TAWNEY, R.H. - Religion and The Rise of Capitalism-Pelican Books (1948)

\
\\\
4‘-OI"
J I‘
\\\\
I
L“
' __
V-P" ._,; _( ‘
ix ’¥_
u\""'$%:P
I ‘‘
4 .1
Ia;
Y
>-__ ._ ____ 7 77 7777777

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism is a study of
religious thought on social issues during the three
centuries from the later middle ages to the early
eighteenth century. Starting with an account of
mediaeval theories of social ethics, it goes on to
examine the impact on traditional doctrines of the
new forces released by the economic and political
changes of the age of the Reformation. The social
backgrounds and teaching of Luther, Calvin, and
the English divines from Latimer to Laud, receive
attention in turn. A chapter on the Puritan
Movement discusses, among other topics, the
theory that Capitalism had Puritanism as one of
its parents. The conclusion reached by the author
at the end of his survey is that ‘ the criticism which
dismisses the concern of Churches with economic
relations and social organisation as a modern
innovation nds little support in past history.
What requires explanation is not the view that
these matters are part of the province of religion,
but the view that they are not’. While the book
is primarily concerned with changes in the world
of thought, it is not con ned to them. Holding
that theories, in order to be understood, must be
read in the light of the practical realities which help
to produce them, it devotes part of its space to a
consideration of the latter. It attempts to explain
the conditions which gave point to prohibitions of
usury and to the insistence on a just price :, describes
the social consequences of the Tudor land question ;
and touches on the impetus to economic specula-
tion given by the price-revolution, the expansion
of foreign commerce, and the growth of the money-
market.
PE!-ICAN B DOE!
A23
RELIGION AND THE RISE
OP CAPIT ALISM
IY I-. H. TAWNIY
2
Q
- I
3-
ol
I-I
I'-
’
_- .\...;_
.-
I
42'.
';"'.
" I
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Equality
The Acquisitivc Society
Land and Labour in China
A Discourse upon Usury by Thomas Wilson
The Acrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century
Elmiish Economic History: Select Document:
(with A. E. Bland and P. A. Brown)
Tudor Economic Docurncntl
(with Dr. E. Power)
RELIGION
AND THE RISE OF
CAPITALISM
‘Ir
A HISTORICAL STUDY BY
R.H.TAWNEY
WITH A PREFATORY NOTE BY
DR.CHARLES GORE
PENGUIN BOOKS
wusr onxvrou - MIDDLESEX
Hoiiand Memorial Lectures, l922
First Edition ilfarch 1926
Pubiished in Pelican Books I938
Reprinted March 1940; May I942 ; August 1948
TO
DR. CHARLES GORE

wlrn xrrecrrou AND onarrrum-3
Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much

me-dilated upon God, the human mind, and the
summum bonum, may possibly make a thriving
earthworm, but will most indubitably make a sorry
patriot and a sorry statesman.
BISHOP BERKELEY, Siris, 350
Blade and Printed in Great Britain for Penguin Books Limited

by Butter ell Tanner L.td., Frame am‘ Landon
courenrs
Panrxce T0 1937 EDITION vii
Pruzrxronv Nora xiv
INTRODUCTION xv
1 Tue MED!)-EVAL Bxcrcoaouno 17
(i) The Social Organism 27
(ii, The Sin of A varice 43
(iii) The ideal and the Reality 67
u THE CONTINENTAL Rraronmens 75

(i) The Economic Revolution 76
(ii) Luther 89
(iii) Calvin 1-ll
111 Tue Cnuncn or ENGLAND 140

(i) The Land Question 142
(ii) Religious Theory and Social Policy 155
(iii) The Growth of Individualism 179
Iv THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 197

(i) Puritanism and Society 193
(ii) A Godly Discipline versus the Religion of Trade 211
(iii) The Triumph of the Economic Virtues 227
(iv) The New Medicine for Poverty 25]
v CONCLUSION 271
Nores 232.
Iuosx 323
PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION
SINCE the appearance of this book ten years ago, the literature on
its subject has considerably increased. The learned work of
Troeltsch, the best introduction to the historical study of religious
thought on social issues, can now be read in an English translation,
as can also the articles of Weber on The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism. The omission from my book of any
reference to post-Reformation Catholic opinion was a serious
defect, which subsequent writers have done something to repair.
The development of economic thought in medizeval Italy; the
social forces at work in the Germany of Luther, and his attitude
to them; the economic doctrines of Calvin; the teaching of the
Jesuits on usury and allied topics; English social policy during
the Interregnum; the religious and social outlook of the French
bourgeoisie of the same period; the attitude of Quakers, Wes-
leyans, and other bodies of English Nonconformists to the chang-
ing economic world which confronted them in the eighteenth
eentury, have all had books devoted to them. In the somewhat
lengthy list of articles on these and kindred subjects, those by the
late Professor Sée, M. Halbwachs, and Mr. Parsons, and an
article by Mr. Gordon Walker which has just appeared in The
Economic History Review, specially -deserve attention.‘
It will be seen, therefore, that the problems treated in the fol-
lowing pages, if they continue to perplcx, have not ceased to
arouse interest. What conclusions, if any, emerge from the
discussion?
The.most signi cant are truisms. When this book rst ap-
peared, it was possible for a friendly reviewer, writing in a serious
journal, to deprecate in all gravity theemployment of. the term
“Capitalism” in an historical work, as a political catch-word,
betraying a sinister intention on the part of the misguided author.
An innocent solecismof the kind would not, it is probable, occur
so readily to-day. Obviously, the word “Capitalism,” like
“Feudalism” and “Mercantilism,"’ is open to misuse. Obviously,
the time has now come when it is more important to determine
‘bhe different species of Capitalism, and the successive phases of
its growth, than to continue to labour the existence of the genus.
vii
viii PREFACE TO I937 EDITION
But, after more than half a century of work on the subject by
scholars of half a dozen diiferent nationalities and of every
variety of political opinion, to deny that the phenomenon exists;
or to suggest that, if it docs exist, it is unique among human
institutions, in having, like Melchizedek, existed from eternity;
or to imply that, if it has a history, propriety forbids that history
to be disinterrcd, is to run wilfully in blinkers. Verbal contro-
versies are pro tless; if an author discovers a more suitable term,
by all means let him use it. He is unlikely, however, to make much
of -theghistory of Europe dining the last three centuries, if, in
addition to eschewing the word, he ignores the fact.
The more general realization of the role of Capitalism in
history has been accomplished by a second change, which, if
equally commonplace, has also, perhaps, its signi cance. “Trade
is one thing, religion is another" : once advanced as an audacious
novelty, the doctrine that religion and economic interests form
two separate and co-ordinate kingdoms, of which neither, without
presumption, can encroach on the other, was commonly accepted
by the England of the nineteenth century with an unquestioning
assurance at which its earliest exponents would have felt some
embarrassment. An historian is concerned less to appraise the
validity of an idea than to understand its development. The
e ects for good or evil of that convenient demarcation, and the
forces which, in our own day, have caused the boundary to shift,
need not here be discussed. Whatever its merits, its victory, it is
now realized, was long in being won. The economic theories pro-
poundcd by Schoolrnen; the fulrninations by the left wing of
the Rcformers against usury, land-grabbing, and cxtortionate
prices; the appeal of hard-headed Tudor statesmen to traditional
religious sanctions; the attempt of Calvin and his followers to
establish an economic discipline more rigorous than that which
they had overthrown, are bad evidence for practice, but good
evidence for thought. All rest on the assumption that the institu-
tion of property, the transactions of the market-place, the whole
fabric of society and the whole range of its activities, stand by no
absolute title, but must justify themselves at the bar of religion.
All insist that Christianity has no morc.dcadly foo than the
appetites divittarum irt nttus, the unbridled indulgence of the
ncqulsltive appetite. Hence the claim that religion should keep
Its hands off business encountered, when rst formulated, a great
body of antithetic doctrine, embodied not only in literature and
PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION ix
teaching, but in custom and law. It was only gradually, and after
a warfare not con ned to paper, that it affected the transition
from the status of an odious paradox to that of an unquestioned
truth. ‘
The tendency of that transition is no longer in dispute. Its
causation and stages remain the subject of debate. The critical
period, especially in England, was the two centuries following the
Reformation. It is natural, therefore, that most recent work on
the subject of this book should have turned its high lights on that
distracted" age. The most striking attempt to formulate a theory
of the movement of religious thought on social issues which then
took place was made at the beginning of the present century by a
German scholar, Max Weber,“ in two articles published in I904
and l90_5. Hence it is not less natural that much of that work
should, consciously or unconsciously, have had Weber as its
starting point.
‘What exactly was the subject with which he was concerned?
That question is obviously the rst which should be asked, though
not all his critics ask it. He was preparing to undertake the com-
parative study of the social outlook and in uence of different
religions, the incomplete results of which appeared in three
volumes -in 1920, under the name of Gesammelte Aufsiitze zur
Religianssoziologie. The articles, Die prorestantische Erhik and der
Geist des Kapitafisnms, were a rst step towards that larger work,
and subsequently, corrected and ampli ed, formed part of its
rst volume. Weber thought that western Christianity as a whole,
and in particular certain varieties of it, which acquired an inde-
pendent life as a result of the Reformation, had been more
favourable to the progress of Capitalism than some other great
creeds. His articles were an attempt to ‘test that generalization.
Their scope is explained in an introduction written later to the
Religionssoziologie. His object was to examine—the abstractions
fall with a mournful thud on English ears-“the in uence of
certain religious ideas on the development of an economic spirit
or the ethos of an economic system.” He hoped-O sancta sim-
plic'i!a.r!-—t0 avoid misunderstanding by underlining somewhat
heavily the limitations of his theme. He formulated no “dogma”;
on the contrary, he emphasized that his articles were to be re-
garded as merely a Vorarbeitf a preparatory essay. He did not
seek “a psychological determination of economic events“; on
the contrary, he insisted ou “the fundamental importance of the
A*
I PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION
economic factor.“ He did not profess to offer a complete inter-
pretation even of the religious attitude discussed in his articles;
on the contrary, he urged the necessity of investigating how that
attitude itself “was in turn in uenced in its development and
character by the totality of social conditions, especially the
economic ones."" So far from desiring-—to quote his own words—-
“to substitute for a one-sided ‘materialistic’ an equally one-sided
‘spiritual’ interpretation of civilization and history,”' he expressly
repudiated any intention of the kind.
ln view of these disclaimers, it should not be necessary to point
out that Weber made no attempt in the articles in question to
advance a comprehensive theory of the genesis and growth of
Capitalism. That topic had been much discussed in Germany
since Marx opened the debate, and the rst edition of the most
massive of recent books on the subject, Sombar.t’s Der Mfodeme
Kapiralismus, had appeared two years before. The range of Weber's
interests, and the sweep of his intellectual vision, were, no doubt,
unusually wide; but his earliest work had been done on economic
history, and he continued to lecture on that subject till his death
in 1920. If he did not in his articles refer to economic consequences
of the discovery of America, or of the great depreciation, or of
the rise to nancial prc-eminence of the Catholic city of Antwerp,
it was not that these bashful events had at last hit on an historian
whose notice they could elude. Obviously, they were epoch-
making; obviously, they had a profound effect, not only on
economic organization, but on economic thought. Weber's im-
mediate problem, however, was a different one. Montesquieu
remarked, with perhaps excessive optimism, that the English
“had progressed furthest of all people in three important things,
piety, commerce and freedom." The debt of the third of these
admirable attributes to the rst had often been emphasized. Was
it possible, Weber asked, that the second might also owe some-
thing to it‘? He answered that question in the affirmative. The
connecting link was to be found, he thought, in the in uence of
the religious movement whose greatest gure had been Calvin.
Since Weber's articles are now available in English, it is need-
less to recapitulate the steps in his argtunent. My own views upon
it, if 1 may refer to them without undue egotism, were sum-
marized in a note-too lengthy to be read--to the rst edition
of the present work, and were later restated more fully in the‘
introduction to the English translation to the articles which ap-
PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION xi
peared in 1930." Weber's generalizations had been widely dis-
cussed by continental scholars for more than twenty years before
this book appeared. The criticisms contained in it, therefore, had
no claim to originality—unless, indeed, to be less anxious to
refute an author than to understand him is in itself to be original.
The rst of them-that “the development of Capitalism in
Holland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
was due, not to the fact that they were Protestant Powers, but to
large economic movements, in particular the Discoveries and the
results which flowed from them”—has since been developed at
some length by Mr. Robertson; but it was not, perhaps, quite
just. Weber would have replied, no doubt, that such a remark,
however true, was, as far as his articles were concerned, an
ignoraria elenchi. To meet hirn fairly, he would have said, one
should meet him on his own ground, which at the moment was
that, not of general economic history, but of religious thought on
social issues. My second comment, already made by Brentano—
that more weight should have been given to the political thought
of the Renaissance—had been anticipa ted by Weber,’ and I regret
that I overlooked his observations on that point. His gravest
weaknesses in his own special eld, where alone criticism is
relevant, are not those on which most emphasis has usually been
laid. The Calvinist applications of the dc-ctrine of the “Calling”
have, doubtless, their signi cance; but the degree of in uence
which they exercised, and their af nity or contrast with other
versions of the same idea, are matters of personal judgment, not
of precise proof. Both Weber and his critics have made too much
of ‘them, asil I did rnlgiself. accguiit og the social theory; of
Ca vinism, owever, ' it rig ty un er inc some points nee ing
emphasis, left a good deal unsaid. The lacunae in his argument
cannot here be discussed, but two of them deserve notice. Though
some recent attempts to nd parallels to that theory in contem-
porary Catholic writers have not been very happy, Weber tended
to treat it as more unique than it was.“ More important, he
exaggerated its stability and consistency. Taking a good deal of
his evidence from a somewhat late phase in the history of the
movement, he did not emphasize suf ciently the profound
changes through which Calvinism passed in the century following
the death of Calvin.
The last point_is of some moment. It suggests that the problem
discussed by Weber requires to be restated. It is natural, no
xii PREFACE TO I937 EDITION
doubt, that much of the later work on the subject should have
taken him for its target, and probably inevitable—such is the
nature of controversy-—that a theory which he advanced as a
hypothesis to explain one range of phenomena, and one alone,
should have been clothed for the purpose of criticism with the
uncompromising nality of a remorseless dogma. I-Iis mine has
paid handsome dividends; but, whatever its attractions, that vein,
it may be suggested, is now worked out. The important question,
after all, is not what Weber wrote about the facts, still less what
the epigani who take in his washing have suggested that he wrote,
but what the facts were. It is an illusion to suppose that he stands
alone in pointing to a connection between the religious move-
ment-.. of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the outburst
of economic energy which was remaking society in the Nether-
lands and England. Other students have reached, independently
of him, that not recondite conclusion.“ How much truth does it
contain?
To attempt a reply to that question would expand a preface
into a book. The materials for answering it are, however, abun-
dant. If contemporary opinion on the point is not easily cited,
the difficulty arises, not from lack of evidence to reveal it, but
from the embarras de richesse which it olfers for quotation. Its
tcnor is not doubtful. The truth is that the ascription to different
confessions of distinctive economic attitudes was not exceptional
in the seventeenth century; among writers who handled such
topics it was ahnost common form. It occurs repeatedly in works
of religious controversy. lt occurs also in books, such as those of
Temple, Petty, and Defoe, and numerous pamphlets, by men
whose primary interest was, not religion, but economic affairs.
So far, in fact, from being, as has been suggested" with disarming
nafveté, the sinister concoction of a dark modern conspiracy,
designed to confound Calvinism and Capitalism, godly Geneva
and industrious Manchester, in a common ruin, the existence of
a connection between economic Radicalism and religious
Radicalism was to those who saw both at rst hand something
not far from a platitude. Until some reason is produced for reject-
ing their testimony, it had better be assumed that they knew
what they were talking about.
How precisely that connection should be conceived is, of
course, a diiferent question. It had, obviously, two sides. Religion
influenced, to a degree which to-day is dif cult to appreciate,
PREFACE TO 1937 EDITION xiii
me-n’s outlook on society. Economic and social changes acted
powerfully on religion. Weber, as was natural in view of his
special interests, emphasized the rst point. I-Ie did so with a
wealth of knowledge and an intellectual force which deserve
admiration, and not least the _ad1-niration of those who, like
myself, have ventured to dissent from some of his conclusions.
He touched the second point only en passant. There is truth in
the criticism of Mr. Gordon Walker that Weber did not inquire
how far the Reformation was a response to social needs, or
investigate the causes, as well as the consequences, of the re-
ligious mentality which he analysed with so much insight.
lt is that aspect of the subject which most needs work to-day.
In the triple reconstruction, political, ecclesiastical, and economic,
through which England passed between the Armada and the
Revolution, every ingredient in the cauldron worked a subtle
change in every other. There was action and reaction. “L'esprit
calviniste,” and "l’esprit des hommes nouveaux que la revolution
économique du temps introduit dans la vie des affaires,"" if in
theory distinct, were in practice intertwined. Puritanism helped
to mould the social order, but it was also itself increasingly
moulded by it. Of the in uence of the economic expansion of the
age on English religious thought something is said in the follow-
ing pages. I hope that their inadequacies may prompt some more
competent writer to deal with the subject as its importance
deserves‘ R. H. rawmtt
PREFATORY NOTE
Tl-IE friends of the late Henry Scott Holland founded a lcctureship

in his memory, the Deed of Foundation laying it down that a
course of lectures, to be called the Holland Memorial Lectures,
are to be delivered. triennially, having for their subject “the re-
ligion of the incarnation in its bearing on the social and economic
].il'e of man." The rst course of these lectures was delivered by
Mr. R. H. Tawney at King's College, London, in March and
April 1922, but it is only now, more than three years later, that
the work of preparing thern for publication has been completed,
and that I have been called upon, as the chairrnan of the Holland
Trustms, to introduce our rst series of lectures to the public.
They are a historical study of the religion of the Reformation in
its bearing on social and economic thought. We have been for
many years feeling our want of such a study, suf ciently docu-
mented and grounded upon an adequate knowledge of the litera-
ture cf the period, as we have watched the modern battle between
zealous medizevalists irnpugning the Reformation as deeply re-
sponsible for the sins of modern industrialism, and no less zealous
Protestants rebutting the charge or throwing it back. At last, I
believe, we have got what is required, and that many besides my-
self will nd in the book a permanent source of enlightenment and
a just and well-grounded judgment. I am thankful to feel that the
rst series of Holland lectures is a worthy tribute to the memory
of a man who set his brilliant faculties to work in no cause so fully
and heartily as in that of re-awakenin g the conscience of English-
men to the social meaning of the religion of the Incarnation, and
who felt as muc-h as anyone the need of accurate research into the
causes which have so disastrously obscured it.
October, 192$ cnantas GORB
'-15V
INTRODUCTION
THIS book is based on a series of lectures on Religious Though: on

Social Questions in the Sixteenth and Se venteenth Centuries, which
were delivered at King's College, London, for the Holland Foun-
dation in March and April 1922. It does not carry the subject be-
yond the latter part of the seventeenth century, and it makes no
pretence of dealing with the history of either economic theory or
of economic organization, except in so far as changes in theory
and organization are related to changes in religious opinion.
Having been prevented by circumstances from publishing the lec-
tures immediately, I have taken advantage of the delay to re-write
part of them, with the addition of some matter which couid not
easily be included in them in their original form. I must thank my
fellow-trustees for their indulgence in allowing me to postpone
publication.
The development of religious opinion on questions of social
ethics is a topic which has been treated in England by the late Dr.
Cunningham, by Sir William Ashley, whose essay on The C-‘an-waist
Doctrine rst interested me in the subject, by Mr. G. G. Couiton,
Mr. H. G. Wood, and Mr. G. O'Brien. But it is no re ection on
their work to say that the most important contributions of recent
years have come from continental students, in particular Troeltsch,
Choisy, Sombart, Brentano, Levy, and above all, Max Weber,
whose celebrated articles on Die Prorestcmrisehe Erhik rnd der
Geist des Kn-pitalismus gave a new turn to the discussion. No one
can work, on however humble a scale, in the sarne eld, without
being conscious of the heavy obligation under which these scholars
have laid him. Vi/'l1ile I have not always been able to accept their
conclusions, I am glad to have this opportunity of expressing my
indebtedness to them. I regret that Mr. Coulton's The Mea'i'rsi'a!
Village appeared too late for me to make use of its abundant
stores of learning and insight.
It only remains for me to thank the friends whose assistance has
enabled me to make this book somewhat less imperfect than it
would otherwise have been. M.r. J. L. Hammond, Dr. B. Power,
and Mr. A. P. Wadsworth have been kind enough to read, and to
improve, the manuscript. Professor J. E. Neale, in addition to
IV
Irl INTRODUCTION
reading the proofs, has helped me most generously throughout
with advice and criticism. I am deeply indebted both to Miss
Bulkley, who has undertaken the thankless task of correcting the
proofs and making an index, and to the London School of Econo-
mics and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial fund for en-
sbling me to make use of her services. My obligation to the help
given by my wifeis beyond acknowledgment.
I. H. TAWNBY
RELIGION
AND THE RISE OF CAPITALISM
i
CHAPTER I
The Medieval Background

La miséricorde de Dieu est in nie: elle sauvera meme un riche.
Amvrorn FRANCE, Le Puits de Sainte Claire
I MUST begin these lectures with an apology. Their subject ll
historical. It is the attitude of religious thought in England
towards social organization and economic issues in the
period immediately preceding the Reformation and in the
two centuries which follow it. Canon Scott Holland was at
once a prophet and a theologian. The most suitable beginning
for a foundation established to commemorate him would
have been either an examination of the spiritual problems
concealed behind the economic mechanism of our society,
or a philosophical discussion of the contribution which reli-
gion can make to their solution. Discretion compels one zvho
is competent neither to inspire to action nor to expound a
system, to refrain from meddling with these high matters.
I have therefore chosen the humbler task of trying to give an
account of the history of opinion during one critical period.
But I do so with the consciousness that the choice is due,
less to any special appropriateness on the part of the sub-
ject, than to the inability of the lecturer to attempt any
other.
I would not, however, excuse the selection merely by my
own incapacity to do justice to a topic of more immediate
11
I8 TI-IE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
moment. Thanks largely to Canon Scott Holland, and to
those who worked with him, the conception of the scope and
content of Christian ethics which was generally, though not
universally, accepted in the nineteenth century, is under-
going a revision; and in that revision the appeal to the
experience of mankind, which is history, has played some
part, and will play a larger one. There have been periods in
which a tacit agreement. accepted in practice if not stated
in theory, excluded economic activities and social institu-
tions from examination or criticism in the light of religion.
A statesman of the early nineteenth century, whose con-
ception of the relations of Church and State appears to
have been modelled on those of Mr. Collins and Lady Cathe-
rine de Bourgh, is said to have crushed a clerical reformer
with the protest, “Things have come to a pretty pass if
religion is going to interfere with private life"; and a more
recent occupant of his of ce has explained "the catastrophe
which must follow, if the Church crosses the Rubicon which
divides the outlying provinces of the spirit from the secular
capital of public affairs.‘
Whatever the merit of these aphorisms, it is evident to-day
that the line of division between the spheres of religion and
secular business, which they assume as self-evident, is shift-
ing. By common consent the treaty of partition has lapsed
and the boundaries are once more in motion. The age of
which Froude, no romantic admirer of ecclesiastical pre-
tensions, could write, with perhaps exaggerated severity,
that the spokesmen of religion “leave the present world to
the men of business and the devil,”“ shows some signs of
drawing to a close. Rightly or wrongly, with wisdom or
with its opposite, not only in England but on the Continent
and in America, not only-in one denomination but among
Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Nonconformists, an
attempt is being made to restate the practical implications
of the social ethics of the Christian faith, in a form su iciently
comprehensive to provide a standard by which to judge the
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND I9
collective actions and institutions of mankind, in the sphere
both of international politics and of social organization. It
is being made to-day. It has been made in the past. Whether
it will result in any new synthesis, whether in the future at
some point pushed farther into the tough world of practical
affairs men will say,
Here nature rst begins
Her farthest verge, and chaos to retire
As from her outmost works, a broken foe,
will not be known by this generation. What is certain is that,
as in the analogous problem oi‘ the relations between Church
and State, issues which were thought to have been buried by
the discretion of centuries have shown in our own day that
they were not dead, but sleeping. To examine the forms which
they have assumed and the phases through which they have
passed, even in the narrow eld of a single country and a
limited period, is not mere antiquarianism. It is to summon
the living, not to invoke a corpse, and to see from ‘a new
angle the problems of our own age, by widening the
experience brought to their consideration.
In such an examination the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries are obviously a critical period. Dr. Figgisa has
described the secularization of political theory as the most
momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the
modern world. It was not the less revolutionary because it
was only gradually that its full consequences became appar-
ent, so that seeds which were sown before the Reformation
yielded their fruit in England only after the Civil War. The
political aspects of the transformation are familiar. The theo-
logical mould which shaped political theory from the Middle
Ages to the seventeenth century is broken; politics becomes
a science, ultimately a group of sciences, and theology at
best one science among others. Reason takes the place of
revelation, and the criterion of political institutions is ex-
pediency, not religious authority. Religion, ceasing to be the
20 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
master-interest of mankind, dwindles into a department of
life with boundaries which it is extravagant to overstep.
The ground which it vacates is occupied by a new institu-
tion, armed with a novel doctrine. If the Church of the
Middle Ages was a kind of State, the State of the Tudors had
some of the characteristics of a Church; and it was precisely
the impossibility, for all but a handful of sectaries, of con-
ceiving a society which treated religion as a thing privately
vital but publicly indifferent, which in England made irre-
concilable the quarrel between Puritanism and the monarchy.
When the mass had been heated in the furnace of the Civil
War, its component parts were ready to be disengaged from
each other. By the end of the seventeenth century the secular
State, separate from the Churches, which are subordinate to
it, has emerged from the theory which had regarded both as
dual aspects of a single society. The former pays a shadowy
deference to religion; the latter do not meddle with the
external fabric of the political and social system, which is the
concern of the former. The age of religious struggles virtually
ends with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The age of the
wars of economic nationalism virtually begins with the war
between England and Holland under the Commonwealth
and Charles II. The State, rst in England, then in France
and America, nds its sanction, not in religion, but in nature,
in a presumed contract to establish it, in the necessity for
mutual protection and the convenience of mutual assistance.
It appeals to no supernatural commission, but exists to pro-
tect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights
which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature.
".The great and chief end of men uniting into common-
wealths and putting themselves under government is the
preservation of their property.”4
While the political signi cance of this development has
often been described, the analogous changes in social and
economic thought have received less attention. These were,
however, momentous, and deserve consideration. The
THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND 21
emergence of an_objeetive and passionless economic science
took place more slowly than the corresponding movement
in the theory of the State, because the issues were less
absorbing, and, while one marched in the high lights of the
open stage, the other lurked on the back stairs and in the
wings. It was not till a century after Machiavelli had
emancipated the State from religion, that the doctrine of the
self-contained department with laws of its own begins
generally to be applied to the world of business relations,
and, even in the England of the early seventeenth century, to
discuss questions of economic organization purely in terms
of pecuniary pro t and loss still wears an air of not quite
reputable cynicism. When the sixteenth century opens, not
only political but social theory is saturated with doctrines
drawn from the sphere of ethics and religion, and economic
phenomena are expressed in terms of personal conduct, as
naturally and inevitably as the nineteenth century expressed
them in terms of mechanism. T
Not the least fundamental of divisions among theories of
society is between those which regard the world of human
affairs as self-contained, and those which appeal to a super-
natural criterion. Modern social theory, like modern political
theory, developed only when society was given a naturalistic
instead of a religious explanation, and the rise of both was
largely due to a changed conception of the nature and
functions of a Church. The crucial period is the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. The most important arena (apart
from Holland) is England, because it is in England, with its
new geographical position as the entrepot between Europe
and America, its achievement of internal economic unity
two centuries before‘ France and two and a half centuries
before Germany, its constitutional revolution, and its power-
ful bourgeoisie of bankerj, ship-owners, and merchants, that
the transformation of the structure of society is earliest,
swiftest, and most complete. Its essence is the secularization
of social and economic philosophy. The synthesis is resolved
22 THE MEDLIEVAL BACKGROUND
into its elements--politics, business, and spiritual exercises;
each assumes a separate and independent vitality and obeys
the laws of its own being. The social functions matured
within the Church, and long identi ed with it, are transferred
to the State, which in tern is-idolized as the dispenser of
prosperity and the guardian of civilization. The theory of a
hierarchy of values, embracing all human interests and
activities in a system of which the apex is religion, is replaced
by the conception of separate and parallel compartments
between which a clue balance should be maintained, but
which have no vital connection with each other.
The intellecttzal movement is, of course, very gradual, and
is compatible with both throw-backs and precocities which
seem to refute its general character. It is easy to detect pre-
monitions of the coming philosophy in the later Middle
Ages, and reyersions to an earlier manner at the very end
of the seventeenth century. Oresme in the fourteenth century
can anticipate the monetary theory associated with the name
of Gresham; in the fteenth century Laurentius de Rudol s
can.distinguish between trade bills and nance bills, and St.
Antonino describe the signi cance of capital; while Baxter
in 1673 can write a Christian Directory in the style of a
mcdiwval Summa, and Bunyan in 1680 can dissect the econo-
mic iniquities of M-r. Badman, who ground the poor with
high prices and usury, in the manner of a medizeval friar.5
But the distance traversed in the two centuries between 1500
and 1700 is, nevertheless, immense. At the earlier date,
though economic rationalism has proceeded far in Italy, the
typical economic systems are those of the Schoolmen; the
typical popular teaching is that of the sermon, or of manuals
such as Dives et Pauper; the typical appeal in dif cult cases of
conscience is to the Bible, the Fathers, the canon law and its
interpreters; the typical controversy is carried on in terms of
morality and religion as regularly and inevitably as two
centuries later it is conducted in terms of economic
expediency.
TI-IE MEDIEEVAL BACKGROUND 23
It is not necessary to point out that the age of Henry \_/III
and Thomas Cromwell had nothing to learn from the
twentieth century as to the niceties of political intrigue or
commercial sharp practice. But a cynical unscrupulousness
in high places is not incompatible with a general belief in the
validity of moral standards which are contradicted by it.
No one can read the discussions which took place between
1500 and 1550 on three burning issues—the rise in prices,
capital and interest, and the land question in England-
without being struck by the constant appeal from the new
and clamorous economic interests of the day to the tradi-
tional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in
the relations of individuals, is still conceived to be the nal
authority. It is because it is regarded as the nal authority
that the of cers of the Church claim to be heard on questions
of social policy, and that, however Catholics, Anglicans,
Lutherans, and Calvinists may differ on doctrine or eccle-
siastical government, Luther and Calvin, Latimer and Laud,
John Knox and the Pilgrim Fathers are agreed that social
morality is the province of the Church, and are prepared
both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by
suitable discipline.
By the middle of the seventeenth century all that is altered.
After the Restoration, we are in a new world of economic, as
well as of political, thought. The claim of religion, at best
a shadowy claim, to maintain rules of good conscience in
economic affairs nally vanished with the destruction of
Laud’s experiment in a confessional State, and with the
failure of the work of the Westminster Assembly. After the
Civil War, the attempt to maintain the theory that there was
a Christian standard of economic conduct was impossible,
not only because of lay opposition, but because the division
of the Churches made it evident that no common standard
existed which could be enforced by ecclesiastical machinery.
The doctrine of the Restoration economists,“ that, as proved
by the experience of Holland, trade and tolerance ourished
24 THE MEDIJEVAL BACKGROUND
together, had its practical signi cance in the fact that neither
could prosper without large concessions to individualism.
The ground which is vacated by the Christian moralist is
quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The future for
the next two hundred years is not with the attempt to re-
affirm, with due allowance for altered circumstances, the
conception that a moral rule is binding on Christians in their
economic transactions, but with the new science of Political
Arithmetic, which asserts, at rst with hesitation and-then
with con dence, that no moral rule beyond the letter of the
law exists. In uenced in its method by the contemporary
progress of mathematics and physics, it handles economic
phenomena, not as a casuist, concerned to distinguish right
from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to
impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, and
assumptions are accepted by all educated men, including the
clergy, even though its particular conclusions continue for
long to be disputed. Its greatest English exponent, before
the days of Adam Smith, is the Reverend Dr. Tucker, Dean
of Gloucester.
Some of the particular stages in this transition will be dis-
cussed later. But that there was a transition, and that the
intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was not
less momentous than the effect of some more familiar intel-
lectual revolutions, is undeniable. Nor is it to be refuted by
insisting that economic motives and economic needs are as
old as history, or that the appeal to religion is often a
decorous drapery for a triumphant materialism. A medizeval
cynic, in expounding the canon law as to usury, remarked
that “he who takes it goes to hell, and he who does not goes
to the workhouse.”7 Mr. Coulton does well to remind us
that, even in the Age of Faith, resounding principles were
compatible with very sordid practice. In a discussion which
has as its subject social thought, not the history of business
organization, it is not necessary to elaborate that truism.
Only the credulous or the disillusioned will contrast succes-
live periods as light with darkness or darkness with light,
or yield to the temper which nds romantic virtues in every
age except its own. To appraise the merits of different
theories of social organization must be left to those who feel
con dent that they possess an adequate criterion. All that
can be attempted in these pages is to endeavour to under-
stand a few among them.
For, after all, because doctrine and conduct diverge, it
does not follow that to examine the former is to hunt abstrac-
tions. That men should have thought as they did is some-
times as signi cant as that they should have acted as they
did, and not least signi cant when thought and practice are
at variance. It may be true that “theory is a criticism of life
only in the same sense as a good man is a criticism of a bad
one." But the emphasis of the theorist on certain aspects and
values is not arbitrary, but is itself signi cant, and, if his
answers are to be discounted,his questions are none the less
evidence as to the assumptions of the period in which they
were asked. It would be paradoxical to dismiss Machiavelli
and Locke and Smith and Bentham as irrelevant to the
political practice of their age, merely on the ground that
mankind has still to wait for the ideal Prince or Whig or
individualist or Utilitarian. It is not less paradoxical to dis-
miss those who formulated economic and social theories i.n
the Middle Ages or in the sixteenth century merely because,
behind canon law and summae and sermons, behind the
good ordinances of borough and gild, behind statutes and
proclamations and prerogative courts, there lurked the
immutable appetites of the economic man.
There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and
the quality of civilization depends, as Professor Wallas has so
convincingly shown, on the transmission, less of physical
qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowledge
and beliefs, the destruction of which would be followed
within a year by the death of half the human race. Granted
that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with which the
individual is born has altered little in recorded history, the
interests and values which compose his world have under-
gone a succession of revolutions. The conventional state-
ment that human nature does not change is plausible only so
long as attention is focused on those aspects of it which are
least distinctively human. The wolf is to-day what he was
when he was hunted by Nimrod. But, while men are born
with many of the characteristics of wolves, man is a wolf
domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has
been partially tamed and improves upon them. He steps into
a social inheritance, to which each generation adds its own
contributionof good and evil, before it bequeathes it to its
successors.
There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, en-
vironment, which sets its stamp on the individual, even when
he is least conscious of it. And the effect of changes in this
environment is not less profound. The economic categories
of modern society, such as property, freedom of contract,
and competition, are as much a part of its intellectual furni-
ture as its political conceptions, and, together with religion,
have probably been the most potent force in giving it its
character. Between the conception of society as a com-
munity of unequal classes with varying functions, organized
for a common end, and that which regards it as a mechanism
adjusting itself through the play of economic motives to the
supply of economic needs; between the idea that a man must
not take advantage of his neighbour’s necessity, and the
doctrine that “man’s self-love is God’s providence”; be-
tween the attitude which appeals to a religious standard to
repress economic appetites, and that which regards expe-
diency as the nal criterion—there is a chasm which no
theory of the permanence and ubiquity of economic interests
can bridge, and which deserves at least to be explored. To
examine how the latter grew out of the former; to trace the
change, from a view of economic activity which regarded it
as one among other kinds of moral conduct, to the view of it
as dependent upon impersonal and almost automatic forees;
to observe the struggle of individualism, in the face of restric-
tions imposed in the name of religion by the Church and of
public policy by the State, rst denounced, then palliated,
then triumphantly justi ed in the name of economic liberty;
to watch how ecclesiastical authority strives to maintain its
hold upon the spheres it had claimed and nally abdicates
them—to do this is not to indulge a vain curiosity, but to
stand at the sources of rivulets which are now a ood.
Has religious opinion in the past regarded questions of
social organization and economic conduct as irrelevant to
the life of the spirit, or has it endeavoured not only to
christianize the individual but to make a Christian civiliza-
tion? Can religion admit the existence of a sharp antithesis
between personal morality and the practices which are per-
missible in business? Does the idea of a Church involve the
acceptance of any particular standard of social ethics, and,
if so, ought a Church to endeavour to enforce it as among the
obligations incumbent on its members ? Such are a few of the
questions which men are asking to-day, and on which a
more competent examination of history than I can hope to
offer might throw at any rate an oblique and wavering light.
(i)
The Social Organism
We are asking these questions to-day. Men were asking
the same questions, though in different language, through-
out the sixteenth century. It is a commonplace that modern
economic history begins with a series of revolutionary
changes in the direction and organization of commerce, in
nance, in prices, and in agriculture. To the new economic
situation men brought a body of doctrine, law, and tradi-
tion, hammered out during the preceding three centuries.
Since the new forces were bewildering, and often shocking,
to conservative consciences, moralists and religious teachers
met them at rst by a re-al rmation of the traditional doc-
trines, by which, it seemed, their excesses might be restrained
and their abuses corrected. As the changed environment
became, not a novelty, but an established fact, these doc-
trines had to be modi ed. As the effects of the Reformation
developed, different Churches produced characteristic
differences of social opinion.
But these were later developments, which only gradually
became apparent. The new economic world was not accepted
with out a struggle. Apart from a few extremists, the rst
generation of reformers were rarely innovators in matters of
social theory, and quoted Fathers and church councils,
dccretals and canon lawyers, in complete unconsciousness
that changes in doctrine and church government involved
any breach with what they had learned to regard as the moral
tradition of Christendom. Hence the sixteenth century sees
a collision, not only between different schools of religious
thought, but between the changed economic environment
and the accepted theory of society. To understand it, one
must place oneself at the point from which it started. One
must examine, however summarily, the historical back-
ground.
That background consisted of the body of social theory,
stated and implicit, which was the legacy of the MiddleAges.
The formal teaching was derived from the Bible, the works
of the Fathers and Schoolmen, the canon law and its com-
mentators, and had been popularized -in sermons and reli-
gious manuals. The informal assumptions were those im-
plicit in law, custom, and social institutions. Both were com-
plex, and to speak of them as a unity is to sacri ce truth to
convenience. It may be that the political historian is justi ed
when he covers with a single phrase the ve centuries or
more .to which tradition has assigned the title of the Middle
Ages. For the student of economic conditions that suggestion
of homogeneity is the rst illusion to be discarded.
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 29
The mediteval economic world was marked, it is true, by
certain common characteristics. They sprang from the fact
that on the westit was a closed system, that on the north it
had so much elbow-room as was givenby the Baltic a.nd the
rivers emptying themselves into it, and that on the east,
where it was open, the apertures were concentrated along a
comparatively short coast-line from Alexandria to the Black
Sea, so that they were easily commanded by any naval power
dominating the eastern Mediterranean, and easily cut by
any military power which could squat across the trade routes
before they reached the sea. While, however, these broad
facts determined that the two main currents of trade should
run from east to west and north to south, and that the most
progressive economic life of the age should cluster in the
regions from which these currents started and where they
met, within this general economic framework there was the
greatest variety of condition and development. The contours
of economic civilization ran on different lines from those of
subsequent centuries, but the contrast between mountain
and valley was not less clearly marked. If the sites on which a
complex economic structure rose were far removed from
those of later generations, it flourished none the less where
conditions favoured its growth. In spite of the ubiquity of
manor and gild, there was as much difference between the
life of a centre of capitalist industry, like fteenth-century
Flanders, or a centre of capitalist nance, like fteenth-
century Florence, and a pastoral society exporting raw
materials and a little food, like mediteval England, as there
is between modern Lancashire or London and modern Den-
mark. To draw from English conditions a picture of a whole
world stagnating in economic squalor, or basking in econo-
mic innocence, is as absurd as to reconstruct the economic
life of Europe in the twentieth century from a study of the
Shetland Islands or the Ukraine. The elements in the social
theory of the Middle Ages were equally various, and equally
changing. Even if the student con nes himself to the body of
doctrine which is de nitely associated with religion, and
takes as typical of it the Summ./e of the Schoolmen, he nds
it in constant process of development. The economic teach-
ing of St. Antonino in the fteenth century, for example, was
far more complex and realistic than that of St. Thomas in
the thirteenth, and down to the very end of the Middle Ages
the btJSl-CSi2i)ii3i1C-’.I and most characteristic parts of the
syste:n——for instance, the theory of prices and of usury-so
far from being stationary, were steadily modi ed and
elaborated.
There are, perhaps, four main attitudes which religious
opinion may adopt toward the world of social institutions
and economic relations. It may stand on one side in ascetic
aloofness and regard them as in their very nature the sphere
of unrighteousness, from which men may escape-from
which, if they consider their souls, they will escape—-but
which they can conquer only by ight. It may take them for
granted and ignore them, as matters of indifference belong-
ing to a world with which religion has no concern; in all
ages the prudence of looking problems boldly in the face
and passing on has seemed too self-evident to require justi -
cation. It may throw itself into an agitation for some par-
ticular reforrn,'for the removal of some crying scandal, for
the promotion of some nal revolution, which will in-
augurate the reign of righteousness on earth. It may at once
accept and criticize, tolerate and amend, welcome the gross
world of human appetites, as the squalid scaffolding from
amid which the life of the spirit must rise, and insist that
this also is the material of the Kingdom of God. To such a
temper, all activities divorced from religion are brutal or
dead, but none are too mean to be beneath or too great to be
above it, since all, in their different degrees, are touched with
the spirit which permeates the whole. It nds its most sub-
lime expression in the words of Piccarda: “Paradise is every-
where, though the grace of the highest good is not shed
everywhere in the same degree.”
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 3!
Each of these attitudes meets us to-day. Each meets us in
the thought of the Middle Ages, as diilerences of period and
place and economic environment and personal temperament
evoke it. In the early Middle Ages the ascetic temper pre-
dominates. The author of the Elucidarium, for example, who
sees nothing in economic life but the struggle of wolves over
carrion, thinks that men of business can hardly be saved, for
they live by cheating and pro teering.“ It is monasticism,
with its repudiation of the prizes and tempta ons of the
secular world, which is par excellence thelife of religion.
As one phase of it succumbed to ease and a luence, another
rose to restore the primitive austerity, and the return te
evangelical poverty, preached by St. Francis but abandoned
by many of his followers, was the note of the majority cl-E’
movements for reform. As for indilTerentism—what else, for
all its communistic phrases, is- Wyclif’s teaching, that the
“just man is already lord of all" and that "in this world God
must serve the devil,” but an anticipation of the doctrine of
celestial happiness as the compensation of earthly misery, to
which Hobbes gave a cynical immortality when he wrote
that the persecuted, instead of rebelling, “must expect their
reward in Heaven,” and which Mr. and Mrs. Hammond
have revealed as an opiate dulling both the pain and the
agitation of the Industrial Revolution? If obscure sects like
the Poor Men of Lyons are too unorthodox to be cited, the
Friars are not, and it was not only Langland, and that
gentlemanly journalist, Froissart, who accused them-—the
phrase has a long history-of stirring up class hatred.
To select from so immense a sea of ideas about society and
religion only the specimens that t the meshes of one's own
small net and to label them “medi_z=eval thought," is to beg
all questions. Ideas have a pedigree which, if realized, would
often embarrass their exponents. The day has long since
passed when it could be suggested that only one-half of
modern Christianity has its roots in mediaeval religion. There
is a mediazval Puritanism and Rationalism as well as a
32 THE MEDI)-EVAL BACKGROUND
mediteval Catholicism. In the eld of ecclesiastical theory, as
Mr. Manning has pointed out in his excellent book,‘
Gregory VII and Boniface VII.’ have their true successors in
Calvin and Knox. What is true of religion and political
thought is equally true of economic and social doctrines.
The social theories of Luther and Latimer, of Bucer and
Bullinger, of sixteenth-century Anabaptists and seventeenth-
century ‘Levellers, of Puritans like Baxter, Anglicans like
Laud, Baptists like Bunyan, Quakers like Bellers, are all the
children of niediaeval parents. Like the Church to-day in
region: which have not yet emerged from savagery, the
Church of the earlier Middle Ages had been engaged in an
immense missionary cifort, in which, as it struggled with the
surrounrling 1:-arba rism, tho work of conversion and of social
construction had been almost indistinguishable. By the very
nature of its task, as much as by the intention of its rulers,
it had become the greatest of political institutions. For good
or evil it aspired to be, not a sect, but a civilization, and,
when its unity was shattered at the Reformation, the differ-
ent Churches which emerged from it endeavoured, according
to their different opportunities, to perpetuate the same tradi-
tion. Asceticism or renunciation, quietism or indilierentism,
the zeal which does well to be angry, tho temper which seeks
n synthesis of the external order and the religion of the spirit
—-all alil-Lo, in one form or another, are represented in the
religious thought and practice of the Middle Ages.
All are represented in it, but not all are equally representa-
tive of lt. Of the four attitudes suggested above, it is the last
which is most characteristic. The first fundamental assump-
tion which is taken over by the sixteenth century is that the
ultimate standard of human institutions and activities is
religion. The architcctonics of the system had been worked
out in the Sumner of the Schoolrnen. ln sharp contrast to the
modern temper, which takes the destination for granted, and
ls thrilled by the hum of the engine, mediazval religious
thought strains "every interest and activity, ' by however
Tl-IE SOCIAL ORGANISM 33
arbitrary a compression, into the service of a single idea.
The lines of its scheme run up and down, and, since purpose
is universal and all-embracing, there is, at least in theory,
no room for eccentric bodies which move in their own private
orbit. That purpose is set by the divine plan of the universe.
“The perfect happiness of man cannot be other than the
vision of the divine essence.”1°
Hence all activities fall within a single system, because all,
though with different degrees of immediateness, are related
to a single end, and derive their signi cance from it. The
Church in its wider sense is the Christian Commonwealth,
within which that end is to be realized; in its narrower sense
it is the hierarchy divinely commissioned for its interpreta-
tion; in both it embraces the whole of life, and its authority
is nal. Though practice is perpetually at variance with
theory, there is no absolute division between the inner and
personal life, which is “the sphere of religion," and the
practical interests, the external order, the impersonal
mechanism, to which, if some modern teachers may be
trusted, religion is irrelevant.
There is no absolute division, but there is a division of
quality. There are-to use a modern phrase—degrecs oi
reality. The distinctive feature of mediaeval thought is that
contrasts which later were to be presented as irreconcilable
antitheses appear in it as differences within a larger unity,
and that the world of social organization, originating in
physical necessities, passes by insensible gradations into that
of the spirit. Man shares with other animals the necessity of
maintaining and perpetuating his species; in addition, as a
natural creature, he has what is peculiar to himself, an
inclination to the life of the intellect and of society—“to
know the truth about God and to live in communities.”11
These activities, which form his life according to the law of
nature, may be regarded, and sometimes are regarded, as
indifferent or hostile to the life of the spirit. But the
characteristic thought is different. It is that of a synthesis.
B iA23J
The contrast between nature and grace, between human
appetites and interests and religion, is not absolute, but rela-
tive. It is a contrast of matter and the spirit informing it, of
stages in a process, of preparation and fruition. Grace works
on the unregenerate nature of man, not to destroy it, but to
transform it. And what is true of the individual is true of
society. An attempt is made to give it a new signi cance by
relating it to the purpose of human life as known by revela-
tion. In the words of a famous (or notorious) Bull: “The way
of religion is to lead the things which are lower to the things
which are higher through the things which are intermediate.
According to the law of the universe all things are not reduced
to order equally and iinmcdiately; but the lowest through the
intermediate, the intermediate through the higher.'”1? Thus
social institutions assume a character which may almost be
called sacramental, for they are the outward and imperfect
expression of a supreme spiritual reality. Ideally conceived,
society is an organism of different grades, and human acti-
vities form a hierarchy of functions, which differ in kind and
in signi cance, but each of which is of value on its own plane,
provided that it is governed, however remotely, by the end
which is common to all. Like the celestial order, of which it
is the dim re ection, society is stable, because it is straining
upwards:
Anzi e formale ad esto beato esse,
Tenersi dentro alla divina voglia,
Per eh’ una fansi nostre voglie stesse.
Needless to say, metaphysics, however sublime, were not
the -zlaily food of the Middle Ages, any more than of to-day.
Tile fifteenth century saw an outburst of commercial activity
and of economic speculation, and by the middle of it all this
lC-'.1'_3lllI1g was becoming antiquated. Needless to say, also,
general ideas cannot be kept in compartments, and the con-
viction of mediaval thinkers that life has a divine purpose
coloured the interpretation of common a 'airs, as it was
coloured by physics in the eighteenth century and by the idea
of evolution in the nineteenth. If the rst legacy of the Middle
Ages to the sixteenth century was the idea of religion as
embracing all aspects of human life, the second and third
owed naturally from the working of that idea in the econo-
mic environment of the time. They may be called, respec-
tively, the functional view of class organization, and the
doctrine of economic ethics.
From the twelfth century to the sixteenth, from the work of
Beckct’s secretary in 1159 to the work'of Henry VIll’s chap-
lain in 1537, the analogy by which society is described—'an
analogy at once fundamental and commonplace—-is the
same.13'Invoked in every economic crisis to rebuke extortion
and dissension with a -high doctrine of social solidarity,_it
was not nally discarded till the rise of a theoretical indivi-
dualism in England in the seventeenth century. lt is that of
the human body. The gross facts of the social order are
accepted, in all their harshness and brutality. They are
accepted with astonishing docility, and, except on rare occa-
sions, there is no question of reconstruction. What they
include is no tri e. It is nothing less than the whole edi ce
of feudal society—class privilege, class oppression, exploita-
tion, serfdom. Butthese things cannot, it is thought, be
treated as simply alien to religion, for religion is all-compre-
hensive. They '1nust be given some ethical meaning, must be
shown to be the expression of some larger plan. The meaning
given them is simple. The facts of class status and inequality
were rationalized in the Middle Ages by a functional theory
of society, as the facts of competition were rationalized in
the eighteenth by the theory of economic harmonies; and
the former took the same delight in contemplating the moral
purpose revealed in social organization, as the latter in
proving that to the curious mechanism of human society a
moral purpose was super uous or disturbing. Society, like
the human body, is an organism composed of di erent
members. Eachmember has its own function, prayer, or
defence, or merchandise, or tilling the soil. Each must receive
36 THE MEDUEVAL BACKGROUND
the means suited to its station, and must claim no more.
Within classes there must be equality; if one takes into his
hand the living of two, his neighbour will go short. Between
classes there must be inequality; for otherwise a class cannot
perform its function, or—a strange thought to us-—enjoy its
rights. Peasants must not encroach on those above them.
Lords must not despoil peasants. Craftsmen and merchants
must receive what will maintain them in their calling, and
no more.
As a rule of social policy, the doctrine was at once repres-
sive and protective. “There is degree above degree, as reason
is, and skill it is that men do their devoir thereas it is due.
But certes, extortions and despite of your underlings is
damnable."“ As a philosophy of society, it attempted to
spiritualize the material by incorporating it in a divine
universe, which should absorb and transform it. To that
process of transmutation the life of mere money-making was
recalcitrant, and hence, indeed, the stigma attached to it.
For, in spite of the ingenuity of theorists, nance and trade,
the essence of which seemed to be, not service, but a mere
appetirus diviriarum injim'm.r, were not easily interpreted in
terms of social function. Comparatively late intruders in a
world dominated by conceptions hammered out in a pre-
commercial age, they were never tted harmoniously into
the medizeval synthesis, and ultimately, when they grew to
their full stature, were to contribute to its overthrow. But
the property of the feudal lord, the labour of the peasant
or the craftsman, even the ferocity of the warrior, were not
dismissed as hostile or indifferent to the life of the spirit.
Touched by the spear of lthuricl, they were to be sublimated
into service, vocation and chivalry, and the ritual which sur-
rounded them was designed to emphasize that they had
undergone a rededication at the hands of religion. Baptized
by the Church, privilege and power became o ice and duty.
That the reconciliation was super cial, and that in
attempting it the Church often degraded itself without rais-
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 3?
ing the world, is as indisputable as that its tendency was to
dignify material interests, by stamping them with the impress
of a universal design. Gentlemen took hard tallages and
oppressed the poor; but it was something that they should
be told that their true function was “to defend God’s law
by power of the world.”15 Craftsmen—-the burden of endless
sermons—worked deceitfully; but it was perhaps not wholly
without value that they should pay even lip-service to the
ideal of so conducting their trade that the common people
should not be defrauded by the evil ingenuity of those
exercising the craft. lf lord and peasant, merchant and
artisan, burgess and villager, pressed each other hard, was it
meaningless to meet their struggles with an assertion of
universal solidarity, to which economic convenience and
economic power must alike give way? “The health of the
whole commonwealth will be assured and vigorous, if the
higher members consider the lower and the lower answer in
like manner the higher, so that each is in its turn a member
of every other."1“
If the mediaeval moralist was often too naive in expecting
sound practice as the result of lofty principles alone, he was
at least free from that not unfashionable form of credulity
which expects it from their absence or from their opposite
To say that the men to whom such teaching was addressed
went out to rob and cheat is to say no more than that tire};
were men. Nor is it self-evident that they would have been
more likely to be honest if they had been informed, like some
of their descendants, that competition was designed by
Providence to provide an automatic substitute for honesty.
Society was interpreted, in short, not as the expression of
economic self-interest, but as held together by a system of
mutual, though varying, obligations. Social well-being exists,
it was thought, in so far as each class performs its functions
and enjoys the rights proportioned thereto. “The Church is
divided in these three parts, preachers, and defenders, and
. . . labourers. . . . As she is our mother, so she is a body,
and health of this body stands in this, that one part of her
answer to another, after the same measure that Jesus Christ
has ordained it. . . . Kindly man's hand helps his head, and
his eye helps his foot, and his foot his body . . . and thus
should it be in parts of the Church. . . . As divers parts of
man served unkindly to man if one took the service of
another and left his own proper work, so divers parts of the
Church have proper works to serve God; and if one part
leave his work that God has limited him and take work of
anotlter part, sinful wonder_is in the Church. . . . Surely the
Church shall never-be whole before proportions of her parts
be brought again by_this heavenly leech and (by) medicine
of men.”1?
Speculation does not develop in vacuo. It echoes, however
radical it is, the established order. Clearly this patriarchal
doctrine is a softened reflection of the feudal land system.
Not less clearly the Church's doctrine of economic ethics is
the expression of the ‘conditions of mediazval industry. A
religious philosophy, unless it is frankly to abandon nine-
tcnths of conduct to the powers of darkness, cannot admit
the doctrine of a world of business and economic relations
self-su lcient and divorced from ethics and religion. But the
facts may be difiicultito moralize, or they may be relatively
easy. Over a great part of Europe in the later Middle Ages,
the economic environment was less intractable than it had
been in the clays of the Empire or than it is to-day. In the
great commercial centres there was sometimes, it is true, a
capitalism as inhuman as any which the world has seen, and
from time to time ferocious class wars between artisans and
merchants.15 But outside them trade, industry, the money
market, all that we call the economic system, was not a
system, but a mass of individual trades and individual deal-
ings. Pecuniary transactions were a fringe on a world of
natural economy. There was little mobility or competition.
There was very little large-scale organization. With some
hnportant exceptions, such as the textile workers of Flanders
and Italy, who, in the fourteenth century, again and again
rose in revolt, the rnedizeval artisan, especially in backward
countries like England, was a- small master. The formation
of temporary organizations, or “parliaments,” of wage-
earners, which goes on in London even before the end of the
thirteenth century," and the growth ofjourneymen’s associa-
tions in the later Middle Ages, are a proof that the conditions
which produced modern trade unionism were not unknown.
But even in a great city like Paris the 128 gilds which existed
at the end of the thirteenth century appear to have included
5,000 masters, who employed not more than 6,000 to 7,000
journeymen. At Frankfurt-am-Main in 1387 actually not
more than 750 to 800 journeynien are estimated to have been
in the service oi‘ 1,554 masters.‘-'1“
In cities of this kind, with their freedom, their compara-
tive peace, and their strong corporate feeling, large enough
to be proli c of associations and small enough for each man
to know his neighbour, an ethic of mutual aid was not wholly
impossible, and it is in the light of such conditions that the
most characteristic of-niediaeval industrial institutions is to be
interpreted. ‘To suggest that anything like a majority of
media-;.val workers were ever members of a craft gild is
extravagant. In England, at any rate, more than nine-tenths
were peasants, among whom, though friendly societies called
gilds were common, there was naturally no question of craft
organization. Even in the towns it is a question whether there
was not a considerable population of casual workers—con-
sider only the number of unskilled workers that must have
been required as labourers by the craftsmen building a
cathedral in the days before mechanical" cranes-—who were
rarely organized in, permanent societies. To invest the craft
gilds with a halo of economic chivalry is not less-inappro-
priate. They were, rst and foreinost, monopolists, and the
cases in which their vested interests came into collision with
the consumer were not a few. Wyclif, with his almost modern
devotion to the conception of a unitary society overriding
40 THE MEDIAEVAL BACKGROUND
particular interests for the common good, was naturally pre-
judiced _against corporations, on the ground that they
distracted social unity by the intrusion of sectarian cupidities
and sinister ambitions; but there was probably from time to
time more than a little justi cation for his complaint, that
“all new fraternities or gilds made of men seem openly to
run in this curse (against false conspirators)," because “they
conspire to bear up each other, yea in wrong, andoppress
other men in their right by their wit and power.”21 It is
significant that the most striking of the projects of political
and social reconstruction produced in Germany in the
century before the Reformation proposed the complete
abolition of gilds, as intolerably corrupt and tyrannical.“
There arc, however, monopolists and monopolists. An age
in which combinations are not tempted to pay lip-service to
religion may do well to remember that the characteristic,
after all, of the mediazval gild was that, if it sprang from
economic needs, it claimed, at least, to subordinate them to
social interests, as conceived by men for whom the social
and the spiritual were inextricably intertwined. “Tout ce
petit monde antique,” writes the historian of French gilds,
“était fortement imbu des idées chrétiennes sur le juste
salaire et le juste prix; sans doute il y avait alors, comme
aujourd’hui, des cupidités et des convoitises; mais une regle
puissante s’imposait a tous et d’une maniere générale exigeait
pour chacun le pain quotidien promis par 1’Evangi1e.”2'*'
The attempt to preserve a rough equality among “the good
men of the mistery,” to check economic egotism by insisting
that every brother shall share his good fortune with another
and stand by his neighbour in need, to resist the encroach-
ments of a conscienceless money-power, to preserve pro-
fessional standards of training and craftsmanship, and to
repress by a strict corporate discipline the natural appetite
of each to snatch special advantages for himself to the injury
of all—whether these things outweigh the evils of conserva-
tive methods and corporate exclusiveness is a question which
THE SOCIAL ORGANISM 4|
each student will answer in accordance with his own pre-
dilections. What is clear, at least, is that both the rules of
fraternities and the economic teaching of the Church were
prompted by the problems of a common environment. Much
that is now mechanical was then personal, intimate and
direct, and therewas little roo1n for organization on a scale
too vast for the standards that are applied to individuals, or
for the doctrine which silences scruples and closes all
accounts with the nal plea of economic expediency.
Such an environment, with its personal economic rela-
tions, was a not unfavourable eld for a system of social
ethics. -And the Church, which brought to its task the tre-
mendous claim to mediate between even the humblest
activity and the divine purpose, sought to supply it. True, its
teaching was violated in practice, and violated grossly, in
the very citadel of Christendom which promulgated it. Con-
temporaries were under no illusion as to the reality of
economic motives in the Age of Faith. They had only to look
at Rome. From the middle of the thirteenth century a con-
tinuous wail arises against the iniquity of the Church, and
its burden may be summed up in one word, “avarice.” At
Rome, everything is for sale. What is followed is the gospel,
not according to St. Mark, but according to the marks of
silver.‘-14
Cum ad papam veneris, habe pro constanti,
Non est locus pauperi, soli favet danti.
Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re,

