history – The Sense of Fairness blog

Reading an old book can sometimes feel like an archaeological dig – you find fragmented artefacts of how people used to think and have to try to piece together an understanding of their world, and their world view. Very often it serves to illuminate our own.

That’s definitely my sense while reading a book called Equality by an old socialist and economic historian, RH (Richard Henry) Tawney. My edition dates from 1964 but the original book was published in 1931, based on lectures given in 1929. This version enjoys a 1964 introduction by founding father of social policy Richard Titmuss, and no fewer than two prefaces by Tawney himself, one from the 1951 revised edition and one from the ‘substantially revised’ 1938 edition. Reading through these in this order is like uncovering historic layers of English inequality, and repeated aspirations for greater equality. What’s more, the first chapter of the book, The Religion of Inequality, starts by referring to a lecture by Matthew Arnold from I think 1878, to which it attributes the coining of that phrase.

I find it impossible to read these archaeological artefacts and not reflect on our own age. This blogpost aims simply to capture a few sentiments from each of these layers of history. Readers will no doubt be conscious of the great ruptures and attempts towards greater equality that provided the context for the writing of each of these layers of commentary, from the heights of the Cold War, the challenges of the Second World War and the creation of the welfare state that followed it, the Great Depression and the rise of fascism – and even, back around the 1870s, the first steps to broad enfranchisement (and while the right to vote did not then extend to women, that decade did see them permitted for the first time to retain their own property rather than simply surrender it on marriage).

Titmuss in his 1964 introduction:

“We…delude ourselves if we think we can equalize the social distribution of life chances by expanding educational opportunities while millions of children live in slums without baths, decent lavatories, leisure facilities, room to explore and the space to dream. Nor do we achieve with any permanency a fairer distribution of rewards and a society less sharply divided by class and status by simply narrowing the differences in cash earnings among men during certain limited periods of their lives.”

“Long years of economic depression, a civilians’ war, rationing and ‘fair shares for all’, so-called ‘penal rates’ of taxation and estate duty, and ‘The Welfare State’ have made little impression on the holdings of great fortunes…Wealth still bestows power, more power than income, though it is probably exercised differently and with more respect for public opinion than in the nineteenth century.”

“These consequences of technology in an age of abundance are more likely to increase than to decrease differentials in income and wealth if no major corrective policies are set to work…Without a major shift in values, an impoverishment in social living for some groups can only result from this new wave of industrialism.”

Tawney in his 1951 preface:

“Like earlier wars of religion, the credal conflicts of our day will find varying issues in different regions; but, if Europe survives, societies convinced that liberty and justice are equally indispensable to civilization will survive as part of her. The experience of a people which regards these great abstractions, not as antagonists, but as allies, and which has endeavoured, during six not too easy years, to serve the cause of both, is not barren of lessons which may profitably be pondered.”

And he quotes The Times from 1 July 1940:

“If we speak of democracy, we do not mean the democracy which maintains the right to vote, but forgets the right to live and work. If we speak of freedom, we do not mean a rugged individualism which excludes social organization and economic planning. If we speak of equality, we do not mean a political equality nullified by social and economic privilege. If we speak of economic reconstruction, we think less of maximum production…than of equitable distribution.”

Tawney in his 1938 preface:

“It is still sometimes suggested that what Professor Pigou, in his latest work, calls ‘the glaring inequalities of fortune and opportunity which deface our present civilization’ are beneficial, irremediable, or both together. Innocent laymen are disposed to believe that these monstrosities, though morally repulsive, are economically advantageous, and that, even were they not, the practical difficulties of abolishing them are too great to be overcome. Both opinions, it may be said with some confidence, are mere superstitions.”

“Institutions which enable a tiny class, amounting to less than two per cent of the population of Great Britain, to take year by year nearly one quarter of the nation’s annual output of wealth…are an economic liability of alarming dimensions. They involve…a perpetual misdirection of limited resources to the production or upkeep of costly futilities, when what the nation requires for its welfare is more and better food, more and better houses, more and better schools.”

