Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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majority in the House of Commons to an electoral system in which ‘For the

elector the vote, for the borough its representation, for the Member his seat…

were valuable assets from which advantages were expected.’

Local government most perfectly reflected the proportional influence of

graduated property. Here the institutions—Quarter Sessions, borough

corporations, parish officers—were merely the forms through which a hierarchy

of property-holders governed themselves and their dependants. In the counties

the lords lieutentant and their deputy lieutenants, the sheriffs and the justices of

the peace, were leading landowners, noblemen or squires, together with an

occasional clergyman or business man with one foot on the land. The boroughs

were ruled under a hotch-potch of charters and customs which almost

everywhere amounted to an oligarchy of substantial traders and professional men,

often with a stiffening of local landowners. At parish level the constables,

churchwardens, overseers of the poor, surveyors of highways and the rest, were

drawn in rotation from the middle ranks of yeomen, tenant farmers, tradesmen

and independent craftsmen.

Such formal equations, however, give little idea of the informal role of

property: the ‘extra-legal county oligarchy’ of justices who came during the

eighteenth century to usurp legislative and executive powers conferred by no

statute, and to punish without right of appeal offences they had themselves

created; the attendance at Quarter Sessions and Assizes of ‘county society’ which

brought propertied opinion subtly to bear on the judgments; the power over their

neighbours of the majority of squires who were not J.P.s; the consultation by the

wage-fixing justices of ‘discreet persons’ not on the bench; the 300-odd bodies

of ‘improvement commissioners’ who appointed themselves under private acts to

clean, pave and light their towns; the ‘extra-legal democracy’ of ratepayers

which governed some parishes as the oligarchy governed the county, still more

the ‘close vestry’ of substantial property-owners which came to replace it after

Sturges Bourne’s Act of 1819; or the informal parish opinion, headed by ‘the

natural and proper overseer, the principal proprietor…the provider of the fund’,

which effectively decided the direction and the level of poor relief.

For political power was merely the most specific institutional form which

property assumed. As Defoe approvingly put it,

’Tis in the power of the Gentry of England to reform the whole Kingdom

without either Laws, Proclamations, or Informers; and without their

concurrence all the Laws, Proclamations and Declarations in the world will

have no Effect; the Rigour of the Laws consists in their Executive Power.

A.Aspinall, The Cabinet Council, 1783–1935 (1952), p. 199.

Plumb, Walpole, I. 8.

E.W.Cohen, Growth of the British Civil Service, 1780–1939 (1941), p. 21n.;

L.B.Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), I. 199.

34 THE OLD SOCIETY

It was the social power of property which underlay the rest. It was not confined

to the landowning élite, for every man of any kind of property had his ‘legitimate

influence’ with his ‘dependants’: master with servants, farmer with labourers,

industrialist with workers, and so on. But its head and centre was the influence of

the landowner, larger or smaller, over a wider or narrower stretch of countryside.

‘Landed property,’ wrote William Marshall in 1804, ‘is the basis on which every

other species of material property rests; on it alone mankind can be said—to live,

to move, and have its being.’

The life of a hamlet, a village, a parish, a market town and its hinterland, a

whole county, might revolve around the big house in its park. Its reception

rooms, gardens, stables and kennels were the centre of local social life; its estate

office the exchange for farm tenancies, mining and building leases, and a bank

for small savings and investments; its home farm a permanent exhibition of the best

available agricultural methods and techniques; its law-room, if the landowner was

on the bench, the first bulwark of law and order; its portrait gallery, music-room

and library the headquarters of local culture; its dining-room the fulcrum of local

politics. Such big houses ranged themselves in a hierarchy, from the squire’s

manor house to the ducal country palace, according to the size of the territory

they dominated. And at each level the landowners and their families met at each

other’s houses, and at the market or county town, and jostled to get invitations

from the level above, culminating in the ring of great families which ruled

England as a whole, and met to dominate London society in the Season. ‘From

some eighteenth-century memoirs,’ Professor Habakkuk has remarked, ‘one

might suppose that England was a federation of country houses.’

