PART VI
ENGLISH HISTORY DOWN TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL PERIOD
Chapter I
It is after the great Civil War that English political development becomes most directly instructive, because it is thenceforward that the modern political conditions begin to be directly traceable. Constitutional or parliamentary monarchy takes at that point a virtually new departure. But we shall be better prepared to follow the play of the forces of attraction and repulsion, union and strife, in the modern period, if we first realise how in the ages of feudal monarchy and personal monarchy, as the previous periods have been conveniently named, the same fundamental forces were at work in different channels. The further we follow these forces back the better we are prepared to conceive political movement in terms of naturalist as opposed to verbalist formulas. Above all things, we must get rid of the habit of explaining each phenomenon in terms of the abstraction of itself—as Puritanism by "the Puritan spirit," Christian civilisation by "Christianity," and English history by "the English character." We are to look for the causation of the Puritan spirit and English conduct and the religion of the hour in the interplay of general instincts and particular circumstances.
§ 1
At the very outset, the conventional views as to the bias of the "Anglo-Saxon race"[987] are seen on the least scrutiny to be excluded by the facts. Credited with an innate bent to seafaring, the early English are found to have virtually abandoned the sea after settling in England;[988] the new conditions altering the sea-going bent just as the older had made it, and continued to do in the case of the Scandinavians. Credited in the same fashion with a racial bias to commerce, they are found to have been uncommercial, unadventurous, home-staying; and it took centuries of continental influences to make them otherwise. Up to the fourteenth century "almost the whole of English trade was in the hands of aliens."[989] And of what trade the "free" Anglo-Saxons did conduct, the most important branch seems to have been the slave trade.[990] As to the mass of the population, whatever were their actual life-conditions—and as to this we have very little knowledge—they were certainly not the "free barbarians" of the old Teutonic legend. Unfree in some sense they mostly were; and all that we have seen of the early evolution of Greece and Rome goes to suggest that their status was essentially depressed. In the words of a close student, English economic history "begins with the serfdom of the masses of the rural population under Saxon rule—a serfdom from which it has taken a thousand years of English economic evolution to set them free."[991] This is perhaps an over-statement: serfdom suggests general predial slavery; and this cannot be shown to have existed. But those who repel the proposition seem to take no account of the tendency towards popular depression in early settled communities.[992] If we stand by the terminology of Domesday Book, we are far indeed from the conception of a population of freemen.
That the mass of the "Saxon" English (who included many of non-Saxon descent) were more or less "unfree" is a conclusion repeatedly reached on different lines of research. Long ago, the popular historian Sharon Turner wrote that "There can be no doubt that nearly three-fourths of the Anglo-Saxon population were in a state of slavery" (History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4th ed. 1823, iii, 255); and he is here supported by his adversary Dunham (Europe during the Middle Ages, Cab. Cyc. 1834, iii, 49-52). J.M. Kemble later admitted that the "whole population in some districts were unfree" (The Saxons in England, reprint, 1876, i, 189). Yet another careful student sums up that "at the time of the Conquest we find the larger portion of the inhabitants of England in a state of villenage" (J.F. Morgan, England under the Normans, 1858, p. 61). (The interesting question of the racial elements of the population at and after the Conquest is fully discussed by the Rev. Geoffrey Hill, Some Consequences of the Norman Conquest, 1904, ch. i.)