Fourier, Marx, Morris). Here, I will concentrate on the context of continuing resistance to agrarian enclosure. If large-scale resistance tended to disappear in England after the Restoration, then conflicts between rights-based and property-based conceptions of the forests certainly did not, as E.P. Thompson has shown in Whigs and Hunters. In Scotland, the disruption of traditional agriculture by improving enclosure did not reach its height until the Highland Clearances of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; in Capital, Marx traces this process as part of the continuing narrative of primitive accumulation. The Clearances disrupted the patriarchal economies of the clans, as scientific improvers (many of them English or Lowlanders, but working in tandem with Highland nobility and landowners) brutally evicted the crofters and converted their communal small-holdings into pasture land and deer parks. This conflict continued almost into the twentieth century, with the Crofters' War and the Battle of the Braes on the Isle of Skye in 1882. The cult of Scots picturesque, built on bleak landscapes and ruined crofts, shows that aestheticization is the last phase of capitalist genocide.

The seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century invaders of North America presented their genocidal clearing and enclosure of the indigenous common lands as a programme of providentially-sanctioned and rational improvement. Something like a country house ethic re-appears among North American environmentalists working in the tradition of John Muir, for whom national parks are nature reserves rather than monuments to exterminated social ecologies. For instance, what is now Yosemite Park was, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, part of the Miwok nation of "Digger" Indians (so called because of their harvesting of tubers), who "were the most numerous native tribe in North America. …Their complex systems of land use, land tenure and land management had modified a diversity of California landscapes, and supported the greatest human population density found in the Americas north of Mexico." They were decimated by disease in the 1830s and by military attacks throughout the nineteenth century.

We can see an even more striking and contemporary version of the controversy over the commons in South America. An aestheticized environmentalism has led most Americans and Europeans to see the struggle over the rain forest as a battle between tree and bulldozer rather than one between two economies: between the destructive economy practised by ranchers and log-harvesters, and the renewable economy of petty extraction (rubber tapping, small farming, nut gathering) practised by the two million forest people — Indians, river bank peoples and rubber tappers. Hecht and Cockburn point out that "The extinction is not only of nature but of socialized nature: what is also being exterminated in the Amazon is civilization". The last 30 years have proved particularly devastating to the forest peoples: "From the sixties until today the entire Amazon has been convulsed by an enormous enclosure movement easily rivaling the conversion of public land to private property in early modern Europe. … Indeed, the Amazon is the site of one of the most rapid and large-scale enclosure movements in history as more than 100 million acres pass from public to private ownership."

This process has provoked responses analogous to those of European peasants resisting enclosure, including the Diggers: the formation of new political collectives such as unions of rural workers, the emergence of a group of self-educated organic intellectuals such as the late Chico Mendes (who was murdered by a landowner in 1988), and the development of techniques of non-violent resistance to enclosure such as the empate, the sit-down strikes of forest peoples resisting workers with chainsaws employed by the great landowners. We might also compare the green millennialism of the Digger pamphlets with the Forest Peoples' Manifesto of 1985 and 1989, which proposes an end to the division of the forest into lots for colonists, a new technology that will benefit the people of the forest, the establishment of extractive reserves, and "Administration and control of reserves directly by the extractive workers and their organizations".

These extractive reserves of rubber and brazil nut trees, which envision a new/old variety of collective life on the land, resonate strongly with the Digger utopia. Ailton Krenak, a self-educated Krenak Indian, describes them in terms that Winstanley would find striking:

Extractive reserves bring into play part of the population which came to the Amazon to "civilize" it along with the Indians, but who instead learn from them a new way of living with nature. Rubber tappers learn how to humanize nature and themselves. Thus the reserve brings a new form of social culture, and economic character. Migrants to this region came in search of land, but the property of the people cannot be commercialized. An extractive reserve is not an exchange item, and it isn't property. It is a good that belongs to the Brazilian nation, and people will live in these reserves with the expectation of preserving them for future generations. This is tremendously innovative.

Here, we might compare the Digger declaration from Iver, which sets the mark of Cain on what it calls "Earthmongers," saying that "we affirm that they have no righteous power to sell or give away the earth, unless they could make the earth likewise, which none can do but God the eternal spirit". Refusal to sell the land is a pledge with the future.

Of course, the projects of the Diggers and the forest peoples are radically diverse and subject to their proper dynamics. The political contexts are quite distinct: a national revolution with strong but stifled egalitarian elements on the one hand, a Fascist military government moving towards an ostensibly democratic one on the other. In place of the long-term history of religious conflict in Winstanley's England, we have a long-term ethnic conflict in Brazil, where developers have sent flu-infected settlers into Indian lands in order to infect and exterminate them — a primitive but effective mode of genocidal germ warfare. Furthermore, the process of enclosure has proceeded much more rapidly in the Amazon, and the conversion of Brazilian rain forest to pasture (and rapidly thereafter, to wasteland) is even less reversible and more devastating than the conversion of English arable to pasture or common lands to private holdings.

But these differences should not blind us to the process tying the two times and places together, for the Diggers and the forest people respond to the same phenomenon: global capitalism in the phase of primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation, as Marx discusses it in Capital, is that early- or pre-capitalist phase that divorces producers from the means of production, and prepares them to become mere sellers of their labour power. To link early modern England and contemporary Brazil in this fashion is not to venture into anachronism, since capitalism is not a system, not even a mechanical sequence of systems (early, middle, late), but a complex, non-synchronous narrative. A single "phase" like primitive accumulation may appear again and again in different places. Conversely, any given historical moment incorporates more than one "time," more than one mode of production. Winstanley's England, for instance, contained the remnants of a feudal agriculture, an early capitalist and possessive individualist agriculture driven by a dynamic of improvement and primitive accumulation, and (among the Diggers) a small-scale practice of communism. Our own historical moment includes the primitive communism of a few uncolonized aboriginal peoples, primitive accumulation in the industrializing Third World nations, early capitalism to rival Engels' Manchester in the industrialized Third World (and in the un-unionized and environmentally degraded First and Second), and even the plausible spectre of a post-industrial "information order" in some ruling class ambients around the world.