And so indeed

it was: for the English nobility and gentry, unlike their Continental counterparts,

had learned the amphibious art of dominating both town and countryside by their

physical presence. Through seasonal residence in the localities and frequent re-

union in metropolis and county and market town they kept in their own hands

and concerted their control over all the strings of dependency and influence.

Whatever the political forms it took, however, their power always came back

to the social control of the ordinary squire over his tenants and villagers. It

manifested itself in the inevitability with which they followed his religion and

politics; in the customary treats and charity for the loyal and deserving, and the

harsh treatment of poor strangers, vagrants and poachers; and in the continual

oversight of the morals and behaviour of all the inhabitants. It can be found

crystallized in a phrase, written by a steward to a substantial farmer: ‘For a

S. and B.Webb, English Local Government: The Parish and the County (1906), pp. 104–

45, 152–63, 550–6, The Manor and the Borough (1908), chaps. viii and ix, and Statutory

Authorities for Special Purposes (1922), pp. 242–3; ‘Report of General Meeting of

Justices of Berkshire at Pelican Inn, Speenhamland, 11 May 1795’, in A.E.Bland et al.,

English Economic History: Select Documents (1914), p. 655; P.P., 1834, XXVII, Report

of Poor Law Commission, p. 384A.

D.Defoe, The Poor Man’s Plea in relation to…a Reformation of Manners (1703), p. 129.

THE OLD SOCIETY 35

tenant to purchase on his own account premises within his landlord’s Estate

without any previous intimation to his Landlord that they were on sale is not a

fair and upright proceeding, and one which Mr. Littleton desires me to say he

will not submit to. He will require you to give up the purchase.’

Still more fundamentally, in the process by which society renewed itself in

each generation property was by far the most important factor, and so in a sense

was the architect of the social structure. Inheritance was the highroad to estate,

which by deliberate policy rather than the law of primogeniture, passed to the

eldest son; an estate was a family concern, and the inheritor usually a life-tenant

under a strict settlement, whose function was to hold the land together from one

generation to the next, and use it as a base from which to launch portioned

younger sons and dowried daughters into brilliant careers and marriages, as well

as provide for his own and his father’s widows.

Where inheritance failed, a

lucky marriage might provide: Johnson’s attorney friend Sir John Hawkins

married a ‘fortune’, as did Lieutenant Henry Sneyd, the sixth son of the

Staffordshire squire, because her aunt liked his face, while the 4th Duke of

Devonshire’s younger son married the Earl of Northumberland’s heiress.

But

such marriages were for the few, and most younger sons had to seek a living,

backed by family influence and funds, in government service, the professions or

in business. The 4th Duke of Devonshire left each of his two younger sons  1,

000 a year to go into politics. Squire Ralph Sneyd gave his six younger sons

capital sums of  1,000: two went into the Church, two into the Army, one into

the Navy, and one into the East India Company’s service. Squire John Egerton’s

two younger sons were apprenticed to merchants in Venice and Holland.

All such launchings cost considerable sums, and younger sons of landowners

competed with and raised the rates for all the sons of the middle ranks. The

education of a lawyer or a clergyman cost several hundreds of pounds, and might

be wasted without further expenditure on articles or an advowson. Army

commissions in 1765 cost from  400 for an ensign to  3,500 for a lieutenant-

colonel.

Apprenticeship varied in cost with the trade, the place, and the standing

W.Marshall, On the Landed Property of England (1804), p. 1.

Habakkuk, ‘England’, loc. cit. p. 4.

Staffs. C.R.O., Hatherton Papers, D260/M/E, Steward’s Letter Book, f. 159, H.Davison

to Mr. Woodward, n.d. [February 1925]; my italics.

H.J.Habakkuk, ‘Marriage Settlements in the 18th Century’, Trans. R.H.S., 1950, XXXII.

15–20.

D.N.B., XXV. 220f.; John Rylands Library, Sneyd Papers (now transferred to Keele

University), Early Correspondence, Henry Sneyd to Ralph Sneyd, 22 December [1780s];

Complete Peerage, II. 433–4.