“Today, when three-quarters or more of the nation leave less than £100 at death, and nearly two-thirds of the aggregate wealth is owned by about one per cent of it, inheritance is on the way to become little more than a device by which a small minority of rich men bequeath to their heirs a right to free quarters at the expense of their fellow-countrymen. The limitations imposed on that right during the past half-century were greeted, when first introduced, with the usual cries of alarm; and the alarm, as is not less usual, has been proved by experience to be mere hysteria. It is perfectly practicable, by extending those limitations and accelerating their application, to reduce the influence of inheritance – at present a strong poison – to negligible dimensions.”

“To make [democracy] a type of society requires an advance along two lines. It involves, in the first place, the resolute elimination of all forms of special privilege, which favour some groups and depress others, whether their source be differences of environment, of education, or of pecuniary income. It involves, in the second place, the conversion of economic power, now often an irresponsible tyrant, into the servant of society, working within clearly defined limits, and accountable for its action to a public authority.”

Tawney reports that Matthew Arnold said, in c1878:

“Arnold observed that in England inequality is almost a religion. He remarked on the incompatibility of that attitude with the spirit of humanity, and sense of the dignity of man as man, which are the marks of a truly civilized society. ‘On the one side, in fact, inequality harms by pampering; on the other by vulgarizing and depressing. A system founded on it is against nature, and, in the long run, breaks down.’”

As LP Hartley says in another old book, one that deliberately plays with memory and history, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” But often ‘they’ worried about the same challenges we do, and sought similar solutions.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

RH Tawney, Equality, 1964, Unwin

Arthur Pigou, Socialism versus Capitalism, 1937

LP Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

A historical meander through the countryside for the holidays

The quintessential vision of England is of a village set in rolling countryside. Depending on the topography, this may be hills cropped by sheep, or less frequently other farm animals, or flatter lands growing cereal. But whatever the countryside, the village is consistently there (whether or not, like former prime minister John Major, we include in our image cricket and warm beer and spinsters cycling across the village green). We imagine these villages as images of fairness and justice, representing the ordinary people of England, strong, independent and free.

But those villages have not always been there. And they do not always represent fairness, independence or freedom (even if we can set aside modern concerns about incomers pricing out locals). Any settlement and community is the creation of a set of decisions. Some of those decisions were by ordinary folk choosing to come together for their own reasons. But many times what are now viewed as symbols of peace and tranquillity were created by force at the whim of the local landlord, a feudal founding created to control the population and ensure that it was productive – to the benefit of the seigneur.

The bucolic beauty that we tend to take for granted was often an emblem of power and an assertion of unfairness. The same villages have also over centuries witnessed further episodes of the ebb and flow of power, and of fairness. We tend to imagine these places unchanged forever. They are not.

It used to be thought that there was a ‘village moment’ in England, when villages suddenly appeared in the landscape. My use of the term ‘seigneur’ was deliberate, for this ‘moment’ was for decades ascribed to the Norman invasion of 1066 and the following years, when newly created feudal lords established villages as power bases to control the population and its work effort. It is not just that the Domesday Book (which dates to 1086) provides us with the first consistent written record of the existence of English villages (though often it refers to individual farmsteads or small hamlets that later developed, or were developed, into villages).

This belief in a particular moment of village creation was reinforced by the archaeological digs of abandoned (or shrunken) mediaeval settlements, which “showed very little evidence for occupation earlier than the eleventh or twelfth century” as Carenza Lewis and colleagues explain in their key work Village, Hamlet and Field. But the belief eroded as further investigations, not least of settlements that continue to exist, tended to extend the moment to a rather broader period: they “seemed to push forward the origin of the large nucleated village to the period between about 850 and 1200”. It’s tempting to suggest that the disproportionate representation of the Norman-created villages among those that were subsequently abandoned is a sign that their artificial creation meant they were less sustainable than those created organically by a population choosing to move closer together, but I suspect that’s a little pat.