It is crucial to remain sensitive to these different times within a single historical moment, since critical and utopian consciousness resides precisely in the lived experience of and critical reflection on this non- synchronous dissonance — the clashing of time, and times, and half a time that pervades everyday life. Given the tendency of many contemporary historicisms to equate history with a rigorous periodization, which carries us along from one dominant mode to another, it is particularly important to note these moments of rational hunger, like that of the Diggers', that reveal critical dissonance with a dominant mode, affiliative resonance with a far-distant moment. When the Diggers cultivate George's Hill, the broken enclosures open up into the rain forest, and we see the common human desire of Diggers and Forest People to create themselves freely through collective praxis on the land. The Diggers' Eden on George's Hill and Winstanley's prophetic writings are certainly of the seventeenth century, and he certainly was not a seventeenth-century Marxist (as periodizing, anti-socialist historians never tire of pointing out). Yet his vision of a once-and-future human relationship to the land, based on common preservation rather than enclosure and rigorously divided ownership, remains non-identical to the oppressive dominant culture of his present, and affiliates itself with distant visions such as Ailton Krenak's of a once-and-future Amazon: "It is for this that the region is so beautiful, because it is a piece of the planet that maintains the inheritance of the creation of the world. Christians have a myth of the garden of Eden. Our people have a reality where the first man created by god continues to be free. We want to impregnate humanity with the memory of the creation of the world." In Bloch's phrase, this memory of a humane socialist future is the Diggers' not-yet-conscious, and might be ours.

extracted from James Holstun, Rational Hunger: Gerard Winstanley's Hortus Inconclusus,
included in Pamphlet Wars, Prose in the English Revolution, [Frank Cass, 1992]

Rogues and Vagabonds: The 24 orders

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:35:39 +0000

The twenty-four orders of rogues and vagabonds, as detailed in Thomas Harman's pamphlet, Caueat for Commen Cursetors, London 1566. (quoted from Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds, 1913)

Rufflers sturdy vagbonds who begged from the strong and robbed the weak Upright Men vagabonds who were strong enough to be chiefs or magistrates among their fellows Hookers or Anglers thieves who stole clothing and other light articles by pulling them through an open window with a hooked stick Rogues ordinary vagabonds, weaker than the Upright Men Wild Rogues rogues born on the road, of vagabond parents Priggers of Prancers horse thieves Palliards beggars who excited compassion by means of artificial sores made by binding some corrosive to the flesh Fraters sham proctors, who pretended to be begging for hospitals and lazar houses Abraham Men pretended mad men Whip-jacks vagabonds who pretended to be ship-wrecked sailors Counterfeit Cranks beggars pretending the falling sickness Dommerers sham deaf mutes Tinkers and Pedlars who ordinarily used their trades as a cloak for thieving Jarckmen makers of false licences Patricoes hedge-priests Demanders for Glimmer men or women begging for pretended losses by fire Bawdy Baskets female pedlars Autem Morts women who had been married in church Walking Morts unmarried whores Doxies female companions of common rogues Dells young girls not yet broken in by the Upright Men Kynchin Morts female children Kynchin Coes male children
How did Harman and his associates deal with such rogues? Torture and capital punishment were not beneath them, as is shown in the following quote on apprehending a dommerer:
Hauing on a time occasion to ride to Dartforde, to speak with a priest there, who maketh all kinds of conserues very well, and vseth stilling of waters ; And repayringe to his house, I found a Dommerar at his doore, and the priest him selfe perusinge his lycence, vnder the seales and hands of certayne worshypfull men, had thought the same to be good and effectuall. I taking the same writing, and reading it ouer, and noting the seales, found one of the seales like vnto a seale that I had aboute me, which seale I bought besides Charing crosse, that I was out of doubte it was none of those Gentlemens seales that had subcribed. And hauing vnderstanding before of their peuish practices, made me to concaeue that all was forged and nought. I made the more hast home ; for well I wyst that he would and must of force passe through the parysh where I dwelt ; for there was no other waye for hymn. And comminge homewarde, I found them in the towne, accordinge to my expectation, where they were staid ; for there was a Pallyarde associate with the Dommerar and partaker of his gaynes, whyche Pallyarde I sawe not at Dartford. The stayers of them was a Gentlemen called Chayne, and a seruant of my Lord Kéepers, cald Wostestowe, which was the chiefe causer of the staying of them, being a Surgien, and cunning in his science, has séene the lyke practices, and, as he sayde, hadde caused one to speake afore that was dome. It was my chaunce to come at the begynning of the matter. "Syr," (quoth this Surgien) "I am bold here to vtter some part of my cunning. I trust" (quoth he) "you shall see a myracle wrought anon. For I once" (quoth he) "made a dumme man to speake." Quoth I, "you are wel met, and somwhat you haue preuented me ; for I had thought to haue done no lesse or they hadde passed this towne. For I well knowe their writing is fayned, and they depe dissemblers." The Surgien made hym gape, and we could sée but halfe a toung. I required the Surgien to put hys fynger in his mouth, and to pull out his toung, and so he dyd, not withstanding he held strongly a prety whyle ; at the length he pluckt out the same, to the great admiration of many that stode by. Yet when we sawe his tounge, hée would neither speake nor yet could heare. Quoth I to the Surgien, "knit the two of his fyngers to gether, and thrust a stycke betwene them, and rubbe the same vp and downe a lytle whyle, and for my lyfe hée speaketh by and by." "Sir," quoth this Surgien, "I praye you let me practise and other waye." I was well contented to sée the same. He had him into a house, and tyed a halter aboute the wrestes of his handes, and hoysed him vp ouser a beam, and there dyd let him hang a good while : at the length, for very paine he required for Gods sake to let him down. So he that was both deafe and dume coulde in short tyme both heare and speake. Then I took that money I could find in his pursse and distributed the same to the poore people dwelling there, whiche was xv. pence halfepeny, being all that we coulde finde. That done, and this merry myracle madly made, I sent them with my seruaunt to the next Iusticer, where they preached on the Pyllery for want of a Pulpet, and were well whypped, and none did bewayle them.

