The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

The Rev. W. Denton, in his learned and instructive survey of the subject (England in the Fifteenth Century, 1888, pp. 1-7), remarks that "from some cause, now difficult to trace, great encouragement was given to French in the reign of Henry III. Probably the foreign tastes and partialities of the king had something to do with this" (p. 4). They certainly had. As soon as he could wield power, "hordes of hungry Poitevins and Bretons were at once summoned over to occupy the royal castles and fill the judicial and administrative posts about the Court" (Green, Short Hist., ch. iii, § 5, p. 140), as had happened before under Henry II. Mr. Denton rightly notes (p. 6) how "in the reign of Henry III the descendants of Norman barons, and the sons of Anglo-Norman fathers, were proud of the name of Englishmen, and took up arms against the king's Norman and Angevin favourites, whom they despised as foreigners." This is the true line of causation. There is doubtless something in the theory that the general resort to the use of English in the schools was a result of the Black Death—the majority of the clergy being destroyed and the new teachers being unable to instruct in French (Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893, p. 202); but there were certainly other causes involved. Mr. de Montmorency (State Intervention in English Education, 1902, pp. 19-23) develops Gasquet's argument with much force, noting further that many of the foreign priests who survived forsook their charges. It might be added that the native peasantry necessarily counted for more in a social as in an economic sense, after the great fall in their numbers. But the fact that the Death came in the period of the successful French wars of Edward III is clearly of capital importance. But for the moral reaction from these wars, the tendency would have been to procure new relays of French priests.

It is indeed conceivable that, but for hostilities with France, French would have steadily gained ground through literature, depressing and discrediting the vernacular. On this view it was the continuance of resistance by the Welsh that probably prevented the absorption of the Saxon speech by that of the conquered British; and it is similarly arguable that it was the relation of hostility between the Carlovingian Franks and the more easterly Germans that determined the supremacy of the Romance speech in French. The point is worth psychological investigation.

Though, however, Chaucer's own new-English work is part of the result, the intellectual gain stops there for the time being. No nation, from Rome to Napoleonic France, ever helped its own higher culture by destroying other States.[1033] The French wars of Henry V were not less injurious to English civilisation[1034] than the desperate civil wars which followed them, when English medieval culture reached, relatively to the rest of Europe, its lowest point.[1035] And these wars, it is always important to remember, were the result of the young king's acting on the doctrine (doubtfully ascribed to his father, but in any case all too easily acquired by kings) that whereas peace gave headway to domestic sedition, foreign war unified the mass of the people and fixed them to their leader. The shameless aggression on France did so unify them for the moment, as imperialism among an unmoralised public may always be trusted to do; and it left them more demoralised and divided than ever, in due sequence. In all likelihood it was the new bribe of foreign plunder that first drew men away from Lollardism, considered as an outcome of economic discontent, thus preparing the collapse of the movement on its moral side.[1036] One man's egoism could thus sway the whole nation's evolution for evil,[1037] setting up for it the ideal which haloed him, and which survived him in virtue of the accident that the Nemesis of his course fell upon his successors rather than on him.

§ 3

In the matter of plebeian subjection, the second half of the fourteenth century supplies the proof of the tendency of the period of war. The great gain to the serfs in that period was the result of the depopulation caused by the Black Death (1348-50)—a relation of cause and effect which is still ignored by some writers, in their concern to insist that English labour was once better off than at present. But it was later in the same half-century that the rising of the "Jacquerie," which appears to have been in its origin strictly a revolt against taxation,[1038] was so bloodily repressed. The manner of the revolt sufficiently proves that the peasantry had gained new heart with the improvement in their lot which followed on the pestilence, in spite of laws to keep down wages;[1039] but even this improvement could not strengthen them sufficiently to make them hold their own politically in 1381 against the aristocracy, gentry, and middle class, now hardened in class insolence. It would seem as if those who rose to the status of tenants[1040] after the depopulation sought in their turn to keep down those who remained landless servitors. After the southern and eastern risings had been crushed, the men of Essex were told by Richard, who had given them charters of freedom and immediately afterwards revoked them, inclined as he was to protect the serfs in a measure against their masters, that "bondsmen they had been and bondsmen they should remain, in worse bondage than before"; and the following Parliament declared that the landowners would never consent to the freeing of the serfs, "were they all to die for it in a day." It is noteworthy, on the side of economics, that despite this temper serfage did gradually die out, the people being for long unable to multiply up to the old level, by reason of restraint, ill-usage, civil war, the decline of tillage and the grouping of holdings, and the high death-rate. Jack Cade's rebellion, in 1450, indicated the persistence of the democratic spirit, contending as it did for the suppression of the system under which the nobles plundered the kingdom while the king was imbecile.

