Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it’; in all countries except new

colonies, ‘rent and profit eat up wages, and the two superior orders of the people

oppress the inferior one.’

In fact, his labour theory of value and its corollary, the

famous distinction between the productive and unproductive members of

society, became the starting point for all anti-landlord and anti-capitalist critics

of society down to Marx and beyond.

Neither the appearance of the word, nor the provenance of the concept,

however, is the same thing as the existence of a mature fact, especially a fact so

portentous as a new structuring of society. In spite of his propagandist purpose in

favour of freer trade and production, Adam Smith did not set out to change the

existing basis of society, still less to undermine the authority of the landed

aristocracy. On the contrary, his main target was the very capitalist whose private

freedom he espoused but whose public influence he denounced, who though the

chief organizer of national wealth was also the protagonist of the selfish and self-

defeating mercantile system, and was least to be trusted with politicial power.

The labourer, though ‘his interest is strictly connected with that of society’, was

‘incapable either of comprehending that interest, or of understanding its

connexion with his own’. Only the landowner was both competent and

disinterested enough to be entrusted with responsibility for the general welfare.

The interest of the landed order ‘is strictly and inseparably connected with the

general interest of society. Whatever either promotes or obstructs the one,

necessarily promotes or obstructs the other. When the public deliberates

concerning any regulation of commerce or policy, the proprietors of land can

never mislead it, with a view to promote the interest of their own particular order;

at least, if they have any tolerable knowledge of that interest.’

It was only with the Ricardians and their opponents that the full implications of

class came to dominate political economy and social thought, and the concept

changed from an analytical tool to an instrument of social and political conflict.

As we shall see in Chapter VI, it was in the 1810’s and 1820’s that class and

class antagonism became a fact. Ricardo’s well-known hostility to the landed

interest and the Ricardian socialists’ denunciation of the capitalist reflected the

overt class struggles of the early nineteenth century.

Until then, however, class remained latent in the old society, as can be seen

from its politics, industrial relations, and religion. As the late Richard Pares

remarked, ‘the distribution of political power between the classes was hardly an

Cf. R.L.Meek, ‘The Scottish Contribution to Marxist Sociology’, in J. Saville, ed.,

Democracy and the Labour Movement (1954).

J.Millar, An Historical View of the English Government (1803), IV. 115.

A.Smith, The Wealth of Nations (ed. E.B.Bax, 1905), I. 263.

D.Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, in Works and

Correspondence (ed. P.Sraffa, 1962), I. 6.

Op. cit., I. 50, 265, II. 73.

24 THE OLD SOCIETY

issue in politics before 1815.’

Up to Waterloo, power was unquestionably in the

hands of the great landowners and their friends of one or the other faction, whom

the ‘great functional interests’ lobbied not for a share of power but for patronage

of their particular policies. In so far as economic questions entered politics at all,

it was via these ‘interests’, the various trades, industries, and professions,

considered as hierarchies within the general hierarchy of society, and

representing through their leaders all levels of society from the squire, great

merchant or industrialist down to the humblest labourer, seaman or handicraft

worker.

The General Chamber of Manufacturers declared in 1784:

It seems hitherto to have escaped the notice of the manufacturers that

whilst the landed and funded interests, the East India, and other

commercial bodies, have their respective advocates in the great council of

the nation, they alone are destitute of that advantage; and it is probable

from this source that many of their grievances have arisen—that they have

so repeatedly and inadvertently been oppressed by ministers unacquainted

with their real interests, and misled by the designs of interested

individuals.

This was not an anticipation of the class politics of the Anti-Corn Law League,

as the use of the word ‘manufacturer’ in its contemporary sense to cover both

master and worker makes clear: ‘The manufacturers of Great Britain constituted

a very large, if not a principal part of the community; and their industry,

ingenuity and wealth have contributed no small share towards raising this

kingdom to the distinguished and envied rank which she bears among European

nations.’

Samuel Garbett, Mathew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood and other leading

industrialists who called the Chamber into being to oppose Pitt’s Irish Treaty

thought of themselves as the hierarchical representatives of their ‘dependants’,

and were typical of the interest politics of the old society. As late as 1812 the

mercantile opposition to the Orders in Council followed an exactly similar

pattern.

