The Crime of Caste in Our Country

by Benjamin Rush Davenport

CHAPTER XV. ENGLAND, 1645.

The American regards England with more than kindly eyes. Her history has been the history of our race. The sterling valor of the Englishman early made itself felt in the demands made by him upon the reluctant kings who ruled him. At no time in the history of Great Britain, from the Norman Conquest, had the peasantry and “Common People” been submerged as completely by the power of the privileged classes as has been the case in France, and, in fact, as in all of continental Europe. When John, known as “Lackland,” the younger brother of Richard Cœur de Lion, came to the throne of England (1109-1216), he ruled weakly and lost nearly all the English possessions in France. The peasants rose against the imbecile monarch and, joined by the barons and feudal lords, compelled him to sign the Magna-Charta or Great Charter, at Runnymede (1215).

By this immortal instrument the king gave up the right to demand money when he pleased, to imprison or punish when he pleased. He was to take money only when the barons granted the privilege, for public purposes, and no freeman was to be punished except when his countrymen judged him guilty of crime. The courts were to be open to all, and justice was not to be sold, refused, or withheld. The serf villein was to have his plow free from seizure. The church was secured against the interference of the king. No class was neglected, but each obtained some cherished right.

Thus, early in the history of England, we find the “Common People” of that nation from whom we derive our blood and many of our laws—the foundation, in fact of all of them—and much of our domestic and social conditions and manners, asserting rights for which Americans afterwards contended with the parent country, England. The Magna-Charta was wrested from King John not by the lords and barons alone—but by a union between the nobles and the “Common People.”

Thus early the “Common People” of England learned to appreciate their might and strength. And the Americans, as inheritors along with their blood of so many of the traditions and characteristics of the English, have not failed to possess themselves of that quality which is inherent in the Anglo-Saxon heart—the fearless demanding of the right to equality.

Pronouncedly did the American people, November 8, 1892, reiterate in an unmistakable manner the sentiment of the race who, in 1214, had forced from King John of England the Magna-Charta which has been, ever since, the foundation of English liberty.

English kings have continually tried to break the Magna-Charta, but have ever failed in the attempt. They have been compelled, during reigns succeeding that of King John, to confirm its provisions thirty-six times. The early assertion of the right to representation by the people is interesting as a step onward in the march of the Anglo-Saxon toward equality and liberty.

Henry II.’s foolish favoritism to foreigners caused a revolt, under the leadership of Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, who defeated the king at Lewes. Earl Simon thereupon called together the Parliament, summoning, besides the barons, two knights from each county and two citizens from each city or borough to represent free-holders (1265). From this beginning, the English Parliament soon took on the form it has since retained of two assemblies—the House of Lords and the House of Commons. Thus, the thirteenth century became ever memorable in the history of the English-speaking people of the world, for the granting of the Magna-Charta and the forming of the House of Commons—that House of Commons, which, as its name indicates, was and is made up of the representatives of the “Common People,” and which has ever been the bulwark of the liberty of the “Common People” of England, resisting every attack of autocratic monarchs upon the rights of the people.

In the reign of Edward III. (1327-1377) the Normans and Saxons were fused completely, and created the English nationality; chivalry reached its highest exaltation; but the court and the upper classes were morally rotten. The laboring classes rose during this reign, and compelled their employers to pay them just wages, and rent to fragments the despotic edicts that effected them; just as the “Common People” will ever do, whether the attempt is made to beguile them by the cry of Protection, Free Trade, Force Bill, or other distracting exclamations.

Richard II. (1377-1399) was a tyrant, with neither the capacity nor courage of his father and grandfather. He lost all the respect and admiration with which the people of England had ever regarded his father and grandfather. One of Richard II.’s tax-gatherers insulted the daughter of one Watt Tyler, at Dartforth on Kent, in exactly the same manner as “Chappie” feels at liberty to do, by his glances, the daughters of the laboring men to-day. Watt Tyler, the wrathful father, killed the man with one blow, and a formidable revolt sprang at once into being.