Cavendish Muniments, Accounts of Trustees for Lords Richard and George Henry

Cavendish; Sneyd Papers, Col. Walter Sneyd’s Estate Accounts, 1798– 1800; Burke’s

Landed Gentry (1937), pp. 2091–2; W.H.Chaloner, ‘The Egertons in Italy and the

Netherlands, 1729–44’, Bulletin of John Rylands Library, 1949–50, XXXII. 157–70.

36 THE OLD SOCIETY

of the master: in London in 1747 from  5– 10 for a hatter, breeches-maker,

millwright or potter to  50– 300 for a merchant or banker.

A Sussex gentleman

gave  180 with his son in 1713 to a London citizen and grocer; a Cheshire widow

 420 with her son in 1785 to a London surgeon; a Durham coalowner  600 with

his son in 1755 to a London banker.

Besides education or apprenticeship,

property or influence was needed for setting up in the professions or trade, in

1747 the ‘Sums necessary to set up as Master’ ranged from  50– 200 for a

breeches-maker, cutler, millwright or pinmaker, to ‘ 20,000 ad lib.’ for a banker,

and ‘Unlimited’ for an overseas merchant or insurance underwriter.

So finely

adjusted to each status was the cost of acquiring it.

After property, and emanating from it, the most important factor in

determining status was patronage. The late Sir Lewis Namier has made familiar

the uses of eighteenth-century political patronage: appointments to Court and

government offices, sinecures and pensions, contracts and agencies, bishoprics

and prebendary stalls, tidewaiterships and excise posts, all geared to the

maintenance of a parliamentary majority.

Government patronage was no

isolated phenomenon, however, but the visible topgrowth of a plant whose roots

and branches ramified throughout society, the political aspect of a personal

system of recruitment which operated at every level and served to articulate the

rigidities of a structure based on property. If government patronage controlled

the more lucrative, private patronage controlled the more numerous

appointments: most church-livings, salaried county, borough and parish offices,

merchants’ and lawyers’ clerks, estate agents, chaplains, secretaries, tutors and

governesses, and the whole pyramid of domestic service, sometimes extending to

the very labourers on the estate or home farm. Since there was no central organ or

policy of government appointments, and no distinction between the official and

the personal influence of individual ministers and their subordinates, public and

private patronage were dovetailed at many points. At all levels, patronage, the

system of personal selection from amongst one’s kinsmen and connections, was

the instrument by which property influenced recruitment to those positions in

society which were not determined by property alone.

When a man of rank and property had an appointment to make or influence,

whether a Clerk of the Pells or footman, a bishop or governess, a colonial

E.Robson, ‘Purchase and Promotion in the British Army in the 18th Century’, History,

1951 XXXVI. 59.

R.Campbell, The London Tradesman (1747), pp. 331f.

Dorothy Marshall, English People in the 18th Century (1956), p. 119; Cheshire C.R.O.,

Wilson Papers, MTD/24/1, Indenture between Thomas Wilson and William Long,

surgeon, 1 December 1785; E.Hughes, North Country Life in the 18th Century (Oxford,

1952, 1965), I. 107.

Campbell, loc. at.

Namier, op. cit., I. 164–82.

THE OLD SOCIETY 37

governor or workhouse master, an army contractor or a scullery maid, a Treasury

agent or an insurance clerk, he looked first, and was expected and actively

solicited to look, amongst his ‘friends’. This was neither surreptitious nor shame-

faced, but a matter of pride and principle. Sir Robert Walpole ‘frankly owned that

while he was in employment, he had endeavoured to serve his friends and

relations; than which, in his opinion, nothing was more reasonable, or more

just.’

Addison, the only man to rise by literary patronage to be Secretary of State

and marry a Countess, was

persuaded that there are few men of generous principles who would seek

after great places, were it not rather to have an opportunity of obliging

their particular friends, or those whom they look upon as men of worth,

than to procure wealth and honour for themselves. To an honest mind the

best perquisites of a place are the advantages it gives a man of doing good.