No Quarter #3

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:54:44 +0000

No Quarter
a zine about radical history
http://anarchistpirates.blogspot.com

Issue 3 of No Quarter has recently been published. This issue contains…

• A reprint of Lost Utopias by Ron Sakolsky, "scholar of music, revolution and radio", from issue 3 of his self-published, anarchist-surrealist zine, Oystercatcher.
• An interview with a member of the Bristol Radical History Group, an independent collective exploring history from below. They have staged some remarkable events, all without any funding from universities, political parties, business or local government.
• The trial statement of nineteenth-century French anarchist Émile Henry (1872 – May 21, 1894). He attempted to dynamite a mining company which was in dispute with its striking workers, only to have the bomb discovered before it was detonated and retrieved to the police office, where it did detonate, killing several policemen present. Later he would mis-throw a bomb into a bourgeois café, slightly injuring a few bourgeois, wounding three persons with gunshot whilst making his escape. He was executed at 22 years old.
• Many reviews of related books and films.

For details on how to obtain a copy of No Quarter #3, see the No Quarter blog.

The Western Rising

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:21:46 +0000

Between the years 1626 and 1632 there were massive anti-enclosure riots in western England. Collectively known as The Western Rising, these riots occurred in Gillingham Forest on the Dorset-Wiltshire border, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, Braydon Forest in Wiltshire, Feckenham Forest in Worcestershire and Leicester Forest. The cause of the uprising was the Crown's policy of disafforestation and enclosure, denying the immemorial, customary rights of common held by all. The main body of the rioters was made up of artisans, landless peasants and wage-earners as, although the Crown had consulted with and offered compensation to the Lords and landowners for their losses, the rights of the majority, who were landless peasants and relying upon the forest and its raw materials for subsistence, were ignored and their rights had no basis in the Crown's laws.

Facing extreme poverty, having access to the land stolen from them, their customary rights denied, and enjoying no rights in law, the pulling down of the enclosures was the only course of action possible. Although many were involved in the riots, (sometimes as many as 3,000 rioters), only few were arrested. This was due to the view of the ruling class that the commoners were incapable of organising themselves, as Buchanan Sharp puts its in In Contempt of All Authority, Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660:

Most of those escaping punishment were persons of the lower orders. The Crown's object was to capture and punish the ringleaders in order to set an example to others and to break the spirit of the rank-and-file. Since Stuart government took it for granted that a ringleader was a person of quality, gentlemen were prime suspects, while artisans and laborers would more easily have escaped notice.
A recurring theme in official opinions on the Western Rising is that the belief that the lower orders were incapable of organizing and directing themselves and, consequently, that persons of quality were behind the riots. This was, of course, only one manifestation of an opinion universally held in the seventeenth century. It is expressed, for example, in that near-limitless storehouse of the period's aphorisms and commonplaces, the essays of Francis Bacon. In "On Sedition" Bacon ascribes the root of sedition to poverty in the common people and discontent among their betters: "If poverty and broken estate in the better sort be joined with a want and necessity in the mean people, the danger is imminent and great: for the rebellions of the belly are the worst." Sedition required the better sort to provide leadership, "for common people are of slow motion, if they will not be excited by the greater sort."

Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority, Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660
(University of California Press 1980), 130-131

This was ruling class naïvety, as there were no rogue gentlemen leading the revolt and the commoners, of course, were more than capable of organising themselves.

Here we are about 400 years later and what has changed? The middle class are now doing the dirty work of maintaining inequality, whilst the ruling class hide themselves from public view. The proletariat are viewed as the ignorant masses or chavs, whilst the media encourages them to fight amongst themselves and reinforces their lack of self-belief and self-worth. Their history is largely hidden, their identity fragmented. At some point morning will come and it will be time to wake up.

The Power is Always on the Side of the People, when they Choose to Act

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 07:30:10 +0000

The enclosure movement and the slave trade ushered industrial capitalism into the modern world. By 1832 England was largely closed, its countryside privatized (some even mechanized), in contrast to a century earlier when its fields were largely open—"champion" country, to use the happy technical term—and yeoman, children, women could subsist by commoning. By 1834 slavery had been abolished in the British empire whereas a century earlier, on 11 September 1713, the asiento licensed British slavers to trade African slaves throughout the Americas. Together the expelled commoners and the captured Africans provided the labor power available for exploitation in the factories of the field (tobacco and sugar) and the factories of the towns (woolens and cottons). Whether indentured servant, West African youngster, former milkmaid, or woodsman without his woods, the lords of humankind looked upon them indifferently as laboring bodies to produce surplus value, and so emerged the Atlantic working day, which entirely depended upon a prior discommoning.
The legal cliché is that the American constitution is written, while the English is unwritten. Strictly speaking this is untrue inasmuch as both have stemmed from the Magna Carta of 1215. The important difference between English and American constitutional development is not that one is unwritten and the other is written. The difference is Africa. The maintenance and expansion of unwaged labor on the plantation where slaves produced surplus value was indispensable to American constitutional and revolutionary history, whereas the salient English development was the statutory enclosure of lands and privatization of all attempts at commoning. The Atlantic multitudes were divided by race in the emerging constitution. The Charters of Liberties were contested in this process. The enclosure movement, opposed by English commoners, conveniently ignored the Forest Charter. The movement to abolish slavery used Magna Carta and helped put it back into the English working-class movement.
Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, Liberties and Commons for All (University of California Press 2008), 94-95

The Generall Complaint…

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 09:25:19 +0000

Wee (as men) confident of your integrity did chuse you as our Proctors and Atturnies, the King's Majesty with his best councell and we (the poore Commons) entrusted you with all we had but we had no mistrust that you would deceive us of all we had. We trusted you to maintaine our peace, and not to embroile us in an universalle endlesse bloudye war. We trusted you with our estates and you have Rob'd, Plundered and Undon us; we trusted you with our freedomes and you have loaded us with slavery and bondage, we trusted you with our lives and by you we are slaughtered and muther'd every day. . . . Thus we perceive that you pretend to fight for the Protestant religion and all the world may see and say, you have made a delicate dainty Directory, new religion of it. And you have fought for the King but it hath been to catch him and make him no King. You have fought for our liberties and have taken them from us. You have fought for the Gospell and you have spoyl'd the Church, you have fought for our goods and you have em and you have fought to destroye the Kingdom and you have done it. . . .
The Generall Complaint of the Most Oppressed, Distressed Commons of England Complaining to
and Crying Out Upon the Tyranny of the Perpetuall Parliament at Westminster (1645)