Quicquid habent alii, solus vult papare;
Vel, si verbum gallicum vis apocopare,
‘Payez, paycz,’ dir le mot, si vis irnpetrare."
The Papacy might denounce usurers, but, as the centre of
the most highly organized administrative system of the age,
receiving remittances from all over Europe, and receiving
them in money at a time when the revenue of other govern-
meuts still included personal services and payments in kind,
Bill
it could not dispense with them. Dante put the Cahorsine
money-lenders in hell, but a Pope gave them the title of
“peculiar sons of the Roman Church.”2“ Grosstéte rebuked
the Lombard bankers, and a bishop of London expelled
them, but papal-protection brought them back}? Archbishop
Peckham, a few years later, had to implore‘Pope Nicholas
lll to withdraw a threat of excornmunication, intended to
compel him to pay the usurious interest demanded by Italian
money-lenders, though, as the archbishop justly observed,
“by your Holiness’s special mandate, it would be my duty to
take strong measures against such lenders.”25 -The Papacy
was, in a sense, the greatest nancial institution'of the Middle
Ages, and, as its scal system was elaborated, things became,
not better, but worse. The abuses which were a trickle in the
thirteenth century were a torrent in the fteenth. And the
frailties of Rome, if exceptional in their notoriety, can
hardly be regarded as unique. Priests, it is from time to time
complained, engage in trade and take usuryfl” Cathedral
chapters lend money at high rates of interest. The pro ts of
usury, like those of simony, should have been refused by
churchmen as hateful to God; but a bishop of Paris, when
consulted by a usurer as to the salvation of his soul, instead
of urging“ restitution, recommended him to dedicate his ill-
gotten wealth to the building of Notre-Dame.“ “Thus,”
exclaimed St. Bernard, as he gazed at the glories of Gothic
architecture, “wealth is drawn up by ropes of wealth, thus
money bringeth money. . . .0 vanity of vanities, yet no
more vain than insane! The Church is resplendent in her
walls, beggarly in her poor. She clothes her stones in- gold,
and leaves her sons naked.”31
The picture is horrifying, and one must be grateful to
those, like M-. Luchaire and Mr. Coulton, who demolish
romance. But the denunciation of vices implies that they are
recognized as vicious; to ignore their condempation is not
les"s one-sided than to conceal their existence; and, when the
halo has vanished from practice, it remains to ask what
principles men valued and what standards they erected. The
economic doctrines elaborated in the Smnma: of the School-
men, in which that question receives its most systematic
answer, have not infrequently been dismissed as the fanciful
extravagances of writers disquali ed from throwing light on
the affairs of this world by their morbid preoccupation with
those of the next. In reality, whatever may be thought of
their conclusions, both the occasion and the purpose of
scholastic speculations upon economic questions were
eminently practical. The movement which prompted them
was the growth of trade, of town life, and of a commercial
economy, in a world whose social categories were still those
of the self-su icing village and the feudal hierarchy. The
object of their authors was to solve the problems to _which
such developments gave rise. It was to reconcile the new
contractual relations. which sprang from economic expan-
sion, with the traditional morality expounded by the Church.
Viewed by posterity as reactionaries, who'damned the
currents of economic enterprise with an irrelevant appeal to
Scripture and to the Fathers, in their own age they were
the pioneers of a liberal intellectual movement. By lifting
the weight of antiquated formulae, they cleared a space with-
in the stiff framework of religious authority for new and
mobile economic interests, and thus supplied an intellectual
justification for developments which earlier generations
would have condemned.
The mercantilist thought of later centuries owed a con-
siderable debt to scholastic discussions of money, prices, and
interest. But the speci c contributions of mediteval writers
to the technique of economic theory were less signi cant
than their premises. Their fundamental assumptions, both
of which were to leave a deep imprint on the social thought
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were two: that
economic interests are subordinate to the real business of
life, which is salvation, and that economic conduct is one
aspect of personal conduct upon which, as on other parts
44 THE MEDi.»*E'v’AL BACKGROUND
of it, the rules of morality are binding. Material riches are
necessary; they have a secondary importance, since without
them men cannot support themselves and help one another;
the wise ruler, as St. Thomas said,-32 will consider in founding
his State the natural resources of the country. But economic
motives are suspect. Because they are powerful appetites,
men fear them, but they are not mean enough to applaud
them. Like other strong passions, what they need, it is
thought, is not a clear eld, but repression. There is no place
in medi:-eval theory for economic activity which is not related
to a moral end, and to found a science of society upon the
assumption that the appetite for economic gain is a constant
and measurable force, to be accepted, like other natural
forces, as an inevitable and self-evident datum, would have
appeared to the med imval thinker as hardly less irrational or
less immoral than to make the premise of social philosophy
the unrestrained operation of such necessary human attri-
butes as pugnacity or the sexual instinct. The outer is
ordained for the sake of the inner; economic goods are
instrumental—sicut qmrdam adririi-iicnla, qrrfbtts adjuvamur ac!
r.~.=r:n’endum in beatitudirreznt “It is lawful to desire temporal
blessings, not putting them in the rst place, as though
setting up our rest in them, but regarding them as aids to
blessedness, inasmuch as they support our corporal life and
serve as instruments for acts of virtue."33 Riches, as St.
Antonino says, exist for man, not man for riches.
At every turn, therefore, there are limits, restrictions,
warnings against allowing economic interests to interfere
with serious affairs. It is right for a man to seek such wealth
as is necessary for a livelihood in his station. To seek more is
not enterprise, but avarice, and avarice is a deadly sin. Trade
is legitimate: the different resources of different countries
show that it was intended by Providence. But it is a clan-
gerous business. A man must be sure that he carries it on
for the public bene t, and that the pro ts which he takes are
no more than the wages of his labour. Private property is a
necessary institution, at least in a fallen world; men work
more and dispute less when goods are private than when
they are common. But it is to be tolerated as a concession to
human frailty, not applauded as desirable in itself; the ideal
-—if only man’s nature could rise to it—is communism.
“Communis enirn,” wrote Gratian in his Decremm, “usus
omnium, quae sunt in hoc mundo, omnibus hominibus esse
debuit."34 At best, indeed, the estate is somewhat en-
cumbered. It must be legitimately acquired. It must be in the
largest possible number of hands. It must provide for the
support of the poor. Its use must as far as practicable be
common. Its owners must be ready to share it with those who
need, even if they are not in actual destitution. Such were
the conditions which commended themselves to an arch-
bishop of the business capital of fteenth-century Europe.“
There have been ages in which they would have been
described, not as a justification of property, but as a revolu-
tionary assault on it. For to defend the property of the
peasant and small master is necessarily to attack that of the
monopolist and usurer, which grows by devouring it.
The assumption on which all this body of doctrine rested
was simple. It was that the danger of economic interests in-
creased in direct proportion to the prominence of the
pecuniary motives associated with them. Labour—tl1e
common lot of mankind is necessary and honourable;
trade is necessary, but perilous to the soul; nance, if not
immoral, is at best sordid and at worst disreputable. This
curious inversion of the social values of more enlightened
ages is best revealed in mediteval discussions of the ethics of
commerce. The severely quali ed tolerance extended to the
trader was partly, no doubt, a literary convention derived
from classical models; it was natural that Aquinas should
laud the State which had small need of merchants hecause
it could meet its needs from the produce of its own soil;
had not the philosopher himself praised 0:151:01 pirate? But
it was a convention which coincided with a vital element in
46 THE MEDUEVAL BACKGROUND
medizeval social theory, and struck a responsive nete in wide
sections of medizeval society. It is not disputed, of course,
that trade is indispensable; the merchant supplements the
deiiciencies of one country with the abundance of another.
lf there were no private traders, argued Duns Scotus, whose
indulgence was less carefully guarded, the governor would
have to engage them. Their pro ts, therefore, are legitimate,
and they may include, not only the livelihood appropriate
to the tradcr’s status, but payment for labour, skill and risk.”
The defence, if adequate, was somewhat embarrassing. For
why should a defence hie required‘? The insistence that trade
is not positively sinful conveys a hint that the practices of
traders may be, at least, of dubious propriety. And so, in the
eyes of most mediteval thinkers, they are. Stmxme pericufosa
est vcudz'rz'0m's ct emprionis r:sg0tz'atz'0.37 The explanation of
that attitude lay partly in the facts of contemporary econo-
mic organization. The economy of the medireval borough-
considcr only its treatment of food supplies and prices—was
one in which consumption held somewhat the same primacy
in the public mind, as the undisputed arbiter of economic
effort, as the nineteenth century attached to pro ts. The
merchant pure and simple, though convenient to the Crown,
for whom he collected taxes and provided loans, and to great
establishments such as monasteries, whose wool he bought in
bulk, enjoyed the double unpopularity of an alien and a
parasite. The best practical commentary on the tepid indul-
gence extended by theorists to the trader is the network of
restrictions with which medieval policy surrounded his
activities, the recurrent storms of public indignation against
him, and the ruthlessness with which boroughs suppressed
the middleman who intervened between consumer and
producer. .
Apart, however, from the colour which it took from its
environment, mediteval social theory had reasons of its own
for holding that business, as distinct from labour, required
some special justification. The suspicion of economic motives
had been one of the earliest elements in the social teaching
of the Church, and was to survive till Calvinism endowed
the life of economic enterprise with a new sancti cation. In
mediatval philosophy the ascetic tradition, which condemned
all commerce as the sphere of iniquity, was softened by a
recognition of practical necessities, but it was not obliterated;
and, if reluctant to condemn, it .was insistent to warn. For it-
was of the essence of trade to drag into a position of solitary
prominence the acquisitive appetites; and towards those
appetites, which to most modern thinkers have seemed the
one sure social dynamic, the attitude of the mediteval
theorist was that of one who holds a wolf by the ears. The
craftsman labours for his living; he seeks what is suf cicnt
to support him, and no more. The merchant aims not
merely at livelihood, but at pro t. The traditional distinc-
tion was expressed in the words of Gratian: “Whosoever
buys a thing, notthat he may sell it whole and unchanged,
but that it may be a material for fashioning something, he is
no merchant. But the man who buys it in order that he may
gain by selling it againunchanged and as he bought it, that
man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from
God’s temple.”3** By very de nition a man who “buys in
order that he may sell dearer," the trader is moved by
an inhuman concentration on his own pecuniary interest,
unsoftened by any tincture of publicspirit or private charity.
He turns what should be a means into an end, and his
Mcupation, therefore, “is justly condemned, since, regarded
in itself, it serves the lust of gain."3°
The dilemma presented by a form'of enterprise at once
perilous to the soul and essential to society was revealed in
the solution most commonly propounded for it. It was to
treat pro ts as a particular case of wages, with the quali ca-
tion that gains in excess of a reasonable remuneration for the
merchant’s labour were, though not illegal, reprehensible as
rurpe Iacrum. The condition of the trader’s exoneration is that
“he seeks gain, not as an end, but as the wages of his
48 THE MEDIEEVAL BACKGROUND
labour.”4° Theoretically convenient, the doctrine was di i-
cult of application, for evidently it implied the acceptance of
what the sedate irony of Adam Smith was later to describe as
“ an affectation not very common among merchants." But
the motives which prompted it were characteristic. The
medizeval theorist condemned as a sin precisely that effort to
achieve a continuous and unlimited increase in material
wealth which modern societies applaud as meritorious, and
the vices for which he reserved his most merciless denuncia-
tions were the more re ned and subtle of the economic
virtues. “I-Ie who has enough to satisfy his wants,” wrote a
Schoolman of the fourteenth century, “and nevertheless
ceaselessly labours to acquire riches, either in order to obtain
a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have
enough to live without labour, or that his sons may become
men of wealth and importance—all such are incited by a
damnable avarice, sensuality or pride.”41 Two and a half
centuries later, in the midst of a revolution in the economic
and spiritual environment, Luther, in even more unmeasured
language, was to say the same.“ The essence of‘the argu-
ment was that payment may properly be demanded by the
craftsmen who make the goods, or by the merchants who
transport them, for both labour in their vocation and serve
the common need. The unpardonable sin is that oft the
speculator or the middleman, who snatches private gain by
the exploitation of public necessities. The true descendant of
the doctrines of Aquinas is the labour theory of value. The
last of the Schoolmen was Karl Marx.
(ii)
The Sin of Amrfce
If such ideas were to be more than generalities, they
required to be translated into terms of the particular trans-
actions by which trade is conducted and property aoquired.
THE SIN OF AVARICE 49
Their practical expression was the body of economic casuis-
try, in which the best-known elements are the teaching with
regard to the just price and the prohibition of usury. These
doctrines sprang as much from the popular consciousness
of the plain facts of the economic situation as from the
theorists who expounded them. The innumerable fables
of the usurer who was prematurely carried to hell, or whose
money turned to withered leaves in his strong box, or who
(as the scrupulous recorder remarks) “ about the year 1240,’?
on entering a church to be married, was crushed by a stone
gure falling from the porch, which proved by the grace of
God to be a carving of another usurer and his money-bags
being carried off by the devil, are more illuminating than the
re nements of lawyers.“
On these matters, as the practice of borough and manor,
as well as of national governments, shows, the Church was
preaching to the converted, and to dismiss its teaching on
economic ethics as the pious rhetoric of professional
moralists is to ignore the fact that precisely similar ideas
were accepted in circles which could not be suspected of any
unnatural squeamishness as to the arts by which men grow
rich. The best commentary on ecclesiastical doctrines as to
usury and prices is the secular legislation on similar subjects,
for, clown at least to the middle of the sixteenth century,
their leading ideas were re ected in it. Plain men might curse
the ehicanery of ecclesiastical lawyers, and gilds and
boroughs might forbid their members to plead before
ecclesiastical courts; but the rules which they themselves
made for the conduct of business had more than a avour
of the canon law. Florence was the nancial capital of
mediaeval Europe; b'ut‘even at Florence the secular authori-
ties ned bankers right and left for usury in the middle of
the fourteenth century, and, fty years later, rst prohibited
credit transactions altogether, and then imported Jews to
conduct a business forbidden to Christians.“ Cologne was
one of the greatest of commercial entrepots; but, when its
50 THE MEDIEEVAL BACKGROUND
successful business man came to malte his will, he remem-
bered that trade was perilous to the soul and avarice a deadly
sin, and o ered what atonement he could by directing his
sons to make restitution and to‘ follow some less dangerous
occupation than that of the merc.hant.‘15 The burgesses of
Coventry fought the Prior over a question of common rights
for the best part of a century; but the Court Leet of that
thriving business city put usury on a par with adultery and
fornication, and decreed that no usurer could become
mayor, councillor, or master of the gild.“ It was not that
laymen were unnaturally righteous; it was not that the
Church was all-powerful, though its teaching wound into
men's minds through a hundred channels, and survived as a
sentiment long after it was repudiated as a command. It
was that the facts of the economic situation imposed them-
selves irresistibly on both. In reality, there was no sharp
collision between the doctrine of the Church and the public
policy of the world of business—its individual practice was,
of course, another matter—bceause both‘ were formed by
the same environment, and accepted the same broad
assumptions as to social expediency. '
The economic background of it all was very simple. The-
medizizval consumer—-we can sympathize with him to-day
more easily than in 19l4—is like a traveller condemned to
spend his life at a station hotel. He occupies a tied house and
is at the mercy of the local baker and brewer. Monopoly is
inevitable. Indeed, a great part of mediwval industry is a
system of organized monopolies, endowed with a public
status, which must be watched with jealous eyes to see that
they do not abuse their powers. It is a' society of small
masters and peasant farmers. Wages are not a burning
question, for, except in the great industrial centres of Italy
and Flanders, the permanent wage-earning class is small.
Usury is, as it is to-day in similar circumstances. For loans
are made largely for consumption, not for production. The
farmer whose harvest fails or whose beasts die, or the artisan
‘THE SIN OF AVARICE 51
who loses money, must have credit, seed-corn, cattle‘, raw
materials, and his distress is the money-lender's opportunity.
Naturally, there is a passionate popular sentiment against
the engrosser who holds a town to ransom, the monopolist
who brings the livings of many into the hands of one, the
money-lender who takes advantage of his neighbours‘
necessities to get a lien on their land and foreclose. “The
usurer would not loan to men these goods, but if he hoped
winning, that he loves more than charity. Many other sins
be more than this usury, but for this men curse and hate it
more than other sin.”4"'
No one who examines the cases actually heard by the
courts in the later Middle Ages will think that resentment
surprising, for they throw a lurid light on the possibilities
of commercial immorality.45 Among the peasants and small
masters who composed the mass of the population in
mediaeval England, borrowing and lending were common,
and it was with reference to their petty transactions, not to
the world of high nance, that the traditional attitude
towa_rds the money-lender had been crystallized. It was
natural that “Juetta [who] is a usuress and sells at a dearer
rate for accommodation,” and John the Chaplain, qui est
u.s:rmr:'us maximus,‘*=‘J should be regarded as gures at once
too scandalous to be tolerated by their neighbours and too
convenient to be altogether suppressed. The Church accepts
this popular sentiment, gives it a religious signi cance, and
crystallizes it in a system, in which economic morality is
preached from the pulpit, emphasized in the confessional,
andenforccd, in the last resource, through the courts.
T-he philosophical basis of it is the conception of natural
law. “Every law framed by man bears the character of a law
exactly to that extent to which it is derived from the law of
nature. But if on any point it is in conflict with the law of
nature, it at once ceases to be a law; it is a mere perversion
of law.”~”° The plausible doctrine of compensations, of the
long-run, of the self-correcting mechanism, has not been yet
52 TI-IE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
invented. The idea of a law of nature——of natural justice
which ought to nd expression in positive law, but which is
not exhausted in it—supplies an ideal standard by which
the equity of particular relations can be measured. The most
fundamental di brence between medimval and modern
economic thought consists, indeed, in the fact that, whereas
the latter normally refers to economic expediency, however
it may be interpreted, for the justi cation of any particular
action, policy, or system of organization, the former starts
from the position that there is a moral authority to which
considerations of economic expediency must 'be subordin-
ated. The practical application of this conception is the
attempt to try every transaction by a rule of right, which is
largely, though not wholly, independent of the fortuitous
combinations of economic circumstances. No man must ask
more than the price xed, either by public authorities, or,
failing that, by common estimation. True, prices even so will
vary with scarcity; for, with all their rigour, theologians are
not so impracticable as to rule out the effect of changing
supplies. But they will not vary with individual necessity or
individual opportunity. The bugbear is the man who uses, or
even creates, a temporary shortage, the man who makes
money out of the turn of the market, the man who, as
Wyclif says, must be wicked, or he could not have been poor
yesterday and rich to-day.“
The formal theory of the just price went, it is true, through
a considerable development. The dominant conception of
Aquinas-—that prices, though they will vary with the varying
conditions of different markets, should correspond with the
labour and costs of the producer, as the proper basis of the
conmmnis esrimatio, conformity with which was the safe-
guard against extortion-—was quali ed by subsequent
writers. Several Schoolmen of the fourteenth century
emphasized the subjective element in the common estima-
tion, insisted that the essence of value was utility, and drew
the conclusion that a fair price was most likely to be reached
under freedom of contract, since the mere fact that a bargain
had been struck showed that both parties were satis ed.“
In the fteenth century St. Antonino, who wrote with a
highly-developed commercial civilization beneath his eyes,
endeavoured to eliect a synthesis, in which the principle of
the traditional doctrine should be observed, while the neces-
sary play should be left to economic motives. After a subtle-
analysis of the conditions affecting value, he concluded that
the fairness of a price could at best be a matter only of “pro-_
bability and conjecture,” since it would vary with places,
periods and persons. His practical contribution was to intro-
duce a new elasticity into the whole conception by dis-
tinguishing three grades of p."ices—a _g'mJ:.is p.";.:.r,..'.’:';;crcttrs,
and rigid:-'5. A seller who exceeded the price xed by more
than 50 per cent was bound, he argued, to make restitution,
and even a smaller departure from it, if deliberate, required
atonement in the shape of aims. But accidental lapses were
vcnial, and there was a debatable ground within which
prices might move without involving sin.-"3
This conclusion, with its recognition of the impersonal
forces of the market, was the natural outcome of the intense
economic activity of the later Middle Ages, and evidently
contained the seeds of an intellectual revolution. The fact
that it should have begun to be expounded as early as the
middle of the fourteenth century is a reminder that the
economic thought of Schoolmen contained elements much
more various and much more modern than is sometimes
suggested. But the characteristic doctrine was diilerent. It
was that which insisted on the just price as the safeguard
against extortion. “To leave the prices of goods at the
discretion of the sellers is to give rein to the cupidity which
goads almost all of them to seek excessive gain.” Prices must
be such, and no more than such, as will enable each man
to “have the necessariesof life suitable for his station.” The
most desirable course is that they should be xed by public
officials, after making an enquiry into the supplies available
and framing an estimate of the requirements of different
classes. Failing that, the individual must x prices for him-
self, guided by a consideration of “what he must charge in
order to maintain his position, and nourish himself suitably
in it, and by a reasonable estimate of his expenditure and
labour.”-"4 If the latter recommendation was a. counsel of
perfection, the former was almost a platitude. It was no
more than an energetic mayor would carry out before
breakfast.
No man, again, may charge money for a loan. He may, of
course, take the pro ts of parizier.-zhip, provided that he takes
the partner's risks. He may buy a rent-charge; for the fruits
of the earth are produced by nature, not wrung from man.
He may demand compensation—-interesse—if he is not re-
paid the principal at the time stipulated. Hp may ask pay-
ment correspending to any loss he incurs or gain he forgoes.
He may purchase an annuity, for the payment is contingent
and speculative, not certain. It is no usury when John
Deveneys, who has borrowed £19 163., binds_himself to pay a
penalty of £40 in the event of failure to restore the principal,
for this is compensation for damages incurred; or when
Geoffrey de Eston grants William dc Burwode three marks of
silver in return for an annual rent of six shillings, for this is
the purchase of a rent-charge, not a loan; or when James le
Reve of London advances £100 to Robert de Bree of Dublin,
merchant, with which to trade for two years in Ireland,
for this is a partnership; or when the Priory of Worcester
sells annuities for a capital sum paid down.55 What remained
to the end unlawful was that which appears in modern
economic text-books as “pure interest”—interest as a xed
payment stipulated in advance for a loan of money c-r wares
vsithout risk to the lender. “Usura est ex mutuo lucrum pacto
dcbitum vet exactum . . . quidquid sorti accedit, subaudi per
pactuiu vel exactionem, usura est, qaodcunque nomen sibi
imponat.”='*“ The emphasis was on pacrum. The essence of
usury was that it was certain, and that, whether the borrower
THE SIN OF AVARICE $5
gained or lost, the usurer took his pound of esh. Mediaeval
opinion, which has no objection to rent or pro ts, provided
that they are reasonable—for is not everyone in a small way
a pro t-maker?—-has no mercy for the debenture-holder.
I-lis crime is that he takes a payment for money which is
xed and certain, and such a payment is usury.
The doctrine was, of course, more complex and more
subtle than a bald summary suggests. With the growth of the
habit of investment, of a market for capital, and of new
forms of economic enterprise such as insurance and exchange
business, theory became steadily more elaborate and schools
more sharply divided. The precise meaning and scope of the
indulgence extended to the purchase of rent-charges pro-
duced one controversy, the foreign exchanges another, the
development of Moms de Piéte’ a third. Even before the end
of the fourteenth century there had bwn writers who argued
that interest was the remuneration of the services rendered
by the lender, and who pointed out (though apparently they
did not draw the modern corollary) 'that present are more
valuable than future goods.“ But on the iniquity of payment
merely for the act of lending, theological opinion, whether
liberal or conservative, was unanimous, and its modern
interpreter,“ who sees in its indulgence to interesse the
condonation of interest, would have created a scandal in
theological circles in any age before that of Calvin. To take
usury is contrary to Scripture; it is contrary to Aristotle; it
is contrary to nature, for it is to live without labour; it is to
sell time, which belongs to God, for the advantage of
wicked men; it is to rob those who use the money lent, and
to whom, since they make it pro table, the pro ts should
belong; it is unjust in itself, for thebene t of the loan to the
borrower cannot exceed the value of the principal sum lent
him; it is in de ance of sound juristic principles, for when a
loan of money is made, the property in the thing lent passes
to the borrower, and why should the creditor demand pay-
ment from a man who is merely using what is now his own?
56 THE MEDIJEVAL BACKGROUND
The part played by authority in all this is obvious. There
were the texts in Exodus and Leviticus; there was Luke vi. 35
——apparently a mistranslation; there was a passage in the
Poliiics, which some now say was mistranslated also.“ But
practical considerations contributed more to the doctrine
than is sometimes supposed. Its character had been given it
in an age in which most loans were not part of a credit
system, but an exceptional expedient, and in which it could be
said that “he who borrows is always under stress of neces-
sity.” If usury were general, it was argued, “men would not
give thought to the cultivation of their land, except when
they could do nought else, and so there would be so great a
famine that all the poor would die of hunger: for even if
they could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to
get the beasts and implements for cultivating it, since the
poor themselves would not have them, and the rich, for the
sake both of pro t and of security, would put their money
into usury rather than into smaller and more risky invest-
ments.”*"° The man who used these arguments was not an
academic dreamer. He was Innocent IV, a consummate
man of business, a believer, even to excess, in Realpolitik,
and one of the ablest statesmen of his day.
True, the Church could not dispense with commercial
wickedness in high places. It was too convenient. The dis-
tinction between pawnbroking, which is disreputable, and
high nance, which is eminently honourable, was as familiar
in the Age of Faith as in the twentieth century; and no
reasonable judgment of the medizeval denunciation of usury
is possible unless it is remembered that whole ranges of
nancial business escaped from it almost altogether. It
was rarely applied to the large-scale transactions of kings,
feudal magnates, bishops and abbots. Their subjects,
squeezed to pay a foreign money-lender, might grumble or
rebel, but, if an Edward III or a Count of Champagne was
in the hands of nanciers, who could bring either debtor
or creditor to book? It was even more rarely applied to the
THE SIN OF AVARICB $7
Papacy itself; Popes regularly employed the international
banking-houses of the day, with a singular inditference, as
was frequently complained, to the morality of their business
methods, took them under their special protection, and
sometimes enforced the payment of debts by the threat of
excommunication. As a rule, in spite of some qualms, the
international money-market escaped from the ban on usury;
in the fourteenth century Italy was full of banking-houses
doing foreign exchange business in every commercial centre
from Constantinople to London, and in the great fairs, such
as those of Champagne, a special period was regularly set
aside for the negotiation of loans and the settlement of
debts.“
It was not that transactions of this type were expressly
excepted; on the contrary, each of them from time to time
evoked the protests of moralists. Nor was it mere hypocrisy
which caused the traditional doctrine to be repeated by
writers who were perfectly well aware that neither commerce
nor government could be carried on without credit. It was
that the whole body of intellectual assumptions and prac-
tical interests, on which the prohibition of usury was based,
had reference to a quite different order of economic activities
from that represented by loans from great banking-houses
to the merchants and potentates who were their clients. Its
object was simple and direct—to prevent the well-to-do
money-lender from exploiting the necessities of the peasant
or the craftsman; its categories, which were quite appro-
priate to that type of transaction, were those of personal
morality. It was in these commonplace dealings among small
men that oppression was easiest and its results most pitiable.
It was for them that the Church’s scheme of economic
ethics had been worked out, and with reference to them,
though set at naught in high places, it was meant to be
enforced, for it was part of Christian charity.
lt was enforced partly by secular authorities, partly. in so
far as the rivalry of secular authorities would permit it, by
$8 THE MEDIEVAL BACKGROUND
the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. The ecclesiastical
legislation on the subject of usury has been so often analysed
that it is needless to do more than allude to it. Early Councils
had forbidden usury to be taken by the clergy.” The
(Y-ouncils of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries forbid it to
be taken by clergy or laity, and lay down rules for dealing
v.ith offenders. Clergy who lend money to persons in need,
take their possessions in pawn, and receive pro ts beyond
the capital sum lent, are to be deprived of their o ice.” Mani-
ti.-st usurers are not to be admitted to communion or
Cliristian burial; their offerings are not to be accepted; and
ecclesiastics who fail to punish them are to be suspended
until they make satisfaction to their bishop.“ The high-
water mark of the ecclesiastical attack on usury was probably
reached in the legislation of the Councils of Lyons (1274)
and of Vienne (I312). The former re-enacted the measures
laid down by the third Lateran Coun.cil (1175), and supple-
mented them by rules which virtually made the money-lender
an outlaw. No individual or society, under pain of excom-
munication or intcrdict, was to let houses to usurers, but
was to expel them (had they been admitted) within“ three
months. They were to be refused confession, absolution, and
Christian burial until they had made restitution, and their
wills were to be invalid.“-5 The legislation of the Council of
Vienne was even more sweeping. Declaring that it has learned
with dismay’ that there are communities which, contrary to
lzutnan and divine law, sanction usury and compel debtors
to observe usurious contracts, it declares that all rulers and
magistrates knowingly maintaining such laws are to incur
excommunication, and requires the legislation in question to
be revoked within three months. Since the true nature of
usurious transactions is often concealed beneath various
specious devices, money-lenders are to be compelled by the
ecclesiastical. authorities to submit their accounts to examina-
tion. Any person obstinately declaring that usury is not a sin
is to be punished as a heretic, and inquisitors are to proceed
against him ranquam contra diffamatos vel suspectos de
h¢2resi.6*'_'
It would not be easy to nd a more drastic example, either
of ecclesiastical sovereignty, or of the attempt to assert the
superiority of the moral law to economic expediency, than
the requirement, under threat of excommunication, that all
secular legislation sanctioning usury shall be repealed. But,
for an understanding of the way in which the system was
intended to work, the enactments of Councils are perhaps
less illuminating than the correspondence between the papal
Curia and subordinate ecclesiastical authorities on speci c
cases and questions of interpretation. Are the heirs of those
who have made money by usury bound to make restitution?
Yes, the same penalties are to be applied to them as to the
original o enders. The pious object of ransoming prisoners
is not to justify the asking of a price for a loan. A man is to
be accounted a usurer, not only if he charges interest, but if
he allows for the element of time in a bargain, by asking a
higher price when he sells on credit. Even when debtors have
sworn notto proceed against usurers, the ecclesiastical autho-
rities are to compel the latter to restore their gains, and, if
witnesses are terrorized by the protection given to usurers by
the powerful, punishment can be imposed without their
evidence, provided that the offence is a matter of common
notoriety. An archbishop of Canterbury is reminded that
usury is perilous, not only for the clergy, but for all men
whatever, and is wamed to use ecclesiastical censures to
secure the restoration,without the deduction of interest, of
property which has been pawned. Usurers, says a papal
letter to the archbishop of Salerno, object to restoring gains,
or say that they have not the means; he is to compel all who
can to make restitution, either to those from whom interest
was taken, or to their heirs; when neither course is possible,
they are to give it to the poor; for, as Augustine says, non
remirtirur peccatum, nlsi’ restitutmr abiatum. At Genoa, the
Pope is informed, a practice obtains of undertaking to pay,
Q THE MEDUEVAL BACKGROUND
at the end of a given term, a higher price for wares than they
were worth at the moment when the sale took place. It is not
clear that such contracts are necessarily usurious; neverthe-
less, the sellers run into sin unless there is a probability
that the wares will have changed in value by the time that
payment is made; “and therefore your fellow-citizens would
show a wise regard for their salvation if they ceased making
contracts of the kind, since the thoughts of men cannot be
concealed from Almighty God."“"
It is evident from the number of doubtful eases referred to
Rome for decision that the law with regard to usury was not
easily administered. It is evident, also, that efforts were
made to o 'er guidance in dealing with dif cult and technical
problems. In the book of common forrns; drawn up in the
thirteenth century for the guidance of the papal penitentiary
in dealing with hard cases, precedents were inserted to show
how usurers should be handled." About the same time
appeared 'St. Raymond's guide to the duties of an arch-
deacon, which contains a long list of inquiries to be made on
visitation, covering every conceivable kind of extortion,
and designed to expose the various illusory contracts-
lictitious partnerships, loans under the guise of sales,
excessive deposits against advances—by which the offence
was concealed.“ Instructions to confessors de ne in equal
detail the procedure to be followed. The confessor, states a
series of synodal statutes, is to “make inquiry concerning
merchandizing, and other things pertaining to avarice and
covetousness.” Barons and knights are to be required to
state whether they have made ordinances contrary to the
liberty of the Church, or refused justice to any man seeking
it, or oppressed their subjects with undue tallages, tolls or
services. “Concerning burgesses, merchants and of cera
(ministralcs) the priest is to make inquiry as, to rapine, usury.
pledges made by deceit of usury, barratry, false and lying
sales, unjust weights and measures, lying, perjury and crall.
Concerning cultivators (agricolas) he is to inquire as to the-ft
THE SIN OF AVARICB 61
and detention of the property of others, especially with
regard to tithes . . . also as to the removing of landmarks
and the occupation of other men's land. . . . Concerning
avarice it is to be asked in this wise: hast_thou been guilty of
simony . . . an unjustjudge. . . a thief, a robber, a perjurer, a
sacrilegious man, a gambler, a remover of landmark-s in
elds . . . a false merchant, an oppressor of any man and
above all of widows, wards and others in misery for the sake
of unjust and greedy gain ‘?” Those guilty of avarice are to do
penance by giving large alrns, on the principle that “con-
traries are to be cured with contraries." But there are
certain sins for which no true penitence is possible until
restitution has been made. Of these usury is one; and usury,
it is to be noted, includes, not only what would now be
called interest, but the sin of those who, on account of lapse
of time, sell dearer and buy cheaper. If for practical reasons
restitution is impossible, the offender is to be instructed to
require that it shall be made by his heirs, and, when the
injured party cannot be found, the money is to be spent,
with the advice of the bishop if the sum is large and of the
priest if it is small, “on pious works and especially on the
poor.”7°
The more popular teaching on the subject is illustrated by
the manuals for use in the confessional and by books for the
guidance of the devout. The space given in them to the
ethics of business was considerable. In the fifteenth century
Bishop Pecock could meet the Lollards’ complaint that the
Scriptures were buried beneath a mass of interpretation by
taking as his illustration the books which had been written
on the text “Lend, hoping for nothing again,” and arguing
that all this teaching upon usury was little enough “to
answer . . . all the hard, scrupulous doubts and questions
which all day have need to be assoiled in men's bargains and
chalferin gs together.”'*1 A century later there were regions in
which such doctrine was still being rehearsed with all the old
rigour. In 1552 the Parliament which made the Scottish
Reformation was only eight years off. But the catechism of
the Archbishop of St. Andrews, which was drawn up in that
year, shows no disposition to compromise with the economic
frailties of his fellow-countrymen. It denounces usurers,
masters who withhold wages, covetous merchants who sell
fraudulent .wares, covetous landlords who grind their
tenants, and in general--a comprehensive and embarrassing
indictmcnt—"all wretches that will be grown rich in-
continent,” and all “who may keep their neighbour from
poverty and mischance and do it not.”?'3
On the crucial question, how the ecclesiastical courts dealt
in practice with these matters, we have very little light. They
are still almost an unworked field. On the Continent we catch
glimpses of occasional raids. Bishops declare war on
notorious usurers; only to evoke reprisals from the secular
authorities, to whom the money-lender is too convenient to
be victimized by anyone but themselves." At the end of the
thirteenthcentury an archbishop of Bourges makes some
thirty- ve usurers disgorge at a sitting," and seventy years
later an inquisitor at Florence collects 7,000 orins in two
years from usurers and blasphemers.” In England com-
merciai morality was a debatable land, in which ecclesiastical
and secular authorities contended from time to time for
jurisdiction. The ecclesiastical courts claimed to deal with
cases of breach of contract in general, on the ground that
they involved Iresio ziei, and with usury in particular, as an
offence against morality speci cally forbidden by the canon
law. Both claims were contested by the Crown and by
municipal bodies. The former, by the Constitutions of
Clarendon," had expressly reserved proceedings as to debts
for the royal ‘courts, and the same rule was laid down more
than once in the course of the next century. The latter again
and again forbade burgesses to take proceedings in the
courts christian, and ned those _wiio disregarded the pro-
hibition." Both, in spite of repeated protests from the
clergy," made good their pretension to handle usurious
contracts in secular courts; but neither succeeded in ousting
the jurisdiction of the Church. The question at issue was not
whether the usurer should be punished¥a point as to which
there was only one opinion-—but who should have the
lucrative business of punishing him, and in practice he ran
the gauntlet of all and of each. Local authorities, from the
Cit.y of London to the humblest manorial court, make bye-
laws against “unlawful chevisaace” and present offenders
against them." The Commons pray that Lombard brokers
may be banished, and that the ordinances of London con-
cerning them may be made of general application.“ The
justices in eyre hear indictments of usurers,“ and the Court
of Chancery handles petitions from victims who can get no
redress at common law.-92 And Holy Church, though there
seems to be only one example of legislation on the subject
by an English Church Council,B3 continues to deal with the-
usurer after her own manner.
For, in spite of the conflict of jurisdictions, the rising
resentment against the ways of ecclesiastical lawyers, and the
expanding capitalism of the later Middle Ages, it is evident
that commercial cases continued, on occasion at least, to
come before the courts christian. Nor, after the middle of the
fourteenth century, was their right to try cases of usury
contested by the secular authorities.‘ A statute of 1341
enacted that (as laid down long before) the Kirig should have
cognizance of usurers dead, and the Church of usurers living.
The same reservation of ecclesiastical rights was repeated
when the question was taken up a century later under Henry
VII, and survived, an antiquated piece of comntpn form,
even into the age of lusty capitalisin under Elizabeth and
James I.“ '
That ecclesiastical authorities had much opportunity of
enforcing the canon law in connection with money-lending is
improbable. It was naturally in the commercial towns that
cases of the kind most frequently arose, and the towns did
not look with favour on the interference of churchmen in
matters of business. In London, collisions between the
courts of the O icial, the Mayor, and the King were frequent
in the early thirteenth century. Men took proceedings
before the rst, it seems, when a speedy decision was desired,
or when their case was of a kind which secular courts were
not likely to regard with favour. Thus craftsmen, to give one
curious example out of many, were evidently using the courts
christian as a means of giving effect to trade union regula-
tions, which were more likely to be punished than enforced
by the mayor and aldermen, by the simple device of imposing
an oath and proceeding against those who broke it for breach
of faith. The smiths, for instance, made a “confederacy,”
supported by an oath, with the object, as they declared, of
putting down night-work, but, as was alleged in court, of
preventing any but members of their organization from
working at the trade, and summoned blacklcgs before the
ecclesiastical courts. The spurriers forbade anyone to work
between sunset and sunrise, and haled ah offending journey-
man before the archdeaccin, with the result that “the said
Richard, after being three times ‘warned by the Official,
had been expelled from the Church and excommunicated,
until he would swear to keep the ordinance."°‘
Even at a later period the glimpses which w_e catch of the
activities of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction are enough to show
that it was not wholly a dead letter. Priests accused of usury
undergo correction at the hands of their bishops.“ Peti-
tioners appeal for redress to the Court of Chancery on the
ground that they have failed to secure justice in the courts of
bishops or archdeacons, where actions on cases of debts or
usury have been begun before “spiritual rnen."‘" The records
of ecclesiastical courts show that, though sometimes
commercial questions were dismissed as belonging to the
secular courts, cases of breach pf contract and usury con-
tinued, nevertheless, to be settled by them.“ The dis-
reputable family of lv1arcroft—Wi.lliam the father was a
common usurer, Alice his daughter baked bread at Pente-
cost, and Edward his son made a shirt on All Saints’ Day-
is punished by the ecclesiastical court of \Vhalley as it
deserves.” At Ripon a--usurer and his victim are induced to
settle the case out of court.” The Commissary of London
cites Thomas Hall super crimine usurarize pravitatis, on the
ground that, having advanced four shillings on the security
of Thomas Foster’s belt, he had demanded twelve pence over
and above the principal, and suspends him when he does not
appear in court.“ Nor did business of this kind cease with
the Reformation. Cases of usury were being heard by
ecclesiastical courts under Elizabeth, and even in a great
commercial centre like the City of London it was still
possible in the reign of James I~for the Bishop’s Com-
missary to be trying tradesmen for “lending upon pawnes
for an excessive gain.”92
It was not only by legal penalties, however, that an
attempt was made to raise a defensive barrier against the
exactions of the money-lender. From a very early date there
was a school of opinion which held that, in view of the
various stratagems by which usurious contracts could be
“coloured,” direct prohibition was almost necessarily impo-
tent, and which favoured the policy of providing facilities for
borrowing on more reasonable terms than could be obtained
from the money-lender. Ecclesiastics try, in fact, to ttI.1'n the
ank of the usurer by establishing institutions where the
poor can raise capital cheaply. Parishes, religious frater-
nities, gilds, hospitals, and perhaps monasteries, lend corn,
cattle, and money.” In England bishops are organizing such
loans with papal approval in the middle of the thirteenth
century," and two centuries later, about 1462, the Francis-
cans lead the movement for the creation of Mants de Piéré
which, starting in Italy, spread by the rst half of the sixteenth
century to France, Germany, and the Low Countries, and,
though never taken up in England—for the Reformation
intervened--supplied a topic of frequent comment and
eulogy to English writers on economic ethics.” The canon
c (A23)
law on the subject of money-lending underwent a steady
development, caused by the necessity of adapting it to the
increasing complexity of business organization, down at
least to the Lateran Council of 1515. The ingenuity with
which professional opinion elaborated the code was itself a
proof that considerable business-—and fees--were the result
of it, for lawyers do not serve God for naught. The canonists,
who had a_bad reputation with the laity, were not, to put it
mildly, more innocent than other lawyers in the gentle art of
making business. The Italians, in particular, as was natural
in the nancial capital of Europe, made the pace, and Italian
canonists performed prodigies of legal ingenuity. In England,
on the other hand, either because Englishmen were unusually
virtuous, or, as a foreigner unkindly said, because “they do
not fear to make contracts on usury,”9° or, most probably,
because English business was a conservative and slow-going
affair, the English canonist Lyndwood is content to quote a
sentence from an English archbishop of the thirteenth century
and to leave it at that." *
-But, however lawyers might distinguish and re ne, the
essential facts were simple. The Church sees buying and
selling, lending and borrowing, as a simple case of neigh-
hourly or unneighbourly conduct. Though a rationalist like
Bishop Pecock may insist that the rich, as such, are not hate-
ful to God,“ it has a traditional prejudice against the arts
by which rnen-—or at least laymen—acquire riches, and is
apt to lump them together under the ugly name of avarice.
Merchants who organize a ring, or money_-lenders who grind
the poor, it regards not as business strategists, but as nefandrz
be1Iua—monsters of iniquity. As for grocers and victuallers
“who conspire wickedly together that none shall sell better
cheap than another,” and speculators “who buy up corn,
meat and wine . . . to amass money at the cost of others,”
they are, “according to the laws of the Church, no better than
common criminals.”°° So,-when the price of bread rises, or
when the London fruiterers, persuaded by one bold spirit
THE SIN or AVARICE "01
that they are “all poor and caitiffs on account of their own
simplicity-, and if they would act on his advice they would
be rich and powerful,"1°° form a combine, to the great loss
and hardship of the people, burgesses and peasants do not
console themselves with the larger hope that the laws of
supply and demand may bring prices down again. Strong in
the approval of all good Christians, they stand the mi_ller in
the pillory, and reason with the fruiterers in the court of
the mayor. And the parish priest delivers a sermon on-the
sixth commandment, choosing as his text the words of the
Book of Proverbs, “Give me neither riches nor poverty, but
enough for my sustenance.”
(iii)
The Ideal and the Reality
Such, in brief outline, was the background of economic
thought which the sixteenth century inherited, and which it
brought to the bewildering changes in land tenure, in prices,
in commercial and nancial organization, that made the age
a watershed in economic development. It is evident that the
whole implication of this philosophy was, on one side,
intensely conservative. There was no question of progress,
still less of any radical social reconstruction. In the numerous
heretical movements of the Middle Ages social aspirations
were often combined with criticisms of the luxury and pomp
of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The o icial Church, to which
independence of thought among the lower orders was but
little less abhorrent when it related to their temporal well-
being than when it was concerned with their eternal salva-
tion, frowned upon these dangerous speculations, and some-
times crushed them with a ferocity as relentless as the most
savage of the White Terrors of modern history has shown to
the most formidable of insurrections.
Intellectually, religious opinion endorsed to the full the
static view, which regarded the social order as a thing
unalterable, to be accepted, not to be improved. Except on
rare occasions, its spokesmen repeated the conventional
doctrine, according to which the feet were born to labour,
the hands to ght, and the head to rule. Naturally, therefore,
they denounced agitations, like the communal movement,1°1
designed to overturn that natural order, though the rise of
the Free Cities was one of the glories of medieval Europe
and the germ of almost every subsequent advance in civiliza-
tion. They referred to questions of economic conduct, not
because they were anxious to promote reforms, but because
they were concerned with the maintenance of traditional
standards of personal morality, of which economic conduct
formed an important part.
Practically, the Church was an immense vested interest,
implicated to the hilt in the economic fabric, especially on
the side of agriculture and land tenure. Itself the greatest of
landowners, it could no more quarrel with the feudal
structure than the Ecclesiastical Commission, the largest of
mineral owners to-day, can lead a crusade against royalties.
The persecution of the Spiritual Franciscans, who dared, in
de ance of the bull of John XXII, to maintain St. Francis’
rule as to evangelical poverty, suggests that doctrines
impugning the sanctity of wealth resembled too closely the
teaching of Christ to be acceptable to the princes of the
Christian Church.
The basis of the whole mediteval economic system, under
which, except in Italy and Flanders, more than nine-"tenths
of the population consisted of agriculturalists, had been
serfdom or villeinage. Confronted in the sixteenth century
with the unfamiliar evils of competitive agriculture, conser-
vative reformers were to sigh for the social harmonies of a
vanished age, which “knyt suche a knott of colaterall amytie
betwene the Lordes and the tenaunts that the Lorde tendered
his tenaunt as his childe, and the tenaunts againe loved and
THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 69
obeyed the Lorde as naturellye as the childe the father.”1°”
Their idealization of the past is illuminating as a comment
upon their own age, but as an account of the conditions of
previous centuries it is misleading. In reality, so far as the
servile tenants, who formed the bulk of mediaaval agri-
culturalists, were concerned, the golden age of peasant
prosperity is, except here and there, a romantic myth, at
which no one would have been more surprised than the
peasants themselves. The very essence of feudal property was
exploitation in its most naked and shameless form, including,
as it did, compulsory labour, additional corvées at the very
moments when the peasant’s labour was most urgently
needed on his own holding, innumerable dues and payments,
the obligation to grind at the lord's mill and bake at the
lord's oven, the private justice of the lord's court. The
custom of the manor, the scarcity of labour, and, in England,
the steadily advancing encroachments of the royal courts,
blunted the edge of the system, and in fteenth-century
England a prosperous yeomanry was rising on its ruins. But,
during the greater part of the Middle Ages, its cumulative
weight had been, nevertheless, immense. Those who lived
under it had no illusions as to its harshness. The rst step
which the peasant who had saved a little money took was to
buy himself out of the obligation to ‘work on the lord’s
demesne. The Peasants’ Revolt in England, the Jacqucrie
in France, and the repeated risings of the German peasantry
reveal a state of social exasperation which has been surpassed
in bitterness by few subsequent movements.
It is natural to ask (though some writers on medizeval
economics refrain from asking), what the attitude of religious
opinion was towards serfdom. And it is hardly possible to
answer that question except by saying that, apart from a few
exceptional individuals, religious opinion ignored it. True,
the Church condemned arbitrary tallages, and urged that the
serf should be treated with humanity. True, it described the
manumission of serfs as an act of piety, like gifts to the poor.
For serfs are not “living tools,” but men; in the eyes of God
all men are serfs together, conservi, and in the Kingdom of
Heaven Lazarus is before Dives.1°3 True, villeinage was a
legal, not an economic, category; in the England of the
fourteenth century there.were serfs who were rich men.
But to release the individual is not to condemn the institu-
tion. Whatever “mad priests" might say and do, the o icial
Church, whose wealth consisted largely of villeins, walked
with circumspcction.
The canon law appears to have recognized and enforced
serfdom.1°4 Few prominent ecclesiastics made any pro-
nouncement against it. Aquinas explains it as the; result of
sin, but that does not prevent his justifying it on economic
grounds.1°5 Almost all mediteval writers appear to assume it
or excuse it. Ecclesiastical landlords, though perhaps some-
what more conservative in their methods, seem as a whole to
have been neither better nor worse than other landlords.
Rusrica gens optima ens, pessima gaudens, was a sentiment
which sometimes appealed, it is to be feared, to the children
of light concerned with rent rolls and farming pro ts, not
less than to the feudal aristocracy, with whom the heads of
the ecclesiastical hierarchy were inextricably intermingled.
When their chance came, John Nameless, and John the
Miller, and John Carter, who may be presumed to have
known their friends, burned the court rolls of an abbot of
St. Albans, and cut off the head of an archbishop, and ran
riot on the estates of an abbot of Kempten, with not less
enthusiasm than they showed in plundering their lay
exploiters. It was not the Church, but revolting peasants in
Germany and England, who appealed to the fact that
“Christ has made all men free" ;1°° and in Germany, at least,
their ecclesiastical masters showed small mercy to them. The
disappearance of serfd om—and, after all, it did not disappear
from France till late in the eighteenth century, and from
Germany till the nineteenth—was part of a general economic
movement, with which the Church had little to do, and
THE ‘IDEAL AND THE REALITY 71
which churchmen, as property-owners, had sometimes
resisted. It owed less to Christianity than to the humanitarian
liberalism of the French Revolution.
The truth was that the very triumph of the Church closed
its mouth. The Church of the third century, a minority of
believers confronted with an alien civilization, might protest
and criticize. But, when the whole leaven was mixed with the
lump, when the Church was regarded, not as a society, but as
society itself, it was inevitably diluted by the mass which it
absorbed. The result was a compromise-—-a compromise of
which the critic can say: “How much that was intolerable
was accepted!” and the eulogist: “How much that was
intolerable was softened!”
Both critic and eulogist are right. For, if religious opinion
acquiesced in much, it also claimed much, and the habit
of mind which made the medizeval Church almost impotent
when dealing with the serried abuses of the mediteval land
system was precisely that which made it strong, at least in
theory, in dealing with the economic transactions of the in-
dividual. In the earlier Middle Ages it had stood for the
protection of peaceful labour, for the care of the poor, the
unfortunate and the oppressed-—for the ideal, at least, of
social solidarity against the naked force of violence and
oppression. With the growing complexity of economic
civilization, it was confronted with problems not easily
handled by its traditional categories. But, if applied capri-
eiously, they were not renounced,.and the world of econo-
mic morality, which ba les us to-day, was-in its turn con-
verted by it into a new, though embarrassing, opportunity.
“fhatever emphasis may be laid—and emphasis can hardly
be too strong-upon the gulf between theory and practice,
the quali cations stultifying principles, and the casuistry by
which the work of canonists, not less than of other lawyers,
was dis gured, t-he endeavour to draw the most common-
place of human activities and the least tractable of human
appetites within the all-embracing circle of a universal
1'2 THE MEDIEVAL nxcxonouup
system still glows through it all with a certain tarnished
splendour. When the distinction between that which is per-
missible in private life and that which is permissible in
business offers so plausible" an escape from the judgment
pronounced on covetousness, it is something to have insisted
that the law of charity is binding on the second not less than
on the rst. When the austerity of principles can be evaded
by treating them as applicable only to those relations of life
in which their application is least exacting, it is something to
have attempted to construct a system tough enough to stand
against commercial unscrupulousness, but yet su iciently
elastic to admit any legitimate transaction. If it is proper to
insist on the prevalence of avarice and greed in high places,
it is not less important to observe that men called these vices
by their right names, and had not learned to persuade
themselves that greed was enterprise and avarice
economy.
Such antitheses are tempting, and it is not surprising that
some writers should have dwelt upon them. To a generation
disillusioned with free competition, and disposed to demand
some criterion of social expediency more cogent than the
verdict of the market, the jealous and cynical suspicion of
economic egotism, which was the prevalent mood of the
Middle Ages, is moreintelligible than it was to the sanguine
optimists of the Age of Reason, which, as far as its theory of
the conduct of men in society is concerned, deserves much
more than the thirteenth century to be described as the Age
of Faith. In the twentieth century, with its trusts and com-
bines, its control of industry by business and of both by
nance, its attempts to x fair wages and fair prices, its
rationingand food controls and textile controls, the econo-
rnic harmonies are, perhaps, a little blown upon. The
temper in which it approaches questions of economic
organization appears to have more a inity with the rage of
the .media=:val burgess at the uncharitable covetousness of
the usurer and the engrosser than it has with the con dence
THE IDEAL AND THE REALITY 73
reposed by its innocent grandfathers in the infallible opera-
tions of the invisible hand.
The resemblance, however, though genuine, is super cial,
and to over-emphasize it is to do less than justice to precisely
those elements in mediaaval thought which were most
characteristic. The signi cance of its contribution does not
consist in its particular theories as to prices and interest,
which recur in all ages, whenever the circumstances of the
economic environment exposeconsumer and borrower to
extortion. It is to be found in the insistence of medieval
thinkers that society is a spiritual organism, not an economic
machine, and that economic activity, which is one sub-
ordinate element within a vast and complex unity, requires
to be controlled and repressed by reference to the moral
ends for which it supplies the material means. So merciless is
the tyranny of economic appetites, so prone to self-aggran-
disement the empire of economic interests, that a doctrine
which con nes them to their proper sphere, as the servant,
not the master, of civilization, may reasonably be regarded
as among the pregnant truisms which are a permanent
element in any sane philosophy. Nor is it, perhaps, as clear
to-day as it seemed a century ago, that it has been an un-
mixed gain to substitute the criterion of economic expediency,
so easily interpreted in terms of quantity and mass, for the
conception of a rule of life superior to individual desires and
temporary exigencies, which was what the mediaeval theorist
meant by» “natural law.”
When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale
involved, the problem of moralizing economic life was faced
and not abandoned. The experiment may have been imprac-
ticable, and almost from the rst it was discredited by the
notorious corruption of ecclesiastical authorities, who
preached renunciation and gave a lesson in greed. But it had
in it something of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility of
the conception is not less absurd than to idealize its practical
results.
C‘ The best proof of the appeal which the attempt to
74 THE MEDI}-EVAL BACKGROUND
subordinate economic interests to religion had made is the
persistence of the same.attempt among reformers, to whom
the Pope was anti-Christ and the canon law an abomination,
and the horror of decent men when, in the sixteenth century,
its breakdown became too obvious to be contested. A
CHAPTER ll
Tire Continental Reformer:

“Neither the Church ofChrist, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought
to teierate such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seei: it to
the hurt of their neighbours."
BUCER, De Regno Christ-I.
LORD ACTON, in an unforgettable passage in his Inaugural

Lecture on the Study of History, has said that “after many
ages persuaded of the headlong decline and impending
dissolution of society, and governed by usage and the will of
masters who were in their graves, the sixteenth century went
forth armed for untried experience, and ready to watch with
hopefulncss a prospect of incalculable ch:1nge."1 His refer-
ence was to the new world revealed by learning, by science,
and by discovery. But his words o 'er an appropriate text for
a discussion of the change in the conception of the relations
between religion and secular interests which took place in
the same period. Its inevitable consequence was the emer-
gence, after a prolonged moral and intellectual con ict, of
new conceptions of social expediency and of new lines of
economic thought.
The strands in this movement were complex, and the
formula which associates the Reformation with the rise of
economic individualism is no complete explanation. Systems
prepare their own overthrow by a preliminary process of
petrifaction. The traditional social philosophy was static, in
the sense that it assumed a body of class relations sharply
de ned by custom and law, and little affected by the ebb and
ow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face of
novel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the
revolt against the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the
partial discredit of the canon law a-nd of ecclesiastical
75
76 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
discipline, and the rise of a political science equipped from
the arsenals of antiquity. But it is not to under-estimate the
effect of the Reformation to say that the principal causes
making the age a watershed, from which new streams of
social theory descend, lay in another region. Mankind does
not re ect upon questions of economic and social organiza-
tion until compelled to do so by the sharp pressure of some
practical emergency. The sixteenth century was an age of
social speculation for the same reason as the early nine-
teenth—because it was an age of social dislocation. The
retort of conservative religious teachers to a spirit which
seems to them the triumph of Mammon produces the last
great literary expression of the appeal to the average con-
science which had been made by an older social order. The
practical implications of the social theory_of the Middle
Ages are stated more clearly in the sixteenth century than
even in its zenith, because they are stated with the emphasis
of a creed which is menaced.
(i)
The Economic Revolution
The religious revolution of the age came upon a world
heaving with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had
experienced since the fall of Rome. Art and scienti c
curiosity and technical skill, learning and statesmanship,
the scholarship which explored the past and the prophetic
vision which pierced the future, had all poured their treasures
into the sumptuous shrine of the new civilization. Behind
the genii of beauty and wisdom who were its architects
there moved a murky, but indispensable, gure. It was the
demon whom Dante had met muttering gibberish in the
fourth circle of the Inferno, and whom Sir Guyon was to
encounter three centuries later, tanned with smoke and
seared with re, in a cave adjoining the mouth of hell. His
THE ECONOMIC REVOLUTION 77
uncouth labours quarried the stones which Michael Angelo
was to raise, and sank deep in the Roman clay the founda-
tions of the walls to be adorned by Raphael.
For it was the mastery of man over his environment which
heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress of
expanding economic energies that this mastery was proved
an-;! won.,Like sovereignty in a feudal society, the economic
efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few favoured spots,
had been fragmentary and decentralized. Now the scattered
raiders were to be organized and disciplined; the dispersed
and irregular skirmishes were to be merged in a grand
struggle, on a front which stretched from the Baltic to the
Ganges and from the Spice Islands to Peru. Every'year
brought the news of fresh triumphs. The general who
marshalled the host and launched the attack was economic
power. p -
Economic power, long at home in Italy, was leaking
through a thousand creeks and inlets into western Europe
for a century before, with the climax of the great Discoveries,
the ood came on breast-high. Whatever its truth as a
judgment on the politics of the fteenth century, the con-
ventional verdict on its futility does scanty justice to its
economic signi cance. It was in an age of political anarchy
that the forces destined to dominate the future tried their
wings. The era of Columbus and Da Gama was prepared
by the patient labour of Italian cartographers and Portu-
guese seamen, as certainly as was that of Crompton and
Watt by the obscure experiments of nameless predecessors.
A The master who set the problem that the heroes of the age
were to solve was material necessity. The Europe of the
earlier Middle Ages, like the world of the twentieth century,
had been a closed circle. But it had been closed, not by the
growth of knowledge, but by the continuance of ignorance;
and, while the latter, having drawn the whole globe into a
single economic system, has no space left for fresh expansion,
for the former, with the Mediterranean as its immemorial
pivot, expansion had hardly begun. Tapping the wealth of
the East by way of the narrow apertures in the Levant, it
resembled, in the rigidity of the limits imposed on its com-
mercial strategy, a giant fed through the chinks of a wall.
As was the general scheme, so were the details. Inelastic in
its external, Europe was hardly more exible in its internal,
relations. Its primary unit had been the village; and the
village, a community of agrarian shareholders fortified by
custom, had repressed with a fury of virtuous unanimity the
disorderly appetitesswhich menaced its traditional routine
with the evil whose name is Change. Beyond the village lay
the greater, more privileged, village called the borough, and
the brethren 'of borough and gild had turned on the foreign
devil from upland and valley a face of int. Above both
were the slowly waking nations. Nationalism was an econo-
mic force before nationality was a political fact, and it was a
sound reason for harrying a competitor that he was a
Florentine or a man of the Emperor. The privileged colony
with its depot, the Steelyard of the Hanseatic League, the
Fondaco Tedesco of the south Germans, the Factory of the
English Merchant Adventurers, were but tiny breaches in a
wall of economic exclusiveness. Trade, as in modern Turkey
or China, was carried on under capitulations.
This narrow framework had been a home. In the fteenth
century it was felt to be a prison. Expanding energies pressed
against the walls; restless appetites gnawed and fretted
wherever a crack in the surface offered room for erosion.
Long before the southward march of the Turks cut the last
of the great routes from the East, the Venetian monopoly
was felt to be intolerable. Long before the plunder of Mexico
and the silver of Potosi ooded Europe with treasure, the
mines of Germany and the Tyrol were yielding increasing, if
still slender, strbams of bullion, which stimulated rather than
allayed its thirst." It was not the lords of great estates, but
eager and prosperous peasants, who in England rst nibbled
at commons and undermined the manorial custom, behind
which, as behind a dyke, their small savings had been
accumulated. It was not great capitalists, but enterprising
gildsmen, who began to make the control of the fraternity
the basis of a system of plutocratic exploitation, or who ed,
precocious individualists, from the fellowship of borough
and craft, that they might grow to what stature they pleased
in rural isolation. It was not even the Discoveries which rst
began the enormous tilt of economic power from south and
east to north and west. The records of German an.d English
trade suggest that the powers of northern Europe had for a
century before the Discoveries been growing in wealth and
civilization,“ and for a century after them English economic
development was to be as closely wedded to its continental
connections, as though Diaz had never rounded the Cape,
nor Columbus praised Heaven for leading him to the shores
of Zayton and Guinsay. First attempted as a counterpoise
to the Italian monopolist, then pressed home with ever
greater eagerness to turn the ank of the Turk, as his
stranglehold on the eastern commerce tightened, the Dis-
coveries were neither a happy accident nor the fruit of the
disinterested curiosity of science. They were the climax of
almost a century of patient economic effort. They were as
practical in their motive as the steam-engine.
The result was not the less sensational, because it had been
long prepared. Heralded by an economic revolution not less
profound than that of three centuries later, the new world of
the sixteenth century took its character from the outburst of
economic energy in which it had been born. Like the nine-
teenth century, it saw a swift increase in wealth and an
impressive expansion of trade, a concentration of nancial.
power on a scale unknown before, the rise, amid erce
social convulsions, of new classes and the depression of old,
the triumph of a new culture and system of ideas amid
struggles not less bitter.
It was an age of economic, not less than of political, sensa-
tions, which were recorded in the letter-books‘ of business
men as well as in the state papers of Governments. The
decline of Venice and of the south German citieswhich had
distributed the products that Venice imported, and which
henceforward must either be marooned far from the new
trade routes or break out to the sea, as some of them did,
by way of the Low Countries; the new economic imperialism
of Portugal and Spain; the outburst of capitalist enterprise
in mining and textiles; the rise of commercial companies, no
longer local but international, and based, not merely on
exclusive privileges, but on the power of massed capital to
drive from the eld all feebler competitors; a revolution in
prices which shattered all customary relationships; the
collapse of mediazval rural society in a nightmare of peasants‘
wars; the subjection of the collegiate industrial organization
of the Middle Ages to a new money»-power; the triumph of
the State and its conquest, in great parts of Europe, of the
Church—all were crowded into less than two generations.
A man who was born when the_Council of Basel was sitting
saw also, if he lived to a ripe old age, the dissolution of the
English monasteries. At the rst date Portuguese explorers
had hardly passed Sierra Leone; at the second Portugal had
been master of an Indian Empire for almost a generation.
In the intervening three-quarters of a century the whole
framework of European civilization had been transformed.
Compared with the currents which raced in Italy, or Ger-
many, or the Low."-Countries, English life was an economic
backwater. But even its stagnant shallows were stirred by the
eddy and rush of the continental whirlpool. When Henry VII
came to the throne, the economic organization of the
country differed but little from that of the age of Wyclif.
When Henry VIII died; full of years and sin, some of
the main characteristics which were to distinguish it till the
advent of steam-power and machinery could already,
though faintly, be descried. The door that remained to be
unlocked was colonial expansion, and forty years later the
rst experiment in colonial expansion had begun.
THE ECONOMIC R-EVOLUTION 81
The phenomenon whch dazzled contemporaries was the
swift start into apparent opulence, rst of Portugal and then
of Spain. The nemesis of parasitic wealth was not discerned,
and it was left for the cynical rationalism of an ambassador
of that commercial republic, in comparison with whose
hoary wisdom the new plutocrats of the West were meddle-
some children, to observe that the true mines of the Spanish
Empire lay, not in America, but in the sodden clay of the
water-logged Netherlands The justice of the criticism was
revealed when Spain, a corpse bound on the back of the most
liberal and progressive community of the age, completed her
own ruin by. sacking the treasury from which, far more than
from Potosi, her wealth had been drawn. But the beginnings
of that long agony, in which the power-house of European
enterprise was to be struck with paralysis, lay still in the
future, and‘ later generations of Spaniards looked back with
pardonable exaggeration on the closing years of Charles V
as a golden age of economic prosperity. Europe as a whole,
however lacerated by political and religious struggles,
seemed to have solved the most pressing of the economic
problems which had haunted her in the later Middle Ages.
During a thousand years of unresting struggle with marsh
and forest and moor, she had colonized her own waste
places. That tremendous achievement almost accomplished,
she now tumed to the task of colonizing the world. No
longer on the defensive, she entered on a phase of economic
expansion which was to grow for the next four hundred
years, and which only in the twentieth century was to show
signs of drawing towards its close. Once a year she was
irrigated with the bullion of America, once a year she was
enriched with a golden harvest from the East. The period of
mere experiment over, and the new connections rmly
established, she appeared to be in sight of an economic
stability based on broader foundations than ever before.
Portugal and Spain held the keys of the treasufe-house of
East and West. But it was neither Portugal, with her tiny
population, and her empire that was little more than a line of
forts and factories 10,000 miles long, nor Spain, for centuries
an army on the march and now staggering beneath the
responsibilities of her vast and scattered empire, devout to
fanaticism, and with an incapacity for economic a 'airs
which seemed almost inspired, who reaped the material
harvest of the empires into which they had stepped, the one
by patient toil, the other by luck. Gathering spoils which
they could not retain, and amassing wealth which slipped
through their ngers, they were little more than the political
agents of minds more astute and characters better versed in
the arts of peace. Every period and society has some par-
ticular centre, or institution, or social class, in which the
characteristic qualities of its genius seem to be xed and
embodied. In the Europe of the early Renaissance the heart
of the movement had been Italy. In the Europe of the
Reformation it was the Low Countries. The economic
capital of the new civilization was Antwerp. The institution‘
which best symbolized its "eager economic energies was the
international money-market and produce-exchange. Its
typical gure, the paymaster of princes, was the intcr-
national nancier.
Before it was poisoned by persecution, revolution and
war, the spirit of the Netherlands found its purest incarna-
tion in Erasmus, a prophet without sackcloth and a reformer
untouched by heat or fury, to the universal internationalism
of whose crystal spirit the boundaries of States were a
pattern scrawled to amuse the childish malice of princes. Of
that cosmopolitan country, destined to be the refuge of the
international idea when outlawed by every other power in
Europe, Antwerp, “a home common to all nations,” was the
most cosmopolitan city. Made famous as a centre of leaming
by Plantin’s press, the metropolis of painting in a country
where painting was almost a national industry, it was at
once the shrine to which masters like Cranach, Diirer and
Holbein made their pilgrimage of devotion, and an asylum
which offered to the refugees of less happy countries a
haven as yet undisturbed by any systematic campaign to
stamp out heresy. In the exuberance of its intellectual life,
as in the glitter of its material prosperity, the thinker and the
reformer found a spiritual home, where the energies of the
new age seemed “gathered for a bound into that land of
happiness and dreams, for the scene of whixh More, who
knew his Europe, chose as the least incredible setting the
garden of his lodgings at Antwerp.
The economic pres-eminence of Antwerp owed much t.o the
industrial region behind it, from which the woollens and
worsteds of Valenciennes and Tournai, the tapestries of
Brussels and Oudenarde, the iron of Namur, and the
munitions of the Black Country round Liege, poured in an
unceasing stream on to its quays But Antwerp was a
European, rather than a Flemish, metropolis. Long the
competitor of Brugcs for the reception of the two great
currents of trade from the Mediterranean and the Baltic,
which met in the Low Countries, by the last quarter of the
fteenth -century she had crushed her rival. The Hanse
League maintained a depotat Antwerp; Italian banking
rms in increasing numbers opened businesses there; the
English Merchant Adventurers made it the entrepot through
which English cloth, long its principal import, was distri-
buted to northern Europe; the copper market moved from
Venice to Antwerp in the nineties. Then came the great
Discoveries, and Antwerp, the rst city to tap the wealth,
not of an inland sea, but of the ocean, stepped into a position
of unchallenged pre-eminence almost unique in European
history. The long sea-roads which ran east and west met and
ended in its harbours. The Portuguese Government made it
in 1503 the depot of the Eastern spice trade. From the
accession of Charles V it was the commercial capital of the
Spanish Empire, and, in spite of protests that the precious
metals were leaving Spain, the market for American silver.
Commerce, with its demand for cheap and easy credit,
I-4 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
brought nance in its train. The commercial companies and
banking houses ofsouth Germany turned from the dwindling
trade across the Alps, to make Antwerp -the base for financial
operations of unexampled magnitude and complexity.’
In such an economic forcing-house new philosophies of
society, like new religious creeds, found a congenial soil. Pro-
fessor Pirenne has contrasted the outlook of the medizeval
middle class, intent on the conservation of corporate and
local privileges, with that of the new plutocracy of the
sixteenth century, with its international rami cations, its
independence of merely local interests, its triumphant vin-
dication of the power of the capitalist to dispense with the
arti cial protection of gild and borough and carve his own
career.“ “No one can deny,” wrote the foreign merchants at
Antwerp to Philip II, in protest against an attempt to inter-
fere with the liberty of exchange transactions, “that the cause
of the prosperity of this city is the freedom granted to those
who trade there."° Swept into wealth on the crest of a wave
of swiftly expanding enterprise, which a century before
would have seemed the wildest of fantasies, the liberal
bourgeoisie of Antwerp pursued, in the teeth of all pre-
cedents, a .policy of practical individualism, which would
have been met in any other city by rebellion, making terms
with the levelling encroachments of the Burgundian mon-
archy, which were fought by their more conservative
neighbours, lowering tariffs and extinguishing private tolls,
welcoming the technical improvements which elsewhere
were resisted, taming the turbulent independence of the gilds,
and throwing open to alien and citizen alike the new Ex-
change, with its signi cant dedication: Ad usum mercatorum
cuiusque gentis ac linguae.
For, if Antwerp was the microcosm which re ected the
soul of commercial Europe, the heart of Antwerp was its
Bourse. One cause which made nancial capitalism as charac-
teristic of the age of the Renaissance as industrial capitalism
was to be of the nineteenth century consisted in the mere
expansion in the scale of commercial enterprise. A steady
ow of capital was needed to nance the movement of the
produce handled on the world-market, such as the eastern
spice crop—above all pepper, which the impecunious Portu-
guese Government sold in bulk, while it was still on the
water, to German syndicates—copper, alum, the precious
metals, and the cloth shipped by the English Merchant
Adventurers. The cheapening of bullion and the rise in
prices swelled the pro ts seeking investment; the growth of
an international banking system mobilized immense
resources at the strategic points; and, since Antwerp was
the capital of the European money-market, the bill on Ant-
werp was the commonest form of international currency.
Linked to each other by the presence in each of the great
nancial houses of the Continent, with liquid funds pouring
in from mines in Hungary and the Tyrol, trading ventures in
the East, taxes wrung from Spanish peasants, speculations
on the part of nanciers, and savings invested by the general
public, Antwerp, Lyons, Frankfurt and Venice, and, in the
second rank, Rouen, Paris, Strassburg, Seville and London,
had developed by the middle of the century a considerable
class of nancial specialists, and a nancial technique
identical, in all essentials, with that of the present day. They
formed together the departments of an international clear-
ing-house, where bills could be readily discounted, drafts
on any important city could be obtained, and the paper of
merchants of almost every nationality changed hands."
Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the
nancial capitalism of the age fared not less sumptuously, if
more dangerously, at the courts of princes. Mankind, it
seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity.
Menaced with an accession of riches which would lighten its
toil, it makes haste to redouble its labours, and to pour
away the perilous stuff, which might deprive of plausibility
the complaint that it is poor. Applied to the arts of peace,
the new resources commanded by Europe during the rst
36 THE 'CONTINEN'TAL REFORMERS
half of the sixteenth century might have done something to
exorcise the spectres of pestilence and famine, and to raise
the material fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights.
Its rulers, secular and ecclesiastical alike, thought otherwise.
When pestilence and famine were ceasing to be necessities
imposed by nature they re-established them by political art.
The sluice which they opened to drain away each new
accession of super uous wealth was war. “Of all birds,"
wrote the sharpest pen of the age, "the eagle alone has
seemed to wise men the type of roy'alty—not beautiful," not
musical, not t for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to
all, the curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing harm,
surpassing them in its desire of doing it.”-11 The words of
Erasmus, uttered in 1517, were only too prophetic. For
approximately three-quarters both of the sixteenth and of
the seventeenth centuries, Europe tore itself to pieces. In
the course of the con ict the spiritual res of Renaissance
and Reformation alike were trampled out beneath the feet
of bravos as malicious and mischievous as the vain, bloody-
minded and futile generals who sttut and posture, to the
hateful laughter of Thersites, in the most despairing of
Shakespeare’s tragedies. By the middle of the sixteenth
century the English Government, after an orgy of debase-
ment and con scation, was in a state of nancial collapse,
and by the end of it Spain, the southern Netherlands, in-
cluding Antwerp, and a great part of France, including
Lyons, the nancial capital of southern Europe, were ruined.
By the middle of the seventeenth century wide tracts of
Germany were a desert, and by the end of it the French
nances had relapsed into worse confusion than that from
which they had been temporarily rescued by the genius of
Colbert. The victors compared their position with that of the
vanquished, and congratulated themselves on their spoils. It
rarely occurred to them to ask what it would have been had
there been neither victors nor vanquished, but only peace.
It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have,
on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability
to raise loans, and the mobilhation of economic power on a
scale unknown before armed the erce nationalism of the
age with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder and cannon.
The centralised States which were rising in the age of the
Renaissance were everywhere faced with a desperate nancial
situation. It sprang from the combination of modern admini-
strative and military methods with medieval systems of
nance. They entrusted to bureaucracies work which, if
done at all, had formerly been done as an incident of tenure,
or by boroughs and gilds; of cials had to be paid.- They
were constantly at war; and the new technique of war,
involving the use of masses of professional infantry and
a.rtillery—which Rabelais said was invented by the inspira-
tion of the devil, as a counterpoise to the invention of print-
ing inspired by God—was making it, as after 1870, a highly
capitalized industry. Government after Government, un-
deterred, with rare exceptions, by the disasters of its
neighbours, trod a familiar round of expedients, each of
which was more disastrous than the last. They hoarded
treasure, only to see the accumulations of a thrifty Henry
VII or Frederick III dissipated by a Henry VIII or a Maxi-
milian. They debased the currency and ruined trade. They
sold o ices, or established monopolies, and crushed the
tax-payer beneath a load of indirect taxation. They
plundered the Church, and spent gorgeously as income
property which should have been treated as capital. They
parted with Crown estates, and left an insoluble problem to
their successors.
These agreeable devices had, however, obvious limits.
What remained, when they were exhausted, was the money-
market, and to the rulers of the money-market sooner or
later all States came. Their dependence on the nancier was
that of an Ismail or an Abdul, and its results were not less
disastrous. Naturally, the City interest was one of the great
Powers of Europe. Publicists might write that the new
Messiah was the Prince, and reformers that the Prince was
Pope. But behind Prince and Pope alike, nancing im-.-,
partially Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth, Francis,
Charles and Ph.ilip,- stood in the last resort a little German
banker, with branches in every capital in Europe, who played
in the world of nance the part of the condottieri in war,
and represented in the economic sphere the morality typi ed
in that of politics by Machiavelli’s Prince. Compared with
these nancial dynasties, Hapsburgs, Val-ois and Tudors were
puppets dancing on wires held by a money-power to which
political struggles were irrelevant except as an opportunity
for gain. '
The nancier received his payment partly in cash, partly in
concessions, which still further elaborated the network of
nancial connections that were making Europe an economic
unity. The range of interests in which the German banking
houses were involved is astonishing. The Wclsers had
invested in the Portuguese voyage of 150$ to the East Indies,
nanced an expedition, half commercial, half military, to
Venezuela in 1527, were engaged in the spice trade between
Lisbon, Antwerp and south Germany, were partners in
silver and copper mines in the Tyrol and Hungary, and had
establishments, not only at Lisbon and Antwerp, but in the
principal cities of Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The
careers of the Hochstetters, Haugs, 'Meutings, and Irnhofs
were much the same. The Fuggers, thanks to judicious loans
to Maximilian, had acquired enormous concessions of
mineral property, farmed a large part of the receipts drawn
by the Spanish Crown from its estates, held silver and
quicksilver mines in Spain, and controlled banking and com-
mercial businesses in Italy, and, above all, at Antwerp.
They advanced the money which made Albrecht of Branden-
burg archbishop of Mainz; repaid themselves by sending
their agent to accompany Tetzel on his campaign to raise
money by indulgences and taki'ng half the proceeds; provided
the funds with which_ Charles V bought the imperial crown,
after an election conducted with the publicity of an auction
and the morals of a gambling hell; browbeat him, when the
debt was not paid, in the tone of a pawnbroker rating a
necessitous client; and found the money with which Charles
raised troops to ght the Protestants in 1552. The head of
the rm built a church and endowed an almshouse for the
aged poor in his native town of Augsburg. He died in the
odour of sanctity, a good Catholic and a Count of the
Empire, having seen his rm pay 54 per cent for the preceding
sixteen years."
(ii)
Luther
Like the rise of the great industry three centuries later, the
economic revolution which accompanied the Renaissance
gave a powerful stimulus to speculation. Both in Germany
and in England the Humanists turned a stream of pungent
criticism on the social evils of their age. Mercantilist thinkers
resharpened an old economic weapon for the armoury of
princes. Objective economic analysis, still in its infancy,
received a new impetus from the controversies of practical
men on the rise in prices, on currency and on the foreign
exchanges.
The question of the attitude which religious opinion would
assume towards these new forces was momentous. It might
hail the outburst of economic enterprise as an instrument of
wealth and luxury, like the Popes who revelled in the redis-
covery of classical culture. It might denounce it as a relapse
into a pagan immorality, like the Fathers who had turned
with a shudder from the material triumphs of Rome. It
might attempt to harness the expanding energies to its own
conception of man’s spiritual end, like the Schoolmen who
had stretched old formulae to cover the new forces of capital
and commerce. It could hardly ignore them. For, in spite of
Machiavelli, social theory was only beginning to emancipate
itself from the sti ‘ ecclesiastical framework of the Middle
Ages. The most systematic treatment of economic questions
was still that contained in the work of canonists, and divines
continued to pronounce judgment on problems of property
and contract with the same assurance as on problems of
theology.
Laymen might dispute the content of their teaching and
defy its conclusions." But it was rarely, as yet, that they
attacked the assumption that questions of economic conduct
belonged to the province of the ecclesiastical jurist. Bellar-
min complained with some asperity of the intolerable com-
plexity of the problems of economic casuistry which pious
merchants propounded in the confessional. The Spanish
dealers on the Antwerp Bourse, a class not morbidly prone
to conscientious scruples, were su iciently deferential to
ecclesiastical authority to send their confessor to Paris in
order to consult the theologians of the University as to the
compatibility of speculative exchange business with the
canon law." When Eek, later famous as the champion who
crossed swords with Luther, travelled to Italy in order to
seek from the University of Bologna authoritative con rma-
tion of his daring argument that interest could lawfully be
charged in transactions between merchants, no less a group
of capitalists than the great house of Fugger thought it
worth-while to nance an expedition undertaken in quest of
so pro table a truth.“
Individualistic, competitive, swept forward by an immense
expansion of commerce and nance, rather than of industry,
and offering opportunities of speculative gain on a scale un-
known before, the new economic civilization inevitably gave
rise to passionate controversy; and inevitably, since both the
friends and the enemies of the Reformation identi ed it with
social change, the leaders in the religious struggle were the
protagonists in the debate. In Germany, where social
revolution had been fermenting for half a century, it seemed
LUTHER 91
at last to have come. The rise in prices, an enigma which
ba l-ed contemporaries till Bodin published his celebrated
tract in 1569,15 produced a storm of indignation against
monopolists. Since the rising-led by Hans Bbheim in 1476,
hardly a decade had passed -without a peasants’ revolt.
Usury, long a grievance with craftsman and peasant, had
become a battle-cry. From city after city municipal autho-
rities, terri ed by popular demands for the repression of the
extortioner, consulted universities and divines as to the legi-
timacy of interest, and universities and divines gave, as is
their wont, a loud, but confused, response. Melanchthon
expounded godly doctrine on the subject of money-lending
and prices." Calvin wrote a famous letter on usury and
delivered sermons on the same subject." Bucer sketched a
scheme of social reconstruction for a Christian prince."
Bullinger produced a classical exposition of social ethics in
the Decades which he dedicated to Edward V1.19 Luther
preached and pamphleteered against extortioners,2° and
said that it was time “to put a bit in the mouth of the holy
company of the Fuggers.”21 Zwingli and Oecolampadius
devised plans for the reorganization of poor relief." Above
all, the Peasants’ War, with its touching appeal to the Gospel
and its frightful catastrophe, not only terri ed Luther into
his outburst: “Whose can, strike, smite, strangle or stab,
secretly or publicly . . . such wonderful times are these that a
prince can better merit Heaven with bloodshed than another
with prayer”;23 it also helped to stamp on Lutheranism an
almost servile reliance on the secular authorities. In England
there was less violence, but hardly less agitation, and a
similar ood of writing and preaching. Latimer, Ponet,
Crowley, Lever, Becon, Sandys and Jewel—to mention but
the best-known names—all contributed to the debate.“
Whatever the social practice of the sixteenth century may
have been, it did not suffer for lack of social teaching on the
part of men of religion. If the world could be saved by
sermons and pamphlets, it would have been a Paradise.
That the problems of a swiftly changing economic environ-
ment should have burst on Europe at a moment when it was
torn by religious dissensions .more acute than ever before;
may perhaps be counted as not least among the tragedies of
its history. But differences of social theory did not coincide
with differences of religious opinion, and the mark of nearly
all this body of teaching, alike in Germany and in England,
is its conservatism. Where questions of social morality were
involved, men whose names are a symbol of religious revolu-
tion stood, with hardly an exception, on the ancient ways,
appealed to medimval authorities, and reproduced in popular
language the doctrines of the Schoolmen.
A view of the social history of the sixteenth century which
has found acceptance in certain quarters has represented the
Reformation as the triumph of the commercial spirit over the
traditional social ethics of Christendom. Something like it is
of respectable antiquity. As early as 1540 Cranmer wrote to
Oziander protesting against the embarrassment caused to
reformers in England by the indulgence to moral laxity, in
the matter alike of economic transactions and of marriage,
alleged to be given by reformers in Germany.25 By the
seventeenth century the hints had become a theory and an
argument. Bossuet taunted Calvin and Bucer with being the
rst theologians to defend extortion,” and it only remained
for a pamphleteer to adapt the indictment to popular con-
sumption, by writing bluntly that “it grew to»a proverb that
usury was the brat of heresy.”2' That the revolt from Rome
synchronized, both in Germany and in England, with a
period of acute social distress is undeniable, nor is any long
argument needed to show that, like other revolutions, it
had its seamy side. What is sometimes suggested, however, is
not merely a coincidence of religious and economic move-
ments, but a logical connection between changes in economic
organization and changes in religious doctrines. It is implied
that the bad social practice of the age was the inevitable
expression of its religious innovations, and that, if the
LUTHER 93
reformers did not explicitly teach a conscienceless indivi-
dualism, individualism was, at least, the natural corollary of
their teaching. In the eighteenth century, which had as little
love for the commercial restrictions of the ages of monkish
superstition as for their political theory, that view was
advanced as eulogy. In our own day the wheel seems almost
to have come full circle. What was then a matter for con-
gratulationis now often an occasion for criticism. There are
writers by whom the Reformation is attacked, as inaugurat-
ing a period of unscrupulous commercialism, which had
previously been held in check, it is suggested, by the teaching
of the Church.
These attempts to relate changes in social theory to the
grand religious struggles of the age have their signi cance.
But the obirer dicta of an acrimonious controversy throw
more light on the temper of the combatants than on the
substance of their contentions, and the issues were too com-
plex‘ to be adequately expressed in the simple antithesis
which appealed to partisans. If capitalism means the direc-
tion of industry by the owners of capital for their own
pecuniary gain, and the social relations which establish them-
selves between them and the wage-earning proletariat whom
they control, then capitalism had existed on a grand scale
both inmediaval Italy and in mediaeval Flanders. If by the
capitalist spirit is meant the temper which is prepared to
sacri ce all moral scruples to the pursuit of pro t, it had
been only too familiar to the saints and sages of the Middle
Ages. It was the economic imperialism of Catholic Portugal
and Spain, not the less imposing, if more solid, achievements
of the Protestant powers, which impressed contemporaries
down to the Armada. It was predominantly Catholic cities
which were the commercial capitals of Europe, and Catholic
bankers who were its leading nanciers.
Nor is the suggestion that Protestant opinion looked with
indulgence on the temper which attacked restraints on econo-
mic enterprise better founded. If it is true that the Reforma-
tion released forces which were to act as a solvent of the
traditional attitude of religious thought to‘ social and
economic issues, it did so without design, and against the
intention of most reformers. In reality, however sensational
the innovations in economic practice which accompanied the
expansion of nancial capitalism in the sixteenth century, the
development of doctrine on the subject of economic ethics
was continuous, and, the more closely it is examined, the
less foundation does there seem to be for the view that the
stream plunged into vacancy over the precipice of the reli-
gious revolution. To think of the abdication of religion
from its theoretical primacy over economic activity and
social institutions as synchronizing with the revolt from
Rome is to antedate a movement which was not nally
accomplished for another century and a half, and which
owed as much to changes in economic and political organiza-
tion as it did to developments in the sphere of religious
thought. In the sixteenth century religious teachers of all
shades of opinion still searched the Bible, the Fathers and the
Corpus Juris Canonici for light on practical questions of
social morality, and, as far as the rst generation of reformers
was concerned, there was no intention, among either
Lutherans, or Calvinists, or Anglicans, of relaxing the rules
of good conscience, which were supposed to control econo-
mic transactions and social relations. If anything, indeed,
their tendency was to interpret them with a more rigorous
severity, as a protest against the moral laxity of the Renais-
sance, and, in particular, against the avarice which was
thought to be peculiarly the sin of Rome. For the passion
for regeneration and puri cation, which was one element in
the Reformation, was directed against the corruptions of
society as well as of the Church. Princes and nobles and
business men conducted themselves after their kind, and
shed eagerly in troubled waters. But the aim of religious
leaders was to reconstruct, not merely doctrine and eccle-
siastical government, but conduct and institutions, on a
LUTHER 95
pattern derived from the forgotten purity of primitive
Christianity.
’ The appeal from the depravity of the present to a golden
age of pristine innocence found at once its most vehement,
and its most artless, expression in the writings of the German
reformers. Like the return to nature in the eighteenth century,
it was the cry for spiritual peace of a society disillusioned‘
with the material triumphs of a too complex civilization.
The prosperity of Augsburg, Niirnberg, Regensburg, U.lm
and Frankfurt, and even of lesser cities like Rotenburg and
Freiburg, had long been the admiration of all observers.
Commanding the great trade routes across the Alps and
down the Rhine, they had held a central position, which they
were to lose when the spice trade moved to Antwerp and
Lisbon, and were not to recover till the creation of a railway
system in the nineteenth century made Germany again the
entrepot between western Europe and Russia, Austria, Italy
and the Near East. But the expansion of commerce which‘
brought affluence to the richer bourgeoisie, had been accom-
panied by the growth ofan acute social malaise, which left its
mark on literature and popular agitation, even before the
Discoveries turned Germany from a highway into a back-
water. The economic aspect of the development was the rise
to a position of overwhelming pre-eminence of the new
interests based on the control of capital and credit. In the
earlier Middle Ages capital had been the adjunct and ally
of the personal labour of craftsman- and artisan. In the
Germany of the fteenth century, as long before in Italy, it
had ceased to be a servant and had become a master.
Assuming a separate and independent vitality, it claimed the
right of a predominant partner to dictate economic organiza-
tion in accordance with its own exacting requirements.
Under the impact of these new forces, while the institu-
tions of earlier ages survived in form, their spirit and opera-
tion were transformed. In the larger cities the gild organiza-
tion, once a barrier to the encroachments of the capitalist,
became one of the instruments which he used to consolidate
his power. The rules of fraternities masked a division of the
brethren into a plutocracy of merchants, sheltered behind
barriers which none but the wealthy craftsman could scale,
and a wage-earning proletariat, dependent for their liveli-
hood on capital and credit supplied by their masters, and
alternately rising in revolt and sinking in an ever-expanding
morass of hopeless pauperism.29 The peasantry suffered
equally from the spread of a commercial civilization into the
rural districts and from the survival of ancient agrarian
servitudes. As in England, the nouveaux riches of the towns
invested money in land by purchase and loan, and drove up
rents and nes by their competition. But, while in England
the customary tenant was shaking o ' the onerous obliga-
tions of villeinage, and appealing, not without success, to
the royal courts to protect his title, his brother in south
Germany, where serfdom was to last till the middle of the
nineteenth century, was less fortunate. He found corvées
redoubled, money-payments increased, and common rights
curtailed, for the bene t of an impoverished noblesse, which
saw in the exploitation of the peasant the only means of
maintaining its social position in face of the rapidly growing
wealth of the bourgeoisie, and which seized on the now
fashionable Roman law as an instrument to give legal
sanction to its harshest exactions.29
On a society thus distracted by the pains of growth came
the commercial revolution produced by the Discoveries.
Their effect was to open a seemingly limitless eld to econo-
mic enterprise, and to sharpen the edge of every social
problem. Unable henceforward to tap through Venice the
wealth of the East, the leading commercial houses of south
Germany either withdrew from the trade across the Alps,
to specialize, like the Fuggers, in banking and nance, or
organized themselves into companies, which handled at
Lisbon and Antwerp a trade too distant and too expensive
to be undertaken by individual merchants using only their
LUTHER 97
own resources. The modern world has seen in America the
swift rise of combinations controlling output and prices by
the power of massed capital. A somewhat similar movement
took place on the narrower stage of European commerce
in the generation before the Reformation. Its centre was
Germany, and it was defended and attacked by arguments
almost identical with those which are familiar to-day. The
exactions of rings and monopolies, which bought in'bulk,
drove weaker competitors out of the eld, “as a great pike
swallows up a lot of little shes,” and plundered the cou-
sumer, were the commonplaces of the social reformer.”
The advantages of large-scale organization and the danger of
interfering with freedom of enterprise were urged by the
companies. The problem was on several occasions brought
before the Imperial Diet. But the discovery of the sage who \
observed that it is not possible to unscramble eggs had