As for the worker, outside his hierarchical ‘interest’ he had no place in

politics: as Adam Smith said, ‘his voice is little heard and less regarded, except

upon some particular occasions, when his clamour is animated, set on, and

supported by his employers, not for his, but for their own particular purposes.’

To what extent the pro-Revolutionary parliamentary reformers of the 1790’s

represented a premature ebullition of class politics is a debatable question. Until

Ibid., I. 263.

R.Pares, King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953), p. 3.

Plan of the General Chamber of Manufacturers of Great Britain, Birmingham Municipal

Library.

Cf. C.W.New, Life of Henry Brougham to 1830 (1961), chaps. iv, vi.

THE OLD SOCIETY 25

1789, certainly, parliamentary reform was little more than a Whig cry for

reducing the power of the Crown and getting themselves back into office, and so

for most aristocratic reformers it remained down to the Reform crisis of 1830. In

the 1790’s Fox’s aristocratic ‘Friends of the People’ could hardly qualify as class

agitators. Major Cartwright’s Society for Constitutional Information had a

mainly ‘middle-class’ membership and anti-aristocratic aims, but it was under

‘gentlemanly’ patronage and failed to carry most ‘middle-class’ opinion with it.

Thomas Hardy’s London Corresponding Society has been described as the first

purely working-class political society, which ‘laid the foundations of the

working-class movement in England,’ but it was in fact sponsored by the

‘middle-class’ reformers, and Hardy himself described the membership as

‘tradesmen, mechanics and shopkeepers’, of the traditional, pre-industrial kind.

All three societies, in spite of their fame and widespread connections, failed to rally

more than a tiny fraction of their own levels of society behind them, though they

played a part in frightening the landed aristocracy towards class consciousness.

At all events, as a demonstration of class politics they were completely

abortive. Much more impressive was the massive demonstration they provoked of

traditional loyalty at all levels to the established social order. As a panic reaction

on the part of the propertied, the ‘Loyal Association’ movement which swept the

country in 1792–94 was a more important step on the way to class politics than

the ‘alleged nation-wide conspiracy to overthrow property and government’

which called it forth. But meanwhile the overwhelming success of ‘the

gentlemen of property in the country’, each ‘according to his rank and situation

in life’, in rallying both ‘citizens of opulence’ and ‘the inferior classes in the

community’ in defence of King and Constitution was a triumph for the

hierarchical politics of the old society.

Class feeling was nearer to the surface in industrial relations. Capitalism in the

sense of production for the market by wageearners employed by capitalists was

as old as the old society. The very conditions which brought the one into being

inevitably produced the other. The decline first of serfdom and then of the small

peasant demanded the expansion of industrial employment for the surplus

population. Apart from small, isolated groups of fully proletarian wage-earners,

in mines, ironworks, foundries, alum-works and the like, mainly from the Tudor

period onwards, most of the surplus was employed in domestic handicrafts,

especially textiles.

Because of the initial restrictionism of the craft guilds, most

of these domestic handworkers worked in the villages and small unincorporated

towns and depended on a merchant for materials and the disposal of the product.

Although England remained predominantly rural throughout the old society, by

the mid-eighteenth century Joseph Massie estimated that more workers were

Op. cit. I. 264.

Henry Collins, ‘The London Corresponding Society’, in Saville, ed., op. cit. pp. 111,

134; Memoirs of Thomas Hardy (1832), p. 15.

26 THE OLD SOCIETY

engaged in trade and manufactures than in agriculture, and this was confirmed by

the first Census in 1801, when only just over a third of all families were allocated

to agriculture, as against over two-fifths to trade, manufactures and commerce.

Some of these domestic workers were self-employed, independent masters, but

most worked for a merchant, on his materials and often with his equipment,

under the domestic outwork system. As Adam Smith pointed out, ‘in all arts and

manufactures the greater part of the workmen stand in need of a master to

advance them the materials of their work and their wages and maintenance till it

be completed.’ Whatever form the advance took, it rapidly approximated to a

piece-rate wage, and the worker became a proletarian working for a capitalist.

Since men do not have to be taught where their economic interest lies, mutually

hostile combinations frequently resulted. Adam Smith remarked, ‘Masters are

always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination,

not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate.’

The workers in their

turn combined in the local trade clubs which are the ultimate roots of the modern

working-class movement.

