Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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over the preceding three centuries. It is fully complete as early as 1644, in an

anonymous pamphlet which gives the clue to its origin: let us, it says, ‘who are

English subjects…blesse God for his goodness who hath…made us absolute

proprietors of what we enjoy, so that our lives, liberties and estates, doe not

depend upon, nor are subject to, the sole breath or arbitrary will of our

Soveraigne.’

For the concept finally rose to supremacy with the victory of the

landowners over the Crown, the last stage of the transformation of medieval

lordship into modern ownership of the land. Feudal lordship was both something

more and something less than the ownership of the land: it was a mere estate

upon the land, a claim upon the fruits of the soil and the allegiance of its

occupiers, subject to and limited by the parallel claims of royal overlord, church,

and sub-tenants. Not by philosophical argument but by a political, legal and

sometimes physical struggle lasting from the high middle ages until the

seventeenth century, the English landowners shook off the claims of crown,

church and peasants, and transformed lordship into ownership.

The struggle with the peasants began with a defeat for the landlords. The

disappearance of serfdom by the commutation of labour services was a

compromise forced on the landlords by the accident of late medieval population

decline, before and after the Black Death. But the copyholders who succeeded

the serfs thereby lost in most cases their hold on the land. When population and

prices rose again in the Tudor period their very freedom made them vulnerable,

and they, or rather their families when they died and their copyholds fell in, were

evicted in large numbers to make room for larger tenants farming for the market.

Some peasants gained by the change: the larger and more prosperous became

new-style ‘farmers’ paying a ‘farm’ or commercial rent for what had been several

peasant holdings; while the freeholders and other secure tenants did best of all,

as inflation rendered their fixed rents negligible and turned freehold into virtual

ownership. But the rest were squeezed out by enclosure and the ‘engrossing of

farms’ to become the more or less landless proletariat of agricultural labourers

and rural industrial workers noticed above. On all except freehold land the

manorial lords were left as residuary owners.

The defeat of the Church was less complete but no less decisive. Lay

patronage of bishoprics and livings had already in the middle ages subordinated

the clergy to a large measure of lay control. In the sixteenth century the Crown

D.Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (ed. T.H.Green and T.H. Grose, 1875),

I. 125.

Cf. W.P.Larkin, Property in the 18th Century, with Special Reference to England and

Locke (Cork, 1930); cf. also C.B.Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive

Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962), which appeared after the original draft of

this chapter was written, and has not affected the views or the terminology presented here.

W.Vincent, Sermons (ed. R.Nares, 1817), I. 281f.; Larkin, op. cit. p. 105.

Cf. M.W.Cranston, John Locke (1957), pp. 206–8.

44 THE OLD SOCIETY

and the landlords, acting together as King-in-Parliament, engulfed the Church

and by the real Tudor revolution in government replaced clerical statesmen and

administrators by laymen, transformed the hierarchy into an arm of the State, and

transferred a large part of the Church’s lands, tithes and advowsons from clerical

to lay ownership. So thorough was the victory that all that remained was to decide

what sort of a Church it should be, and which of the aggressors, King or

Parliament, should control it. These questions were to be decided by a further

struggle, between the landlords and the Crown. Meanwhile the outcome of that

further struggle was prejudiced if not determined by the poverty of the Crown,

and the consequent redistribution of the bulk of the monastic and other Church

lands to families who, whatever their provenance, formed the backbone of the

nobility and gentry of the following centuries.

Most singular of all in contemporary Europe, the landlords out-manoeuvred,

defeated and tamed the Crown without either (permanently) abolishing it or

weakening the international standing of the kingdom. Almost from the

establishment of feudalism their main aim became to escape its burdens. By the

opening of the seventeenth century they could grant, sell, let or bequeath the land

at will, subject only to the fiscal annoyances of wardship and marriage. These

vestiges of feudal tenure, the subject of the abortive Great Contract of 1610,

were abolished in 1645, and the abolition was confirmed at the Restoration,

when the Crown was compensated by an excise on beer, paid mainly by non-

landowners.

The crucial phase of this third struggle, however, can be pinned

down to the year 1641, when the landlords, by abolishing the prerogative courts,

stripped the Crown of all the instruments by which it might govern without their

aid, approval and consent. That decision was upheld by a sufficient fraction of

them on the battlefield, and survived the Restoration, to be amply confirmed at

the Revolution. The timely publication of Locke’s Treatises of Civil Government

in 1690 celebrates the final triumph of that concept of absolute, unfettered

ownership of their estates for which the landlords had fought and won.