already been made, and its decrees, passed in the teeth of
strenuous opposition from the interests concerned, do not
seem to have been more effective than modern legislation on
the same subject.
The passionate anti-capitalist reaction which such con-
ditions produced found expression in numerous schemes of
social reconstruction, from the so-called Reformation of the
Emperor Sigismund in the thirties of the fteenth century
to the Twelve Articles of the peasants in 1525.31 In the age
of the Reformation it was voiced by Hipler, who, in his
Divine Evangelical Reformation, urged that all merchants’
companies, such as those of the Fuggers, Hochstetters and
Welsers, should be abolished; by Hutten, who classed mer-
chants with knights, lawyers and the clergy as public
robbers; by Geiler von Kaiserberg, who wrote that the
monopolists were more detestable than Jews, and should be
exterminated like wolves; and, above all, by Luther."
Lugl1er's utterances on social morality are the occasional
explosions of a capricious volcano, with only a rare ash of
lright amid the torrent of smoke and ame, and it is idle to
o (A23:
scan them for a coherent and consistent doctrine. Compared
with the lucid and subtle rationalism of a thinker like St.
Antonino, his sermons and pamphlets on social questions
make an impression of naiveté, as of an impetuous but ill-
informed genius, dispensing with the cumbrous embarrass-
m.ents of law and logic, to evolve a system of social ethics
from the inspired heat of his own unsophisticated
consciousness.
It was partly that they were piéces de circonsrance, thrown
off in the storm of a revolution, partly that it was precisely
the re nements of law and logic which Luther detested. Con-
fronted with the complexities of foreign trade and nancial
organization, or with the subtleties of economic analysis, he
is like a savage introduced to a dynamo or a steam-engine.
He is too frightened and angry even to feel curiosity.
Attempts to explain the mechanism merely enrage him; he
can only repeat that there is a devil in it, and that good
Christians will not meddle with the mystery of iniquity.
But there is a method in his fury. It sprang, not from
ignorance, for he was versed in scholastic philosophy, but
from a conception which made the learning of the schools
appear trivial or mischievous.
“Gold,” wrote Columbus, as one enunciating a truism,
"constitutes treasure, and he who possesses it has all he
needs in this world, as also the means of rescuing souls from
Purgatory, and restoring them to the enjoyment of Para-
di_se.”33 It was this doctrine that all things have their price-
future salvation as much as present felicity—which scan-
dalized men who could not be suspected of disloyalty to
the Chufch, and which gave their most powerful argument
to the reformers. Their outlook on society had this incom-
mon with their outlook on religion, that the essence of both
was the arraignment of a degenerate civilization before the
majestic bar of an uncorrupted past. Of that revolutionary
conservatism Luther, who hated the economic individualism
of the age not less than its spiritual laxity, is the supreme
LUTHER 99
example. His attitude to the conquest of society by the mer-
chant and nancier is the same as his attitude towards the
commercialization of religion. When he looks at the Church
in Germany, he sees it sucked dry by the tribute which ows
to the new Babylon. When he looks at German social life,
he nds it ridden by a conscienceless money-power, which
incidentally ministers, like the banking business of the
Fuggers, to the avarice and corruption of Rome. The ex-
ploitation of the Church by the Papacy, and the exploitation
of the peasant and the craftsman by the capitalist, are thus
two homs of the beast which sits on the seven hills. Both are
essentially pagan, and the sword which will slay both is the
same. It is the religion of the Gospel. The Church must
cease to be an empire and become . a congregation of
believers. Renouncing the prizes and struggles which make
the heart sick, society must be converted into a band of
brothers, performing in patient cheerfulness the round of
simple toil which is the common lot of the descendants of
Adam.
Thechildren of the mind are like the children of the body.
Once born, they grow by a law of their own being, and, if
their parents cou_1d- foresee their future development, it
would sometimes break their hearts. Luther, who has earned
eulogy and denunciation as the grand individualist, would
have been horri ed could he have anticipated the rernoter
deductions to be derived from his argument. Wamba said
that to forgive as a Christian is not to forgive at all, and a
cynic who urged that the Christian freedom expounded by
Luther imposed more social restraints than it removed,
would have more a inity with the thought of Luther himself,
than the libertarian who saw in his teaching a plea for
treating questions of economic conduct and social organiza-
tion as spiritually indifferent. Luther’s revolt against autho-
rity was an attack, not on its rigour, but on its laxity and its
corruption. His individualism was not the greed of the
plutocrat, eager to snatch from the weakness of public
I00 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
authority an opportunity for personal gain. It was the
ineenuous enthusiasm of the anarchist, who hungers for a
society in which order and fraternity will reign without “the
tedious, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law and statute,”
because they well up in all their native purity from the heart.
Professor Troeltsch has pointed out that Protestants, not
less than Catholics, emphasized the idea of a Church-
civilization, in which all departments of life, the State and
society, education and science, law, commerce and industry,
were to be regulated in accordance with the law of God.“
That conception dominates all the utterances of Luther on
social issues. So far from accepting the view which was
afterwards to prevail, that the world of business is a closed
compartment with laws of its own, and that the religious
teacher exceeds his commission when he lays down rules for
the moral conduct of secular affairs, he reserves for that
plausible heresy denunciations hardly less bitter than those
directed against Rome. The text of his admonitions is
always, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the
Scribes and Pharisees,” and his appeal is from a formal,
legalistic, calculated virtue to the natural kindliness which
does not need to be organized by law, because it is the
spontaneous expression of a habit of love. To restore is to
destroy. The comment on Luther's enthusiasm for the
simple Christian virtues of an age innocent of the arti cial
chicaneries of ecclesiastical and secular jurisprudence came
in the thunder of revolution. It was the declaration of the
peasants, that “the message of Christ, the promised Messiah,
the word of life, teaching only love, peace, patience and
concord,” was incompatible with serfdom, corvées and
enclosures.“
The practical conclusion to which such premises led was a
theory Of society more mediazval than that held by many
thinkers in the Middle Ages, since it dismissed the C0111-.-
mercial developments of the last two centuries as a relapse
into paganism. Thefoundation .of itwas. partly- the Bible,
LUTHER lOl
partly a vague conception of a state of nature in which men
had not yet been corrupted by riches, partly the popular
protests against a commercial civilization which were every-
where in the air, and which Luther, a man of the people,
absorbed and reproduced with astonishing naiveté, even
while he denounced the practical measures proposed to give
effect to them. Like some elements in the Catholic reaction
of the twentieth century, the Protestant reaction of the six-
teenth sighed for a vanished age of peasant prosperity. The
social theory of Luther, who hated commerce and capitalism,
has its nearest modern analogy in the Distributive State of
Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton. '
For the arts by which men amass wealth and power, as for
the anxious provision which accumulates for the future,
Luther had all the distrust of a peasant and a monk.
Christians should earn their living in the sweat of their
brow, take no thought for the morrow, marry young and
trust Heaven to provide for its own. Like Melanchthon,
Luther thought that the most admirable life wasathat of the
peasant, for it was least touched by the corroding spirit of
commercial calculation, and he quoted Virgil to drive home
the lesson to be derived from the example of the patriarchs.“
The labour of the craftsman is honourable, for he serves
the community in his calling; the honest smith or shoemaker
is a priest. Trade is permissible, provided that it is con ned
to the exchange of necessaries, and that the seller demands
no more than will compensate him for his labour and risk.
The unforgivable sins are idleness and covetousness, for
they destroy the unity of the body of which Christians are
members. The grand author and maintainer of both is Rome.
For, having ruined Italy, the successor of St. Peter, who lives
in a worldly pomp that no king or emperor can equal, has
fastened his fangs on Germany; while the mendicant orders,
mischievous alike in their practice and by their example,
cover the land with a horde of beggars. Pilgrimages, saints’
days and monasteries are an excuse for idleness and must be
l0.?. THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
suppressed. Vagrants must be either banished or compelled
to labour, and each town must organize charity for the
support of the honest poor."
Luther accepted the social hierarchy, with its principles of
status and subordination, though he knocked away the
ecclesiastical rungs in the ladder. The combination of reli-
gious radicalism and economic conservatism is not un-
common, and in the traditional conception of society, as an
organism of unequal classes with di 'erent rights and
functions, the father of all later revolutions founded an
arsenal of arguments against change, which he launched
with‘ almost equal fury against revolting peasants and grasp-
ing monopolists. H is_ vindication of the spiritual freedom of
common men, and his outspoken abuse of the German
princes, had naturally been taken at their face value by serfs
groaning under an odious tyranny, and, when the inevitable
rising came, the rage of Luther, like that of Burke in another
age, was sharpened by embarrassment at what seemed to
him a hideous parody of truths which were both sacred and
his own. As fully convinced as any mediazval writer that
serfdom was the necessary foundation of society, his alarm
at .the attempt to abolish it was intensi ed by a political
theory which exalted the absolutism of secular authorities,
and a religious doctrine which drew a sharp antithesis
between the extemal order and the life of the spirit. The
demand of the peasants that villeinage should end, because
“Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly as well
as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His
precious blood,”3" horri ed him, partly as portending an
orgy of anarchy, partly because it was likely to be confused
with and to prejudice, as in fact it did, the Reformation
movement, partly because (as he thought) it degraded the
Gospel by turning a spiritual message into a programme of
social reconstruction. “This article would make all men
equal and so change the spiritual kingdom of Christ into an
external worldly one. Impossible! An earthly kingdom can-
LUTHER 103
not exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free,
others serfs, some rulers, others subjects. As St. Paul says:
‘Before Christ both master and slave are one.’ "39 After
nearly four centuries, Luther's apprehensions of a too hasty
establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven appear somewhat
exaggerated.
A society may perish by corruption as well as by violence.
Where the peasants battered, the capitalist mined; and
Luther, whose ideal was the patriarchal ethics of a world
which, if it ever existed, was visibly breaking up, had as
little mercy for the slow poison of commerce and nance as
for the bludgeon of revolt. No contrast could be more
striking than that between his social theory and the outlook
of Calvin. Calvin, with all his rigour, accepted the main
institutions of a commercial civilization, and supplied a
creed to the classes which were to dominate the future.
The eyes of Luther were on the past. He saw no room in a
Christian society for those middle classes whom an English
statesman once described as the natural representatives of
the human race. International trade, banking and credit,
capitalist industry, the whole complex of economic forces,
which, next to his own revolution, were to be the mightiest
solvent of the medizeval world, seem to him to belongin their
very essence to the kingdom of darkness which the Christian
will shun. He attacks the authority of the canon law, only to
rea irm more dogmatically the detailed rules which it had
been used to enforce. V-Then he discusses economic questions
at length, as in his Long Sermon on Usury in 1520, or his tract
On Trade and Usury in 1524, his doctrines are drawn from
the straitest interpretation of ecclesiastical jurisprudence,
unsoftened by the quali cations with which canonists them-
selves had attempted to adapt its rigours to the exigencies of
practical life. .
In the matter of prices he merely rehearses traditional
doctrines. “A man should not say, ‘I will sell my wares as
dear as I can or please,’ but ‘I will sell my wares as is right
IO4 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
and proper.’ For thy selling should not be a work that is
within thy own power or will, without all law and limit, as
though thou wert a God, bound to no one. But because
thy selling is a work that thou performest to thy neighbour,
it should be restrained within such law and conscience that
thou mayest practise it without harm or injury to him.”‘*°
If a price is xed by public authority, the seller must keep to
it. If it is not, he must follow the price of common estimation.
If he has to determine it himself, he must consider the
income needed to maintain him in his station in life, his
labour and his risk, and must settle it accordingly. He must
not take advantage of scarcity to raise it. He must not corner
the market. He must not deal in futures. He must not sell
dearer for deferred payments.
On the subject of usury, Luther goes even further than the
orthodox teaching. He denounces the concessions to prac-
tical necessities made by the canonists. "The greatest mis-
fortune of the German nation is easily the tra ic in interest.
. . . The devil invented it, and the Pope, by giving his sanc-
tion to it, has done untold evil throughout the world.”41
Not content with insisting that lending ought to be free, he
denounces the payment of interest as compensation for loss
and the practice of investing in rent-charges, both of which
the canon law in his day allowed, and would refuse usurers
the sacrament, absolution and Christian burial. With such a
code of ethics, Luther naturally nds the characteristic
developments of his generation-the luxury trade with the
East, international nance, speculation on the exchanges,
combinations and monopolies-shocking beyond measure.
“Foreign merchandise which brings from Calicut and India
and the like places wares such as precious silver and jewels
and spices . . . and drain the land and people of their money,
should not be permitted. . . . Of combinations I ought really
to say much, but the matter is endless and bottomless, full
of mere greed and wrong. '. . . Who is so stupid as not to see»
that combinations are mere outright monopolies, which even‘
LUTHER 10$
heathen civil laws_I will say nothing of divine right and
Christian law—condemn as a plainly harmful thing in all the
world ?”42
So resolute an enemy of licence might have been expected
to be the champion of law. It might have been supposed that
Luther, with his hatred of the economic appetites, would
have hailed as an ally the restraints by which, at least in
theory, those appetites had been controlled. In reality, of
course, his attitude towards the mechanism of ecclesiastical
jurisprudence and discipline was the opposite. It was one,
not merely of indi erence, but of repugnance. The prophet
who scourged with whips the cupidity of the individual
chastised with scorpions the restrictions imposed upon it by
society; the apostle of an ideal ethic of Christian love turned
a shattering dialectic on the corporate organization of the
Christian Church. In most ages, so tragic a parody of human
hopes are human institutions, there have been some who
have loved mankind, while hating almost everything that
men have done or made. Of that temper Luther, who lived
at a time when the contrast between a sublime theory and a
hideous reality had long been intolerable, is the supreme
example. He preaches a sel ess charity, but he recoils with
horror from every institution by which an attempt had been
made to give it a concrete expression. He reiterates the con-
tent of mediaeval economic teaching with a literalness rarely
to be found in the thinkers of the later Middle Ages, but for
the rules and ordinances in which it had received a positive,
if sadly imperfect, expression, he has little but abhorrence.
God speaks. to the soul, not through the mediation of the
priesthood or of social institutions built up by man, but
solus cum solo, as a voice in the heart and in the heart alone.
Thus the bridges between the worlds of spirit and of sense
are broken, and the soul is isolated from the society of men,
that it may enter into communion with its Maker. The
grace that is freely bestowed upon it may over ow in its
social relations; but those relations can supply no particle
D1-
of spiritual nourishment to make easier the reception of
grace. Like the primeval confusion into which the fallen
Angel plunged on his fatal mission, they are a chaos of
brute matter, a wilderness of dry bones, a desert unsancti ed
and incapable of contributing to sancti cation. "It is certain
that absolutely none among outward things, under whatever
name they may be reckoned, has any in uence in producing
Christian righteousness or liberty. . . . One thing, and one
alone, is necessary for life, justi cation and Christian liberty;
and that is the most holy word of God, the Gospel of
Christ.”“
The difference between loving men as a result of rst
loving God and learning to love God through a growing
love for men may not, at rst sight, appear profound. To
Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It was, in
a sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For carried,
as it was not carried by Luther, to its logical result, the
argument made, not only good works, but sacraments and
the Church itself unnecessary. The question of the religious
signi cance of that change of emphasis, and of the validity
of the intellectual processes by which Luther reached his
conclusions, is one for theologians. Its e 'ects on social
theory were staggering. Since salvation is bestowed by the
operation of grace in the heart, and by that alone, the whole
fabric of organized religion, which had mediated between
the individual soul and its Maker—divinely commissioned
hierarchy, systematized activities, corporate institutions-—
drops away, as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of
works. The medizeval conception of the social order, which
had regarded it as a highly articulated organism of members
contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose,
was shattered, and differences which had been distinctions
within a larger unity were now set in irreconcilable anta-
gonism to each other. Grace no longer completed nature:
it was the antithesis of it. Man's actions as a member of
society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of
LUTHER I07
God:_they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to
possess, even remotely, a religious signi cance: they might
compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed
rules of conduct--a Christian casuistry—are needless or
objectionable: the Christian has a su icient guide in the
Bible and in his own conscience. In one sense, the distinction
between the secu.lar and the religious life vanished. Monasti-
cism was, so to speak, secularized; all men stood hence-
forward on the same footing towards God; and that ad-
vance, which contained the germ of all subsequent revolu-
tions, was so enormous that all else seems insigni cant. In
another sense, the distinction became more profound than
ever before. For, though all might be sancti ed, it was their
inner life alone which could partake of sancti cation. The
world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness,
spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute;
no human effort could span the chasm.
The remoter corollaries of the change remained to be
stated by subsequent generations. Luther himself was not
consistent. He believed that it was possible to maintain the
content of mediaeval social teaching, while rejecting its
sanctions, and he insisted that good works would be the
fruit of salvation, as vehemently as he denied that they
could contribute to its attainment. In his writings on social
questions emphasis on the traditional Christian morality is
combined with a repudiation of its visible and institutional
framework, and in the tragic struggle which results between
spirit and letter, form and matter, grace and works, his
intention, at least, is not to jettison the rules of good con-
science in economic matters, but to purify them by an
immense e '0rt of simpli cation. His denunciation of
medizeval charity, fraternities, mendicant orders, festivals
and pilgrimages, while it drew its point from practical
abuses, sprang inevitably from his repudiation of the idea
that merit could be acquired by the operation of some
specialmachinery beyond the conscientious discharge of the
ordinary duties of daily life. His demand for the abolition of
the canon law was the natural corollary of his belief that the
Bible was an all-su icient guide to action. While not reject-
ing ecclesiastical discipline altogether, he is impatient of it.
The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate mechanism to
teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects it. He has
the Scriptures and his own conscience; let him listen to them.
“There can be no better instructions in . . . all transactions in
temporal goods than that every man who is to deal with his
neighbour present to himself these commandments: ‘What
ye would that others should do unto you, do ye also unto
them,’ and ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ If these were
followed out, then everything would instruct and arrange
itself; then no law books nor courts nor judicial actions
would be required; all things would quietly and simply be
set to rights, for every one’s heart and conscience would
guide hi_m.”44 '
“Everything would arrange itself.” Few would deny it.
But how if it does not? Is emotion really an adequate substi-
tute for reason, and rhetoric for law? Is it possible to solve
the problem which social duties present to the individual by
informing him that no problem exists? If it is true that the‘
inner life is the sphere of religion, does it necessarily follow
that the external order is simply irrelevant to it? To wave
aside the world of institutions and law as alien to that of
the spirit—is not this to abandon, instead of facing, the task
of making Christian morality prevail, for which mediaeval
writers, with their conception of a hierarchy of values related
to e common end, had attempted, however inadequately, to
discover a formula‘? A Catholic rationalist had answered
by anticipation Luther's contemptuous dismissal of law and
leaming, when he urged that it was useless for the Church to
prohibit extortion unless it was prepared to undertake the
intellectual labour of de ning the transactions to which the
prohibition applied.“ It was a pity that Pecock’s douche of
common sense ,was not of a kind which could be appreciated
LUTHER I09
by Luther. He denounced covetousness in general tenns,
with a surprising exuberance of invective. But, confronted
with a request for advice on the speci c question whether
the authorities of Danzig shall put down usury, he retreats
into the clouds. “The preacher shall preach only the Gospel
rule, and leave it to each man to follow his own conscience.
Let him who can receive it, receive it; he cannot be com-
pelled thereto further than the Gospel leads willing hearts
whom the spirit of God urges forward.”4°
Luther's impotence was not accidental. It sprang directly
from his fundamental conception that to externalize religion
in rules and ordinances is to degrade it. He attacked the
casuistry of the canonists, and the points in their teaching
with regard to which his criticism was j usti ed were only too
numerous. But the remedy for bad law is good law, not law-
lessness; and casuistry is merely theapplication of general
principles to particular cases, which is involved in any living
system of jurisprudence, whether ecclesiastical or secular. If
the principles are not to be applied, on the ground that they
are too sublime to be soiled by contact with the gross world
of business and politics, what remains of them? _Denuncia-
tions such as Luther launched against ‘the Fuggers and the
peasants; aspirations for an idyll of Christian charity and
simplicity, such as he advanced in his tract On Trade and
Usury. Pious rhetoric may be edifying, but it is hardly the
panoply recommended by St. Paul.
_"As the soul needs the word alone for life and justifica-
tion, so it is justi ed by faith alone, and not by any works.
. . . Therefore the rst care of every Christian ought to be to
lay aside all reliance on works, and-to strengthen his faith
alone more and more.”‘" The logic of Luther's religious
premises was more potent for posterity than his attachment
to the social ethics of the past, and evolved its own inexorable
conclusions in spite of them. It enormously deepened
spiritual experience, and sowed the seeds from which new
freedo:-is, abhorrent to Luther,'were to spring. But it-riveted
on the social thought of Protestantism a dualism which, as
its implications were developed, emptied religion of its social
content and society of its soul. Between light and darkness
a great gulf was xed. Unable to climb upwards plane by
plane, man must choose between salvation and damnation.
If he despairs of attaining the austere heights where alone
true faith is found, no human institution can avail to help
him. Such, Luther thinks, will be the fate of only too many.
He himself was conscious that he had left the world of
secular activities perilously divorced from spiritual restraints.
He met the di iculty, partly with an admission that it was
insuperable, as one who should exult in the majestic un-
reasonableness of a mysterious Providence, whose decrees
might not be broken, but could not, save by a few, be
obeyed; partly with an appeal to the State to occupy the
province of social ethics, for which his philosophy could nd
no room in the Church. “Here it will be asked,"Who then
can be saved, and where shall we nd Christians? For in
this fashion no merchandising would remain on earth.’ . . .
You see it is as I said, that Christians are rare people on
earth. Therefore stern hard civil rule is necessary in the
world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and com-
merce and common interests bedestroyed. . No one need
think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil
sword shall and must be red and bloody.”4°
Thus the axe takes the place of the stake, and authority,
expelled from the altar, nds a new and securer home upon
the throne. The maintenance of Christian morality is to be
transferred from the discredited ecclesiastical authorities to
the hands of the State. Sceptical as to the existence of uni-
corns and salamanders, the age of Machiavelli and Henry
VIII found food for its credulity in the worship of that rare
monster, the God-fearing Prince.
CALVIN 111
(iii)
Calvin
The most characteristic and in uential form of Pro-
testantism in the two centuries following the Reformation is
that which descends, by one path or another, from the
teaching of Calvin. Unlike the Lutheranism from which it
sprang, Calvinism, assuming different shapes in di erent
countries, became an international movement, which
brought, not peace, but a sword, and the path of which was
strewn with revolutions. Where Lutheranism had been
socially conservative, deferential to established ‘political
authorities, the exponent of a personal, almost a quietistic,
piety, Calvinism was an active and radical force. It was a
creed_ which sought, not merely to purify the individual,
but to reconstruct Church and State, and to renew society
by penetrating every department of life, public as well
as private, with the in uence of religion.
Upon the immense political reactions of Calvinism this is
not the place to enlarge. As a way of life and a theory of
society, it possessed from the beginning one characteristic
which was both novel and important. It assumed an econo-
mic organization which was relatively advanced, and ex-
pounded its social ethics on the basis of it. In this respect
the teaching of the Puritan moralists who derive most
directly from Calvin is in marked contrast with that both of
medieval theologians and of Luther. The di 'erence is not
merely one of the conclusions reached, but of the plane on
which the discussion is conducted. The background, not
only of most mediteval social theory, but also of Luther and
his English contemporaries, is the traditional strati cation
of rural society. It is a natural, rather than a money,’
economy, consisting'of the petty dealings of peasants and
craftsmen in the small market town, where industry is
carried on for the subsistence of the household and the con-
sumption of wealth follows hard upon the production of it,
and where commerce and nance are occasional incidents,
rather than the forces which keep the whole system in
motion. When they criticize economic abuses, it is precisely
against departures from that natural state of things—against
the enterprise, the greed of gain, the restless competition,
which disturb the stability of the existing order with
clamorous economic appetites-that their criticism is
directed.
These ideas were the traditional retort to the evils of
unscrupulous commercialism, and they left some trace on
the writings of the Swiss reformers. Zwingli, for example,
who, in his outlook on society, stood midway between
Luther and Calvin, insists on the oft-repeated thesis that
private property originates in sin; warns the rich that they
can hardly enter the Kingdom of Heaven; denounces the
Councils of Constance and Basel—“assembled, forsooth, at
the bidding of the Holy Ghost"-—for showing indulgence to
the mortgaging of land on the security of crops; and, while
emphasizing that interest must be paid when the State
sanctions it, condemns it in itself as contrary to the law of
God." Of the attempts made at Ziirich and Geneva to
repress extortion something is said below. But these full-
blooded denunciations of capitalism were not intended by
their authors to supply a rule of practical life, since it was
the duty of the individual to comply with the secular legisla-
tion by which interest was permitted, and already, when
they were uttered, they had ceased to represent the con-
clusion of_the left wing of the Reformed Churches.
For Calvin, and still more his later interpreters, began
their voyage lower down the stream. Unlike Luther, who
saw economic life with the eyes of a peasant and a mystic,
they approached it as men of a 'airs, disposed neither to
idealize the patriarchal virtues of the peasant community,
nor to regard with suspicion the mere fact of capitalist
enterprise in commerce and nance. Like early Christianity
CALVIN l|3
and modern socialism, Calvinism was largely an urban
movement; like them, in its earlier days, it was carried from
country to country partly by emigrant traders and work-
men; and its stronghold was precisely in those social groups
to which the traditional scheme of social ethics, with its
treatment of economic interests as a quite minor aspect of
human affairs, must have seemed irrelevant or arti cial.
As was to be expected in the exponents of a faith which had
its headquarters. at Geneva, and later its most in uential
adherents in‘ great business centres, like Antwerp with its
industrial hinterland, London and Amsterdam, its leaders
addressed their teaching, not of course exclusively, but
none the less primarily, to the classes engaged in trade and
industry, who formed the most modern and progressive
elements in the life of the age.
In doing so they naturally started from a frank recognition
of the necessity of capital, credit and banking, large-scale
commerce and nance, and the other practical facts of
business life. They thus broke with the tradition which,
regarding a preoccupation with economic interests “beyond
what is necessary for subsistence” as reprehensible, had
stigmatized the middleman as a parasite and the usurer as a
thief. They set the pro ts of trade and nance, which to the
mediaaval writer, as to Luther, only with difficulty escaped
censure as turpe lucrum, on the same level of respectability
as the earnings of the labourer and the rents of the landlord.
“What reason is there,” wrote Calvin to a correspondent,
“why the income from business should not be larger than
that from landowning? Whence do the 1nerchant’s pro ts
come, except from his own diligence and industry? "5" It
was quite in accordance with the spirit of those words that
Bucer, even while denouncing the frauds and avarice of
merchants, should urge the English Government to _under-
take the development of the woollen industry on mercantilist
lines.“
Since it is the environment of the industrial and com-
mercial classes which is foremost in the thoughts of Calvin
and his followers, they have to make terms with its practical
necessities. It is not that they abandon the claim of religion
to moralize economic life, but that the life which they are
concerned to moralize is one in which the main features of a
commercial civilization are taken for granted, and that it is
for application to such conditions that their teaching is
designed. Early Calvinism, as we shall see, has its own rule,
and a rigorous rule, for the conduct of economic a 'airs.
But it no longer suspects the whole world of economic
motives as alien to the life of the spirit, or distrusts the
capitalist as one who has necessarily grown rich on the mis-
fortunes of his neighbour, or regards poverty as in itself
meiitorious, and it is perhaps the rst systematic body" of
religious teaching which can be said to recognize and
applaud the economic virtues. Its enemy is not the accumula-
tion of riches, but their misuse for purposes of self-indul-
gence or ostentation. Its ideal is a society which seeks
wealth with the sober gravity of men who are conscious at
once of disciplining their own characters by patient labour,
and of devoting themselves to a service acceptable to
God.
It is-in the light of that change of social perspective that
the doctrine of usury associated with the name of Calvin is
to be interpreted. Its signi cance consisted 'not in the phase
which it marked in the technique of economic analysis, but
in its admission to a new position of respectability of a
powerful and growing body of social interests, which,
however irrepressible in practice, had hitherto been regarded
by religious theory as, at best, of dubious propriety, and, at
worst, as frankly immoral. Strictly construed, the famous
pronouncement strikes the modern reader rather by its
rigour than by its indulgence. “Calvin,” wrote an English
divine a generation after his death, “deals with usurie as
the apothecarie doth with poyson.”52 The apologetic was
just, for neither his letter to Oecolampadius, nor his sermon
CALVIN 11$
on- the same subject, reveals any excessive tolerance for the
trade of the nancier. That interest is lawful, provided that it
does not exceed an official maximum, that, even when a
maximum is xed, loans must be made gratis to the poor,
that the borrower must reap as much advantage as the
lender, that excessive security must not be exacted, that what
is venial as an occasional expedient is reprehensible when
carried on as a regular occupation, that no man may snatch
economic gain for himself to the injury of his neighbour-_
a condonation of usury protected by such embarrassing
entanglements can have offered but tepid consolation to the
devout money-lender.
Contemporaries interpreted Calvin to mean that the
debtor might properly be asked to concede some small part
of his pro ts to the creditor with whose capital they had been
earned, but that the exaction of interest was wrong if it
meant that “the creditor becomes rich by the sweat of the
debtor, and the debtor does not reap the reward of his
labour.” There have been ages in which such doctrines
would have been regarded as an attack on nancial enter-
prise rather than as a defence of it. Nor were Calvin’s
speci c contributions to the theory of usury strikingly
original. As a hard-headed lawyer, he was free both from the
incoherence and from the idealism of Luther, and his
doctrine was probably regarded by himself merely as one
additional step in the long series of developments through
which ecclesiastical jurisprudence on the subject had already
gone. In emphasizing the di 'erence between the interest
wrung from the necessities of the poor and the interest which
a prosperous merchant could earn with borrowed capital,
he had been anticipated by Major; in his sanction of a
moderate rate on loans to the rich, his position was the same
as that already assumed, though with some hesitation, by
Melanchthon. The picture of Calvin, the organizer and
disciplirrarian, as the parent of laxity in social ethics, is a
legend. Likethe author of another revolution in economic
ll6 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
theory, he might have turned on his popularizers with the
protest: “I am not a Calvinist.”
Legends are apt, however, to be as right in substance as
they are wrong in detail, and both its critics and its defenders
were correct in regarding Calvin’s treatment of capital as a
watershed. What he did was to change the plane on which
the discussion was conducted, by treating the ethics of
money-lending, not as a matter to be decided by an appeal
to a special body of doctrine on the subject of usury, but as
a particular case of the general problem of the social rela-
tions of a Christian community, which must be solved in the
light of existing circumstances. The signi cant feature in his
discussion of the subject is that he assumes credit to be a
normal and inevitable incident in the life of society. He there-
fore dismisses the oft-quoted passages from the Old Testa-
ment and the Fathers as irrelevant, because designed for
conditions which no longer exist, argues that the payment
of interest for capital is as reasonable as the payment of
rent for land, and throws on the conscience of the individual
the obligation of seeing that it does not exceed the amount
dictated by natural justice and the golden rule. He makes, in
short, a fresh start, argues that what is permanent is, not the
rule “non fa=nerabr's," but ,“I’équité et la droiture,” and
appeals from Christian tradition to commercial common
sense, which he is sanguine enough to hope will be Christian.
On such a view all extortion is to be avoided by Christians.
But capital and credit are indispensable; the nancier is not
a pariah, but a useful member of society; and lending at
interest, provided that the rate is reasonable and that loans
are made freely to the poor, is not per se more extortionate
than any other of the economic transactions without which
human affairs cannot be carried on. That acceptance of the
realities of commercial practice as a starting-point was of
momentous importance. It meant that Calvinism and its
o "shoots took their stand on the side of the activities which
were to be most characteristic of the future, and insisted
CALVIN 1!?
that it was not by renouncing them, but by untiring con-

centration on the task of using for the glory of God the
opportunities which they offered, that the Christian life
could and must be lived.
It was on this practical basis of urban industry and com-
mercial enterprise that the structure of Calvinistic social
ethics was erected. Upon their theological background it
would be audacious to enter. But even an amateur may be
pardoned if he feels that there have been few systems in
which the practical conclusions ow by so inevitable a logic
from the theological premises. ”God not only foresaw,"
Calvin wrote, “the fall of the rst man, . . . but also arranged
all by the determination of his own will.”53 Certain indivi-
duals he chose as his elect, predestined to salvation from
eternity by “his gratuitous mercy, totally irrespective of
human merit”; the remainder have been consigned to
eternal damnation, “by a just and irreprehensible, _but
incomprehensible, judgment.”54 Deliverance, in short, is
the work, not of man himself, who can contribute nothing
to it, but of an objective Power. Human e 'ort, social institu-
tions, the world of culture, are at best irrelevant to salvation,
and at worst mischievous. They distract man from the true
aim of his existence and encourage reliance upon broken
reeds.
That aim is not personal salvation, but the glori cation
of God, to be sought, not by prayer only, but by action—the
sancti cation of the world by strife and labour. For Cal-
vinism, with all its repudiation of personal merit, is intensely
practical. Good works are not a way of attaining salvation,
but they are indispensable as a proof that salvation has been
attained. The central paradox of religious ethics—that only
those are nerved with the courage needed to turn the world
upside down, who are convinced that already, in a higher
sense, it is disposed for the best by a Power of which they
are the humble instruments— nds in it a special exempli ca-
tion. For the Calvinist the world is ordained to show forth
the majesty of God, and the duty of the Christian is to live
for that end. His task is at once to discipline his individual
life and to create a sancti ed society. The Church-, the State,
the community in which he lives, must not merely be a
means of personal salvation or minister to his temporal
needs. It must be a “Kingdom of Christ,” in which individual
duties are performed by men conscious that they are “ever
in their great Taskrnaster’s eye,” and the whole fabric is
preserved from corruption by a stringent and all-embracing
discipline.
The impetus to reform or revolution springs in every age
from the realization of the contrast between the external
order of society and the moral standards recognized as
valid by the conscience or reason of the individual. And
naturally it is in periods of swift material progress, such as
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, that such a contrast
is most acutely felt. The men who made the Reformation
had seen the Middle Ages close in the golden autumn which,
amid all the corruption and tyranny of the time, still glows
in the pictures of Ntirnberg and Frankfurt drawn by Aeneas
Silvius and in the woodcuts of_ Diirer. And already a new
dawn of economic prosperity was unfolding. Its promise was
splendid, but it had been accompanied by a cynical
materialism, which seemed a denial of all that had been
meant by the Christian virtues, and which was the more
horrifying because it was in the capital of the Christian
Church that it reached its height. Shocked by the gulf be-
tween theory and practice, men tumed this way and that to
nd some solution of the tension which racked them. The
German reformers followed one road and preached a return
to primitive simplicity. But who could obliterate the
achievements of two centuries, or blot out the new worlds
which science had revealed? The Humanists took another,
which should lead to the gradual regeneration of_,mankind
by the victory of reason over superstition and brutality and
avarice. But who could wait for so distant a consummation?
CALVIN I19
Might there not be a third? Was it not possible that, puri ed
and disciplined, the very qualities which economic success
demanded-—thrift, diligence, sobriety, frugality—were them-
selves, after all, the foundation, at least, of the Christian
virtues? Was it not conceivable that the gulf which yawned
between a luxurious world and the life of the spirit could be
bridged, not by eschewing material interests as the kingdom
of darkness, but by dedicating them to the service of God?
It was that revolution in the traditional scale of ethical
values which the Swiss reformers desired to achieve; it was
that new type of Christian character that they laboured to
create. Not as part of any scheme of social reform, but as
elements in a plan of moral regeneration, they seized on the
aptitudes cultivated by the life of business and affairs,
stamped on them a new sancti cation, and used them as the
warp of a society in which a more than Roman discipline
should perpetuate a character the exact antithesis of that
fostered by obedience to Rome. The Roman Church, it was
held, through the example of its rulers, had encouraged
luxury and ostentation: the members of the Reformed
Church must be economical and modest. It had sanctioned
the spurious charity of indiscriminate almsgiving: the true
Christian must repress mendicancy and insist on the virtues
of industry and thrift. It had allowed the faithful to believe
that they could atone for a life of worldliness..by the savour-
less formality of individual good works reduced to a com-
mercial system, as though man could keep a pro t and loss
account with his Creator: the true Christian must organize
his life as a whole for the service of his Master. It had
rebuked the pursuit of gain as lower than the life of religion,
even while it took bribes from those who pursued gain with
success: the Christian must conduct his business with a high
seriousness, as in itself a kind of religion.
Such teaching, whatever its theological merits or defects,
was admirably designed to liberate economic energies, and
to weld into a disciplined social force the rising bourgeoisie,
conscious of the contrast between its own standards and
those of a laxer world, proud of its vocation as the standard-
bearer of the economic virtues, and determined to vindicate
an open road for its own way of life by the use of every
weapon, including political revolution and war, because the
issue which was at stake was not merely convenience or self-
interest, but the will of God. Calvinism stood, in short, not
only for a new doctrine of theology and ecclesiastical
government, but for a new scale of moral values and a new
ideal of social conduct. Its practical message, it might
perhaps be said, was la carriére 0uverte—not aux talents, but
an caracrére. _ ,
Once the world had been settled to their liking, the middle
classes persuaded themselves that they were the convinced
enemies of violence and the devotees of the principle of
order. While their victories were still to win, they were
everywhere the spear-head of revolution. It is not wholly
fanciful to say that, on a narrower stage but with not less
formidable weapons, Calvin did for the bourgeoisie of the
sixteenth century what Marx did for thekproletariat of the
nineteenth, or that the doctrine of predestination satis ed
the same hunger for an assurance that the forces of the
universe are on the side of the elect as was to be assuaged in
a di erent age by the theory of historical materialism. He
set their virtues at their best in sharp antithesis with the
vices of’the established order at its worst, taught them to feel
that they were a chosen people, made them conscious of
their great destiny in the Providential plan and resolute to
realize it. The new law was graven on tablets of esh; it not
merely rehearsed a lesson, but fashioned a soul. Compared
with the quarrelsome, self-indulgent nobility- of most
European countries, or with the extravagant and half-bank-
rupt monarchies,_the middle classes, in whom Calvinism
took root most deeply, were a race of iron. It was not
surprising that they made several revolutions, and imprinted
their conceptions of political and social expediency on the
CALVIN I21
public life of half a dozen di 'erent States in- the Old World
and in the New.
The two main elements in this teaching were the insistence
on personal responsibility, discipline and asceticism, and the
call to fashion for the Christian character an objective
embodiment in social institutions. Though logically con-
nected, they were often in practical discord. The in uence of
Calvinism was not simple, but complex, and extended far
beyond the circle of Churches which could properly be
called Calvinist. Calvinist theology was accepted where
Calvinist discipline was repudiated. The bitter struggle
between Presbyterians and Independents in England did not
prevent men, to whom the whole idea of religious uniformity
was fundamentally abhorrent, from drawing inspiration
from the conception of a visible Christian society, in which,
as one of them said, the Scripture was “really and materially
to be ful lled.”55 Both an intense individualism and a
rigorous Christian Socialism could be deduced from Calvin’s
doctrine. Which of them predominated depended on
di 'erences of political environment and of social class. It
depended, above all, on the question whether Calvinists
were, as at Geneva and in Scotland, a majority, who could
stamp their ideals on the social order, or, as in England, a
minority, living on the defensive beneath the suspicious eyes
of a hostile Government.
In the version of Calvinism which found favour with the
English upper classes in the seventeenth century, indivi-
dualism in social a 'airs was, on the whole, the prevalent
philosophy. It was only the fanatic and the agitator who
drew inspiration from the vision of a New Jerusalem
descending on England’s green and pleasant land, and the
troopers of Fairfax soon taught them reason. But, if the
theology of Puritanism was that of Calvin, its conception
of society, diluted by the practical necessities of a com-
mercial .age, and softened to suit the conventions of a
territorial aristocracy, was poles apart from that of the
master who founded a discipline, compared with which that
of Laud, as Laud himself dryly observed,“ was a thing of
shreds -and patches. As both the teaching of Calvin himself
and the practice of some Calvinist communities suggest, the
social ethics of the heroic age of Calvinism savoured more of
a collectivist dictatorship than of individualism. The expres-
sion of a revolt against the medieval ecclesiastical system, it
stood itself, where circumstances favoured it, for a discipline
far more stringent and comprehensive than that of the
Middle Ages. If, as some historians have argued, the philo-
sophy of laissez faire emerged as a result of the spread of
Calvinism among the middle classes, it did so, like tolerance,
by a route which was indirect. It was accepted less because
it was esteemed for its own sake than as a compromise
forced upon Calvinism at a comparatively late stage in‘ its
history, as a result of its modi cation by the pressure of
commercial interests, or of a balance of power between
con icting authorities.
The spirit of the system is suggested by its treatment of the
burning question of pauperism. The reform of traditional
methods of poor relief was in the air—Vives had written his
celebrated book in 1526"-—-and, prompted both by Human-
ists and by men of religion, the secular authorities all over
Europe were beginning to bestir themselves to cope with
what was, at best, a menace to social order, and, at worst, a
moral scandal. The question was naturally one which
appealed strongly to the ethical spirit of the Reformation.
The characteristic of the Swiss reformers, who were much
concerned with it, was that they saw the situation not, like
the statesmen, as a problem of police, nor, like more intelli-
gent Humanists, as a problem of social organization, but as a
question of character. Calvin quoted with approval the
words of St.'Paul, "if a man will not work, neither shall he
eat," condemned indiscriminate almsgiving as vehemently
as any Utilitarian, and urged that the ecclesiastical autho-
rities should regularly visit every family to ascertain whether
CALVIN I23
its members were idle, or drunken, or otherwise undesirable."
Oecolampadius wrote two tracts on the relief of the poor.”
Bullinger lamented the army of beggars produced by mon-
astic charity, and secured part of the emoluments of a
dissolved abbey for the maintenance of a school and the
assistance of the destitute.“ In the plan for the reorganiza-
tion of poor relief at Ziirich, which was drafted by Zwingli
in 1525, all mendicancy was strictly forbidden; travellers
were to be relieved on condition that they left the town next
day; provision was. to be made for the sick and aged in
special institutions; no inhabitant was to be entitled to relief
who wore ornaments or luxurious clothes, who failed to
attend church, or who played cards or was otherwise
disreputable. The basis of his whole scheme was the duty
of industry and the danger of relaxing the incentive to work.
“With labour,” hewrote, “will no man now support him-
self. . . . And yet labour is a thing so good and godlike . - .-
that makes the body hale and strong and cures the sicknesses
produced by idleness. . . . In the things of this life, the
labourer is most like to God.”°1
In the assault on pauperism, moral and economic motives
were not distinguished. The idleness of the mendicant was
both a sin against God and a social evil; the enterprise of the
thriving tradesman was at once a Christian virtue and a
bene t to the community. The same combination of re‘igious
zeal and practical shrewdness prompted the attacks on
gambling, swearing, excess of apparel and self-indulgence in
eating and drinking. The essence of the system was not
preaching or propaganda, though it was proli c of both,
but the attempt to crystallize a moral ideal in the daily life
of a visible society, which should be at once a Church and a
State. Having overthrown monasticism, its aim was to
turn the secular world into a gigantic monastery, and at
Geneva, for a short time, it almost succeeded. “In other
places,” wrote Knox of that devoted city, “I confess Christ
to be truly preached, but manners and religion so sincerely
1-24 THE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
reformed I have not yet seen in any place besides.”°2
Manners and morals were regulated, because it is through
the minurice of conduct that the enemy of mankind nds his
way to the soul; the traitors to the Kingdom might be
revealed by pointed shoes or golden ear-rings, as in 1793
those guilty of another kind of incivisme were betrayed
by their knee-breeches. Regulation meant legislation, and,
still more, administration. The word in which both were
summarized was Discipline.
Discipline Calvin himself described as the nerves of
religion,“ and the common observation that he assigned to
it the same primacy as Luther had given to faith is just. As
organized in the Calvinist Churches, it was designed
primarily to safeguard the sacrament and to enforce a
censorship of morals, and thus di 'ered in scope and purpose
from the canon law of the Church of Rome, as the rules of a
private society may di 'er from the code of a State. Its
establishment at Geneva, in the form which it assumed in
the last half of the sixteenth century, was the result of
nearly twenty years of struggle between the Council of the
city and the Consistory, composed of ministers and laymen.
It was onlyin 1555 that the latter nally vindicated its right to
excommunicate, and only in the edition of the Institutes
which appeared in 1559 that a scheme of church organiza-
tion and discipline was set out. But, while the answer to the
question of the constitution of the authority by whom
discipline was to be exercised depended on political con-
ditions, and thus differed in different places and periods,
the necessity of enforcing a rule of life, which was the
practical aspect of discipline, was from the start of the very
essence of Calvinism. Its importance was the theme of a
characteristic letter addressed by Calvin to Somerset in
October 1548, the moment of social convulsion for which
Bucer wrote his book De Regno Christi. The Protector is
reminded that it is not from lack of preaching, but from
failure to enforce compliance with it, that the troubles of
CALVIN 125
England have sprung. Though crimes of violence are
punished, the licentious are spared, and the licentious have
no part in the Kingdom of God. He is urged to make sure
that “les hommes soient tenus en bonne et honneste discip-
line,” _and to be careful “que ceulx qui oyent la doctrine de
l’Evangile s’approuvent estre Chrestiens par sainctité de
vie.”“4
“Prove themselves Christians by holiness of life"—thc
words might be taken as the motto of the Swiss reformers,
and their projects of social reconstruction are a commentary
on the sense in which “holiness of life” was understood. It
was in that spirit that Zwingli took the initiative in forming
at Zurich a board of moral discipline, to be composed of the
clergy, the magistrates and two elders; emphasized the
importance of excommunicating offenders against Christian
morals; and drew up a list of sins to be punished by ex-
communication, which included, in addition to murder and
theft, unchastity, perjury and avarice, “especially as it
discovers itself in usury and fraud."“5 It was in that spirit
that Calvin composed in the Institutes a Protestant Summa
and manual of moral casuistry, in which the lightest action
should be brought under the iron control of a universal rule.
It was in that spirit that he drafted the heads of a compre-
hensive scheme of municipal government, covering the whole
range of civic administration, from the regulations to be
made for markets, crafts, buildings and fairs to the control
of prices, interest and rents.“ It was in that spirit that he
made Geneva a city of glass, in which every household lived
its life under the supervision of a spiritual police, and that
for a generation Consistory and Council worked hand in
hand, the former excommunicating drunkards, dancers and
contemners of religion, the latter punishing the dissolute
with nes and imprisonment and the heretic with death.
"Having considered-,” ran the preamble to the ordinances of
1576, which mark the maturity of the Genevese Church,
-"that it is a thing worthy ‘of commendation above all others,
12¢ rnn courrunurar nraroruvrsns _
that the doctrine of the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus
Christ shall be preserved in its purity, and the Christian
Church duly maintained by good government and policy,
and also that youth in the future be well and faithfully
instructed, and the Hospital well ordered for the support of
the poor: Which things can only be if there be established a
certain rule and order of living, by which each man may be
able to understand the duties of his position. . . .”°" The
object of it all was so simple. “Each man to understand the
duties of his position”-—what could be more desirable, at
Geneva or elsewhere? It is sad to re ect that the attainment
of so laudable an end involved the systematic use of torture,
the beheading of a child for striking its parents, and the
burning of a hundred and fty heretics in sixty years."
Tanturn religio potuit suadere malorum.
Torturing and burning were practised elsewhere, by
Governments which a 'ected no excessive zeal for righteous-
ness. The characteristic which was distinctive of Geneva-—
”the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on earth
since the days- of the Apostles”“-—was not its merciless
intolerance, for no one yet dreamed that tolerance was
possible. It was the attempt to make the law of God prevail
even in those matters of pecuniary gain and loss which
mankind, to judge by its history, is disposed to regard more
seriously than wounds and death. “No member [of the
Christian body],” wrote Calvin in his Institutes, "holds
his gifts to himself, or for his private use, but shares them
among his fellow members, nor does he derive bene t save
from those things which proceed from the common pro t of
the body as a whole. Thus the pious man owes to his
brethren all that it is in his power to give.”"° It was natural
that so remorseless an attempt to claim the totality of human
interests for religion should not hesitate to engage even the
economic appetites, before which the Churches of a ‘later
generation were to lower their arms. If Calvinism welcomed
the world of business to its fold with an eagerness unknown
CALVIN 127
before, it did so in- the spirit of a conqueror organizing a
new province, not of a suppliant arranging a compromise
with a still powerful foe. A system of morals and a code of
law lay ready to its hand in the Old Testament..Samuel and
Agag, King of the Amalekites, Jonah and Nineveh, Ahab
and Naboth, Elijah and the prophets of Baal, Micaiah the
son of Imlah, the only true prophet of the Lord, and Jero-
boam the son of Nebat, whomade Israel to sin, worked on
the tense imagination of the Calvinist as did Brutus and
Cassius on the men of 1793. The rst half-century of the
Reformed Church at Geneva saw a prolonged effort to
organize an economic ‘order worthy of the Kingdom of
Christ, in which the ministers played the part of Old Testa-
ment prophets to an Israel not wholly weaned from the
eshpots of Egypt.
Apart from its quali ed indulgence to interest, Calvinism
made few innovations in the details of social policy, and the
contents of the programme were thoroughly medizeval. The
novelty consisted in the religious zeal which was thrown into
its application. The organ of administration before which
offenders were brought was the Consistory, a mixed body of
laymen and ministers. It censures harsh creditors, punishes
usurers, engrossers and monopolists, reprimands or nes the
merchant who defrauds his clients, the clothmaker whose
stuff is an inch too narrow, the dealer who provides short
measure of coal, the butcher who sells meat above the rates
xed by authority, the tailor who charges strangers excessive
prices, the surgeon who demands an excessive fee for an
operation." In the Consistory the ministers appear to have
carried all before them, and they are constantly pressing for
greater stringency. From the election of Beza in place of
Calvin in 1564 to his death in 1605, hardly a year passes
without a new demand for legislation from the clergy, a new
censure on economic unrighteousness, a new protest against
one form or another of the ancient sin of avarice. At one
moment it is excessive indulgence to debtors which rouses
their indignation; at another, the advance of prices and rents
caused by the in ux of distressed brethren from the per-
secutions in France; at a third, the multiplication of taverns
and the excessive charges demanded by the sellers of wine.
Throughout there is a prolonged ‘warfare against the twin
evils of extortionate interest and extortionate prices.
Credit was an issue of moment at Geneva, not merely for
the same reasons which made it a burning question every-
where to the small producer of the sixteenth century, but
because, especially after the ruin of Lyons in the French wars
of religion, the city was a nancial centre of some import-
ance. lt might be involved in war at any moment. In order to
secure command of the necessary funds, it had borrowed
heavily from Basle and Berne, and the Council used the
capital to do exchange business and make advances, the rate
of interest being xed at I0, and later at 12, per cent. To the
establishment of a bank the ministers, who had been con-
sulted, agreed; against the pro table business of advancing
money at high rates of interest to private persons they pro-
tested, especially. when the loans were made to spendthrifts
who used them to ruin themselves. When, ten years later, in
1580, the Council approved the project advanced by some
company promoters of establishing a second bank in the
city, the ministers led the opposition to it, pointed to the
danger of covetousness as revealed by the moral corruption
of nancial cities such as Paris, Venice and Lyons, and
succeeded in getting the proposal quashed. Naturally,'-how-
ever, the commoner issue was a more simple one.-The'capi-
talist who borrowed in order to invest and make a' pro t
could take care of himself, and the ministers explained that
they had no objection to those “qui baillent leur argent aux
marchands pour emploier en marchandise." The crucial
issue was that of the money-lender who makes advances
“simplement a un qui aura besoin,” and who thereby
exploits the necessities of his poorer neighbours."
Against monsters of this kind the ministers rage without
CALVIN 129
ceasing. They denounce them from the pulpit in the name of
the New Testament, in language drawn principally from the
less temperate portions of the Old, as Ian-ans, brigands, Ioups
er tigres, who ought to be led out of the city and stoned to
death. “The poor cry and the rich pocket their gains; but
what they are heaping up for themselves is the wrath of
God. . . . One has cried in the market-place, ‘a curse on those
who bring us dearth.’ . . . The Lord has heard that cry . . .
and yet we are asking the cause of the pestilence! . . . A cut-
purse shall be punished, but the Lord declares by his prophet
Amos . . . ‘Famine is come upon my people of Israel, O ye
who devour the poor.’ The threats there uttered have been
executed against his people.”"3 They demand that for his
second offence the usurer shall be excommunicated, or that,
if such a punishment be thought too severe, he shall at least
be required to testify his repentance publicly in church
before being admitted to the sacrament. They remind their
fellow-citizens of the fate of Tyre and Sidon, and, momen-
tarily despairing of controlling the money-lender directly,
they propose to deprive him of his victims by removing the
causes which create them. Pour mrir les ruisseazzx il faut
escouper la source. Men borrow because of “idleness, foolish
extravagance, foolish sins, and law suits.” Let censors be
established at Geneva as in Republican Rome, to inouire,
among rich as well as among poor, how each household
earns its livelihood, to see that all children of ten to twelve
are taught some useful trade, to put down taverns and
litigation, and to “bridle the insatiable avarice of those who
are such wretches that they seek to enrich themselves by the
necessities of their poor neighbours."74
The Venerable Company advanced their programme, but
they were not sanguine that it would be carried out, and they
concluded it by cxpressing to the City Fathers the pious hope,
not wholly free from irony. that “none of your honourable
fellowship may be found spotted with such vices.” Their
apprehensions were justi ed. The Council of Geneva endured
B (L53)
I30 Tl-IE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
many things at the hands of its preachers, till, on the death
of Bcza, it brought them to heel. But there were limits to its
patience, and it was in tl1-2. eld of business ethics that they
were most quickly reached. It did not venture to question the
right of the clergy to be heard on matters of commerce and
nance. The pulpit was press and platfonn in one; ministers
had the public behind them, and, conscious of their power,
would in the last resort compcl submission by threatening to
resign en masse. Profuse in expressions of sympathy, its
strategy was to let the cannon balls of Christian Socialism
spend themselves on the yielding down of o icial pro-
crastination, an.d its rst repty was normally qu‘on y pense rm
peu. To the clergy its inactivity was a new proof of com-
plicity with Mammon, and they did not hesitate to declare
their indignation from the pulpit. In 1574 Beza preached a
sermon in which he accused members of the Council of
having intelligence with speculators who had made a corner
in wheat. Throughout I577 the ministers were reproaching
the Council with laxity in administration, and they nally
denounced it as the real author of the rise in the prices of
bread and wine. In 1579 they addressed to it a memorandum,
setting out a new scheme of moral discipline and social
reform.
The prosperous bourgeoisie ‘who governed Geneva had no
objection to discouraging extravagance in dress, or to
exhorting the public to attend sermons and to send their
children to catechism. But they heard denunciations of
covetousness without enthusiasm, and on two matters they
were obdurate. They refused to check, as the ministers con-
cerned to lower prices had demanded, the export of wine,
on the ground that it was needed in order to purchase imports
of wheat; and, as was natural in a body of well-to-do
creditors, they would make no concession to tl1c complaint
that debtors were subjected to a "double usury,” since they
were compelled to repay loans in an appreciating currency.
Money fell as well as rose, they replied, and even the late
CALVIN 131
M. Calvin, by whom the ordinance now criticized had been
approved, had never pushed his scruples to such lengths.
Naturally, the ministers were indignant at these evasions.
They informed the Council that large sums were being spent
by speculators in holding up supplies of corn, and launche-:l
a campaign of sermons against avarice, with appropriate
topical illustrations. Equally naturally, the Council retorted
by accusing Bcza of stirring up class hatred against the rich_.l'5
The situation was aggravated by an individual scandal.
One of the magistrates, who regarded Beza’s remarks as a
personal re ection, was rash enough to demand to be heard
before the Council, with the result that he was found guilty,
condemned to pay a ne, and compelled to forfeit fty
crowns which he had lent at IO per cent interest. E,vident.i_+.*,
when matters were pushed to such lengths as this, no one,
however respectable, could feel sure that he was safe. The
Council and the ministers had already had words over the
sphere of their respective functions, and were to fall out a
year or two later over the administration of the local
hospital. On this occasion the Council complained that the
clergy were interfering with the magistrate’s duties, and
implied politely that they would be well advised i' to mind
their own business. _
So monstrous a suggestion—as though there were any
human activity which was not the business of the Church !-—
evoked a counter-manifesto on the part of theministers, in
which the full doctrine of the earthly Jerusalem was set forth
in all its majesty. They declined to express regret for having
cited before the Consistory those who sold corn at extor-
tionate prices, and for refusing the sacramcnl to one of
them. Did not Solomon say, “Cursed is he who keeps his
corn in time of scarcity”? To the charge of intcmperatc
language Chauvet replied that the Council had better begin
by burning the books of the Prophets, for he had done no
more than follow the example set by Hosea. “If we should be
silent," said Beza, “what would the people say? That they
are dumb dogs. . . . As to the question of causing scandals,
for the last two years there has ‘been unceasing talk of usury,
and, for all that, no more than three or four usurers have
been punished. . . . It is notorious everywhere that the
city is full of usurers and that the ordinary rate is 10 per
cent or more.""
The magistrates renewed their remonstrances. They had
seen without a shudder an adulterer condemned to be
hanged, and had mercifully commuted his sentence to
scourging through the town, followed by ten years’ imprison-
ment in chains." But at the godly proposal to make capi-
talists die the death of Achan their humanity blenched.
Besides, the punishment was not only cruel, but dangerous.
la Geneva “most men are debtors.” If they are allowed to
taste blood, who can say where their fury will end? Yet,
such is the power of the spoken word, the magistrates did
not venture on a blunt refusal, but gave scripture for scrip-
ture. They informed the ministers that they proposed to
follow the example of David, who, when rebuked by
Nathan, confessed his fault. Whether the ministers replied
in the language of Nathan, wesare not informed.
Recent political theory has been proli c in criticisms of the
ernnieompetent State. The principle on which the collec-
tivism of Geneva rested may be described as that of the
omnicompetent Church." The religious community formed
a closely organized society, which, while using the secular
authorities as police officers to enforce its mandates, not
enly instructed them as to the policy to be pursued, but was
itself a kind of State, prescribing by its own legislation the
standard of conduct to be observed by its members, putting
down o['l'ences against public order and public morals,
1:..rovi.ling for the education of youth and for the relief of the
p'.>0I'. The peculiar relations between the ecclesiastical and
secular authorities, which for a short time made the system
possible at Geneva, could not exist to the same degree when
Calvinism was the creed, not of a single city, but of a minority
CALVIN 133
in a national State organized on principles quite different
from its own. Unless the State itself were captured, rebellion,
civil war, or the abandonment of the pretension to control
society, was the inevitable consequence. But the last result
was long delayed. In the sixteenth century, whatever the
political conditions, the claim of the Calvinist Churches is
everywhere to exercise a collective responsibility for the
moral conduct of their members in all the various relations
of life, and to do so, no-t least, in the sphere of economic
transactions, which offer peculiarly insidious temptations
to a lapse into immorality.
The mantle of Calvin’s system fell earliest upon the
Reformed Churches of France. At their rst Synod, held in
1559 at Paris, where a scheme of discipline was adopted,
certain dif cult matters of economic casuistry were discussed,-
and similar questions continued to receive attention at
subsequent Synods for the next half-century, until, as the
historian of French Calvinism remarks, “they began to lax
the reins, yielding too much to the iniquity of the time."7°
Once it is admitted that membership of the Church involves
compliance with a standard of economic morality which the
Church must enforce, the problems of interpretation which
arise are innumerable, and the religious community nds
itself committed to developing something like a system of
ease law, by the application of its general principles to a
succession of varying situations. The elaboration of such a
system was undertaken; but it was limited in the sixteenth
century both by the comparative simplicity of the economic
structure and by the fact that the Synods, except at Geneva,
being concerned not to reform society, but merely to repress
the grosser kinds of scandal, dealt only with matters on
which speci c guidance was demanded by the Churches.
Even so, however, the riddles to be solved were net a few.
What is to be the attitude of the Churches towards those who
have grown rich on ill-gotten wealth? May pirates and
fraudulent tradesmen be admitted to the Lord's Supper?
May the brethren trade with such persons, or do they share
their sin if they buy their goods? The law of the State allows
moderate interest; what is to be the attitude of the Church?
What is to be done to prevent craftsmen cheating the
consumer with shoddy wares, and tradesmen oppressing
him with extortionate pro ts? Are lotteries permissible?
Is it legitimate toinvest at interest monies bequeathed for
the bene t of the poor? The answers which the French
Synods made to such questions show the persistence of the
idea that the transactions of business are the province of the
Church, combined with a natural desire to avoid an imprac-
ticable rigour. All persons who have wrung wealth-unjustly
from others must make restitution before they be admitted
to communion, but their goods may be bought by the faith-
ful, provided that the sale is public and approved by the
civil authorities. Makers of fraudulent wares are to be
censured, and-tradesmen are to seek only “indi erent gain.”
On the question of usury, the same division of opinion is
visible in the French Reformed Church as existed at the
same time in England and Holland, and Cal‘-.=in’s advice on
the subject was requested. The stricter school would not
hear of con ning the prohibition of usury to “excessive and
scandalous” exactions, or of raising money for the poor by
interest orr capital. In France, however, as elsewhere, the
day for these heroic rigours had passed, and the common-
sense view prevailed. The brethren were required to demand
nomore than the law allowed and than was consistent
with charity. Within these limits interest was not to be
condemned.9°
Of the treatment of questions of this order by English
Puritanism something is said in a subsequent chapter. In
Scotland the views of the Rcformers as to economic ethics
did not differ in substance from those of the Church before
the Reformation, and the Scottish Book of Discipline
denounced covetousness with the same vehemcnce as did
the “accursed Popery” which it had overthrown. Gentlemen
CALVIN 135
are exhorted to be content with their rents, and the Churches
are required to make provision for the poor. “Oppression of
the poor by exactions," it is declared, “[and] dweiving of
them in buying or selling by wrong mete or measure . . . do
properly appertain to the Church of God, to punish the same
as God’s word comm_andeth.”31 The interpretation given to
these offences is shown by the punishment of a usurer and
of a defaulting debtor before the Kirk Sessions of St.
Andrews." The relief of the poor was in 1579 made the
statutory duty of ecclesiastical authorities in Scotland, seven
years after it had in England been nally transferred to the
State. The arrangement under which in rural districts it
reposed down to 1846 on the shoulders of ministers, elders
and deacons, was a survival from an age in which the real
State in Scotland had been represented, not by Parliament
or Council, but by the Church of Knox.
Of English-speaking communities, that in which the social
discipline of the Calvinist Church-State was carried to the
furthest extreme was the Puritan theocracy of New England.
Its practice had more at nity with the iron rule of Calvin’s
Geneva than with the individualistic tendencies of contem-
porary English Puritanism. In that happy, bishopless Eden,
where men desired only to worship God “according to the
simplicitie of the gospel and to be ruled by the laws of God's
word,"‘="3 not only were “tobacco and immodest fashions
and costly apparel," and “that vain custom of drinking one
to another," forbidden to true professors, but the Fathers
adopted towards that “notorious evil . . . whereby most men
walked in all their commerce-—to buy as cheap and sell as
dear as they can,"*-‘-4 an attitude which possibly would not
be wholly congenial to their more business-like descendants.
At an early date in the history of Massachusetts a minister
had called attention to the recrudescence of the old Adam-~
“pro t being the chief aim and not the propagation of
religion"—and Governor Bradford, observing uneasily how
men grew “in their outward estates,” remarked that the
increase in material prosperity “will be the ruin of New
England, at least of the Churches of God there."°5 Sometimes
Providence smote the exploiter. The immigrant who organ-
ized the rst American Trust-—he owned the only mileh cow
on board and sold the milk at 2d. a quart—“being after at a
sermon wherein oppression was complained of . . . fell dis-
tracted.”°° Those who escaped the judgment of Heaven
had to face the civil authorities and the Church, which, in
the infancy of the colony, were th_e same thing.
Naturally the authorities regulated prices, limited the rate
of interest, xed a maximum wage, and whipped incorrigible
idlers; for these things had been done even in the house of
bondage from which they ed. W'hat was more distinctive of
the children of light was their attempt to apply the same
wholesome discipline to the elusive category of business
pro ts. The price of cattle, the Massachusetts authorities
decreed, was to be determined, not by the needs of the
buyer, but so as to yield no more than a reasonable return
to the seller.“ Against those who charged more, their wrath
was that of Moses descending to nd the chosen people wor-
shipping a golden calf. What little emotion they had to spare
from their rage against religious freedom, they turned against
economic licence. Roger Williams touched a real a inity
when, in his moving pleafor tolerance, he argued that, though
extortion was an evil, it was an evil the treatment of which
should be left to the discretion of the civil authorities.“ "
Consider the case of Mr. Robert Keane. His offence, by
general consent, was black. He kept a shop in Boston, in
which he took “in some . . . above 6d. in the shilling pro t ;
in some above 8d.; and in some small things above two for
one"; and this, though he was “an ancient professor of the
gospel, a man of eminent parts, wealthy and having but one
child, having come. over for conscience’ sake and for the
advancement of the gospel." The scandal was terrible. Pro-
teers were unpopular—“the cry of the country was great
against oppression”—and the grave elders re ected that a
CALVIN 137
reputation for greed would injure the infant community,
lying as it did “under the curious observation of all Churches
and civil States in the world." In spite of all, the magistrates
were disposed to be lenient. There was no positive law in
force limiting pro ts; it was not easy to determine what
pro ts were fair; the sin of charging what the market could
stand was not peculiar to Mr. Keane; and, after all, the law
of God required no more than double restitution. S0 they
treated him mercifully, and ned him only £200.
Here, if he had been wise, Mr. Keane would have let the
matter drop. But, like some others in a similar position, he
damned himself irretrievably by his excuses. Summoned
before the church of Boston, he rst of all “did with tears
acknowledge and bewail his covetous and corrupt heart,"
and then was rash enough to venture on an explanation, in
which he argued that the tradesman must live, and how
could he live if he might not make up for a loss on one
article by additional pro t on another? Here was a text on
which no faithful pastor could refrain from enlarging. The
minister of Boston pounced on the opportunity, and took
occasion “in his public exercise the next lecture day to lay
open the error of such false principles, and to give some rules
of direction in the case. Some false principles were these:—
"1. That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap
as he can.
“2. If a man lose by casualty of sea‘, etc., in some of his com-
modities, he may raise the price of the rest.
"3. That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear,
and though the commodity be fallen, etc.
"4. That, as a man may take the advantage of his own skill or
ability, so he may of another’s ignorance or necessity.
"5. Where one gives time for payment, he is to take like re-
eompence of one as of another.”
The rules for trading were not less explicit:—-
“l. A man may not sell above the current price, i.e. such a
price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who knows
the worth of the commodity) would give for it if he had occasion
Eil
133 TI-IE CONTINENTAL REFORMERS
to use ii; as that is cailed current money which every man will
take, etc.
“2. When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc.,
he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must
not lay it upon another.
“3. Where a man loseth by casualty of sea, etc., it is a loss cast
upon himself by Providence, and he may not ease himself of it
by casting it upon another; for so a man should seem to provide
against all providences, etc., that he should never lose; but where
there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their
price; for new it is a hand of God upon the commodity, and not
the person.
“4. A man may not ask any more for his commodity than his
selling price, as Ephron to Abraham; the land is worththus
much."
It is unfortunate that the example of Ephron was not
remembered in the case of transactions affecting the lands of
Indians, to which it might have appeared peculiarly appro-
priate. In negotiating with these children of the devil, how-
ever, the saints of God considered the dealings of Israel with
Gibeon a more appropriate precedent.
The sermon was followed by an animated debate within
the church. It was moved, amid ojuetations from l Cor. v. ll,
that Mr. Keane should be exconnnunieated. That he might
be excommunicated, if he were a covetous person within the
meaning of the text, was doubted as little as that he had
recently given a pitiable exhibition of covetousness. The
question was only whether he had erred through ignorance
or carelessness, or whether he had acted “against his
conscience or the very light of nature"—-whether, in short,
his sin was accidental or a trade. In the end he escaped with
his ne and admonition.”
If the only Christian documents which survived were the
New Testament and the records of the Calvinist Churches in
the age of the Reformation, to suggest a connection between
them more intimate than a coincidence of phraseology would
appear, in all probability, a daring extravagance. Legalistic,
CALVIN 139
mechanical, without imagination or compassion, the work
of a jurist and organizer of genius, Calvi;1’s system was more
Roman than Christian, and more Jewish than either. That
it should be as much more tyrannical than the mediteval
Church, as the _Jaeobin Club was than the cmcfen refginte,
was inevitable. its meshes were ner, its zeal and its efficiency
greater. And its enemies were not merely actions and
writings, but thoughts.
The tyranny with which it is reproached by posterity
would have been regarded by its champions as a compli-
ment. In the struggle between liberty and authority, Calvin-
ism sacri ced liberty, not with reluctance, but with enthu-
siasm. For the Calvinist Church was an army marching
back to Canaan, under orders delivered once for all from
Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of the
Promised Land, not the consolation of stragglers or the
encouragement of laggards. In war the classical expedient
is a dictatorship. The dictatorship of the ministry appeared
as inevitable to the whole-hearted Calvinist, as the Com-
mittee of Public Safety to the men of I793, or the dictator-
ship of .the proletariat to an enthusiastic Bolsheviit. If it
reached its zenith where Calvin’s discipline was accepted
without Calvin’s culture and intellectual range, in the orgies
of devil worship with which a Cotton and an Endicott
shocked at last even the savage superstition of New England,
that result was only to be expected.
The best that can be said of the social theory and practice
of early Calvinism is that they were consistent. Most
tyrannies have contented themselves with tormenting the
poor. Calvinism had little pity for poverty; but it distrusted
wealth, as it distrusted all in uences that distract the aim or
relax the bres of the soul, and, in the rst ush of its youth-
ful austerity, it did its best to make life unbearable for the
rich. Before the Paradise of earthly comi'ort it hung a aming
brand, waved by the implacable shades of Moses and
Aaron."
CHAPTER III
The Church of England