Edward Gibbon assumed the common motive for going into Parliament to be ‘to

acquire a title the most glorious of any in a free country, and to employ the

weight and consideration it gives in the service of one’s friends’.

As clearly as

by his property, a man’s position in society was measured by the number of

‘friends’ he could ‘oblige’.

Who were one’s friends? They were all those who expected or, reciprocally,

from whom one could expect the benefits of patronage. They were first of all

one’s nearest relations. Richardson’s Pamela, the daughter significantly of her

master’s tenant, does not just go home to her parents, but ‘to her friends’. Mrs.

Malaprop in The Rivals exhorts her niece to take ‘a husband of your friends’

choosing’, meaning her own. The father of John Millar, the Glasgow Professor

of Law, ‘was not inflexible in his determination, so that with little opposition

from his friends, Mr. Millar was allowed to transfer his attention from the Pulpit

to the Bar.’

William Wright in The Complete Tradesman argued the

apprentice’s right to the advantages ‘for which he served his time, and, perhaps,

for which his friends gave a considerable sum of money with him.’

Defoe,

proposing a university as ‘the way to make London the most flourishing city in

the Universe’, suggested that the ‘pupils’ could lie and diet ‘at home, under the

eye of their friends’.

Walpole procured for his three sons sinecures in the Exchequer totalling  13,

400 a year. Rutland influence helped the 3rd Duke’s grandson, Charles Manners-

Sutton, brother of an Irish Lord Chancellor and favourite of the Royal family, to

become in rapid succession between 1791 and 1805 Dean of Peterborough,

Plumb, Walpole, I. 247–8.

P.H.B.O.Smithers, Life of Joseph Addison (1954), p. 122.

Private Letters of Edward Gibbon (ed. R.E.Prothero, 1896), I. 24; Namier op. cit., I. 23.

38 THE OLD SOCIETY

Bishop of Norwich, Dean of Windsor, and Archbishop of Canterbury. In the

Navy, where commissions could not be purchased, Admiral Rodney’s son during

1780 advanced between the ages of 15 and 16 through all the ranks from

midshipman to captain. The clerical sons of the Sneyd family were preferred to

the family livings of Keele and Wolstanton. John Powell, a Bristol merchant,

apprenticed all his five sons to himself. Thomas Stubbs, a farmer on the Sneyd

estate, employed his kinsman William Stubbs, ‘a servant’, whom he left  40 in

his will.

They were, secondly, the members of one’s wider family or household, and by

extension their relations. Bernard Edward Howard, squire of Glossop and later

Duke of Norfolk, gave his agent’s sons a beneficial lease to develop one of the

early cotton mills.

Lord Moira, friend of the Prince Regent, later Governor of

India and Marquess of Hastings, presented his chaplain and children’s tutor, the

Rev. John Dalby, the son of his attorney, to the livings of Belton and Castle

Donington, and procured him two more in the Lord Chancellor’s gift.

They were, thirdly, one’s tenants and villagers. The same Lord Moira

discovered and educated a local farmer’s son with a gift for languages, the

orientalist John Shakespeare, and helped him to professorships at the East India

colleges at Marlow and Addiscombe. The squire of Charlton, Wiltshire, started

Stephen Duck, the ‘thresher-poet’, on the career which led him to be Yeoman of

the Guard, Keeper of the Queen’s Library at Richmond, Royal Preacher at Kew,

Rector of Byfleet and, sad to relate, to suicide. The cobbler’s son, James Mill,

was educated in exchange for tuition of the daughter of the laird, Sir John Stuart,

after whom he named his famous son.

They were, fourthly, one’s political helpers, associates and supporters. Political

patronage, the shameless begging for ‘place’ for one’s relative, supporters and

constituents, is too well-known to need much illustration. Amongst an

embarrassment of examples we might instance John Calcraft, son of the Duke of

Rutland’s Grantham election agent, who was procured a post in the Paymaster’s

office, and under the further patronage of Henry Fox became agent for half the

regiments in the army, one of the principal channels for the purchase of

J.Craig, ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author’, prefixed to Millar,

Distinction of Ranks, p. vi.