The roots, however, are not the thing itself. Eighteenth-century industrial

relations were often violent, involving machine-breaking, physical intimidation

and even occasional murder. But eighteenth-century workers resorted to violence

as often against bakers who sold dear bread in hard times, the Irish who undercut

wages, or merchants who imported competing products or exported their raw

materials, as against their employers.

Sporadic violence, moreover, was the

resort of the frustrated and ineffectively organized and a compliment to the

strength of paternal social control. Most eighteenth-century workers were too

scattered, too isolated, too dependent upon a face-to-face relationship with a

paternal employer, for extensive permanent, trade-union organization. Some of

the most proletarian wage-earners, the agricultural workers, the miners, the

general labourers, could scarcely organize at all. For the rest, their occasional

resentment showed itself in local, sporadic, temporary combination, frequently

accompanied by violence and rioting, and as vigorously suppressed as other forms

of social insubordination. In between such outbreaks the workers’ organization,

if it survived at all, relapsed into the cross between drinking club and friendly

society, often frequented by independent craftsmen and small masters, which

was the average trade club.

The exceptions, the comparatively rare examples of more widespread and

permanent trade unionism, as amongst the felt hatters, the London tailors, the

Spitalfields silk weavers, the West of England cloth-workers, or the East

Midland framework knitters, prove the rule. For in practically every case they

A.Mitchell, ‘The Association Movement of 1792–93’, Hist.J., 1961, IV. 56f., quoting

Duke of Buckingham, Col. de Lancey, and other contemporaries.

Cf. G.Unwin, Industrial Organization in 16th and 17th Centuries (Oxford, 1904).

Mathias, loc. cit.

THE OLD SOCIETY 27

existed, often with the recognition or connivance of the law, to uphold the

paternal system of industrial regulation. The tailors earned themselves the first of

the eighteenth-century anti-combination acts in 1720, but obtained the control of

their wages by the Middlesex justices, and reinforced it by appeals in 1744,

1750–1 and 1767. West of England weavers petitioned the King against their

employers in 1726, and were admonished not to combine unlawfully, but ‘to lay

their grievances in a regular manner before His Majesty.’ They obtained a short-

lived Act regulating their wages in 1756, and were, with the Yorkshire weavers,

trying to obtain redress by legal proceedings in 1802, when their intervention led

to the suspension and ultimate repeal of the laws regulating woollen manufacture.

The London framework knitters failed to prevent the abolition of their

Company’s control over the masters in 1753, but the East Midland knitters by

prolonged agitation in 1778–80 came near to carrying a regulating Bill. The

Spitalfields Acts of 1765 and 1773 led to a unique combination of masters and men

for settling silk-weaving rates. Even the workers in the new cotton industry

turned first to similar methods of settling their grievances: parliamentary

petitions from Lancashire and Glasgow weavers, culminating in a famous and

costly battle in the Scottish courts, were only then followed by the 1812 strike of

40,000 looms, and its suppression by the common law.

Ultimately, all such attempts to keep alive the paternal protection of the old

society broke down in face of the abandonment by the ruling aristocracy of its

old responsibilities. Not so the paternal discipline of the old society, however.

The general Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 were only the last of some 40

acts for particular industries or localities, and the general prohibition of

industrial insubordination dates back through the Tudor legislation to the

fourteenth-century Statutes of Labourers, and the beginnings of the old society.

Like the landed rulers’ panic reaction to the ‘Jacobin’ reformers of the 1790’s,

with which it was connected, the consolidation of the anti-combination laws—an

afterthought to the master mill-wright’s bill, prompted by the generalizing mind

of Wilber-force

—was a step in the direction of class industrial relations. But in

itself it belonged more to the repressive industrial discipline of the old society

than to the free class competition of the new.

Religion provided the nearest approach in the old society to overt class

attitudes. From the Restoration settlement, when the Puritan aristocracy and

gentry finally opted for the Church and left the sects to their social inferiors, the

Wealth of Nations, I. 66, 67.

Cf. Ashton, 18th Century, pp. 227–9.

S. and B.Webb, History of Trade Unionism (1920), pp. 32, 49–55, 58–9.

Cf. M.D.George, ‘The Combination Acts Reconsidered’, Ec.H. (Ec.J.), 1926–9, I. 214;

J.H.Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain (1964), I. 205.