“lfa nyman be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common,
state, he is void of the sense of piety, and wisheth peace andhappiness
to himselfin vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the
C‘ommonwealth and in the body of the Church."
Lauo, Sermon before His Majesty, June 19, 1621.
THE ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend

from the sixteenth century have thrust into oblivion all
issues of less perennial interest. But the discussions which
were motived by changes in the texture of society and the
relations of classes were keen and continuous, nor was their
result without signi cance for the future. In England, as on
the Continent, the new economic realities came into sharp
collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle
Ages. The result was a reassertion of the traditional doctrines
with an almost tragic intensity of emotion, their gradual
retreat before the advance of new conceptions, both of
economic organization and of the province of religion, and
their nal decline from a militant creed into a kind of pious
antiquarianism. They lingered, venerable ghosts, on the
lips of churchmen down to the Civil War. Then the storm
blew and they ickered out.
Medizeval England had lain on the outer edge of economic
civilization, remote from the great highways of commerce
and the bustling nancial centres of Italy and Germany.
With the commercial revolution which followed the Dis-
coveries, a new age began. After the rst outburst of
curiosity, interest in explorations which yielded no immediate
return of treasure died down. It was not till more than half
a century later, when the silver of the New World was
140
THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 141
dazzling all Europe, that Englishmen re ected that it might
conceivably have been lodged in the Tower instead of at
Seville, and that talk of competition for America and the
East began in earnest.
In the meantime, however, every other aspect of English
economic life was in process of swift transformation.
Foreign trade increased largely in the rst half of the
sixteenth century, and, as manufactures developed, cloth
displaced wool as the principal export. With the growth of
commerce went the growth of the nancial organization on
which commerce depends, and English capital poured into
the growing London money-market, which had previously
been dominated by Italian bankers. At home, with the
expansion of internal trade which followed the Tudor peace,
opportunities of speculation were increased, and a new
class of middlemen arose to expioit them. In industry, the
rising interest was that of the commercial capitalist, bent
on securing the freedom to grow to what stature he could,
and produce by what methods he pleased. Hampered by the
defensive machinery of the gilds, with their corporate discip-
line, their organized torpor restricting individual enterprise,
and their rough equalitarianism, either he quietly -evaded
gild regulations by withdrawing from the corporate towns,
within which alone the pressure of economic conformity
could be made effective, or he accepted the gild organiza-
tion, captured its government, and by means of it developed
a system under which the craftsman, even if nominally a
master, was in effect the servant of an employer. In agri-
culture the customary organization of the village was being
sapped from below and battered down from above. For a
prosperous peasantry, who had commuted the labour
services that were still the rule in France and Germany,
were rearranging their strips by exchange or agreement,
and lords, no longer petty sovereigns, but astute business
men, were lcasing their derncsnes to capitalist farmers, quick
to grasp the pro ts to be won by sheep-grazing, and eager
142 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
to clear away the network of communal restrictions which
impeded its extension. Into commerce, industry and agricul-
ture alike, the revolution in prices, gradual for the rst third
of the century, but after 1540 a mill race, injected a virus of
hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish
enterprise and an acid dissolvingall customary relationships.
It was a society in rapid motion, swayed by new ambitions
and haunted by new terrors, in which both success and failure
had changed their meaning. Except in the turbulent north,
the aim of the great landowner was no longer to hold at his
calI._an army of retainers, but to expioit his estates as a
judicious investment. The prosperous merchant, once con-
tent to win a position of dignity and power in fraternity or
town, now ung himself into the tasic of carving his way to
solitary pre-eminence, unaided by the arti cial protection
of gild or city. To the immemorial poverty of peasant and
craftsman, pitting, under the ever-present threat of famine,
their pigmy forces against an implacable nature, was added
the haunting insecurity of a growing, though still small,
proletariat, detached from their narrow niche in village or
borough, the sport of social forces which they could neither
understand, nor arrest, ncr control.
(T)
The Lona‘ Question
The England of the Reformation, to which posterity turns
as a source of high debates on church government and
doctrine, was to contemporaries a cauldron seething with
economic unrest and social passions. But the material on
which agitation fed had been accumulating for three genera-
tions, and of the grievances which exploded in the middle of
the century, with the exception of the depreciation of the
currency, there was not one--neither enclosures and pasture
farming, nor usury, nor the malpractices of gilds, nor the
THE LAND QUESTION 143
rise in prices, nor the oppression of craftsmen by merchants,
nor the eittortions of the engrosser——whic11 had not evoked
popular protests, been denounced by publicists, an-cl pro-=
duced legislation and administrative action,lc-ng before the
Reformation Parliaznent met.‘ The oods were already
running high when the religious revolution swelled them
with a torrent of bitter, if bracing, waters. its effect on the
social situation was twofold. Since it produced a sweeping
redistribution of wealth, carried out by an unscrupulous
minority using the weapons of violence, intimidation and
fraud, and succeeded by an,orgy of interested misgovcrn-
ment on the part of its principal bene ciaries, it aggravated
every problem, and gave a new turn to the screw which was
squeezing peasant and craftsman. Since it released a torrent
of writing, on questions not only of religion, but of social
organization, it caused the criticisms passed on the changes
of the past half-century to be brought to a head, in a
sweeping indictment of the new economic forces, and an
eloquent restatement of the traditional theory of social
obligations. The centre of both was the land question. For
it was agrarian plunder which principally stirred the cupidity
of the age, and agrarian grievances which were the most
important ground of social agitation.
The land question had been a serious matter for the
greater part of a century before the Reformation. The rst
detailed account of enclosure had been written by a chantry
priest in Warwickshire, soon after 1460.1 Then had come le
legislation of 1489, 1515 and 1516, Wolsey’s Royal Corn-
mission in 1517, and more legislation in 1534.2 Throughout,
a steady stream of criticism had owed from men of the
Renaissance, like More, Starkey, and a host of less well-
known writers, dismayed at the advance of social anarchy,
and sanguine of the miracles to be performed by a Prince
who would take counsel of philosophers.
If, however, the problem was acute long before the
con scation of the monastic estates, its aggravation by
the fury of spoliation let loose by Henry and Cromwell is
not open to serious question. lt is a mistake, no doubt, to
see the last days of monasticism through rose-coloured
spectacles. The monks, after all, were business men, and the
lay agents whom they often employed to manage their
property naturally conformed to the agricultural practice
of the world around them. In Germany revolts were no-
where more frequent or more bitter than on the estates of
ecclesiastical land-ownc-rs.3 In England a glance at the pro-
ceedings of the Courts of Star Chamber and Requests is
enough to show that holy men reclaimed villeins, turned
copy-holders into tenants at will, and, as More complained,
converted arable land to pasture.‘
In reality, the supposition of unnatural virtue on the part
of the monks, or of more than ordinary harshness on the
part of the new proprietors, is not needed in order to explain
the part which the rapid transference of great masses of
property played in augmenting rural distress. The worst side
of all such sudden and sweeping redistributions is that the
individual is more or less at the mercy of the market, and
can hardly help taking his pound of esh. Estates with a
capital value (in tenus of modern money) of £l5,000,0f}O to
£2fi,fiO0,t'}O0 changed hands.-" To the abbey lands, which
carne into the market after 1536, were added those of the
gilds and chantries in 154?. The nancial necessities of the
Crown were too pressing to allow of its retaining them in
its own possession and drawing the rents; nor, in any case,
would that have been the course dictated by prudence to a
Government which required a party to carry through a
revolution. What it did, therefore, was to aiienate most
of the land almost inrrnediately, and to spend the capital as
income. For a decade there was a mania of land specula-
lion. Much of the property was bought by needy courtiers
at a ridiculously low gure. lviuch of it passed to sharp
business men who brought to bear on its management the
methods learned in the nancial school of the City; the
TI-IE LAND QUESTION 145
largest single grantee was Sir Richard Gresham. Much was
acquired by middlemen, who bought scattered parcels of
land, held them for the rise, and disposed of them piecemeal
when they got a good offer; in London, groups of trades-
men—cloth-workers, leather-sellers, merchant tailors,
brewers, tallow-chandlers—formed actual syndicates to
exploit the market. Rack-renting, evictions, and the con-
version of arable to pasture were the natural result, for
surveyors wrote up values at each transfer, and, unless the
last purchaser squeezed his tenants, the transaction would
not pay.“
\Vhy, after all, should a landlord be more squeamish than
the Crown‘? “Do ye not know,” said the grantee of one of
the Sussex manors of the monastery of Sion, in answer to
some peasants who protested at the seizure of their com-
mons, “that the I{ing’s Grace hath put down all the houses
of monks, friars and nuns? Therefore now is the time come
that we gentlemen will pull down the houses of such poor
knaves as ye be.”7 Such arguments, if inconsequent, were
too convenient not to be common. The protests of con-
temporaries receive detailed con rmation from the bitter
struggles which can be traced between the peasantry and
some of the new landlords—-the Herberts, who enclosed a
whole village to make the park at Washerne, in which,
according to tradition, the gentle Sidney was to write his
Arcadia, the St. Johns at Abbot’s Ripton, and Sir John
Yorke, third in the line of speculators in the lands of Whitby
Abbey, whose tenants found their rents raised from £29 to
£64 a year, and for nearly twenty years were besieging the
Government with petitions for redress.$ The legend, still
repeated late in the seventeenth century, that the grantees of
monastic estates died out in three generations, though
unveracious, is not surprising. The wish was father to the
thought. .
It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser
and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentimcn t,
schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the
greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic
self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the
offence. In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radi-
calism marehed hand in hand with social conservatism. The
most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the
partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left
wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic indivi-
dualism but another expression of the laxity and licence
which had degraded the purity of religion, and who under-
stood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the
primitive Church, no less than to its government and
doctrine. The touching wordsi‘ in which the leader of the
Pilgrimage of Grace painted the social effects of the dissc-lu-
tion of the Yorkshire monasteries were mild compared with
the denunciations launched ten years later by Latimer,
Crowley, Lever, Becon and Ponet.
Their passion was natural. What Aske saw in ‘the green
tree, they saw in the dry, and their horror at the plunge into
social immorality was sharpened by the bitterness of dis-
appointed hopes. It was all to have been so different! The
movement which produced the Reformation was a Janus,
not with two, but with several, faces, and among them had
been one which looked wistfully for a political and social
regeneration as the fruit of the regeneration of religion.“
In England, as in Germany and Switzerland, men had
dreamed of a Reformation which would reform the State
and society, as well as the Church. The puri cation, not
merely of doctrine, but of morals, the encouragement of
learning, the diffusion of education, the relief of poverty,
by the stirring into life of a mass of sleeping endowments, a
spiritual and social revival inspired by the revival of the
faith of the Gospel—such, not without judicious encourage-
ment from a Government alert to play on public opinion,
was the vision which had oated before the eyes of the
humanitarian and the idealist.
It did not vanish without a struggle. At the very height of
the economic crisis, Bucer, the tutor of Edward Vl and Pro-
fessor of Divinity at Cambridge, stated the social programme
of a Christian renaissance in the manual of Christian politics
which he drafted in order to expl:-tin to his pupil how the
Kingdom of Christ might be established by a Christian
prince. lts outlines were sharpened, and its details elaborated,
with all the" remorseless precision of a disciple of Calvin.
Wilful idlers are to be ertcommunicated by the Church and
punished by the State. The Government, a pious mercan-
tilist, is to revive the woollen industry, to introduce the linen
industry, to insist on pasture being put under the plough.
It is to take a high line with the commercial classes. For,
though trade in itself is honourable, most traders are rogttcs
—indeed “next to the sham priests, no class of rnen is more
pestilential to the Commonwealth”; their works are usury,
mcnc-polies and the bribery of Governments to overlook
both. Fortunately, the remedies are simple. The State must
x just prices—“a very necessary but an easy matter.” Only
“pious persons, devc-ted to the Com.-.nonwealtl1 more than
to their own interests," are to be allowed to engage in trade
at all. In every villa and town a school is to be established
under a master eminent for piety and wisdom. “Christian
princes must above all things strive that men of virtue may
abound, and live to the glory of God. . . . Neither the Church
of Christ, nor a Christian Commonwealth, ought to tolerate
such as prefer private gain to the public weal, or seek it to
the hurt of their neighbou1's.”11
The Christian prince strove, but not, poor child, as those
that prevail. The classes whose backing was needed to ma!-re
the Reformation a political success had sold their support on
terms which made it inevitable that it should be a social
disaster. The upstart aristocracy of the future had their
teeth in the carcass, and, having tasted blood, they were not
to be whipped off by a sermon. The Government of Edward
VI, like all Tudor Governments, made its experiment in
xing just prices. What the astute Gresham, its nancial
adviser, thought of restricting commerce to persons of piety,
we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, what it
did for them Mr. Leach has told us. It swept them away
wholesale in order to distribute their endowments among
courtiers. There were probably more schools in proportion
to the population at the end of the fteenth century than
there were in the middle of the nineteenth. “These endow-
ments were con scated by the State and many still line the
pockets of the descendants of the statesmen of the day."12
King Edward Vl's Grammar Schools are the schools which
King Edward VI did not destroy. .
The disillusionment was crushing. Was it surprising that
the reformers should ask what had become of the devout
imaginations of social righteousness, which were to have been
realized as the result of a godly reformation? The end of
Popery, the curtailment of ecclesiastical privileges, six new
bishoprics, lectureships in Greek and Latin in place of the
disloyal subject of the canon law, the reform of‘doctrine and
ritual-—side by side with these good things had come some
less edifying changes, the ruin of much education, the cessa-
tion of much charity, a raid on corporate property which
provoked protests even in the House of Commons," and for
ten years a sinister hum, as of the oating of an immense
land syndicate, with favourable terms for all su iciently
rich. or in uential, or mean, to get in on the ground oor.
The men who had invested in the Reformation when it was
still a gambling stock naturally nursed the security, and
denounced the revolting peasants as communists, with the
mystical reverence for the rights of property which is
characteristic in all ages ofC the nouveaux riches." The men
whose religion was not money said what they thought of
the business in pamphlets and sermons, which left respectable
congregations spluttcring with fury.
Crowley pilloried lease-mongers and usurers, wrote that
the sick begged in the street because rich men had seized the
endowments of hospitals, and did not conceal his sympathy
with the peasants who rose under Ket." Becon told the
gentry, eloquent on the vices of abbey-lubbers, that the only
di- 'ercnce between them and the monks was that they were
more greedy and more useless, more harsh in wringing the
last penny from their tenants, more sel sh in spending the
whole income on themselves, more pitiless to the poor.“
"In suppressing of abbics, cloisters, colleges and chantries,”
preached Lever in St. Paul's, “the intent of the King's
Majesty that dead is, was, and of this our king now is, very
godly, and the purpose, or else the pretence, of other
wondrous goodly: that thereby such abundance of goods
as was superstitiously spent upon vain ceremonies, or
voluptuously upon idle bellies, might come to the king's
hands to bear his great charges, necessarily bestowed in the
common wealth, or partly unto other men’s hands, for the
better relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning, and
the setting forth of God’s word. l-Iowbeit, covetous of cers
have so used this matter, that even those goods which did
serve to the relief of the poor, the maintenance of learning,
and to comfortable necessary hospitality in the common
wealth, be now turned to maintain worldly, wicked, covetous
ambition. . . . You which have gotten these goods into your
own hands, to turn them from evil to worse, and other goods
more from good unto evil, be ye sure it is even you that have
offended God, beguiled the king, robbed the rich, spoiled
the poor, and brought a common wealth into a common
misery."1' _ _
This was plain speaking indeed. Known to their enemies
as the “Commonwealth men” from their advocacy of social
reconstruction, the group of which Latimer was the prophet
and Hales the man of action naturally incurred the charge
of stirring up class-hatred, which is normally brought against
all who call attention to its causes. The result of their
activity wasthe appointment of a Royal Commission to
inquire into olfences against the Acts forbidding the con-
ISO Ti-"HE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
version of arable to pasture, the introduction of legislation
requiring the maintenance of tillage and rebuilding of
cottages, and a proclamation pardoning persons who had
taken the law into their own hands by pulling down hedges.
The gentry were furious. Pagct, the secretary to the Council,
who was quite ready for a reign of terror, provided that the
gentlemen began it, prophesied gloomily that the German
Peasants’ War was to be re-enacted in England; the Council,
most of whose members held abbey lands, was sullen; and
Waiwvick, the personi cation of the predatory property of
the day, attacked Hales ercely for carrying out, as chair-
man of the Midland committee of the Depopulation Com-
mission, the duties laid upon him by the Government.
“Sir,” wrote a plaintive gentleman to Cecil, “be plain with
my Lord's Grace, that under the pretence of simplicity and
poverty there may [not] rest much mischief. So do I fear
there doth in these men called Common ‘v-Vealths and their
adherents. To declare unto you the state of the gentlemen (I
mean as well the greatest as the lowest), I assure you they
are in such doubt, that almost they dare touch none of them
[i.e. the peasants], not for that they are afraid of them, but
for that some of them have been sent up and come away
without punishment, and the Common Wealth called
Latimer hath gotten the pardon of others.”1“
The Commonwealth called Latimer was unrepentant.
Combining gifts of humour and invective which are not very
common among bishops, his fury_ at oppression did not
prevent him from greeting the Devil with a burst of up-
roarious laughter, as of a satirical gargoyle carved to make
the sinner ridiculous in this world before he is damned in the
next. So he was delighted when he provoked one of his
audience into the exclamation, “Mary, a seditious fellow!”
used the episode as comic relief in his next sermon," and
then, suddenly serious, redouls-led his denunciations of step-
lords and rent-raisers. Had not the doom of the covetous
been pronounced by Christ Himself?
THE LAND- QUESTION 15]
“You thoughte that I woulde not rec,uyre
The blocde of all suche at your hande,
But be you sure, eternal] fyre
ls redy for eche hell fyrcbrande.
Both for the housynge and the lande
That you have taken from the pore
Ye shall in hell dwell evermcre.”*‘°
On the technicalities of the Tudor land question the
authors of such outbursts spoke without authority, and,
thanks to Mr. Leadarn and Professor Gay, modern research
has found no di iculty in correcting the perspective of their
story._At once incurious and ill-informed as to the large
impersonal causes which were hurrying forward the re-
organization of agriculture on a commercial basis, what
shocked them was not only the material misery of their age,
but its repudiation of the principles by which alone, as it
seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of
wolves. Their enemy was not merely the Northumberlands
or Herberts, but anidea, and they sprang to the attack, less
of spoliation or tyranny, than of a creed which was the parent
of both. That creed was that the individual is absolute master
of his own, and, within the limits- set by positive law, may
exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage,
unrestrained by -any obligation to postpone his own- pro t
to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of
his actions to a higher authority. It was, in short, the theory
of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized
communities.
The question of the respective rights of lord and peasant
had never, at least within recent centuries, arisen in so acute
a form, for, as long as the customary tenants were part of
the stock of the manor, it was obviously to the interest of
the lord to bind them to the soil. Now all that had been
changed, at any rate in the south and midlands, by the
expansion of the woollen industry and the devaluation of
money Chevage and merchet had gone; forced labour, if it
l52 THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND
had not gone, was fast going. The psychology of land-
owning had been revolutionized, and for two generations
the sharp landlord, instead of using his seigneurial right to
ne or arrest run-aways from the villein nest, had been
hunting ‘for aws in titles, screwing up admission nes,
twisting manorial customs, and, when he dared, turning
copyholds into leases. The of cial opposition to depopula-
tion, which had begun in 1489 and was to last almost till
1640, infuriated him, as an intolerable interference with the
rights of property. In their attacks on the restraints imposed
by village custom from below and by the Crown from above,
in their illegal de ance of the statutes forbidding depopula-
tion, and in their erce resistance to the attempts of Wolsey
and Somerset to restore the old order, the interests which
were ma king the agrarian revolution were watering the seeds
of that individualistic conception of ownership which was
to carry all before it after the Civil War. With such a doc-
trine, since it denied both the existence and the necessity of
a moral title, it was not easy for any religion less pliant than
that of the cigliteenth century to make a truce. Once
accepted, it was to silence the preaching of all social duties
save that of submission. If property be an unconditional
right, emphasis on its obligations is little more than the
graceful parade of a attering, but innocuous, metaphor.
For, whether the obligations are ful lled or neglected, the
right continues unchallenged and indefeasible.
A religious theory of society necessarily regards with sus-
picion all doctrines which claim a large space for the un-
fettered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the end
of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the
felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations
imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the ‘imperfect
re ection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high value
to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of
mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means,
it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a spiri-
tual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when he
spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for “the
glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate.” To a
temper nurtured on such ideas, the new agrarian regime,
with its sacri ce of the village--a fellowship of mutual aid,
a partnership of service and protection, “a little common-
wealth”-—to the pecuniary interests of a great proprietor,
who made a desert where men had worked and prayed,
seemed a de ance, not only of man, but of God. It was the
work of “men that live as thoughe there were no God at all,
men that would have all in their owne handes, men that
would leave nothyng for others, men that would be alone on
the earth, men that bee never satis ed.”2‘ Its essence was an
attempt to extend legal rights, while repudiating legal and
quasi-lgeal obligations. It was against this new idolatry of
irresponsible ownership, a growing, but not yet triumphant,
creed, that the divines of the Reformation called down re
from heaven.
Their doctrine was derived from the conception of
property, of which the most elaborate formulation had been
made by the Schoolmen, and which, while justifying it on
grounds of experience and expediency, insisted that its use
was limited at every turn by the rights of the community
and the obligations of charity. Its practical application was
an idealized version of the feudal order, which was vanishing
before the advance of more business-like and impersonal
forms of land-ownerships, and which, once an engine of
exploitation, was now hailed as a bulwark to protect the
weak against the downward thrust of competition. Society
is a hierarchy of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce the
second, as much as to protect the rst. Property is not a
mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible
office. Its raisan d’étre is not Only income, but service. It is
to secure its owner such means, and no more than such
means, as may enable him to perform those duties, whether
labour on the land, or labour in government, which are
I54 THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
involved in the particular status which he holds in the
system. He who seeks more robs his superiors, or his
dependants, or both. He who exploits his property with a
single eye to its economic possibilities -at once perverts its
very essence and destroys his own moral title, for_he has
“every man's living and does no man's duty?“
The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the
function which he performs and should lapse if he repudiates
it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they are limited
no less by the rights of his tenants against him. Just as the
peasant may not cultivate his land in the way which he may
think most pro table to himself, but is bound by the law of
the village to grow the crops which the village needs and to
throw his strips open after harvest to his neighbours’ beasts,
so the lord is required both by custom and by statute to
forego the anti-social pro ts to be won by methods of
agriculture which injure his neighbours and weaken the
State. He may not raise his rent or demand increased nes,
for the function of the peasant, thougl'rdi 'ereut, is not less
essential than his own. He is, in short, not a renrier, but an
ollicer, and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he
sacri ces the duties of his charge t_o the greed for personal
gain. “We heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into the
hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and
dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering them-
selves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the
rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable
nes and incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings
. . . but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements,
lands and pastures, that after this life they may be received
into everlasting dwelling placcs."2i' Thus, while the covetous
worldlings disposed the goods of this transitory life to their
liking, did a pious monarch consider their eternal welfare in
the Book of Private Prayer issued in 1553.
RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 15$
(ii)
Religious Tlteory and Social Policy
If a. philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be as
mobile and realistic as the forces which it would control. The
weakness of an attitude which met the onset of insurgent
economic interests with a generalized appeal to traditional
morality and an idealization of the past was only too
obvious. Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, if
courageous and eloquent, defensive by changes even in the
slowly moving world of agriculture, mediaeval social theory,
to which the most representative minds of the English
Church still clung, found itself swept off its feet after the
middle of the century by the swift rise of a commercial
civilization, in which all traditional landmarks seemed one
by one to be submerged. The issue over which the struggle
between the new, economic movements of the age and the
scheme of economic ethics expounded by churchmen was
most de nitely joined, and continued longest, was not, as
the modern reader might be disposed to expect, that of
wages, but that of credit, money-lending and prices. The
centre of the controversy--the mystery of iniquity in which
a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately,
epitomized--was the problem which contemporaries
described by the word usury.
“Treasure cloth then advance greatness," wrote Bacon, in
words characteristic of the social ideal of the age, “when the
wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than fcw."*4
In spite of the growing concentration of property, Tudor
England was still, to use a convenient modern phrase, a
Distributive State. It was a community in which the owner-
ship of land, and of the simple tools used in most industries,
was not the badge of a class, but the attribute of a society,
and in which the typical worker was a peasant farmer, a
tradesman or a small master. In this world ofsmall property-
owners, of whose independence and prosperity English
publicists boasted, in contrast with the "housed beggars”
of France and Germany, the wage-earners were a minority
scattered in the interstices of village and borough, and,
being normally themselves the sons of peasants, with the
prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at
worst, the chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a
strong position vis-ti-vis their employers.
The special economic malaise of an age is naturally the
obverse of its special qualities. Except in certain branches of
the textile industry, the grievance which supplied fuel to
social agitation, which evoked programmes of social re-
form, and which prompted both legislation and admini-
strative activity, sprang, not from the exploitation of a
wage-earning proletariat by its employers, but from the
relation of the producer to the landlord of whom he held,
the dealer with whom he bought and sold, and the local
capitalist, often the dealer in another guise, to whom he
ran into debt. The farmer must borrow money when the
season is bad, or merely to nance the interval between
sowing and harvest. The craftsman must buy raw materials
on credit and get advances before his wares are sold. The
young tradesman must scrape together a little capital before
he can set up shop. Even the cottager, who buys grain at
the local market, must constantly ask the seller to "give day.”
Almost everyone, therefore, at one time or another, has nee-:1
"of the money-lender. And the lender is often a monopolist-
“a money master,” a maltster or corn monger, “a rich
priest," who is the solitary capitalist in a community of
peasants and artisans. Naturally, he is apt to become their
master.‘=-"
l n such circumstances it is not surprising that there should
have been a popular outcry against extortion. Inspired by
practical grievances, it found an ally, eloquent, if disarmed,
in the teaching of the Church. The doctrine as to the ethics
of economic conduct, which had been formulated by
RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY I57
mediteval Popes and interpreted by medizeval Schoolmen,
was rehearsed by the English divines of the sixteenth
century, not merely as the conventional tribute paid by a
formal piety to the wisdom of the past, but because the swift
changes of the period in commerce and agriculture had not
softened, but accentuated, the problems of conduct for
which it had been designed. Nor was it only against the
particular case of the covetous money-lender that the
preacher and the moralist directed their arrows. The essence
of the medizeval scheme of economic ethics had been its
insistence on equity in bargaining—a contract is fair, St.
Thomas had said, when both parties gain from it equally.
The prohibition of usury had been the kernel of its doctrines,
not because the gains of the money-lender were the only
species, but because, in the economic conditions of the age,
they were the most conspicuous species, of extortion.
In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth
century, the word usury had not the specialized sense which
it carries to-day. Like the modern pro teer, the usurer was a
character so unpopular that most unpopular characters
could be called usurers, and by’ the average practical man
almost any form of bargain which he thought oppressive
would be classed as usurious. The interpretation placed on
the word by those who expounded ecclesiastical theories of
usury was equally elastic. Not only the taking of interest
for a loan, but the raising of prices by a monopolist, the
beating down of prices by a keen bargainer, the rack-
renting of land by a landlord, the sub-letting of land by a
tenant at a rent higher than he himself paid, the cutting of
wages and the paying of wages in truck, the refusal of dis-
count to a tardy debtor, the insistence on unreasonably
good security for a loan, the excessive pro ts of a middle-
man—all these had been denounced as usury in the very
practical thirteenth-century manual of St. Raymond;‘3° all
these were among the “unlawful chaffer,” the “subtlety and
sleight,” which was what the plain man who sat on juries and
listened to sermons in parish churches meant by usury three
centuries later. If he had been asked why usury was wrong,
he would probably have answered with a quotation from
Scripture. If he had been asked for a de nition of usury, he
would have been puzzled, and would have replied in the
words of a member of Parliament who spoke on the Bill
introduced in 1571: “It standcth doubtful what usury is;
we have no true de nition of it.”2'* The truth is, indeed, that
any bargain, in which one party obviously, gained more
advantage than the other, and used'his power to the full,
v.'as regzirded as usurious. The description which best sums
up alike popular sentiment and ecclesiastical teaching is con-
tained in the comprehensive indictment applied by his
parishioners to an unpopular divine who lent at a penny in
the shilling—the cry of all poor men since the world began-
Dr. Bcnnet “is a great taker of advantages."2"
It was the fact that the theory of usury which the divines of
the sixteenth century inherited was not an isolated freak of
casuistical ingenuity, but one subordinate element in a com-
prehensive system of social philosophy, which gave its poig-
nancy to the controversy of which it became the centre. The
passion which fed on its dusty dialec-tics was fanned by the
conviction that the issue at stake was not merely a legal
technicality. It was the fate of the whole scheme of mediteval
thought, which had attempted to treat economic affairs as
part of a hierarchy of values, embracing all interests and
activities, of which the apex was religion.
If the Reformation was a revolution, it was a revolution
which left almost intact both the lower ranges of ecclesiastical
organization and the traditional scheme of social thought.
The villager who, resisting the temptations of the alehouse,
morris dancing or cards, attended his parish church from
1530 to 1560, must have been bewildered by a succession of
changes in the appearance of the building and the form of
the services. But there was little to make him conscious of
any alteration in the social system of which the church was
RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 159
the centre, or in the duties which that system imposed upon
himself. After, as before, the Reformation, the parish
continued to be a community in which religious and social
obligations were inextricably intertwined, and it was as a
parishioner, rather than as a subject of the secular authority,
that he bore his share of public burdens and perforined such
public functions as fell to his lot. The o icers of whom he
saw most in the routine of his daily life were the church-
wardens. The place where most public business was trans-
acted, and where news of the doings of the great world came
to him, was the parish church. The contributions levied
from hint were demanded in the name of the parish. Such
education as was available for his children was often given
by the curate or parish schoolmaster. Such training in co-
operation with his fellows as he received sprang from
common undertakings maintained by the parish, which
owned property, received bequests, let_out sheep and cattle,
advanced money, made large pro ts by church ales, and
occasionally engaged in trade.” Membership of the Church
and of the State being co-extensive and equally compulsory,
the Government used the ecclesiastical organization of the
parish for purposes which, in a later age, when the religious,
political, and economic aspects of life were disentangled,
were to be regarded as secular. The pulpit was the channel
through which o icial information was conveyed to the
public and the duty of obedience inculcated. It was to the
clergy and the parochial organization that the State turned
in coping with pauperism, and down to 1597 collectors for
the poor were chosen by the churchwardens in conjunction
with the parson.
Where questions of social ethics were concerned, the
religious thought of the age was not less conservative than
its e-eclc-siastical organization. Both in their view of religion
as eml:-racing all sides of life, and in their theory of the
particular social obligations which religion involved, the
most representative thinkers of the Church of England had
no intention of breaking with traditional doctrines. In the
rooted suspicion of economic motives which caused them to
damn each fresh manifestation of the spirit of economic
enterprise as a new form of the sin of covetousness, as in
8
their insistence that the criteria of economic relations and or
the social order were to be sought, not in practical ex-
pediency, but in truths of which the Church was the guardian
and the exponent, the utterances of men of religion in the
reign of Elizabeth, in spite of the revolution which had
intervened, had more affinity with the doctrines of the
Schoolmen than with those which were to be fashionable
after the Restoration.
The oppressions of the tyrannous landlord, who used his
economic power to drive an unmerciful bargain, were the
subject of constant denunciation down to the Civil War. The
exactions of midd1emen—“merchants of mischief . . . [who]
do make all things dear to the buyers, and yet wonderful vile
and of small price to many that must needs set or sell that
which is their own honestly come by”—were pilloried by
Lever.” Nicholas Heming, whose treatise on The Laugful Use
ofkicizes became something like a standard work, expounded
the doctrine of the just price, and swept impatiently aside the
argument which pleaded freedom of contract as an excuse for
covetousness: “Cloake the same by what title you liste, your
synne is excedyng greate. . . . He which hurteth but one man
is in a damna blc case; what shall bee thought of thee, whiche
bryngest whole householdes to their graves, or at the leaste
art a lneanes of their extreame miserie? Thou maiest nde
airiiites to avoide the danger of men, but assuredly thou shalte
not escape the judgemente of God.”31 Men eminent among
Anglican divines, such as Sandys and Jewel, took part in the
controversy on the subject of usury. A bishop of Salisbury
gave his blessing to the book of Wilson; an archbishop of
Canterbury allowed Mosse’s sharp Arraigrmzem‘ to be dedi-
cated to himself; and a clerical pamphleteer in the seven-
teenth century produced a catalogue of six bishops and ten
RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY I6]
doctors of divinity-—not to mention numberless humbler
clergy—who had written in the course of the last hundred
years on di ferent aspects of the sin of extortion in all its
manifold varieties." The subject was still a favourite of the
ecclesiastical orator. The sixteenth-century preacher was
untrammelled by the convention which in a more fastidious
age was to preclude as an impropriety the discussion in the
pulpit of the problems of the market-place. “As it belongeth
to the magistrate to punishe,” wrote Heming, “so it is the
parte of the preachers to reprove usurie. . . . First, they
should earnestly inveigh against all unlawfull and wicked
contractes. . . . Let them . . . amend all manifest errours in
bargaining by ecclesiasticall discipline. . . . Then, if they
cannot reforme all abuses which they shall nde in bargaines,
let them take heede that they trouble not the Churche over-
muche, but commende the cause unto God. . . . Last of
all, let them with diligence admonishe the ritche men, that
they suffer not themselves to be entangled with the shewe of
ritches.”3°
“This,” wrote an Anglican divine in reference to the
ecclesiastical condemnation of usury, “hath been the generall
judgment of the Church for above this fteene hundred
yceres, without opposition, in this point. Poor sillie Church
of Christ, that could never nde a lawful usurie before this
golden age wherein we live.”34 The rst fact which strikes
the modern student of this body of teaching is its continuity
with the past. In its insistence that buying and selling, letting
and hiring, lending and borrowing, are to be controlled by a
moral law, of which the Church is the guardian, religious
opinion after the Reformation did not differ from religious
opinion before it. The reformers themselves were conscious,
neither of the emancipation from the economic follies of the
age of medizeval darkness ascribed to them in the eighteenth
century, nor of the repudiation of the traditional economic
morality of Christendom, which some writers have held to
have been the result of the revolt from Rome. The relation
F (A23)
in which they conceived themselves to stand to the social
theory of the medizeval Church is shown by the authorities
to whom they appealed. “Therefore I would not,” wrote Dr.
Thomas Wilson, Master of Requests and for a short time
Secretary of State, “have men altogether to be enemies to the
canon lawe, and to condempne every thinge there written,
because the Popes were aucthours of them, as though no
good lawe coulde bee made by them. . . . Nay, I will saye
playnely, that there are some suche lawes made by the Popes
as be righte godly, saye others what they list.”35 From the
lips of a Tudor of cial, such sentiments fell, perhaps, with
a certain piquancy. But, in their appeal to the traditional
teaching of the Church, Wilson's words represented the
starting point from which the discussions of social questions
still commonly set out.
The Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen, the decretals,
church councils, and commentators on the canon law—all
these, and not only the rst, continued to be quoted as
decisive on questions of economic ethics by men to whom
the theology and government of the mediazval Church were
an abomination. What use Wilson made Qf them a glance
at his book will show. The writer who, after him, produced
the most elaborate discussion of usury in the latter part of
the century.prefaced his work with a list of pre-Reformation
authorities running into several pages.“ The author of a
practical memorandum on the amendment of the law with
regard to money-lending—-a memorandum which appears
to have had some effect upon 'policy—thought it necessary
to drag into a paper concerned with the chicanery of
nanciers and the depreciation of sterling by speculative
exchange business, not only Melanchthon, but Aquinas and
I-iostiensisf" Even a moralist who denied all virtue whatever
to “the decrees of the Pope,” did so only the more strongly
to emphasize the prohibition of uncharitable dealing con-
tained in the “statutes of holie Synodes and sayings of godlie
Fathers, whiche vehemently forbid usurie.”3° Objective
economic science was developing in the hands of the experts
who wrote on agriculture, trade and, above all, on currency
and the foreign exchanges. But the divines, if they read such
works at all,_waved them on one side as the intrusion of
Mammon into the fold of Christian morality, and by their
obstinate obscurantism helped to prepare an intellectual
nemesis, which was to discredit their fervent rhetoric as the
voice of a musty superstition. For one who examined present
economic realities, ten rearranged thrice-quoted quotations
from tomes of past economic casuistry. Sermon was piled
upon sermon, and treatise upon treatise: The assumption of
all is that the traditional teaching of the-Church as to social
ethics is as binding on men’s consciences after the Reforma-
tion as it had been before it.
Pamphlets and sermons do not deal either with sins which
no one commits or with sins that every one commits, and
the literary evidence is not to be dismissed merely as pious
rhetoric. The literary evidence does not, however, stand
alone. Upon the immense changes made by the Reformation
in the political and social position of the Church it is not
necessary to enlarge. It became, in effect, one arm of the
State; excommunication, long discredited by abuse, was fast
losing what little terrors it still retained; a clergy, three-
quarters of whom, as a result of the enormous transference
of ecclesiastical property, were henceforward presented by
lay patrons, were not likely to display any excessive inde-
pendence. But the canon law was nationalized, not abolished;
the assumption of most churchmen throughout the sixteenth
century was that it was to be administered; and the canon
law included the whole body of legislation as to equity in
contracts which had been inherited from the Middle Ages.
True, it was administered no longer by the clergy acting as
the agents of Rome, but by civilians acting under the
authority of the Crown. True, after the prohibition of the
study of canon law—after the estimable Dr. Layton had
“set Dunce in Bocardo” at Oxford—it languished at the
universities. True, for the seven years from 1545 to I552,
and again, and on this occasion for good, after l57l, parlia-
ntentary legislation expressly sanctioned loans at interest,
provided that it did not exceed a statutory maximum. But
the convulsion which changed the source of canon law did
not, as far as these matters are concerned, alter its scope. Its
validity wasnot the less because it was now enforced in the
name, not of the Pope, but of the King.
As Maitland has pointed out,“ there was a moment
towards the middle of the century when the civil law was
pressing the canon law hard. The civil law, as Sir Thomas
Smith assured the yet brie ess barrister, offered a promising
career, since it was practised in the ecclesiastical courLs.“°
Though it did not itself forbid usury, it had much to say
about it; it was a doctor of the civil law under Elizabeth
by whom the most elaborate treatise on the subject was
compiled.“ By an argument made familiar by a modern
controversy on which lay and ecclesiastical opinion have
diverged, it is argued that the laxity of the State does not
excuse the-consciences of men who are the subjects, not only
of the State, but of the Church. “The permission of the
Prince,” it was urged, “is no absolution from the authority
of the Church. Supposing usury to be unlawfull . . . yet the
civil laws-permit it, and the Church forbids it. In this case
the Canons are to be preferred. . . . By the laws no man is
compelled to be an usurer; and therefore he must pay that
reverence and obedience which is otherwise due to them
that have the rule over them in the conduct of their souls.”‘"
It was this theory which was held by almost all the
ecclesiastical writers who dealt with economic ethics in the
sixteenth century. Their view was that, in the words of a
pamphleteer, “by the laws" of the Church of. England . . .
usury is simply and generally prohibited.”43 When the lower
I-louse of Convocation petitioned the bishops-in 1554 for a
restoration of their privileges, they urged, among other
matters, that “usurers may be punished by the canon lawes
as in tymes past has been used.”44 In the abortive scheme for
the reorganization of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction drawn up
by Cranmer and Foxe, usury was included in the list of
o 'ences with which the ecclesiastical courts were to deal,
and, for the guidance ofjudges in what must often have been
somewhat knotty cases, a note was added, explaining that it
was not to be taken as including the pro ts derived from
objects which yielded increase by the natural process of
growth." Archbishop Grindal's injunctions to the laity
of the Province of York (I571) expressly emphasized the
duty of presenting to the Ordinary those who lend and
demand back more than the principal, whatever the guise
under which the transaction may be concealed." Bishops’
articles of visitation down to the Civil War required the
presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers, together
with drunkards, ribalds, swearers and sorcerers." The rules
to. be observed in excommunicating the impenitent, pro-
mulgated in 1585, the Canons of the Province ofCanterbury
in 1604, and of the Irish Church in I634, all included a
provision that the usurer should be subjected to ecclesiastical
discipline."
The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased with
the Reformation, and they continued throughout the last
half of the century to play an important, if increasingly
unpopular, part in the machinery of local government. In
addition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of
charity, by punishing the man who refused to “pay to the
poor men’s box,” or who was “detected for being an un-
charitable person and for not giving to the poor and impo-
tent,”49 they dealt also, at least in theory, with those who
offended against Christian morality by acts of extortion. The
jurisdiction of the Church in these matters was expressly
reserved by legislation, and ecclesiastical lawyers, while
lamenting the encroachments of the common'law courts,
continued to claim certain economic misdemeanours as their
province. That, in spite of the rising tide of opposition,
the references to questions of this kind in articles of visitation
were not wholly an affair of common form, is suggested by
the protests against the interference of the clergy in matters
of business, and by the occasional cases which show that
commercial transactions continued to be brought before the
ecclesiastical courts. The typical usurer was apt, indeed, to
outrage not one, but all, of the decencies of social inter-
course. “Thomas Wilkoxe,” complained his fellow burgesses,
“is excommunicated, and disquieteth the parish in the time
of divine service. He is a horrible usurer, taking ld. and some-
times 2d. for a shilling by the week. He has been cursed
by his own father and mother. For the space of two years
he hath not received the Holy Communion, but every
Sunday, when the priest is ready to go to the Commuriion,
then he departeth the church for the receiving of his weekly
usury, and doth not tarry the end of divine service thrice in
the year.”="° Whether the archdeacon corrected a scandal so
obviously suitable ‘for ecclesiastical discipline, we do not
know. But in 1578 a case of clerical usury is heard in the
court of the archdeacon of Essex.“ Twenty-two years later,
a usurer is presented with other offenders on the occasion
of the visitation of some Yorkshire parishes.“ Even in
1619 two instances occur in which mpney-lenders are cited
before the Court of the Commissary of the Bishop of Lon-
don, on the charge of “lending upon pawnes for an excessive
gain commonly reported and cried out of.“ One is excom-
municated and afterwards absolved; both are admonished
to amend their ways.“
There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases
were other than highly exceptional; nor is it from the occa-
sional activities of the ever more discredited ecclesiastical
jurisdiction that light on the practical application of the
ideas of the age as to social ethics is to be sought. Eccle-
siastical discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to the
in uence of religious opinion, and on the practice of a time
when, except for the Court of High Commission, the whole
system was in decay, the scanty proceedings of the courts
christian throw little light. To judge the degree to which
the doctrines expounded by divines were accepted or repu-
diated by the common sense of the laity, one must turn to
the records which show how questions of business ethics
were handled by individuals, by municipal bodies and.by the
Government.
The opinion of the practical man on questions of econo-
mic conduct was in the sixteenth century in a condition of
even more than its customary confusion. A century before,
he had practised extortion and been told that it was wrong;
for it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was
to practise it and be told that it was right; for it was in
accordance with the law of nature. In this matter, as in
others of even greater moment, the two generations which
followed the Reformation were unblessed by these ample
certitudes. They walked in an obscurity where the glittering
armour of theologians
made
A little glooming light, most like a shade.
In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had

arisen, but had not yet wholly submerged those which pre-
ceded them, every shade of opinion, from that of the pious
burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled
with a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitu-
dinarianism of the cosmopolitan nancier, to whom the
confusion of business with morals was a vulgar delusion,
was represented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan
England. '
As far as the smaller property_-owners were concerned, the
sentiment of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely from
the doctrines expotmded by divines than it did from the
individualism which was beginning to carry all before it
among the leaders of the world'of business. Against the
rising nancial interests of the day were arrayed the stolid
I63 TI-IE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
conservatism of the peasantry and the humbler bourgeoisie,
whose conception of social expediency was the defence of
customary relations against innovation, and who regarded
the growth of this new power with something of the same
jealous hostility as they opposed to the economic radicalism
of the enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was an instinctive
movement of self-protection. Free play for the capitalist
seemed to menace the independence of the small producer,
who tilled the nation’s elds and wove it-s cloth. The path
down which the nancier beguiles his victims may seem at
rst to be strewn with roses; but at the end of it lies-
incredible nightmare—a régime of universal capitalism,
in which peasant and small master will have been merged
in a property-less proletariat, and “the riches of the city
of London, and in effect of all this realm, shall be at that
time in the hands of a few men having unmerciful
hearts.”-54
Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted
arable to pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resent-
ment, unless supported by the Government, was powerless.
Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional
machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and
dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him
before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money
from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even,
on occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a
monopoly of the right to make loans, as a protection to the
inhabitants against extreme “usurers and extortioners." The
commonest charity of "the age, which was the establishment
of a fund to make advances without interest to tradesmen,
was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was _to ehable the
young artisan or shopkeeper, the favourite victim of the
money-lender, to acquire the indispensable “stock,” with-
out which he could not set up in business.“
The issues which confronted the Government were
naturally more complicated and its attitude was more
RELIGIOUS ‘THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY I69
ambiguous. The pressure of commercial interests growing in
wealth and influence, its own clamorous nancial necessities,
the mere logic of economic development, made it out of the
question for it to contemplate, even if it had. been disposed to
do so, the rigorous economic discipline desired by the
divines. Tradition, a natural conservatism, the apprehension
of public disorder caused by enclosures or by distress among
the industrial population, a belief in its own mission as the
guardian of “good order” in trade, not unmingled with a
hope that the control of economic affairs might be made to
yield agreeable nancial pickings, gave it a natural bias to-a
policy which aimed at drawing all the threads of economic
life into the hands of a paternal monarchy.
In the form_ which the system assumed under Elizabeth,
considerations of public policy, which appealed to the State,
were hardly distinguishable from considerations of social
morality, which appealed to the Church. As a result of the
Reformaticn the relations previously existing between the
Church and the State had been almost exactly reversed. ln
the Middle Ages the former had been, at least in theory,
the ultimate authority on questions of public and private
morality, while the latter was the police-of cer which
enforced its decrees. In the sixteenth century the Church
became the ecclesiastical department of the State, - and
religion was used to lenda moral sanction to secular social
policy. But the religious revolution had not destroyed the
conception of a single society, of which Church and State
were different aspects; and, when the canon law became “the
King's ecclesiastical law of England,” the jurisdiction of
both ine_vi_tably tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiastical
authority into itself, the Crown had its own reasons of
political expediency for endeavouringito maintain tradi-
tional standards of social conduct, as an antidote for what
Cecil called “the license grown by liberty of the Gospel.”
Ecclesiastics, in their turn, were public of cers—un'ier
Elizabeth the bishop was normally also a justice of the
1="' '
peace—-and relied on secular machinery to enforce, not only
religious conformity, but Christian morality, because both
were elements in a society in which secular and spiritual
interests had not yet been completely disentangled from
each other. “We mean by the Commonwealth,” wrote
Hooker, “that society with relation unto all public a 'airs
thereof, only the matter of true religion excepted; by the
Church, the same society, with only reference unto the matter
of true religion, without any other a airs besides.”5°
In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the
opening years of Elizabeth were a period of conservative
reconstruction. The psychology of a nation which lives pre-
dominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with that of a
commercial society. In the latter, when all goes well, con-
tinuous expansion is tak-en for granted as the rule of life,
new horizons are constantly opening, and the catchword of
politics is the encouragement of enterprise. In the former,
the number of niches into which each successive generation
must be tted is strictly limited; movement means disturb-
ance, for, as one man rises, another is thrust down; and the
object of statesmen is, not to foster individual initiative, but
to prevent social dislocation. It was in this mood that
Tudor Privy Councils approached questions of social policy
and industrial organization. Except when they were diverted
by nancial interests, or lured into ambitious, and usually
unsuccessful, projects for promoting economic development,
their ideal was, not progress, but stability. Their enemies were
disorder, and the restless appetites which, since they led to
the encroachment ofclass on class, were thought to provoke
it. Distrusting economic individualism for reasons of state,
as heartily as did churchmen for reasons of religion, their
aim was to crystallize existing class relationships by submit-
ting them to the pressure, at once restrictive and protective,
of a paternal Government, vigilant to detect all movements
which rncnaced the established order, and alert to suppress
them.
RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 17]
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows. . . .
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong
(Between whoseendless jar justice resides)
Should lose their narnes, and so should justice too,
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And, last, eat up himself.
In spite of the swift expansion of commerce in the latter part

of the century, the words of Ulysses continued for long to
express the of cial attitude.
The practical application of such conceptions was an
elaborate system of what might be called, to use a modern
analogy, “controls.” Wages, tlwmovement of labour, the
entry- into a trade, dealings in grain and in wool, methods
of cultivation, methods of manufacture, foreign exchange
business, rates of interest-all are controlled, partly by
statute, but still more by the administrative activity of the
Council. In theory, nothing is too small or too great to
escape the eyes of an omniscient State. Does a landowner
take advantage of the ignorance of peasants and the uncer-
tainty of the law to enclose commons or evict copyholders?
The Council, while protesting that it does not intend to
hinder him from asserting his rights at common law, will
intervene to stop gross cases of oppression, to prevent poor
men from being made the victims of legal chicanery and
intimidation, to settle disputes by common sense and moral
pressure, to remind the aggressor that he is bound “rather to
consider what is agreeable . . . to the use of this State and for
the good of the comon wealthe, than to seeke the uttermost
advantage that a landlord for his particular pro t maie take
amonge his tenaunts."5" Have prices been raised by a bad
harvest? The Council will issue a_ solemn denunciation of the
I12 THE CHURCH OF-ENGLAND
covetousness of speculators, “in conditions more like to
wolves or cormorants, than to natural men,"-*9 who take
advantage of the dearth to exploit public necessities; will
instruct the Commissioners of Grain and Victuals to suspend
exports; and will order justices to inspect barns, ration
supplies, and compel farmers to sell surplus stocks at a
xed price. Does the collapse of the continental market
threaten distress in the textile districts? The Council will put
pressure on clothiers to nd work for the operatives, “this
being the rule by which the wool-grower, the clothier and
merchant must be governed, that whosoever had a part of
the gaine in pro table times . . . must now, in the decay of
trade . . . beare a part of the publicke losses, as may best
conduce to the good of the publicke and the maintenance of
the general trade."=*° Has the value of sterling fallen on the
Antwerp market? The Council will consider pegging the
exchanges, and will even attempt to nationalize foreign
exchange business by prohibiting private transactions alto-
gether.°° Are local authorities negligent in the administra-
tion of the Poor Law? The Council, which insists on regular
reports as to the punishment of vagrants, the relief of the
impotent, and the steps taken to provide materials on which
to employ the able-bodied, inundates them with exhorta-
tions to mend their ways and with threats of severer pro-
ceedings if they fail. Are tradesmen in difliculties? The
Council, which keeps suf ciently in touch with business
conditions to know when the ditlieulties of borrowers
threaten a crisis, endeavours to exercise a moderating
in uence, by making an example of persons guilty of
agrant extortion, or by inducing the parties to accept a
compromise. A mortgagee accused of “hard and unchris-
tianly dealing” is ordered to restore the land which he has
seized, or to appear before the Council. A creditor who has
been similarly “hard and unconscionable" is committed to
the Fleet. The justices of Norfolk are instructed to put
pressure on a money-lender who has taken “very unjust and
immoderate advantage by way of usury.” The bishop of
Exeter is urged to induce a usurer in his diocese to show “a
more Christian and charitable consideration of these his
neighbours.” A nobleman has released two olTcnders
imprisoned by the High Commission for the Province of
York for having “taken usury contrary to the laws of God
and of the realm,” and is ordered at once to recommit
them. No Government can face with equanimity a state of
things in which large numbers of respectable tradesmen may
be plunged into bankruptcy. In times of unusual depression
the Council’s intervention to prevent creditors from pressing
their claims to the hilt was so frequent as to create the
impression of something like an informal moratorium.“
The Governments of the Tudors, and, still more, of the
rst two Stuarts, were masters of the art of disguising
commonplace, and sometimes sordid, motives beneath a
glittering facade of imposing principles. In spite of its lofty
declarations--of a disinterested solicitude for the public
welfare, the social policy of the monarchy not only was as
slipshod in execution as it was grandiose in design, but was
not seldom perverted into measures disastrous to its osten-
sible ends, both by the sinister pressure of sectional interests,
and by _the insistent necessities of an empty exchequer.
Its fundamental conception, however—-the philosophy of
the thinkers and of the few statesmen who rose above
immediate exigencies to consider the signi cance of the
system in its totality——had a natural a inity with the doc-
trines which commended themselves to men of religion. It
was of an ordered and graded society, in which each class
performed its allotted function, and was secured such a
livelihood, and no more than such a livelihood, as was
proportioned to its status. “God and the Kinge,” wrote one
who had laboured much, amid grave personal dangers, for
the welfare of his fellows, “hathe not sent us the poore
lyvinge we have, but to doe services therefore amonge our
neighbours abroade.”“2 The divines who fulminated against
I74 TI-IE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
the uncharitable covetousness of the extortionate middle-
man, the grasping money-lender, or the tyrannous landlord,
saw in the measures by which the Government endeavoured
to suppress the greed of individuals or the collision of classes
a much-needed cement of social solidarity,-and appealed to
Caesar to redouble his penalties upon an economic licence
which was hateful to God. The statesmen concerned to
prevent agitation saw in religion the preservative of order,
and the antidote for the cupidity or ambition which
threatened to destroy it, and reinforced the threat of tem-
poral penalties with arguments that would not have been
out of place in the pulpit. To both alike religion is concerned
with something more than personal salvation. It is the sanc-
tion of social duties and the spiritual manifestation of the
corporate life of a complex, yet united, society. To both the
State is something more than an institution created by
material necessities or political convenience. It is the tem-
poral expression of spiritual obligations. It is a link between
the individual soul and that supernatural society of which
all Christian men are held to be members. It rests not
merely on practical convenience, but on the will of God.
Of that philosophy, the classical expression, at once the
most catholic, the most reasonable, and the mostsublime,
is the work of Hooker. What it meant to one cast in a
narrower mould, pedantic, irritable, and intolerant, yet not
without the streak of harsh nobility which belongs to all
who love an idea, however unwisely, more than their own
ease, is revealed in the sermons and the activity of Laud.
Laud’s intellectual limitations and practical blunders need
no emphasis. If his vices made him intolerable to the most
powerful forces of his own age, his virtues were not of a kind
to commend him to those of its successor, and history has
been hardly more merciful to him than were his political
opponents. But an intense conviction of the fundamental
solidarity of all the manifold elements in a great community,
a grand sense of the dignity of public duties, a passionate
RELIGIOUS THEORY AND SOCIAL POLICY 17$
hatred for the self-seeking pettiness of personal cupidities
and sectional interests-—-these qualities are not among
the weaknesses against which the human nature of ordinary
men requires to be most upon its guard, and these qualities
Laud possessed, not only -in abundance, but to excess. His
worship of unity was an idolatry, his detestation of faction a
superstition. Church and State are one Jerusalem. “Both
Commonwealth and Church are collective bodies, made up
of many into one; and both so near allied that the one, the
Church, can never subsist but in the other, the Common-
wealth; nay, so near, that the same men, which in a temporal
respect make the Commonwealth, do in a spiritual make the
Church.”°3 Private and public int_erests are inextricably
interwoven. The sanction of unity is religion. The foundation
of unity is justice: “God will not bless the State, if kings and
"magistrates "do not execute judgment, if the widow and the
fatherless have cause to cry out against the ‘thrones of
justice.’ "64
To a temper so permeated with the conception that society
is an organism compact of diverse parts, and that the grand
end of government is to maintain their co-operation, every
social movement or personal motive which sets group
against group, or individual against individual, appears, not
the irrepressible energy of life, but the mutterings of chaos.
The rst demon to be exorcised is party, for Governments
must “entertain no private business," and “parties are ever
private ends.”°5 The second is the self-interest which leads
the individual to struggle for riches and advancement.
“There is no private end, but in something or other it will
be led to run cross the public; and, if gain come in, though it
be by ‘making shrines for Diana,’ it is no matter -with them
though Ephesus be in an uproar for it.”°° For Laud, the
political virtues, by which he understands subordination,
obedience, a willingness to sacri ce personal interests for
the good of the community, are as much part of the Chris-
tian’s religion as are the duties of private life; and, unlike
some of those who sigh for social unity to-day, he is as
ready to chastise the rich and powerful, who thwart the
attainment of that ideal, as he is to preach it to the humble.
To talk of holiness and to practise injustice is mere hypo-
crisy. Man is born a member of a society and .is dedicated
by religion to the service of his fellows. To repudiate the
obligation is to be guilty of a kind of political atheism.
“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect
the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety and wisheth
peace and happiness to himself in vain. For whoever he be,
he must live in the body of the Commonwealth, and in the
body of the Church.”‘“ To one holding such a creed econo-
mic individualism was hardly less abhorrent than religious
nonconformity, and its repression was a not less obvious
duty; for both seemed incompatible with the -stability of a
society in which Commonwealth and Church were one. It is
natural, therefore, that Laud’s utterances and activities in
the matter of social policy should have shown a strong bias
in favour of the control of economic relations by an
authoritarian State, which reached its climax in the eleven
years of personal government..It was a moment when.,partly
in continuance of the traditional policy of protecting
peasants and maintaining the supply of grain, partly for less
reputable reasons of finance, the Government was more
than usually active in harrying the depopulating landlord.
The Council gave sympathetic consideration to petitions
from peasants begging for protection or redress, and in 1630
directions were issued to the justices of ve midlazzd counties
to remove all enclosures made in the last ve years, on the
ground that they resulted in depopulation and were par-
ticularly harmful in times of dearth. In 1632, 1635 and 1636
three Commissions were appointed and special instructions
against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize. In
parts of the country, at any rate, land which had been laid
down to grass was ploughed up in obedience to the Govern-
ment's orders. In the four yea1's.fr‘om 1635 to 1638 a list of
some 600 offenders was returned to the Council, and about
£50,000 was imposed upon them in fines.“ With this policy
Laud ~waswhole~heartedI'y in sympathy. A letter in his private
correspondence, i'n which he expresses his detestation of
enclosure, reveals the temper which evoked Clarendon’s
gentle complaint that the archbishop made himself unpopular
by his inclination “a little too much to countenance the
Commission for Depopulation.”69 Laud was himself an
active member of the Commission, and dismissed with
impatient contempt the squirearchy’s appeal to the common
law. In the day of his ruin he was reminded by his enemies
of the needlessly sharp censures with which he barbed the
neimposed upon an enclosing landlord.”
The prevention of enclosure and depopulation was merely
one element in a general policy, by which a benevolent
Government, unhampered by what Laud had called “that
noise” of parliamentary debate, was to endeavour by even-
handed pressure to enforce social obligations on great and
small-, and to prevent the public interest being sacri ced to an
unconscionable appetite for private gain. The preoccupation
of the "Council with the problem of securing adequate food
supplies and reasonable prices, with poor relief, and, to a
lesser degree, with questions of wages, has been described
by Miss Leonard, and its attempts to protect craftsmen
against exploitati-on at the hands of merchants by Professor
Unwin." In 1630-1 it issued in an amended form the Eliza-
bethan Book of Orders, instructing justices as to their duty
to see that markets were served and prices controlled,
appointed a special committee of the Privy Council as
Commissioners of the Poor and later a separate Com-
mission, and issued a Book of Orders for the better admini-
stration of the Poor Law. In 1629, l63l and again in 1637,
it took steps to secure that the wages of textile workers in
East Anglia were raised, and punished with imprisonment
in the Fleet an employer notorious for paying in truckl
As President of the Council of the North, Wentworth pro-
tected the commoners whose vested interests were threatened
by the drainage of Hat eld Chase, and endeavoured to
insist on the stricter administration of the code regulating
the woollen industry."
Such action, even if inspired largely by the obvious
interest of the Government, which had enemies enough on
its hands already, in preventing popular discontent, was of a
kind to appeal to one with Laud’s indi 'erence to the opinion
of the wealthier classes, and with Laud’s belief in the divine
mission of the House of David to teach an obedient people
“to lay down the private for the public sake.” It is not
surprising, therefore, when tl1eStar Chamber nes an en-
grosser of corn, to Iilld him improving the occasion with
the remark that the defendant has been “guilty of a most
foule offence, which the Prophet hath (called) in a very
energeticall phrase grynding the faces of the poore,” and
that the dearth has been caused, not by God, but by “cruell
men” ;'"-‘- or taking part in the proceedings of the Privy Coun-
cil at a time when it is pressing justices, apparently not with-
out success, to compel the East Anglian clothiers to raise the
wages of spinners and weavers; or serving on the Lincoln-
shire sub-committee of the Commission on the Relief of the
Poor, which was appointed in January I631."
“A bishop,” observed Laud, in answer to the attack of
Lord Saye and Sele, “may preach the Gospel more publicly
and to far greater edi cation in a court of judicature, or at a
Council-table, where great men are met together to draw
things to an issue, than many preachers in their several
charges can.”"5 The Church, which had abandoned the pre-
tension itself to control society, found some compensation
in the re ection that its doctrines were not wholly without
in uence in impressing the principles which were applied
by the State. The history of the rise of individual liberty——to
use a question-begging phrasc—-in economic a- 'airs follows
somewhat the same course as does its growth in the more
important sphere of religion, and is not unconnected with it.
The conception of religion as a thing private and individual
does not emerge until after a century in which religious
freedom normally means the freedom of the State to
prescribe religion, not the freedom of the individual to
worship God as he pleases. The assertion of economic
liberty as a natural right comes at the close of a period in
which, while a religious phraseology was retained and a
religious interpretation of social institutions was often
sincerely held, the ,supernatural sanction had been in-
creasingly merged in doctrines based on reasons of state and
public expediency. “Jerusalem . . . stands not for the City
and the State only . . . nor for the Temple and the Church
only, but jointly for both."'"i In identifying the maintenance
of public morality with the spasmodic activities of an
incompetent Government, the Church had built its house
upon the sand. It did not require prophetic gifts to foresee
that the fall of the City would be followed by the destruction
of the Temple.
(iii)
The Growth of Individualism
Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics
continued to be made by one school of churchmen down to
the meeting of the Long Parliament, it was increasingly the
voice of the past appealing to an alien generation. The
expression of a theory of society which had made "religion
supreme over all secular affairs, it had outlived the synthesis
in which it had been an element, and survived, an archaic
fragment, into an age to whose increasing individualism the
idea of corporate morality was as objectionable as that of
ecclesiastical discipline by bishops and archdeacons was
becoming to its religion. The collision between the prevalent
practice and what still purported to be the teaching of the
Church is almost the commonest theme of the economic
literature of the period from I550 to 1640; of much of it,
in-deed, it is the occasion. Whatever the Church might say,
men had asked interest for loans, and charged what prices
the market would stand, at the very zenith of the Age of
Faith. But then, except in the great commercial centres and
in the high nance of the Papacy and of secular Govern-
ments, their transactions had been petty and individual, an
occasional shift to meet an emergency or seize an oppor-
tunity. The new thing in the England of the sixteenth century
was that devices that had formerly been occasional were now
woven into the very texture of the industrial and com-
mercial civilization which was developing in the later years
of Elizabeth, and whose subsequent enormous expansion
was to give English society its characteristic quality and
tone. Fifty years ‘later, Harrington, in a famous passage,
described how the ruin of the feudal -nobility by the Tudors,
by democratizing the ownership of land, had prepared the
way for thebourgeais republic." His hint of the economic
changes which preceded the Civil War might be given a
wider application. The age of Elizabeth saw a steady growth
of capitalism in textiles and mining, a great increase of
foreign trade and an outburst of joint-stock enterprise in
connection with it, the beginnings of something like deposit
banking in the hands of the scriveners, an_d the growth,
aided by the fall of Antwerp and the Government’s own
nancial necessities, of a money-market with an almost
modern technique—-speculation, futures and arbitrage
transactions—in London. The future lay with the classes
who sprang to wealth and in uence with the expansion of
commerce in the later years of the century, and whose
religious and political aspirations were, two generations
later, to overthrow the monarchy.
An organized money-market has many advantages. But it
is not a school of social ethics or of political responsibility.
Finance, being essentially impersonal, a matter of oppor-
tunities, security and risks, acted among other causes as a
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM I3!
solvent of the sentiment, fostered both by the teaching of
the Church and the decencies of social intercourse among
neighbours, which regarded keen bargaining as “sharp
practice.” In the half-century which followed the Reforma-
tion, thanks to the collapse of sterling on the international
market, as a result of a depreciated currency, war and a
foreign debt contracted on ruinous terms, the state of the
foreign exchanges was the obsession of publicists and
politicians. Problemsof currency and credit lend themselves
more readily than most economic questions to discussion
in terms of mechanical causation. It was in the long debate
provoked by the rise in" prices and the condition of the
exchanges that the psychological assumptions, which were
afterwards to be treated by economists as of sell”-evident
and universal validity, were rst hammered out.
“We see,” wrote Malynes, “how one thing driveth or en-
forceth another, like as in a clock where there are many
wheels, the rst wheel being stirred driveth the next and that
the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instru-
ment that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a
strait, where the foremost is driven by him that is next to
him, and the next by him that followeth hi-m.""' The spirit
of modern business could hardly be more aptly described.
Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a soulless
individualism, but, needless to say, their denunciations were
as futile as they were justi ed. It might be possible to put
fear into the heart of the village dealer who bought cheap
and sold dear, or of the pawnbroker who took a hundred
quarters of wheat when he had lent ninety, with the warning
that '1‘the devices of men cannot be concealed from Almighty
God.” To a great clothier, or to a capitalist like Pallavicino,
Spinola, or Thomas Gresham, who managed the Govern-
ment business in Antwerp, such sentiments were foolishness,
and usurious interest appeared, not bad morals, but bad
business. Moving, as they did, in a world where loans were
made, not to meet the temporary di ictrlty of an unfor-
tunate neighbour, but as a pro table investment on the part
of not too scrupulous business men, who looked after them-
selves and expected others to do the same, they had scanty
sympathy with doctrines which re ected the spirit of mutual
aid not unnatural in the small circle of neighbours who
formed the ordinary village or borough in rural England.
lt was a natural result of their experience that, without
the formal enunciation of any theory of economic indivi-
dualism, they should throw their weight against the tradi-
tional restrictions, resent the attempts -made by preachers
and popular movements to apply doctrines of charity and
“good conscience” to the impersonal mechanism of large-
scale transactions, and seek to bring public policy more into
accordance with their economic practice. The obstruction to
the Statutes against depopulation offered by the self-interest
of the gentry was being supported in the latter years of
Elizabeth by free-trade arguments in the House of Com-
mons, and the last Act, which was passed in 1597, expressly
allowed land to be laid down to pasture for the purpose of
giving it a rest." From at any rate the middle of the century,
the xing of prices by municipal authorities and by the
Government was regarded with scepticism by the more
advanced economic theorists, and towards the end of the
century it produced complaints that, since it weakened the
farmer’s incentive to grow corn, its results were the precise
opposite of those intended.” As markets widened, the
control of the middleman who dealt in wool and grain;
thoughstrictly enforced in theory, showed unmistakable
signs of breaking down in practice. Gresham attacked the
prohibition of usury, and normally stipulated that nanciers
who subscribed on his inducement to public loans should be
indemni ed against legal proceedings.“ Nor could he well
have done otherwise, for the sentiment of the City was that
of the merchant in Wilson’s Dialogue: “What man is so
madde to deliver his moneye out of his owne possession for
naughte? or whoe is he that will not make of his owne the
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 183
best he can?”°2 With such a wind of doctrine in their sails
men were not far from the days of complete freedom of
contract.
Most signi cant of all, economic interests were already
appealing to the political theory which, when nally
systematized by Locke, was to prove that the State which
interferes with property and business destroys its own title to
exist. “All free subjects,” declared a Committee of the House
of Commons in 1604, “are born inheritable, as to their land,
so also to the free exercise of their industry, in those trades
whereto they apply themselves and whereby they are to live.
Merchandise being the chief and richest of all other, and of
greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against
the natural right and liberty of the subjects of England to
restrain it into the hands of some few.”*=‘3 The process by
which natural justice, imperfectly embodied in positive law,
was replaced as t.he source of authority by positive law
which might or might not be the expression of natural
justice, had its analogy in the rejection by social theory of
the whole conception of an objective standard of economic
equity. The law of nature had been invoked by mediazval
writers as a moral restraint upon economic self-interest.
By the seventeenth century a signi cant revolution" had taken
place. “Nature” had come to connote, not divine ordinance,
but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the
individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should
be given free play.
The effect of these practical exigencies and intellectual
changes was seen in a reversal of policy on the part of the
State. In 1571 the Act of 1552, which had prohibited all
interest as “a vyce_ moste odyous and detestable, as in dyvers
places of the hollie Scripture it is evydent to be seen,” had
been repealed, after a debate in the House which revealed
the revolt of the plain man against the theorists who had
triumphed twenty years before, and his determination that
the law should not impose on business a utopian niqrality.“
I84 Tl-IE CHURCH OF ENGLAND
The exaction of interest ceased to be a' criminal offence,
provided that the rate did not exceed te_n per cent, though it
still remained open to a debtor, in the improbable-event of
his thinking it expedient to jeopardize his chance of future
advances, to take civil proceedings to recover any payment
made in excess of the principal. This quali ed condonation
of usury on the part of the State naturally reacted upon
religious opinion. The Crown was supreme ruler of the
Church of Christ, and it was not easy for a loyal Church
to be more fastidious than its head. Moderate interest, if
without legal protection, was at any rate not unlawful, and
it is dif cult to damn with conviction vices of which the
degrees have been adjusted on a slidi-ng scale by an; Act
of Parliament. Objective economic science was beginning its
disillusioning career, in the form of discussions on the rise in
prices, the mechanism of the money-market, and the balance
of trade, by publicists concerned, not to po-int a moral, but
to analyse forces so productive of pro t to those interested
in their operation. Since Calviri’s indulgence to interest,
critics of the traditional doctrine could argue that religion
itself spoke with an uncertain voice.
Such developments inevitably affected the tone in which
the discussion of economic ethics was carried on by the
divines, and even before the end of the sixteenth century,
though they did not dream of abandoning the denunciation
of unconscionable bargains, they were surrounding it with
quali cations.i'The Decades of Bullinger, of which three
English translations were made in the ten years following
his death, and which Convocation in 1586 required to be
obtained and studied by all the inferior clergy, indicated a
via media. As uncompromising as any media:val writer in
his hatred of the sin of covetousness, he denounces with all
the old fervour oppressive contracts which grind the poor.
But he is less intolerant of economic motives than most of
his predecessors, and concedes, with Calvin, that, before
interest is condemned as usury, it is necessary to consider
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM I85
both the terms of the loan and the position of borrower and
lender.
The stricter school of religious opinion continued to cling
to the traditional theory down to the Civil War. Conserva-
tive divines took advantage of the section in the Act of I571
declaring that “all usurie being forbydden by the lawe of
God is synne and detestable," to argue that the Statute had
in reality altered nothing, and that the State left it to the
Church to prevent bargains which, for r-easons of practical
expediency, it did not think t to prohibit, but which it did
not encourage and declined to enforce. It is in obedience to
such doctrines that a scrupulous parson refuses a cure,
until he is assured that the money which will be paid to
him comes from the rent of land, not from interest on
capital.‘-"5 But, even so, there are dif culties. The parson of
Kingham bequeaths a cow to the poor of Burford, which is
“set to hire for a year or two for four shillings a year,"
the money being used for their assistance. But the arrange-
ment has its inconveniences. Cows are mortal, and this
communal cow is “very like to have perished through
casualty and ill-keeping.”"° Will not the poor be surer of
their money if the cow is disposed of for cash down? So it is
sold to the man who previously hired it, and the interest
spent on the poor instead. Is this usury? ls it usury to invest
money in business in order to provide. an income for those,
like widows and orphans, who cannot trade with it them-
selves? If it is lawful to buy a rent-charge or to share in
trading pro ts, what is the particular criminality of charging
a price for a loan? Why should a creditor, who may himself
be poor, make a loan gratis, in order to put money into- the
pocket of a wealthy capitalist, who uses the advance to
corner the wool crop or to speculate on the exchanges?
To such questions liberal theologians answered that the
crucial point was not the letter of the law which forbade the
breeding of barren metal, but the observance of Christian
charity in economic, as in other, transactions. Their oppo-
nents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the
Church, argued that usury differed, not merely in degree,
but in kind, from payments which, like rent and pro ts,
were morally unobjectionable provided that they were not
extortionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be
interpreted as “whatever is taken for a loan above the
principal.” The literature of the subject was voluminous. But
it was obsolete almost before it was produced. _For, whether
theologians and moralists condemned all interest, or only
some interest, as contrary to Christian ethics, the assump-
tion implied in their very disagreement had been that
economic relations belonged to a province of which, in the
last resort, the Church was master. That economic trans-
actions were one department of ethical conduct, and to be
judged, like other parts of it, by spiritual criteria; that,
whatever concessions the State might see t to male to
human frailty, a certain standard of economic morality was
involved in membership of the Christian Church; that it
was the function of ecclesiastical authorities, whoever they
might be, to take the action needed to bring home to men
their social obligations—such doctrines were still common
ground to all sections of religious thought. It was precisely
this whole conception of a social theory based ultimately on
religion which was being discredited. While rival authorities
were discussing the correct interpretation of economic
eth.ics, the ank of both was turned by the growth of a
powerful body of lay opinion, which argued that economics
were one thing and ethics another.
Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the
issue in which the whole controversy over “good conscience”
in bargaining came to a head, and such questions were only
one illustration of the immense problems with which the
rise of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose
social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the
Fathers and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished
with citations from Scripture and from the canonists, were
written to answer them. Many of them are learned; some are
almost readable. But it may be doubted whether, even in
their own day, they satis ed any one but their authors. The
truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held
that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable
to the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that
claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions
of a very different environment from that of commercial
England in the seventeenth century.
The most crucial and the most dif cult of all political
questions is that which turns on the difference between public
and private morality. The problem which it presents in the
relations between States is a commonplace. But, since its
essence is the difficulty of applying the same moral standard
to decisions which a "ect large masses of men as to those in
which only individuals are involved, it emerges in a hardly
less acute form in the sphere of economic life, as soon as its
connections ramify widely, and the unit is no longer the
solitary producer, but a group. To argue, in the manner of
Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another
for private life, is to open a door to an orgy of unscrupulous-
ness before which the mind recoils. To argue that there is no
difference at all, is to lay down a principle which few men
who have faced the difficulty in practice will be prepared
to endorse as of invariable application, and incidentally to
expose the idea of morality itself to discredit by subjecting it
to an almost‘ intolerable strain. The practical result of senti-
mentality is too often a violent reaction towards the baser
kinds of Realp0l:'ti.?c:
With the expansion of nance and international trade in
the sixteenth century, it was this problem which faced the
Church. Granted that I should love my neighbour as myself,
the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale
organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my
neighbour‘? and, How exactly am I to make my love for him
effective in practice? To these questions the conventional
religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even
realized that they could be put. It had tried to moralize
economic relations, by treating every transactioh as a ease of
personal conduct, involving personal responsibility. In an
age of impersonal nance, world-markets and a capitalist
organization of industry, its traditional social doctrines had
no speci c to offer, and were merely repeated, when, in
order to be effective, they should have been thought out
again from the beginning and formulated in new and living
terms. It had endeavoured to protect the peasant and the
craftsman against the oppression of the money-lender and
the monopolist. Faced with the problems of a wage-earning
proletariat, it could do no more than repeat, with meaning-
less iteration, its traditional lore as to the duties of master
to servant and servant to master. It had insisted that all
men were brethren. But it did not occur to it to point out
that, as a result of the new economic imperialism which was-
beginning to develop in the seventeenth century, the brethren
of the English merchant were the Africans whom he kid-
napped for slavery in America, or the American Indians
whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen
from whom he bought muslins and silks at starvation prices.
Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the prac-
tical di iculty of applying its moral principles, by clasping
the comfortable formula that for the transactions of econo-
mic life no moral principles exist. But, for the problems
involved in the association of men for economic purposes on
the grand scale which was to be increasingly the rule in the
future, the social doctrines advanced from the pulpit offered,
in their traditional form, little guidance. Their practical
ineffectiveness prepared the way for their theoretical
abandonment.
They were abandoned because, on the whole, they
deserved to be abandoned. The social teaching of the Church
had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to
think. Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in
economic thought-—these qualities were to be the note of the
seventeenth century, when once the confusion of the Civil
War had died down. When mankind is faced with the choice
between exhilarating activities and piety imprisoned in a
shrivelled mass of desiccated formula, it will choose the
former, -though the energy be brutal and the intelligence
narrow. In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting with
clamorous interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above all, in the
germs of economic speculation, from which was to grow the
new science of Political Arithmetic, the social theory of the
Church of England turned its face from the practical world,
to pore over doctrines which, had their original authors
been as impervious to realities as their later exponents,
would never have been formulated. Naturally it was
shouldered aside. It was neglected, because it had become
negligible.
This defect was fundamental. It made itself felt in countries
where there was no Reformation, no Puritan movement, no
common law jealous of its rights and eager to prune ecclesias-
tical pretensions. But in England there were all three; and,
from the beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth cen-
tury, ecclesiastical authorities who attempted to enforce
traditional morality had to reckon with a temper which
denied their right to exercise any jurisdiction at all, above
all, any jurisdiction interfering with economic matters. It
was not merely that there was the familiar objection of the
plain man, that parsons know nothing of business—that
“it is not in simple divines to show what contract is lawful
and what is not.”5’ More important, there was the opposi-
tion of the common lawyers to part, at least, of the machinery
of ecclesiastical discipline. Bancroft in I605 complained to
the Privy Council that the judges were endeavouring to
con ne the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to testa-
mentary and matrimonial cases, and alleged that, of more
than ve hundred prohibitions issued to stop proceedings
in the Court of Arches since the accession of Elizabeth, not
more than one in twenty could be sustained.“ “As things
are," wrote two years later the author of a treatise on the
civil and ecclesiastical law, “neither jurisdiction knowes
their owne bounds, but one snatcheth from the other, in
maner as in a batable ground lying betweene two king-
domes.”3° The jurisdiction of the Court of High Com-
mission su 'ered in the same way. In the last resort appeals
from the ecclesiastical courts went either to it or to the
Court of Delegates. From the latter part of the sixteenth
century down to the removal of Coke from the Bench in
1616, the judges were from time to time staying proceedings
before the Court of High Commission by prohibitions, or
discharging offenders imprisoned by it. In 1577, for example,
they released on a writ of Habeas Corpus a prisoner
committed by the High Commission on a charge of usury.”
Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a theory
of the Church, which denied the very principle of a discipline
exercised by bishops and archdeacons. The acquiescence of
the laity in the moral jurisdiction of the clergy. had been
accorded with less and less readiness for two centuries before
the Reformation. With the growth under Elizabeth of a
vigorous Puritan movement, which had itsstronghold among
the trading and commercial classes, that jurisdiction became
to a considerable proportion of the population little less
than abhorrent. Their dislike of it was based, of course, on
weightier grounds than its occasional interference in matters
of business. But their attitude had as an inevitable result
that, with the disparagement of the whole principle of the
traditional ecclesiastical discipline, that particular use of it
was also discredited. It was not that Puritanism implied a
greater laxity in social relations. On the contrary, in its
earlier phases it stood, at learst in theory, for a stricter
discipline of the life of the individual, alike in his business
and in his pleasures. But it repudiated as anti-Christian the
organs through which such discipline had in fact been
exercised. When the Usury Bill of 1571 was being discussed
in'the House of Commons, reference to the canon law was
met by the protest that the rules of the canon law on the
matter were abolished, and that “they should be no more
remembered than they are followed.”°1 Feeling against the
system rose steadily during the next two generations;
excommunications, when courts ventured to resort to them,
were freely disregarded ;'-*2 and by the thirties of the seven-
teenth century, under the in uence of Land's regime, the
murmur was threatening to become a hurricane. Then came
the Long Parliament, the erce denunbiations in both
Houses of the interference of the clergy in civil affairs, and
the legislation abolishing the Court of High Commission,
depriving the ordinary ecclesiastical courts of penal juris-
diction, ands nally, with the abolition of episcopacy,
sweeping them away altogether. I
“Not many good days,” wrote Penn, “since ministers
meddled so much in laymen’s business."°3 That sentiment
was a dogma on which, after the Restoration, both Cavalier
and Roundhead could agree. It inevitably reacted, not oniy
upon the practical powers of the clergy, which in any case
had long been feeble, but on the whole conception of
religion which regarded it as involving the control of
economic self-interest by what_Laud had called “the body of
the Church.” The works of Sanderson and of Jeremy Taylor,
continuing an earlier tradition, reasserted with force and
eloquence the viewtltat the Christian is bound by his faith
to a rule of life which nds expression in equity in bargaining
and in works of mercy to his neighbours.“ But the con-
ception that the Church possessed, of its own authority, an
independent standard of social values, which it could apply
as a criterion to the practical affairs of the economic world,
grew steadily weaker. The result, neither immediate nor
intended, but inevitable, was the tacit denial of spiritual
signi cance in the transactions of business and in the
relations of organized society. Repudiating the right of
religion to advance any social theory distinctively its own,
I92 THE CHURCH. OF ENGLAND
that attitude became itself the most tyrannical and par-alysing
of theories. It may be called Indi brentism.
The change had begun before the Civil War. It was com-
pleted with the Restoration, and, still more, with the
Revolution. In the eighteenth century it is almost super-
uous to examine the teaching of the Church of England as
to social et.hics. For it brings no distinctive contribution,
and, except by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the
Church as an independent moral authority, whose standards
may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been
abandoned.
An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own
inevitably accepts that which happens to be fashionable.
What set the tone of social thought in the eighteenth century
was partly the new Political Arithmetic, which had come to
maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was to be
expected in the rst great age of English natural science-—
the age of Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal Society-
drew its inspiration, not from religion or morals, but from
mathematics and physics. It was still more the political
theory associated with the name of Locke, but popularized
and debased by a hundred imitators. Society is not a com-
munity of classes with varying functions, united to each other
by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a
common end. It is a joint-stock company rather than an
organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders are strictly
limited. They enter it in order to insure the rights already
vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. The State,
a matter of convenience, not of supernatural sanctions,
exists for the protection of those rights, and ful ls its object
in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures
full scope for their unfettered exercise.
The most important of such rights are property rights, and
property rights attach mainly, though not, of course,
exclusively, to the higher orders of men, who hold the
tangible, material “stock” of society. Those who do not
THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUALISM 19]
subgcribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in
the pro ts, though they have a moral claim on the charity
of their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which
treats almost all below the nobility, gentry and freeholders
as “the poor”—and the poor, it is well known, are of two
kinds, “the industrious poor,” who work for their betters,
and “the idle poor,” who work for themselves. Hence the
unending discussions as to whether “the labouring poor"
are to be classed among the “productive” or “unproductive”
classes—whether they are, or are not, really worth their
keep. Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that
any substantial amelioration of their lot COUld be effected
by‘ any kind of public policy. “It would be easier, where
property was well secured, to live without money than
without poor, . . . who, as they ought to be kept from
starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving”;
the poor “have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable
but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to
cure”; “to make society happy, it is necessary that great
numbers should be wretched as well as poor.”95 Such sen-
tences from a work printed in 1714 are not typical. But they
are straws which show how the wind is blowing.
In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low
and equable, and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was
an intellectual solecism and an error in taste. Religious
thought was not immune from the same in uence. It was
not merely that the Church, which, as much as the State,
was the heir of the Revolution settlement, reproduced the
temper of an aristocratic society, as it reproduced its class
organizationand economic inequalities, and was disposed
too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean sub-
servience to wealth and social position which, after more
than half a century of political democracy, is still the charac-
teristic and odious vice of Englishmen. Not less signi cant
was the fact that, apart from certain groups and certain
questions, it accepted the prevalent social philosophy and
0 (x2e)
adapted its teaching to it. The age in which political theory
was cast in the mould of religion had yielded to one in which
religious thought was no longer an imperious master, but a
docilepupil. Conspicuous exceptions like Law, who reasserted
with matchless power the idea that Christianity implies a
distinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley's sermon on
The Use of Money, merely heighten the impression of a
general acquiescence in the conventional ethics. The pre-
valent religious thought might not unfairly be described as
morality tempered by prudence and softened on occasion
by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the
natural counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated
teleology, and which substituted the analogy of a self-
regulating mechanism, moved by the weights and pulleys
of economic motives, for the theory which had regarded
society as an organism composed of different classes united
by their common subordination to a spiritual purpose.
Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic har-
mony of apparently con icting interests, left small scope for
moral casuistry. The materials for the reformer were, indeed,
abundant enough. The phenomena of early commercial
capitalism—consider only the orgy of nancial immorality
which culminated in l720—wcre of a kind which might have
been expected to shock even the not over-sensitive conscience
of the eighteenth century. Two centuries before, the Fuggers
had been denounced by preachers and theologians; and,
compared with the men who engineered the South Sea
Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In reality, religious
opinion was quite unmoved by the spectacle. The traditional
scheme of social ethics had been worked out in a simpler
age; in the commercial England of banking, and shipping,
and joint-stock enterprise, it seemed, and was called, a
Gothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was
quietly dropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from
episcopal charges. In the popular manual called The Whole
Duly of Mari,“ rst. published in 1658, and widely read
during the following century, extortion and oppression still
gure as sins, but the attempt to de ne what they are is
frankly abandoned. If preachers have not yet overtly
identi ed themselves with the view of the natural man,
expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words,
“trade is one thing and religion is another,” they imply a
not very di 'erent conclusion by their silence as to the
possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic
doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious
teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the
theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous
reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-
interest the operation of a providential plan. “National
commerce, good morals and good gbvernmcnt," wrote D-can
Tucker, of whom Warburton unkindly said that religion
was his trade, and trade his religion, “are but part of one
general scheme in the designs of Providence.”
Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the
Church to insist on commercial morality, since sound
morality coincided with commercial wisdom. The existing
order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of
Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and
the order established by nature was the order established
by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the century,
would have found their philosophy expressed in the liner of
Pope:
Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.
Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical

