Part 10 (2/2)
In his interview with the Diggers, Lord Fairfax had expressed his intention to leave them to ”the Gentlemen of the County and the Law of the Land.” The former soon put the latter in motion, and on July 11th, 1649, the day before Cromwell set out with much pomp and ceremony for his notorious expedition to Ireland, Winstanley, under circ.u.mstances that will presently be revealed, found himself compelled to address an eloquent appeal for protection to the House of Commons, long extracts from which we feel impelled to place before our readers. It appeared in pamphlet form with the following t.i.tle-page:
”AN APPEAL TO THE HOUSE OF COMMONS:[105:1]
Desiring their answer whether the Common People shall have the quiet enjoyment of the Commons and Waste Land; or whether they shall be under the will of Lords of Manors still. Occasioned by an Arrest made by Thomas Lord Wenman, Ralph Verney Knight, and Richard Winwood Esq. upon the Author hereof, for a Trespa.s.s in Digging upon the Common Land at Georges Hill in Surrey.
BY GERRARD WINSTANLEY, JOHN BARKER AND THOMAS STAR.
In the name of all the poor oppressed in the Land of England.
Unrighteous oppression kindles a flame, but love, righteousness and tenderness of heart quenches it again.”
With more than his usual directness, Winstanley at once states the subject of his appeal in the following manner:
”SIRS,--The cause of this our presentment before you is, an Appeal to you desiring you to demonstrate to us, and the whole Land, the equity or non-equity of our cause. And that you would either cast us by just reason under the feet of those we call Task Masters, or Lords of Manors, or else to deliver us out of their tyrannical hands: In whose hands by way of Arrest we are for the present, for a Trespa.s.s to them, as they say, in digging upon the Common Land.
The settling whereof according to Equity and Reason will quiet the minds of the oppressed people; it will be a keeping of our National Covenant; it will be a peace to yourselves, and make England the most flouris.h.i.+ng and strongest Land in the world, and the first of Nations that shall begin to give up their Crown and Scepter, their dominion and government, into the hands of Jesus Christ.[106:1]
”The cause is this, we amongst others of the common people, that have ever been friends to the Parliament, as we are a.s.sured our enemies will witness to it, have ploughed and digged upon Georges Hill in Surrey, to sow corn for the succour of man, offering no offence to any, but do carry ourselves in love and peace towards all, having no intent to meddle with any man's enclosures or property till it be freely given to us by themselves, but only to improve the Commons and waste lands to our best advantage, for the relief of ourselves and others, being moved thereunto by the reason hereafter following, not expecting any to be much offended, in regard the cause is so just and upright.
”Yet notwithstanding, there be three men (called by the people Lords of Manors), viz., Thomas Lord Wenman, Ralph Verney Knight, and Richard Winwood Esq., have arrested us for a trespa.s.s in digging upon the Commons, and upon the arrest we made our appearance in Kingstone Court, where we understood we were arrested for meddling with other men's rights; and, secondly, they were encouraged to arrest us upon your Act of Parliament (as they tell us) to maintain the old laws. We desired to plead our own cause, the Court denied us, and to fee a lawyer we cannot, for divers reasons, as we may show hereafter.
”Now, Sirs, our case is this, for we appeal to you, for you are the only men that we are to deal withal in this business: Whether the common people, after all their taxes, free-quarter and loss of blood to recover England from under the Norman yoke, shall have the freedom to improve the Commons and Waste Lands free to themselves, as freely their own as the Enclosures are the propriety of the elder brothers? Or whether the Lords of Manors shall have them, according to their old custom, from the King's will and grant, and so remain Task Masters still over us, which was the people's slavery under conquest?
”We have made our appeal to you to settle this matter in the Equity and Reason of it, and to pa.s.s 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 a.s.sist 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 G.o.d 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 ma.s.ses 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 ent.i.tled _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 ma.s.ses, 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 ma.s.s 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 pa.s.sed a Statute under which the estates of such of the free-holders as had no doc.u.mentary evidence by which to support their t.i.tles, 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 s.h.i.+fting 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 pa.s.sed a Corn Law artificially to increase their rents, at the cost and to the detriment, often to the starvation, of the ma.s.ses 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[100:1] Thoma.s.son's Tracts. British Museum, Press Mark, E. 560 (1).
Reprinted in the _Harleian Miscellany_, vol. ii. p. 485.
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