“We have made our appeal to you to settle this matter in the Equity and Reason of it, and to pass the sentence of freedom to us, you being the men with whom we have to do in this business, in whose hands there is power to settle it, for no Court can end this controversy but your Court of Parliament, as the case of this Nation now stands.”
After emphasising his fundamental contention that in Equity and by the Law of Righteousness all should have the freedom of the Earth granted unto them, he summarises the causes that have conspired to place the Members of the House of Commons in power, as follows:
“You of the Gentry, as well as we of the Commonalty, all groaned under the burden of the bad government and burdening laws of the late King Charles, who was the last successor of William the Conqueror. You and we cried for a Parliament, and a Parliament was called, and wars, you know, presently began between the king that represented William the Conqueror and the body of the English people that were enslaved. We looked upon you to be our Chief Council to agitate business for us, though you were summonsed by the king’s writ, and choosen by the Freeholders, who are the successors of William the Conqueror’s soldiers. You saw the danger so great that without a war England was likely to be more enslaved, therefore you called upon us to assist you with plate, taxes, free-quarter and our persons: and you promised us, in the name of the Almighty, to make us a Free People. Thereupon you and we took the National Covenant with joint consent, to endeavour the freedom, peace, and safety of the people of England. And you and we joined person and purse together in the common cause, and Will. the Conqueror’s successor, which was Charles, was cast out; thereby we have recovered ourselves from under that Norman yoke. And now unless you and we be merely besotted with covetousness, pride and slavish fear of men, it is and will be our wisdom to cast out all those enslaving laws which was the tyrannical power the king pressed us down by.[108:1] O shut not your eyes against the light; darken not knowledge by dispute about particular men’s privileges, when Universal Freedom is brought to be tried before you; dispute no further when truth appears, but be silent and practice it. Stop not your ears against the secret moanings of the oppressed, under these expressions, lest the Lord see it and be offended, and shut His eyes against your cries, and work a deliverance for His waiting people some other way than by you.”
He then summarises the prevailing ills, and indicates their manifest and immediate duty, as follows:
“The main thing that you should look upon is the Land, which calls upon her children to be free from the entanglements of the Norman Taskmasters. For one third part lies waste and barren, and her children starve for want, in regard the Lords of Manors will not suffer the poor to manure it.... The power is in your hands, the Nations Representative, O let the first thing you do be this, to set the land free. Let the Gentry have their enclosures free from all enslaving entanglements whatsoever, and let the Common People have the Commons and Waste Lands set free to them from all Norman enslaving Lords of Manors. That so both Elder and Younger Brother, as we spring successively one from another, may live free and quiet one by and with another in this Land of our Nativity.” “This thing,” he then boldly declares, “you are bound to see done, or at least to endeavour it, before another Representative force you; otherwise you cannot discharge your trust to God and man.” And the Appeal concludes with the following words: “Set the Land free from oppression, and righteousness will be the Laws, Government, and Strength of that People.”
The Long Parliament, however, were too busy carrying English civilisation into Ireland to heed his words. And yet surely there was work enough for them to do in their own country, in which, as we have already pointed out, since the reign of Henry the Seventh the condition of the masses of the people had steadily worsened, and, as a natural consequence, the number of beggars, “rogues and vagrants,” despite barbarous laws, involving their wholesale hanging, had steadily increased. During the reign of James the First, in a pamphlet entitled Grievous Groans of the Poor, published 1622, we hear the complaint that “the number of the poor do daily increase.” The only remedy the then wise men of England could devise was to make the laws against them still more severe. Consequently it was ordered that the first time such people were apprehended they should be branded with the letter R, and if subsequently again found begging or wandering they were “to suffer death without benefit of Clergy.” Yet such was their obstinacy that they still increased in numbers; and that for the simple reason that the economic or social causes of which they were but the inevitable outcome were not removed.
During all this period, however, the country was developing, its industry and commerce expanding, and its wealth increasing by leaps and bounds; but in all this the “meaner sort,” the Younger Brothers, the disinherited masses, had neither lot nor share. Though Clarendon may speak of the growing economical prosperity of the country during the time of which we are writing, yet there be no doubt of the truth of Thorold Rogers’ contention, that[109:1]—“I am convinced from the comparison I have been able to make between wages, rents and prices, that it was a period of excessive misery among the mass of the people and the tenants, a time in which a few might have become rich, while the many were crushed down into hopeless and almost permanent indigence.” And yet the facts are such as to compel him, when speaking of the Restoration, to point out that[110:1]—“the labourers, as far as the will went, were better off under the rule of the Saints than under that of the sinners.”
The English land-system, as we know it to-day, really began with the Restoration, when the very memory of Winstanley and his doctrines was swept away, when the men of the Model Army found themselves powerless, while “the great and wise men” of the nation “set up Monarchy again,” humbly prostrating themselves at the feet of a licentious, cynical debauchee, and the Landocracy, new and old, found themselves in the saddle with far greater political power than they had ever before enjoyed. They soon found means of fastening their yoke more firmly than ever on the necks of the people, and of making short work of any claims of an independent yeomanry to any right to the soil of their native country apart from their good-will and pleasure. After some effort, they passed a Statute under which the estates of such of the free-holders as had no documentary evidence by which to support their titles, were confiscated and turned into tenancies at will. By means of Enclosure Acts they still further plundered and impoverished the peasantry, by appropriating to themselves millions of acres of land over which these still had some right, some enjoyment. By means of the Law of Parochial Settlement, as Thorold Rogers repeatedly points out,[110:2] they “consummated the degradation of the labourer”; and made him, as it has left him, what the same impartial authority well terms “the most portentous phenomenon in agriculture, a serf without land.” By means of their Financial Policy they rid themselves of the duties which originally accompanied the privilege of land-holding, viz. to provide the necessary public revenues for all defence purposes, and converted themselves from Land Holders into Land Owners, by shifting the burden of taxation to the food, industry, and handicraft of those they had despoiled and disinherited. And, finally, for the first time in the history of England, they passed a Corn Law artificially to increase their rents, at the cost and to the detriment, often to the starvation, of the masses of the people. From the effect of these laws the people of Great Britain have not yet been able entirely to recover themselves, though since 1824 they have made heroic steps to do so. With this portion of the history, we had almost written of the martyrdom, of the English people we are not here directly concerned. Manifestly it would have been very different had the Long Parliament listened to Winstanley’s appeal, or had his self-sacrificing efforts been crowned with the success they so well deserved.
[100:1] Thomasson’s Tracts. British Museum, Press Mark, E. 560 (1). Reprinted in the Harleian Miscellany, vol. ii. p. 485.
[103:1] Others, in far more influential positions than Winstanley and his comrades, gave forcible expression to much the same views. In the debates of the Army Council on the Agreement of the People, on November 1647, Edward Sexby, the Agitator or Representative of the private soldiers, an able, daring, and energetic man, replying to Ireton, on the question of the right to vote, said: “We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen; and by the arguments urged, there are none. There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives, we have had little propriety in the kingdom as to our estates, yet we have had a birthright. But it seems now that except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so deceived. If we had not a right to the kingdom, we were mere mercenary soldiers. There are men in my position, it may be little estate they have at present, and yet they have as much a birthright as those two who are their law-givers, or as any in this place.” During the same debate Colonel Rainborrow said: “I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he.” And, also in reply to Ireton, he subsequently declared: “Sir, I see that it is impossible to have liberty but all property must be taken away.... If you will say it, it must be so. But I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while? He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, to men of estate, and to make himself a perpetual slave.”—See Clarke Papers, vol. i. pp. 322-323, 325.