examination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian
charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for
philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger
area of normal human relations, in which the promptin gs of
self-interest provided an all—su icient motive and rule of
conduct. It was, therefore, in the sohere
1 of rovidin"D succour
for the non-combatants and for the wounded, not in
inspiring the main army, that the social work of the Church
was conceived to Lie. Its characteristic expressions in the
eighteenth century were the relief of the poor, the, care of
the sick and the establishment of schools. In spite of the
genuine, if somewhat unctuous, solicitude for the spiritual
welfare of the poorer classes, which inspired the evangelical
revival, it abandoned the fundamental brain-work of
criticism and construction to the rationalist and the
humanitarian.
Surprise has sometimes been expressed that the Church
should not have been more effective in giving inspiration and
guidance during the immense economic reorganization to
which tradition has assigned the not very felicitous name of
the “Industrial Revolution.” It did not give it, because it did
not possess it. There were, no doubt, special conditions to
account for its silence—mere ignorance and inelliciency, the
supposed teachings of political economy, and, after I790,
the terror of all humanitarian movements inspired by
France. But the explanation of its attitude is to be sought,
less in the peculiar circumstances of the moment, than in the
prevalence of a temper which accepted the established order
of class relations as needing no vindication before any higher
tribunal, and which made religion, not its critic or its accuser,
but itslanodyne, its apologist and its drudge. It was not
that there was any relapse into abnormal inhumanity. lt
was that the very idea that the Church possessed an inde-
pepdentstandard of values, to which social institutions were
amenable, had been abandoned. The surrender had been
made long before the battle began. The spiritual blindness
which made possible the general acquiescence in the horrors
of the early factory system was, not a novelty, but the habit
of a century.
CHAPTER IV
The Puritan Movement

“And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe.”
Genesis xxxix. 2 (Ivndalc’s Tramfalioil).
BY the end of the sixteenth century the divorce between

religious theory and economic realities had long been
evident. But in the meantime, within the bosom of religious
theory itself, a new system of ideas was being matured,
which was destined to revolutionize all traditional values,
and to turn on the whole eld of social obligations a new
and penetrating light. On a world heaving with expanding
energies, and on a Church uncertain of itself, rose, after
two generations of premonitory mutterings, the tremendous
storm of the Puritan movement. The forest bent; the oaks
snapped; the dry leaves were driven before a gale, neither
all of winter nor all of spring, but violent and life-giving,
pitiless and tender, sounding strange notes of yearning and
contrition, as of voices wrung from a people dwelling in
Meshech, which signi es Prolonging, in Kedar, which
signi es Blackness; while amid the blare of trumpets, and
the clash of arms, and the rending of the carved work of
the Temple, humble to God and haughty to man, the soldier-
saints swept over battle eld and scaffold their garments
rolled in blood.
In the great silence which fell when the Titans had turned
to dust, in the Augustan calm of the eighteenth century, a
voice was heard to observe that religious liberty was a
considerable advantage, regarded “merely in a commercial
view."1 A new world, it was evident, had arisen. And this
new world, born of the vision of the mystic, the passion of
the prophet, the sweat and agony of heroes famous and
197
l98 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT
unknown, as well as of mundane ambitions and common-
place cupidities, was one in which, since “Thorough” was no
more, since property was secure, and contracts inviolable,
and the executive tamed, the judicious investments of
business men were likely to yield a pro table return. So the
epitaph, which crowns the life of what is calledsuccess,mocl<s
the dreams in which youth hungered, not for success, but
for the glorious failure of the martyr or the saint.
(i)
Puritanism and Society
The principal streams which descended in England from
the teaching of Calvin were three-—Presbyterianism, Congre-
gationalism, and a doctrine of the nature of God and man,
which, if common to both, was more widely diffused, more
pervasive and more potent than either. Of these three off-
shoots from the parent stem, the rst and eldest, which had
made some stir under Elizabeth, and which it was hoped,
with judicious watering from the Scotch, might grow into a
State Church, was to produce a credal statement carved in
bronze, but was to strike, at least in its original guise, but
slender roots. The second, with its insistence on the right of
every Church to organize itself, and on the freedom of all
Churches from the interference of the State, was to leave,
alike in the Old World and in the New, an imperishable
legaoy of civil and religious liberty. The third was Puritanism.
Straitened to no single sect, and represented in the Anglican
Church hardly, if at all, less fully than in those which after-
wards separated from it, it determined, not only conceptions
of theology and church‘government, but political aspirations.
business relations, family life and the nzinurire of personal
behaviour.
The growth, triumph and transformation of the Puritan
spirit was the most fundamental movement of the seven-
PURITANISM AND SOCIETY I99
teenth century. Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from
Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its
struggle against the old order that an England which is
unmistakably modern emerges. But, immense as were its
accomplishments on the high stage of public affairs, its
achievements in that inner world, of which politics are but
the squalid scaffolding, were mightier still. Like an iceberg,
which can awe the traveller by its towering majesty only
because sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye, the
revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and State
was less than that which it worked in men's souls, and the
watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum of Parlia-
ments and the roar of battles, had been learned in the lonely
nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord to
wring a blessing before he ed.
We do it wrong, being so majestical,
To offer it the show of violence.
In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding melan-
choly and glowing energy of Cromwell, in the victorious
tranquillity of Milton, “unshaken, unseduced, unterri ed,”
amid a world of self-seekers and apostates, there are depths
of light and darkness which posterity can observe with
reverence or with horror, but which its small fathom-line
cannot plumb.
There are types of character which are like a prism, whose
various and brilliant colours are but broken re ections of a
single ray of concentrated light. If the inward and spiritual
grace of Puritanism eludes the historian, its outward and
visible signs meet him at every turn, and not less in market-
place and counting-house and camp, than in the student’s
chamber and the gathering of the elect for prayer. For to the
Puritan, a contemner of the vain shows of sacramentalism,
mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacrament. Like a man
who strives by unresting activity to exorcise a haunting
demon, the Puritan, in the effort to save his own soul, sets in
200 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT
motion every force in heaven above or in the earth beneath.
By the mere energy of his expanding spirit, he remakes, not
only his own character and habits and way of life, but family-
and church, industry and city, political institutions and social
order. Conscious that he is but a stranger and pilgrim,
hurrying from this transitory life to a life to come, he turns
with almost physical horror from the vanities which lull into
an awful indifference souls dwelling on the borders of eter-
nity, to pore with anguish of spirit on the grand facts, God,
the soul, salvation and damnation. “It made the world seem
to me,” said a Puritan of his conversion, “as a carkass that
had neither life nor loveliness. And it destroyed those
ambitious desires after literate fame, which was the sin of
my childhood. . . . It set me upon that method of my studies
which since then I have found the bene t of. . . . It caused me
rst to seek God's Kingdom and his Righteousness, and
most to mind the One thing needful, and to determine rst
of my Ultimate End.”2
Overwhelmed by a sense of his “Ultimate End,” the
Puritan cannot rest, nevertheless, in re ection upon it. The
contemplation of God, which the greatest of the Schoolmen
described as the supreme blessedness, is a blessedness too
great for --sinners, who must not only contemplate God,
but glorify him by their work in a world given over to the
powers of darkness. “The way to the Celestial City lies just
through this town, where this lusty fair is kept; and he that
will go to the City, and yet not go through this town, must
needs go out of the world.”3 For that awful journey, girt
with precipices and beset with ends, he sheds every
encumbrance, and arms himself with every weapon. Amuse-
ments, books, even inte_rcou_rse with friends, must, if need
be, be cast aside; for it is better to enter into eternal life halt
and maimed, than having two eyes to be cast into eternal
re. He scours the country, like Baxter and Fox, to nd one
who may speak the word of life to his soul. He seeks from
his ministers, not absolution, but instruction, cxhortation
PURITANISM AND SOCIETY 201
and warning. Prophesyings—that most revealing episode in
early Puritanism-—were the cry of a famished generation for
enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the intellect;
and it was because “much preaching breeds faction, but
much praying causes devotion” that the powers of this world
raised their parchment shutters to stem the gale that blew
from the Puritan pulpit. He disciplines, rationalizes,
systematizes his life; “method” was a Puritan catchword a
century before the world had heard of Methodists. He makes
his very business a travail of the spirit, for that too is the
Lord's vineyard, in which he is called to labour.
Feeling in him that which “maketh him more fearful of
displeasing God than all the world,"-'> he is a natural
republican, for there is none on earth that he can own as
master. If powers and principalities will hear and obey, well;
if not, they must be ground into dust, that on their ruins the
elect may build the Kingdom of Christ. And, in the end, all
these—prayer, and toil, and discipline, mastery of self and
mastery of others, wounds and death-—may be too little for
the salvation of a single soul. “Then l saw that there was a
way to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from
the City of Destruction"°-—-those dreadful words haunt him
as he nears his end. Sometimes they break his heart. More
often, for grace abounds even to the chief of sinners, they
nerve his will. For it is will—will organized and disciplined
and inspired, will quiescent in rapt adoration or straining in
violent energy, but always will-which is the essence of
Puritanism, and for the intensi cation and organization of
will every instrument in that tremendous arsenal of religious
fervour is mobilized. The Puritan is like a steel spring com-
pressed by an inner force, which shatters every obstacle by
its rebound. Sometimes the strain is too tense, and, when
its imprisoned energy is released, it shatters itself.
The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every
social grade had felt their hearts lifted by its breath, from
aristocrats and country gentlemen to weavers who, “as
Gi
they stand in their loom, can set a book before them or edi e
one another)" But, if religious zeal and moral enthusiasm
are not straitened by the vulgar categories of class and
income, experience proves, nevertheless, that there are
certain kinds of environment in which they burn more
bravely than in others, and that, as man is both spirit and
body, so different types of religious experience correspond
to the varying needs of different social and economic milieux.
To contemporaries the chosen seat of the Puritan spirit
seemed to be those classes in society which combined econo-
mic independence, education, and a certain decent pride in
their status, revealed at once in a determination to live their
own lives, without truckling to earthly superiors, and in a
somewhat arrogant contempt for those who, either through
weakness of character or through economic helplessness,
were less resolute, less vigorous and masterful, than them-
selves. Such, where the feudal spirit had been weakened by
contact with town life and new intellectual currents, were
some of the gentry. Such, conspicuously, were the yeomen,
“mounted on a high spirit, as being slaves to none,”°
especially in the freeholding counties of the east. Such,
above all, were the trading classes of the towns, and of those
rural districts which had been partially industrialized by the
decentralization of the textile and iron industries.
“The King’s cause and party,” wrote one who described
the situation in Bristol in 1645, “were favoured by two
extremes in that city; the one, the wealthy and powerful
men, the other, of the basest and lowest sort; but disgusted
by the middle rank, the true and best citizens.”° That it was
everywhere these classes who were the standard-bearers of
Puritanism is suggested by Professor Usher's statistical
estimate of the distribution of Puritan ministers in the rst
decades of the seventeenth century, which shows that, of 281
ministers whose names are known, 35 belonged to London
and Middlesex, 96 to the three manufacturing counties of
Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, 29 to Northamptonshire, l7 to
Lancashire, and only 104 to the whole of the rest of the
country." The phenomenon was so striking as to evoke the
comments of contemporaries absorbed in matters of pro-
founder spiritual import than sociological generalization.
“Most of the tenants of these gentlemen,” wrote Baxter,
“and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the
other called the Rabble, did follow the gentry, and were for
the King. On the Parliament's side were (besides them-
selves) the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in
most of the counties, and freeholders, and the middle sort
of men; especially in those corporations and counties which
depend on cloathing and such manufactures.” He explained
the fact by the liberalizing effect of constant correspondence
P
with the greater centres of trade, and cited the example or
France, where it was “the merchants and middle sort of men
that were Protestants.”11
The most conspicuous example was, of course, London,
which had nanced the Parliamentary forces, and which con-
tinued down to the Revolution to be par excellence “the
rebellious city,” returning four Dissentcrs to the Royalist
Parliament of I661, sending its mayor and aldermcn to
accompany Lord Russell when he carried the Exclusion Bill
from the Commons to the Lords, patronizing Presbyterian
ministers long after Presbyterianism was proscribed, nursing
the Whig Party, which stood for tolerance, and sheltering
the Whig leaders against the storm which broke in 1631.
But almost everywhere the same fact was to be observed.
The growth of Puritanism, wrote a hostile critic, was “by
meanes of the City of London (the nest and seminary of the
seditious faction) and by reason of its universall trade
throughout the kingdome, with its commodities conveying
and deriving this civill contagion to all our cities and
corporations, and thereby poysoning whole counties."12 In
Lancashire, the clothing towns—-“the Genevas of Lanca-
shire”—rose like Puritan islands from the surrounding sea
of Roman Catholicism. In Yorkshire, Bradford, Leeds and
Halifax; in the midlands, Birmingham and Leicester; in the
west, Gloucester, Taunton and Exeter, the capital of the
west of England textile industry, were all centres of
Puritanism.
The identi cation of the industrial and commercial classes
with religious radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of
Anglicans and Royalists, who found in the vices of each an
additional reason for distrusting both. Clarendon com-
mented bitterly on the “factious humour which possessed
most corporations, and the pride of their wealth”;1i'- and,
after the Civil War, both the politics and the religion of the
boroughs were suspect for a generation. The bishop of
Oxford warned Charles II’s Government against showing
them any favour, on the ground that “trading combina-
tions" were “so many nests of faction and sedition,” and
that “our late miserable distractions" were “chiefly hatched
in the shops of tradesmen.”14 Pepys commented dryly on
the black looks which met the Anglican clergy as they
returned to their City churches. It was even alleged that the
courtiers hailed with glee the re of London, as a providential
instrument for crippling the centre of disaffection.15
When, after 1660, Political A-rithmetic became the fashion,
its practitioners were moved by the experience of the last
half-century and by the example of Holland—the economic
schoolmaster of seventeenth-century Europe-—to inquire, in
the manner of any modern sociologist, into the relations
between economic progress and other aspects of the national
genius. Cool, dispassionate, very weary of the drum
ecclcsiastic, they con rmed, not without some notes of
gentle irony, the diagnosis of bishop and presbyterian, but
deduced from it different conclusions. The question which
gave a topical point to their analysis was the rising issue of
religious tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual
signi cance, they found a practical reason for applauding it
in the fact that the classes who were in the van of the Puritan
movement, and in whom the Clarendon Code found its most
prominent victims, were also those who led commercial
and industrial enterprise. The explanation, they thought, was
simple. A society of peasants could be homogeneous in its
religion, as it was already homogeneous in the simple
uniformity of its economic arrangements. A many-sided
business community could escape constant friction and
obstruction only if it were free to absorb elements drawn
from a multitude of different sources, and if each of those
elements were free to pursue its own way of life, and—in
that age the same thing—to practise its own religion.
Englishmen, as Defoe remarked, improved everything
and invented nothing, and English economic organization
had long been elastic enough to swallow Flemish weavers
ying from Alva and Huguenots driven from France. But
the traditional ecclesiastical system was not equally accom-
modating. It found not only the alien refugee, but its home-
bred sectaries, indigestible. Laud, reversing the policy of
Elizabethan Privy Councils, which characteristically thought
diversity of trades more important than unity of religion,
had harassed the settlements of foreign artisans at Maid-
stone, Sandwich and Canterbury,“ and the problem re-
curred in every attempt to enforce conformity down to 1639.
“The gaols were crowded with the most substantial trades-
men and inhabitants, the clothiers were forced frotn their
houses, and thousands of workmen and women, whom they
employed, set to starving."1" The Whig indictment of‘ the
disastrous effects of Tory policy recalls the picture drawn by
French intendants of the widespread distress which followed
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes."
When the collision between economic interests and the
policy of compulsory conformity was so agrant, it is not
surprising that the economists of the age should have
enunciated the healing principle, that persecution was in-
compatible with prosperity, since it was on the pioneers of
economic progress that persecution principally fell. “Every
law “ofA this nature," wrote the author of a pamphlet on the
subject, is not only “expressly against the very principles
and rules of the Gospel of Christ,” but is also “destructive
to the trade and well-being of our nation by oppressing and
driving away the most industrious working hands, and
depopulating, and thereby impoverishing our country, which
is capable of employing ten times the number of people we
now have.”1°
Temple, in his calm and lucid study of the United Nether-
lands, found one reason of their success in the fact that,
Roman Catholicism excepted, every man might practise
what religion he pl€ S€'.Cl.2° Dela Court, whose-striking book
passed under the name of John dc Witt, said the same."
Petty, after pointing out that in England the most thriving
towns were those where there was most nonconformity,
cited the evidence, not only of Europe, but of India and the
Ottoman Empire, to prove that, while economic progress is
compatible with any religion, the class which is its vehicle
will always consist of the heterodox minority, who “profess
opinions di 'erent from what are publicly establisited.”*'=i‘
“There is a kind of natural unaptness," wrote a pamphleteer
in 1671, “in the Popish religion to business, whereas on the
contrary among the Reformed, the greater their zeal, the
greater their inclination to trade and industry, as holding
idleness unlawful. . . . The domestic interest of England lieth
in the advancement of trade by removing all obstructions
both“ in city and country, and providing such laws as may
help it, and make it most easy, especially in giving liberty
of conscience to all Protestant Nonconformists, and denying
it to Papists."23
If the economists applauded tolerance because it was good
for trade, the Tory distrust of the commercial classes was
aggravated by the fact that itwas they who were most vocal
in the demand for tolerance. Swift denounced, as part of the
same odious creed, the maxim that “religion ought to make
no distinction between Protestants” and the policy “of pre-
ferring, on all occasions, the monied interests before the
landed."1’-4 Even later in the eighteenth century, the stale gibe
of “the Presbyterians, the Bank and the other corporations”
still gured in the pamphlets of the statesman whom Lord
Morley describes as the prince of political charlatans,
Bolingbroke.2-5
“The middle ranks,” “the middle class of men,” “the
middle sort"—-such social strata included, of course, the
widest variety of economic interest and personal position.
But in the formative period of Puritanism, before the Civil
War, two‘ causes prevented the phrase from being merely the
vapid substitute for thought which it is to-day. In the rst
place, outside certain exceptional industries and districts,
there was little large-scale production and no massed prole-
tariat of propertyless wage-earners. As a result, the typical
workman 'was still normally a small master, who continued
himself to work at the loom or at the forge, and whose
position was that described in Baxter’s Kidderrninster,
where “there were none of the tradesmen very rich . . . the
magistrates of the town were few‘ of them worth £40 per
annum, and most not half so much; three or four of the
richest thriving masters of the trade got but about £500 to
£600 in twenty years, and it may be lost £100 of it at once by
an ill debtor."2° Differing in wealth from the prosperous
merchant or clothier, such men resembled them in economic
and social habits, and the distinction between them was one
of degree, not of kind. In the world of industry vertical
divisions between district and district still cut deeper than
horizontal ssures between class and class. The number of
those who could reasonably be described as independent,
since they owned their own tools and controlled their own
businesses, formed a far larger proportion of the population
than is the case in capitalist societies. .
The second fact was even more decisive. The business
classes, as a‘ power in the State, were still sufficiently young
to be conscious of themselves as something like a separate
order, with an outlook on religion and politics peculiarly
their own, distinguished, not merely by birth and breeding,
but by their social habits, their business discipline, the whole
bracing atmosphere of their moral life, from a Court which
they believed to be godless and an aristocracy which they
knew to be spendthrift. The estrangement—for it was no
more—was of shorter duration in England than in any other
European country, except Switzerland and Holland. By the
latter part of the seventeenth century, partly as a result of the
common struggles which made the Revolution, still more
perhaps through the redistribution of wealth by commerce
and nance, the former rivals were on the way to be com-
pounded in the gilded clay of a plutocracy embracing both.
The landed gentry were increasingly sending their sons into
business; “the tradesman meek and much a liar” looked
forward, as a matter of course, to buying an estate from a
bankrupt noble. Georgian England was to astonish foreign
observers, like Voltaire and Montesquieu, as the Paradise
of the bourgeoisie, in which the prosperous merchant
shouldered easily aside the impoverished bearers of aristo-
cratic names."
That consummation, however, was subsequent to the
great divide of the Civil War, and, in the main, to the tamer
glories of the Revolution. In the germinating period of
Puritanism the commercial classes, though powerful, were
not yet the dominant force which a century later they were
to become. They could look back on a not distant past, in
which their swift rise to prosperity had been regarded with
suspicion, as the emergence of an alien interest, which
applied sordid means to the pursuit of anti-social ends—an
interest for which in a well-ordered commonwealth there
was little room, and which had been rapped on the knuckles
by conservative statesmen. .They lived in a present, where a
Government, at once interfering, ine icient and extrava-
gant, cultivated, with an intolerable iteration of grandilo-
quent principles, every shift and arti ce mostrepugnant‘ to
the sober prudence of plain-dealingrmen. The less reputable
courtiers and the more feather-pated provincial gentry,
while courting them to raise a mortgage or renew a loan,
reviled them as parvenus, usurers and blood-suckers. Even
in the latter part of the seventeenth century the in uence of
the renrier and of the nancier still continued to cause
apprehension and jealousy, both for political and for
economic reasons. “By this single strat:-igem," wrote an in-
dignant pamphleteer of the Puritan capitalists who specialized
in money-lending, “they avoyd all contributions of tithes
and taxes to the King, Church, Poor (a soverain cordial to
tender consciences); they decline all services and offices of
burthen incident to visible estates; they escape all oaths and
ties of publick allegiance or private fealty. . . . They enjoy
both the secular applause of prudent conduct, and withal
the spiritual comfort of thriving easily and devoutly . . .
leaving their adversaries the censures o_f improvidence,
together with the misery of decay. They keep many of the
nobility and gentry in perfect vassalage (as their poor copy-
holders), which eclipses honour, enervates justice, and oft-
times protects them in their boldest conceptions. By engross-
ing cash and credit, they in effect give the price to land and
law to markets. By commanding ready money, they likewise
command such o ices as they widely affect . . . they feather
and enlarge their own nests, the corporations.”-1°
Such lamentations, the protest of senatorial dignity against
equestrian upstarts or of the noblesse against the roturier,
were natural in a conservative aristocracy, which for a
century had felt authority and prestige slipping from its
grasp, and which could only maintain its hold on them by
resigning itself, as ultimately it did, to sharing them with its
rival. In return, the business world, which had its own reli-
gious and political ideology, steadily gathered the realities
of power into its own hands; asked with a sneer, “how would
merchants thrive if gentlemen would not be unthriftes”;2°
and vented the indignant contempt felt by an energetic,
successful and, according to its lights, not too unscrupulous,
generation for a class of fainéams, unvcrsed in the new
learning of the "City and incompetent to the verge of
immorality in the management of business affairs. Their
triumphs in the past, their strength in the present, their
con dence in the future, their faith in themselves and their
difference from their feebler neighbours—a di 'erence as of
an iron wedge in a lump of clay—made them, to use a
modern phrase, class-conscious. Like the modern pro-
letarian, who feels that, whatever his personal misery and
his present disappointments, the Cause is rolled forward to
victory by the irresistible force of an inevitable evolution,
the Puritan bourgeoisie knew that against the chosen people
the gates of hell could not prevail. The Lord prospered their
doings. i
There is a magic mirror in which each order and organ of
society, as the consciousness of its character and destiny
dawns upon it, looks for a moment, before the dust of con-
ict or the glamour of success obscures its vision. In that
enchanted glass, it sees its own lineaments re ected with
ravishing allurements; for what it sees is not what it is, but
what in the eyes of mankind and of its own heart it would be.
The feudal noblesse had looked, and had caught a glimpse of
a world of fealty and chivalry and honour. The monarchy
looked, or Laud and Stra 'ord looked for it; they saw a
nation drink-ing the blessings of material prosperity and
spiritual edi cation from the cornucopia of a sage and
paternal monarchy—a nation “forti ed and adorned . . .
the country rich . . . the Church ourishing . . . trade in-
creased to that degree that we were the exchange of Christen-
dom . . . all foreign merchants looking upon nothing as their
own but what they laid up in the warehouses of this King-
dom.”3° In a far-off day the craftsman and labourer were
to look and see a band of comrades, where fellowship should
be known for life and lack of fellowship for death. For the
middle classes of the early seventeenth century, rising but
not yet triumphant, that enchanted mirror was Puritanism.
GODLY DISCIPLINE v. RELIGION OF TRADE 2ll
What it showed was a picture grave to sternness, yet not
untouched with a sober exaltation-—an earnest, zealous,
godly generation, scorning delights, punctual in labour,
constant in prayer, thrifty and thriving, lled with a decent
pride in themselves and their calling, assured that strenuous
toil is acceptable to Heaven, a people like those Dutch Cal-
vinists whose economic triumphs were as famous as their iron
Protestantism——“thinking, sober and patient men, and such
as believe that labour and industry is their duty towards
God.”@*1 Then an air stirred and the"glass was dimmed. It
was long before any questioned it again.
(ii)
A God!y Discipline versus the Religion of Trade
Puritanism was the schoolmaster of the English middle
classes. It heightened their virtues, sancti ed, without eradi-
cating, their convenient vices, and gave them an inexpugnable
assurance that, behind virtues and vices alike, stood the
majestic and inexorable laws of an omnipotent Providence,
without whose foreknowledge not a hammer could beat upon
the forge, not a gure could be added to the ledger. But it is a
strange school which does not teach more than one lesson,
and the social reactions of Puritanism, trenchant, permanent
and profound, are not to be summarized in the simple
formula that it fostered individualism. Weber, in his ecle-
brated articles, expounded the thesis that Calvinism, in its
English version, was the parent of capitalism, and Troeltsch,
Schulze-Gaevernitz and Cunningham have lent to the same
interpretation the weight of their considerable authority.”
But the heart of man holds mysteries of contradiction which
live in vigorous incompatibility together. When the shrivelled
tissues lie in our hand, the spiritual bond still eludes us.
In every human soul there is a socialist and an indivi-
dualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each
ZIZ THE PURlTA'N' MOVEMENT
there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The same is true of the
mass movements in which men marshal themselves for
common action. There was in Puritanism anelement which
was conservative and traditionalist, and an element which-
was revolutionary; a collectivism which grasped at an iron
discipline, and an individualism which spurned the savour-
less mess of human ordinances; a sober prudence which
would garner the fruits of this world, and a divine reckless-
ness which would make all things new. For long nourished
together, their discords concealed, in the furnace of the Civil
War they fell apart, and Presbyterian and Independent,
aristocrat and Leveller, politician and merchant and
utopian, gazed with bewildered eyes on the strange monsters
with whom they had walked as friends. Then the splendours
and illusions vanished; the force of common things pre-
vailed; the metal cooled in the mould; and the Puritan
spirit, shorn of its splendours and its illusions, settled nally
into its decent bed of equable respectability. But each
element in its social philosophy had once been as vital as
the other, and the battle was fought, not between a Puri-
tanism solid for one view and a State committed to another,
but between rival tendencies in the soul of Puritanism itself.
The problem is to grasp their connection, and to understand
the reasons which caused this to wax and that to wane.
“The triumph of Puritanism,” it has been said, “swept
away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employ-
ment of moncy.”°3 That it swept away the restrictions
imposed by the existing machinery is true; neither eccle-
siastical courts, nor High Commission, nor Star Chamber,
could function after 1640. But, if it broke the discipline of
the Church of Laud and the State of Stra 'ord, it did so but
as a step towards erecting a more rigorous discipline of its
own. It would have been scandalized by economic indivi-
dualism, as much as by religious tolerance, and the broad
outlines of its scheme of organization favoured unrestricted
liberty inmatters of businesses little as in .the things of the
GODLY DISCIPLINE v. RELIGION OF TRADE 213
spirit. To the Puritan of any period in the century between
the accession of Elizabeth and the Civil War, the suggestion
that he was the friend of economic or social licence would
have seemed as wildly inappropriate as it would have
appeared to most of his critics, who taunted him, except
in the single matter of usury, with an intolerable
meticulousness.
A godly discipline was, indeed, the very ark of the Puritan
covenant. Delivered in thunder to the Moses of Geneva, its.
vital necessity had been the theme of the Joshuas of Scot-
land, England and France. Knox produced a Scottish edition
of it; Cartwright, Travers and Udall composed treatises
expounding it. Bancroft exposed its perils for the established
ecclesiastical order.“ Theword “discipline” implied essen-
tially “a directory of Church government,” established in
order that “the wicked may be corrected with ecclesiastical
censures, according to the quality of the fault”;35 and the
proceedings of Puritan classes in the sixteenth century show
that the conception of a rule of life, to be enforced by the
pressure of the common conscience, and in the last resort
by spiritual penalties, was a vital part of their system.
When, at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the sectaries in
London described their objects as not merely the “free and
pure" preaching of the Gospel, nor the pure ministration of
the sacraments, but “to have, not the fylthye cannon lawe,
but disciplyne onelye and altogether agreeable to the same
heavenlye and Allmightye word of our good Lorde Jesus
Chryste,”3° the antithesis suggests that something more
than verbal instruction is intended. Bancroft noted that
it was the practice, when a sin was committed by one of the
faithful, for the elders to apply rst admonishment and then
excommunication. The minute-book of one of the fewclasses
whose records’ survive con rms his statement.3"
All this early movement had almost ickered out before
the end of the sixteenth century. But the conception lay ct
the very root of Presbyterianism, and it re-emerged in the
system of church government which the supereilious Scotch
Commissioners at the Westminster Assembly steered to
inconclusive victory, between Erastians on the right and
Independents on the left. The destruction of the Court of
High Commission, of the temporal jurisdiction of all per-
sons in Holy Orders, and nally, with the abolition of episco-
pacy, of the ecclesiastical courts themselves, left a vacuum.
“Mr. Henderson,” wrote the insufferable Baillie, “has ready
now a short treatise, much called for, of our church discip-
line.”‘"‘ In June 1646 an unenthusiastie Parliament accepted
the ordinance which, after a three years’ debate of intolerable
tedium, emerged from the Assembly's Committee on the
Discipline and Government of the Church, and which pro-
vided for the suspension by the elders of persons guilty of
scandalous offences. Detested by the Independents, and
cold-shouldered by Parliament, which had no intention of
admitting the divine right of presbyteries, the system never
took deep root, and in London, at least, there appears to be
no evidence of any exercise of jurisdiction by elders or
classes. In parts of Lancashire, on the other hand, it seems to
have been actively at work, down, at any rate, to 1649.
The change in the political situation, in particular the
triumph of the army, prevented it, Mr. Shaw thinks, from
functioning longer.”
“Discipline” included all questions of moral conduct, and
of these, in an age when a great mass of economic relations
were not the almost automatic reactions of an impersonal
mechanism, but a matter of human kindliness or ineanness
between neighbours in village or borough, economic conduct
was naturally part. Calvin and Beza, perpetuating with a
new intensity the mcdieeval idea of a Church-civilization,
had sought to make Geneva a pattern, not only of doctrinal
purity, but of social righteousness and commercial morality.
Those who had drunk from their spring continued, in even
less promising environments, the same ‘tradition. Bucer,
who wrote when something more fundamental than a
GODLY DISCIPLINE V. RELIGION OF TRADE 2l$
politician's reformation seemed possible to enthusiasts with
their eyes on Geneva, had urged the reconstruction of every
side of the economic life of a society which was to be Church
and State in one.4° English Puritanism, while accepting after
some hesitation Calvin’s much quali ed condonation of
moderate interest, did not intend in other respects to
countenance a laxity welcome only to worldlings. Knewstub
appealed to the teaching of “that worthy instrument of
God, Mr. Calvin," to prove that the habitualusurer ought
to be “thrust out of the society of men.” Smith embroidered
the same theme. Baro, whose Puritanism lost him his pro-
fessorship, denounced the “usual practice amongst rich men,
and some of the greater sort, who by lending, or by giving
out their money to usury, are wont to snare and oppress the
poor and needier sort." Cartwright, the most famous leader
of Elizabethan Puritanism, described usury as “a hainous
offence against God and his Church,” and laid down that
the offender should be excluded from the sacraments until
he satis ed the congregation of his penitence.“ The ideal
of all was that expressed in the apostolic injunction to be
content with a modest competence and to shun the allure-
ments of riches. “Every Christian man is bound in conscience
before God,” wrote Stubbes, “to provide for his household
and family, but yet so as his immoderate care surpasse not
the bands, nor yet transcend the limits, of true Godlynes. . . .
So farre from covetousnes and from immoderate care would
the Lord have us, that we ought not this day to care for
to-morrow, for (saith he) sufficient to the day is the travail
of the same.”‘-’-2
The most in uential work on social ethics written in the
rst half of the seventeenth century from the Puritan stand-
point was Ames’ De Conscientia, a manual of Christian
conduct which was intended to supply the brethren with the
practical guidance which had been offered in the Middle
Ages by such works as Dives er Pauper. It became a standard
authority, quoted again and again by subsequent writers.
Forbidden to preach by the bishop of London, Ames spent
more than twenty years in Holland, where he held a chair of
theology at the University of Franeker, and his experience
of social life in the country which was then the business
capital of Europe makes the remorseless rigour of his social
doctrine the more remarkable. He accepts, as in his day was
inevitable, the impossibility of distinguishing between
interest on capital invested in business, and interest on
capital invested in land, since men put money indiilerently
into both, and, like Calvin, he denies that interest is for-
bidden in principle by Scripture or natural reason. But,
like Calvin, he surrounds his indulgence with quali cations;
he requires that no interest shall be charged on loans to the
needy, and describes as the ideal investment for Christians
one in which the lender shares risks with the borrower, and
demands only “a fair share of the pro ts, according to the
degree in which God has blessed him by whom the money is
used.” His teaching with regard to prices is not less con-
servative. “To wish to buy cheap and to sell dear is common
(as Augustine observes), but it is a common vice.” Men
must not sell above the maximum xed by public authority,
though they may sell below it, since it is xed to protect the
buyer; when there is no legal maximum, they must follow
the market price and “the judgment of prudent and good
men.” They must not take advantage of the necessities of
individual buyers, must not overpraise their wares, must not
sell them dearer merely because they have cost them much
to get.“ Puritan utterances on the subject of enclosing were
equally trenchant.“
Nor was such teaching merely the pious pedantry of the
pulpit. It found some echo in contrite spirits; it left some
imprint on the conduct of congregations. If D’E.wes was the
unresisting victim of a more than ordinarily aggressive con-
science, he was also a man of ‘the world who played a not
inconspicuous part in public a airs; and lD'Ewes not only
ascribed_ the re which destroyed his father's house to the
judgment of Heaven on ill-gotten. gains, but expresslypre-
scribed in his will that, in order to avoid the taint of the
accursed thing, provision should be made for his daughters,
not by investing his capital at a xed—--and therefore usurious
—rate of interest, but by the purchase either of land or of
annuities.“ The classis which met at Dedham in the eighties
of the sixteenth century was concerned partly with questions
of ceremony, of church government, of the right use of
Sunday, and with the weighty problems whether boys of
sixteen might wear their hats in church, and by what marks
one might detect a witch. But it discussed also what pro-
vision could be made to check vagrancy; advised the
brethren to con ne their dealings to “the godliest of that
trade” (of cloth making); recommended the establishment
in the township of a scheme of universal education, that of
children of parents too poor to meet the cost being defrayed
from collections made in church; and urged that each
well-to-do householder should provide in his home for two
(or, if less ablc, one) of his impoverished neighbours who
“walke christianly and honestlie in their callinges.”4“ In the
ever-lengthening list of scandalous and notorious sins to be
punished by exclusion from the sacrament, which was elabo-
rated by the Westminster Assembly, a place was found, not
only for drunkards, swearers and blasphemers, worshippers
and makers of images, senders or carriers of challenges,
persons dancing, gaming, attending plays on the Lord‘s day,
or resorting to witches, wizards and fortune-tellers, but for
the more vulgar vices of those who fell into extortion,
barratry and bribery." The classis of Bury in Lancashire
(quantum mumtus!) took these economic lapses seriously.
It decided in 1647, after considerable debate, that “usury is a
scandalous sin, deserving suspention upon obstinacy."4°
It was a moment when good men were agog to cast the
money-changers from the temple and to make straight the
way of the Lord. “God hath honnored you in callinge you
to a place of power and trust, and hee expects that you
2l8 THE PURITAN MOVEMENT
should bee faithful! to that trust. You are postinge to the
grave every day; you dwell up-pon the borders of eternity;
your breath is in your nostrells; therfore duble and treble
your resolutions to bee zealous in a good thinge. . . . How
dreadfull will a dieinge bed bee to a negligent magistrate!
What is the reward of a slothfull servant? Is it not to bee
punished with everlastinge destruction from the presence of
the Lord ?”4° Such, in that singular age, was the language
in which the mayor of Salisbury requested the justices of
Wiltshire to close four public-houses. Apparently they closed
them.
The attempt to crystallize social morality in an objective
discipline was possible only in a theocracy; and, still eloquent
in speech, theocracy had abdicated in fact, even before the
sons of Belial returned to cut down its groves and lay waste
its holy places. In an age when the right to dissent from the
State Church was still not fully established, its defeat was
fortunate, for it was the victory of tolerance. It meant,
however, that the discipline of the Church gave place to the
attempt to, promote refonn through the action of the State,
which reached its height in the Barebones Parliament. Pro-
jects for law reform, marriage reform and nancial reform,
the reform of prisons and the relief of debtors, jostled each
other on its committees; while outside it there were murmurs
among radicals against social and economic privilege, which
were not to be heard again till the days of the Chartists, and
which to the conservative mind of Cromwell seemed to por-
tend mere anarchy. The transition from the idea of a moral
code enforced by the Church, which had been characteristic
ofearl-y Calvinism, to the economic individualism of the later
Puritan movement took place, in fact, by way of the demo-
cratic agitation of the Independents. Abhorring the whole
mechanism of ecclesiastical discipline and compulsory
conformity, they endeavoured to achieve the same social
and ethical ends by political action.
The change was momentous. If the English Social Demo-
cratic movement has any single source, that source is to be
found in the New Model Army. But the conception implied
in the attempt to formulate a scheme of economic ethics—-
the theory that every department of life falls beneath the
same all-encompassing arch of religion-was too deeply
rooted to be exorcised merely by political changes, or even
by the more corroding march of economic development.
Expelled from the world of fact, where it had always been a
stranger and a sojourner, it survived in the world of ideas,
and its champions in the last half of the century laboured it
the more, precisely because they knew that it must be
conveyed to their audiences by teaching and preaching or
not at all. Of those champions the most learned, the most
practical, and the most persuasive was Richard Baxter.
How Baxter endeavoured to give practical instruction to
his congregation at Kidderminster, he himself has told us.
“Every Thursday evening my neighbours that were most
desirous and had opportunity met at my house, and there
one of them repeated the sermon, and afterwards they pro-
posed what doubts any of them had about the sermon, or
any other case of conscience, and I resolved their doubts.”=i°
Both in form and in matter, his Christian Directory, or a
Summ of Practical Theologie and Cases 0j'C0nsct'cnce51 is 3
remarkable book. It is, in essence, a Puritan Summa Theo-
logica and Summa Moralis in one; its method of treatment
descends directly from that of the mcdimval Summte, and
it is, perhaps, the last important English specimen of a
famous genus. Its object, as Baxter explains in his intro-
duction, is “the resolving of practical cases of conscience,
and the reducing of theoretical knowledge into serious
Christian practice." Divided into four parts, Ethics, Econo-
mics, Ecclesiastics and Politics, it has as its purpose to
establish the rules of a Christian casuistry, which may be
sufficiently detailed and precise to afford practical guidance
to the proper conduct of men in the dillerent relations of
life, as lawyer, physician, schoolmaster, soldier, master and
servant, buyer and seller, landlord and tenant, lender and
borrower, ruler and subject. Part of its material is derived
from the treatment of similar questions by previous writers,
both before and after the Reformation, and Baxter is eon-
scious of continuing a great tradition. But it is, above all
things, realistic, and its method lends plausibility to the
suggestion that it originated in an attempt to answer prac-
tical questions put to its author by members of his congrega-
tion. Its aim is not to overwhelm by authority, but to con-
vince by an appeal to the enlightened common sense of the
Christian reader. It does not overlook, therefore, the prac-
tical facts of a world in which commerce is carried on by the
East India Company in distant markets, trade is universally
conducted on credit, the iron manufacture is a large-scale
industry demanding abundant supplies of capital and
olTering a pro table opening to the judicious investor,
and the relations of landlords and tenants have been thrown
into confusion by the re of London. Nor does it ignore the
moral qualities for the cultivation of which an opportunity is
offered by the life of business. It takes as its starting-point
the commercial environment of the Restoration, and its
teaching is designed for “Rome or London, not Fools’
Paradise."
Baxter’s acceptance of the realities of his age makes the
content of his teaching the more impressive. The attempt to
formulate a casuistry of economic conduct obviously implies
that economic relations are to be regarded merely as one
department of human behaviour, for which each man is
morally responsible, not as the result of an impersonal
mechanism, to which ethical judgments are irrelevant.
Baxter declines, therefore, to admit the convenient dualism,
which exoncrates the individual by representing his actions
as the outcome of uncontrollable forces. The Christian, he
insists, is committed by his faith to the acceptance of certain
ethical standards, and these standards are as obligatory in
the sphere of economic transactions as in any other province
of human activity. To the conventional objection that
religion has nothing to do with business-——that “every man
will get as much as he can have and that caveat emptor is the
only security"-—he answers bluntly that this way of dealing
does not hold among Christians. Whatever the laxity of the
law, the Christian is bound to consider rst the golden rule
and the public good. Naturally, therefore, he is debarred
from making money at the expense of other persons, and
certain pro table avenues of commerce are closed to him
at the outset. “It is not lawful to take up or keep up any
oppressing monopoly or trade, which tends to enrich you
by the loss of the Commonwealth or of many.”
But the Christian must not only eschew the obvious
extortion practised by the monopolist, the engrosser, the
organizer of a corner or a combine. He must carry on his
business in the spirit of one who is conducting a public
service; he must order it for-the advantage of his neighbour
as much as, and, if his neighbour be poor, more than, for
his own. He must not desire “to get another’s goods or
labour for less than it is worth.” He must not secure a good
price for his own wares “by extortion working upon mcn’s
ignorance, error, or necessity.” When prices are xedby law,
he must strictly observe the legal maximum; when they are
not, he must follow the price xed by common estimatio.-1.
If he nds a buyer who is willing to give more, he “must
not make too great an advantage of his convenience or
desire, but be glad that [he] can pleasure him upon equal,
fair, and. honest terms,” for “it is a false rule of them that
think their commodity is worth as much as any one will
give.” If the seller foresees that in the future prices are likely
to fall, he must not make pro t out of his neighbour’s
ignorance, but must tell him so. If he foresees that they will
rise, he may hold his wares back, but only-—a somewhat
embarrassing exception-—-if it be not “to the hurt of the
Commonwealth, as if . . . keeping it in be the cause of the
dearth, and . . . bringing it forth would help to prevent it.”
If he is buying from the poor, “charity must be exercised as
well as justice”; the buyer must pay the full price that the
goods are worth to himself, and, rather than let the seller
suffer because he cannot stand out for his price, should offer
him a loan or persuade some one else to do so. In no case
may a man doctor his wares in order to get for them a higher
price than they are really worth, and in no case may he
conceal any defects of quality; if he was so unlucky as to
have bought an inferior article, he “may not repair [his]
less by doing as [he] was done by . . . no more than [he]
may cut another’s purse because [his] was cut.” Rivalry in
trade, Baxter thinks, is inevitable. But the Christian must
not snatch a good bargain “out of greedy covetousness,
nor to the injury of the poor . . . nor . . . so as to disturb
that due and civil order which should be among moderate
men in trading.” On the contrary, if “a covetous oppressor”
offer a poor man less than his goods are worth, “it may be a
duty to offer the poor man the worth of his commodity and
save him from the oppressor.”
The principles which should determine the contract
between buyer and seller are applied equally to all other
economic relations. Usury, in the sense of payment for a
loan, is not in itself unlawful for Christians. But it becomes
so when the lender does not allow the borrower “such a
proportion of the gain as his labour, hazard, or poverty
doth require, but . . . will live at ease upon his labours”;
or when, in spite of the borrower's misfortune, he rigorously
exacts his pound of esh; or when interest is demanded for a
loan which charity would require to be free. Masters must
discipline their servants for their good; but it is “an odious
oppression and injustice to defraud a servant or labourer of
his wages, yea, or to give him less than he deservcth.” As
the descendant of a family of yeomen, “free,” as he says,
“from the temptations of poverty and riches,"52 Baxter
had naturally strong views as to the ethics of landowning.
Signi cantly enough, he deals with them under the general
rubric of “Cases of oppression, especially of tenants,”
oppression being de ned as the “injuring of inferiors who are
unable to resist or to right themselves.” “It is too common a
sort of oppression for the rich in all places to domincer too
insolently over the poor, and force them to follow their
wills and to serve their interest, be it right or wrong. . . .
Especially unmerciful landlords are the common and sore
oppressors of the countrymen. If a few men can but get
money enough to purchase all the land in a county, they
think that they may do with their own as they list, and set
such hard bargains of it to their tenants, that they are all
but as their servants. . . . An oppressor is an Anti-Christ
and an Anti-God . . . not only the agent of the Devil, but his
image.” As in his discussion of prices, the gist of Baxter’s
analysis of the cases of conscience which arise in the relations
of landlord and tenant is that no man may secure pecuniary
gain for himself by injuring his neighbour. Except in unusual
circumstances, a landlord must not let his land at the full
competitive rent which it would fetch in the market:
“Ordinarily the common sort of tenants in England should
have so much abated of the fullest worth that they may
comfortably live on it, and follow their labours with cheer-
fulness of mind and liberty to serve God in their families,
and to mind the matters of their salvation, and not to be
necessitated to such toil and care and pinching want, as shall
make them liker slaves than free men.” He must not improve
(t'.e., enclose) his land without considering the effect on the
tenants, or evict his tenants without compensating them,
and in such a way as to cause depopulation; nor must a new-
comer take a holding over the sitting tenant's head by offer-
ing “a greater rent than he can give or than the landlord
hath just cause to require of him.” The Christian, in short,
while eschewing “causeless, perplexing, melancholy scruples,
which would stop a man in the course of his duty," must so
manage his business as to “avoid sin rather than loss,” and
seek rst to keep his conscience in peace.
Z24 'TH'E PURITAN MOVEMENT
The rst characteristic to strike the modern reader in all
this teaching is its conservatism. In spite of the economic and
political revolutions of the past two centuries, how small,
after all, the change in the presentation of the social ethics
of the Christian faith! A few months after the appearance of
the Clzrt'stt'an Directory, the Stop of the Exchequer tore a
hole in the already intricate web of London nance, and
sent a shiver through the money-markets of Europe. But
Baxter, though no mere antiquarian, discourses of equity in
bargaining, ofjust prices, of reasonable rents, of the sin of
usury, in the same tone, if not with quite the same conclu-
sions, as a mediaaval Schoolman, and he differs from one
of the later Doctors, like St. Antonino, hardly more than
St. Antonino himself had differed from Aquinas. Seven years
later Bunyan published The Life and Death of Mr. Badman.
Among the vices which it pilloried were the sin of extor-
tion, “most commonly committed by men of trade, who
without all conscience, when they have an advantage, will
make a prey of their neighbour,” the covetousness of “huclt-
sters, that buy up the poor man's victual wholesale and
sell it to him again for unreasonable gains," the avarice of
usurers, who watch till “the poor fall into their mouths,”
and “of those vile wretches called pawnbrokers, that lend
money and goods to poor people, who are by necessity
forced to such an inconvenience, and will make by one
trick or another the interest of what they so lend amount to
thirty and forty, yea sometimes fty pounds by the year.”
As Christian and Christiana watched Mr. Badman thus
bite and pinch the poor in his shop in Bedford, before they
took. staff and scrip for their journey to a more distant City,
they remembered that the Lord himself will plead the cause
of the a licted against them that oppress them, and re ected,
taught by the dealings of Ephron the son of Zohar, and of
David with Ormon the Jebusite, that there is a “wickedness,
as in selling too dear, so in buying too cheap."~¥3 Brother
Bcrthold of Regensburg had said the san1e four centuries
GODLY DISCIPLINE V. RELIGION OF TRADE 225
before, in his racy sermons in Germany. The emergence of
the idea that “business is business," and that the world of
commercial transactions is a closed compartment with laws
of its own, if more ancient than is often supposed, did not
win so painless a triumph as is sometimes suggested. Puritan
as well as Catholic accepted without demur the view which
set all human interests and activities within the compass of
religion. Puritans, as well as Catholics, essayed the formid-
able task of formulating a Christian casuistry of economic
conduch
They essayed it. But they succeeded even less than the
Popes and Doctors whose teaching, not always unwittingly,
they repeated. And their failure had its roots, not merely in
the obstacles o 'ered by the ever more recalcitrant opposition
of a commercial environment, but, like all failures which are
signi cant, in the soul of Puritanism itself. Virtues are often
conquered by vices, but their rout is most complete when it is
inflicted by other virtues, more militant, more e icient, or
more congenial, and it is not only tares which choke the
ground where the good seed is sown. The fundamental
question, after all, is not what kind of rules a faith enjoins,
but what type of character it esteems and cultivates. To the
scheme of Christian ethics which offered admonitions
against the numberless disguises assumed by the sin which
sticketh fast between buying and selling, the Puritan
character offered, not direct opposition, but a polished
surface on which these ghostly admonitions could nd no
enduring foot-hold. The rules of Christian morality elabor-
ated by Baxter were subtle and sincere. But they were like
seeds carried by birds from a distant and fertile plain, and
dropped upon a glacier. They were at once embalmed and
sterilized in a river of ice.
“The capitalist spirit" is as old as history, and was not, as
has sometimes been said, the offspring of Puritanism. But it
found in certain aspects of later Puritanism a tonic which
braced its energies and forti ed its already vigorous temper.
n mas)
At rst sight, no contrast could be more violent than that
between the iron collectivism, the almost military discipline,
the remorseless and violent rigours practised in Calvin’s
Geneva, and preached elsewhere, if in a milder form, by his
disciples, and the impatient rejection of all traditional
restrictions on economic enterprise which was the temper of
the English business world after the Civil War. In reality, the
same ingredients were present throughout, but they were
mixed in changing proportions, and exposed to different
temperatures at different times. Like traits of individual
character which are suppressed till the approach of maturity
releases them, the tendencies in Puritanism, which were to
make it later a potent ally of the movement against the
control of economic relations in the name either of social
morality or of the public interest, did not reveal themselves
till political and economic changes had prepared a congenial
environment for their growth. Nor, once those conditions
were created, was it only England which witnessed the
transformation. In all countries alike, in Holland, in
America, in Scotland, in Geneva itself, the social theory of
Calvinism went through the same process of development.
It had begun by being the very soul of authoritarian regi-
mcntation. It ended by being the vehicle of an almost Utili-
tarian individualism. While social reformers in the six-
tcenth century could praise Calvin for his economic rigour,
their successors in Restoration England, if of one persuasion,
denounced him as the parent of economic licence, if of
another, applauded Calvinist communities for their com-
mercial enterprise and for their freedom from antiquated
prejudices on the subject of economic morality. So little do
those who shoot the arrows of the spirit know where they
will light.
TRIUMPH o1= "run ECONOMIC VIRTUES 221
(iii)
The Triumph of the Economic Virtues
"One beam in a dark place,” wrote one who knew the
travail of the spirit, “hath exceeding much refreshment in it.
Blessed be His name for shining upon so dark a heart as
mine."-54 While the revelation of God to the individual soul
is the centre of all religion, the essence of Puritan theology
was that it made it, not only the centre, but the whole cir-
cumference and substance, dismissing as dross and vanity
all else but this secret and solitary communion. Grace alone
can save, and this grace is the direct gift of God, unmediated
by any earthly institution. The elect cannot by any act of
their own evoke it; but they can prepare their hearts to
receive it, and cherish it when received. They will prepare
them best, if they empty them of all that may disturb the
intentness of their lonely vigil. Like an engineer, who, to
canalize the rush of the oncoming tide, dams all channels
save that through which it is to pour, like a painter who
makes light visible by plunging all that is not light in
gloom, the Puritan attunes his heart to the voice from
Heaven by an immense effort of concentration and abnega-
tion. To win all, he renounces all. When earthly props have
been cast down, the soul stands erect in the presence of God.
In nity is attained by a process of subtraction.
To a vision thus absorbed in a single intense experience,
not only religious and ecclesiastical systems, but the entire
world of human relations, the whole fabric of social institu-
tions, witnessing in all the wealth of their idealism and their
greed to the in nite creativeness of man, reveal themselves
in a new and wintry light. The re of the spirit burns brightly
on the hearth; but through the windows of his soul the
Puritan, unless a poet or a saint, looks on a landscape
touched by no breath of spring. What he sees is a forbidding
and frost-bound wilderness, rolling its snow-clad leagues
223 Tl-IE PURITAN MOVEMENT
towards the grave—a wilderness to be subdued with aching
limbs beneath solitary stars. Through it he must take his
way, alone. No aid can avail him: no preacher, for only the
elect can apprehend with the spirit the word of God; no
Church, for to the visible Church even reprobates belong;
no sacrament, for sacraments are ordained to increase the
glory of God, not to minister spiritual nourishment to man;
hardly God himself, for Christ died for the elect, and it may
well be that the majesty of the Creator is revealed by the
eternal damnation of all but a remnant of the created.“
His life is that of a soldier in hostile territory. He suffers
in spirit the perils which the rst settlers in America endured
in body, the sea behind, the untamed desert in front, a cloud
of inhuman enemies on either hand. Where Catholic and
Anglican had caught a glimpse of the invisible, hovering like
a consecration over the gross world of sense, and touching
its muddy vesture with the unearthly gleam of a divine, yet
familiar, beauty, the Puritan mourned for a lost Paradjse
and a creation sunk in sin. Where they had seen society as a
mystical body, compact of members varying in order and
degree, but dignified by participation in the common life of
Christendom, he saw a bleak antithesis between the spirit
which quickeneth and an alien, indifferent or hostile world.
Where they had reverenced the decent order whereby past
was knit to present, and man to man, and man to God,
through fellowship in works of charity, in festival and fast,
in the prayers and ceremonies of the Church, he turned with
horror from the lthy rags of human righteousness. Where
they, in short, had found comfort in a sacrament, he started
back from a snare set to entrap his soul.
We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live.
Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, he

