Assuredly there was joy and there was devotion; for the laden cart made the difference between plenty and starvation. Before that harvest-home came there had been many an aching heart in the village hovels, for there was no store to equalize prices, and no communication to make the abundance of one district—much less of one country—mitigate the scarcity of another. It was not a question of the rise or the fall of a penny or two in the price of a loaf of bread; it was a question of bread or no bread.
The Hock-Cart.
During those dark periods the crown carried on the war against capital with an industry that could not be exceeded by that of the nobles or the people. Before the great charter the Commons complained that King Henry seized upon whatever was suited to his royal pleasure—horses, implements, food, anything that presented itself in the shape of accumulated labour. In the reign of Henry III. a statute was passed to remedy excessive distresses; from which it appeared that it was no unfrequent practice for the king's officers to take the opportunity of seizing the farmer's oxen at the moment when they were employed in ploughing, or, as the statute says, "winning the earth,"—taking them off, and starving them to death, or only restoring them with new and enormous exactions for their keep. Previous to the Charter of the Forest no man could dig a marl-pit on his own ground, lest the king's horses should fall into it when he was hunting. As late as the time of James I. we find, from a speech of the great Lord Bacon, that it was a pretty constant practice of the king's purveyors to extort large sums of money by threatening to cut down favourite trees which grew near a mansion-house or in avenues. Despotism, in all ages, has depopulated the finest countries, by rendering capital insecure, and therefore unproductive; insomuch that Montesquieu lays it down as a maxim, that lands are not cultivated in proportion to their fertility, but in proportion to their freedom. In the fifteenth century, in England, we find sums of money voted for the restoration of decayed towns and villages. Just laws would have restored them much more quickly and effectually. The state of agriculture was so low that the most absurd enactments were made to compel farmers to till and sow their own lands, and calling upon every man to plant at least forty beans. All the laws for the regulation of labourers, at the same period, assumed that they should be compelled to work, and not wander about the country,—just in the same way that farmers should be compelled to sow and till. It is perfectly clear that the towns would not have been depopulated, and gone to decay, if the accumulation of capital had not been obstructed by insecurity and wasted by ignorance, and that the same insecurity and the same waste rendered it necessary to assume that the farmer would not till and sow, and the labourer would not labour, without compulsion. The natural stimulus to industry was wanting, and therefore there was no industry, or only unprofitable industry. The towns decayed, the country was uncultivated—production languished—the people were all poor and wretched; and the government dreamt that acts of parliament and royal ordinances could rebuild the houses and cultivate the land, when the means of building and cultivation, namely, the capital of the country, was exhausted by injustice producing insecurity.
But if the king, the nobles, and the people of the middle ages conspired together, or acted at least as if they conspired, to prevent the accumulation of capital, the few capitalists themselves, by their monstrous regulations, which still throw some dark shadows over our own days, prevented that freedom of industry without which capital could not accumulate. Undoubtedly the commercial privileges of corporations originally offered some barriers against the injustice of the crown and of the nobility; but the good was always accompanied with an evil, which rendered it to a certain extent valueless. Where these privileges gave security, they were a good; where they destroyed freedom, they were an injury. Instead of encouraging the intercourse between one trade and another, they encircled every trade with the most absurd monopolies and exclusive privileges. Instead of rendering commerce free between one district and another, they, even in the same country, encompassed commerce with the most harassing restrictions, which separated county from county, and town from town, as if seas ran between them. If a man of Coventry came to London with his wares, he was encountered at every step with the privileges of companies; if the man of London sought to trade at Coventry, he was obstructed by the same corporate rights, preventing either the Londoner or the Coventry man trading with advantage. The revenues of every city were derived from forfeitures upon trades, almost all established upon the principle that, if one trade became too industrious or too clever, it would be the ruin of another trade. Every trade was fenced round with secrets; and the commonest trade, as we know from the language of an apprentice's indenture, was called an "art and mystery." All these follies went upon the presumption that "one man's gain is another man's loss," instead of vanishing before the truth, that, in proportion as the industry of all men is free, so will it be productive; and that production on all sides ensures a state of things in which every exchanger is a gainer, and no one a loser.
It is not to be wondered at that, while such opinions existed, the union of capital and labour should have been very imperfect; and that, while the capitalists oppressed the labourers, in the same way that they oppressed each other, the labourers should have thought it not unreasonable to plunder the capitalists. It is stated by Harrison, an old writer of credit,[13] that during the single reign of Henry VIII. seventy-two thousand thieves were hanged in England. No fact can exhibit in a stronger light the universal misery that must have existed in those days. The whole kingdom did not contain half a million grown-up males, so that, considering that the reign of Henry VIII. extended over two generations, about one man in ten must have been, to use the words of the same historian, "devoured and eaten up by the gallows." In the same reign the first statute against Egyptians (gipsies) was passed. These people went from place to place in great companies—spoke a cant language, which Harrison calls Pedler's French—and were subdivided into fifty-two different classes of thieves. The same race of people prevailed throughout Europe. Cervantes, the author of 'Don Quixote,' says of the Egyptians or Bohemians, that they seem to have been born for no other purpose than that of pillaging. While this universal plunder went forward, it is evident that the insecurity of property must have been so great that there could have been little accumulation, and therefore little production. Capital was destroyed on every side; and because profitable labour had become so scarce by the destruction of capital, one-half of the community sought to possess themselves of the few goods of the other half, not as exchangers but as robbers. As the robbers diminished the capital, the diminution of capital increased the number of robbers; and if the unconquerable energy of human industry had not gone on producing, slowly and painfully indeed, but still producing, the country would have soon fallen back to the state in which it was a thousand years before, when wolves abounded more than men. One great cause of all this plunder and misery was the oppression of the labourers.
[12] Ruffhead's Pope.
[13] Preface to the Chronicles of Holinshed.