No Quarter

Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:29:26 +0000

No Quarter
an anarchist zine about pirates, brigands, and millenarian revolt
http://anarchistpirates.blogspot.com

My article from this breviary stuff, entitled TheaurauJohn : A Name, Not The Thing, is reprinted in the recently published issue 2 of the No Quarter anarchist zine. It also includes an interesting interview with Marcus Rediker, the historian, writer, teacher, and activist; unlike many published historians, he is also a great writer, not simply stuck in the dust of academia thinking that a procession of facts constitutes a book; he also understands 'that general readers are smart and thoughtful and capable of getting interested in complex, well-researched histories', which is a fact that has been evidently missed by many. In my opinion, his work is comparable to that of the late Christopher Hill, whose article Radical Pirates? is also reprinted in this issue of No Quarter. Radical Pirates? 'deals with the period in England after 1640 … [of] those who rejected a state church, supported full religious toleration, and often carried this over to advocacy of democratic, communist, or antinomian ideas – beyond the pale of respectable puritanism.' It deals with the apparent disappearance of radical ideas after 1660.

The memoires of French anarchist, Illegalist and founding member of The Bonnot Gang, (la bande à Bonnot), Octave Garnier, are presented, translated from the French. He was a believer in the theory of la reprise individuelle, the belief that since the bourgeois and the rich obtained their wealth through exploitation of the lower classes, individuals are justified in redistributing wealth on a small scale, (i.e. stealing it back), rather than waiting for a general redistribution of wealth "after the revolution".

No Quarter also contains bibliographies and many, many reviews of books through which readers can further pursue their interests.

The editor says in his introduction that the purpose 'of this zine is not to withdraw from the present, from the world, and to seek comfort in dusty books and libraries … or to escape into fantasy. This zine does not look at history as an escape from the present, but rather to better understand what has happened and is happening now', and that's breviary stuff, that is.

workers of the world: relax

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 11:00:45 +0000

An extract from Peter Linebaugh's The London Hanged, Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, (2nd edition, Verso 2006)
(For further information, see the entry in the Reading List category)

Colquhoun was the London agent for the planters of St. Vincent, Nevis, Dominica and the Virgin Islands. He worked tirelessly for the West India Merchant's Committee in London. He worked closely with the Home Secretary and the House of Commons, testifying frequently to the Finance Committee on the subject of police and drafting its legislation on that subject. Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith were visitors to his home. He collaborated closely with Jeremy Bentham on police schemes and reformations of the dockyards. If a single individual could be said to have been the planner and theorist of class struggle in the metropolis it would be he. Melville Lee called him the 'architect' of the police. The Webbs called him its 'inventor'. His influence goes far beyond the establishment of the Marine Police Office, because his books, although written for the practical purpose of establishing a police force, contain that combination of law, economics, flattery and class hatred that together have exercised a powerful influence upon subsequent conceptions of law and order.

His concept of class relations was at once cosmic and dialectical. London was the greatest manufacturing and commercial city in 'the known world'. Its riches were greater than anything 'in the Universe'. Yet, he stated axiomatically, where riches flow there is an acession of crime. The 'progressive increase of Crimes' is 'the constant and never-failing attendant on the accumulation of Wealth'. 'Commercial Riches and Criminal Offences have grown together.' Property and acts of pillage are logically and necessarily connected. He speaks, not for the West India merchants and planters, but for the 'community', 'the nation', 'humanity', 'the civilised world', 'society', 'the law'. His attitude was Newtonian in its obsession with enumerating the 'flux' of wealth and crime. He measures exports, imports, river traffic, ocean traffic, profits and losses. He seeks to do the same with the working class, whose lodging-houses, street-sellers, horse-dealers, pawnbrokers, stablekeeps, second-hand sellers, hawkers, pedlars, public houses, old-iron shops he wished to count, register and license.

'Police in this country,' he writes, 'may be considered as a new Science; in the PREVENTION and DETECTION OF CRIMES, and in those other functions which relate to INTERNAL REGULATIONS for the well ordering and comfort of Civil Society.' This was the classic conception of 'police' because it combined law and economics, the protection of property and the protection of production. It is the conception that Colquhoun learned from the Scottish élite such as Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations first appeared as 'Lectures on Police', or William Robertson, who distinguished feudal from commercial societies by the presence of 'police'. Smith's pupil, Adam Ferguson, had argued in 1792 that 'national felicity' depended on 'labour rightly directed'. That 'Wealth comes from inequality' was the first principle of his 'Moral and Political Science'.

Colquhoun sees the working class as an epidemic: the mass of labourers are 'contaminated', one group of workers 'infect' another. Hence he proposes a police to sanitize class relations. He sees the working class as a military enemy whose 'various detachments and subdivisions … [form] the general army of Delinquents'. 'Opportunities are watched and intelligence procured with a degree of vigilance similar to that which marks the conduct of a skilful General.' The London working class has spun a 'system', a 'monstrous System of Depredation', a 'General System of Pillage'. It is 'disciplined in Acts of Criminal Warfare'. It forms 'conspiricies', it comprises a 'phalanx'. The working class is also uncivilised, possessing 'unruly passions', 'rapacious desires', 'evil propensities', 'noxious qualities', 'vicious and bad habits', and its moral turpitude needs the 'humane improvement' by police.