made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his
contempt.
TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 229
Those who seek God in isolation from their fellowmen,
unless trebly armed for the perils of the quest, are apt to nd,
not God, but a devil, whose countenance bears an embarrass-
ing resemblance to their own. The moral self-suf ciency of
the Puritan nerved his will, but it corroded his sense of social
solidarity. For, if each individual’s destiny hangs on a private
transaction between himself and his Maker, what room is
left for human intervention? A servant of Jehovah more
than of Christ, he revered God as a Judge rather than loved
him as a Father, and was moved less by compassion for his
erring brethren, than by impatient indignation at the blind-
ness of vessels of wrath who “sinned their mercies." A
spiritual aristocrat, who sacri ced fraternity to liberty, he
drew from his idealization of personal responsibility a
theory of individual rights, which, secularized and general-
ized, was to be among the most potent explosives that the
world has known. He drew from it also a scale of ethical
values, in which the traditional scheme of Christian virtues
was almost exactly reversed, and which, since he was above
all things practical, he carried as a dynamic into the routine
of business and political life.
For, since conduct and action, though availing nothing to
attain the free gift of salvation, are a proof that the gift has
been accorded, what is rejected as a means is resumed as a
consequence, and the Puritan ings himself into practical
activities with the daamonic energy of one who, all doubts
allayed, is conscious that he is a sealed and chosen vessel.
Once engaged in affairs, he brings to them both the qualities
and limitations of his creed, in all their remorseless logic.
Called by God to labour in his vineyard, he has within
himself a principle at once of energy and of order, which
makes him irresistible both in war and in the struggles of
commerce. Convinced that character is all and circumstances
nothing, he sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way,
not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral
failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of
suspicion—though like other gifts they may be abused-
but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and
will. Tempered by self-examination, self-discipline, self-
control, he is the practical ascetic, whose victories are won
not in the cloister, but on the battle eld, in the counting-
house, and in the market.
This temper, of course with in nite varieties of quality and
emphasis, found its social organ in those middle and com-
mercial classes who were the citadel of the Puritan spirit,
and whom, “ennobled by their own industry and vi11ue,”5‘5
Milton described as the standard-bearers of progress and
enlightenment. We are so accustomed to think‘ of England as
par excellence the pioneer of economic progress, that we are
apt to forget how recently that role has been assumed. In
the Middle Ages it belonged to the Italians, in the sixteenth
century to the Netherland dominions of the Spanish
Empire, in the seventeenth to the United Provinces, and,
above all, to the Dutch.
The England of Shakespeare and Bacon was still largely
medieval in its economic organization and social outlook,
more interested in maintaining customary standards of con-
sumption than in accumulating capital for future production,
with an aristocracy contemptuous of the economic virtues, a
peasantry farming for subsistence amid the organized con-
fusion of the open- eld village, and a small, if growing, body
of jealously conservative craftsmen. In such a society Puri-
tanism worked like the yeast which sets the whole mass
fermenting. It went through its slack and loosely knit texture
like a troop of Cromwell’s Ironsides through the disorderly
cavalry of Rupert. Where, as in Ireland, the elements were
so alien that assimilation was out of the question, the result
was a wound that festered for three centuries. In England the
effect was that at once of an irritant and of a tonic. Puri-
tanism had its own standards of social conduct, derived
partly from the obvious interests of the commercial classes,
partly from its conception of the nature of God and the
TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 23]
destiny of man. These standards were in sharp antithesis,
both to the considerable surviving elements of feudalism in
English society, and to the policy of the authoritarian State,
with its idea] of an ordered and graded society, whose
di erent members were to be maintained in their traditional
status by the pressure and protection of a paternal monarchy.
Sapping the former by its in uence, and overthrowing the
latter by direct attack, Puritanism became a potent force in
preparing the way for the commercial civilization which
nally triumphed at the Revolution.
The complaint that religious radicalism, which aimed at
upsetting the government of the Church, went hand in hand
with an economic radicalism, which resented the restraints
on individual self-interest imposed in the name of religion
or of social policy, was being made by the stricter school of
religious opinion quite early in the reign of Elizabeth."
Seventeenth-century writers repeated the charge that‘ the
Puritan conscience lost its delicacy where matters of business
were concerned, and some of them were suf ciently struck
by the phenomenon to attempt an historical explanation of
it. The example on which they usually seized—the symbol
of a supposed general disposition to laxity—was the indul-
gence shown by Puritan divines in the particular matter of
moderate interest. It was the elI'ect, so the picturesque story
ran,“ of the Marian persecution. The refugees who ed to
the Continent could not start business in a foreign country.
If, driven by necessity, they invested their capital and lived
on the proceeds, who could quarrel with so venial a lapse in
so good a cause‘? Subsequent writers embellished the picture.
The redistribution of property at the time of the Dissolution,
and the expansion of trade in the middle of the century, had
led, one of them argued, to a great increase in the volume
of credit transactions. The opprobrium which attached to
loans at interest-—“a sly and forbid practice”—-not only
among Romanists and Anglicans, but among honest Puri-
tans, played into the hands of the less scrupulous members of
232 TI-IE PURITAN MOVEMENT
“the faction.” Disappointed in politics, they took to money-
lending, and, without venturing to justify usury in theory,
defended it in practice. “Without the scandal of a recante-
tion, they contrived an expedient, by maintaining that,
though usury for the name were stark naught, yet for
widows, orphans and other impotents (therein principally
comprising the saints under persecution) it was very toler-
able, because pro table, and in a manner necessary."
Naturally, Calvin’s doctrine as to the legitimacy of moderate
interest was hailed by these hypocrites with a shout of glee.
“It took with the brethren like polygamy with the Turks,
recommended by the example of divers zealous ministers,
who themselves desired to pass for orphans of the rst
rank.”°° Nor was it only as the apologist of moderate
interest that Puritanism was alleged to reveal the cloven
hoof. Puritans themselves complained of a mercilessness in
driving hard bargains, and of a harshness to the poor, which
contrasted unfavourably with the practice of followers of the
unreformed religion. “The Papists,” wrote a Puritan in
1653, “may rise up against many of this generation. It is a
sad thing that -they should be more forward upon a bad
principle than a Christian upon a good one.”°°
Such, in all ages, is history as seen by the political pam-
phleteer. The real story was less dramatic, but more signi-
cant. From the very beginning Calvinism had comprised
two elements, which Calvin himself had fused, but which
contained the seeds of future discord. It had at once given a
whole-hearted imprimatur tothe life of business enterprise,
which most earlier moralists had regarded with suspicion,
and had laid upon it the restraining hand of an inquisitorial
discipline. At Geneva, where Calvinism was the creed of a
small and homogeneous city, the second aspect had pre-
dominated; in the many-sided life of England, where there
were numerous con icting interests to balance it, and where
it was long politically weak, the rst. Then, in the late six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries, had come the wave
TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 23.3
of commercial and nancial expansion-—companies, colo-
nies, capitalism in textiles, capitalism in mining, capitalism
in nance—on the crest of which the English commercial
classes, in Calvin’s day still held in leading-strings by
conservative statesmen, had climbed to a position of dignity
and affluence.
Naturally, as the Puritan movement came to its own, these
two elements ew apart. The eollectivist, half-communistie
aspect, which had never been acclimatized in England,
quietly dropped out of notice, to crop up once more, and
for the last time, to the disgust and terror of merchant and
landowner, in the popular agitation under the Common-
wealth. The individualism congenial to the world of business
became the distinctive characteristic of a Puritanism which
had arrived, and which, in becoming a political force, was
at once secularized and committed to a career of com-
promise. lts note was not the attempt to establish on earth a
“Kingdom of Christ,” but an ideal of personal character and
conduct, to be realized by the punctual discharge both of
public and private duties. Its theory had been discipline; its
practical result was liberty.
Given the social and political conditions of England, the
transformation was inevitable. The incompatibility of Pres-
byterianism with the strati ed arrangement of English society
had been remarked by Hooker.“ If the City Fathers of
Geneva had thrown o ' by the beginning of the seventeenth
century the religious collectivism of Calvin’s regime, it was
not to be expected that the landowners and bourgeoisie of an
aristocratic and increasingly commercial nation, however
much Calvinist theology might appeal to them, would view
with favour the social doctrines implied in Calvinist discip-
line. In the reign of the rst two Stuarts both economic
interests and political theory pulled them hard in the
opposite direction. “Mcrchants’ doings," the man of business
in Wilson’s Discourse upon Usury had observed, “must not
thus be overthwarted by preachers and others, that cannot
Hi
skill of their dealings.”62 Behind the elaborate facade of
Tudor State control, which has attracted the attention of
historians, an individualist movement had been steadily
developing, which found expression in opposition to the
traditional policy of stereotyping economic relations by
checking enclosure, controlling food supplies and prices,
interfering with the money-market and regulating the con-
ditions of the wage contract and of apprenticeship. In the
first forty years of the seventeenth century, on grounds both
of expediency and of principle, the commercial and pro-
pertied classes were becoming increasingly restive under the
whole system, at once ambitious and inef cient, of economic
paternalism. It was in the same sections of the community
that both religious and economic dissatisfaction were most
acute. Puritanism, with its idealization of the spiritual
energies which found expression in the activities of business
and industry, drew the isolated rivulets of discontent
together, and swept them forward with the dignity and
momentum of a religious and a social philosophy.
For it was not merely as the exponent of certain tenets as
to theology and church government, but as the champion of
interests and opinions embracing every side of the life of
society, that the Puritan movement came into collision with
the Crown. In reality, as is the case with most heroic ideo-
logies, the social and religious aspects of Puritanism were
not disentangled; they presented themselves, both to
supporters and opponents, as different facets of a single
scheme. “All that crossed the views of the needy courtiers,
the proud encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the
lewd nobility and gentry . . . whoever could endure a sermon,
modest habit or conversation, or anything good—all these
were Puritans."°3 The clash was not one of theories—a
systematic and theoretical individualism did not develop
till after the Restoration—but of contradictory economic
interests and incompatible conceptions of social expediency.
The economic policy haltingly pursued by the Govern-
TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 23$
ment of Charles I bore some resemblance to the system of
which a more uncompromising version was developed
between 1661 and 1685 by Colbert in France. It was one
which favoured an arti cial and State-promoted capitalism
—a capitalism resting on the grant of privileges and con-
cessions to company promoters who would pay for them,
and accompanied by an elaborate system of State control,
which again, if partly inspired by a genuine solicitude for
the public interest, was too often smeared with an odious
trail of nance. It found its characteristic expression in the
grant of patents, in the revival of the royal monopoly of
exchange business, against which the City had fought under
Elizabeth, in attempts to enforce by administrative action
compliance with the elaborate and impracticable code
controlling the textile trades and to put down speculation
in foodstuffs, and in raids on enclosing landlords, on
employers who paid in truck or evaded the rates xed by
assessment, and on justices who were negligent in the
administration of the Poor Laws. Such measures were
combined with occasional plunges into even more grandiose
schemes for the establishment of county granaries, for taking
certain industries into the hands of the Crown, and even for
the virtual nationalization of the cloth manufacture.“
“The very genius of that nation of people," wrote Straf-
ford to Laud of the Puritans, “leads them always to oppose,
as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that ever authority
ordains for them."“~" Against this whole attempt to convert
economic activity into an instrument of pro t for the
Government and its hangers-on—against, no less, the spas-
modic attempts of the State to protect peasants against
landlords, craftsmen against merchants, and consumers
against middlemen the interests which it thwarted and
curbed revolted with increasing pertinacity. Questions of
taxation, on which attention has usually been concentrated,
were in reality merely one element in a quarrel, which had
its deeper cause in the collision of incompatible social
philosophies. The Puritan tradesman had seen his business
ruined by a monopoly granted to a needy courtier, and
cursed Laud and his Popish soap. The Puritan goldsmith
or nancier had found his trade as a bullion-broker "ham-
pered by the re-establishment of the ancient of ce of Royal
Exchanger, and secured a resolution from the House of
Commons, declaring that the patent vesting it in Lord
Holland, and the proclamation forbidding the exchanging
of gold and silver by unauthorized persons, were a grievance.
The Puritan money-lender had been punished by the Court
of High Commission, and railed at the interference of
bishops in temporal affairs. The Puritan clothier, who had
suffered many things at the hands of interfering busybodies,
despatched from Whitehall to teach him his business, averted
discreet eyes when the Wiltshire workmen threw a more
than usually obnoxious Royal Commissioner into the Avon,
and, when the Civil War came, rallied to the Parliament.
The Puritan country gentleman had been harried by De-
population Commissions, and took his revenge with the
meeting of the Long Parliament. The Puritan merchant had
seen the Crown both squeeze money out of his company
and threaten its monopoly by encouraging courtly inter-
lopers to infringe its charter. The Puritan member of Parlia-
ment had invested in colonial enterprises, and had ideas as
to commercial policy which were not those of the Govern-
ment. Con dent in their own energy and acumen, proud of
their success, and regarding with profound distrust the
interference both of Church and of State with matters of
business and property rights, the commercial classes, in
spite of their attachment to a militant rnercantilism in
matters of trade, were, even before the Civil War, more than
half converted to the administrative nihilism which was to
be the rule of social policy in the century following it. Their
demand was the one which is usual in such circumstances.
It was that business affairs should be left to besettled by
business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated
morality or by misconccived arguments of public
policy.“
The separation of economic from ethical interests, which
was the note of all this movement, was in sharp opposition
to religious tradition, and it did not establish itself without a
struggle. Even in the very capital of European commerce
and nance, an embittered controversy was occasioned by
the refusal to admit usurers to communion or to confer
degrees upon them; it was only after a storm of pamph-
leteering, in which the theological faculty of the Univer-
sity of Utrecht performed prodigies of zeal and ingenuity,
that the States of Holland and West Friesland closed the
agitation by declaring that the Church had no concern with
questions of banking." In the French Calvinist Churches
the decline of discipline had caused lamentations a genera-
tion earlier." In America, the theocracy of Massachusetts,
merciless alike to religious liberty and to economic licence,
was about to be undermined by the rise of new States like
Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, whose tolerant, individualist
and utilitarian temper was destined to nd its greatest repre-
sentative in the golden common sense of Benjamin Frank-
lin.” “The sin of our too great fondness for trade, to the
neglecting of our more valuable interests,” wrote a Scottish
divine in I709, when Glasgow was on the eve of a triumphant
outburst of commercial enterprise, “I humbly think will be
written upon our judgment. . . . I am sure the Lord is
remarkably frowning upon our trade . . . since it was put in
the room of religion.”"°
In England, the growing disposition to apply exclusively
economic standards to social relations evoked from Puritan
writers and divines vigorous protests against usurious
interest, extortionate prices and the oppression of tenants by
landlords; The faithful, it was urged, had interpreted only
too literally the doctrine that the sinner was saved, not by
works, but by faith. Usury, “in time of Popery an odious
thing,”" had become a scandal. Professors, by their
covetousness, caused the enemies of the reformed religion to
blaspheme." The exactions of the forestaller and regrater
were never so monstrous or so immune from interference.
The hearts of the rich were never so hard, nor the necessities
of the poor so neglected. “The poor able to work are suffered
to beg; the impotent, aged and sick are not sufficiently
provided for, but almost starved with the allowance of 3d.
and 4d. a piece a week. . . . These are the last times indeed.
Men generally are all for themselves. And some would set
up such, having a form of religion, without the power of it.”'"*
These utterances came, however, from that part of the
Puritan mind which looked backward. That which looked
forward found in the rapidly growing spirit of economic
enterprise something not uncongenial to its own temper, and
went out to welcome it as an ally. What in Calvin had been a
quali ed concession to practical exigencies, appeared in some
of his later followers as a frank idealization of the life of the
trader, as the service of God and the training-ground of
the soul. Discarding the suspicion of economic motives,
which had been as characteristic of the reformers as of
medizeval theologians, Puritanism in its later phases added a
halo of ethical sancti cation to the appeal of economic
expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of
religion and the calls of business ended their long estrange-
ment in an unanticipated reconciliation. Its spokesmen
pointed out, it is true, the peril to the soul involved in a
single-minded concentration on economic interests. The
enemy, however, was not riches, but the bad habits some-
times associated with them, and its warnings against an
excessive preoccupation with the pursuit of gain wore more
and more the air of after-thoughts, appended to teaching
the main tendency and emphasis of which were little affected
by these incidental quali cations. It insisted, in short, that
money-making, if not free from spiritual dangers, was not a
danger and nothing else, but that it could be, and ought to
be, carried on for the greater glory of God.
The conception to which it appealed to bridgethe gulf
sprang from the very heart of Puritan theology. It was that
expressed in the characteristic and oft-used phrase, “a
Calling."" The rational order of the universe is the work of
God, and its plan requires that the individual should labour
for God’s glory. There is a spiritual calling and a temporal
calling. It is the rst duty of the Christian to know and
believe in God; it is by faith that he will be saved. But
faith is not a mere profession, such as that of Talkative cf
Prating Row, whose “religion is to make a noise.” The only
genuine faith is the faith which produces works. “At the day
of Doom men shall be judged according to their fruits. It
will not be said then, Did you believe? but, Were you
doers, or talkers only”'?"'5 The second duty of the Christian
is to labour in the affairs of practical life, and this second
duty is subordinate only to the rst. “God,” wrote a Puritan
divine, “doth call every man and woman . . . to serve him in
some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own
and the common good. L . . The Great Govemour of the
world hath appointed to every man his proper post and
province, and let him be never so active out of his sphere, he
will be at a great loss, if he do not keep his own vineyard
and mind his own business.”"'°
From this reiterated insistence on secular obligations as
imposed by the divine will, it follows that, not withdrawal
from the world,'but the conscientious discharge of the duties
of business, is among the loftiest of religious and moral
virtues. “The begging friars and such monks as live only to
themselves and to their formal devotion, but do employ
themselves in no one thing to further their own subsistence
or the good of mankind . . . yet have the con dence to boast
of this their course as a state of perfection; which in very
deed, as to the worthiness of it, falls short of the poorest
cobbler, for his is a calling of God, and theirs is none.”"
The idea was not a new one. Luther had advanced it as a
weapon against monasticism. But for Luther, with his
patriarchal outlook on economic affairs, the calling means
normally that state of life in which the individual has been
set by Heaven, and against which it is impiety to rebel. On
the lips of Puritan divines, it is not an invitation to resigna-
tion, but the bugle-call.which summons the elect to the long
battle which will end only with their death. “The world is all
before them.” They are to hammer out their salvation, not
merely in vocarione, but per vocarionem. The calling is not a
condition in which the individual is born, but a strenuous
and exacting enterprise, to be undertaken, indeed, under the
guidance of Providence, but to be chosen by each man for
himself, with a deep sense of his solemn responsibilities.
“God hath given to man reason for this use, that he should
rst consider, then choose, then put in execution; and it is a
preposterous and brutish thing to x or fall upon any weighty
business, such as a calling or condition of life, without a
careful pondering it in the balance of sound reason."'*°
Laborare es: orare. By the Puritan moralist the ancient
maxim is repeated with a new and intenser signi cance. The
labour which he idealizes is not simply a requirement
imposed by nature, or a punishment for thesin of Adam.
It is itself a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than
that demanded of any order of mendicants—a discipline
imposed by the will of God, and to be undergone, not in
solitude, but in the punctual discharge of secular duties.
It is not merely an economic means, to be laid aside when
physical needs have been satis ed. It is a spiritual end, for in
it alone can the soul nd health, and it must be continued
as an ethical duty long after it has ceased to be a material
necessity. Work thus conceived stands at the very opposite
pole from “good works,” as they were understood, or mis-
understood, by Protestants. They, it was thought, had been
a series of single transactions, performed as compensation
for particular sins, or out of anxiety to acquire merit. What
is required of the Puritan is not individual meritorious acts,
but a holy life—a system in which every element is grouped
round a central idea, the service of God, from which all
disturbing irrelevances have been pruned, and to which all
minor interests are subordinated.
His conception of that life was expressed in the words,
“Be wholly taken up in diligent business of your lawful
callings, when you are not exercised in the more immediate
service of God.”79 In order to deepen his spiritual life, the
Christian must be prepared to narrow it. He “is blind in no
man's cause, but best sighted in his own. He confines himself
to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his ngersin
needless res. . . . He sees the falseness of it [the world]
and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others so far as
not to be damaged by their disappointment.”3° There must
be no idle leisure; “those that.are prodigal of their time
despise their own souls.”31 Religion must be active, not
merely contemplative. Contemplation is, indeed, a kind of
self-indulgence. “To neglect this [i.e., bodily employment
and mental labour] and say, ‘I will pray and meditate,‘ is as
if your servant should refuse your greatest work and tye
himself to some lesser, easic part. . . . God hath commanded
you some way or other to labour for your daily bread.”"
The rich are no more excused from work than the poor,
though they may rightly use their riches to select some
occupation specially serviceable to others. Covetousness
is a danger to the soul, but it is not so grave a danger as
sloth. “The standing pool is prone to putrefaction; and it
were better to beat down the body and to keep it in sub-
jection by a laborious calling, than through luxury to
become a castaway.”-3 So far from poverty being meri-
torious, it is a duty to choose the more pro table occupa-
tion. “If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get
more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to
any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way,
you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and you refuse to
be God’s steward.” Luxtury, unrestrained pleasure, personal
extravagance, can have no place in a Christian's conduct,
for “every penny which is laid out . . . must be done as by
God’s own appointment.” Even excessive devotion to friends
and relations is to be avoided. “It is an irrational act, and
therefore not t for a rational creature, to love any one
farther than reason will allow us. . . . It very often taketh up
men’s minds so as .to hinder their love to God.”34 The
Christian life, in short, must be systematic‘ and organized,
the work of an iron will and a cool intelligence. Those who
have read Mill’s account of his father must have been
struck by the extent to which Utilitarianism was not merely
a political doctrine, but a moral attitude. Some of the
links in the Utilitarian coat of mail were forged, it may be
suggested, by the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century.
The practical application of these generalities to business
is set out in the numerous works composed to expound the
rules of Christian conduct in the varied relations of life. If
one may judge by their titles—Navigarion Spiritualized,
Husbandry Spiritualized, The Religious Weaver95—there
must have been a considerable demand for books conducive
to professional edi cation. A characteristic specimen is The
Traclesmmfs Calling,“ by Richard Steele. The author, after
being deprived of a country living under the Act of Uni-
formity, spent his declining years as minister of a congrega-
tion at Armourers Hall in London, and may be presumed
to have understood the spiritual requirements of the City in
his day, when the heroic age of Puritanism was almost over
and enthusiasm was no longer a virtue. No one who was
writing a treatise on economic ethics to-day‘ would address
himself primarily to the independent shopkeeper, as the
gure most representative of the business community, and
Steele’s book throws a ood of light on the problems and
outlook of the bourgeoisie, in an age before the centre of
economic gravity had shifted from the substantial tradesman
to the exporting merchant, the industrial capitalist and the
nancier.
Like Baxter, he is acquainted with the teaching of earlier
authorities as to equity in bargaining. He is doubtful, how-
ever, of its practical utility. Obvious frauds in matters of
quality and weight are to be avoided; an honest tradesman
ought not to corner the market, or “accumulate two or three
callings merely to increase his riches," or oppress the poor;
nor should he seek more than a “reasonable proportion of
gain,” or “lie on the catch to make [his] markets of others’
straits.” _But Steele rejects as useless in practice the various
objective standards of a reasonable pro t—cost of produc-
tion, standard of life, customary prices—which had been
suggested in earlier ages, and concludes that the individual
must judge for himself. “Here, as in many other cases, an
upright conscience must be the clerk of the market.”
In reality, however, the characteristic of The Trn(lesman’.s
Calling, as of the age in which it was written, is not the relics
of medizeval doctrine which linger embalmed in its guileless
pages, but the robust common sense, which carries the
author lightly over traditional scruples on a tide of genial,
if Philistine, optimism. For his main thesis is a comfortable
onc——that there is no necessary con ict between religion and
business. “Prudence and Piety were always very good
friends. . . . You may gain enough of both worlds if you
would mind each in its place.” His object is to show how that
agreeable result may be produced, by dedicating business—-
with due reservations—to the service of God, and he has
naturally little to say on the moral casuistry of economic
conduct, because he is permeated by the idea that trade
itself is a kind of religion. A tradesman’s rst duty is to get a
full insight into his calling, and to use his brains to improve
it. “He that hath lent you talents hath also said, ‘Occupy till
I come!’ Your strength is a talent, your parts are talents, and
so is your time. How is it that ye stand all the day idle? . . .
Your trade is your proper province. . . . Your own vine-
yard you should keep. . . . Your fancies, your understand-
ings, your memories . . . are all to be laid out therein.” So far
from there being an inevitable collision between the require-
ments of business and. the claims of religion, they walk hand
in hand. By a fortunate dispensation, the virtues enjoined on
Christians—diligence, moderation, sobriety, thrift—-are the
very qualities most conducive to commercial success. The
foundation of all is prudence; and prudence is merely
another name for the “godly wisdom [which] comes in
and puts duc bounds” to his expenses, “and teaches the
tradesman to live rather somewhat below than at all above
his income.” Industry comes next and industry is at once
expedient and meritorious. It will keep the tradesman
from “frequent and needless frequenting of taverns," and
pin him to his shop, “where you may most con dently expect
the presence and blessing of God.”
If virtue is advantageous, vice is ruinous. Bad company,
speculation, gambling, politics, and “a preposterous zeal” in
religion--it is these things which are the ruin of tradesmen.
Not, indeed, that religion is to be neglected. On the con-
trary, it “is to be exercised in the frequent use of holy ejacula-
tions.” What is deprecated is merely the unbusinesslike habit
of “neglecting a man’s necessary affairs upon pretence of
religious worship.” But these faults, common and uncommon
alike, are precisely those to be avoided by the sincere Chris-
tian, who must not, indeed, deceive or oppress his neigh-
bour, but need not y to the other extreme, be righteous
overmuch, or refuse to “take the advantage which the Pro-
vidence of God puts into his hands." By a kind of happy,
pre-established harmony, such as a later age discovered
between the needs of society and the self-interest of the
individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of
spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has laboured
faithfully in his vocation, and that “God has blessed his
trade." “Nothing will pass in any man’s account except it
be done in the way of his calling. . . . Next to the saving his
soul, [the tradesman’s] care and -business is to serve God in
his calling, and to'drive it as far as it will go."
Whenduty was so pro table, might not pro t-making be a
duty? Thus argued the honest pupils of Mr. Gripeman, the
schoolmaster of Love-gain, a market-town in the county of
Coveting in the north.“ The inference was illogical, but how
attractive! When the Rev. David Jones was so indiscreet as
to preach at St. Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street a sermon
against usury, on the text, “The Pharisees who were covetous
heard all these things and they derided Christ," his career in
London was brought to an abrupt conclusion.-99'
The springs of economic conduct lie in regions rarely
penetrated by moralists, and to suggest a direct reaction of
theory on practice would be paradoxical. But, if the circum-
stances which determine that certain kinds of conduct shall
be pro table are economic, those which decide that they
shall be the object of general approval are primarily moral
and intellectual. For conventions to be adopted with whole-
hearted enthusiasm, to be not merely tolerated, but
applauded, to become the habit of a nation and the admira-
tion of its philosophers, the second condition must be present
as well as the rst. The insistence among men of pecuniary
motives, the strength of economic egotism, the appetite for
gain—these are the commonplaces of every age and need
no emphasis. What is signi cant is the change of standards
which converted a natural frailty into a resounding virtue.
After all, it appears, a man can serve two masters, for-—so
happily is the world disposed—he may be paid by one. while
he works for the other. Between the old-fashioned denuncia-
tion of uncharitable covetousness and the new-fashioned
applause of economic enterprise, a bridge is thrown by the
argument which urges that enterprise itself is the discharge
of a duty imposed by God.
In the year 1690 appeared a pamphlet entitled A Discourse
of Trade, by N. B., M.D."° Notable for its enlightened dis-
cussion of conventional theories of the balance of trade, it is
a good specimen of an indifferent genus. But its authorship-
was more signi cant than its argument. For N. B. was Dr.
Nicholas Barbon; and Dr. Nicholas Barbon, currency ex-
pert, pioneer of insurance, and enthusiast for land-banks,
was the son of that Praise-God Barebones, by the parody of
whose alluring surname a cynical posterity recorded its
verdict on the brief comedy of the Rule of the Saints over
Laodicean Englishmen. The reaction from Puritan rigour to
Restoration licence is the most familiar of platitudes. The
reaction to a mundane materialism was more gradual, more
general, and ultimately of greater signi cance. The pro igacy
of the courticr had its decorous counterpart in the economic
orgies of the tradesman and the merchant. Votaries, not of
Bacchus, but of a more exacting and more pro table divinity,
they celebrated their relief at the discredit of a too arduous
idealism, by plunging with redoubled zest into the agreeable
fever of making and losing money.
The transition from the anabaptist to the company pro--
moter was less abrupt than might at rst sight be supposed.
It had been prepared, however unintentionally, by Puritan
moralists. In their emphasis on the moral duty of untiring
activity, on work as an end in itself, on the evils of luxury
and extravagance, on foresight and thrift, on moderation and
self-discipline and rational calculation, they had created an
ideal of Christian conduct, which canonized as an ethical
principle the ef ciency which economic theorists were
preaching as a speci c for social disorders. It was as capti-
vating as it was novel. To countless generations of religious
thinkers, the fundamental maxim of Christian social ethics
had seemed to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to
Timothy: “Having food and raiment, let us be therewith
content. For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Now,
while, as always, the world battered at the gate, a new
standard was raised within the citadel by its own defenders.
The garrison had discovered that the invading host of
economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally. Not
su iciency to the needs of daily life, but limitless increase
and expansion, became the goal of the Christian's efforts.
Not consumption, on which the eyes of earlier sages had
been turned, but production, became the pivot of his argu-
ment. Not an easy-going and open-handed charity, but a
systematic and methodical accumulation, won the meed of
praise that belongs to the good and faithful servant. The
shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human
relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which
cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or
pro ts to be won, the love of social power and hunger for
economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked
from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of
saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later
Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had
denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues.
They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists
not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror
deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the
question, “What shall it pro t a man ?" carries no sting. In
winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul
as well.
The idea of economic progress as an end to be consciously
sought, while ever receding, had been unfamiliar to most
earlier generations of Englishmen, in which the theme of
moralists had been the danger of unbridled cupidity, and
the main aim of public policy had been the stability of
traditional relationships. It found a new sanction in the
identi cation of labour and enterprise with the service of
God. The magni cent energy which changed in a century
the face of material civilization was to draw nourishment
from that temper. The worship ofproduction and ever greater
production—the slavish drudgery of the millionaire and his
unhappy servants--was to be hallowed by the precepts of
the same compelling creed.
Social development moves with a logic whose inferences
are long delayed, and the day of these remoter applications
had not yet dawned. The version of Christian ethics ex-
pounded by Puritanism in some of its later phases was still
only in its vigorous youth. But it sailed forward on a owing
tide. It had an unconscious ally in the preoccupation with
economic interests which found expression in the enthusiasm
of business politicians for a commercial Machrpolirik. The
youthful Commonwealth, a rival of Holland “for the fairest
mistress in the world—trade,”9° was not two years old when
it made its own essay in economic imperialism. “A bare-
faced war" for commerce, got up by the Royal‘African
Company, was Clarendon’s verdict’-*1 on the Dutch war of
1665-7. Five years later, Shaftesbury hounded the City
against Holland with the cry of Delenda est Carthago. The
war nance of the Protectorate had made it necessary for
Cromwell to court Dutch and Jewish, as well as native,
capitalists, and the impecunious Government of the Restora-
tion was in the hands of those syndicates of goldsmiths,
whose rapacity the Chancellor, a survivor from the age
before the deluge, when aristocrats still despised the upstart
plutocracy, found not a little disgusting."
The contemporary progress of economic thought forti ed
no less the mood which glori ed the economic virtues.
Economic science developed in England, not, as in Ger-
many, as the handmaid of public administration, nor, as in
France, through the speculations of philosophers and men
of letters, but as the interpreter of the practical interests of
the City. With the exception of Petty and Locke, its most
eminent practitioners were business men, and the questions
which excited them were those neither of production nor of
social organization, but of commerce and nance—the
balance of trade, tariffs, interest, currency and credit. The
rise of Political Arithmetic after the Restoration, profoundly
in uenced, as it was, by the Cartesian philosophy and by
the progress of natural science, stamped their spontaneous
and doctrineless individualism with the seal of theoretical
orthodoxy. "Knowledge," wrote the author of the preface
to a work by one of the most eminent exponents of the new
science, “in great measure is become mechanical.”°i' The
ex-act analysis of natural conditions, the calculations of
forces and strains, the reduction of the complex to the opera-
tion of simple, constant and measurable forces, was the
natural bias of an age interested primarily in mathematics
and physics. Its object was “to express itself in terms of
number, weight or measure, to use only arguments of sense,
and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations
in nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable
minds, opinions, appetites and passions of particular men
to the consideration of others.”94
In such an atmosphere, the moral casuistry, which had
occupied so large a place in the earlier treatment of social
and economic subjects, seemed the voice of an antiquated
superstition. Moreover, the main economic dogma of the
mercantilist had an a inity with the main ethical dogma of
the Puritan, which was the more striking because the
coincidence was undesigned. To the former, production,
not consumption, was the pivot of the economic system, and,
by what seems to the modern reader a curious perversion,
consumption is applauded only because it offers a new
market for productive energies. To the latter, the cardinal
virtues are precisely those which nd in the strenuous toils
of industry and commerce their most natural expression.
The typical qualities of the successful business life, in the
days before the rise of joint-stock enterprise, were intensity
and earnestness of labour, concentration, system and
method, the initiative which broke with routine and the
foresight which postponed the present to the future. Advice
like that of the Reverend Mr. Steele to his City congregation
was admirably calculated to give these arduous excellences
a heightened status and justi cation. The lean goddess,
Abstinence, whom Mr. Keynes, in a passage of brilliant
indiscretion, has revealed as the tutelary divinity of Victorian
England, was inducted to the austere splendours of her
ascetic shrine by the pious hands of Puritan moralists.
Such teaching fell upon willing ears. Excluded by legisla-
250 TI-IE PURITAN MOVEMENT
tion from a direct participation in public affairs, Dissentcrs
of means and social position threw themselves into the
alternative career offered by commerce and nance, and did
so the more readily because religion itself had blessed their
choice. If they conformed, the character “given them by their
critics-“opinionating, relying much upon their own judg-
ment . . . ungrateful, as not holding themselves beholden to
any man . . . proud, as thinking themselves the only
favourites of God, and the only wise or virtuous among
men"95—-—disposed them to the left in questions of Church
and State. The names of the commercial magnates of the
day lend some con rmation to the suggestion of that
af nity between religious radicalism and business acumen,
which envious contemporaries expressed in their sneers at
the “Presbyterian old usurer,” “devout misers,” and “extort-
ing lshban.”'~'° The four London members elected in I661
had not only lled the ordinary civic o ices, but had held
between them the governorship of the East India Company,
the deputy-governorship of the Levaht Company, and the
masterships of the Salters and Drapers Companies; two of
them were said to be Presbyterians and two IndepeDClCl'lllS.97
Of the committeelof leading business men who advised
Charles lI’s Government on questions of commercial policy,
some, like Sir Patience Ward and Michael Godfrey, repre-
sented the ultra-Protestantism of the City, while others,
like Thomas Papillon and the two Houblons, were members
of the French Huguenot church in London.“ In spite of the
bitter commercial rivalry with Holland, both Dutch capital
and Dutch ideas found an enthusiastic welcome in London.”
Sir George Downing, Charles II’s envoy at the Hague, who
endeavoured to acclimatize Dutch banking methods in
England, and who, according to Clarendon, was one of the
intriguers who prepared the war of 1665-7, had been reared
in the Puritan severity of Salem and Harvard, and had been
a preacher in the regiment of Colonel Okey.1°° Paterson,
who supplied the idea of a joint-stock banking corporation,
TRIUMPH OF THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES 25!
which Michael Godfrey popularized in the City and Mon-
tagu piloted through Parliament, was, like the magni cent
Law, a Scotch company promoter, who had haunted the
Hague in the days when it was the home of disconsolate
Whigs.1°1 Yarranton, most ingenious of projectors, had
been an officer in the Parliamentary army, and his book
was a long sermon on the virtues of the Dutch.1°2 Defoe,
who wrote the idyll of the bourgeoisie in his Compiere
English Tradesman, was born of nonconformist parents, and
was intended for the ministry, before, having failed~in trade,
he took up politics and literature.1°3 In his admirable study
of the iron industry, Mr. Ashton has shown that the most
eminent ironmasters of the eighteenth century belonged as
a rule to the Puritan connection.1°4 They had their prototype
in the seventeenth century in Baxter’s friend, Thomas Foley,
“who from ahnost nothing did get about £5,000 per annum
or more by iron works.”1°5
To such a generation, a creed which transformed the
acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a
moral duty was the milk of lions. It was not that religion was
expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a
foundation of granite. In that keen atmosphere of economic
enterprise, the ethics of the Puritan bore some resemblance
to those associated later with the name of Smiles. The good
Christian was not wholly dissimilar from the economic man.
(iv)
The New Medicinefor Poverty
To applaud certain qualities is by implication to condemn
the habits and institutions which appear to con ict with
them. The recognition accorded by Puritan ethics to the
economic virtues, in an age when such virtues were rarer
than they are to-day, gave a timely stimulus to economic
e iciency. But it naturally, if unintentionally, modi ed the
traditional attitude towards social obligations. For the
spontaneous, doctrineless individualism, which became the
rule of English public life a century before the philosophy of
it was propounded by Adam Smith, no single cause was
responsible. But, simultaneously with the obvious move-
ments in the world of affairs—the discrediting of the ideal
of a paternal, authoritarian Government, the breakdown of
central control over local administration, the dislocation
caused by the Civil War, the expansion of trade and the
shifting of industry from its accustomed seats—it is perhaps
not fanciful to detect in the ethics of Puritanism one force
contributing to the change in social policy which is noticeable
after the middle of the century.
The loftiest teaching cannot "escape. from its own shadow.
To urge that the Christian life must be lived in a zealous dis-
charge of private duties—how necessary! Yet how readily
perverted to the suggestion that there are no vital social
obligations beyond and above them! To insist that the in-
dividual is responsible, that no man can save his brother,
that the essence of religion is the contact of the soul with its
Maker—how true and indispensable! But how easy to slip
from that truth into the suggestion that society is without
responsibility, that no man can help his brother, that the
social order and its consequences are not even the sca 'olding
by which men may climb to greater heights, but something
external, alien and irrelevant——something, at best, indifferent
to the life of the spirit, and, at worst, the sphere of the letter
which killeth and of the reliance on works which ensnares
the soul into the slumber of death! In emphasizing that
God’s Kingdom is not of this world, Puritanism did not
always escape the suggestion that this world is no part of
God’s Kingdom. The complacent victim of that false anti-
thesis between the social mcchanism and the life of the spirit,
which was to tyrannize over English religious thought for the
next two centuries, it enthroned religion in the privacy of the
individual soul, not without some sighs of sober satisfaction
THE NEW MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 253
at its abdication from society. Professor Dicey has com-
mented on the manner in which “the appeal of the Evan-
gelicals to personal religion corresponds with the appeal
of Benthamite Liberals to individual energy."“'° The same
affinity between religious and social interests found an even
clearer expression in the Puritan movement of the seventeenth
century. Individualism in religion led insensibly, if not quite
logically, to an individualist morality, and an individualist
morality to a disparagement of the signi cance of the social
fabric as compared with personal character.
A practical example of that change of emphasis is given by
the treatment accorded to the questions of Enclosure and of
Pauperism. For a century and a half the progress of enclosing
had been a burning issue, aring up, from time to time, into
acute agitation. During the greater part of that period, from
Latimer in the thirties of the sixteenth century to Laud in the
thirties of the seventeenth, the attitude of religious teachers
had been one of condemnation. Sermon after sermon and
pamphlet after pamphlet—not to mention Statutes and
Royal Commissions—had been launched against depopula-
tion. The appeal had been, not merely to public policy, but
to religion. Peasant and lord, in their di 'erent degrees, are
members of one Christian commonwealth, within which the
law of charity must bridle the corroding appetite for
economic gain. In such a mystical corporation, knit together
by mutual obligations, no man may press his advantage to
the full, for no man may seek to live outside “the body of the
Church.”
Sabotaged by the unpaid magistracy of country gentle-
men, who had been the obstructive agents of local admini-
stration, the practical application of such doctrines had
always been intermittent, and, when the Long Parliament
struck the weapon of administrative law from the hands of
the Crown, it had ceased altogether. But the politics of
Westminster were not those of village and borough. The
events which seemed to aristocratic Parliamentarians to
close the revolution seemed to the left wing of the victorious
army only to begin it. In that earliest and most turbulent of
English democracies, where buff-coat taught scripture
politics to his general, the talk was not merely of political,
but of social, reconstruction. The programme of the Level-
lers, who more than any other party could claim to express
the aspirations of the unprivileged classes, included a
demand, not only for annual or biennial Parliaments, man-
hood su 'rage, a redistribution of seats in proportion to
population, and the abolition of the veto of the House of
Lords, but also that “you would have laid open all enclosures
of fens and other commons, or have them enclosed only or
chie y for the bene t of the poor.”1°" Theoretical com-
munism, repudiated by the leading Levellers, found its
expression in the agitation of the Diggers, on whose behalf
Winstanley argued that, “seeing the common people of
England, by joynt consent of person and purse, have caste
out Charles, our Norman oppressour . . . the land now is to
returne into the joynt hands of those who have conquered,
that is the commonours,” and that the victory over the King
was incomplete, as long as “wee . . . remayne slaves still to
the kingly power in the hands of lords of manors.”1°°
Nor was it only from the visionary and the Zealot that the
pressure for redress proceeded. When the shattering of tradi-
tional authority seemed for a moment to make all things new,
local grievances, buried beneath centuries of dull oppression,
started to life, and in several Midland counties the peasants
rose to pull down the hated hedges. At Leicester, where in
1649 there were rumours of a popular movement to throw
down the enclosures of the neighbouring forest, the City
Council tookthe matter up. A petition was drafted, setting
out the economic and social evils attending enclosure, and
proposing the establishment of machinery to check it, con-
sisting of a committee without whose assent enclosing was
not to be permitted. A local minister was instructed to sub-
mit the petition to Parliament, “which hath still a watchful
eye and open ear to redress the common grievances of the
nation.”1°° The agent selected to present the city's case was
the Rev. John Moore, a proli c pamphleteer, who for
several years attacked the depopulating landlord with all
the fervour of Latimer, though with even less than Latimer’s
success. _
Half a century before, such commotions would have been
followed by the passing of Depopulation Acts and the issue
of a Royal Commission. But, in the ten years since the
meeting of the Long Parliament, the whole attitude of public
policy towards the movement had begun to change. Con-
scations, compositions and war taxation had elfected a
revolution in the distribution of property, similar, on a
smaller scale, to that which had taken place at the Reforma-
tion. As land changed hands, customary relations were
shaken and new interests were created. Enclosure, as Moore
complained,11° was being pushed forward by means of law
suits ending in Chancery decrees. It was not to be expected
that City merchants and members of the Committee for
Compounding, some of whom had found land speculation a
pro table business, should hear with enthusiasm a proposal
to revive the old policy of arresting enclosures by State
interference, at which the gentry had grumbled for more
than a century.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that reformers
should have found the open ear of Parliament impenetrably
closed to agrarian grievances. Nor was it only the political
and economic environment which had changed. The revolu-
tion in thought was equally profound. The theoretical basis
of the policy of protecting the peasant by preventing en-
closure had been a conception of landown'ership which
regarded its rights and its duties as inextricably inter-
woven. Property was not merely a source of income, but a
public function, and its use was limited by social obligations
and necessities of State. With such a doctrine the classes
who had taken the lead in the struggle against the monarchy
could make no truce. Its last vestiges nally disappeared
when the Restoration Parliament swept away military
tenures, and imposed on the nation, in the shape of an
excise, the nancial burden previously borne by themselves.
The theory which took its place, and which was to become
in the eighteenth century almost a religion, was that expressed
by Locke, when he described property as a right anterior to
the existence of the State, and argued that “the supreme
power cannot take from any man any part of his property
without his own consent.” But Locke merely poured into a
philosophical mould ideas which had been hammered out in
the stress of political struggles, and which were already the
commonplace of landowner and merchant. The view of
society held by that part of the Puritan movement which
was socially and politically in uential had been expressed
by Ireton and Cromwell in their retort to the democrats in
the army. It was that only the freeholders really constituted
the body politic, and that they could use their property as
they pleased, uncontrolled by obligations to any superior,
or by the need of consulting the mass of men, who were mere
tenants at will, with no xed interest or share in the land of
the kingdom.111
Naturally, this change of ideas had profound reactions on
agrarian policy. Formerly a course commending itself to all
public-spirited persons, the prevention of enclosure was now
discredited as the programme of a sect of religious and
political radicals. When Major-General Whalley in 1656
introduced a measure to regulate and restrict the enclosure
of commons, framed, apparently, on the lines proposed by
the authorities of Leicester, there was an instant outcry
from members that it would “destroy property," and the bill
was refused a second rea'ding."2 After the Restoration the
tide began to run more strongly in the same direction.
Enclosure had already become the hobby of the country
gentleman. Experts advocated it on economic grounds, and
legislation to facilitate it was introduced into Parliament.
Though its technique still remained to be elaborated, the
attitude which was to be decisive in the eighteenth century
had already been crystallized.
The change of policy was striking. The reason of it was
not merely that political conditions made the landed gentry
omnipotent, and that the Royalist squirearchy, who
streamed back to their plundered manors in 1660, were in
no mood to countenance a revival, by the Government of
Charles II, of the administrative interference with the rights
of property which had infuriated them in the Government
of Charles I. It was that opinion as'to social policy had
changed, and changed not least among men of religion
themselves. The pursuit of economic self-interest, which is
the law of nature, is already coming to be identi ed by the
pious with the operation of the providential plan, which
is the law of God. Enclosures will increase the output of
wool and grain. Each man knows best what his land is
suited to produce, and the general interest will be best served
by leaving him free to produce it. “It is an undeniable maxim
that everyone -by the light of nature and reason will do that
whichmakes for his greatest ad vantage. . . . Theadvancement
of private*persons will be the advantage of the public.”"3
It is signi cant that such considerations were adduced,
not by an economist, but by a minister. For the argument
was ethical as well as economic, and, when Moore appealed
to the precepts of traditional morality to bridle pecuniary
interests, he provoked the retort that judicious attention to
pecuniary interests was an essential part of an enlightened
morality. What the poor need for their spiritual health is-
to use the favourite catchword of the age——“regulation,”
and regulation is possible only if they work under the eye
of'an employer. In theeyes of the austere moralists of the
Restoration, the rst, and most neglected, virtue of the poor
is industry. Common rights encourage idleness by o 'ering a
precarious and demoralizing livelihood to men who ought
to be at work for amaster. It is not surprising, therefore,
1 mas)
25B THE PURITAN MOVEMENT
that the admonitions of religious teachers against the
wickedness ofjoining house to house and eld to eld should
almost entirely cease. Long the typical example of un-
charitable covetousness, enclosure is now considered, not
merely economically expedient, but morally bene cial.
Baxter, with all his scrupulousness—partly, perhaps, because
of his scrupulousness—differs from most earlier divines, in
giving a quali ed approval to enclosure “done in modera-
tion by a pious man," for the characteristic reason that a
master can establish a moral discipline among his em-
ployees, which they would miss if they worked for them-
selves. What matters, in short, is not their circumstances,
but their character. If they lose as peasants, they will gain as
Christians. Opportunities for spiritual edi cation are more
important than the mere material environment. If only the
material environment were not itself among the. forces
determining men’s capacity to be edi ed!
The temper which deplored that the open- eld village was
not a-school of the severer virtues turned on pauperism and
poor relief an even more shattering criticism. There is no
province of social life in which the fashioning of a new scale
of social values on the Puritan anvil is more clearly revealed.
In the little communities of peasants and craftsmen which
composed mediazval England, all, when I-Ieaven sent a bad
harvest, had starved together, and the misery of the sick, the
orphan and the aged had appeared as a personal calamity,
not as a social problem. Apart from a few precocious
theorists, who hinted at the need for a universal and secular
system of provision for distress, the teaching most charac-
teristic of mediaeval writers had been that the relief of the
needy was a primary obligation on those who had means.
St. Thomas, who in this matter is typical, quotes with
approval the strong words of St. Ambrose about those who
cling to the bread of the starving, insists on the idea that
property is stewardship, and concludes—a conclusion not
always drawn from that well-worn phrase—that to with-
hold alms when there is evident and urgent necessity is
mortal sin.114 Popular feeling had lent a half-mystical
glamour, both to poverty and to the compassion by which
poverty was relieved, for poor men were God’s friends. At
best, the poor were thought to represent our Lord in a
peculiarly intimate way—“in that sect,” as Langland said,
“our Saviour saved all mankind”—-and it was necessary for
the author of a religious manual to explain that the rich, as
such, were not necessarily hateful to God.115 At worst, men
re ected that the prayers of the poor availed much, and that
the sinner had been saved from hell by throwing a loaf of
bread to a beggar, even though a curse went with it. The
alms bestowed to-day would be repaid a thousand-fold,
when the soul took its dreadful journey amid rending briars
and scorching ames._
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Everie nighte and a e,
Sit thee down and pu't them on,
And Chrisre receive thy saute.
If hosen and shoon thou gavest nane,
Everie nighte and alie,
The whinnes shall pricke thee to the bare bane,
And Christe receive thy saule.
I 2 9 ' I
If ever thou gavest meate or drinke,

Everie nighte and alie,
The re shall never make thee shrinke,
And Chrisre receive thy saute.
If meate or drinke thou gavest nane,
Everie nighte and alle,
The re will burne thee to the bare bane,
And Christe receive thy saute.
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Everie rtighte and aile,
Fire, and sleete, and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy sau1e.“°
The social character ofwealth, which had been the essence
of the mediaeval doctrine, was asserted by English divines in
the sixteenth century with redoubled emphasis, precisely be-
cause the growing individualism of the age menaced the
traditional conception. “The poor man," preached Latimer,
“hath title to the rich man's goods; so that the rich man
ought to let the poor man have part of his riches to help
and to comfort him withal.”11' Nor had that sovereign
indi 'erence to the rigours of the economic calculus dis-
appeared, when, under the in uence partly of humanitarian
representatives of the Renaissance like Vives, partly of
religious reformers, partly of their own ambition to gather
all the threads of social ad ministration into their own hands,
the statesmen of the sixteenth century set themselves to
organize a secular system of poor relief. In England, after
three generations in which the attempt was made to stamp
out vagrancy by police measures of hideous brutality, the
momentous admission was ma'de that its cause was economic
distress, not merely personal idleness, and that the whip had
no terrors for the man who must either tramp or starve.
The result was the celebrated Acts imposing a compulsory
poor-rate and requiring the able-bodied man to be set on
work. The Privy Council, alert to prevent disorder, drove
lethargic justices hard, and down to the Civil War the system
was administered with fair regularity. But the Elizabethan
Poor Law was never designed to be what, with disastrous
results, it became in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, the sole measure for coping with economic distress.
While it provided relief, it was but the last link in a chain
of measures--the prevention of evictions, the control of food
supplies and prices, the attempt to stabilize employment
and to check unnecessary dismissals of workmen—intended
to mitigate the forces which made relief necessary. Apart
from the Poor Law, the rst forty years of the seventeenth
century were proli c in the private charity which founded
alms-houses and hospitals, and established funds to provide
employment or to aid struggling tradesmen. The appeal was
still to religion, which owed to poverty a kind of reverence.
It was Thy choice, whilst Thou on earth didst stay,
And hadst not whereupon Thy head to lay.“°
“What, speak you of such things?” said Nicholas Ferrar
on his death-bed to one who commended his charities;
“it would have been but a suitable return for me to have
given all I had, and not to have scattered a few crumbs of
alms here and there.”11°
It was inevitable that, in the anarchy of the Civil War,
both private charity and public relief should fall on evil
days. In London, charitable endowments seem to have
su 'ered from _more than ordinary malversation, and there
were complaints that the income both of Bridewell and of
the Hospitals was seriously reduced.12° In the country, the
records of Quarter Sessions paint a picture of confusion,
in which the machinery of presentment by constables to
justices has broken down, and a long wail arises, that thieves
are multiplied, the poor are neglected, and vagrants wander
to and fro at their will.121 The administrative collapse of the
Elizabethan Poor Law continued after the Restoration, and
twpnty-three years later Sir Matthew Hale complained that
the sections in it relating to the provision of employment
were a dead letter!” Always unpopular with the local
authorities, whom they involved in considerable trouble and
expense, it is not surprising that, with the cessation of
pressure by the Central Government, they should, except
here and there, have been neglected. What is more signi-
cant, however, than the practical de ciencies in the admini-
stration of relief, was the rise of a new school of opinion,
which regarded with repugnance the whole body of social
theory of which both private charity and public relief had
been the expression.
“The generall rule of all England," wrote a pamphleteer in
1646, “is to whip and punish the wandring beggars . . . and
so many justices execute one branch of that good Statute
(which is the point of justice), but as for the point of
charitie, they leave [it] undone, which is to provide houses
and convenient places to set the poore to work."1” The
House of Commons appears to have been conscious that the
complaint had some foundation; in 1649 it ordered that the
county justices should be required to see that stocks of
material were provided as the law required,124 and the
question of preparing new legislation to ensure that persons
in distress should be found employment was on several
occasions referred to committees of the House.125 Nothing
seems, however, to have come of these proposals, nor was
the Elizabethan policy of “setting the poor on work” that
which was most congenial to the temper of the time. Upon
the admission that distress was the result, not of personal
de ciencies, but of economic causes, with its corollary that
its victims had a legal right to be maintained by society, the
growing individualism of the age turned the same frigid
scepticism, as was later directed against the Speenhamland
policy by the reformers of I834. Like the friends of Job, it
saw in misfortune, not the chastisement of love, but the
punishment for sin. The result was that, while the penalties
on the vagrant were redoubled, religious opinion laid less
emphasis on the obligation of charity than upon the duty
of work, and that the admonitions which had formerly
been turned upon uncharitable covetousness were now
directed against improvidence and idleness. The charac-
teristic sentiment was that of Milton's friend, Hartlib: “The
law of God saith, ‘he that will not work, let him not eat.’
This would be a sore scourge and smart whip for idle
persons if . . . none should be stilfered to eat till they had
wrought for it.”12°
The new attitude found expression in the rare bursts of
public activity provoked by the growth ofpauperism between
I640 and 1660. The idea of dealing with it on sound business
principles, by means of a corporation which would combine
pro t with philanthropy, was being sedulously preached by a
small group of reformers.12" Parliament took it up, and in
1649 passed an Act for the relief and employment of the
poor and the punishment of beggars, under which a com-
pany was to be established with power to apprehend
vagrants, to o er them the choice between work and
whipping, and to set to compulsory labour all other poor
persons, including children, withoutmeans ofmaintenance.123
Eight years later the prevalence of vagrancy produced an
Act of such extreme severity as almost to recall the sugges-
tion made a generation later by Fletcher of Saltoun, that
vagrants should be sent to the galleys. It provided that, since
offenders couldrarely be taken in the act, any vagrant who
failed to satisfy the justices thatihe had a good reason for
being on the roads should be arrested and punished as a
sturdy beggar, whether actually begging or not.12°
The protest against indiscriminate almsgiving, as the
parade of a spurious religion, which sacri ced character to a
formal piety, was older than the Reformation, but it had
been given a new emphasis by the reformers. Luther had
denounced the demands of beggars as blackmail, and the
Swiss reformers had stamped out the remnants of monastic
charity as a bribe ministered by Popery to dissoluteness and
demoralization. “I conclude that all the large givings of the
papists,” preached an English divine in the reign of Eliza-
beth, “of which at this day many make so great brags,
because they be not done in a reverent regard of the com-
mandment of the Lord, in love, and of an inward being
touched with the calamities of the needy, but for to be well
reported of before men whilst they are alive, and to be prayed
for after they are dead . . . are indeed no alms, but pharisaical
trumpets.”13° The rise of a commercial civilization, the
reaction against the authoritarian social policy of the Tudors,
and the progress of Puritanism among the middle classes,
all combined in the next half-century to sharpen the edge of
that doctrine. Nurtured in a tradition which made the
discipline of character by industry and self-denial the centre
of its ethical scheme, the Puritan moralist was undisturbed
by any doubts as to whether even the seed of the righteous
might not sometimes be constrained to beg its bread, and
met the taunt that the repudiation of -good works was the
cloke for a conscienceless egoism with the retort that the
easy-going open-handedncss of the sentimentalist was not
less sel sh in its motives and was more corrupting to its
objects. “As for idle beggars," wrote Steele, “happy for them
if fewer people spent their foolish pity upon their bodies,
and if more shewed some wise compassion upon their
souls."131 That the greatest of evils is idleness, that the poor
are the victims, not of circumstances, but of their own
“idle, irregular and wicked courses,” that the truest charity
is not to enervate them by relief, b.ut so to reform their
characters that relief may be unnecessary-—such doctrines
turned severity from a sin into a duty, and froze the impulse
of natural pity with the assurance that, if indulged, it-would
perpetuate the su ering which it sought to allay.
Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more
curious than the naive psychology of the business man, who
ascribes his achievements to his own unaided e 'orts, in
bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose
continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as
a lamb bleating in the desert. That individualist complex
owes part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of Puritan
moralists, that practical success is at once the sign and the
reward of ethical superiority. “No question,” argued a
Puritan pamphleteer, “but it [riches] should be the portion
rather of the godly than of the wicked, were it good for them;
for godliness hath the promises of this life as well as of the
life to come.”1" The demonstration that distress is a proof
of demerit, though a singular commentary on the lives of
Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the
prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy of the Restoration,
roaring after its meat, and not indisposed, if it could not
THE NEW’ MEDICINE FOR POVERTY 26$
nd it elsewhere, to seek it from God, it was welcomed with
a shout of applause.
A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the
supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor
as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for
making their life a hell in this. Advanced by men of religion
as a tonic for the soul, the doctrine of the danger of pam-
pering poverty was hailed by the rising school of Political
Arithmeticians as a sovereign cure for the ills of society.
For, if the theme of the moralist was that an easy-going
indulgence undermined character, the theme of the econo-
mist was that it was economically disastrous and nancially
ruinous. The Poor Law is the mother of idleness, “men and
women growing so idle and proud that they will not work,
but lie upon the parish wherein they dwell for maintenance.”
It discourages thrift; “if shame or fear of punishment
makes him earn his dayly bread, he will do no more; his
children are the charge of the parish and his old age his
recess from labour or care.” It keeps up wages, since "it
encourages wilful and evil-disposed persons to impose what
wages they please upon their labours; and herein they are
so refractory to reason and the bene t of the nation that,
when corn and provisions are cheap, they will not work
for less wages than when they were dear.”133 To the land-
owner who cursed the poor-rates, and the clothier who
grumbled at the high cost of labour, one school of religious
thought now brought the comforting assurance that morality
itself would be favoured by a reduction of both.
As the history of the Poor Law in the nineteenth century
was to prove, there is no touchstone, except the treatment
of childhood, which reveals the true character of a social
philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it regards
the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the way.
Such utterances on the subject of poverty were merely one
example of a general attitude, which appeared at times to
consign to collective perdition almost the whole of the wage-
t* '
266 Tl-IE PURITAN MOVEMENT
earning population. It was partly that, in an age which
worshipped property as the foundation of the social order,
the mere labourer seemed something less than a full citizen.
lt was partly the result of the greatly increased in uence on
thought and public affairs acquired at the Restoration by
the commercial classes, whose temper was a ruthless
materialism, determined at all costs to conquer world'-
markets from France and Holland, and prepared to sacri ce
every other consideration to their economic ambitions. It
was partly that, in spite of a century of large-scale pro-
duction in textiles, the problems of capitalist industry and
of a propertyless proletariat were still too novel for their
essential features to be appreciated. Even those writers, like
Baxter and Bunyan, who continued to insist on the wicked-
ness of extortionate prices and unconscionable interest,
rarely thought of applying their principles to the subject of
wages. Their social theory had been designed for an age of
petty agriculture and industry, in which personal relations
had not yet been superseded by the cash nexus, and the
craftsman or peasant farmer was but little removed in
economic status from the half-dozen journeymen or
labourers whom he employed. In a world increasingly
dominated by great clothiers, iron-masters and mine-
owners, they still adhered to the antiquated categories of
master and servant, with the same obstinate indifference to
economic realities, as leads the twentieth century to talk of
employers and employed, long after the individual employer
has been converted into an impersonal corporation.
In a famous passage of the Communist Manifesto, Marx
observes that “the bourgeoisie, wherever it got the upper
hand, put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations,
pitilessly tore asunder the motley feudal ties that bound
man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and left remaining no other
bond between man and man than naked self-interest and
callous cash payment.”1°4 An interesting illustration of his
thesis might be found in the discussions of the economics
of employment by English writers of the period between
l660 and 1760. Their characteristic was an attitude towards
the new industrial proletariat noticeably harsher than that
general in the rst half of the seventeenth century, and which
has no modern parallel except in the behaviour of the less
reputable of white colonists towards coloured labour. Tho
denunciations of the “luxury, pride and slotl1”13=" of the
English wage-earners of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries are, indeed, almost exactly identical with those
directed against African natives to-day. It is complained
that, compared with the Dutch, they are self-indulgent and
idle; that-they want no more than a bare subsistence, and
will cease work the moment they obtain it; that, the higher
their wages, the more—“so licentious are they”13“-—they
spend upon drink; that high prices, therefore, are not a
misfortune, but a blessing, since they compel the wage-
earner to be more industrious; and that high wages are not a
blessing, but a misfortune, since they merely conduce to
“weekly debauches."
When such doctrines were general, it was natural that the
rigours of economic exploitation should be preached as a
public duty, and, with a few exceptions, the writers of the
period differed only as to the methods by which severity
could most advantageously be organized, Pollexfen and
Walter Harris thought that salvation might be found by
reducing the number of days kept as holidays. Bishop
Berkeley, with the conditions of Ireland before his eyes,
suggested that “sturdy beggars should . . . be seized and
made slaves to the public for a certain term of years."
Thomas Alcock, who was shocked at the workman’s taste
for snuff, tea and ribbons, proposed the revival of sumptuary
legislation i" The writers who advanced schemes for
reformed workhouses, which should be places at once of
punishment and of training, were innumerable. All were
agreed that, on moral no less than on economic grounds,
it was vital that wages should be reduced. The doctrine
afterwards expressed by Arthur Young, when he wrote,
“every one but an idiot knows that the lower classes must
be kept poor, or they will never be industrious,"1=’-9 was the
tritest commonplace of Restoration economists. It was not
argued; it was accepted as self-evident.
When philanthropists were inquiring whether it might not
be desirable to re-establish slavery, it was not to be expected
that the su 'c-rings of the destitute would wring their hearts
with social compunction. The most curious feature in the
whole discussion, and that which is most sharply in contrast
with the long debate on pauperism carried on in the six-
teenth century, was the resolute refusal to admit that society
had any responsibility for the causes of distress. Tudor
divines and statesmen had little mercy for idle rogues. But
the former always, and the latter ultimately, regarded
pauperism primarily as a social phenomenon produced by
economic dislocation, and the embarrassing question put
by the genial Harrison—“at whose handes shall the bloude
of these men be required ?”13°—was never far from the
minds of the most cynical. Their successors after the
Restoration were apparently quite unconscious that it was
even conceivable that there might be any other cause of
poverty than the moral failings of the poor. The practical
conclusion to be drawn from so comfortable a creed was at
once extremely simple and extremely agreeable. It was not to
nd employment under the Act of 160], for to do that
was only “to render the poor more bold." It was to surround
the right to relief with obstacles such as those contained
in the Act of 1662, to give it, when it could not be avoided,
in a workhouse or house of correction, and, for the rest, to
increase the demand for labour by reducing wages.
The grand discovery of a commercial age, that relief might
be so administered as not merely to relieve, but also to
deter, still remained to be made by Utilitarian philosophers.
But the theory that distress was due, not to economic circum-
stances, but to whatthe Poor Law Commissioners of 1834
called “individual improvidence and vice,” was rmly
established, and the criticism on the Elizabethan system
which was to inspire the new Poor Law had already been
formulated. The essence of that system was admirably
expressed a een_tury later by a Scottish divine, as “the prin-
ciple that each man, simply because he exists, holds a right
on other men or on society for existence.”14" Dr. Chalmers’
attack upon it was the echo of a note long struck by Puritan
moralists. And the views of Dr. Chalmers had impressed
themselves on Nassau Senior)“ before he set his hand to
that brilliant, in uential and wildly unhistorical Report,
which, after provoking something like a rebellion in the
north of England, was to be one of the pillars of the social
policy of the nineteenth century.
It would be misleading to dwell on the limitations of
Puritan ethics without emphasizing the enormous contribu-
tion of Puritanism to political freedom and social progress.
The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual inde-
pendence, which nerves the individual to stand alone against
the powers of this world, and in England, where squire and
parson, lifting arrogant eyebrows at the insolence of the
lower orders, combined to crush popular agitation, as a
menace at once to society and to the Church, it is probable
that democracy owes more to Nonconformity than to any
other single movement. The virtues of enterprise, diligence
and thrift are the indispensable foundation of any complex
and vigorous civilization. It was Puritanism which, by
investing them with a supernatural sanction, turned them
from an unsocial eccentricity into a habit and a religion.
Nor would it be difficult to nd notable representatives of
the Puritan spirit, in whom the personal austerity, which
was the noblest aspect of the new ideal, was combined with a
profound consciousness of social solidarity, which was the
noblest aspect of that which it displaced. Firmin the philan-
thropist, and Bellers the Quaker, whom Owen more than a
century later hailed as the father of his doctrines, were
pioneers of Poor Law reform. The Society of Friends, in an
age when the divorce between religion and social ethics was
almost complete, met the prevalent doctrine that it was per-
missible to take such gain as the market o 'ered, by insisting
on the obligation of good conscience and forbearance in
economic transactions, and on the duty to make the honour-
able maintenance of the brother in distress a common
charge?"
The general climate and character of a country are not
altered, however, by the fact that here and there it has peaks
which rise into an ampler air. The distinctive note of Puritan
teaching was different. It was individual responsibility, 11ot
social obligation. Training its pupils to the mastery of others
through the mastery of self, it prized as a crown of glory the
qualities which arm the spiritual athlete for his solitary con-
test with a hostile world, and- dismissed concern with the
social order as the prop of weaklings and the Capua of the
soul. Both the excellences and the defects of- that attitude
were momentous for the future. It is sometimes suggested
that the astonishing outburst of industrial activity, which
took place after 1760, created a new type of economic
character, as well as a new system of economic organiza-
tion. ln reality, the ideal which was later to carry all before
it, in the person of the inventor and engineer and captain
of industry, was well established among Englishmen before
the end of the seventeenth century. Among the numerous
forces which had gone to form it, some not inconsiderable
part may reasonably be ascribed to the emphasis on the life
of business enterprise as the appropriate eld for Christian
endeavour, and on the qualities needed for success in it,
which was characteristic of Puritanism. These qualities,
and the admiration of them, remained, when the religious
reference, and the restraints which it imposed, had weakened
or disappeared.
CHAPTER V
Conclusion
“Ther is a certaine man that shortly after my fyrst sennon, beynge
asked if he had bene at the sermon that day, answered, yea. I praye
you, said he, how lyked you hym? Mary, sayed he, even as I lyked hym
alwayes—a sedicious fellow."
LATIMER, Seven Sermons before King Edward VI,
SOCIETIES, like individuals, have their moral crises and their

spiritual revolutions. The student can observe the results
which these cataclysms produce, but he can hardly without
presumption attempt to appraise them, for it is at the re
which they kindled that his own small taper has been lit.
The rise of a naturalistic science of society, with all its mag-
ni cent promise of fruitful action and of intellectual light;
the abdication of the Christian Churches-from departments of
economic conduct and social theory long claimed as their pro-
vince ; the general acceptance by thinkers of'a scale ofethical
values, which turned the desire for pecuniary gain from a peril-
ous, if natural, frailty into the idol of philosophers and the
mainspring of socie-ty—-—such movements'are written large
over the history of the tempestuotrs age which lies between
the Reformation and the full light of the eighteenth century.
Their consequences have been worked into the very tissue of
modern civilization. Posterity still stands too near their source
to discern the ocean into which these streams will ow.
In an historical age the relativity of political doctrines is
the tritest of commonplaces. But social psychologycontinues
too often to be discussed in serene indifference to the cate-
gories of time and place, and economic interests are still
popularly treated as though they formed a kingdom over
which the Zeitgeist bears no sway. In reality, though in-
herited dispositions may be constant from generation to
271
272 CONCLUSION
generation, the system of valuations, preferences, and ideals
-the social environment within which individual character
functions—is in process of continuous change, and it is in
the conception of the place to be assigned to economic
interests in the life of society that change has in recent
centuries been most comprehensive in its scope, and most
sensational in its consequences. The isolation of economic
aims as a specialized "object of concentrated and systematic
effort, the erection of economic criteria into an independent
and authoritative standard of social expediency, are pheno-
mena which, though familiar enough in classical antiquity,
appear, at, least on a grand scale, only at a comparatively
recent date in the history of later civilizations. The con ict
between the economic outlook of East and West, which
impresses the traveller to-day, nds a parallel in the contrast
between mediazval and modern economic ideas, which strikes
the historian.
-The elements which combined to produce that revolution
are too numerous to be summarized i_n any neat formula.
But, side by side with the expansion of trade and the rise of
new classes to political power, there was a further cause,
which, if not the most conspicuous, was not the least
fundamental. It was the contraction of the territory within
which the writ of religion was conceived to run. The
criticism which dismisses the concern of Churches with
economic relations and social organization as a modern
innovation finds little support in past history. What requires
explanation is not the view that these matters are part of
the province of religion, but the view that" they are not.
When the age of the Reformation begins, economics is still a
branch of ethics, and ethics of theology; all human activities
are treated as falling within a single scheme, whose character
is determined by the spiritual destiny of mankind; theappeal
of theorists is to natural law, not to utility; the legitimacy of
economic transactions is tried by reference, less to the
movements‘ of the market, than to moral standards derived
CONCLUSION 2?3
from the traditional teaching of the Christian Church; the
Church itself is regarded as a society wielding theoretical,
and sometimes practical, authority in social affairs.
The secularization of political thought, which was to be
"the"work'of the next two centuries, had profound reactions
on social speculation, and by 'the Restoration the whole
perspective, at least in England, has been revolutionized.
Religion has been converted from the keystone which holds
together the social edifice into one department within _it,
and.the idea of a rule of right is replaced by economic
expediency as the arbiter of policy and the criterion of
conduct. From a spiritual being, who, in order to survive,
must devote a reasonable attention to economic interests,
man seems sometimes to have become an economic animal,
who will be prudent, nevertheless, if he takes due precautions
to assure his spiritual well-being.
The result is an attitude which forms so fundamental a
part of modern political thought, that both its precarious
philosophical basis and the contrast which it offers with the
conceptions of earl icr generations are commonly forgotten.
Its essence is a dualism which regards the secular and the
religious aspects of life, not as successive stages within a
larger unity, but as parallel and independent provinces,
governed by different laws, judged by different standards,
and amenable to different authorities. To the most repre-
sentative minds of the Reformation as of the Middle Ages,
a philosophy which treated the transactions of commerce
and the institutions of society as indifferent to religion would
have appeared, not merely morally reprehensible, but in-
tellectually absurd. Holding as their rst assumption that
the ultimate social authority is the will of God, and that
temporal interests are a transitorycpisode in the life of
spirits which are eternal, they state the rules to which the
social conduct of the Christian must conform, and, when
circumstances allow, organize the discipline by which those
rules may be enforced. By their successors in the eighteenth
274 CONCLUSION
century the philosophy of Indifferentism, though rarely
formulated as a matter of theory, is held in practice as a
truism which it is irrational, if not actually immoral, to
question, since it is in the heart of the individual that religion
has its throne, and to externalize it in rules and institutions
is to tarnish its purity and to degrade its appeal. Naturally,
therefore, they formulate the ethical principles of Christianity
in terms of a comfortable ambiguity, and rarely indicate
with any precision their application to commerce, nance
and the ownership of property. Thus thecon ict between
religion and those natural economic ambitions, which the
thought of an earlier age had regarded with suspicion, is
suspended by a truce which divides the life of mankind
between them. The former takes as its province the individual
soul, the latter the intercourse of man with his fellows in
the activities ofbusiness and the affairs of society. Provided
that each keeps to its own territory, peace is assured. They
cannot collide, for they can never meet.
History is a stage where forces which are within human
control contend and co-operate with forces which are not.
The change of opinion described in these pages drew
nourishment from both. The storm and fury of the Puritan
revolution had been followed by a dazzling outburst of
economic enterprise, and the transformation of the material
environment prepared an atmosphere in which a judicious
moderation seemed the voice at once of the truest wisdom
and the sincerest piety. But the inner world was in motion
as well as the outer. The march of external progress woke
sympathetic echoes in hearts already attuned to applaud
its triumph, and there was no consciousness of an acute
tension between the claims of religion and the glittering
allurements of a commercial civilization, such as had
tormented the age of the Reformation.
It was partly the natural, and not unreasonable, di idence
of men who were conscious that traditional doctrines of
social ethics, with their impracticable distrust of economic
CONCLUSION 27$
motives, belonged to the conditions of a vanished age, but
who lacked the creative energy to state them anew, in a form
applicable to the needs of a more complex and mobile social
order. It was partly that political changes had gone far to
identify the Church of England with the ruling aristocracy,
so that, while in France, when the crash came, many of the
lower clergy threw in their lot with the tiers érat, in England
it was rarely that the of cers of the Church did not echo the
views of society which commended themselves to the rulers
of the State. It was partly that, to one important body of
opinion, the very heart of religion was a spirit which made
indifference to the gross world of external circumstances
appear, not a defect, but an ornament of the soul. Untram-
meiled by the silken chains which bound the Establishment,
and with a great tradition of discipline behind them, the
Nonconformist Churches might seem to have possessed
opportunities of reasserting the social obligations of religion
with a vigour denied to the Church of England. What
impeded their utterance was less a weakness than the most
essential and distinctive of their virtues. Founded on the
repudiation of the idea that human effort could avail to win
salvation, or human aid to assist the pilgrim in his lonely
quest, they saw the world of business and society as a
battle eld, across which character could march triumphant
to its goal, not as crude materials waiting the arcl1itect’s
hand to set them in their place as the foundations of‘ the
Kingdom of Heaven. It did not occur to them that character
is social, and society, since it is the expression of character,
spiritual. Thus the eye is sometimes blinded by light itself.
The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

Few will refuse their admiration to the magni cent con-
ception of a community penetrated from apex to foundation
by the moral law, which was the inspiration of the great
reformers, not less than of the better minds of the Middle
Ages. But, in order to subdue the tough -world of material
276 CONCLUSION
interests, it is necessary to have at least so much sympathy
with its tortuous ways as is.needed to understand them. The
Prince of Darkness has a right to a courteous heating and a
fair trial, and thosewho will not give him his due are wont to
nd that, in the long run, he turns the tables by taking his
due and something over. Common sense and a respect for
realities are not less graces of the spirit than moral zeal.
The paroxysms of virtuous fury, with which the children of
light denounced each new victory of economic enterprise as
yet another stratagem of Mammon, disabled them for the
staff-work of their campaign, which needs a cool head as
weh as a stout heart. Their obstinate refusal to revise old
formula: in the light of new facts exposed them helpless to a
counter-attack, in which the whole fabric of their philo-
sophy, truth and fantasy alike, was overwhelmed together.
They despised knowledge, and knowledge destroyed them.
Few can contemplate without a sense of exhilaration the
splendid achievements of practical energy and technical skill,
which, from the latter part of the seventeenth century, were
transforming the face of material civilization, and of which
England was the daring, if not too scrupulous, pioneer. If,
however, economic ambitions are good servants, they are
bad masters. Harnessed to a social purpose, they will turn the
mill and grind the corn. But the question, to what end the
wheels revolve, still remains; and on that question the naive
and uncritical worship of economic power, which is the mood
of unreason too often engendered in those whom that new
Leviathan has hypnotized by its spell, throws no light. Its
result is not seldom a world in which men command a
mechanism that they cannot fully use, and an organization
which has every perfection except that of motion.
Er neimfs Vernunft and brauchfs a ein,
Nur tieifsrfrer a.’.r jedes Tier zu sein.
The shaft of Mephistopheles, which drops harmless from

the armour of Reason, pierces the lazy caricature which
CONCLUSION 277
masquerades beneath that sacred name, to atter its
followers with the smiling illusion of progress won from the
mastery of the material environment by a race too sel sh
and super cial to determine the purpose to which its
triumphs shall be applied. Mankind may wring her secrets
from nature, and use their knowledge to destroy them-
selves; they may command the Ariels of heat and motion,
and bind their wings in helpless frustration, while they
wrangle over the question of the master whom the imprisoned
genii shall serve. Whether the chemist shall provide them
with the means of life or with trinitrotoluol and poison gas,
whether industry shall straighten the bent back or crush it
beneath heavier burdens, depends on an act of choice
between incompatible ideals, for which no increase in the
apparatus of civilization at man's disposal is in itself a
substitute. Economic ef ciency is a necessary clement in the
life of any sane and vigorous society, and only the incorri-
gible sentimentalist will depreciate its signi cance. But to
convert ef ciency from an instrument into a primary object
is to destroy ef ciency itself. For the condition of effective
action in a complex civilization is co-operation. And the
.condition of co-operation is agreement, both as to the ends
to which effort should be applied, and the criteria by which
its success is to be judged.
Agreement as to ends implies the acceptance of a standard
of values, by which the position to be assigned to different
objects may be determined. In a world of limited resources,
where nature yields a return only to prolonged and systematic
effort, such a standard must obviously take account of econo-
mic possibilities. But it cannot itself be merely economic,
since the comparative importance of economic and of other
intcrests——the sacri ce, for example, of material goods worth
incurring in order to extend leisure, or develop education,
or humanize toil-—-is precisely the point on which it is needed
to throw light. it must be based on some conception of the
requirements of human nature as a whole, to which the
278 CONCLUSION
satisfaction of economic needs is evidently vital, but which
demands the satisfaction of other needs as well, and which
can organize its activities on a rational system only in so far
as it has a clear apprehension of their relative signi cance.
“Whatever the world thinks," wrote Bishop Berkeley, “he
who hath not much mcditated upon God, the human mind
and the summum bommz, may possibly make a thtiving earth-
worm, but will most indubitably make a sorry patriot and a
sorry statesman.” The philosopher of to-day, who bids us
base our hopes of progress on knowledge inspired by love,
does not differ from the Bishop so much, perhaps, as he
would wish.
The most obvious facts are the most easily forgotten. Both
the existing economic order and too many of the projects
advanced for reconstructing it break down through their
neglect of the truism that, since even quite common men
have souls, no increase in material wealth will compensate
them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and
impair their freedom. A reasonable estimate of economic
organization must allow for the fact that, unless industry is
to be paralysed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged
human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely
economic. A reasonable view of its possible modi cations
must recognize that natural appetites may be puri ed or
restrained, as, in fact, in some considerable measure they
already have been, by being submitted to the control of some
larger body of interests. The distinction made by the philo-
sophers of classical antiquity between liberal and servile
occupations, the medizeval insistence that riches exist for
man, not man for riches, Ruskin’s famous outburst, “there
is no wealth but life,” the argument of the Socialist who
urges that production should be organized for service, not
for pro t, are but different attempts to emphasize the
instrumental character of economic activities, by reference
to an ideal which is held to express the true nature of man.
Of that nature and its possibilities the Christian Church
CONCLUSION 279
was thought, during the greater part of the period discussed
in these pages, to hold by de nition a conception dis-
tinctively its own. It was therefore committed to the formula-
tion of a social theory, not as a philanthropic gloss upon
the main body of its teaching, but as a vital element in a
creed concerned with the destiny of men whose character is
formed, and whose spiritual potentialities are fostered or
starved, by the commerce of the market-place and the institu-
tions of society. Stripped of the eccentricities of period and
place, its philosophy had as its centre a determination to
assert the superiority of moral principles over economic
appetites, which have their place, and an important place,
in the human scheme, but which, like other natural appetites,
when attered and pampered and overfed, bring ruin to the
soul and confusion to society. Its casuistry was an attempt to
translate these principles into a code of practical ethics,
sufficiently precise to be applied to the dusty world of
warehouse and farm. Its discipline was an effort, too often
corrupt and pettifogging in practice, but not ignoble in
conception, to work the Christian virtues into the spotted
texture of individual character and social conduct. That
practice was often a sorry parody on theory is a truism which
should need no emphasis. But in a world where principles
and conduct are unequally mated, men are to be judged by
their reach as well as by their grasp—by the ends at which
they aim as well as by the success with which they attain
them. The prudent critic will try himself by his achievements
rather than by his ideals, and his neighbours, living and dead
alike, by their ideals not less than by their achievement.
Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical
interpretation of moral principles must alter with them.
Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social history
will be disposed to deny that the exploitation of the weak by
the powerful, organized for purposes of economic gain,
buttressed by imposing systems of law, and screened by
decorous draperies of virtuous sentiment and resounding
280 CONCLUSION
rhetoric, has been a permanent feature in the life of most
communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality
in modern societies, which is most sharply opposed to the
teaching ascribed to the Founder of the Christian Faith,
lies deeper than the exceptional failures and abnormal
follies against which criticism is most commonly directed.
It consists in the assumption, accepted by most reformers
with hardly less nafveté than by the defenders of the estab-
lished order, that the attainment of material riches is the
supreme object of human endeavour and the nal criterion
of human success. Such a philosophy, plausible, militant,
and not indisposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism
by persecution, may triumph or may decline. What is certain
is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals
which can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian.
Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ
and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion
of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and
the State idofatry of the Roman Empire.
“Modern capitalism,” writes Mr. Keynes, “is absolutely
irreligious, without internal union, without much public
spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of
possessors and pursuers." It is that whole system of appetites
and values, with its dei cation of the life of snatching to
hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of
its triumph, while the plaudits of the crowd still ring in the
ears of the gladiators and the laurels are still unfaded on
their brows, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on
the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest
of its material environment resources unknown in earlier
ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was
against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating
youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask
of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even
to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched
their warnings and their denunciations. The language in
CONCLUSION 281
which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of
the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader
too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts
of business and the disposition of property may seem an
impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable
failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is
less pardonable to be silent than to say too much. Posterity
has, perhaps, as much to learn from the whirlwind eloquence
with which Latimer scourged injustice and oppression,.as
from the sober respectability of the judicious Paley—who
himself, since there are depths below depths, was regarded
as a dangerous revolutionary by George Ill.
FINIS
Notes
PREFACE TO I937 EDITION
References to some of the earlier literature will be found in the notes

on subsequent chapters. The following list of recent books and
articles is not exhaustive, but it may be of some use to thoseinter-
ested in the subject:
E. Troeltsch, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 2
voIs., London, 1931 (Eng. trans. by Olive Wyon of his Die Sozial-
lehren der Christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen, Ttibingcn, I912); Max
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, London,
1930 (Eng. trans. by_ Talcott Parsons of Die Protestantische Ethilc
und der Geist des Kapitalismus in “Archiv ftir Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik," vols. xx (I904) and xxi (I905); later reprinted in
Gesammelte Au iitze zur Religionssoziologie, 3 voIs., Tiibingen,
192.1); I-I. Hauser, Les debuts du Capitalisme, Paris, I927, chap. ii
(“Les ldécs économiques de Calvin"); B. Groethuysen, Origines de
l'esprit bourgeois en France, Paris, 1927; Margaret James, Social
Problems and Policy during the Puritan Revolution, 1640-1660, Lon-
don, I930; Isabel Grubb, Quakerism and Industry before 1800, Lon-
don, l930; W. J. Warner, The Wesleyan Movement in the Industrial
Revolution, London, I930; R. Pascal, The Social Basis ofthe German
Reformation, 1933; H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Eco-
nomic lndividualism, Cambridge, 1933; A. Fanfani, Le Origini dello
Spirito Capitalistico in ltalia, Milan, I933, and Cattolicismo e Pro-
testantesimo nella For-mnzione Storica del Capitalisme, Milan, I934
(Eng. trans. Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, London,
I935); J . Brodrick, S.J., The Economic Morals of the Jesuits, Lon-
don, I934; E. D. Bebb, Nonconformity and Social and Economic Life,
I660-I800, London, I935. The articles include the following: M.
Halbwachs, "Les Origines Puritaines du Capitalisme Moderne”
(Revue d'histoire et de philosophic réligieuses, March—April, I925)
and “flconomistes et Historiens, Max Weber, une vie, un ceuvre”
(Annales d'Histoire Economiqne et Sociale, No. I, I929); H. Sée,
" Dans quelle mesure Puritains et Juifs ont-ils contribué au Progres
du Capitalisme Moderne?" (Revue Historique, t. CLV, 1927);
Kemper Fullerton, “Calvinism and Capitalism” (Harvard Theologi-
cal Review, July I928); F. H. Knight, “Historical and Theoretical
Issues in the Problem of Modem Capitalism” (Journal ofEconomic
232
NOTES ON PREFACE 233
and Business History, November I928); Talcott Parsons, “Capital-
ism in Recent German Literature” (Journal of Political Economy,
December 1928 and February 1929); P. C. Gordon Walker, "Capi-
talism and the Reformation” (Economic History Review, November
1937).
2. For Weber's life and personality, see Marianne Weber, Max Weber,
ein Lebertsbild, Tijbingen, I926, and Karl Jaspers, Max Weber,
Deutsches Wesen im politischen Denken, im Forschen and Philoso-
phieren, Oldenburg, 1932.
3 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Eng.
trans., p. 183.
4 H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic lntlivitluaiis.-n,
p. xu.
5 Weber, op. cit., p. 26.
6 Weber, op. cit., p. I83.
7 lbt'd., p. 183, and note 1 18 on chap. v: “it would have been easy to
proceed . . . to a regular construction which logically deduced
everything characteristic of modern culture from Protestant nation-
alism. But that sort ofthing may be left to the type ofdilettante who
believes in the unity of the group mind antl its reducibility to a
single formula." “Spiritual” is my rendering of the almost un-
translatable “spiritualistische kausale."
8. See below, note 32 on chap. iv. pp. 311-13, and Max Weber, op.
cit., pp. 3-11.
9. Weber, op. cit., pp. 197-8. A chapter expanding the same criticism
is contained in H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Economic
lndiviriualism, pp. 57-87. The best treatment of the subject is that of
Brentano, Die Anf nge des modernen Kapitalismus, 1916, pp. I 17-57,
and Der wirthschaftende Mensch in der Geschichte, Leipzig, 1923,
pp. 363 sq.
I0. See H. M. Robertson, op. cit., pp. 88-110 and 133-67; and J. Brod-
rick, The Economic lllorals of the Jesuits, which, in addition to Cot‘-
recting Robertson's errors, contains the best account of the eco-
nomic teaching of the Jesuits available in English.
II. E.g. H. Wiskemann, Darstellung der in Deutschland Zur Zeit der
Reformation herrschenden Nationalo'ko:1otnt'schen Ansichten, Leipzig,
I361; F. Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, London, I892,
Introduction; Alfred Marshall, Principles ofEconornics, 1898, chap.
III; W. Cunningham, Christianity and Social Questions, London,
1910 (see below, note 33 on chap. iv). The last work, though pub-
lished seven years after the appearance of Weber's articles, docs not
refer to them, nor is its argument similar to theirs.
12. E.g. H. M. Robertson, op. cit., p. xi. “Many writers have taken ad-
284 NOTES
vantage of an unpopularity of Capitalism in the twentieth century
to employ them [sc. the theories ascribed to Weber] in attacks on
Calvinism, or on other branches of religion." The only Guy Fawkes
of the gang—apart, of course, from myself-detected by Mr. Rob-
ertson actually ring the train appears to be that implacable incen-
diary, Mr. Aldous Huxley. “Infected,” like the arch-conspirator,
Weber, “with a deep hatred of Capitalism," we stand with him eon-
clemned of “a general tendency to undermine the basis of Capitalist
society" (iln'd., pp. 207-8). The guilty secret is out at last.
13. H. Pirenne, Les Périodes de l’Histoire Sociale tlu Capitalisme, I914.
CIIAPTERI
I. Lloyd George at Portmadoc (Times, June 16, 1921).

