It was this theory which was held by almost all the ecclesiastical writers who dealt with economic ethics in the sixteenth century. Their view was that, in the words of a pamphleteer, “by the laws of the Church of England ... usury is simply and generally prohibited.”[[43]] When the lower House of Convocation petitioned the bishops in 1554 for a restoration of their privileges, they urged, among other matters, that “usurers may be punished by the canon lawes as in tymes past has been used.”[[44]] In the abortive scheme for the reorganization of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction drawn up by Cranmer and Foxe, usury was included in the list of offenses with which the ecclesiastical courts were to deal, and, for the guidance of judges in what must often have been somewhat knotty cases, a note was added, explaining that it was not to be taken as including the profits derived from objects which yielded increase by the natural process of growth.[[45]] Archbishop Grindal’s injunctions to the laity of the Province of York (1571) expressly emphasized the duty of presenting to the Ordinary those who lend and demand back more than the principal, whatever the guise under which the transaction may be concealed.[[46]] Bishops’ articles of visitation down to the Civil War required the presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers, together with drunkards, ribalds, swearers and sorcerers.[[47]] The rules to be observed in excommunicating the impenitent promulgated in 1585, the Canons of the Province of Canterbury in 1604, and of the Irish Church in 1634, all included a provision that the usurer should be subjected to ecclesiastical discipline.[[48]]
The activity of the ecclesiastical courts had not ceased with the Reformation, and they continued throughout the last half of the century to play an important, if increasingly unpopular, part in the machinery of local government. In addition to enforcing the elementary social obligation of charity, by punishing the man who refused to “pay to the poor men’s box,” or who was “detected for being an uncharitable person and for not giving to the poor and impotent,”[[49]] they dealt also, at least in theory, with those who offended against Christian morality by acts of extortion. The jurisdiction of the Church in these matters was expressly reserved by legislation, and ecclesiastical lawyers, while lamenting the encroachments of the common law courts, continued to claim certain economic misdemeanors as their province. That, in spite of the rising tide of opposition, the references to questions of this kind in articles of visitation were not wholly an affair of common form, is suggested by the protests against the interference of the clergy in matters of business, and by the occasional cases which show that commercial transactions continued to be brought before the ecclesiastical courts. The typical usurer was apt, indeed, to outrage not one, but all, of the decencies of social intercourse. “Thomas Wilkoxe,” complained his fellow burgesses, “is excommunicated, and disquieteth the parish in the time of divine service. He is a horrible usurer, taking 1d. and sometimes 2d. for a shilling by the week. He has been cursed by his own father and mother. For the space of two years he hath not received the Holy Communion, but every Sunday, when the priest is ready to go to the Communion, then he departeth the church for the receiving of his weekly usury, and doth not tarry the end of divine service thrice in the year.”[[50]] Whether the archdeacon corrected a scandal so obviously suitable for ecclesiastical discipline, we do not know. But in 1578 a case of clerical usury is heard in the court of the archdeacon of Essex.[[51]] Twenty-two years later, a usurer is presented with other offenders on the occasion of the visitation of some Yorkshire parishes.[[52]] Even in 1619 two instances occur in which money-lenders are cited before the Court of the Commissary of the Bishop of London, on the charge of “lending upon pawnes for an excessive gain commonly reported and cried out of.” One is excommunicated and afterwards absolved; both are admonished to amend their ways.[[53]]
There is no reason, however, to suppose that such cases were other than highly exceptional; nor is it from the occasional activities of the ever more discredited ecclesiastical jurisdiction that light on the practical application of the ideas of the age as to social ethics is to be sought. Ecclesiastical discipline is at all times but a misleading clue to the influence of religious opinion, and on the practice of a time when, except for the Court of High Commission, the whole system was in decay, the scanty proceedings of the courts christian throw little light. To judge the degree to which the doctrines expounded by divines were accepted or repudiated by the common sense of the laity, one must turn to the records which show how questions of business ethics were handled by individuals, by municipal bodies and by the Government.
The opinion of the practical man on questions of economic conduct was in the sixteenth century in a condition of even more than its customary confusion. A century before, he had practised extortion and been told that it was wrong; for it was contrary to the law of God. A century later, he was to practise it and be told that he was right; for it was in accordance with the law of nature. In this matter, as in others of even greater moment, the two generations which followed the Reformation were unblessed by these ample certitudes. They walked in an obscurity where the glittering armor of theologians
made
A little glooming light, most like a shade.
In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had arisen, but had not yet wholly submerged those which preceded them, every shade of opinion, from that of the pious burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled with a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitudinarianism of the cosmopolitan financier, to whom the confusion of business with morals was a vulgar delusion, was represented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan England.
As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, the sentiment of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely from the doctrines expounded by divines, than it did from the individualism which was beginning to carry all before it among the leaders of the world of business. Against the rising financial interests of the day were arrayed the stolid conservatism of the peasantry and the humbler bourgeoisie, whose conception of social expediency was the defence of customary relations against innovation, and who regarded the growth of this new power with something of the same jealous hostility as they opposed to the economic radicalism of the enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was an instinctive movement of self-protection. Free play for the capitalist seemed to menace the independence of the small producer, who tilled the nation’s fields and wove its cloth. The path down which the financier beguiles his victims may seem at first to be strewn with roses; but at the end of it lies—incredible nightmare—a régime of universal capitalism, in which peasant and small master will have been merged in a propertyless proletariat, and “the riches of the city of London, and in effect of all this realm, shall be at that time in the hands of a few men having unmerciful hearts.”[[54]]
Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted arable to pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resentment, unless supported by the Government, was powerless. Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even, on occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a monopoly of the right to make loans, as a protection to the inhabitants against extreme “usurers and extortioners.” The commonest charity of the age, which was the establishment of a fund to make advances without interest to tradesmen, was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was to enable the young artisan or shopkeeper, the favorite victim of the money-lender, to acquire the indispensable “stock,” without which he could not set up in business.[[55]]
The issues which confronted the Government were naturally more complicated, and its attitude was more ambiguous. The pressure of commercial interests growing in wealth and influence, its own clamorous financial necessities, the mere logic of economic development, made it out of the question for it to contemplate, even if it had been disposed to do so, the rigorous economic discipline desired by the divines. Tradition, a natural conservatism, the apprehension of public disorder caused by enclosures or by distress among the industrial population, a belief in its own mission as the guardian of “good order” in trade, not unmingled with a hope that the control of economic affairs might be made to yield agreeable financial pickings, gave it a natural bias to a policy which aimed at drawing all the threads of economic life into the hands of a paternal monarchy.