W.Wright, The Complete Tradesman; or a Guide in the Several Parts and Progressions

of Trade (Dublin, 1787), p. 3.

D.Defoe, Angusta Triumphans, or the Way to make London the most Flourishing City in

the Universe (1841 ed.), p. 5.

Habakkuk, ‘England’, loc. cit., p. 7; D.N.B., XXXVI. 57f.; A.S.Turberville, ed.,

Johnson’s England (Oxford, 1952), I. 58; Burke’s Landed Gentry, pp. 2091–2;

W.E.Minchinton, ‘The Merchants in England in the 18th Century’, in The Entrepreneur

(Economic History Society, Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 22; Sneyd Papers, Thomas

Stubb’s Notebook, 1755–88.

THE OLD SOCIETY 39

commissions, and the founder of a landed and parliamentary family at Wareham,

Dorset.

They included, finally, almost anyone amongst one’s acquaintances in whom

one recognized special merit or services to oneself. Lord Moira obtained the

Admiralty registrarship at Bermuda for his friend, the poet Thomas Moore, who

sailed there in 1803 before discovering it was a sinecure.

Through their

influence with the trustees of the Duke of Hamilton, Adam Smith and Lord

Kames obtained the Glasgow chair of law for Smith’s pupil John Millar. Lord

Bagot took James Wyatt to Italy as travelling companion to study Italian

architecture. Charles Abbott, later Speaker of the Commons and Lord

Colchester, himself a beneficiary of patronage in the shape of the clerkship of the

rules in the Court of King’s Bench at  2,700 a year, made the statistician, John

Rickman, his secretary, out of which partnership the first Census Act emerged,

and the clerkship of the Commons from which Rickman supervised the first four

Censuses.

Indeed, what later ages considered corruption was, in the absence of

impersonal examination and selection procedures, the inevitable method of

recruitment, and patronage, in the midst of so much self-seeking, has some notable

successes to its credit. Through William Hamilton and Lord Rockingham it

launched Edmund Burke into politics, though through him it also promoted his

dubious kinsman Will Burke. Through Burke’s friend William Windham it gave

Cobbett his anti-Jacobin start in journalism.

Through the Duke of Buccleuch it

provided Adam Smith with the leisure to write The Wealth of Nations, and

through Thomas Wedgwood enabled Coleridge to become one of the ‘two

seminal minds’ of the nineteenth century.

It succoured Hobbes, Locke,

Addison, Swift, Matthew Prior and, less effectively, Defoe, and even provided

that scourge of patrons, Samuel Johnson, with a government pension. In the old

society the only alternative for ambition to inheriting, marrying or making a

T.W.Ellison, ‘Glossop Dale Reminiscences’, Glossop Advertizer, 28 December 1935 et

seq.

J.M.Lee, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Market Town: Castle Donington in the 19th Century’,

Trans. Leicestershire Arch, and Hist. Soc., 1956, XXXII. 65–9.

D.N.B., LI. 345f.; R.G.Furnivall, ‘Stephen Duck, the Wiltshire Phenomenon, 1705–56’,

Cambridge Journal, 1953, VI. 8f.; A.Bain, Life of James Mill (1882), pp. 12–13.

E.Hughes, ‘The Professions in the 18th Century’, Durham University Journal, 1952,

XIII. 51; D.N.B., VIII. 235–6, 236f.

40 THE OLD SOCIETY

fortune by extraordinary endeavour in business or at the Bar was to obtain the

friendship of those already in possession of property and influence.