2. J . A. Froude, Revival of Romanism, in Short Studies on Great Sub-
jects, 3rd ser., 1877, p. 108.
3. J. N. Figgis, From Gerson to Grotius, I9l.6, pp. 21 seqq.
4. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, bk. ii, chap. ix. § 124.
5. Nicholas Oresme, c. 1320-82, Bishop of Lisieux from I377. His
Tractatus do origine, natura, jure et mutationibtts rnonetarurn was
probably written about I360. The Latin and French texts have been
edited by Wolowski (Paris, 1864), and extracts are translated by
A. E. Monroe, Early Economic Thought, I924, pp. 81-102. Its sig-
ni cance is discussed shortly by Cunningham, Growth of English
Industry and Commerce, Early and Middle Ages (4th ed., I905, pp.
354-9), and by Wolowski in his introduction. The date of the De
Usurls of Lauren-tius de Rudol s was I403; a short account of his
theories as to the exchanges will be found In E. Schreiber, Die voll:s-
wirtschqftlichen Anschauungen der Scholastilc seit Thomas v. Aquln,
1913, pp. 211-17. The most important works of St. Antonino
(1389-1459, Anchbishop of Florence, I446) are the Snmma Theolo-
gica, Sttmma Confessionalis, and De Usuris. Some account of his
teaching is given by Carl Ilgncr, Die vollcswlrthschaftlichen Anschau-
ttngen Antonlns von Florenz, I904; Schreiber, op. cit., pp. 217-23 ; and
Bede Jarrett, St. Antonino and Ivfedircval Economics, 1914. The full
title of Baxter's work is A Christian Directory: a Summ of Practical
Theologie and cases of Conscience.
6. See Chap. IV, p. 205.
7. Benvenuto da Imola, Cornentum super Dantls Conurdlam (ed.
Lacaita), vol. i, p. 579: “Qui tacit usuram vadit ad infernum; qui
non facit vadit ad inoplam" (quoted by G. G. Coulton, Social Life
in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation, I919, p. 342).
NOTES ON CHAPTER I 285
Elucidariurn, lib. ii, p. I8 (in Lanfranci Opera, ecl. J. A. Giles). For
the reasons for holding that Honorius of Augsburg, and not Lan-
franc, as stated in my earlier editions, was the author of the Eluci-
dariuni, see J._ A. Endres, Honorius Augustodnnensis: Beitrag zur
Geschichte des geistigen Lebens in 12. Jahrhundert, I906, pp. 22-26.
I am in‘debted to Professor F. M. Povricke for the correction. See
also Vita Sancti Guidonis (Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorunt, September,
vol. iv. p. 43): “Mercatura raro aut nunquam ab aliquo diu sine
crimine exerceri potuit." _
9 B. L. Manning, The People's Faith in the time of Wyclt I919, p. 186.
I0 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2“ 2*, div. i, Q. iii, art. viii. i
I1 Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1* 2*, div. i, Q. xciv, art. ii.
I2 The Bull Unam Sanctarn of Boniface VIII.
13 John of Salisbury, Polycraticus (ed. C. C. J. Webb), lib. v, cap. ii
(“Est autem res publica, sieut Plutarco placet, corpus quoddam
quod divini muneris bene cio animatur"), and lib. vi, cap. x, where
the analogy is worked out in detail. For Henry VIII’s chaplain see
Starkey, A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset
(E.E.T.S., Extra Ser., no. xxxii, 1878).
I4 Chaucer, The Pcrsone‘s Tale, § 66.
I5 On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xix (Select English Works of John
Wyclif, ed. T. Arnold, vol. iii, 1871, p. 145).
16 John of Salisbury, op. cit., lib. vi, cap. x: "Tune autem totius rei
pUbllC2E salus incolumis przeclaraque erit, si superiora membra se
impendant inferioribus et inferiora superioribus pari jure respon-
deant, ut singula sint quasi aliorum ad invicem membra."
17 Wyclif, op. cit., chaps. ix, x, xi, xvii, passim (Works of Wycli/, ed.
T. Arnold, vol. iii, pp. 130, 131, 134, 143, 132).
18 See, e.g., A. Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirtschajlsge-
schichte, 1901, vol. i, chaps. v, vii. His nal verdict (p. 458) is: "Man
kann es getrost aussprechen: es gibt wohl keine Pericde in der
Weltgeschichte, in der die natijrliche Ubermacht des Kapitals iiber
die besitz- und kapitallose Handarbeit rticksichtsloscr, freier von
sittlichen und rechtlichen Bedenken, naiver in ihrer selbstverstiind-
lichen Konsequenz gewaltet hatte und bis in die entferntesten Fol-
gen zur Geltung gebracht worden ware, als in der Bltitezeit der
Florentiner Tuchindustrie." The picture drawn by Pirenne of the
textile industry in Flanders (Belgian Democracy, its early History,
trans. by J. V. Saunders, I915, pp. 128-34) is somewhat similar.
I9 In Jan. I298/9 there was held a “parliament of carpenters at Mile-
hende, where they bound themselves by a corporal oath not to ob-
serve a- certain ordinance or provision made by the Mayor and
Aldermen touching their craft," and in the following March a “par-
286 NOTES
Iiament of smiths" was formed, with a common chest (Calendar of
Early Mayor‘: Court Rolls of the City of London, 1298-1307, ed.
A. H. Thomas, I924, pp. 25, 33-4).
20. The gures for Paris are the estimate of Martin Saint-Leon (Histoire
des Corporations de Métiers, 3rd ed., 1922, pp. 219-20, 224, 226):
those for Frankfurt are given by Bticher (Die Bevollcerung von
Frankjitrt am Main irn XIV und XV.lahrhundert, 1886, pp. 103, I46,
605). They do not include apprentices, and must not be pressed too
far. The conclusion of Martin Saint-Leon is: “ll est certain qu‘au
moyen age (abstraction faite des villes de Flandre) il n’existait pas
encore un proletariat, Ie nombre des ouvricrs he dépassant guere on
n’atteignant meme pas oelui des maitres” (op. cit., p. 227 n.). The
towns of Italy should be added, asan exception, to those of Flan-
ders, and in any case the statement is not generally true of the later
Middle Ages, when there was certainly a wage-earning proletariat
in Germany (see Lamprecht, Zurn Verstiindniss der wirtschaftlichen
und sozialen Wandlungen in Deutschland vom 1,4. zum 16. .lah.rhun-
dert, in the Zeitschrift jiir S0zial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. i,
1893, pp. 191-263), and even, though on a smaller scale, in England.
21 The Grete Sentence of Cars Expouued, chap. xxviii (Select English
Works of Wyclif; ed. T, Arnold, vol. iii, p. 333). The passage con-
tains comprehensive denunciations of all sorts of combination, in_
particular, gilds, “men of sutel craft, as fre masons and othere,” and
“marchauntis, grocers, and vitileris“ who “conspiren wickidly to-
gidre that noon of hem schal bie over a certeyn pris, though the
thing that thei bien be moche more _worthi" (ib_id., pp. 333,
334). ‘
Wyclif's argument is of great interest and importance. It is (1),
that such associations for mutual aid are unnecessary. No special
institutions are needed to promote fratemity, since, quite apart from
them, all members of the community are bound to help each other;
*‘AlIe the goodness that is in thes gilds eche man owith for to do
bi comyn fratemyte of Cristendom, by Goddis comaundement."
(2) ‘that combinations are a conspiracy against the public. Both
statements were points in the case for the sovereignty of the unitary
State, and both were to play a large part in subsequent history.
They were used by the absolutist statesmen of the sixteenth century
as an argument for State control over industry, in place of the ob-
structive torpor of gilds and boroughs, andby the individualists of
the eighteenth century as an argument for free competition. The
line of thought as to the relation of minor. associations to the State
runs from Wyclif to Turgot, Rousseau, Adam Smith, the Act of the
Legislative Assembly in 1792 forbidding trade unions (“Les citoyens
de meme état ou profession, les ouvriers et compagnons d’un art
quelcorique ne pourront . . . former des reglements sur leurs pre-
tendus intérets cemmuns"), and the English Combination Acts.
Kayser Sigmunds Reformation aller Stéinden des Heiligcn Romischen
Rcichs, printed by Goldast, Collectio Constitutiormm Imperialium,
1713, vol. iv, pp. 170-200. Its probable date appears to be about
1437. It is discussed shortly by J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and
the Reformation, I909, pp. 93-9.
Martin Saint-Leon, op. cit., p. 187. The author’s remark is made
d propos of a ruling of 1270, xing minimum rates for textile
workers in Paris. It appears, however, to be unduly optimistic.
The fact that minimum rates were xed for textile workers must not
be taken as evidence that that policy was common, for in England,
and probably in France, the textile trades received special treatment,
and minimum rates were xed for them, while maximum rates were
xed for other, and much more numerous, bodies of workers. What
is true is that the medizeval assumption with regard to wages, as with
regard to the much more important question of prices, was that it
was possible to bring them into an agreement with an objective stan-
dard of equity, which did not re ect the mere play of economic
forces.
“The Cardinals’ Gospel," translated from the Carmina Barana by
G. Ci. Coulton, in A Medieval Garner, 1910, p. 347.
Printed from the Carmina Burana by S. Gaselee, Arr Anthology of
llfcziir.-zval Lorin, 1925, pp. 58-9.
Innocent IV gave them in 1248 the title of “Romanze ecclesize lii
speciales " (Ehrenberg, Dos Zeitaltcr der Fugger, 1896, vol. ii,
p. 66).
For Grosstete see Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, vol. v, pp. 404-5
(where he is reported as denouncing the Cahorsines, "whom in our
time the holy fathers and teachers . . . had driven out of France,
but who have been encouraged and protected by the Pope in Eng-
land, which did not formerly sulTer from this pestilence"), and F. S.
Stevenson, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, 1899, pp. 101-4.
For the bishop of London and the Cahorsines see Matthew Paris,
Ciiron. Maj., vol. iii, pp. 331-2, A useful coilection of references on
the whole subject is Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 64-8.
Registrum Epistolaram J. Peckham, vol. i, p. 18, July 1279 (trans-
lated by Coulton, Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the
Reformation, p. 345).
For cases of clerical usury see Sclden Society, vol. v, I891, Leet
Jurisdiction in the City of Norwich, ed. W. Hudson, p. 35; Hist.
MSS. Com., MSS. ofrhe Marquis ofLothian, I905, p. 26; and Th.
NOTES
Bonnin, Regestrum Visitationum Odonis Rigaldi, 1832, p. 35. See
also note 86 below. .
The Chapter of Notre-Dame appears to have lent money at interest
to the citizens of Paris (A. Luchaire, Social France at the time of
Philip Augustus, translated by E. B. Krehbiel, 1912, p. 130). For
the bishop's advice to the usurer see ibia'., p. 166.
From a letter of St. Bernard, c. 1125, printed by Coulton, A
Mediaval Garner, pp. 68-73.
Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, lib. ii, cap. i-vii, where the
economic foundations of a State are discussed.
Aquinas, Sttmma Theol., 2‘ 2", Q. lxxxiii, art. vi. For St. Antonino‘s
remarks to the same purpose, see Jarrett, St. Antonino and Medireval
Economics, p. 59.
Gratian, Decretum, pt. ii, causa xii, Q. i, c. ii, § 1.
A good account of St. Antonino’s theory of property is given by
Ilgner, Die vollcswirtschaftlichen Anschatmngen Antonin: von
Florenz, chap. x.
“Sed si essct bonus legislator in patria indigente, deberet locare pro
pretio magno huiusmodi mercatores . . . ct non tantum eis ct fami-
liar sustentationem necessariam invenire, sed etiam industriam, peri-
tiam, et pericula omnia locare; ergo etiam hoe possunt ipsi in ven-
dendo” (quoted Schreiber, Die volkswirtschaftlichen Anschauungen
der Scholastik seit Thomas v. Aquin, p. I54).
Henry of Ghent, Am-ea Quodltbeta, p. 42b (quoted Schreiber, op.
cit., p. 135).
Gratian, Decretam, pt. I, dist. lxxxviii, cap. xi.
Aquinas, Summa Theol., 2* 2*, Q. lxxvii, art. iv.
lbid. Trade is unobjectionable, “cum aliquis negotiationi intendit
propter publicam utilitatem, ne scilicet res necessaria: ad vitam
patriz desint, ct lucrum cxpetit, non quasi nem, sed quasi stipen-
diurn laboris."
Henry of Langenstein, Tractatus bipartitus de contractions emptionis
et venditionis, i, 12 (quoted Schreiber, op. cit., p. 197).
See Chap. II, § ii.
Examples of these stories are printed by Coulton, A Medieval
Garner, 1910, pp. 212-15, 298, and Social Lt_'/‘e in England front the
Conquest to the Reformation, 1919, p. 346.
The facts are given by Arturo Segre, Storia del Commercio, vol. i,
p. 223. For a fuller account of credit and money-lending in Flor-
ence, see Doren, Stmlien ans der Florentiner Wirtschaftsgeschichte,
vol. i, pp. 173-209.
Bruno Kuske, Qaellen zur Geschichte des Kiilner Handel: and
Vefltehrs im Mittelalter, vol. iii, 1923, pp. 197-8.
NOTESON CHAPTER I 239
E.E.T.S., The Coventry Leet Book, ed. M. D. Harris, 1907-13,
p. 544.
Wyclif, On the Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xxiv (Works of Wyciij, ed.
T. Arnold, vol. iii, pp. 154-5). The word rendered "loan" is “leeve"
(? leene) in the text.
For examples of such cases see Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle.
lxiv, nos. 291 and 1089; Btile. xxxvii, no. 38; Bdlc. xlvi, no. 307.
They are discussed in some detail in my introduction to Thomas
Wilson's Discoursenpon Usury, 1925, pp. 28-9.
Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. of Marquis of Lotltian, p. 27; Sclden S-oc.,
Leet Juriscliction in the City of Norwich, p. 35.
Aquinas, Summa Theol., 1° 2*, Q. xcv, art. ii.
On the_Seven Deadly Sins, chap. xxiv (Works of It/[vrli ed. T.
Arnold, vol. iii, p. 153): “Bot men of lawe and marchauntis and
chaprnen and vitelcrs synnen more in avarice then done pore
laborers. And this token hereof; for now ben thei pore, and now
ben thei ful riche, for wronges that thei done."
E.g., .1Egidius Lessinus, De Usuris, cap. ix, pt. i: “Tantum res esti-
rnatur juste, quantt';_n ad utilitatem possidcntis refcrtur, et tantum
juste valet, quantum sine fraude vendi potest. . . . Omnis trans-
latio facta libera voluntate dominorum juste t"; Johannes Buri-
danus, Qutestiones super rlecern libros Ethicorum Aristotelis, v, 23:
“Si igitur rem suam sic alienat, ipse secundum suam estimationern
non damni catur, sed lucratur; igitur non injustum patitur." Both
writers are discussed by Schreiber (op. cit., pp. 161-71 and 177-91).
The theory of Buridanus appears extraordinarily modern; but he
is care1'uI_to emphasize that prices should be xed “secundum utili-
tatem ct neeessitatem totius communitatis," not “penes necessi-
tatem ementis vel vendentis."
St. Antonino, Smnma Tltcologica, pars ii, tit. i, cap. viii, § l, and
cap. xi, § iii. An account of St. Antonino‘s theory 01' prices is given
by llgner, Die volkswirtschaftlichen Anschaunngen Antonins von Flor-
enz, chap. iv; Jarrett, St. Antonino and Mediwval Economics; and
Schreiber, op. cit., pp. 217-23. Its interest consists in the attempts
to maintain the principle of the just price, while making allowance
for practical necessities.
Henry of Langenstein, Tractatns bipartitus dc contractibus ernptionis
et venrlitionis, i, ll, 12 (quoted Schreiber, op. cit., pp. 198-2.00).
For these examples see Cal. ofEarly Mayor's Court Rolls ofthe City
of London, ed. A. I-I. Thomas, pp. 259-'60; Records of the City of
Norwich, ed. W. Hudson and J. C. Tingey, vol. i, I906, p. 227; Cal.
of Early Mayor's Court Rolls, p. 132; J . M. Wilson, The Worcester
Liber Albus, 1920, pp. 199-200, 2.12-13. The question of the legiti-
K (A23)
NOTES
macy of rent-charges and of the pro ts of partnership has been fully
discussed by Max Neumann, Geschichte des Watchers in Detttschland
(1865), and by Ashley, Economic History. See also _G. O‘Brien, An
Essay on Metlitcval Economic Teaching (1920), and G. G. Coulton,
An Episode in Canon Law (tn History, July 1921), where_the dif cult
question raised by the Deeretal Naviganti is discussed.
Bernardi Papiensis Sttmma Decretaliunt (ed. E. A. D. Laspeyres,
1860), lib. v. tit. xv. _ _
E.g. Egidius Lessinus, De Usuris, cap. ix, pt. ii: “Etiam res futurm
per tempera non sunt tantre estimationis, sieut ezedem collecta: in
instanti, nee tantam utilita tem inferunt possidentibus, propter quod
eportet, quocl sint minoris estimationis secundum justitiam."
C‘-’l3rien_ (op. cit.) appears, unless I misunderstand him, to take this
view.
Politics, I, iii, ad n. 1258b. See Who said "Barren Metal"? by
E. Caunan, W. D. Ross, etc., in Economica, June 1922, pp. 105-7.
Innocent IV, Apparatus, lib. v. De Usuris. '
For Italy, see Arturo Segre, Storia del Cornmercio, vel. i, pp. 179-91,
and for France, P. Doissonade, Le Travail darts l’Europe chrétienne
an Moyen Age, 1921, pp. 206-9, 212-13. Both emphasize the
linancial relations of the Papacy.
E.g., Council of Arles, 314; Nicma, 325; Laodicea, 372; and many
others.
Corpus Juris Canonici, Decretal. Greg. IX, lib. V, tit. xix, Cap. i.
lbid., cap. iii.
1bt':l., Sexti Dccretal., lib. v, tit. v, cap. i, ii.
lbt'd., Clementinarum, lib. v, tit. v, cap. i.
The passages referred’ to in this paragraph are as follows: Corp. Jur.
Can., Decretal. Greg. IX, lib. v, tit. xix, cap. ix, iv, x, xiii, xv, ii,
v, vi. _
A Forrnulary of the Papal Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century, ed.
H. C. Lea, 1892, Nos. xcii, clxxviii (2), clxxix.
Raimunrli de Penna-forti Surnma Pastoralis (Ravaisson, Catalogue
General des MSS. des Bibliothéques pttbliques des Departemertts,
1849, vol. i, pp. 592 seqq.). The archdeacon is to inquire: “Whether
[the priest] feeds his flock, assisting those who are in need and above
all those who are sick. Works of mercy also are to be suggested by
the archdeacon, to be done by him for their assistance. If he cannot
fully accomplish them out of his own resources, he ought, according
to his power, to use his personal in uence to get from others the
means of carrying them out. . . . Inquiries concerning the parish-
ioners are to be made, both from the priest and from others among
them worthy of credence, who, if necessary, are to be summoned for
the purpose to the presence of the archdeacon, as well as from the
neighbours, with regard to matters which appear to need correction.
First, inquiry is to be made whether there are notorious usurers, or
persons reputed to be usurers, and what sort of usury they practise,
whether anyone, that is to say, lends money or anything else . . .
on condition that he receive anything above the principal, or holds
any pledge and takes pro ts from it in excess of the principal, or re-
ceives pledges and uses‘ them in the meantime for his own gain; . . .
whether he holds horses in pledge and reckons in the cost of their
fodder more than they can eat . . . or whether he buys anything at
a much lower price than it is worth, on condition that the seller can
take it back at a xed tenn on paying the price, though the buyer
knows that he (the seller) will not be able to do so; or whether he
buys anything for a less price than it is worth, hecause he pays be-
fore receiving the article, for example, standing corn; or whether
anyone, as a matter of custom and without express contract, is wont
to take payment above the principal, as the Cahorsiues do. . . .
Further, it is to be inquired whether he practises usury cloaked
under the guise of a partnership (nomine societatis palliatum), as
when a man lends money to a merchant, on condition that he be a
partner in the gains, but not in the losses. . . . Further, whether he
practises usury cloaked under the guise of a penalty, that is to say,
when his intention in imposing a penalty (for non-payment at a
given date) is not that he may be paid more quickly, but that he may
be paid more. Further, whether he practises usury in kind, as
when a rich man, who has lent money, will not receive from a poor
man any money above the principal, but agrees that he shall work
two days in his vineyard, or something of the kind. Further, whether
he practises usury cloaked by reference to a third party, as when a
man will not lend himself, but has a friend whom he induces to lend.
When it has been ascertained how many person_s in that parish are
notorious for usury of this kind, their names are to be reduced to
writing, and the archdeacon is to proceed against them in virtue of
his oflice, causing them to be cited to his court on a day xed, either
before himself or his responsible o icial, even if there is no accuser,
on the ground that they are accused by common report. If they are
convicted, either because their offence is evident, or by their own
confession, or by witnesses, he is to punish them as he‘ thinks best.
. . . If they cannot be directly convicted, by reason of their mani-
fold shifts and stratagems, nevertheless their ill name as "usurers can
easily be established. . . . If the archdeacon proceed with caution
and diligence against their wicked doings, they will hardly be able to
held their own or to escapc—if, that is . . . he vex them with
2 NOTES
trouble and expense, and humiliate them, by frequently serving cita-
tions on them and-assigning several di 'erent days for their tr-ial,
so that by trouble, expense, loss of time, and all manner ofconfusion
they may be induced to repent and submit themselves to the disci-
pline of the Church."
E. Marlene and U. Durand, Thesaurus nevus Anecdotorum, 1717,
.vol. iv, pp. 696 seqq.
Pecock, The Repressor of over-much blarning of the Clergy, ed. C-
Babington, 1860, pt. i, chap. iii, pp: 15-16. His words show both
the difficulties which confronted ecclesiastical teaching and the
attempts to overcome them. “I preie thee . . . seie to me where in
Holi Scripture is yoven the hundrid parti of the teching upon matri-
monie which y teche in a book mad upon Mar:-inionie, and in the
rste partie of Crisren rcligioun . . . Seie to me also where in Holi
Scripture is y-oven the hundred part of the teching which is yoven
upon usure in the thridde parti of the book yclepid The lfing of the
iiij tables; and yit al thilk hool teching yoven upon usure in the
now named book is litil ynough or ouer litle for to leerne, knowe and
have suf cientli into mannis behove and into Goddis trewe service
and lawe keping what is to be leerned and kunnen aboute usure, as
to reeders and studiers ther yn it muste needis be open. Is ther eny
more writen of usure in al the Newe Testament save this, Luke vi,
‘Geve ye loone, hoping no thing ther of,’ and al that is of usure
writen in the Oold Testament favourith rather usure than it re-
proveth. Howevere, therefore, schulde eny man seie that the suf-
cient leernying and kunnyng of usure or of the vertu contrarie to
usure is groundid in Holi Scripture? Howe evere schal thilk' litil
now rehercid clausul, Luke vi, be su icient for to answere and
assoile alle the harde scrupulose doutis and questiouns which
al dai hau neede to be assoiled in mennis bargenyngis and chef-
faringis togidre? Ech man having to do with suche questiouns
mai soone se that Holi Writt geveth litil or noon light therto at al.
Forwhi al that Holi Writt seith ther to is that he forbedith usure, and
therfore all that mai be take therbi is this, that usure is unleeful; but
though y bileeve herbi that usure is unleeful, how schal y wite herbi
what usure is, that y be waar for to not do it, and whanne in a bar-
geyn is usure, though to summen seerneth noon, and how in a bar-
geyn is noon usure though to summen ther semeth to be?"
Pecock’s defence of the necessity of commentaries on the teaching
of Scripture was the real answer to the statement afterwards made
by Luther that the text, “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” was an
all-suf cient guide to action (see Chap. II, p. 103). Examples of
teaching-as-.,to-usuiy containedin books such as. Pecock had in mind
will be found in Myrc’s Instructions for Parish Priests (E.E.T.S.,
ed. E. Peacock and F. J. Fumivall, 1902), the Pupitta Oculi, and
Dan Michel’: Ayenbite of Imvyr (E.E.T.S., ed. R. Morris, 1866).
'72. The Catechism ‘of John Hamilton, Archbishop of St. Andrews, I552,
ed. T. G. Law, 1834, pp. 97-9. Under the seventh commandment
are denounced: “Fyftlie, al thay that defraudis or spoulyeis the com-
mon geir, aganis the common weill for lufe of their awin pryvate
and singulare weill. Saxtlie, all usuraris and ockiraris synnis aganis
this command, that will nocht len their geir frelie, bot makis condi-
tione of ockir, aganis the command of Christe. Sevintlie, all thay
quhilk hais servandis or work men and wyll nocht pay theim thair
fee or waige, accordyng to conditioun and thair deservyng, quilk
syn, as sanct James sayis, cryis vengeance before God. Auchtlie, all
thai that strykis cowyne of unlauchful metall, quhair throuch the
common weil is hurt and skaithit. The nynte, all Merchandis that
sellis corruppit and evyll stufe for gude, and gyf thay or ony uther in
bying or seelyng use desait, falsate, parjurie, wrang mettis or wey-
chtis, to the skaith of their nychtbour, thay committ gret syn agane
this command. Nother can we clenge fra breakyng of this command
all kyndis of craftis men quhilk usis nocht thair awin craft leillalie
and trewlie as thai suld do. . . . Al wrechis that wyl be ground
ryche incontynent, quhay be fraud, falset, and gyle twynnis men and
'thair geir, quhay may keip thair nychbour fra.povertie and mys-
chance and dois it nocht. Quhay takis ouer sair mail, otter mekle
ferme or ony blake maillis fra thair tennands, or puttis thair cotarris
to ouir sair labouris, quhair throw the tenentis and cottaris is put
to herschip. Quha invies his nychboutis gud fortune, ouir byis him
or takis his geir out of his hands with fair hechtis, or prevenis him,
or begyles him at his marchandis hand." The detail in which dif-
ferent forms of commercial sharp practice are denounced is notice-
able. .
'73. See e.g. Matt. Paris, Citron. Maj., vol. iii, pp. 19]-2, for the case of
a priest who, for refusing to give Christian burial to an excommuni-
cate usurer, is seizedby order of the Count of Brittany and buried
alive, bound to the dead man. See also Mare:-iuisjbr the History of
Thomas Becket, vol. v, p. 38.
74. Harduin, Acta Canciiiorum, vol. vii, pp. 1017-20: “Anno prardicto
[I485], diebus Mercurii et Jovis przedictis, scilicet ante Ramos Pa.l-
marum, ibidem apud Vicanum, in claustro ecclesia: de Vicano;
coram domino archiepiscopo, et mandato suo, personte. infrascrip-
tas, parochiani de Guorgonio, qui super usuraria pravitate erant
quam plurimum diffamati; coram domino propter hoe vocati ab-
juraveruut: et per mandatum domini summas infrascriptas, quas
NOTES
se confessi fuerunt habuisse per usurariam pravi ta tem, per juramen-
tum suum restituere promiserunt, et stare juri super his coram eo.
Bertrandus de Faveriis adjuratus usuras, ut prmmittitur, promisit
restituere centum solidos monette antiquas: quot, prout ipse con-
fessus. est, habuerat per usurariam pravitatem. . . ." Thirty-six
more eases were treated in this way.
Villani, Cronica, book xii, chap. lviii (ed. 1823, vol. vi, p. 142):
Villani complains of the conduct of the inquisitor: “Ma per atti-
gnere danari, d'ogni picoola parola oziosa che alcuno dicesse per in-
iquittt contra Iddio, o dicesse che usura non fosse pcecato mot-tale,
o sirnili parole, condannava in grossa somma di danari, seeondo
che l‘uomo era ricco."
Constitutions of Clarendon, cap. 15: “Placita dc debitis, qua: de
interposita debentur, vel absquc interpositione ftdei, sint in justitia
regis." On the whole subject see Pollock and Maitland, History of
English Law, 2nd ed., 1898, vol. ii, pp. 197-202, and F. Makower,
Constitutional History of the Church of England, 1895, § 60.
Cal. of Early Mayor's Court Rails of the City of Lot.-don, ed. A. H.
Thomas, pp. 44, 88, 156, 235; Seiden Soc., Borough Customs, ed.
M. Bateson, vol. ii, 1906, pp. I61 (London) and 209-10 (Dublin);
Records ofLeicester, ed. M-. Bateson, vol. ii, 1901, p. 49. For similar
prohibitions by manorial courts, see Hist. tlJ.S'S. Cont., MSS. of
Marquis of Lorhian, p. 28, and G. P. Scrope, History of the lltlanor
and Barony of Castle Combe, 1852, p. 238.
Annales a'e Burton, p. 256; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. ii, p. IIS; Rot.
Parl., vol. ii, p. l29b. '
Cal. of Letter Books of the City of London, ed. R. R. Sharpe, vol. H,
pp. 23-4, 24-5, 27, 28, 200, 206-7, 261-2, 365; Liber A lbus, bk. iii,
pt. ii, pp. 77, 315, 394-401, 683; Sclden Soc., Leet Jurisdiction in
the City ofNorwich, p. 35; Hist. MSS. Com., MSS. ofMarquis of
Lotltian, pp. 26, 27.
Rot. Parl., vol. ii, pp. 332a, 350b.
R. H. Morris, Cl-‘tester in the Plantagenet and Tudor Reigns, 1894 ('2),
p. 190.
Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. xi, no. 307; Bdle; xxix, nos.
193-5; Bdle. xxxi, nos. 96-100, 527; Bdle. Ix, no. 20; Bdle. lxiv, no.
1039. See also Year Books and Plea Rolls as Sources of Historical
Information, by H. G. Richardson, in Trans. R.H..S'., 4th series, vol.
v, 1922, pp. 47-8.
Ed. Gibson, Codex Jttris Ecclcsiastici Anglicani, 2r:d ed., 1761,
p. 1026.
15 Ed. III, st. 1,-c. 5; 3 Hen. VII, e. 5; 11 Hen. VII, c. 8; 13 Eliz.
c. 8; 21 Jac. 1, c.17.
NOTES ON CHAPTER I 29$
B5 Cal. of_Early Mayor’s Court Rolls of City of London, ed. A. H.
Thomas, pp. 1, 12, 28-9, 33-4, 44, 52, 88, 141, I56, 226, 235", 251.
The cases of the smiths and spurriers occur on pp. 33-4 and 52. In
the fteenth oentury a gild still occasionally tried to-enforce its rules
by proceedings in an ecclesiastical court (see Wm. H. Hale, A Series
of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal Causes, 184 7, nos. xxxvi
and Lwiii, where persons breaking gild rules are cited before the
Con1missary's cou rt).
86 Canterbury and York Soc., Registrum Tltonte Spofford, ed. A. T.
Bannister, 1919, p. 52 (1424); and Surtces Society, vol. cxxxviii, The
Register of Thomas of Corbritlge, Lord Archbishop of York, ed. Wm.
Brown, 1925, vol. i, pp. 187-8: “6 kal. Maii, 1303. Wilton." Lit-
tera tes-timonialis super purgacione domini Johannis de Multhorp,
vica rii ecclesie de Garton’. de usura sibi imposita. Universis Christi
delibus, ad quos presentes littere pcrvenerint, patent per easdem
quod, cum dominus Johannes de Multhorp’, vicarius ecclesie de
Garton’, nostre diocesis, coram nobis Thoma, Dci gracia, etc., in
visitacione nostra super usura fuisset notatus, videlioet, quod mutu-
avit cuidam Jollano dc Briddale, ut dicebatur, xxxiij s. iiij d, eo pacto
quod idem vicarius ab eo reciperet per x annos annis singulis x s.
pro eisdem, de quibus eciam dictum fuit quod prefatus Jollanus
dicto vicario pro octo annis ex pacto satisfecit et solvit predicto;
eundem vicarium super hoe vocari fecimus coram nobis et ei object-
mus supradicta, que ipse inftcians constancius atque negans se optu-
lit in forma juris super hiis legitime purgaturum. Nos autem eidem
vicario purgacionem suam cum sua sexta manu vicariorum et
aliorum presbiterorum sui ordinis indisimus faciendam, quam die
Veneris prosima ante festum apostolorurn Philippi et Jacobi (April
26), anno gracie m° ccc° tercio, ad hoc sibi pre xo, in manerio nos-
tro de Wilton’ super articulo recipimus supradicto, idemque vica-
rius, unacum dominis Johanne, rectore ecclesie l3.M. juxta portam
castri de Eboraco, Johanhe et Johanne, de Wharrtrm ct dc Wyvcr-
thorp’ ecclesiarum vicarijs ac Roberto, Johanne, Alano, Stepheno
et Willelmo, de Naffert0n', Drifield’, Wetewang’, Foston’ et Win-
ttingharn ecclesiarum prcsbiteris parochialibus dedignis, de me-
morato articu.lo legitime se purgavit; propter quod ipsum vicarium
sic purgatum pronunciamus et immuaern sentenciaiiter declaramus,
restituentes eundem ad suam pristinam bonam famam. In cujus
rei testimonium sigillurn nostrum present-ibus est appensum."
7. Early Chancery Proceedings, Bdle. xv-iii, no. 157; Bdle. xix, no. 2155;
Bdle. x-xiv, no. 255; Bdle. in-oti, no. 348. Seealso A. Abram, Social
England in the Fifteenth Century, 1909, pp. 215-17. In view of these
examples, it seems probable that a more thorough examination of
NOTES
the Early Chancery Proceedings would show that, even in the f-
teenth century, the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts in matters
of contract and usury was of greater practical importance than has
sometimes been supposed.
Surtees Soc., vol. lxiv, 1875 (Acts ofChapter ofthe Collegiate Church
ofRipon), contains more than 100 cases in which the court deals with
questions of contract, debt, etc. The case which is dismissed “prop-
ter civilitatem causte" occurs in 1532 (Surtees Soc., vol. Jtxi, 1845,
Ecclesiastical Proceedings front the Courts of Durham, p. 49).
Chetham Soc., vol. xliv, 1901, Act Book of the Ecclesiastical Court
of Whalley, pp. 15-16.
Surtees Soc., vol. lxiv, 1875, Acts of Chapter ofthe Collegiate Church
of Ripon, p. 26.
l-Iale, op. cit. (note 85 above), noxccxxxviii.
See Chap. Ill, p. 166.
For parishes, see S. O. Addy, Church and Manor, 1913, chap. xv,
where numerous examples are given. For a gild which appears to
have acted as a bank, see Hist. MSS, C0m., llth Report, 1887,
App!-t., pt. iii, p. 228 (MSS. ofthe Borough of King‘: Lynn), and for
other examples of loans, 1-I. F. Westlake, The Parish Gilds ofMediat-
val England, 1919, pp. 61-3, Records of the City of Oxford, ed. Wm.
H. Turner, 1880, p. 8, Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, ed. C. Words-
worth, pt. ii, 1897, pp. 616-17, and Unwin, The Gilds and Com-
panies ofLondon, 1908, p. 121. For a hospital, see Hist. MSS. Com.,
14th Report, Appx., pt. viii, 1895, p. 129 (ll/ISS. of the Corporation
of Bury St. Edmunds), where 20d. is lent (or given) to a poor man
to buy seed for his land. A statement (made halfa century after the
Dissolution) as to loans by monasteries is quoted by F. A. Gasquet,
Henry Vlll and the English Monasteries, 7th ed., 1920, p. 463;
speci c examples are not known to me.
W. H. Bliss, Cal. of Papal Letters, vol. i, pp. 267-8.
For the early history of the Monts de Piété see Holzapfel, Die
Anfdiuge der Montes Pietatis (1903), and for their development in the
Low Countries, A. Henne, Histoire du Regne de Charles quint en
Belgiqtte, 1859, vol. v, pp. 220-3. For proposals to establish them in
England see S.P.D. Eliz., vol. ex, no. 57 (printed in Tawney and
Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iii, sect. iii, no. 6), and my
irttroduction to Thomas Wilson's Discourse upon Usury, 1925 ed.,
pp. 125-7.
Camden Soc., A Relation of the Island of England about the year
1500 (translated from the Italian), 1847, p. 23.
Lyndwood, Prat-ineiale, sub. tit. Usura, and Gibson, Codex Jur.
Eccl. Angl., vol. ii, p. 102.6.
Pecock, The Repressor of over-much blaming of the Clergy, pt. iii,
chap. iv, pp. 296-7: ‘Also Crist seide here in this present process,
that ‘at God’ it is possible a riche man to entre into the kingdom of
heuen; that is to seie, with grace which God profrith and geueth
. . . though he abide stille riche, and though withoute such grace
it is ouer hard to him being riche to entre. Wherfore folewith herof
openli, that it is not forbodun of God eny man to be riche; for
thanne noon such man schulde eure entre heuen. . . . And if it be
not forbode any man to be riche, certis thanne it is leeful ynough
ech man to be riche; in lassc than he vowe the contrarie or that he
knoweth bi assay and experience him silf so miche indisposid anen-
tis richessis, that he schal not mowe rewle him silf aright anentis tho
richessis: for in thilk caas he is bonde to holde him silf in poverte."
The embarrassing quali cation at the end-which suggests the ques-
tion, who then dare be rich?—is the more striking because of the
common-sense rationalism of the rest of the passage.
Trithemius, quoted by J. Janssen, History of the German People at
the Close of the Middle Ages, vol. ii, 1896, p. 102.
. Cal. of Early Mayor's Court Rolls of the City of London, ed.
A. H. Thomas, pp. 157-8.
. See A. Luchaire, Social France at the time ofPhilip Augustus (trans-
lated by E. B. Krehbicl), pp. 391-2, where an eloquent denuncia-
tion by Jacques de Vitry is quoted.
. Topogrepher and Genealogist, vol. i, 1846, p. 35. (The writer is a
surveyor, one Humberstone.)
. See, e.g., Chaucer, The Persone's Tale, §§ 64-6. The parson ex-
presses the orthodox view that “the condicion of thraldom and
the rst cause of thraldom is for sinne.” But he insists that serfs
and lords are spiritually equal: “Thilke that thou clepest thye
thrallcs been goddes peple; for humble folk been Cristes
freendes."
. Gratian, Decretum, pt. ii, causa x, Q. li, c. iii, and causa xii, Q. ii,
c. xxxix.
. Summa Theol., 1' 2", Q. xciv, art. v. § 3.
. An article of the German Peasants‘ programme in 1525 declared:
“For men to hold us as their own property . . . is pitiable enough,
considering that Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, the lowly
as well as the great, without exception, by the shedding of His
precious blood. Accordingly it is consistent with Scripture that we
should be free." (The programme is printed in J. S. Schapiro,
Social Reform and the Reformation, 1909, pp. 137-42). The rebels
under Ket prayed “that all bondmcn may be made free, for God
freed them all with His precious blood-shedding" (printed in
NOTES
Bland, Brown, and Tawney, English Economic History, Select
Documents, pt. ii, sect. i, no. 8).
CHAPTERII
A Lecture on the Srudy of Ht'.'rt0ry, delivered at Cambridge, June 11,
1895, by Lord Acton, p. 9.
W. Sombart (Der moderne Kopitolismus, 1916, vol. i, pp. 524--6)
gives facts and gures. See also J. Strieder, Srudien zur Geschichte
t'copita.'istisclrer Organizotiousformeu, 1914, kap. i. ii. '
E. R. Diinell, {Die Bltlitezeit der Deutscheu Hanse, ' 1905; Schanz,
Errgiisclie Handelspofitik gegen die Ende des Mittelalters, vol. i;
N. S. B. Gras, The Early Engiish Customs System, 1918, pp. 452-514.
E.g., The Fugger News-Letters, 1568-1605, ed. V. von Klarwill,
trans. P. de Chary, 1924.
E. Alberi, Le Relazioue degli Ambasciotori Veneti oi Sertato, serie i,
vol. iii, 1853, p. 357 (Relozione di Filippo H Re di Spagno do Michele
Soriouo rte! 1559): “Questi sono li tesori del re di Spagna, queste le
miniere, queste l’Indie che hanno sostentato Pimpresse dell‘ Im-
peratore tanti anni."
The best contemporary picture of the trade of Antwerp is that of
L. Guicciarclini,.Descrittione di tum‘ i Poesi Bossi (1567), of which
part is reprinted in a French translation in Tawney and Power
Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iii, pp. 149-73. The best mOdelT|
accounts of Antwerp are given by Pirenne, Histoire do Belgique, vol.
ii, pp. 399-403, and vol. iii, pp. 259-72; Ehrenberg, Dos Zeirolrer
der Fugger, vol. ii, pp. 3-68; and J. A. Goris, Etude sur fer Colonies
Marclrrtttzics Mér'ir!iorrales ti Artvers do I488 ti I567 (1925).
The Mcutings had opened a branch in Antwerp in 1479, the Hoch-
stetters in 1486, the Fuggcrs in 1508, the Wclsers in 1509 (Pirenne,
op. cit., vol. iii, p. 261).
Pirenne, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 2.73-6.
Ehrenberg, op cit., vol. ii, pp. 7-8.
A short account of international nancial relations in the sixteenth
century will be found in my introduction to Thomas Wilson's
Discourse upon Usury, 1925 ed., pp. 60-86.
Erasmus, Adagio; see also The Complaint of Peace.
For the Fuggers, see Ehrenberg, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 85-186, and
for the other German rms mentioned, r'L~id., pp. 187-269.
See Goris, op. cit., pp. 510-45, where the reply of the Paris theolo-
gians is printed in full: and Ehrenberg, op. cit., v.ol. ii, pp. 18, 21.
For Bellarrnin, see Goris, op. cit., pp. 551-2. A curious illustration
of the manner i.u which it was still thought necessary in the later
NOTES ON CHAPTER II 299
sixteenth century, and in Protestant England, to reconcile economic
policy with canonist doctrine, will be found in S.P.D. Eliz., vol.
lxxv, no. 54 (printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Docu-
ments, vol. iii, pp. 359-70). The writer, who is urging the repeal of
the Act of 1552 forbidding all interest whatever, cites Aquinas and
Hostiensis to prove that “trewe and unfayned interest" is not to be
condemned as usury.
14 Ashley, Economic History, 1893, vol. i, pt. ii, pp. 4-42-3.
15 Bodi n, La Response de Jean Bodin aux Paradoxes de Malestroit
touchant l'enchér'issement de toutes chases et le moyen d’y remédier.
16 See Max Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland, 1865,"
pp. 487 seqq.
17 Calvin’s views will be found in his E-;)t'.S‘l'0l£' et Responsa, 1575,
pp. 355-7, and in Sennon xxviii in the Opera.
18 Bucer, De Regno Christi.
19 Third Decade, 1st and_ 2nd Sermons, in The Decades of Henry
Bullinger (Parker Society), vol. iii, 1850.
20 Luther, Klciner Sermon von: 1-Vac/rer (1519) in Werhe (Weimar eCl.),
vol. vi, pp. I-8; Grosser Sermon vom I-Vucher (1520), in t'bid., pp. 33-
60; Von Kau slrorrdlung und Wnchcr (1524), in ibr'd., vol. xv, pp. 279-
322; An die Pfarrherrn wider den Wucher zu predigen, Vermahnung
(I540), in ibid., vol. li, pp. 325-424. '
21 “Hie miisste man wahriich ouch den Fuckern und der gcistlichert
Gescllschoft einen Zaum ins Maul legen" (quoted by Ehrenberg, op.
cit., vol. i, p. 117 n.).
22 See p. 122.
23 Luther, Wider die rduberisclren und rmiirderischen Rotten der Bauem
(1525), in Werlse, vol. xviii, pp. 357-61.
24 Latimer, Sermons; Ponet, An Exhortation, or rather a Warning, to
the Lords and Commons; Crowley, The Way to Wealth, and ‘Epi-
grams (in Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M‘. Cowper,
E.E.T.S., 1872); Lever, Sermons, 1550 (English Reprints, ed. E.
Arber, 1895); Becon, The Jewel of Joy, 15,53; Sandys, 2nd, 10th,
11th, and 12th of Sermons (Parker Society, 1841); Jewel, Works,
pt. iv, pp. 1293-8 (Parker Society, 1850). Citations from less welt-
known writers and preachers will be found in J. O. W. I-Iaweis,
Sketches of the Reformation, 1844.
25 Gairdner, Letters and Papers of Henry V111, vol. xvi, no. 357.
26 Bossuet, Traité do l'Usure. For an account of his views, see Favre,
Le prét a intérét dons l'ancienne France.
27 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England with the Mischiefs
attending it, 1673.
28. For an account of these changes see K. Larnprecht, Zuni Vers.'a'nd-
NOTES
niss der itirtscha lichen und sozialen Wandhmgen in Deutschland
vom 14. zum 16. Jahrhundert, in the Zeitschrtft fiir SOZial- uml
wirtscha sgeschichte, Bd. i, 1893, pp. 191 seqq.
Lamprecht, op. cit., and J. S. Schapiro, Social Reform and the
Reformation, 1909, pp. 40-73. .
Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 20-39, and Strieder, op. cit. (see note 2),
pp. 156-212.
For the so-called Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund see
Chap. I, note 22, and for the Peasants’ Articles, ibid., note 106.
For Geiler von Kaiserberg and Hipler see Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 30,
126-31. For Hutten see H. Wiskemann, Darstellung der in Deutsch-
land zur Zeit der Reformtition herrschenden Notionalokonomisclten
Arsichten, 1861, pp. 13-24.
Quoted W. Raleigh, The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century,
1910, p. 28.
Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, 1912, pp. 44-52.
Schapiro, op. cit., p. 137.
See citations in Wiskemann, op. cit., pp. 47-8, and, for a discussion
of Luther's social theory, Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christ-
lichen Kirchen, 1912,-pp. 549-93.
Luther, An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation (1520), in Werlce,
vol. vi, pp. 381 seqq.
Schapiro, op. cit., p. 139.
Luther, Ermahnung zurn Friederl auf die zwiilf Artiltel der Bauer-
schaft in Schwarben (1525), in Werlte, vol. xviii, p. 327.
Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in r'bid., vol. xv, p. 295.
An den christlichen Adel, in ibid., vol vi, p. 466 (quoted by R. H.
Murray, Erasmus and Luther, 1920, p. 239).
Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in ibid., vol. xv, pp. 293-4, 312.
Concerning Christian Liberty, in Wace and Buchheim, Luther’:
Primary Works, 1896, pp. 256-7.
Grosser Sermon vom Wucher, in Werke, vol. vi, p. 49.
See note 71 on Chapter I.
Printed in Neumann, Geschichte des Wuchers in Deutschland,
Beilage F, pp. 618-19.
Concerning Christian Liberty, in Wace and Buchheim, op cit.,
pp. 258-9. '
Von Kaufshandlung und Wucher, in Werke, vol. xv, p. 302.
Zwingli, Von der gdttliclren und rnenschlichen Gerechtigkelt, oder
von dem gottlichen Gesetze und den burger-lichen Gesetzen, printed in
R. Christoffel, H. Zwingli, Leben und ausgewdltlte Schrtften, 1857,
pt. ii, pp. 313 seqq. See also Wiskemann, op cit., pp. 71-4.
“Quid si igitur ex negociatione plus lucri percipi possit quam ex
NOTES ON CHAPTER II 301
fundi cuiusvis proventu? Unde vero mercatoris lucrum? Ex ipsius
inquies, diligentia et industria" (quoted by Troeltsch, Die Social-
lehren der Christlichen Kirche, p. 707).
Bucer, De Regno Christi.
Roger Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie, 1612, p. 61.
Calvin, lnstitutes of the Christian Religion, trans. by J. Allen, 1333,
vol. ii, p. 147 (bk. iii, ch. xxiii, par. 7).
lbid., vol. ii, pp. 128-9 (bk. iii, ch. xxi, par. 7).
Gerrard Winstanley, A New- Yeers Gift for the Parliament and
Annie, 1650 (Thomason Tracts, Brit. Mus., E., 587 (6), p. 42).
The Works of l/Villio.-n Laud, D.D., ed. Wm. Scott, vol. vi, pt; i,
1857, p. 213.
De Subventione Pauperum.
“Quod ad maiores natu spectat, a nobis quotannis repetitur in-
spectio cuiusque familite. Distribuimus inter nos urbis regiones, ut
ordine sin gulas decurias executere liceat. Adest ministro comes unus
ex senioribus. lllic novi incolm exarninantur. Qui semel recepti
sunt, omittuntur; nisi quod requiritur sitne domus pacata et recte
composita, num lites cum vicinis, num qua ebrietas, num pigri sint
et ignari ad conciones frequentendas" (quoted by Wiskemann, op.
cit., p. 80 n.). For his condemnation of indiscriminate almsgiving,
see ibid., p. 79 n.
De non habendo Paupcrum Delectu (1523), and De Erogatione Elec-
mosynarum (1542). See K. R. Hagenbach, Johann Oelcolamptltl und
Oswald Myconius, die Reformatoren Rasels, 1859, p. 46.
Carl Pestalozzi, Heinrich Bullinger, Leben und ausgewtlihlte Schrif-
ten, 1858, pp. 50-1, 122-5, 340-2.
Wiskemann, op. cit., pp. 70-4.
Quoted by Preserved Smith, The Age of the Reformation, 1921,
p. 17-1.
Calvin, lnst., bk. iv, ch. xii, par. 1.
Printed in Paul Henry, Dos Leben Johann Calrins, vol. ii, 1838,
Appx., pp. 26-41.
R. Christoffel, Zwingli, or the Rise ofthe Reformation in Switzerlund,
trans. by John Cochran, 1858, pp. 159-60.
Printed in Paul Henry, op. cit., vol. ii, Appx., pp. 23-5.
E. Choisy, L'Etat Chre'tien Calviniste ti Geneve au temps de Theodore
de Beze, 1902, p. 145. I should like to make acknowledgments to
this excellent book for most of the matter contained in the following
paragraphs.
Paul Henry, op. cit., pp. 70-5. Other examples are given by Pre-
served Smith, op. cit., pp. 170—4,_ and by F. W. Kampschultc, Johann
Calvin, seine Kirche und sein Staat in Genj] 1869. Statistical esti-
NOTES
mates of the bloodthirstiness o1'Ca1vin’s regime vary; Smith (p. 171)
states that in Geneva, a town of 16,000 inhabitants, 58 persons were
executed and 76 banished in the years 1542-6.
Knox, quoted by Preserved Smith, op. cit., p. 174.
Calvin, lnsi., bk. iii, ch. vii, par. 5.
Choisy, op. cit., pp. 442-3.
Ibirl., pp. 35-37.
ll:ia'., pp. 189, 117-19.
lbid., pp. 35, 165-7.
lbirl., pp. 119-21.
1bid., pp. 189-94.
Paul Henry, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 70 n-. ,
Se": the description of the Church given in Calvin, Inst, bk. iv, ch. i,
par. 4: “Quia nunc de ecclesia visibili disserere propositum est,
discamus vel matris elogio, quam utilis sit nobis eius cognitio, immo
necessaria, quando non alius est in vitam ingressus nisi nos ipsa
concipiat in utero, nisi pariat, nisi nos alat suis uberibus, denique
sub custodia et gubernatione sua nos tueatur, donec excuti came
mortali, similes erimus angelis. Noque enim patitur nostra in rmi-
tas, a sc-hola nos dimitti, donec toto vita: cursu discipuli fuerimus.
Adde quod extra eius gremium nulla est speranda peccatorum
remissio nee ulla salus.”
Synodicon in Gallia Rcformota: Or the Acts, Decisions, Decrees and
Canons of those famous National Councils of ll]-8 Reformed Churches
in France, by John Quick, 1692, vol. i, p. 99.
lbid., vol. i, p. 9 (pirates and fraudulent tradesmen), pp. 25, 34, 33,
'79, 140, 149 (interest and usury), p. 70 (false merchandise and selling
of stretched cloth), p. 99 (reasonable pro ts), pp. 162, 204 (invest-
ment of money for the bene t of the poor), pp. 194, 213
(lotteries).
The Bake of Disci_oline, in Works‘ of Jolm Knox, ed. D. Laing,
vol. ii, 1848, p. 227. _
Scottish H istory Soc., Sr. Andrews Kirk Session Register, ed. D. H.
Fleming, 1889-90, vol. i, p. 309; vol. ii, p. 322.
W. B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1890,
vol. i, p. 11. The words are Governor Bradford’s.
Wt'm‘l:rop's Journal “History of New England," 1630-4.9, ed. J. K.
-Hosmer, 1908, vol. i, pp. 134, 32$; vol. ii, p. 20.
W-eeden, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 125, S3.
Winthrop, op. cit., vol. ii, .p. -20.
J. A. "Doyle, The English in America, vol. ii, 1887, p. 57; the price
of cattle “must not '-be judged by urgent necessity, but by reasonable
pro t."
NOTES ON CHAPTER III 303
Roger Williams, The Bloucly Tcnent of Persecution, 1644, chap. lv.
Winthrop, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 315-18. A similar set of rules as to the
conduct of the Christian in trade are given by Bunyan in The Life
and Death of Mr. Badman, 1905 ed., pp. 118-22.
I owe this phrase to the excellent book of J. T. Adams, The Founding
of New England.
CHAPTER ll]
J. Rossus, Historia Regum Anglia-* (ed. T. Hearnc).