While landscape historians have pushed back the creation of many villages, it is undoubtedly true that many others were created soon after the Norman invasion, by those new feudal landlords: “lordly authority was clearly a key motor in the planning of settlements,” explains Oliver Creighton in his Designs Upon the Land. He further says: “The well attested phenomenon of seigneurial village planning, which in many cases extended to embrace field systems, can be taken as further evidence for the expression of lordly authority.”

These Saxon and mediaeval creations were of course not the first villages, though they were the first of a scale that we would recognise, and the first to include a village church (typically seen as the signifier of the distinction between village and hamlet). There were Neolithic villages – examples of these can still be seen at Scara Brae in Orkney, Carn Euny in Cornwall and Ty Mawr on Anglesey (preservation is better in remote places). But life generally remained scattered until towards the end of the Anglo-Saxon period.

These were not the first villages, but these were the first that we might recognise today. And, whatever the timing of their creation, all were under tight command and control arrangement, “a tightly managed landscape” says Trevor Rowley in the classic Villages in the Landscape. “The manorial court was responsible for the regulation of internal field boundaries, the precise amount of grazing and rights of gathering on the common waste, and it also had responsibility for the trackways and streams. The manor courts collectively administered rules of husbandry, watched over local customs of tenure and inheritance and enforced local peace and order. By 1300 we would have looked on a landscape which was intensively used at a subsistence level.” This was not a fair landscape: most lived the hardest of subsistence existences while a small handful prospered.

As Rowley summarises: “the permanent nucleated village so familiar to us today was a factor not of ethnic or cultural change, but of economic and social forces. It was brought about by a complex combination of increasing population and increasing authoritarian control through the manorial system”.

And it wasn’t only the villages, but the landscape more broadly. Creighton takes a particular interest in parkland, land taken into private ownership as a venue for hunting. He points out that taking land out of agricultural production and creating parks was not an economic decision, but a social one driven by concerns of status. “The right to empark was a jealously guarded privilege and badge of lordly authority,” he writes. “The huge outlay involved in the creation of parks and the challenges of maintaining them, combined with the minimal financial returns that accrued, shows that they were not geared to maximise profit by cold, hard businesslike patrons.”

Ridge and furrow – a relic of mediaeval communal shared fields – within the private walled grounds of the National Trust’s Canons Ashby, Northamptonshire. An example of the historic privatisation of shared land

This contrasts of course with the much later enclosure movement when the wealthy took land out of common usage by the general population and asserted their direct ownership of it (often with the formal endorsement of acts of parliament – the law being used to enforce the demands of the powerful). Enclosure coincided with the agricultural revolution, making the productivity of the seized lands more than recompense the cost of the creation of the hedges, walls and fencing – and of the policing of the protests from the dispossessed population. Susanna Wade Martins in Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes reports that after enclosure, “Productivity could sometimes be doubled and rents went up by an equivalent amount.” That wasn’t the case with mediaeval seizures.

Parks in the mediaeval era were just as contested as the enclosed lands, though. As Creighton points out, “Many parks were recorded for the first time not when they were licenced or created, but when they were first broken into.” He suggests that poaching may have been just an assertion of continuing rights to seek food in emparked land.

Alongside this privatisation of land, from 1250, the elite turned more aloof, power and wealth enabling them to distance themselves from ordinary folk. Increasingly, the wealthy kept themselves apart, both in the siting of their own property and in the design of their buildings also. Creighton says: “an increasingly aloof aristocracy … was progressively increasing the social distance between the household and the world beyond the walls… This is part of a pan-European phenomenon evident at key lordship sites in France, Germany and Scandinavia and, in turn, part and parcel of a broader phenomenon of the increased privatisation of space, as manifested particularly clearly in the changing function of the hall and modes of domestic planning that enabled individuals to spend more time in individual rooms.” This period seems to coincide with a trend towards moated sites for elite dwellings – typically a symbolic separation rather than offering any degree of protection. This trend towards status symbols and separation was reflected in food also, for example it is at this period when the eating of more exotic birds becomes an activity for the elite, and the poor were excluded from certain foods.