England’s Monarch, or a Conviction and Refutation of those False Principles… of

Albericus (1644); Larkin, op. cit. p. 52.

Cf. R.H.Tawney, The Agrarian Problem of the 16th Century (1912).

Cf. J.H.Round, Family Origins (1930), p. 22; James Harrington, The Commonwealth of

Oceana (1656); R.H.Tawney, ‘The Rise of the Gentry, 1558– 1640’, Ec.H.R., 1941, XI;

H.R.Trevor-Roper, The Gentry, 1540–1640 (Ec.H.R Supplement I, 1953), and the whole

‘gentry’ controversy—for sources see Lawrence Stone, Social Change and Revolution in

England, 1540–1640 (1965), pp. 179–83.

Cf. a whole literature of 19th-century land reform, including W.Cobbett, Legacy to

Labourers (1834), letter ii; Anti-Corn Law League Tract No. 1: A Plea for the Total and

Immediate Repeal of the Corn Laws; with remarks on the Land Tax Fraud (1841); Anti-

Corn Law League, The Constitutional Right to a Revision of the Land Tax (1842);

J.S.Mill, Speech on Land Tenure Reform, 15 May 1871, Dissertations and Discussions

(1875), IV. 251f.

THE OLD SOCIETY 45

The implications of the concept were far-reaching. For Locke, as for the

pamphleteer of 1644, property embraced life and liberty as well as estate, and if

the old society held the first two cheap when they offended against the third, the

fact that it entrusted their defence to tangible property was a gain in citizenship

rights even for non-landowners against the arbitrary State.

Even religion came

within its embrace, to the benefit of toleration: A Dissenter’s Plea, about 1790,

claimed religion as ‘the unalienated property of every individual, for which he is

answerable to God alone’.

But the most important implication was the social

ideal which the concept supported. Emphasizing as it did the owner’s right to the

enjoyment of his property rather than his function as, say, an investor or

entrepreneur, its whole weight went to support the ideal of the leisured

gentleman. The landowner was distinguished from the rest not so much by the

size of his income as by its unearned character; and the rest paid him the

unstinted tribute of admiration, envy and emulation. For the leisured gentleman

was the ideal at which the whole society aimed, and by which it measured its

happiness and ambitions.

Leisure, it goes without saying, did not necessarily mean idleness, although

the right to be idle if one so wished was an integral part of the concept. It meant

strictly the freedom to pursue any interest, taste or pleasure consonant with the

honour of a gentleman, without the further need to demean oneself by earning a

living. Social emulation had, as we have seen, stretched the notion of a

gentleman to cover, if not quite ‘all… who maintain themselves without manual

labour’, at least a wide variety of the higher professions and occupations. But

clergymen, lawyers, physicians, bankers and overseas merchants knew, and

showed by their ambitions that they knew, that the only worthwhile thing to be in

the old society was a completely leisured—which in effect meant landed—

gentleman. For, with few exceptions, only the landowners were, in a phrase of

Bishop Sprat’s to describe the majority of the Royal Society, ‘gentlemen, free

and unconfined’.

And only those who were so had the time and opportunity to

enjoy to the full the pursuits of gentlemen.

What were the pursuits of gentlemen? There was scarcely an unpaid activity

pleasurable or useful in which gentlemen were not prominent as patrons or

protagonists. The Squire Westerns and Osbaldestons lived for the pleasures of

the table and the hunting field, the Horace Walpoles, Lord Herveys and Creeveys

for political gossip and the polite social round, the Lord Seftons, Sir Francis

Dashwoods and Lord Hertfords for gambling, irreligion or vice unadorned.

Others excelled in more admirable spheres: the Earl of Leicester, Thomas Coke

and the Duke of Bedford in agricultural improvement, the Duke of Bridgewater,

Sir Nigel Gresley or the Ayrshire laird John Loudon Macadam in transport

undertakings, the Duke of Chandos in commercial investment, Sir George

Cf. T.H.Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (1950), pp. 14–20.

G.Walker, A Dissenter’s Plea [c. 1790]. p. 3; Henriques, op. cit., p. 21.