The question as to the rate at which the population recovered from the Black Death has been discussed by Prof. Thorold Rogers, Mr. Seebohm, and Prof. Cunningham (see the latter's Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 1891, i, 304). Prof. Rogers, on the one hand, maintains that by 1377, when the tax rolls seem to give a population of about two and a half millions (cp. Dunton, England in the Fifteenth Century, p. 130), the population had recovered all it had lost in the Plague, he being of opinion that the England of that age could not at any time support more than two and a half millions. Mr. Seebohm, with whom Dr. Cunningham substantially concurs (see also Pearson, Fourteenth Century, p. 249, and Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893, p. 194), thinks that the return of the Plague in 1361 and 1369, and the unsettled state of the country, must have prevented recuperation; and, accepting the loose calculation that the Plague destroyed half the population (Mr. Pearson says "one-half or two-thirds"; Dr. Gasquet endorses the general view that "fully one half" were destroyed), he concludes that the population before 1348 may have been five millions.

The truth surely lies between these extremes. That the population should not at all have recovered in twenty-five years is extremely unlikely. That it should have restored a loss of thirty-three per cent in twenty-five years, which is what Prof. Rogers's position amounts to, is still more unlikely (see his Six Centuries of Work and Wages, pp. 223, 226, where the mortality is estimated at one-third). It is besides utterly incongruous with Prof. Rogers's own repeated assertion that "during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries the population of England and Wales was almost stationary" (Industrial and Commercial History of England, pp. 46, 49; Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 337; Economic Interpretation of History, p. 53). How could a medieval population conceivably stand for half a century at a given figure, then, having been reduced by one-third, replace the loss in twenty-five years, and thereafter continue to subsist without further increase for two centuries more?

On the other hand, there is a natural tendency in every suddenly depleted population to reproduce itself for a time at a quickened rate; and in the England of the latter half of the fourteenth century the conditions would encourage such an effort. The lack of house-room and settlement which normally checked increase (cp. Stubbs, § 493) was remedied for a large number of persons; and the general feeling would be all in favour of marriage and repopulation (cp. Rogers, Six Centuries, p. 226, where, however, evidence obviously bad is accepted as to multiplied births), though just after the Plague there would be a great stimulus to the extension of pasture, since that needed fewer hands than tillage.

On the whole, we may reasonably surmise that the population before 1348 was, not five millions, but between three and four millions (so Green, ch. v, § 4, p. 241, who, however, takes the somewhat excessive view that "more than one-half were swept away," and further, p. 239, that the population "seems to have all but tripled since the Conquest"), and that it was prevented regaining that figure in the next century by the economic preference of sheep-farming to tillage. Mr. Rogers expressly admits (Six Centuries, p. 233) that "the price of labour, proclamations and statutes notwithstanding, did not ever fall to its old rates," and repeatedly asserts that "the labourers remained masters of the situation." On his own principles, this goes to prove that their numbers remained lower than of old. He infers a "considerable loss of life" in the famine of 1315-16 from the immediate rise of agricultural wages (from 23 to 30 per cent), of which on the average 20 per cent was permanent. Here there is a presumption that even before 1315 the population was greater than afterwards. Yet again he states (p. 326, etc.) that "the fifteenth century and the first quarter of the sixteenth were the golden age of the English labourer"—a proposition which staggers credence. Cp. W.J. Corbett, in Social England, ii, 382-84.

It is impossible, however, to attain demonstration either on that head or as regards the numbers of the population in the periods under notice. Mr. Rogers's claims to give decisive evidence show a serious misconception of what constitutes proof; and there is special reason to distrust his conclusion that population was no greater at the end of Elizabeth's reign than in that of Henry IV. Cp. Mr. Gibbins's Industrial History of England, pp. 107-108. Prof. J.E. Symes (in Social England, iii, 128, 129) decides that a "great increase of the population undoubtedly took place in the reign of Henry VIII," adopting the estimate that the total at the death of Henry VII was about two and a half millions, and at the death of Henry VIII about four millions. As to the population at the Conquest, see Sharon Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons, bk. viii, c. 9, vol. iii, and Dunton, as cited, pp. 128-29. It was then probably below two millions; and in the reign of Edward II it may well have been over three millions; for Bishop Pecock about 1450 (cited by Dunton, p. 130 note) speaks of a long-continued decrease, such as would be caused by the wars in France and at home. But the assertion of Tyndale in 1532 (id. ib.), that the population was then less by a third than in the time of Richard II, must be dismissed as a delusion set up by the phenomena of agrarian depopulation in certain districts. On this see below, p. 405.