Patronage, however, was more than a device for filling jobs, fostering talent,

and providing pensions for the deserving and the undeserving. In the mesh of

continuing loyalties of which appointments were the outward sign, patronage

brings us very close to the inner structure of the old society. Hierarchy inhered

not so much in the fortuitous juxtaposition of degree above degree, rank upon

rank, status over status, as in the permanent vertical links which, rather than the

horizontal solidarities of class, bound society together. ‘Vertical friendship’, a

durable two-way relationship between patrons and clients permeating the whole

of society, was a social nexus peculiar to the old society, less formal and

inescapable than feudal homage, more personal and comprehensive than the

contractual, employment relationships of capitalist ‘Cash Payment’. For those

who lived within its embrace it was so much an integral part of the texture of life

that they had no name for it save ‘friendship’.

In the Elizabethan springtime of patronage, Francis Bacon had expressed its

essence: ‘There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals…

that that is, is between superior and inferior, whose fortunes may comprehend the

one the other.’

In that age of glittering courtiers and competing favourites,

patronage shaped society into a complex solar system, planet around planet,

moon around moon, all revolving about the sun and centre of their world, the

Queen herself. Bacon just managed to extricate himself in time from the collision

of two such satellite systems, those of Essex and the Cecils. By the eighteenth

century the Court counted for less and the Cabinet for more, and the distribution

of rewards depended more on the horse-trading of an oligarchy than on the

arbitrary whim of royal favour, but the system was essentially the same. Indeed,

patronage was the middle term between feudal homage and capitalist cash nexus.

Though it may seem a far cry from the overmighty subjects and armed retainers

of fifteenth-century ‘bastard feudalism’ (so different in content and meaning from

its legitimate parent) and the borough-mongering Whig magnates and their

‘friends’ of the eighteenth, there is a clear line of descent from the one to the

other. In both, the important social bonds were the chains of informal vertical

loyalty converging at the top in the struggles for power of great landlords.

In this wider sense the relationship of patronage was the module of which the

social structure was built. It was allpervading, from Court and Cabinet to the

Lee, loc. cit.; D.N.B., XXXVIII. 340f.: in 1817 he found that the sinecure was not

without care, when his deputy defalcated in the sum of  6,000, and Moore had to flee to

the Continent to avoid the debtors’ prison.

Craig, in Millar, Distinction of Ranks, p. vi; D.N.B., XLVIII. 264f., LXIII. 178f.

D.N.B., VII. 345f., 369f.; W.B.Pemberton, William Cobbett (1949), p. 38.

A.Gray, Adam Smith (Historical Association, 1948), p. 6; D.N.B., XI. 302f., LX. 146f.

F.Bacon, ‘Of Followers and Friends’, in Works (ed. B.Montague, 1825), I. 164.

THE OLD SOCIETY 41

parish poor. The political parties which manipulated majorities in the Cabinet

and House of Commons were groupings of ‘friends’ around leading aristocratic

patrons, held together by the hope and expectation of ‘place’. As a client wrote to

the Duke of Newcastle, ‘Protection is due to attachment, and…sentiments of

friendship to be reall and lasting must be reciprocall.’

The commercial and

industrial ‘interests’ which lobbied them for support were similar groups

clustering round leading figures like Sir Josiah Child, Governor Pitt, Samuel

Whitbread, Josiah Wedgwood, or Samuel Garbett.

Both ‘party’ and ‘interest’

based their strength on the local, personal prestige and influence of their

members, the politicians amongst their neighbours and tenants in the counties

and boroughs, the merchants and industrialists amongst their suppliers,

customers and economic dependants in the ports, market towns, and industrial

villages.

At the lowest level even the poor were drawn into the system: the

‘respectable’, those for whom powerful friends, squire, parson or prominent

townsman or parishioner would vouch, had first access to local charities. Even

the paupers were those acknowledged by ‘the gentlemen of the parish’ as their

own— an acknowledgement merely formalized by the Settlement Act of 1662.