This move is not to be taken lightly. In his The Archaeology of Power, John Steane discusses the ceremonial role of the lordship’s property, in particular the community role fulfilled by his hall, “the architectural expression of the household”. He quotes from William Langland, the 14th century supposed author of Piers Plowman, who criticises those lords whose halls have become a “sorry, deserted place” because “the rich nowadays have a habit of eating by themselves in private parlors”. The implications of the harm caused to community and society as a whole by this withdrawal are significant.

This was an age of remarkable unfairness. The majority toiled, a few did well – and increasingly turned their backs on the toilers, living very separate lives. It took a devastating event, or series of events, to reawaken fairness in our country. Those events were the repeated scourges of the Black Death (which first swept across Europe in the years either side of 1350), devastating the population and bringing enormous changes in its diseased wake.

I wrote in my last post about the impact of the Second World War in sweeping away some of our nation’s then ossified unfairness and injustice. And I noted that we must hope that it doesn’t take such an event to sweep aside the unfairness that has built up again in our society. The Black Death was a still more lethal and traumatic event that led to an even more remarkable reversal of inequalities. According to James Belich’s analysis in his remarkable and epic history of the consequences of the plague era, The World the Plague Made, around half of Europe’s population died from the initial outbreak of the plague (he spends a whole chapter justifying this conclusion, which is greater than the usually quoted one-third, a death toll that would have been remarkable enough).

As Belich explains, this halving of the population dramatically increased the value put on labour – meaning that the poorest suddenly began to be paid more. The poorest may have doubled their available spending capacity (even the smallest increment in pay for someone operating at subsistence levels will enable this), as well as giving them more leisure time; others fared better in absolute terms. The decrease in the availability of labour, and the increase in its cost, led to a productivity revolution – and with the same capital goods now shared between a halved population there was significant scope for such a productivity shift. This, together with increases in money available across the economy, led to a boom in demand for what had previously been luxuries available only to the few. Trade boomed, deploying the same shipping capacity for the benefit of the halved population. Many were freed from subsistence farming and agricultural patterns shifted to favour more specialisation.

Belich argues that it was the plague that led to Europe’s imperial dominance of the globe over subsequent centuries. One vehicle for this, he suggests, is that the fairness of the post-plague era lingered long enough in folk memories that it made ordinary people willing to risk everything to travel to far off lands in search of a better life, a life more like the less unequal era post-plague.

Those with Scottish and Irish heritage will no doubt baulk at this, pointing to the enforced movements caused by those great historic injustices the Clearances and the Great Hunger (the capital letters just a nod to their cultural significance) – and others will point to other causes in other lands. There’s truth that many travelled the world (and do so now as well as then) because their homeland no longer offered them a home, but both events came later than Belich intends. He is thinking about the start of the European imperial era, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the journey itself was extremely hazardous, with around 30% dying even before they reached their destination – let alone the challenges of the precarious imperial outposts that were created. Those of course are the odds of those who travelled freely as free people, not of those who were enslaved, nor those of the indigenous peoples whose lands were taken from them.

European people travelled in spite of these odds, Belich believes, because they remembered the freedom and fairness that followed the horrors of the Black Death. A small hope for fairness will inspire many to action.

As we walk the countryside, we should recognise how it offers insights into past unfairness, and not the simple bucolic beauty that is all we sometimes see.

I am happy to confirm as ever that the Sense of Fairness blog is a purely personal endeavour.

Village, Hamlet and Field: Changing Mediaeval Settlements in Central England, Carenza Lewis, Patrick Mitchell-Fox, Christopher Dyer, Windgather Press, 2001

Designs Upon the Land: Elite Landscapes of the Middle Ages, Oliver Creighton, Boydell Press, 2009

Villages in the Landscape, Trevor Rowley, Dent, 1978

Farmers, Landlords and Landscapes: Rural Britain 1720-1870, Susanna Wade Martins, Windgather Press, 2001

The Archaeology of Power, John Steane, Tempus Publishing, 2004

The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe, James Belich, Princeton University Press, 2022

Tag: history

Plague and planning: a long history of English unfairness