Parliamentary Register, 9 April 1799; J.L. and B.Hammond, The Town Labourer, 1760–

1832 (Guild Books ed., 1949), I. 121.

28 THE OLD SOCIETY

social structure of English religion became the familiar ‘sandwich’, with

Anglicans (in some areas, such as rural Lancashire, Roman Catholics) at top and

bottom, and Dissenters in the middle. The Quaker bankers and ironmasters,

Presbyterian, Congregational and Baptist merchant-clothiers and traders of the

eighteenth century have usually been accounted for in Weber’s terms by the

mutual attractions of capitalism and puritanism.

No doubt there were conscious

or unconscious advantages in the combination of virtue and frugality, spiritual

and economic ascetism, worldly and other-worldly wisdom, and the godly life

and financial success as interchangeable marks of Calvinist election. But not all

Dissenters were capitalists, and not all capitalists were Dissenters: eighteenth-

century Dissent embraced many yeoman farmers and ordinary textile workers on

the one hand, and excluded many great, especially London, merchants and

bankers, West country clothiers, and Liverpool slave-traders, on the other.

The full explanation is both simpler and more complex than the Calvinist-

capitalist equation. In the old society Dissent flourished in precisely those groups

which both wished and could afford to be somewhat independent of the paternal

hierarchy. Only those groups who were not dependent on the landed élite for

employment, tenancies, or patronage in the form of preferment, government

contracts, or the purchases of the plupart of their wares or services, could afford

the luxury of dissent from the landlords’ religion; and only those who did not

wish or could not hope for admission to the fringes of county society and its

pleasures, political, cultural and frivolous, wished to do so. Hence Old Dissent—

the original puritan sects of the Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists,

and their more recent offshoots, the Quakers and Unitarians—was confined to

the ‘middle ranks’, the yeoman farmers and more independent craftsmen of the

countryside, and the traders and master manufacturers of the towns. The arm of

dependency was long, and even in the towns, especially market as distinct from

industrial towns, the tenants of local landowners, the professional men who

served them, and those business men who hoped for some advantage, social,

political or lucrative, from the association, tended to follow the landlords’

religion. Thus the Duke of Devonshire’s Knaresborough tenants, Walpole’s

relatives the Turners, attorneys and wine merchants of King’s Lynn, and the

bankers, East India merchants, and government contractors of the City of London

would be Churchmen almost to a man; while a Quaker ironmaster like Ambrose

Crowley found it paid to become an Anglican when he moved his headquarters

to London.

Hence, too, the ‘filling’ in the sandwich was much thinner than the

middle ranks of society: in the first half of the century Old Dissenters probably

numbered only about 250,000 to 300,000, and in the second half rose to about

400,000, mainly in the last two decades.

Cf. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930); R.H.Tawney,

Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926); E.D.Bebb, Noncon-formity and Social Life,

1600–1800 (1935); Isabel Grubb, Quakerism and Industry before 1800 (1930).

THE OLD SOCIETY 29

They were reinforced from the 1740’s by New Dissent. By the time of

Wesley’s final separation from the Church in 1784, there were about 50,000

Methodists, though a much larger number of sympathizers and adherents; by

1800 there were over 100,000.

Early Methodism was peculiarly fitted by its

ambivalence, of loyalty to and rejection by the Church, its conservatism and

dissent from Old Dissent, to find a place in the social structure of religion.

Appealing mainly to those working men who were just beginning to emerge from

complete subordination to landlord or employer, it provided a short first step in

either direction from Church or from Dissent. The sandwich, as it were, acquired

a second layer of filling below the first, midway between middle and lowest

layers. Thus an extra step was provided for the familiar progress from

Anglicanism to Dissent and back to Anglicanism again, which usually

accompanied social mobility from the labouring poor through the middle ranks to

a landed estate.

There was nothing cynical about this: one sect contained as

much scope for piety or worldliness as another, they were all equally Protestant,

and atheism was equally anathema to them all. More important, the religious

matrix was completed for the moulding of the classes of the future.