'Poverty' was necessary to wealth (It is the lot of Man – it is the source of Wealth). 'Indigence' on the other hand is 'the evil'. It is the condition of 'idleness', the root of all problems, producing 'a disposition to moral and criminal offences'. 'Idleness' is both a moral category and an economic one: it is the refusal to accept exploitation. This refusal is measured by the 'losses' of the West India merchants (during a decade of unprecedented profit and trade). The conflation of morality and economics is also found in Colquhoun's taxonomy of depredation, which, in fact, apart from diction, is identical to the riverside division of labour, so watermen became 'night plunderers', coopers became 'light horsemen', lumpers became 'heavy horsemen', porters and gangsmen became 'scuffle hunters', etc. Colquhoun employs a rhetorical strategy that criminalizes the river proletariat. The semantic trick enables his readers both to extol the division of labour and to despise the divided labourers. The rhetorical freedom permitting this sleight of hand is necessary to the double vision of the bourgeoisie, which fears and dreads the working class while simultaneously understanding that labour is 'the foundation of all value'. Dr Johnson noted that the diction of the labouring class as casual and mutable, and he called it 'fugitive cant', thus performing a semantic criminalization. He therefore excluded the diction of labour from his dictionary as 'unworthy of preservation'. Such ignorance was a luxury that could not be afforded by those who need to understand the proletarians, such as police, army captains and engineers. Captain Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, whose third edition was published in 1796, does not mention the terms of Colquhoun's approbrium. He was unfamiliar with river work. Colquhoun's semantic strategy was an old one, originating in the first cant dictionaries of the sixteenth century. They divide the working class into a dangerous, incomprehensible, secret underworld, and an honest, plain-spoken, orderly world of labouring dependents. By the 1790s the association between civilisation and correct English implied that speakers of vulgar English were 'savage' – the term Harriott used to describe river workers. Colquhoun added particularity to the generalization.

Colquhoun was not given to making distinctions between 'custom' and 'crime', and where he was forced to acknowledge them his goal was only to abolish the difference.

What was at first considered the wages of fortitude, at length assumes the form, and is viewed in the light of a fair perquisite of office. In this manner abuses multiply, and the ingenuity of man is ever fertile in finding some palliative. Custom and example sanction the greatest enormaties which at length become fortified by immemorial and progressive usage: it is no wonder, therfore, that the superior Officers find it an Herculean labour to cleanse the Augean stable.

The relations of appropriation give to labour a unity that is apprehended according to various capitalist interests. We can distinguish three. First, are the technologists, like Samuel Bentham or William Vaughan, who see the working class as the producers of things, because they wish to increase productivity by revolutionizing the tools of labour. Second, are the economists, like Adam Smith or David Ricardo, to whom the working class is a quantitative aspect of capital, the producers of a value according to the duration of their labour. Third, are the police, like Colquhoun and Harriott, who see the working class as the producers of idleness, drunkeness and disorder. Customary appropriations appear as inefficiency or waste to the technologists, as an inventory loss or transaction cost to the economists, and a depredation or crime to the police. They therefore wage war against the working class.

TheaurauJohn : A Name, Not The Thing

Sat, 29 Jul 2006 11:02:19 +0000

There is a name and a thing, and a thing, And a name, And a name, And not the thing, And the Name and the thing both in accordance to the thing and name.

from The Nations Right in Magna Charta discussed with the thing Called Parliament. [Dec 1650]

I have come to set all things out of joynt

Thomas Tany, (also known as Theauraujohn Tani, John Tany, Thomas Totni, Theaurau-John Tanniour, John Tawney, John Tanny, Theaura John, Theauro John, Tom Tottey, …), a London goldsmith, is known to have had 15 works published between 1650 and 1655, varying from single sheet broadsides to works of up to 100 pages.

On the 23rd of November, 1649, after several weeks of fasting and prayer, Thomas Totney entered into a trance and the Voice of God spoke to him. It was revealed to him that he was the High-Priest of the Jews and that his task was to ensure the safe return of all Jews to Israel. At this same time he was also given the name TheaurauJohn Tany. His mission was publicly declared in April of 1650 with the publication of I PROCLAIME From the Lord of HOSTS, printed by Charles Sumptner for Giles Calvert, and sold at the Black-spread-Eagle at the West-end of [St] Paules, London, which he signed, 'THEAURAUJOHN TANY Gold-smith'.

Tany states, in Theauraujohn his Aurora in Translagorum in Salem Gloria or, The discussive of the Law and the Gospell betwixt the Jew and the Gentile in Salem Resurrectionem (1651), "…though I was unlearned, all languages under heaven I had given me in seven days space. … when I write I have no knowledge, neither behind nor before, but the word that comes…" The publication of this work saw him, (and Captain Robert Norwood, member of the High Court of Justice, who wrote the preface), charged with Blasphemy and subsequently convicted and sentenced to 6 months in Newgate gaol.

Before this sentencing was carried out, Tany published Theous Ori Apolipikal or, God's Light Declared in Mysteries (1651), in the final pages of which is found My ANSWER Added to the CHARGE against ME, where Tany refutes each of the charges brought against him. "Through the great Calumny of aspersion laid upon me, I am forced to publish to the world what I have declared…"

1 They charge me with A dissoluteness in living, and breaking all humane society: …I desire you to search my life in actions thorowly, and I shall prove unto you a Looking-glass, whereby you may discern your own spots and foulness, and wilful failings…
2 The second Charge is, That I deny Gospel-Ordinances: To which I Answer, That I do not nor cannot… your Gospel lies in your head by parrat-learning … not in your hearts, writ by the finger of God; for if it were, persecution would cease, and acts of mercy would flow, and deceit vanish …
3 The third was, That I said, That the Bible was a riddle: …is it not a riddle, a mystery, a Microcosm to the world; nay to you? … But ye cry the name of the Gospel high, but you are a Gospel to your self-ends, for the truth in the Gospel is doing deeds of mercy, and not in disputing names of dead letters…
4 The fourth is, that I should say That there is no such thing as Hell, as your Ministers hold forth: …Hell is a separation from enjoyment…
…
9 That I said the New-Testament is a lye: …and I say, It is but a name of dead letters set together with much intervention: and more, many places translated to hold up the Pope and Clergecies supremacie, and burdening the people to their tyranny…
…
12 They say that I said, that God was not forever: Which I protest I have never spoken … Now I say before all men, you my accusers are blasphemers, and I am not; but rage not, I can pass it by…
…

Tany served his prison sentence in full, and was released in February 1652, returning to Eltham.