Only the poor stranger, the vagrant, the miscreant, the ‘masterless man’, without

a friend to speak for him, was whipped and turned away. Indeed, criminal justice

itself was modified, not to say distorted, by the influence of property and

patronage. Though the penal code was savage and enjoined the death penalty for

a wide range of offences, propertied opinion could in particular cases reduce the

value of property involved and so reduce the penalty; the word of a powerful

friend could commute a death sentence to transportation or imprisonment; and

genteel, wealthy or influential prisoners could transform their punishment into a

pleasant and profitable escapade: Leigh Hunt received his friends in his private

garden, or in the cell he had had papered with a ‘trellis of roses’, while the poor

wretches rotted in the dungeons below.

The personal, face-to-face relationships of patronage, unlike the impersonal

solidarities of class, could only exist in a society distributed in small units, a

society of villages and small towns in which everyone knew everyone else. As

we shall see, it was in the expanding towns that a new class society was to

outgrow the personal bonds of the old society. Meanwhile, there was by modern

standards only one great city in pre-industrial Britain, and although London was

in many respects a forcing-ground of many features of modern society—it was,

for example, almost the only place where criminals, prostitutes and other ne’er-

dowells extruded by their own small communities could find anonymity—it was

nevertheless the focal centre of the personal system of social relationships. The

Cf. J.H.Hexter, ‘A New Framework for Social History’, J.Ec.H., 1955, XV.

Hans Stanley to Newcastle, 26 June 1757; Namier, op. cit., I. 199.

Cf. Pares, loc. cit. ; S.H.Beer, Modern British Politics (1965), chap. i.

42 THE OLD SOCIETY

higher one’s place in the mesh of vertical loyalties, the wider were one’s range

of connections. ‘County society’ was a real entity, a comparatively small, face-to-

face group of personal acquaintances. So too at the top was metropolitan society:

London in ‘the Season’ was the literal meeting place of the only real ‘class’, the

finite group of personal friends, rivals, acquaintances and enemies who made up

the comparatively small informal aristocracy of landed gentlemen, peers or

commoners, in whom the chains of patronage, ‘friendship’, or connection

converged.

Patronage, then, was the other face of property, and brings us back to that first

principle on which the old society was based. For Locke, the philosopher par

excellence of the old society, it was the raison d’être of government and of civil

society itself: ‘The great and chief end…of men uniting into commonwealths,

and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.’

That a government of landowners should have welcomed such a philosophical

defence of their interest is not surprising, but it does not explain how they came

to have so extraordinary and sophisticated an interest to defend. As David Hume

remarked, ‘though men be much governed by interest; yet even interest itself,

and all human affairs, are entirely governed by opinion.’

The key to Locke, and

therefore to eighteenth-century society, lies in the peculiar concept of absolute

property bequeathed to them by history.

Whereas the medieval concept of property, especially in land, was contingent,

conditional, circumscribed, and subject to the specific claims of God, the

Church, the king, the inferior tenants, and the poor, the eighteenth-century

concept was absolute, categorical, unconditional; and, whether based with

Locke, Blackstone and Adam Smith on a natural right anterior to society, or with

Hume, Paley and Bentham on the principle of utility, it was secure from the envy

of the poor and the covetousness of kings. Property gave to the owner the right to

dispose of it exactly as he wished, short of actual fraud or physical injury to

others. As the Dean of Westminster put it in 1798: ‘Riches, you may think, are

abused; but have not the rich a right over their own wealth, to use it or abuse it?

A man may be vicious, or a prodigal, or a fool; but if he injures himself only, he

is accountable to himself only, to his family or to God.’

But ‘May I not do what

I will with mine own?’ is not a simple common-sense but a highly sophisticated

notion, especially when ‘mine own’ is private land on which all mankind, in

William Marshall’s phrase, must ‘live, and move, and have its being’.

This notion was not invented by Locke. ‘The language thinks for us,’ says

Coleridge. Locke merely worked out, for a specific political purpose (the

justification of the Whig view of government in the Exclusion Crisis of 1680,

though it served admirably as an apology for the 1688 Revolution

), the

philosophical implications of the concept of absolute property as it had evolved

Blackwood’s, 1830, XXVII. 390.

J.Locke, Two Treatises of Civil Government (Everyman, 1955), p. 180.

THE OLD SOCIETY 43