For, at least in part, religious dissent, new and old, was from the social point

of view the sublimated form taken by vertical social antagonism in the old

society. Since political expression was denied it—not so much by the Test and

Corporation Acts, which were easily evaded, but by the hierarchical system

which prevented practically all but the landowners and their friends from

attaining political power—such resentment of the higher orders as existed was

diverted into religion. Of course, religion had always played a large part in

politics, and the Old Dissenters, who had never been content with a bare

toleration and civic inferiority, were a powerful ‘interest’ which constantly

lobbied through their Whig patrons. Towards the end of the century, however,

one of the first signs of the expansion of the independent ‘middle ranks’ which

accompanied industrial growth was the increased force and self-confidence of

the Dissenters. A new campaign for their emancipation in the late 1780’s led by

the ‘Rational Dissenters’, Priestley, Price and Robinson,

together with the

fervour for religious and civic equality released by the French Revolution, came

near to producing the spark which fuses dissent into class feeling.

Again, however, the reaction of the paternal hierarchy was more powerful than

the threat. The rational Dissenters were overwhelmed by the same anti-

revolutionary tide which all but drowned the parliamentary Reformers and the

New, op. cit., pp. 402, 407–8; Plumb, Walpole, I. 25–7; M.W.Flinn, ‘Sir Ambrose

Crowley, Ironmonger, 1658–1713’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 1953, V.

162–80.

Bebb, op. cit pp. 45, 174–7.

Ibid. p. 178.

Cf. E.Halévy, History of the English People in the 19th Century (1961), I. 424.

30 THE OLD SOCIETY

trade clubs. Church-and-King mobs sacked Joseph Priestley’s house in

Birmingham as they sacked Thomas Walker’s in Manchester.

Priestley fled to

America, Dissenters deserted Reform in droves for the defence of property, and

the Presbyterians who had been most affected split up between the untainted

Baptist and Congregational flocks and the Unitarians who took over the

Presbyterian chapels. Even the loyal Methodists did not escape the storm:

accused of being ‘a system which tended to overthrow Church and State’, whose

real objects were sedition and atheism, they felt impelled year after year from the

1793 Conference to pass an abject loyal address.

Though latent class feeling and

organization were clearly the underlying factor in religious dissent, the time for

its emergence was not yet.

In short, although class was latent in the politics, industrial relations, and

religion of the old society, it was overlain by powerful bonds and loyalties which

effectively prevented its overt expression. The explanation lies in the total social

situation of the individual. Of this, source of income and the vertical antagonism

it generates are but a part, and, though important, can operate freely and

effectively only in large-scale communities, where the individual can unite with

many others of his kind to defeat the ubiquitous pressures of personal

dependency. In the small communities, the villages and tiny towns, of the old

society in which the average individual worked, lived and had his being, the

source of income itself, with the rest of the ‘life-chances’ of the individual, was

controlled by a paternal landlord, employer or patron who regarded class

attitudes as the insubordination of a dependent child. In a world of personal

dependency any breach of ‘the great law of subordination’, between master and

servant, squire and villager, husband and wife, father and child, was a sort of

petty treason, to be ruthlessly suppressed.

Resentment had therefore to be

swallowed, or sublimated in religious dissent, or, when pressed beyond

endurance, it exploded in outbursts of desperate violence.

If, as one modern sociologist has put it, a classless society is one with a unified

élite, which unites in itself the political, economic and social power of the

community,

then eighteenth-century England was a classless society. The

landed aristocracy, standing at the head of all the ‘interests’ of the social

pyramid, held in its hands the strings of connection and dependency which held

society together in a hierarchical system. How and why it achieved this

Cf. U.R.Q.Henriques, Religious Toleration in England, 1787–1833 (1961), pp. 57–67.

Ibid. p. 66.

R.F.Wearmouth, Methodism and the Working-Class Movements of England, 1800–50

(1937), pp. 54–60.

Literally so in the case of women who murdered, or were accessory to the murder of,

their husbands, who were burned at the stake for ‘petty treason’; cf. L.Radzinowicz, A

History of the English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750 (1948), I. 209–10.

THE OLD SOCIETY 31

remarkable degree of social control we can best see by considering the principles

upon which the hierarchy was based, property and patronage.

PROPERTY AND PATRONAGE

The old society was firmly based on the twin principles of property and

patronage. One’s place in that society was wholly determined by the amount and

kind of one’s own property— ‘the great source’, as John Millar observed, ‘of

distinction among individuals’

—or that of one’s relations and friends. Whereas

in feudal society, property, in theory at least, followed status—the knight

invested with his fee in return for military service which only he was qualified to

perform, the serf with his holding in return for servile labour which only he was

lowly enough to render—in post-feudal England status followed property. The

English gentry, unlike their Continental counterpart, the minor aristocracy,

possessed no legal privilege except the readily purchased coat of arms. Land

alone granted them their status. ‘Gentility is nothing but ancient riches,’ Sir John

Holles could say as early as Elizabeth I’s reign: his descendants became dukes of

Newcastle.