March 1652 saw the publication of Tany's THEAVRAUIOHN High Priest to the IEVVES, HIS Disputive Challenge to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and the whole Hirach. of Roms Clargical Priests, ("I am in prison at the writing hereof"), in which he sets a day, "the fifth day of April 1652", and a place, "Saint Pauls, that old called Church, but now the new made Stable", where he will give a "demonstration of the glorious clothing wherewith my God hath clothed me", challenging "the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, as also the dessembling, deceived, and deceiving Clergie," and "the whole Hirarchie of Rome … And if you dare not appear to despute, then know, I take your silence to consent to my affirmation … then know ye, that you are Liars, Cheaters, and Deceivers, and dare not come to the Light." A margin note declares, "If the States, or men, or man, would hear of me, I live at Eltham but at M. Giles Calvert at the Black spred-Eagle, at the West end of Saint Pauls church there you may be directed to my lodging, for know all people that I turn my face from no man upon Earth."

When the day came he found the door locked and that none of the invited were there to meet him. In THEAVRAUIOHN HIS EPITAH And EVROPS Looking-glass, (April 1652), he writes, "Now all people, wheras I wrote an Epistle in which I challenged the lying Clergy of England, upon the 5 of April in Pauls Church, offering a fair dispute unto them, at which place, I was in the morning, and put up my bill signifying to appear at three of the clock that day, in the meantime the seduced spirits had obtained strength and power, to shut the doors and keep the people out, so when I came the doors was shut…"

In May, 1654, now residing in a tent pitched in Eltham, Tany published the broadside, Hear O Earth, wherein is said, "The Heavens have given Fire to lighten the Cabbafl in man; and a voice from that Enlightenedment shall be declared from the Lords Tent, standing in the bounds of Eltham, called by name, The middle Park … And in the Lords Tent is the Creation vivificated, in colour, manner, and matter, and to be viewed by any one, until the end of the days of Dedication."

Later that same year, in December, Tany, now living in Lambeth, created a bonfire outside his tent; on this fire, in front of a crowd of people that had gathered, he burnt a sword, a saddle, a pair of pistols, and the Bible, declaring them to be the four great Idols of England. He then, with his accomplice, Rowle Tichburne, made his way by boat to the House of Commons, dressed in old armour and equipped with a rusty sword, declaring that he was going to murder those present in the House.

He entered the lobby of the House and asked the door-keeper whether he might deliver a petition. The door-keeper informed him that this may be possible if any Member of the House would give his endorsement. Tany then retired for an hour, after which he returned, with Rowle Tichburne, both armed with swords, and paced up and down in the Lobby for fifteen minutes. He then suddenly charged at the door-keeper, who, along with almost all of those present in the lobby, ran from the room. Major Christopher Ennis remained in the lobby and a scuffle between Tany and Ennis ensued, ending in Tany forcing his way into the Chamber. Inevitably, this resulted in Tany being imprisoned in the Gate-House.

The event was recorded in broadsides of the day:

The Faithful Scout, No. 208, 29 December – 5 January, 1654/5 reported…

Saturday Dec. 29
This day a hair brained Gentleman, one Theaurau John Tanior, who calls himself the High-priest of the Jewes, and useth sometimes to live in Tents, which he erects at Lambeth and Greenwich, saying He is to gather the dispierced Jews, and carry them to the Holy-Land, came in an antique habit, with a long rusty sword by his side to the Lobby at the Parl house door, where he suddenly fell a slashing of the people, and with his sword drawn ran at Cooper the Door-keeper, and put him, and the rest of to the Run, cleering the Room of all persons, except Major Ennis, who closed in with him, and struck up his heels; yet he recovered himself again, and ran with his sword drawn, and bounced with his foot at the house door, and turned the key with his hand, and opened the door; Then Maj. Ennis fell into him again, and disarmed him. Whereupon he was sent for in, and coming to the bar he stood covered; but the Sergeant was commanded to take off his hat; He was there asked divers questions, to which he answered notably; and being afterwards examined by a Committee, he declared, That he came inspired by the Holy Spirit, to kill every man that sat in the house, and was resolved thereupon. And after some time spent in examination, he was committed to the Gate-house, in order to his further Tryal. But note, that even before he came from Lambeth, to act this Assassination at Westminster, with great solemnity he burnt a sword, a geat saddle, a pair of pistols, and the Bible together, declaring them the three grand Idols of England. This is the fruit of the phrensie, called Quakerism.

Certain Passages of Every Dayes Intelligence, No. 74, 20 December – 5 January, 1654/5 reported…

Tuesday January 4
John Tawney, alis Theoreau John (of whom mention is made before) was examined before a Committee, since his commitment to the Gatehouse, and divers Witnesses concerning his carriage examined, and it appeared that he cut & slasht with a rusty sword in the Lobby, but he did not much hurt.
2. That when he was called to the Bar of the House, he stood with his hat on til the Serjeant took it off.
3. That when he came in this manner to the House door, he said that he was inspired by the Holy Ghost to kill every man that sat in the House.
4. That he had formerly been committed to Newgate for Blasphemy.
5. That last week at Lambeth with great solemnity he openly burnt the Bible, a great saddle, and a pair of pistols together, and openly declared that they were the three grand Idols of England.
6. He professeth himselfe to be no Schollar, yet have set forth several things in print, wherein he takes on him the most accurate knowledge of Hebrew, and saith it came to him by Revelation, in one of his Quaking trances.
7. He saith that his Office is to gather the dispersed Jews (sprung out of the Gentiles) in England, and that there be more like unto himselfe designed for other places.

Some of which were more slanderous than others:

Mercurius Fumigosus, No. 32, 3-10 January, 1655 reported…

A Plott, A Plott, old Nick is dead,
John Tawney did him kill,
With rusty sword he hack'd his head,
but sore against his will.
…
Theorau John, one of the inspired Cyclops of Vulcans Forge, being a mad Transylvanian, that had the Hebrew reveal'd to him in a Quaking fitt…
He drew, and put it up again, like a great Booby
A two-legg'd beast, called a Slutt, last week having her leaven devoured by the Rats, and fearing her Mistris would be angry with her, surreverence dropt a little into her Kneading-trough of her own making, which made her bread so sowre and crabbed, that no Milk-woman dares passe by their door without having all their milk turned into Chees-curds, no knife that cutts this bread, but is sent the next Day to the Grinders, no edge can be set thereon ever after; the women are afraid to lie with their Husbands for fear of begetting Children with Crab-tree Faces: the Maide that committed this Piece of Huswifery is next week to be Circumcised by Black Madge of the Beare-garden, and so be gathered into Theoreau Johns flock of Converted Jews, and to be Cook Russian to the Pharisees, as they are conducted by John Robbins through the Red Sea, to the Iland in the Moon, to recollect their scences, which were lost a fort-after Midsummer come Twelve Month.