46 THE OLD SOCIETY

Cayley in aeronautics, the Earl of Burlington and Cork in architecture, the third

Earl of Shaftesbury in philosophy, Lord Dartmouth and Lady Huntingdon in

religious enthusiasm, Robert Boyle, Sir Joseph Banks or Henry Cavendish in

science, Edward Gibbon in history, Sir John Hawkins in musicology, Byron,

Shelley, and Beckford in literature, and so on. But the one overriding pursuit of

landed gentlemen was government. From the squire who was the unofficial

arbiter of village affairs through the J.P. at Quarter Sessions and the M.P. in the

Commons to the House of Lords and the Cabinet, government was the right,

privilege and responsibility of the landed gentlemen who, besides being the only

nation-wide class in that otherwise classless society, were in the most literal

sense the ruling class.

A DYNAMIC SOCIETY

The old society was, finally, an open aristocracy. The triumph of the English

landowners was gained at a price which few oligarchies have been willing to pay.

Not only were they willing to tax themselves, in land and luxury taxes, to defend

themselves from counter-revolution and, in poor rates, to buy internal peace from

those whose lives they had made insecure. They paid for their unique conception

of property, for the freedom to do what they would with their own, by opening

their ranks to all who could acquire the one necessary qualification, the purchase-

price of an estate. From the dawning of the old society with the decline of

feudalism and serfdom in the fourteenth century (though there are traces of it as

far back as the reign of Henry I) there began that familiar rise of new men into the

gentry and nobility which became the most distinctive feature of English

History.

‘Apart from fortunate marriages, the leading English families have mainly

owed their rise to three great sources: successful trade; the law; and the spoils of

monastic houses,’ wrote the doyen of genealogists, J.H.Round.

If for the last we

substitute royal service, for which monastic spoils were merely one kind of

reward, this was true for the whole life of the old society. The upflow of new

men began in the two centuries or rather more before the Reformation, with the

rise of merchants like Sir William de la Pole of Hull, Sir John de Pulteney and

Sir Thomas Boleyn of London, or, on a humbler level, William Sneyd of

Chester; of judges like Sir William Howard, Sir John Cavendish, William Paston,

Thomas Littleton, or Sir Robert Brudenell; and royal servants like Sir Thomas

Tresham, the Yorkist Speaker of the Commons, Sir John Throckmorton, under-

treasurer of England in 1440, Edmund Dudley, Henry VII’s unpopular tax-

gatherer, or John Russell, the obscure Devon squire whose chance encounter as

interpreter to the landfallen King and Queen of Spain led to Whitehall and the

Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (1667), p. 67.

THE OLD SOCIETY 47

earldom of Bedford.

The process is complicated because many families had

more than one rise: first into landholding as such and, later and sometimes

through a younger son, into the substantial estate which might then or later

qualify for a peerage. The first rise might come through good peasant husbandry

and laying field to field, as did the early Pastons, Sneyds, and the Spencers of

Althorp, and then, perhaps, by launching a son into law or trade. The second was

most commonly through royal service, like the Tudor Cavendishes, Cecils, and

Throckmortons.

The upflow became spectacular between the Reformation and the Civil War,

when profit inflation, the rapid expansion of trade and industry, the enormous

growth of government administration and the share of the laity in it, and the brisk

market in Crown and monastic lands increased both the opportunities and the

rewards. It was in that critical century that the landowners, noble and common,

consolidated their defeat of the Church and the peasants, and acquired the

political means and economic sinews to defeat the Crown. But whether or not

there was a rise of the gentry as a social group, there can be no doubt about the

rise of larger numbers of individual families into the gentry, and from the gentry

into the nobility, which, in spite of defunct peerages, was almost trebled to

accommodate them. To mention only the famous, new families were founded by

merchants, financiers and industrialists like Alderman Cokayne, Sir William

Craven, Baptist Hicks and Paul Bayning, all of whose sons became peers, Lionel

Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, Sir Edward Osborne, ancestor of the dukes of

Leeds, the German paper-maker, Sir John Spilman, and the clothiers Thomas

Cony, the grandfather of Baron Lexington, and Alexander Langford, whose

descendant Anne Hyde became the mother of Queens Mary II and Anne; by

judges like Sir Edward Montagu and his younger son Henry, ancestors

respectively of the Earls of Cardigan and the earls and dukes of Manchester, Sir

Thomas Egerton, ancestor of the earls and dukes of Bridge water, or the great Sir

Edward Coke, ancestor of the earls of Leicester; but above all by the royal

officials and favourites who enjoyed so large a share of the monastic lands: Sir

William Cavendish, ancestor of the dukes of Newcastle and of Devonshire, Sir

Thomas Heneage, ancestor of the Finches, earls of Nottingham, the two Cecils,

Burleigh and his younger son Sir Robert, ancestors of the earls of Exeter and the

marquesses of Salisbury, and the notorious George Villiers, Duke of

Buckingham, founder of the ubiquitous ‘Villiers connection’. And the catalogue

could be greatly extended.