His contemporary Sir Thomas Smith declared: ‘Who can live idly

and without manual labour, and will beare the port, charge and countenaunce of

a gentleman, hee…shal be taken for a gentleman.’

Title itself came to follow property. From James I’s reign knighthoods,

baronetcies and Irish peerages could be freely purchased by anyone with

sufficient cash and the land to support the dignity. An English peerage was more

difficult to obtain, but in practice a great estate, like the fifty-eight manors

assembled by Lord Chief Justice Coke, sooner or later drew to itself a title; and a

commoner who inherited that estate, as his eighteenth-century descendant

Thomas Coke of Holkham did from his grandfather the Earl of Leicester, could

normally expect to get the patent revived. The dukedom of Newcastle was thrice

resurrected between 1694 and 1756 for non-noble heirs, while the dukedom of

Northumberland was re-created in 1750 for Sir Hugh Smithson who had married

the heiress of the Percies.

By the eighteenth century only a handful of English

peers could claim continuity in the male line from a medieval feudal grant: all

the rest owed their status to their property.

Below the landed order status, honour and power over others were distributed

according to wealth, down to the very cottager on the common: ‘In his own

R.Aron, ‘Social Structure and the Ruling Class’, B.J.Sociology, 1950, I. 131; for a

similar concept of a classless or one-class society, see Peter Laslett, The World We Have

Lost (1965), chap. ii.

J.Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1793), p. 4.

Historical Manuscripts Commission, Portland Manuscripts (1923), IX. 5.

Sir T.Smith, op. cit. p. 40.

32 THE OLD SOCIETY

house he finds those who respect him, who obey him; those, to whom he says

go, and they go, and come, and they come.’

Only the utterly propertyless and

friendless, the vagrant, the beggar and the outlaw, were excluded from the

hierarchy of prestige.

Nowhere can this be better seen than in the distribution of political power.

Government in the old society was a function of property, and reflected its

distribution. According to Arthur Young in 1794,

The principle of our constitution is the representation of property,

imperfectly in theory, but efficiently in practice…the great mass of

property, both landed, monied and commercial, finds itself represented;

and that the evils of such representation are trivial, will appear from the

ease, happiness, and security of all the lower classes, hence possibly

virtual representation takes place even where the real seems most remote.

Descriptive of Parliament, this was no less true of other political institutions.

Even the Crown could be said to come within its ambit: in the vestigial belief that

‘the King should live of his own’ lingered the notion of the supreme

responsibility of the largest property-holder, the first amongst his landed peers,

the greatest of the borough-mongering gentlemen of England. The House of

Lords consisted almost entirely of great landowners. In the House of Commons,

protected by political realities rather than by property qualifications ancient or

modern, three-quarters of the Members between 1734 and 1832 were landowners

or their near-relations, and those of the rest who were not their friends or

nominees were rich business and professional men often with one foot on the

land.

Though within the charmed circle of property political ability played some

part in selection for high office, ‘the chief qualification required of a Cabinet

Minister was not so much ability as aristocratic connections and a large landed

property’, and in every Cabinet between 1783 and 1835 peers and sons of peers

formed a clear majority.

Under the patronage system administration at all levels

from the Household to the Customs and Excise department was carried out by

landowners and their clients. In 1726 a quarter of the active peerage held Court or

Government office;

while the chief qualification for appointment as a mere tide-

waiter or exciseman was a noble or genteel friend with the ear of a Minister.

Office itself was defined by Blackstone in proprietorial terms, as ‘a right to

exercise a public or private employment and to take the fees and emoluments

thereunto belonging,’ and was linked by the need to maintain a government

Complete Peerage, IX. 529–31, 743.

Information for Cottagers, collected from the Reports of the Society for Bettering the

Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor (1800), chap. i.

A.Young, The Example of France…a Warning to Britain (1794), p. 106.

G.P.Judd, Members of Parliament, 1734–1832 (New Haven, Conn., 1955), p. 71.

THE OLD SOCIETY 33