Whilst imprisoned at the Gatehouse Tany has a large lock and chain attached to his leg as a metephor for the captivity of the people of England. He was released on bail in February 1655, following a petition to the upper bench protesting wrongful imprisonment, habeas corpus.

In April 1655 Tany published THARAM TANIAH, Leader of the Lords Hosts, Unto his brethren the QUAKERS, scornfully so called… a broadside, aimed at his followers, instructing them that Tany's mission, to deliver the captive Jews to Jerusalem, is still very much in his plans, and declaring, These things the Heathen dogs know not.

In August Tany published My EDICT Royal, his last extant work, wherein he gives his account of the burning of the three Idols of England and what transcended at the House of Commons. "…Now I shall declare unto the whole earth the cause both of my burning and breaking my Sword, Pistols, and Musket, and the spoiling of the Barrel of Powder, as also the burning of the Bible termed the Word of GOD by ignorants, not knowing GOD. … Therefore all People, Tongues and Nations, Know, That I did not burn the BIBLE in contempt of GOD, or in contempt of its Record from GOD … I say, the Word of GOD cannot be burned, for it's GOD's righteousness in my Soul planted, and unto Men by my life declared in these Words, Sell all that you have, and give unto the poor, and follow me. … Thus saith GOD, the dogs and toads are that you count the basest in the Creation, is cleaner than all men and women under heaven; for they act only for life, an dye for your abominable lusts…

"…Three days before I came down to the House, the name I know not by reason of its Catastrophe, ing, ing, ing, thus my body fainted, and my spirit in me retained scare strength to move my frame, & then my teeth beat in my head as the fiercest ague that ever fell on man, my knees smote together, my hands quaked, and my water fell from me, for the presense of God was terrible unto me; then came the word of Jehovah, and said unto me, go down and slay the rebels against me, and make sharp thy sword, for they have broken the Covenants. … Then the Lord commanded to burn his Tent onely save the Tent staff, and burn the priests garments, with all that I had; whereupon I began to burn many things, and my own books, for all books do but image the life of some thing from the life expressing the true thing, and are dead idols when you come to dy, what good can all the written books in the whole world do you, they are but dead letters…

"…now when I had done burning, the people did rage so, that I was fain to go to boat with my sword drawn, and one Rowle Tichburn with me, and I borrowed an old sword for him to have in his hand, but he knew nothing at all, onely my safety from the people that did stone us in the boat, and I cannot go without a gard by reason of the heathen rage …

"…and I came into the Loby, and spake to Master Hull, that he would help me deliver [my petition], but I must give it to a Member, and I said I know no men their … Then I went … and had two mess of broth and two pots of Ale for Tichburn and my self, and then I was commanded by Jehovah, for to go, and comming to the door, the door-keeper of the Loby pressed me betwixt the door and the wall, whereupon I came in the sliped of my cloak, and drew my sword, and ran at him so hard, that the people came within a foot of the hand, and would not enter, then I swange my sword round about to have killed all that was nigh me; then I run to the door and struck it with my foot, and then they gat hold of me, and threw me down and took away my sword…

"Now all people see your liberty by my president amongst wicked men your lord rulers, by their own unjust laws: they sent for me to examine me before a Committee, and some friends were at prison, and went along with me, but because of their wickedness, they are fearful of every winde, and according to their wills, establish for our English laws; no man must hear me examined, but one or two pressed in. The first queries were frivolus, as where I lived, and had I not been at Rome, and my clothes did trouble them, and they asked who gave me money for my clothes, I answered by their asking that question they were free from charity, for they were to clothe the naked and feed the hungry. Then they did ask why were my sleeves so laced, I said it was the Glob in the four Spheres holdment, and I told them that they were no wiser than before…

"The next and last was this, I did beseech and consider that a man of peace, a man that had forsaken all, that God should raise him up to testifie with the hazard of his life, God's fierce wrath kindled against them, to cut them off quite from the earth. Then one answered and said, I fought with Colonel Rich; then I said, Gentlemen I beseech you all to hear me in this matter, then they heard me attentively, then I said, that when Colonel Rich and Captain French that villiain, with the rest of the theeves came to divide their theevish purchases, the Parks, in which they had cheated the poor souldiers, by buying their debentures for a song in comparison of their due right, for Gentlemen, I said, thus, if I set a man to work till it comes unto twenty shillings, and then give him ten groats, I count them cheating theeves and villains. What do you think of this?? At this word they were mute, and asked me what I was, and if I loved the Quakers, and I said that they were honest men, if they were but what they said, but for to speak good words, and under them good pretences wrong and spoil others, them my soul did abhor and loath…"

In September 1655, Tany was involved in a dispute over land rights in St George's Fields, where he had pitched his tent, which involved assaults on himself and his belongings. He reputedly issued a broadside, Take Notice All People, warning people off the "ground I hyre", which was published verbatim within an article in Mercurius Fumigosis, No. 70, 11 September – 3 October, 1655.

There were no further publications by Tany after this point in time. It is believed that he made himself a boat and set sail for Holland, continuing his mission of gathering the dispersed Jews, only to be shipwrecked on the journey and drown.

The meaning of the name
"…Now minde, The, is from the Greek word Theos; now The stands before in my name given by God, which is to say the eye, or Gods eye; discovering the light, in the hidden mysterious mystery of John." (Epistle VII, Theous Ori Apolipikal or, God's Light Declared in Mysteries, 1651). "…the import of my name, which is thus, Theauraujohn, that is, God his declarer in the morning, the peaceful tidings of good things. … Scholars, you know Theus, then Aurau, you know them two names, and John is the beloved Dove…" (Epistle 12, Wrote at Eltham, but the intendant of the delivery of this Epistle was at Saint Pauls Church, Theous Ori Apolipikal, Part Two, 1653).