4 Hen. V11, c. 19; 6 l-len. V111, e. 5; 7 Hen. V111, c. 1; 25 Hen.
VIII, c. 13. For the Commission of 1517 see Leadam, The Domes-
day of Enclosures.
For examples see J. S. Schapiro, Social .Reform arul the Reformation,
pp. 60-1, 65, 67, 70-1.
More, Utopia, p. 32 (Pitt Press ed., 1879). “Noblemen and gentle-
men, yes and certayne abottes, holy men no doubt . . . leave no
grounds for tillage, thei enclose al into pastures." For a case of
claiming a bondrnan see Selden Society, vol. xvi, 1903, Select Cases
in the Court of Star Chamber, pp. cxxiii—exxix, 118-29 (Carter v. the
Abbot of Malmesbury); for conversion of copyholds to tenancies
at will, Selden Society, vol. xii, 1898, Select Cases in the Court of
Requests, pp. l.ix-lxv, 64-101 (Kent and other inhabitants of Abbot's
Ripton v. St. John; the change was alleged to have been niade in
1471). .
A. Savine, English ll/Ionasteries on the Eve ofthe Dissolution (Oxford
Studies in Social and Legal History, ed. P. Vinogradolf, vol. i, 1909,
p. 100), estimates the net temporal income 01' English monasteries
in 1535 at £109,736, and the net income from all sources at £135,361.
These gures require to -be multiplied by at least 12 to convert them
into terms of modern money. An estimate of the capital value
which they represent can only be a guess, but it can hardly have
been less (in terms of modem money) than £20,051-'),000.
For the status and payments of grantees, see the gures of Savine,
printed in I-I. A. L. Fisher, The Political History ofEngland, 1485-
1547, Appx. ii: the low price paid by peers is pa rtieularly striking.
The best study is that of S. B. Liljegren, The Full of the Monasteries
and the Social changes in England leading up to the Great Re rolution
(1924), which shows in detail. (pp. 118-25) the activities of specu-
lators.
Star Chamber Proc., Hen. V111, vol. vi, no. 181, printed in Tawney
and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. i, pp. !~9-29.
304 NOTES
8. Selden Society, Select Cases in the Court of Requests, pp; lvi.ii—lxiJt,
198-200.
9. Quoted by F. A. Gasquet, Henry the Eighth and the English Monas-
teries, 1920, pp. 227-8.
10 See, e.g., The Obedience ofa Christian lldan (in Tyndale's Doctrinal
Treatises, Parker Society, 1848), p. 231, where the treatment of the
poor by the early Church is cited as an example; and Policies to
retluce this realme of Englancle unto a Prosperus I/Veaithe and Estate
(1549, printed in Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents,
vol. iii, pp. 311-45): “Like as we suffered our selles to be ignorant
of the trewe worshipping of God, even so God kepte from us the
right knowledge how to reforme those inconveniences which we did
sec before our eyes to tende unto the utter Desolation of the Realms.
But now that the trew worshepping of Gode is . . . so purely and
sincerely sett forthe, it is likewise to be trusted that God . . . will
use the kinges maiestie and your grace to beyalso his ministres in
plucking up by the roots all the cawses and occasions of this fore-
said Decaye and Desolation."
11 Bucer, De Regno Christi.
12 A. F. Leach, The Schools of Median-al England, 1915, p. 331. He
goes on: “The contrast between_ one grammar school to every 5,625
people, and that presented by the Schools Inquiry Report in 1864
of one to every 23,750 people . . . is not to the disadvantage of
our pre-Reformation ancestors.” For details of the Edwardian
spoliation, see the same author's English Schools at the Reformation,
1546-8 (1896).
13 See Acts of the Privy Council, vol. ii, pp. 193-5 (1548); in response
to protests from the members for Lynn and Coventry, the gild lands
of those cities are regranted to them.
14 Crowley, The Way to Wealth, in Select Works of Robert Crowley.
ed. .1. M. Cowper (E.E.T.S., 1872, pp. 129-50).
15 Crowley, op. cit., and Epigrams (in ibid., pp. 1-51).
16 Becon, The Jewel ofJoy, 1553: “They abhore the names of Monkes.
Friers, Chanons, Nonnes, etc., but their goodes they gredely gripe-
And yet where the cloysters kept hospitality, let out their fermes at
a reasonable price, norished scholes, brought up youth in good
letters, they do nore of all these thynges.”
17 Thomas Lever, Sermons, 1550 (English Reprints, ed. E. Arber,
1895), p. 32. The same charge is repeated in subsequent
sermons.
18. F. W. Russell, Kett's Rebellion in Norfolk, 1859, p. 202. For Somer-
set's policy and the revolt of the gentry against it, see Tawney;- The
Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. pp. 365-70.
NOTES ON CHAPTER lII 30$
19 Latimer, Seven Sermons before Edward VI (English Reprints, ed.
E. Arber, 1895), pp. 84-6.
20.- Pleasure and Pain, in Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M.
Cowper, p. 116.
21 The Way to Wealth, in _ib:'d., p. 132.
22 Lever, op. cit., p. 130.
23. A Prayer for Landlords, from A Book of Private Prayer set forth by
Order of King Edward VI.
24 Bacon, Of the True Greatness of the Kingdom of Britain.
25 For a discussion of the problem of credit as it a 'ected the peasant
and small master, see my introduction to Wilson's Discourse upon
Usury, 1925, pp. 1'7-30.
26 See note 69 on Chapter I.
27. D’Ewcs, Journals, 1682, p. 1'.-*3.
23 Calendar S.P.D. Eliz., vol. cclxxxvi, nos. 19, 20.
29 For examples see S. O. Addy, Church and Manor, 1913, chap. xv.
The best account of parish business and organization is given by
S. L. Ware, The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial
Aspects, 1908.
30 Lever, op. cit., p. 130. See also Harrison, The Description of
Britaine, I587 ed., bk. ii, chap. xviii.
31 A Godlie Treatise concerning the Lawji.-l Use of Riches, a translation
oy Thos. Rogers from the “Latin of Nicholas Heming, 1578,
p. 8.
32 Sandys, 2nd, 10th, llth, and 12th of Sermons (Parker Society,
1841); Jewel, Works, pt. iv. pp. 1293-3 (Parker Society, 1350); Thos.
Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, I572; Miles Mosse, The Arraign-
ment and Conviction of Usurie, 1595; John Blaxton, The English
Usurer, or Usury Condemned by the llfost Learneel and Famous
Divines of the Church of England, 1634.
33 Heming, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
34 Roger Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie, l_6l2, p. 59.
35 Wilson, op. cit., I925 ed., p. 2B1.
36 Miles Mossc, op. cit.
37 S.P.D. Eliz., vol. lxxv, no. 54. (Printed in Tawney and Power,
Tudor Economic Documents, vol. iii, pp. 359-70).
38 Homing, op. cit., p. ll. '
39 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, 190].
40 Quoted by Maitland, op. cit., pp. 49-50.
41 Wilson, op. cit.
42 Jeremy Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, 166Q, bk iii, ch. iii, par. 30.
43 Mosse, op. cit., Dedication, p. 6.
44 E. Cardwell, Synodalia, 1842, p. 436..
NOTES
Cardwell, The Reformation -of the Ecclesiastical Laws, I850, pp. 205,
323.
The Remains of Archbishop Grindal, ed. Wm. Nicholson (Parker
Soc., 1843), P. I43.
Sec, e.g., W. P. M. Kennedy, Elizabethan Episcopal Administration,
1924, vol. iii, p. ISO (Archdeacon Mullins’ Articles for the Arch-
deaconry of London (1585): “Item, whether you do know that
within your parish there is (or are) any person or persons notoriously
known or suspected by probable tokens of common fame to be an
usurer: or doth offend by any colour or means directly or indirectly
in the same"), and pp. 184, 233; Wilkins, Co.-tcilia, vol. iv. pp. 319,
337, 426.
Cardwcll, Synodalia, vol. i, pp. 144, 308; Wilkins, Concilia, vol. iv,
p. 509.
\-'v"a re, op. cit. (see note 29 above), quotes several examples. See also
Archazologia Cantiana, vol. xxv, 1902, pp. 27, 48 (Visitatioas of the
Archdeacon of Canterbury).
I-list. MSS. Com., 13th Report, 1892, Appx., pt. iv, pp. 333-4
(MSS. of the Borough of Hereford).
W. H. Hale, A Series of Precedents and Proceedings in Criminal
Causes, I847, p. 166. _
Yorkshire Arch. Journal, vol. xviii, 1895, p. 33].
Commissary of London Correction Books, 1618-1625 (H. I84, pp.
164, I92). Iam indebted to Mr. Fincham of Somerset House (where
the books are kept) for kindly calling my attention to these cases.
The shorter of them (p. 192) runs as follows:
Sancti Botolphi Detected for an usurer that taketh above the
extra Aldersgate rate of it" in the 100" and above the rate of 2s.
Thomas Witham in the pound for money by him lent for a yeare»
at the signe of or more than after that rate for a lesse tyme ex
the Unicorne fama prout in rotula. Quo die comparuit, etc.
9mo Maii 1620 coram domino of ciali principali etc. ct in eius
camera etc. comparuit dictus Witham et ei objecto ut supra alle-
gavit that he is seldom at home himselfe but leaves his man to deale
in the business of his shop, and yf any fault be committed he saith
the fault is in his man and not in himselfe, and he sayeth he will give
charge and take care that no oppression shall be made nor offence
cotnmittcd this way hereafter, humbly praying the judge for favour
to be dismissed, unde dominus rnonuit eum that thereafter neither
by himselfe nor his servant he offende in the lyke nor suffer any
such oppression to be“ committed, et cum hac monitione cum
dimisit.
NOTES ON CHAPTER [II 3-‘J7
54 S.P.D. Eliz., vol. lxxxv, no. S4.
55. For an account of these expedients see my introduction to Wilson's
Discourse upon Usury, 1925, pp. 123-8.
56, Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, bk. viii, chap. i,
par. 5.
57. Acts of the Privy Council, vol. xxvii, 1597, p. 129.
58, The Sti hey Papers (ed. H. W. Saunders, R_.H.S., Camden Third
Series, vol. xxvi, 1915), p. 140.
59. Quoted by E. M. Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief]
1900, p. 143.
60 For an account of the treatment of exchange business under Eliza-
beth, see Wilson, op. cit., Introduction, pp. 146-54.
61. For references see ibid., pp. 164-5; and Les Reportes des Cases in
Camera Stellata, 1593'"-1609, ed. W. P. Baildon, 1894, pp. 235-7.
The latter book contains several instancesof intervention by the
Star Chamber in cases of engrossing of corn (pp. 71, 76-7, 78-9, 91)
and of enclosure and depopulation (pp. 49-52, 164-5, 192-3, 247,
346-7). . '
62. A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, ed-
E. Lamond, 1893, p. 14.
63. The Works of William Laud, D.D., ed. Wm. Scott, vol. i, 1847, p. 6.
64 lbid., 64.
65. lbial, pp. 39, 133.
66. !bid., p. 167.
67. ll.-id., pp. 28-9.
68. Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, 1912, pp. 166-7. For the
activity of the Government from 1629 to 1640, see Tawney, The
Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 376, 391, and E. M.
Leonard, The lnclosure of Common Fields in the Seventeenth Cen-
tury, in Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., N.S., vol. xix, pp. 101 seqq.
69 Letter to ‘Dr. Gilbert Sheldon, Warden of All Souls (in Laud's
I-Vorks, vol. vi, pt. ii, p. 520): “One thing morel must tell you, that,
though I did you this favour, to make stay of the hearing till your
return, yet for the business itself, I can show you none; partly be-
cause I am a great hater of dcpopulations in any kind, as being one
of the greatest rnischic.-is in this kingdom, and of very ill example
from a college, or college tenant"; Clarendon, History of the Re-
bellion, bk. i, par. 204. .
70 S. P.D. Chas. I, vol. ccccxcix, no. 10 (printed in Tawney, The Agrar-
ian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 420-1); and Lords‘
Journals, vol. vi, p. 468b (March 13, 1643-4), Articles against Laud:
“Then Mr. Talbot upon oath deposed how the Archbishop did
oppose the law in the business.of inclosures and dcpopulations;
308 NOTES
how, when the law was desired to be pleaded for the right of land,
he bid them ‘Go plead law in inferior Courts, they should not plead
it before him’; and that the Archbishop did ne him for that busi-
ness two hundred pounds for using the property of his freehold, and
would not sulTcr the law to be pleaded."
7| Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 150-64;
Unwin, l-mlttstrial Organt'zatt'c:rt in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, 1904, pp. 142-'7.
72 R. R. Reid, The King’s Couucil in the North, 1921, pp. 412, 413 n.
73 Camden Soc., N.S., vol. xxxix, 1886, Cases in the Courts of Star
Chamber and High Comrnission, ed. S. R. Gardiner, p. 46. For
another case of engrossing of corn, see ibi.-l., pp. 82-9.
74 Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the
Peace, in Viertehfahrschri fiir Sozial und Wirtscha sgeschichte,
Bd. xi, 1913, pp. 55l—4; Leonard, op. cit., p. 157.
75 The Works of William Laud, ed. Wm. Scott, vol. vi, I857, pt. i,
p. 19l (Answer to Lord Saye and Scle's speech upon the Bill about
Bishops’ Powers in Civil Affairs and Courts of Judicature).
76 lbt'cl., vol. i, pp. 5-6.
77 Harrington, Worlcs, 1700 ed., pp. 69 (Oceaua) and 388-9 (The Art
of Law-giving).
73 G. Malynes, Lex Mercatoria, 1622.. The same simile had been used
much earlier in A Discourse of the Common l-Veal of this Realm of
England, ed. E. Lamond, p. 93.
79 D‘Ewes, Journals, p. 674; and 39 Eliz. c. 2.
B0 For criticisms of price control see Tawney and Power, Tudor Eco-
nomic Documents, vol. iii, pp. 339-4], and vol. ii, p. 188, and
Su key Papers (see note 58 above), pp. 130-40.
8] H. Ellis, Original Letters, 2nd series, vcl. ii, l82'l, letter clxxxii, and
J . W. Burgon, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Greshatn, 1339,
vol. ii, p. 343.
82 Wilson, op. cit. (see note 55 above), p. 249.
83 Commons’ Journals, May 21, 1604, vol. i, p. 213.
S4. 13 Eliz., c. 8, repealing 5 and 6 Ed. V1. c. 20; D’Ewes, Journals,
pp. 1714.
85 Owen and Blakcway, History ofShrcwsbury, I825, vol. ii, pp. 364 n.,
4l2.
B6 Hist. MSS. Com., Report on MSS. in various Collections, vol. i,
I90], p. 46 (.M.S'S. of Corporation of Burford).
S7 Wilson, op. cit. (see note 55 above), p. 233.
83 Coke, Institutes, pt. ii, 1797, pp. 601 seqq. (Certain articles of
abuses which are desired to be reformed in granting of prohibitions,
exhibited ‘DY Richard Bancroft, Archbishop of Canterbtuy.)
NOTES ON CHAPTER III 309
‘Thomas Ridley, A View of the Civile and Ecclesiastical Lcw, and
wherein the practice of them is straitened and may be relieved witltltt
this Land, 1607, Dedication, p. 3.
W. Huntley, A Ere viate of the Prelates' intolerable Usttrpation, 1637,
pp. 183-4. The case referred to is that of Hinde, alleged to have
been heard Mich. 18 and 19 Eliz. For the controversy over pro-
hibitions, sec R. G. Usher, The Rise and Fall ofthe High Commission,
1913, pp. 180 seqq.
D'Ewes, Journals, pp. I'll, 173.
See, e.g., Surtees Society, vol. xxxiv, I858, The Acts of the High
Commission Court within the Diocese of Durham, Preface, which
shows that between 1626 and 1639 cases of contempt of the ordinary
ecclesiastical jurisdiction ran into hundreds.
Penn, No Cross, No Crown, pt. i, ch. xii, par. 8.
Sanderson, De Obligations Conscientite, 1650; Taylor, The Rule anal
Exercises of Holy Living, 1650, chap. iii, sect. iii (Of Negotiation or
Civil Contracts, Rules and Measures of Justice in Bargaining).
Mandcville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 1924, pp. 193,
194. Similar sentiments with regard to the necessity of poverty were
expressed later in the century by the Rev. J . Townsend, in his Dis-
sertation on the Poor Laws (1785), and by Patrick Colquhoun in his
Treatise on the Wealth and Resources of the British Empire (I814).
Like Mandeville, both these writers argue that poverty is essential
to the prosperity, and, indeed, to the very existence, of civilization.
For a full collection of citations to the same effect from eighteenth-
century writers, see E. S. Furniss, The Position of the laborer in a
System of Nationalism, 1920, chaps. iv—vi.
The Whole Duty of Man, laid down in a plain and familiar way for
the use of all, 1658.
CHAPTER IV
Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which

respectively attend France and Great Britain with regard to Trade,
I750, p. 33. The best account of Tucker, most of whose works are
scarce, is gjvcn by W. E. Clark, Josiah Tucker, Economist (Studies
in History, Economics and Public Law, Columbia University, vol,
xix, 1903-5).
Reliquia: Baxteriante: or Mr. Richard Baxter's Narrative of the most
memorable Passages of his Life and Times, 1696, p. 5.
Bunyan, The Pilgrim‘: Progress.
The Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by Margaret, Duchess of New-
castle (Everyman ed., 1915), p. 153.
NOTES
Baxter, op. cit., p. 31.
Bunyan, The Pi!grim’s Progress.
Baxter, op. cit., p. B9.
Thomas Fuller, The Holy and Profane States, I884 ed., p. 122.
Quoted S. Meyer, Memoirs of Bristol, vol. ii, 1823, p. 314.
R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church, vol. i, 1910,
pp. 249-50.
Baxter, op. cit., p. 30.
An orclerly and plaine Narration of the Beginnings and Causes of this
Warre, I644, p. 4 (Brit. Mus., Thomason Tracts, E. 54 (3)). I owe
this reference to the kindness of Father Paschal Larl-tin.
Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. vi, par. 2'll.
Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 1670, Preface, p.
xxxirt.
The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, mitten by himself, 1327 ed.,
vol. iii, p. l0l.
D. C. A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France, 1886, vol. i, pp.
20-l. In 1640 the Root and Branch Petition included, among the
evils due to the Bishops, “the discouragement and destruction of ail
good subjects, of whom are multitudes, both clothiers, merchants
and others, who, being deprived of their ministers, and over-bur-
thened with these pressures, have departed the kingdom to Holland
and other parts, and have drawn with them a great -manufacture of
cloth and trading out of the land into other places where they re-
side, whereby wool, the great staple of the kingdom, is become of
small value and vcnds not, trading is decayed, many poor people
want work, seamen lose employment, and the whole land is much
impoverished" (S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the
Puritan Revolution, 1628-60 (I889), p. 73). For instances of the
comparatively liberal treatment of alien immigrants under Elizabeth
see Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Document, vol. i, section vi,
nos. 3, 4, ll (2), 15, and Cunningham, Growth of English Industry
and Commerce, Modern Times, 1921, pt. i, pp. 79-84.
Torism and Trade can never agree, p. 12. The tract is wrongly
attributed to Davenant by Levy (Economic Liberalism, p; 12).
See, e.g., G. Martin, La Grande Industrie sous le régne de Louis X1 V,
1899, chap. xvii, where the reports of several intendants are quoted;
and Lcvasscur, Histoire dz: commerce de la France, 1911, vol. i,
p. 421. '
A Letter from a Gentleman in the City to a Gentleman in the Country
about the orliousness of Persecution, 1677, p. 29.
Sir Wm. Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the
l'\’etr'terlttt:;.’s, chap. v, vi.
NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 31]
2]. The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republicic of Holland
and West-Friesland, 1702, pt. i, chap. xiv.
22. Petty, Political Arithmetic, I690, pp. 25-6.
23. The Present interest of Englantl stated, by a Lover of his King and
Country, 167]. I am indebted to Mr. A.-P. Wadsworth for calling
my attention to the passage quoted in the text. The same point is
put more speci cally by Lawrence Bracldon: “The superstition of
their religion obligeth France to keep (at least) fty Holy days more
than we are obliged to keep; and every such day wherein no work
is done is one hundred and twenty thousand pounds loss to the
deluded people" (Abstract of the dra ofa Bill for relieving, reform-
ing and employing the Poor, I717). See also Defoe, in his Enquiry
into Occasional Conformity, I702, pp. 13-19: “We wonder, gentle-
men, you will accept our money on your de cient funds, our stocks
to help carry on your wars, our loans and credits to your victualling
office and navy office. If you would go on to distinguish us, get a
law made we shall buy no lands, that we may not be freeholders;
and see if you could find money to buy us out. Transplant us into
towns and bodies, and let us trade by ourselves; let us card,.spin,
knit, weave and work with and for one another, and see how you'll
maintain your own poor without us. Let us fraight our ships apart,
keep our money out of your Bank, accept none of our bills, and
separate your selves as absolutely from us in civil matters, as we do
from you in religious, and see how you can go on without us.”
24 Swift, Examiner. l
25. Bolingbroke, Letter to Sir Wm. Windham, I753, p. 21.
lo Reliquire Baxteriante (see note 2), p. 94. He goes on: “The gener-
I’
ality of the Master workmen (i .e., employers) lived but a little better
than their journeymen (from hand to mouth), but only that they
laboured not altogether so hard."
27. Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiqnes, no. x, and Montcsquieu, Esprit
des Lois, xix, 27, and xx, 22. See also the remarks to the same effect
in D'Argenson, Considerations sur le Goavernement tle la France,
1765.
28 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, I673.
'29 Marston, Eastward Ho! act l, sc. i.
3.0 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. i, par. 163.
Jl Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, p. 23.
32 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Sjoirit of Capitalism, 1930
(Eng. trans. by Talcott Parsons of Die protestantische Eth-ik and der
Geist des Kapitalismns, rst published in the Archiv fiir Sozial-
wissenschaft und Sozialpolitiic Statistik, vols. xx, xxi; Troeltsch, Die
Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen and Protestantism and Progress,
NOTES
1912; Schulze-Géivemitz, Britischer Imperinlismus und Englischer
Frcihandcl, I906; Cunningham, Christianity and Economic Science,
1914, chap. v. ‘
Weber's essay gave rise to much discussion in Germany. Its main
thesis-—that Calvinism, and in particular English Puritanism, from
which nearly all his illustrations are drawn, played a part of pre-
ponderant importance in creating moral and political conditions
favourable to the growth of capitalist enterprise—-appears to be
accepted _by Troeltsch, op. cit., pp. 704 seqq. It is submitted to a
critical analysis by Brentano (Die Artfiinge der modemen Kapr'mlis-
nms, 1916, pp. ll?-'57), who dissents from many of Weber's con-
clusions. Weber‘s essay is certainly one of the mostlfruitful examina-
tions of the relations between religion and social theory which has
appeared, and I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to it, in
particular with reference to its discussion of the economic applica-
tion given by some Puritan writers to the idea expressed by the word
"calling." At the same time, there are several points on which
Weber's arguments appear to me to be one-sided and over-strained,
and on which l3rentano's criticisms of it seem to me to be sound.
Thus (i), as was perhaps inevitable in an essay dealing with econo-
mic and social thought, as distinct from changes in economic and
social organization, Weber seems to me to explain by reference to
moral and intellectual in uences developments which have their
principal explanation in another region altogether. There was plenty
of the “capitalist spirit" in the fteenth-century Venice and Flor-
ence, or in South Germany and Flanders, for the simple reason that
these areas were the greatest commercial and nancial centres of the
age, though all were, at least nominally, Catholic. The development
of capitalism in Holland and England in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries was due, not to the fact that they were Protestant
powers, but to large economic movements, in particular the Dis-
coveries and the results which owed from them. Of course material
and psychological changes went together, and of course the second
reacted on the rst. But it seems a little arti cial to tall: as though
capitalist enterprise could not appear till religious changes had pro-
duced a capitalist spirit. It would be equally true, and equally one-
sided, to say that the religious changes were purely the result of
economic movements.
(ii) Weber ignores, or at least touches too lightly on, intellectual
movements, which were favourable to the growth of business enter-
prise and to an individualist attitude towards economic relations,
but which had little to do with religion. The political thought of
the Renaissance was one; as Brentano point: out, Machiavelli was
NOTES ON CHAPTER IV 313
at least as powerful a solvent of traditional ethical restraints as Cal-
vin. The speculations of business men and economists on money,
prices, and the foreign exchanges were a second. Both contributed
to the temper of single-minded concentration on pecuniary gain,
which Weber understands by the capitalist spirit.
(iii) He appears greatly to over-simplify Calvinism itself. In the
rst place, he apparently ascribes to the English Puritans of the
seventeenth century the conception of social ethics held by Calvin
and his immediate followers. In the second place, he speaks as
though all English Puritans in the seventeenth century held much
the same view of social duties and expediency. Both suggestions are
misleading. On the one hand, the Calvinists of the sixteenth century
(including English Puritans) were believers in a rigorous discipline,
and the individualism ascribed not unjustly to the Puritan move-
ment in its later phases would have horri ed them. The really sig-
ni cant question is that of the causes of the change from the one
standpoint to the other, a question which Weber £t1‘.pt:£t.I'S to ignore.
On the other hand, there were within seventeenth-century Puritan-
ism a variety of elements, which held widely different views as to
social policy. As Cromwell discovered, there was no formula which
would gather Puritan aristocrats and Levellers, landowners and
Diggers, merchants and artisans, buff-coat and his general, into the
fold ofa single social theory. The issue between divergent doctrines
was fought out within the Puritan movement itself. Some won;
others lost.
Both “the capitalist spirit" and “Protestant ethics,” therefore,
were a good deal more complex than Weber seems to imply. What
is true and valuable in his essay is his insistence that the commercial
classes in seventeenth-century England were the standard-bearers of
a particular conception of social expediency, which was ma-l~:edly
different from that of the more conservative elements in society-
the peasants, the craftsmen, and many landed gentry—and that that
conception found expression in religion, in politics, and, not least,
in social and economic conduct and policy.
Cunningham, The hforai Witness of the Church on the Invcstmcn
of Money and the Use of Wealth, 1909, p. 25.
Knox, The Bake of Discipline. in Works, ed. D. Laing, vol. ii, I343,
pp. 183 seqq.; Thos. Cartwright, A Directory of Church Government
(printed in D. Neal, History of the Puritans, 1822, vol. v, Appx. iv);
W. Travers, A Full and Plain Declaration ofEcclesiastical Disciptittc,
1574; J. Udall, A Demonstration of the Trtteth of that Disci_t;i.'nc
which Christa hath prescribed in his worde for the Government of his
Church, 1589; Bancroft, Dangerous Positions and Proceedings pub-
NOTES
h'.~:he:i and practised within this Iiand of Brytaine under Pretence of
Reformation and for the Presbyteriaii Discipiihe, 1593 (part re-
printed in R. G. Usher, The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of
Queen Ehzobetli, as itlustroted by the Minute Book of the Dedham
Ciossis, 1905).
Cartwright, op. cit.
Usher, op. cit., p. 1.
Ibid., pp. 14-15, for Bancroft's account of the procedure.
Quoted from Baillie's Letters by W. A. Shaw, A History of the Eng-
lish Church during the Cirii Wars and under the Commonweaith,
1900, vol. i, p. 128.
Shaw, op. cit., vol. ii, chap. iii (The Presbyterian System, 1646-60).
For the practical working of Presbyterian discipline see Chetham
Society, vols. xx, xxii, xxiv, Minutes of the Jllanchester Classis, and
vols. xstxvi, xli, Minutes of the Bury Ciossis.
See Chap. 111, p. 147.
Puritan ivfanifcstoes, p. 120, quoted by H. G. Wood, The In uence
of the Reformation on Ideas concerning Wealth and Property i.n
Property, Its Rights and Duties, 1913, p. 142. Mr. Wood's essay
contains an excellent discussion of the whole subject, and I should
like here to acknowledge my obligations to it. For the views of
Knewstub, Smith, and Baro, see the quotations from them printed
by Hawes, Sketches ofthe Reformation, 1844, pp. 237-40, 243-6. It
should be noted that Baro, while condemning these who, “sitting
idle at home, make merchandise only of their money, by giving it
out in this sort to needy persons . . . without having any regard of
his commodity, to whome they give it, but only of their own gain,"
nevertheless admitted that interest was not always to be condemned.
See also Thos. Fuller, History of the University of Cambridge, ed.
M. Prickett and T. Wright, 1840, ftp. 275-6, 288-9, and Cunning-
ham, Growth cg" Engtish Industry and Commerce, Modern Times,
1921 ed., pt. i, pp. 157-8.
42. New Shakespeare Society, Series vi, no. 6, 1877-9, Phillip Stubbes's
Anatomy of the Abuses in Engtrmd, ed. F. J. Furnivall, pp. 115-16.
W. Ames, De Conscicntiu ct eins iure vet casibus iibri quinquc, bk. v,
chaps. xliii, xliv. Arnes (1576-1633) was educated at Christ's Col-
lege, Cambridge, tried to settle -at -Colchester, but was forbidden to
preach by the Bishop of London, went to Leyden about 1610,-was
appointed to the .11'1t':01qgiC€t'1 chair at Frzaneker in 162.2, where he
remained for ten years, and died at Rotterdam.
E.g., Stubbes, op. cit.; Richard Capel, Temptations, their Nature,
Danger, Cure, 1633; John Moore, The Crying Sin of England of not
caring for the Poor.‘ wherein Inciosure, viz. such as doth unpeopie
Townes, and tmcorn Fields, is arraigned, convicted and condemned,
1653.
J. O. Halliwell, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir
Simonds D'E1:.-es, 1345, vol. i, pp. 206-10, 322, 354; vol. ii, pp. 96,
153-4.
Usher, op. cit. (see note 34 above), pp. 32, S3, 70, 99-100.
Sept. 26, 1645, it is resolved “that it shall be in the power of the
eldership to suspend from the sacrament of the Lord's supper any
person that shall belegally attainted of Barratry, Forgery, Extor-
tion, Perjury, or Bribery” (Cott1mons' Journal, vol. iv, p. 290).
Cheth.am,Society, Minutes of the Bury Presbyterian Classis, I 0'4 7'-57,
pt. i, pp. 32-3. The Cambridge ciassis (.ibid., pt. ii, pp. 196-7) dc»
cided in 1657 that the ordinance of Parliament of August 29, I648,
should be taken as the rule of the classis in the matter of scandal.
The various scandals mentioned in the ordinance included extor-
tion, and the classis decided that “no person lawfully convict of any
of the foresaid scandalls, bee admitted to the Lord's supper without
signi cation of sincere repentance," but it appears (p. 198) to have
been mainly interested in witches, wizards, and fortune-tellers.
Hist. AISS. Comm., Report on M'SS. in various Collections, vol. i,
l9Ul, p. 132.
Quoted by F. J. Powiclte, A Life of the Reverend Richard Baxter,
I924, p. 92.
Selections from those parts of The Christian Directory which bear
on social ethics are printed by Jeannette Tawney, Chapters from
Richard Baxter's Christian Directory, 1925, in which most of the
passages quoted in the text will be found.
Relt'quia: Ba-xteriana: (see note 2), p. 1.
Life and Death of M'r. Badman (Cambridge English Classics, 1905),
pp. 116-25, where Bunyan discusses at length the ethics of prices.
Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Letter ii.
See on these points Weber, op. cit. (note 32 above), p. 94, whose
main conclusions I paraphrase.
Milton, A Defence of tire People of England (-1692 ed.), p. xvii.
See, e.g., Thos. Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, Preface, 1925 ed.,
p. 178: “There bee two sortes of men -that -are alvvayes to bee looked
upon very nanovvly, the one is the disscrnblinge gospeller, and the
other is the wilfull and indunate papiste. The rst under colour of
religion overthroweth all religion, and bearing good men in hande
thathe lOVClLlTpl3.)'-HCSSG, useth covertelie all deccypte that maye bee,
and -for peyvate gayne undoeth the common -welfare of man. And
touching thys-sinne of usurie, none doe more openly offende in thys
behalfe than do these counterfeite professours of thys pure religion."
NOTES
Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie, 1612, pp. 60-1.
Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673.
S. Richardson, The Cause of the Poor Plearled, 1653, Thomason
Tracts, E. 703 (9), p. 14. For other references see note 72 below. For
extortionate prices, see Thomason Tracts, E. 399 (6), The Worth of
a Penny, or a Caution to keep Money, 1647. I am indebted for this
and subsequent references to the Thomason Tracts to Miss P. James.
Hooker, Preface to The Laws ofEcclesiastical Polity, Everyman ed.,
1907, vol. i, p. 128.
Wilson, op. cit., p. 250.
Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, written by his widow
Lucy, Everyman ed., 1908, pp. 64-5.
.“.ee the references given in note 66.
The Earl of Stra 'ordc’s Letters and Despatches, by William Know-
ler, D.D., I739, vol. ii, p. I38.
No attempt has been made in the text to do more than refer to the
points on which the economic interests and outlook of the commer-
cial and propertied classes brought them into collision with the mon-
archy, and only the most obvious sources of information are men-
tioned here. For patents and monopolies, including the hated soap
monopoly, see Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, 1908,
chap. xvii, and W. Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly,
1906, chap. xi, and passim. For the control of exchange business,
Cambium Regis, or the Office of his Majesties Exchange Royall, dc-
claring andjustifying his Majestics Right and the Convenience thereof,
1623, and Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, 1819, vol. iv. pp. 20l—l0.
For the punishmentof speculation by the Star Charnber, and for
projects of public granaries, Camden Society, N.S., vol. xxxix, 1886,
Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Comrr:is-
sion, ed. S. R. Gardiner, pp. 43 seqq., 82 seqq., and N. S. 13. Gras,
The Evolution of the English Corn Market, 1915, pp. 246-50. For
the control of the textile industry and the reaction against it, H.
Heston, The Yorhsltire Woollen and Worsted lndustries, 1920, chaps.
iv, vii; Kate E. Barford, The West of England Cloth Industry: A
Seventeenth Century Experiment in State Control, in the Wiltshire
Archreological and Natural History Magazine, Dec., 1924, pp. 53]-
42; R. R. Reid, The King's Council in the North, 192], pt. iv, chap.
ii; V.C.H., Stt follc, vol. ii, pp. 263-8. For the intervention of the
Privy Council to raise the wages of textile workers and to protect
craftsman, Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in England by the
Justices of the Peace, in ll‘.-e Vierteliahrschrift fiir Sozial- und Wiri-
scha sgeschichte, Bd. xi, I913, pp. 307-37, 533-64; Leonard, The
Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 160-3; l".C.H., .S_‘u 'ollc,
vol. ii, pp. 263-9; and Unwin, industrial Organization in the Six-
teenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1904, pp. 142-7. For the Depopu-
lation Commissions, Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth
Century, pp. 376, 391. For the squeezing of money from the East
India Company and the infringement of its Charter, Shafa’at Ah-
mad Khan, The East India Trade in the XVlith Century, 1923, pp.
69-73. For the colonial interests of Puritan members, A. P. Newton,
The Coionising Activities of the English Puritans, 1914, and C. E.
Wade, John Pym, 1912.
E. Laspeyres, Geschichte der voikswirtschafiiichen Anschauungen
der Niederiander und ihrer Litteratur zur Zeit der Repttblih, 1863,
pp. 256-70. An idea of the points at issue can he gathered from the
exhaustive (and unreadable) work of Salmasius, De Mario Usurarum,
1639.
John Quick, Synodicon in Galiia Rejbrmata, 1682, vol. i, p. 99.
For the change of sentiment in America see Troeltsch, Protestantism
and Progress, pp. 117-27; for Franklin, Memoirs of the Life amt
Writings of Benjamin Franklin, and Sombart, The Quintessence of
Capitalism, 1915, pp. 116-21.
Rev. Robert Woodrow (quoted .by Sombart, op. cit., p. 149).
John Cooke, Unum Necessarium or the Poore Matt's Case (1643),
which contains a plea for the regulation of prices and the establish-
ment of Monts de Piété.
For the scandal caused to the Protestant religion by its alleged con-
donation of covetousness, see T. Watson, A Plea for Aims, 1653
(Thomason Tracts, E. 2125), pp. 21, 33-4: “The Church of Rome
layes upon us this aspcrsion that we are against good workes . . .
I am sorry that any who go for honest men should be brought into
the indightment; 1 mean that any professors should be impeached
as guilty of this sinns of covetousness: and unmercifulnesse . . . I
tell you these devout misers are the reproach of Christianity . . . I
may say of penurious votaries, they have the wings of profession by
which they seem to y to heaven, but the feet of beasts, walking on
the earth and even licking the dust . . . Oh, take heed, that, seeing
your religion will not destroy your covetousnesse, at last your covet-
ousnesse doth not destroy your religion." See also Sir Balthazar
Gerbier, A New Year's Result in favour of the Poore, 1651 (Thom-
ason Tracts, E. 651 (14), p. 4: “If the Papists did rely as much on
faith as the reformed professors of the Gospel (according to our
English tenets) doe, or that the reformed professors did so much
practice charity as the Papists doe?"
S. Richardson, Op. cit. (see note 60 above), pp. 7-8, 10.
The rst person‘ to-emphasize"-the way in which the idea of a -“cal1-
NOTES
ing” was used as an argument for the economic virtues was Weber
(see note 32 above), to whose conclusions I am largely indebted for
the following paragaphs.
Bunyan, The Pilgriufs Progress.
Richard Steele, The Tradesmarfs Calling, being a Discourse concern-
ing the Nature, Necessity, Choice, etc., of a Calling in general, 1684,
pp. 1, 4;
ll>ltl., pp. 21-2.
lbizl., p. 35.
Baxter, Christian Directory, 1678 ed., vol. i, p. 33Gb.
Thomas Adams (quoted Weber, op. cit., p. 96 n.).
Matthew Henry, The Worth of the Soul (quoted ibid., p. 163 n.).
lsaxter, op. cit., vol. i, p. 111a.
Steele, op. cit., p. 20.
Baxter, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 378b, 1081); vol. iv, p. 253a.
Navigation Spiritualizecl: or a New Compass for Seamen, consisting
ot'.1:xxii Points:
Pleasant Observations
of {Pro table Applications and
Serious Re ections.
All cottcluded with so many spiritualpoems. Whereunto is now added,
i A sober conversation of the sin of drunkenness.
ii The Hat-lot’s face in the scripture-glass, etc.
Being an essay towards their much desired Reformation from the hor-
rible and detestable sins of Drunk enness, Swearing, Uncleanness, For-
getjirlness ofMercies, Violation ofPromises, and Atheistical contempt
ofdeath, I632. _
The author of this cheerful work was a Devonshire minister, John
Flavell, who also wrote Husbandry Spiritualized, or the Heavenly
Use of Earthly '.Fhings,.l669. In him, as in Steele, the Chadband
touch is unmistakable. The Religious Weaver, apparently by one
Fawcett, I have not been able to ‘trace.
Steele, op. cit. (see note 76-above).
Bunyitfl, The Pilgrim"-s Progress.
David Jones, A Farewell Sermon at St. Mary Woolnoth’s, 1692.
Nicholas Harbcm, A Discourse of Trade, 1690, ed. by Professor
John H. Hollander (A Repnint ofiL’conomt'c Tracts,,Series -ii, no. 1).
The words of a member of -the Long Parliament, quoted by C. H.
Firt-h. Oliver Cromwell, 1902, p.=313.
The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 182’-7 ed., vol. ii, p. 235:
“The merchants took much delight to enlarge themselves upon this
argument [i.e., the advantages of war], and shortly after to dis-
course ‘of the in nite bene t that would accrue from a barefaced
war against the Dutch, how easily they might be subdued and the
trade carried by the English.’ " According to Clarendon, who de-
spised the merchants and hated the whole business, it was almost a
classical example of a commercial war, carefully stage-managed in
all its details from the directorship which the Royal African Com-
pany gave to the Duke of York down to the inevitable "incident"
with which hostilities began.
92 Ibid., vol. iii, pp. 7-9.
93 Sir Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade, I69], Preface.
94 Petty, Political Arithmetic, Preface.
95 Chamberlayne, Angiite Notitia (quoted P. E. Dove, Account of
Andrew Yarranton, 1854, p. 82 n.).
96 Roger North, The Lives ofthe No.--ths (1826 ed.), vol. iii, p. 103;
T. Watson, A Piea for Aims (Thomason Tracts, E. 2125), p. 33;
Dryden, Absaiorn and Achitopht--I, 2nd part, 1682, p. 9, where Sir
Robert Clayton, Lord Mayor 1679-80, and Member of Parliament
for the City 1679-81 and again from 1689, appears as “extorting
Ishban." He was a scrivener who had made his money by usury.
97 John Fawke, Sir William Thompson, William Love and John
Jones.
93 Charles King (The British Merchant, l72l, vol. i, p. 181) gives the
following persons as signatories of an analysis of the trade between
England and France in 1674: Patience Ward, Thomas Papillon,
James Houblon, William Bellamy, Michael Godfrey, George Tori-
ano, John Houblon, John Houghe, John Mervin, Peter Paravicine,
John Dubois, Benj. Godfrey, Edm._ Harrison, Benj. Delaune. The
number of foreign names is remarkabile.
99 For Dutch capital in London, see Hist. MSS. Comm, 8th Report,
1831, p. 134 (proceedings of the Committee on the decay of trade,
1669); with regard to investment of foreign capital in England, it
was stated that “Alderman Buclcnell had above £100,000 in his
hands, Mr. Meynell above £39,000, Mr. Vandeptlt at one time
£60,000, Mr. Dericost always near £200,000 of Dutch money, lent
to merchants at 7, 6 and 5 per cent.”
100 . The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 289-93, and
vol. iii, pp. 4-7; and John Beresford, The Godfather of Downing
Street, 1925.
101. S. Bannister, William Paterson, the Merdzant-Statesman, and
Founder of the Bank of England: his Life and Trials, 1858.
102. A. Yarranton, England’: Improvement, 1677.
103. The Complete English Tradesman (1726) belongs to the same genus
320 NOTES
as the book of Steele (see above, pp. 242-4), but it has reduced
Christianity to even more innocuous proportions: see Letter xvii
(Of Honesty in Dealing).
104 T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, 1924,
pp. 211-26. Mr. A. P. Wadsworth has shown that the leading Lan-
cashire clothiers were often Nonconformists (History of the Roch-
dale Woollen Trarle, in Trans. Rochtlale Lit. and Sci. Soc., vol. xv,
1925).
I05. Quoted F. J. Powicl-te, Life of Baxter, 1924, p. I58.
I06 Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England, I905, pp. 400-1.
I07 The Humble Petition of thousarrds of well a ected persons inhabiting
the city of London, Wcstnrinstcr, the Borough 0fSotttl|warlt, Hamlets,
and places adjacent (Bodleian Pamphlets, The Levellers‘ Petitions,
c. 15. 3 Linc.). See also G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in
the Seventeenth Century, I898.
103 Camden Society, The Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth, 1891-4, vol.
ii, pp. 217-21 (letter from Winstanley to Fairfax and the Council
of War, Dec. 8, 1649).
109 Records of the Borough of Leicester, 1603-88, ed. Helen Stocks,
1923, pp. 370, 414, 428-30.
I10 John Moore, op. cit. (see note 44 above), p. I3. See also Gonner,
Common Land and Enclosure, I912, pp. 53-5.
lll Camden Soc., The Clarke Papers, vol. i, pp. 299 .seqq., lxvii seqq.
112 The Diary of Thomas Eurton, ed. J. T. Rutt, 1828, vol. i, pp. 175-6.
A letter from Whalley, referring to agitations against enclosure in
Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, and Leicestcrshire,
will be found in Thurloe, State Papers, vol. iv, p. 686.
113 Joseph Lee, A Vintlirtltion of a Regulated Enclosure, 1656, p. 9.
114 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 2' 2", Q. xxxii, art. v.
115 Dives et Pauper; 1493, Prol., chap. vii; cf. Pecock, The Repressor
ofover-much blaming of the Clergy, pt. iii, chap. iv, pp. 296-7. For
an excellent account of the mediaaval attitude towards the poor. see
B. L. Manning, The People’: Faith in the Time of Wycli/Q I919,
chap. x.
116 A Lyke-wake Dirge, printed by W. Allingharn, The Ballad Boole,
1907, no. xxxi.
117 Latimer, The l-‘iftlr Sermon on the Lord's Prayer (in Sermons,
Everyman ed., p. 336). Cf. Tyndale, The Parable of the Wicked
Matnnron (in Doctrinal Treatises of Williarrr Tyndale, Parker
Society, 1848, p. 97): “lf thy brother or neighbour thcrefore need,
and- thou have to help him, and yet shovrest not mercy, but with-
drawest thy hands from him, then robbest thou him of his own,
and art a thief."
I18 Christopher Harvey, The Overseer of the Poor (in G. Gil llan,
The Poetical Works of George Herbert, I853, pp. 24l—3).
II9 J. E. B. Mayor, Two Lives of N. Ferrar, by his brother John and Dr.
Jebb, p. 261 (qrroted by B. Kirkman Gray, A History of English
Philanthropy, 1905, p. 54).
I20 A True Report of the Great Cost and Charges Of the foure Hospitals
in the City ofLondon, I644 (quoted, ibid., p. 66).
I21 See, e.g., Hist. MSS. Comm., Reports on MSS. in various collec-
tions, vol. i, 1901, pp. 109-24; Leonard,_Early History of English
Poor Relief, pp. 268-9.
I22 Sir Matthew Hale, A Discourse touching Provision for the Poor,
I633.
I23 Stanley‘: Remedy, or the Way to reform wandering Beggars,
Thieves, Highway Robbers and Pick-pockets, 1646 (Thomason
Tracts, E. 317 (6)), p. 4.
I24 Commons‘ Journals, March I9, I648/9, vol. vi, p. 167.
I25. lbid., vol. vi, pp. 20I, 374, 4I6, 48] ; vol. vii, p. I27.
I26 Samuel I-Iartlib, London's Charity lnlarged, I650, p. i.
I27. Hartlib, op. cit.
I28 Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the lntcrregnum, I9Il,
vol. ii, pp. I04-I0. An ordinance creating a corporation had been
passed Dec. I7, I647 (-ibid.,-vol. i, pp. I0-12-5).
I29 lbid., vol. ii, pp. I098-9. .
I30 Stoelcwood. at Paul's Cross, I578 (quoted by I-laweis, Sketches of
the Reformation, p. 277). '
l3I Steele, op. cit. (note 76 above), p. 22.
I32 R. Younge, The Poores' Advocate, I654 (Thomason Tracts, E.
I452. (3)). p. 6.
I33 For these and other passages from Restoration economists to the
same effect, see a striking article by Dr. T. E. Gregory or. The
Economics of Employment in England (166!)-l7l3) in Economica,
no. i, Jan. I921, pp. 37 seqq., and E. S. Furniss, The Position ofthe
Labourer in a System of Nationalism, 1920, chaps. v, vi.
I34 Das_ Kommunistisclte Marrrij'est, I918 ed., pp. 27-8; "Die Bour-
geoisie, we sic zur I-lerrschaft gekommen, hat alle feudalen, patri-
archalischen, idyllischen Verhiiltnisse zerstort. Sie hat die bunt-
scheekigen Feudalbande, die den Menschen an seinen nattirlichen
Vorgesetzterr kni.'rpften, unbarmherzig zerrissen, und kein anderes
Band zwischen Mensch und Mensch iibrig gel-assen, als das nacltte
Interesse, als die gefiihllose bare Zahlung.”
I35 Defoe. Giving Alms no Charity, I704, pp. 25-7.
I36 Petty, Political Arithmetic, p. 45.
137 Sir Henry Pollexfen, Discourse of Trade, 1697, p. 49; Walter
L (A23)
322 NOTES
Harris, Remarks on the A airs and Trade of England and Ireland,
I691, pp. 43-4; The Qtterist, 1737 (in The Works of George Berke-
ley, D.D., ed. A. C. Fraser, 1871, p, 387); Thomas Alcock, Obser-
vations on the Defects of the Poor Laws, 1752, pp. 45 seqq. (quoted
Furniss, op. cit., p. 153).
138 Arthur Young, Eastern Tour, 1771, vol. iv, p. 361.
139. Harrison, The Description of Britaine, 1587 ed., bk. ii, chap. X,
Of Provision it/!acle for the Poor.
140. H. Hunter, Probletrts of Poverty: Selections from the . . . writings
of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., 1912, p. 20:2.
141 For the in uence of Chalmers’ ideas on Senior, and, through him,
on the new Poor Law of 1834, see T. Mackay, History of the Eng-
lish Poor Law, vol. iii, 1899, pp. 32—4. Chalmers held that any Poor
Law was in itself objectionable. Senior, who described Chalmers’
evidence before the Committee on the _State of the Poor in Ireland
as “the most instructive, perhaps, that ever was given before a
Committee of the House of Commons," appears to have begun by
agreeing with him, but later to have adopted the principle of de-
terrence, backed by the test workhouse, as a second best. The Com-
missioners of 5332-4 were right in thinking the existing methods ol’
relief administration extremely bad; they were wrong in supposing
distress to be due mainly to lax adrninistration, instead of realising,
as was the fact, that lax administration had arisen as an attempt to
meet the increase of distress. Their discussion of the causes of
pauperism is, therefore, extremely super cial, and requires to be
supplemented by the evidence contained in the various contem-
porary reports (such, e.g., as those on the handloom weavers)
dealing with the industrial aspects of the problem.
142. W. C. Braithwaitc, The Second Period of Qualcerism, 1919, pp.
560-2. Defoe comments on the strict business standards of the
Quakers in Letter xvii (Of Honesty in Dealing), in The Complete
English Tradesman. Mr. Ashton (Iron and Steel in the Industrial
Revolution, p. 219) remarks, “The eighteenth century Friend no
less than the medizcval Catholic held rmly to some doctrine of
Just Price," and quotes examples from the conduct of Quaker iron-
masters.
INDEX
AanoT’s RIPTON, 145, 303 Bargaining, equity in, I57, I63,
Acton, Lord, 75 I84, I86, I91, 22I—2, 224, 243,
Actsof Parliament: (I341), 63; 270. See also Prices and Pro ts.
(I545), 164; (I552), 164, I83; Baro, 2l5, 3I4
(I571), I64, I83, I85, I90; Basel, I28; Council of, II2
(I597), I82; (I601), 268; (I662), Baxter, Richard, 22, 32, 200, 203,
268; (1834), 269, 322 207, 2I9-24, 225, 24l-2
Aegidius Lessinus, 289, 290 (quoted), 251, 258, 266, 284
Agriculture, 68-9, 142-54, 230. Becon, 9l, I46, 149
See-also under Land. Beggars. See Almsgiving and
Alcock, Thomas, 267 Vagrancy.
Alien immigrants, 205, 3l0 Bellarmin, 90
Almsgiving, condemnation of, Bellers, 32, 269
I19, I22, 263; a duty, 258-60 Benvenuto (la Imola, quoted, 24
America, Calvinism in, I35—9, Berkeley, Bishop, 267, 268
226, 237, 317 Berthold, Brother, 224
Ames, 2I5-16, 314 Beza, I27, I30, I3], 214
Amsterdam, II3 Birmingham, 204
Annuities, $4, 217 Bishops, 165, 169, 308. See also
Antwerp, ix, 82-5, 88, 90, 95, 96, Commissary, Court of High
II3, I72, I80, l8I, 298 Cotnmission and Courts, ecclesi-
Apparel, excess in, I23, I35 astical.
Archdeacons, jurisdiction of, 60, Bodin, 9]
64, 166, 290-1, 306 ' Bijheim, Hans, 9I
Asceticism, 30, 3], 32 Bolingbrolce, 207
Ashley, Sir William, xiv Boniface VIII, 32, 34
Ashton, T. S., 251, 322 Bossuet, 92
Aske, I46 Boston, 136-8
Augsburg, 95 Bourges, 62
Braddon, Lawrence, 3II
Bacon, 153, 155, 189 Bradford, 203
Baillie, 214 ——, Governor, I35, 302
Bancroft, Archbishop, 189, 2l3 Brentano, x, xiv, 3I2
Bank, at Geneva, I28; of Englan d, Bristol, 202
250-I Bruges, 83
Banking, deposit, 180 Bucer, 32, 75, 91, 92, II3, I24,
Barbon; Dr. Nicholas, 245-6 147, 214-15
323
324 INDEX
Bullinger, 32, 9|, 123, 184 Charles V, 81, 88-9
Bunyan, 22, 32, 199, 224, 266, 303 Chauvet, 131
Burford, 185 Choisy, xiv, 301
Buridanus, Johannes, 289 Church, medieval, attitude of, to
Bury, 217 established social order, 68-71;
ideals of, 71-4
Canoasmss, 42, 287, 291 -—— of England, 140-96; con-
“Calling,” x, 239-44, 312, 317-I8 servatism of, 94, 159-63; in-
Calvin, v, vii, ix, 23, 32, 103, 111- effectiveness of, 187-96; Puri-
39, 147; teaching of, on usury, tanism represented in, 198. See
91, 92, 134, 184, 215, 216, 232, also Clergy, Councils (Church),
238. See also Calvinism. Courts (ecclesiastical), Law
Calvinism, x, 111-39, 232-3; (canon), Papacy, Reformation,
sancti cation ofeconomic enter- Religion and under State.
prise by, 47, 113, 116-19, 123, Clarendon Code, 204
232, 238; connection of indivi- —, Constitutions of. 62
dualism with, l2l, 226, 313; ——, Earl of, 177, 204, 248, 250,
discipline of, vii, 118, 121, 122, 319
124-39, 214-15, 218, 226, 232, Class hatred, 31, 38, 131, 149
233, 237," 313; development of, Classes, Puritan, 213, 214, 217,
in England, 121, 198; in Scot- 314, 315
land, 121, 134-5; in France, Clayton, Sir Robert, 319
133-4; in America, 135-9, 226, Clergy, taking of usury by, 42, 58,
237, 317; in Holland, 211. See 64, 156, 166, 167, 287-8, 295;
also Calvin and Puritanism. subservience of, 163, 275; re-
Cambridge, 31$ turn of, to City churches, 204;
Canon law. See Law, canon. popular sympathies of, in
Canonists, 49, 63, 66, 71, 109. France, 275. See also Church of
See also Law, canon. England.
Canterbury, 205; archbishop of, Cloth industry, 113, 141, 147, 151;
59, I60; Canons of, I65 capitalism in, 80, 180, 266; dis-
Capitalism, early appearance of, tress in, 172, 205, 310; wages in,
29, 38, 93, 225 177, 287, 316; regulation of,
Carpenters, parliament of, 285 178, 235, 236, 316; Puritanism
Cartwright, Thomas, 213, 215 in centres of, 202, 203-4, 320;
Catholicism, and capitalism, 93, proposed nationalization of,
312 235. See also Textile workers.
Cattle, loaning of, 65, 159, I85 Coke, I90
Cecil, William, 150, 169 Colbert, 86, 235
Chalmers, Dr., 269, 322 Cologne, 49
Charles I, social policy of, 173-B, Colonization, 80, 236, 317
210, 235-6, 316-17 Colquhoun, Patrick, 309
INDEX 325
Columbus, 77, 79, 97 177, 235; labour of, honour-
Combines, of traders, 67, 97, 104, able, l0l. See also Gilds and
286 Wage-earners.
Commissary, Court of, 65', 166, Cranmer, 92, 165
29$, 306 Cromwell, Oliver, 199, 218, 227
Commons, enclosure of, 145, 171, (quoted), 248, 256, 313
254, 256, 257-8. See also Ll’:- Crowley, Robert, 91, 146, 148, 150
closures. and I53 (quoted)
“Commonwealth men,” 149 Cunningham, William, xiv, 211,
Communal movement, 68 212 (quoted)
Communism, 45, 254 Curia, papal, 59
Confessors, instructions to, 60 Currency, depreciation of, 86,
Congregationalism, 198 142, 151, 181
Consistory, at Geneva, 124, 127-
3'2 D1-IDHAM, 217
Constance, Council _of, 112 . Defoe, xi, 205, 251, 311,322
Consumption, 46, 230, 247, 249 Depopulation, 150, 152, 176-7,
Copper, 83, 85, 88 182, 223, 236, 253, 307, 317.
Copyholders, I44, 152, 171, 303 See also Enclosures.
Corn, engrossing of, 130, 131, D'Ewes, 216-I7
I71-2, I78, 307, 308. Sec also Dixey, Prol., 253
Granaries. Diggers, 254, 313
Coulton, G. G., xiv, '24, 42 Discoveries, x, 77, 79, 83, 95,96,
Councils, Church, 58-9, 63, 66, 140, 312
290 Dives et Pauper, 22, 215
Court, De la, 206 Downing, Sir George, 250
Court of Arches, 189 Duns Scotus, 46
—— Chancery, 63, 64 Dutch, virtues of, 211, 251, 267;
-—- Delegates, 190 capital supplied to England by,
-— High Commission, 166, I90, 248, 250, 319. See also Holland.
191, 212, 214, 236
-—— Star Chamber, 144, 178, East ANGLIA, 177, 178; Puritan-
212, 307, 316 ism in, 202, 203
Courts, ecclesiastical, jurisdiction -—- India Co., 317
of, 62-5, 164-7, 189-91, 212, Eek, 90
214, 295, 296; royal, 69, 96. See Economic science, development
also the several Courts above- of, 163, I84, 204, 248. See also
mentioned. Economists and Political Arith-
Covcntry, 50, 304 metic.
Craftsmen, deccits practised by, Economists, 248; attitude of, to-
37, 134, 293; relations between wards religious tolerance, 23,
merchants and, 38, 141, 143, 204-5, 206; attitude of, towards
326 INDEX
poor relief, 265-70, 321. See 56-7, 82, 83, 84-5, 87-9, 93;
also Economic science. attitude of Swiss reformers to,
Edict of Nantes, 205 112-13, 116. Sec also Usury.
Education, 146, 147, 148, 159, 217 Firmin, 269
Elizabeth. See Tudors. Flanders. See Low Countries.
Enclosures, 142-50; popular agi- Flavell, John, 318
tations against, 142-3, 145, Fletcher 01'!-Saltoun, 263
148-S0, 254, 320; steps taken by Florence, 29, 49, 62, 285, 288, 312
Government to suppress, 143, Foley, Thomas, 251
150, 152, 176-7, 182, 234, 235, Fondaco Tedesco, 78
253, 307; attitude of Puritans to, Food supplies, control of,177, 234,
216, 223, 236, 253-8. See also 235, 260. See also Corn.
under Gentry. Fox, 199, 200
Erlgrosscrs, 51, 52, 66, 127, 143, Foxe, 165
145, 168, 172, 178, 194, 238, France, 65, 86, 235, 248, 266, 275,
307, 308 287; peasantry in, 69, 70, 141,
England, comparison of, with 156; Calvinism in, 133-4, 203,
Continent, 21, 29, 66, 80, 140, 237. See also Lyons and Paris.
230 Franciscans, 31, 65; Spiritual, 68
Erasmus, 82, 86 Frankfurt, 39, 85, 95, 118, 286
Erastians, 214 Frankiin, Benjamin, 237
Evangelicals, 196, 253 Free cities, 68
Exchanges, foreign,discussions on, F-reeholders, 202, 203, 256
55, 88,162,163,18l, 313; con- Freiburg, 95
trol of, 84, 171, 172, 235, 236, Friars. See Mendicanr Orders.
307, 316; lawfulness of trans- Froissart, 31
actions on, 90 Froude, 18
Exchequer, stop of, 224 Fruiterers, of London, 66-7
Exclusion Bill, 203 Fuggers, The, 88-9, 90, 91, 96 ,97,
Excommunication, 42, 57, 58, 59, 99, 109, 194, 298
- 64,125, 129,147, 165, 166, 213,
293; disregarding of, 163, 191 GAY, Pn0t=., 151
Exeter, 204; bishop of, 173 Geiler von Kaiserberg, 97
Geneva, 112, 113, 121,- 123, 124-
Fsmou, Room, quoted, 114, 161 32, 133, 135, 214, 215, 226, 232,
Ferrar, Nicholas, 261 233, 302
Feudalism, 35, 67-70, 231; de- Genoa, 59
cline of, 68-9, 151-2, 153. Sec Gentry, opposition of, to preven-
also Peasants. tion of enclosures, 150, 152,
Figgis, Dr., 19 182, 236, 253, 255, 256-7, 30-1-;
Financiers, mcdizeval attitude to, attitude, of, to commercial
36, 45; international, rise of, classes, 208-9
INDEX 327
George, Lloyd, quoted, 18 mercial rivalry of England with,
Germany, v, 40, 65, 78, 86, 97, 20, 248, 250, 266, 318--19; reli-
248, 286; peasantry in, 69, 70, gions developments in, 23, 206,
91, 96, 97, 100, 102, 141, 144, 211, 226; economic progress of,
156, 297; trade and banking x, 23, 204, 211, 216, 230, 312;
business of, 78, 80, 84, 85, 88, controversy in, about usury,
95-7, 99, 312; Reformation in, 134, 237; emigration of Dissen-
_89, 91, 92-3, 95-110, 118,146 tcrs to, 310. See also Darrel: and
Gilds, 39-41, 65, 79, 96, 141, 142, Low Cormrries.
144, 286, 295, 304 Holland, Lord, 236
Glasgow, 237 Honorius of Augsburg, 285
Godfrey, Michael, 250, 251 1-looker, Richard, 170, 174, 233
Goldsmiths, 248 Hospitals, 65, 149, 260, 261
Granaries, public, 235, 316 Hostiensis, 162, 299
Gratian, 45, 47 Honblon, James and John, 250
Gregory VII, 32 House of Commons, 148, 182,
Gresham, Sir Richard, 145 183, 191, 262
——, Sir Thomas, 22, 148, 181, 182 —— Convocation, 164, 184
Gri.ndal, Archbishop, 165 —— Lords, 254
Grosstéte, Bishop, 42, 287 Huguenots, 205, 250
Humanists, 89, 118, 122, 262
HALE, Sm Mxrrnew, 261 Hutten, 97
Hales, John, 149, 150
Halifax, 204 Itvtnors, The, 88
Hamilton, John, 293 Independents, 121, 212, 214, 218,
Hammond, Mr. and Mrs., 31 250
Hanse League, 78, 83 Indians, American, 138, 188
Harrington, 180 Indiffcrentism, 30, 31, 32, 274
Harris, Walter, 267 Individualism, rise of, 24, 27, 35,
Harrison, 268 75, 84, 90, 146, 1-J7, 170, 176,
Hartlib, Samuel, 262 178-96, 218, 226, 233, 234, 248,
Hat eld Chase, 173 252, 253, 260, 313; deduction
Hangs, The, 88 of, from teaching of reformers,
Hcming, Nicholas, 160, 161 93, 99, 121, 226. See also under
(quoted). Pruiranism.
Henry of Langenstein, quoted; 48, Industrial Revolution, 31, 196
53-4 Innocent IV, 56, 287
Herberts, The, 145 Inter-esse, 54, 55
Hipler, 97 Interest, “pure,” 54; lawful, 90,
Hobbes, 31 299; rate of, 128, 131, 132, 136,
Hochstetters, The, 88, 97, 298 158, 164, 166, 184, 319. See
Holland, 21, 208; wars and com- also lnreresse and Usury.
328 INDEX
Ireland, 230, 267, 322; Church of, Land, I41-54; purchase of, by nou-
165 veaux riches and speculation in,
Ireton, 256 96, 144-5, 148-9, 180, 208, 255;
Iron industry, 202, 220, 251, mortgaging of, 112, 172. See
322 also Enclosures, Landlords, Pas-
Italy, v, 22, 65, 68, 82; medizcval ture farming, Property, Rents.
capitalism in, 93, 95, 312; wage- Landlords, oppressions of, 62,
earners in, 38-9, 50, 286; nan- 145, 150, 152, 153, 160, 168,
ciers of, 42, 56, 83, 88, 141; 171, 176, 222-3, 235, 237, 293;
canonists of, 66; economic posi- ecclesiastical, 68, 70-1, 144,
tion of, 77, 80, 230. Sec also 149. See also Peasants and
Florence and Venice. Rents.
Langland, 31, 259
lacquerie, 69 Lateran Councils, 58, 66
Jewel, Bishop, 91, 160 Latimer, 23, 32, 91, 146, 149, 150,
Jews, 49, 97, 248 253, 255, 260, 271, 281
John XXII, Bull of, 68 Land, 23, 32,121,14-0,174-9, 191,
John of Salisbury (quoted), 35, 205, 210, 212, 235,236, 253, 307
37, 285 Laurentius de Rudol s, 22, 284
Joint-stock enterprise, 180 Law, canon, 22, 70, 74, 90, 169;
Jones, Rev. David, 245 rules of, as to usury, 24, 49-66,
Journeymen. See Wage—earners. 103, 104; discredit of, 75, 148,
Justices of the Peace, usurers 163, 191; continued appeal to,
dealt with by, 168, 172-3; regu- 90, 94, 162-7. See also
lation of markets by, 177; clos- Canonists.
ing of public-houses by, 218; ——-, civil, 164
administration of poor laws by, —-——, common, 165, 189
177, 235, 261 ; administration of i, natural, 51-2, 73, 183, 195
orders against enclosures by, Law, John, 251
176, 253 -——, William, 194
Leach, A. F., 148
Kean:-:, Rousar, 136-8 Leadam, 151
Ket, 149, 297 Lease-mongers, 148
Keynes, J. M., 249, 280 Leicester, 204, 253-4, 256
Kidderminster, 207, 219 Leonard, Miss, 177
Krfewstub, 215, 314 Levellers, 32, 212, 254, 313
Knox, John, 23, 32, 123, 126 Lever, 91, 146, 149, 160
(quoted), 135, 213 Linen industry, 147
Lisbon, 88, 95, 96
Latssez faire, 122 Loans, charitable, 65, 159, 168,
Lancashire, Puritanism in, 203, 260-1, 296. See also Interest
214, 320. See also Bury. and Usury.
INDEX 329
Locke, 20 (quoted), 25, 183, 192, among, 120, 122, 190, 202-11,
248, 256 230, 263, 313; qualities of, 120,
1.ollards, 61 208, 211, 230; humbler, out-
Lombard bankers, 41, 63 look and economic position of,
London, 39, 63, 64, 65, 66, 112, 16s,2o7,242,3tt
145, 261; money-market in, 85, Middlemen. See Traders.
141, 180; Nonconformity in, Mill, J. S., 242
113, 203, 204, 213, 214, 242, Milton, 199, 230
250; re of, 204, 220; bishop of, Mines, of New World, 78; of
41, 65, 166, 287 Europe, 78, 85, 88; capitalism
Lotteries, 134, 302 in working of, 80, 180
Low Countries, 65, 80, 81, 82-3, Monarchy, paternal. See Charles
86, 230, 296; early capitalism I and Tudors.
in, 29, 38, 93, 285, 312; wage- Monasteries, loans by,.65, 296;
earners in, 38, 50, 285. See also relief of beggars by, 101, 123,
Antwerp and Holland. 263; dissolution of, 143-6, 149,
Luchaire, A., 42 231; income of, 303
Luther, v, 23, 32, 48, 89-110, 112, Moneylenders. Sec Financiers, la-
113, 115, 124, 239-40, 263, 291 terest, Usury.
Lyndwood, 66 Money-market. See Exchanges,
Lyons, 85, 86, 128; Poor Men of, Financiers, and under London,
31; Council of, S8 Monopolies. See Patents.
Monopolists, denunciations of,
MACHIAVELLI, 21, 25, 90, 187, 312 50-1, 91, 97, 102, 10-4-5, 127,
Maidstone, 205 221
Maitland, 164 Montesquieu, ix, 208
Major, 115 Monts de .l’ie'te', 55, 65, 296, 317
Malynes, G., 181 Moore, John, 255, 257
Mandeville, 193 (quoted), 309 More, Sir Thomas, 83, 143, 144
Manning, B. L., 32 Mosse, Miles, 160, 162, 164
Marx, Karl, viii, 48, 120, 266 (quoted)
Massachusetts, 135-6. Mullins, Archdeacon, 306
Melancthon, 91, 101, 115, 162
MenrLicantorders,3 1 , 101, 107,239 Narromtrsm, 78, 87
Mercantilism, 43, 89, 113, 147, Netherlands. See Holland.
236, 249 New England, Calvinism in, 135-8
Merchant Adventurers, 78, 83, 84 New Model Army, 219
Merchants. See Traders. Nicholas III, 42
Meutings, The, 88, 298 North, Sir Dudley, quoted, 248
Middle classes, rise of, 21, 95, 96, Notre-Dame, Cathedral of, 42,
103, 119, 180, 207-8, 233, 266; 288
Calvinism and Puritanism Niirnberg, 95, 118
33t) INDEX
O'BRIEN, G., xiv with peasantry of France and
Oecolampadi-us, 91, 114, 123 Germany, 70, 96, 141, 156;
Oresme, Nicholas, 22, 284 Calling of, praised, 101. See also
Owen, Robert, 269 Jacquerie and Landlords.
Oziander, 92 Peckham, Archbishop, 42
Pecock, Bishop, 61, 66, 108, 292,
Pacer, 150 297
Paley, 281 Penn, William, 191
Pallavicino, 181 Pennsylvania, 237
Papacy, avarice and corruption of, Pepys, 204
41-2, 94, 99, 101, 119; nancial Petty, Sir William, xi, 206, 248,
relations of, 42, 57, 290 249 (quoted).
Papillon, Thomas, 250 Piccarda, 30
Papists, unaptness of, for business, Pilgrimage of Grace, 146
206; charity of, 232, 263, 317 Pirenne, Prof., 84, 285
Paris, '39, 85, 90, 128, 133, 157, Political Arithmetic, 24, 189, 192,
160, 287; bishop of, 42 204, 248. See aLso Econoniic
Parish, loans by, 65, 159, 296; or- science.
ganization of, 159, 305 Pollexfen, Henry, 267
Parker, Bishop, quoted, 204 Ponet, 91, 146
Parliament, Levellers’ demands Poor, 193; reliefof, 91, 101, 122-3,
for reform of, 254 146, 149, 159, 165, 196, 238,
-—, Barebones, 218, 246 258, 269-70; investment for
--, Long, 179, 191, 236, 253, bene t of, 134, 185, 302; legis-
255 lation re relief of, 135, _260, 262-
“Parliaments” of wage-earners, 3, 269-70, 322; administration
39, 285-6 of laws for relief of, 172, 177,
Partnership, pro ts of, lawful, 54, 178, 235, 261-2; right of, to re-
290; ctitious, 60, 291 lief, 262, 269; relief of, to be
Pasture farming, 141, 142, 144, deterrent, 268, 322;ab1c-bodied,
145, 147, 150, 176, 182. See also employment of, 172, 260, 261,
Enclosures. 262, 268. See also Alntsgiving,
Patents, 23$, 236, 316 Poverty, Vagrancy.
Paterson, William, 250-1 —— Law Commissioners, 268,
Pawnbroking, 56, 168, 224 322
Peasants, associations among, 39; Portugal, 80, 81, 83, 85, 93
harshness of lot of, 69; revolts Poverty, attitude of Swiss re-
of, 69, 70, 80, 148-50, 254, 297; formers to, 114, 122-3, 139;
revolts of, in Germany, 69, 70, attitude to, in eighteenth cen-
91, 97, 102, 144, 150, 297; tury, 193, 309; attitude of Puri-
emancipation of, 68-70, 78-9, tans to, 229, 232, 241, 253, 257-
96, 141, 151; comparison of, 70; medizeval attitude to, -258-
INDEX 331
9, 320; causes of,‘ 260, 262, 264, See also Calvinism, Presbyterian-
268, 322. See also Poor. ism, and under Middle Classes,
Prcdestination, 117, 120 Poverty, Riches, and Usury.
Presbyterianism, 121, 198, 203,
207, 212, 214-15, 217, 233, 250, Quaxras, v, 32, 269-70, 322
314. See also Puritanism. Quarter~Sessions. See .lustices of
Prices, rise in, 23, 80, 85, 89, 91, the Peace.
142, 143, 181, 184;jnst, doctrine
as to, 30, 40, 49, 52-4, 91, 103- Ranetats, 87
5, 157, 160, 216, 221-2, 223, Rationalism, mediaaval, 31
243, 266, 287, 289, 315, 322; Reformation, relation of, to
control of, 53-4, 125, 127, 128, changes in social theory, vii,
130, 131, 136-8, 147, 148, 171- viii, xii, 28, 32, 75-6, 90, 92--5,
2, 177, 182, 260, 317; opposi- 98-102, 146, 158-63
tion to control of, 182, 234, 308. Regensburg, 95
See also Bargaining. _ Religion, sphere of;a1l-embracing,
Privy Council, activities of, 170-3, vii, 18-19, 21-3, 26-7, 30, 32-48,
176-7, 260 71-4, 90, 92-5, 99-100, 152-3,
Production, 247, 249 155-79, 186, 220-1, 224-5, 272.
Pro ts, medizeval doctrine as to, 273, 275, 279 (see also under
4-4, 47-8, 55, 113; attempted Traders); economic and social
limitation of, in New England activities excluded frotrt pro-
135-8. See also Traders. vince of, vi-vii, 18, 19-27, 30-1,
Property, theories as to, 44-5, 1 12, 100,, 106-10, 178-9, 180-96,
151-4, 192-3, 255-6, 258, 260 220-1, 225, 236-7, 252-3, 271-
Prophesyings, 201 81; wars of, 20, 128. See also
Public-houses, closing of, 218 Asceticism, Calvinism, Indif-
Puritanism, xii, 197-270; quarrel ferentism, Preslayterianism, Puri.
between monarchy and, 20, 212, tanism, Reformation, Tolerance.
234-6, 316-17; mediaeval, 31; Rent-charge, 54, 55, 104, 185, 290
discipline of, 121-2,. 135-8, 190, Rents, control of, at Geneva, 125;
212-18, 233, 313; theology of, raising of, 128, 145, 150, 157;
121, 227-9; connection of indi- Baxter’s teaching re, 223, 224
vidualism with, l21, 135, 212- Rhode Island, 237
13, 218,226, 229-37, 252-3, 264, Riches, medizeval attitude to, 44-
269-70, 313; divergent ele- 5, 47-8, 66, 278, 297; attitude of
ments in, 198, 212, 233, 313; Calvinists and Puritans to, 139,
sancti cation of business life by, 229-30, 238, 264-5; modern
199, 201, 229-30, 232, 238-52, attitude to, 280. See also Finan-
269; geographical distribution ciers and Traders.
of, 202-4; connection of, with Ridley, Thomas, quoted, 190
capitalism, 209, 211, 312-13. Robertson, H. M., x
332 INDEX
Root and Branch Petition, 310 Serfdom, 35, 68-7, 100, 102-3,
Rotenburg, 95 297. See also Peasants.
Rouen, 85 Seville, 85
Royal African Company, 248, 319 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 248
Shaw, W. A., 214
Sr. Anattosr, 258 Sheep-grazing. See Pasture farm-
St. Andrews, 135; archbishop of, mg.
62 Sigismund, Emperor, Reforma-
St. Antonino, 22, 30,44, 45 (cited), tion of, 40, 97, 287
53, 98, 224, 284, 288, 289 Silver, of America, 78, 81, 83,
St. Augustine, 59 140; of Europe, 88
St. Bernard, 42 Sion, monastery of, 145
St. Francis, 31, 68 Slave-trade, 188
St. Johns, The, 145, 303 Smiles, Samuel, 251
St. Leon, Martin, 40 (quoted), Smith, Adam, 24, 25, 48, 195, 252
286, 287 --—-, Rev. 1-lent-y, 215, 314
St. Raymond, 60, 157 -—, Sir Thomas, 164
St. Thomas Aquinas, 30, 33 Smiths, of London, 64, 285-6, 295
(quoted), 44, 45, 39-40 (quoted), Soap, monopoly of, 236, 316
48, 51 (quoted), 52, 70, 157, 162, Social Democratic movement,
200, 224, 258, 299 218-19
Salerno, archbishop of, 59 Society, functional theory of, 26,
Salisbury, bishop of, 160; mayor 35-8, 102, 106,153, 173-4, 175,
of, 218 192, I94, 253; modern concep-
Sanderson, Bishop, 191 tion of, 26, 35, 192, 194
Sandwich, 205 Somerset, Duke of, 124, 151, 304
Sandys, Bishop, 91, 160 South Sea Bubble, 194
Saye and Sele, Lord, 178, 308 Spain, 80, 81, 82, 83, 86, 93;
Schoolmen, v, "22, 28, 30, 32, 43-8, nanciers of, 90
52-3, 89, 92, 153, 157, 160, 162, Speculation. See Engrossers.
186, 200, 224. See also St. Speenhamland, 262
Antonino and St. Tltomas. Spices, 83, 85, 88, 95
Schools, 148, 196, 304. See also Spurriers, of London, 64, 295
Education. Starkey, 143
Schulze-Gaevernitz, 211 State, relation between Church
Scotland, 121, 134-5, 213; Com- and, 20-3, 33, 80, 100, 110, 132,
missioners from, 214 163, 169-70, 174-5, 176, 178-9,
Scriveners, 180 215, 273; Locke's conception
Self-interest, harmony of needs of of, 20, 183, 192; unitary, 39,
society with, 26, 37, 183, 194, 286; Distributive, 101, 155
195, 244, 257, 271 Steel, Richard, 239-40 and 241
Senior, Nassau, 269, 322 (quoted), 242-4, 249, 264
INDEX 333
Stockwood, Rev. 3., quoted, 263 of power of, 141, 142; purchase
Strafford, Earl of, 210, 212, 235 of land by, 145, 208, 255; break-
Strassburg, 85 down of State control of, 182-3,
Stubbes, Philip, 215 235. Sec also Bargaining, Prices,
Summre, 30, 32, 43, 219. See also Pro ts, Trade.
Schoolmen. Travers, W., 213
Swift, Dean, 206 Troeltsch, Prof., v, xiv, 100, 211,
Switzerland, 88, 208; Reformation 312
in, 111-33, 146, 263. See also Tucker, Dean, 24, 195, 197
Geneva. (quoted), 309
Synods, ‘French, 133 Tudors, social policy of, 168-74,
234, 260, 263, 268
TAUNTON, 204 Turks, 78, 79
Taylor, ‘Jeremy, 160 (quoted), 190 Tyrol, 78, 85, 88
Temple, Sir William, xi, 206
Tenures, military, abolition of, UDALL, J., 213
256 Ulm, 95
Textile workers, of Flanders and Unwin, Prof., 177
Italy, 38-9, 285; of Paris, 287. Usher, R. G., 202
For England, see under Cloth Usury, controversy on, 91, 92,
industry. _ 155-68, 181-7; teaching of
Tolerance, religious, 23-4, 122, mcdiseval Church on, 30, 49-52,
126, 178-9, 197, 204-6 54-66; practising of, on large
Tories, 206 scale, in Middle Ages, 41-2,
Townsend, Rev. J., 309 56-7, 180; restitution of pro ts
Trade, ourishing of, under reli- of, 42, 59, 61; enforcement o.
gious tolerance, 23-4, 197, 2'04- prohibition of, 49-50, 57-65,
6; free exercise of, 179; foreign, 127, 129, 132, 135, 164-7, 168,
increase of, 141, I30, 231; bal- 172-3, 190, 194, 236, 237, 291,
ance of, 184, 245, 248. See also 292, 293, 306; prevalence of,
Traders. 50-1, 156; popular denuncia-
Trade unionism, 39, 64, 286-7 tions of, 51, 91, 142-3, 156-8;
Traders, medizeval attitude to, 31, certain transactions not re-
36, 44-8, 49-50, 113; relations garded as, 54-5, 104, 185, 216,
between craftsmen and, 38, 141, 217, 289-90; ecclesiastical legis-
143, 177, 235; sancti cation of lation re, 24, 58-9, 63, 65-6;
occupation of, 47, 113-14, 116- secular legislation re, 63, 158,
-20, 123, 199, 201, 229-30, 232, 164, 183-4, 185, 190-1; devices
238-52, 270; frauds and extor- for concealment of, 58, 60, 65,
tion of, 62, 113, 127, 133, 134, 291 ; attitude of reformers to, in
147, 157, 160, 293, 302; Lu- Germany, 91, 92, 103, 104, 109;
ther's attitude to, 101; growth in Switzerland, 91, 92, 112-16,
334 INDEX
125, 128-32, 184-5, 215, 216; Weber, Max, v, vii-xii, xiv, 211,
in France, 134, 302; Puritan 312-13, 315,318
attitude to, 209, 213, 215-17, Welsers, The, 88, 97, 298
222, 224, 231-2, 237, 245, 250, Wentworth, 177-8
266, 314, 315, 317. See also Wesley, 194
Interest, Loans, and under Westminster Assembly, 23, 214,
Clergy. 217
Utilitarianism, 226, 242, 268 Whalley, ecclesiastical court of, 65
Utrecht, University of, 237 -—, Major-General, 256, 320
Whigs, 203, 205, 251
VAGRANCY, 101, 172, 217, 260, Whitby Abbey, 145
262, 263, 267, 268._ See also Whole Duty of Man, The, 194-5
A lmsg iving and Poor. Widows and orphans, usury for
Value, theories of, 48, 52 bene t of, 185, 232
Venice, 78, 80, 83, 85, 96, 128, 312 Williams, Roger, 136
Vienne, Council of, 58 Wilson, Thomas, 160, 162, 16-1
Villeinage. See Serfdom. (cited), 182, 233, 315
Virtues, economic, 114, 119, 123, Wiltshire, 218, 236
227-51, 269, 270 Winstanley, Gerrard, 12.1
Vives, 122 (quoted), 254
Voltaire, 208 Witt, John de, 206
Wolsey, 143, 151
Wxoe-exnnens, small number of, Wood, H. G., xiv, 314
39, 50, 142, 156, 207, 266, 286; Woodrow, Rev. Robert, quoted,
organizations of, 39, 286-7; 237
attitude of economists to, 266- Woollen industry. See Cloth in-
8. See also Wages. dusrry.
Wages, withholding of, 62, 222, Workhouses, 267, 268, 322
293; regulation of, 136, 171, Works, good, 117, 119, 237, 240,
177, 178, 234, 235, 287, 316; 264, 317
payment of, in truck, 157, 177, Wyclif, 31, 37-8 (quoted), 39-40,
235. See also Wage-earners. 51 (quoted), 52, 286
Walker, Gordon, v, xii. YARRANTON, A., 251
Wallas, Graham, 25 Yeomen, 69, 202
Warnba, 99 York; Province of, 165, 173
Warburton, 195 Yorke, Sir John, 145
Ward, Sir Patience, 250 Yorkshire, 146, 166, 203-4
Warwick, Earl of, 150 Young, Arthur, 268
Warwickshire, 143, 320 Younge, R., quoted, 264
Washerne, 145
Wealth. See Production and ZURICH, 112, 123, 125
Riches. Zwingli, 91, 112, 123, 125

TAWNEY, R.H. - Religion and The Rise of Capitalism-Pelican Books (1948)

Uploaded by

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Document Informationclick to expand document information

Copyright:

Available Formats

TAWNEY, R.H. - Religion and The Rise of Capitalism-Pelican Books (1948)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

TAWNEY, R.H. - Religion and The Rise of Capitalism-Pelican Books (1948)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

\

>-__ ._ ____ 7 77 7777777

DR. CHARLES GORE

Whatever the world thinks, he who hath not much

Blade and Printed in Great Britain for Penguin Books Limited

u THE CONTINENTAL Rraronmens 75

111 Tue Cnuncn or ENGLAND 140

Iv THE PURITAN MOVEMENT 197

Tl-IE friends of the late Henry Scott Holland founded a lcctureship

THIS book is based on a series of lectures on Religious Though: on

The Medieval Background

Papa, si rem tangimus, nomen habet a re,

Tire Continental Reformer:

LORD ACTON, in an unforgettable passage in his Inaugural

observed that it is not possible to unscramble eggs had

that it was not by renouncing them, but by untiring con-

The Church of England

THE ecclesiastical and political controversies which descend

In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had

In spite of the swift expansion of commerce in the latter part

Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical

The Puritan Movement

BY the end of the sixteenth century the divorce between

Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, he

If ever thou gavest meate or drinke,

SOCIETIES, like individuals, have their moral crises and their

The certainties of one age are the problems of the next.

The shaft of Mephistopheles, which drops harmless from

References to some of the earlier literature will be found in the notes

I. Lloyd George at Portmadoc (Times, June 16, 1921).

J. Rossus, Historia Regum Anglia-* (ed. T. Hearnc).

Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which

You might also like