Review English 1640 by Christopher Hill
Source: The Labour
Monthly, Volume 22, Number 10, December 1940, pp.768-769 (949 words)
Transcription: Ted Crawford
HTML Markup: Mark Harris
Public Domain: Marxists Internet Archive (2010). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
The English Revolution 1640. Three Essays, edited by Christopher Hill. (Lawrence & Wishart. 2s. 6d.)
In a period when autocratic government robs the people of the rights and liberties so dearly fought for during the last century, it is important to remember similar phases in our history and to learn from them. Three hundred years ago the people began a fight against brutal oppression, a fight which led to civil war, a fight which has not yet ended.
The bourgeois world to-day is silent about these events. No book is published to commemorate them. The bourgeois world dare not remember its own young and vigorous past; it dare not transmit its ex¬periences to the present generation. It is left to the Labour movement and to its most active publishers to remind us of our past fights for freedom.
The first of these three essays is written by the editor. Mr. Hill has a very sound knowledge of many problems of seventeenth century England, and has done much original research on agricultural questions of that period. It is not astonishing, therefore, to find not only useful material but many valuable comments and interesting sidelights in his study. But one must disagree, I think, with his interpretation of the course of political events and of economic conditions and movements which lead up to the Civil War. He speaks of “the new economic facts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries [which] made the feudal economic and social system unworkable” (pp.13-14), of “the development of the capitalist mode of production within the structure of feudalism” (p.22), and he says that before the Civil War “the structure of society was still essentially feudal; so were its laws and its political institutions” (p.25). This characterisation is not new but it contradicts that which Marx and Engels and other students of English history have given.
Marx, for example, says quite clearly that he regards British society not only immediately before the Civil War but already in the sixteenth century as definitely bourgeois, that is, capitalist. He writes to Engels in 1858: “We cannot deny that bourgeois society has been for a second time living through its sixteenth century, a sixteenth century which I hope will sound its death-knell as surely as the first brought it into life”. While capitalism developed within the framework of dying feudalism from the fourteenth century it became the dominant element in the sixteenth and gave society as a whole a capitalist bourgeois character. And indeed, whether we study agriculture or manufacture or commerce, whether we look at the political leaders of sixteenth century England (the Walsinghams and Cecils and Cromwells) or whether we read the new literature, we find the capitalist spirit victorious. Marx is right: the sixteenth-century society is a bourgeois society. Perhaps Mr. Hill has brought to light new material which was not available to Marx and Engels?
But one does not find it in his study; on the contrary, one notices; without surprise, that he has considerable difficulties in interpreting events in the light of his fundamental characterisation of sixteenth and pre-Civil War seventeenth-century society as feudal.
Thus, he says that during the Tudor period it was “the function of the monarchy to see that the inevitable acceptance of bourgeois demands did the smallest possible harm to the ruling class” (p.38). Since when are the demands of an oppressed class - as a bourgeois capitalist class under feudalism must be - to be inevitably accepted? The French bourgeoisie before 1789 could tell another story. Of course, they would not have to be accepted and the ruling house of the ruling class would have opposed them to the last or it would have been disposed of by the ruling class—if English society had been feudal under the Tudors. But Marx rightly points out that it was not feudal, it was bourgeois, and, therefore, the demands of the capitalists are executed and encouraged by the monarchs, who also are capitalists.
Elizabeth was not a feudal monarch bowing to the demands of an oppressed capitalist class. She was the most prominent capitalist in capitalist bourgeois society - comparable to Leopold of Belgium, one of the greatest colonial investors in the nineteenth century. Engels speaks of the Tudor “ex-feudal landowners” as “the first bourgeois of the Kingdom.” (Socialism, Utopian and Scientific: introduction.)
In order to claim sixteenth-century society as feudal, Mr. Hill, whenever he finds an opportunity, under-rates the capitalist elements and exaggerates the importance of feudal remnants. One of the foundations of capitalism, for instance, is the exploitation of “free” labour, of the proletariat. Mr. Hill says: in 1640 “there were few proletarians (except in London)” (p.36). It is true, the manufacturing proletariat was not very large, but Mr. Hill forgets that there existed a large agricultural proletariat - Marx speaks of “great numbers of masterless proletarians” as victims of the capitalist methods of agricultural production, and if there were many workless proletarians one cannot say that the whole class of proletarians were “few in number”.
True, there still existed feudal strongholds in the country, and under Charles I there was a counter-revolutionary movement. But that does not make sixteenth-century or pre-Civil War seventeenth-century England feudal. The Civil War of 1642 began as a war against the counter-revolution, was a necessary bloody suppression of feudalism joined by certain treacherous bourgeois groups (e.g. some monopolists) in order to keep the bourgeoisie in power.
The two essays dealing with problems of ideology are very valuable, though it seems that Miss James in her “Contemporary Materialist Interpretations of Society in the English Revolution” occasionally confuses simple materialism with Marxist dialectical materialism. Edgell Rickword’s Milton is a little gem.