What I have written, I have written

Further reading:
TheaurauJohn Speaks! The Collected Work Of Thomas Tany
Edited by Jarett Kobek. Resurrectionary Press, Providence, RI., 2003

Roger Crab [1621 - 1680]

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 13:24:40 +0000

Hermit, pacifist, vegetarian, ascetic, celibate, teetotaller, herbalist, agitator in the Parliamentarian army, hatter, follower of (the extraordinary and charismatic blasphemer[1]) John Robins, member of the Philadelphians, Familist, standing 6' 7" (approx. 2m) tall.

In 1641, the year before the English Civil War broke out, Roger Crab became a vegetarian, as 'Eating of flesh is an absolute enemy to pure Nature'. He joined the Parliamentarian Army, where he served for seven years. Condemned to death by Oliver Cromwell, presumably for political agitation, perhaps an involvement with the Levellers, he spent two years imprisoned, but was released without the execution taking place.

In 1648, during the battle for Colchester, he received a near-fatal blow to the head, leading to his discharge from the army, after which he denounced violence and became a pacifist. He moved to Chesham and set up as a hat seller for three years, before disbanding his business and giving away his property to his poorest neighbours. Keeping just enough, he leased some land at Ickenham, near Uxbridge and built himself a house, taking up the life of a hermit, making his own clothes from sackcloth. Here he became known as a herbal doctor and received many patients.

Put in stocks, whipped, imprisoned four times for breaking the Sabbath, yet never silent. He published four pamphlets, The English Hermite [1655], Dagons-Downfall [1657], Gentle Correction for the High-flown Backslider [1659], and A Tender Salutation [1659].

In 1657 he moved to Bethnal Green, then a small hamlet about 2 miles outside of London, continuing to follow his ascetic lifestyle, subsisting on bran broth, turnip leaves, mallow leaves, herbs, roots, grass and water. He lived in a small cottage, still rejecting authority, (the "Whore-Master"), and convention, pursuing his mystical Christian vision, until his death in September 1680. He was buried in Stepney Churchyard.

Crab referred to the Church as the Whore-House and the clergy as the Pimps, in rejection of their hypocritcal use of religion. "You may observe the Whores houses in every Parish where her Pimps come to vent their Traffick to the Merchants and Beast." "If the elect are chosen from all Eternity, why do Priests take our money?" He was also critical of hypocrisy in his fellow common-man, the "labouring poor Men, which in Times of Scarcity pine and murmur for Want of Bread, cursing the Rich behind his Back; and before his Face, Cap and Knee and a whining countenance."

[1] The Declaration of John Robins and other writings. [Aporia Press 1992] Writings originally published in 1651.

Fire in the Bush

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 23:06:58 +0000

Gerrard Winstanley – Fire in The Bush – 19 March 1650
(Collected in Winstanley – The Law of Freedom and Other Writings – Edited and introduced by Christopher Hill – Pelican Classics 1973)

The cover text mentions Winstanley's mastery of colloquial prose and superb use of imagery, although possibly the former is better represented, the latter is well expressed in Fire in the Bush. Out of context, slices of text would lose the force and weight they have when reading the whole piece, but nevertheless…

'If this be true, it will destroy all government and all our ministry and religion?'
I answer, it is very true;
…
You oppressing powers of the world, who think that God hath blessed you because you sit down in the chair of government out of which former tyrants are gone: do you remember this? Your overturing, overturning, overturning, is come on to you, as well as your fellow break-promises that are gone before. You that pretend to be saviours of the people, and to seek the peace of the whole nation; and yet serve yourselves upon the people's ruins, not regarding the cry of the poor: surely you must have your overturnings too.
…
'This man will have no government', some will say.
I answer, you run too fast. True government is that I long for to see…
…
Love your enemies, and do as you would be done by, in actions and not in words only.
…
… so that covetousness does not reign, imagination doth not frighten you, with 'What shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewith shall be clothed hereafter?'
…
… you are that power that hedges some into the earth and hedges others out; and takes to yourselves, by the power of the killing sword, a liberty to rule over the labours and persons of your fellow-creatures, who are flesh of your flesh and bone of your bone. And you do the very same things, in a higher degree and nature, for which you hang other men for, punishing others for such actions as you call sin; and yet you live in the daily action yourselves, taking the earth from the weaker brother, and so killing him by poverty or prison all day long.
…
And here I shall end with this question, What are the greatest sins in the world? I answer, these two: first for a man to lock up the treasuries of the earth in chests and houses, and to suffer it to rust or moulder while others starve for want to whom it belongs – and it belongs to all. …
The second sin is like to this, and is the same in nature with the other; and this is for any man or men first to take the earth by power of the murdering sword from others, and then by the laws of their own making do hang or put to death any who takes the fruits of the earth to supply his necessaries, from places or persons where there is more than can be made use of by that particular family where it is hoarded up.

Break-promises. Nice turn of phrase, and as true now as it was then.

The whole world's insane

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 09:08:29 +0000

On January 1st 1650 Gerrard Winstanley's A New-year's Gift for the Parliament and Army¹ was published. The English Civil War was over, the Parliamentarians, with the help of the Common People, had overthrown the Royalists and beheaded the King, Winstanley had been arrested again for digging on the Common Land at George's Hill, and the fact that the Common People had been duped into assisting the overthrow, only to have one set of tyrants replaced by another, was all too apparent. Yet Winstanley still appealed to Reason and Rationality to reverse the shocking hyprocrisy of the new state.

England is a prison; the variety of subtleties in the laws preserved by the sword are bolts, bars and doors of the prison; the lawyers are jailors, and poor men are the prisoners; for let a man fall into the hands of any from the bailiff to the judge, and he is either undone or weary of his life.

We are still living out this history, and what has changed?

1 A New-year's Gift for the Parliament and Army: Shewing what the Kingly Power is; And that the Cause of those They call DIGGERS is the life and marrow of the Cause the Parliament hath Declared for, and the Army Fought for; The perfecting of which Work, will prove England to be the first of Nations, or the tenth part of the city of Babylon, that falls off from the Beast first, and that sets the Crown upon Christ's head, to govern the World in Righteousness: By Gerrard Winstanley a lover of England's freedom and Peace.

"The whole world's insane" Re: Null & Void, 'Still…it must go on', 7" single, Not So Brave Records, 1984