Op. cit. p. 22.

The references for ‘new men’ are too numerous to be cited in full. The bulk of them can

be found in standard reference works, including D.N.B., Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage

and Landed Gentry, The Complete Peerage, and so on.

Cf. Trevor-Roper, op. cit., pp. 8f.; Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–

1641 (Oxford, 1965).

48 THE OLD SOCIETY

After the Restoration the spectacular prizes were reserved for the few, like

Walpole, Marlborough, or ‘Diamond’ Pitt, governor of Madras, the first two

significantly from within the landed order. But if the emphasis at the highest

level had switched from the rise to the consolidation of the great families,

the

road to the gentry was now a beaten one, with any number of new gates of

access, and a byword to the very journalists:

Trade is so far here from being inconsistent with a gentleman, that, in

short, trade in England makes gentlemen, and has peopled this nation with

gentlemen…; for, after a generation or two, the tradesmen’s children, or at

least their grandchildren, come to be as good gentlemen, statesmen,

parliamentmen, privy counsellors, judges, bishops and noblemen as those

of the highest birth and most ancient families.

The familiar paths were still open for merchants and industrialists like Sir Josiah

Child, Sir James Bateman and Sir George Wombwell, chairman of the East India

Company, Paul Medway the Essex clothier, Sir George Dashwood the London

brewer, William Stone the Sheffield cutler, whose ‘grandfather was a common

hammerman’, the paper-making Portals of Hampshire and Whatmans of Kent, or

the Birmingham ‘Japanner to the Queen’, Henry Clay; for lawyers from Lords

Macclesfield, Hardwicke and the two Camdens down to the Scott brothers Eldon

and Stowell, and Thurlow, Erskine and Ellenborough; and for government

officials and client-politicians like the Calcrafts, the army agents mentioned

above, Charles Abbott, Lord Chichester, or Henry Addington, Lord Sidmouth.

Now there rose, however, a host of substantial squires and minor peers from a

great variety of occupations: bankers like the Hoares, Childs, Smiths, or

Thorntons; government contractors and agents like Sir Lawrence Dundas, Earl of

Zetland, and John Henniker, who became an Irish peer; nabobs—in addition to

‘Diamond’ Pitt, ancestor of the earls of Londonderry as well as of Chatham—

like Henry Vansittart, father of Lord Bexley (who rose still further as Chancellor

of the Exchequer), and Robert, Baron Clive; mere attorneys like Sir Joseph

Banks’s grandfather and his predecessor Thomas Wright of Sheffield, or

Walpole’s friend Philip Case of King’s Lynn, who left large estates in Norfolk

and  100,000 in the funds; and mere inland traders like the Wilberforces of

Beverley, the London booksellers who established J.H.Round’s ancestors at

Birch Hall, Essex, or Joseph Hague of Glossop, the travelling packman who

came home to buy Park Hall at Hayfield. Even domestic service could boast its new

landed gentry, like Mr. Poynter, the Duke of Kingston’s master of horse, who

purchased an estate of  200 a year and ‘seven miles of manor for sporting’, Mr.

Rogers, the stable-boy who rose to be Lord Monson’s steward and ‘a very great

Cf. H.J.Habakkuk, ‘English Landownership, 1680–1740’, Ec.H.R., 1939–40, X. 2f.

D.Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (1726), p. 376.

THE OLD SOCIETY 49

landholder’, or Henry Isherwood, M.P., son of an innservant who prospered as a

brewer. The list could be indefinitely extended, but it is long enough to show

how open by the eighteenth century was the door to the landed oligarchy.

Many of these new men were themselves younger sons striving to outdo their

elder brothers. For the English landowners jealously preserved one principle of

feudal lordship, that of primogeniture. Neither the land, the title nor the status of

the father normally descended to the younger sons, who were sent out into the

world to fend for themselves. The consequences for English society were

profound. The landed gentry, unlike the Continental minor aristocracies, the

French petite noblesse, the Spanish hidalgos, the German junkers, and so on,

were not impoverished by a demographic burden of proud penury and elegant

unemployment or driven into compulsory service of the State or the Church. On

the contrary, they increased their demographic chances of wealth by sending into

lucrative occupations sons whose success might raise the whole family, or who

might themselves inherit the estate and bring back their wealth to enrich the

parent stock. At the same time they increased their contacts with and thus their

informal control of the society over which they ruled. Meanwhile, since younger

sons were not—pace Dr Thomas Wilson—left with ‘that which the cat left on

the malt heap’,

but were given at least an education or apprenticeship and an

allowance or capital sum to launch them on a career, the middle ranks of society

benefited by an additional inflow of new, energetic young men of capital and

resource.

The English aristocracy was therefore open in both directions. The upward

flow of new men into the landed élite was matched by a downward flow of

younger sons into the middle ranks. To these movements we should add the

parallel upflow of heiresses —scarcely a noble family of any consequence in the

eighteenth century failed to acquire at least one heiress—and a downflow of

dowried daughters, both of which served a precisely similar purpose. There was

thus a two-way flow of blood and wealth which goes far towards explaining the

economic expansion and the political stability of the old society in England.

It is true that there have been novi homines in all ages and in most countries,

but nothing quite on the same scale of social mobility existed elsewhere. In

Venice, Florence, or Holland merchants might acquire land and even corporate

sovereignty, but they remained an urban oligarchy wedded to commerce and

finance, until at length in the Italian case they abandoned trade without leaving

behind adequate successors.

In France lawyers might aspire to the noblesse de

robe and officials to bureaucratic power, but from Louis XIV’s reign their hopes

of reaching to the top of the social scale in the noblesse d’épée were increasingly

frustrated, until the angry explosion of the Revolution.

Elsewhere the barriers

between bourgeoisie and nobility were to all intents impenetrable, and if a

T.Wilson, The State of England, A.D. 1600 (ed. F.J.Fisher, Camden Miscellany, XVI,

1936), p. 24; Habakkuk, op. cit., Trans. R.H.S., 1950, XXXII. 19.

50 THE OLD SOCIETY

handful of newcomers ‘passed’, as American negroes sometimes ‘pass’ for white,

that in itself was a proof of the effectiveness of the gulf. Only in England was

there an easy, continuous and accepted interchange between the two.

There is no English word for bourgeoisie because, until the nineteenth century

at least, the thing itself did not exist, in the sense of a permanent, self-conscious

urban class in opposition to the landed aristocracy. In every generation the richer

citizens and townsmen who, if socially frustrated, might have galvanized their

neighbours into a powerful class were themselves transmuted into country

gentlemen, thus making room for other townsmen at the top, and setting in train

a general upward movement. The buoyant effects of this social mobility could be

felt almost to the bottom of urban society, and radiated outwards to the

countryside, through the urban demand for new men at all levels. Meanwhile, the

landed aristocracy and gentry were constantly replenished with men, heiresses

and new wealth from below, thus replacing their own wastage by failure of heirs,

bankruptcies, competitive expenditure, and family jointures, portions and

dowries. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The result was a self-

contained system of social movement which left the shape and structure of

society precisely as before, a ‘stationary state’ based on the restless motion of its

constituent atoms.

On this dynamic social equilibrium was founded the political stability of the

old society. But it was not economically stationary. The two-way flow of men

and wealth acted like the circulation of the blood, enriching every organ of the

body politic, and creating the most important feature of the old society:

economic growth without fundamental change of structure. For two centuries or

more before the onset of the Industrial Revolution, England achieved by the

standards of the time a remarkable degree of economic expansion without any

fundamental reorganization of the structure of industry, trade and society.

But such a tour de force could not continue for ever. What if the pace of

expansion should accelerate to the point where the new men could not be

absorbed and assimilated fast enough to prevent the formation of a bourgeoisie

hostile to the landowners? What if a set of men should hit upon new ways of

making money which, though aimed as before at social climbing, required, like

the steam-powered factory, a change in the structure of economy and society?

And what if the ruling aristocracy itself should begin to abandon the paternal

responsibilities on which the whole system rested? Then the dynamic equilibrium

might be shattered, and the forces of stability become themselves the forces of

change.

Cf. E.Salin, ‘European Entrepreneurship’, J.Ec.H., 1952, XII. 366–7.

H.G.Koenigsberger, ‘Decadence or Shift? Changes in the Civilization of Italy and

Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, Trans. R.H.S., 1960, X. 1f.

Cf. R.B.Grassby ‘Social Status and Commercial Enterprise under Louis XIV, Ec.H.R.,

1960, XII.

THE OLD SOCIETY 51

III

The Social Causes of Industrialism

WE can now return to the questions from which we began. Why did the pioneer

industrial revolution happen at all? Why when it did? And why in Britain first?

Because, alone among nations with the full complement of material resources

and adequate access to expanding world trade, Britain had in the fullest degree

the right kind of society to produce it. An open, dynamic aristocracy based on

absolute property and linked vertically by patronage was the ideal society for

generating a spontaneous industrial revolution. The underlying causes were

social causes. This is not to say that the social causes were in any sense

alternative to the ancillary political, intellectual and religious causes, still less to

the necessary economic and technological causes. On the contrary, they worked

upon and through these causes, calling them forth, and bringing them to bear in

harmonious operation. The nature and structure of the old society were the

central, integrating cause, though not of course the sole determinant, of the

British Industrial Revolution.

SOCIETY AND THE ANCILLARY CAUSES

Britain’s political good fortune was not fortuitous. It was the direct consequence

of the domination of government and society by a landed aristocracy jealous of

the Crown and with a stake in economic growth. If for the encouragement of

industrial expansion a combination of internal freedom and external protection—

laissez-faire in the arms of mercantilism—was the best economic policy, then the

seventeenth-century victory of the landowners over the Crown was a decisive

step towards industrialism.

The economic significance of this step can be seen by contrasting English

policy after the Restoration both with that of contemporary European governments

and with that of the Tudors and early Stuarts. Both Continental contemporaries

and English predecessors assiduously fostered industry and commerce, and yet

neither came near to generating an industrial revolution. Tudor and early Stuart

economic paternalism, inindeed, was deliberately designed to prevent just those

changes in the economy and society most necessary to industrialization. The

control of industrial processes, the regulation of employment and apprenticeship,

the restriction of the internal corn trade, the anti-enclosure acts, the sumptuary

laws, the London building restrictions, and the rigorously enforced poor laws,

were consciously intended to hinder unwanted economic innovation and

maintain the social status quo. The 1563 Statute of Artificers set out to keep men

in their places in the social hierarchy, and prevent them from rising higher than

their fathers.

If William Cecil, that second-generation new man, had had his

way, there would have been no more new men: he would have prohibited all non-

landowners save merchants from buying land worth more than  5 a year, and

even merchants land worth more than  50 a year, and so dammed the upward

flow of blood and wealth.

Because of the administrative inefficiency and

financial weakness of the Crown and the frustration of its policies by

unsympathetic officials, governments before the Civil War could not prevent the

growth of capitalist industry and agriculture, but they did act as a brake on its

development, and could conceivably have continued to forestall the essential

preconditions of industrialism.

Similarly, in Louis XIV’s France and wherever Colbertism was imitated,

industry and trade were aggressively encouraged, but only within the framework

of accepted techniques and processes. Although Colbert’s methods of control

might conceivably have been used, given a bureaucracy with the appropriate

technical knowledge, to bring about an industrial revolution—and, indeed,

French governments from Louis XIV to Napoleon displayed an enlightened

interest in industrial invention—in practice the dead hand of State regulation

proved inimical to fundamental industrial change. The example of France shows

how effectively a victorious English monarchy might have pursued limited

economic prosperity while unconsciously preventing the onset of unlimited

industrialism.

Instead, the triumphant English landowners from the Restoration, still more

from the Revolution, stood the monarchy’s traditional policy on its head. They

abolished most of the restrictions on internal industry, ignored those on building,

forgot the anti-enclosure acts and began to pass private acts in favour of

enclosure, and exchanged corn trade controls for bounties on corn exports.

During the eighteenth century they allowed the wage-fixing and apprenticeship

clauses of the Statute of Artificers to fall gradually into disuse, until only the

attenuated poor law remained as the forlorn remnant of the great edifice of Tudor

and early Stuart State control. What the Webbs said of the poor law, ‘Between

5 Elizabeth c.4, 1563, by which apprenticeship to the more profitable and prestigious

trades was restricted to the sons of existing masters and of holders of certain property

qualifications.

‘Considerations delivered to Parliament, 1559’, Historical Manuscripts Commission,

Salisbury Manuscripts, I. 162–3, in Bland et. al., op. cit., pp. 323–4. According to

Professor T.S.Willan there is some doubt about whether these notes were in fact by Cecil.

SOCIAL CAUSES OF INDUSTRIALISM 53