Socio-economic revolution in
. ALAN MACFARLANE
[From : Revolution in History,
eds. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich,
p. 145
In the early
nineteenth century de Tocqueville contemplated the differences between
Our hypothetical oriental visitor, male or female, would have found a
peculiar legal system, based on unwritten codes and precedents, known as the
Common Law, combined with a separate and equally strange system known as
Equity. This legal system had many unique features; for instance the use of
juries, the absence of judicial torture, the concept
of equality before the law. The law enshrined an obsession with property, which
was conceived of as virtually private, rather than communal. These strange
procedures and concepts of the law were linked to political and constitutional
peculiarities. The most important of these was the idea of the sovereignty of
the people and the supremacy of law. The Crown was under the law and answerable
to the people in parliament; this was not an absolutist state but a limited
monarchy.
146 . ALAN ` MACFARLANE
representative government and a
constitution, even if only a small part of the people were yet enfranchised.
Political power was widely dispersed and seemed to be diffused through much of
the society. There was only a small standing army, no armed police force, no
huge centralized bureaucracy or court. This was far from the despotism that
still existed over much of continental
There were linked social peculiarities. Although very steeply ranked,
with infinite gradations of status and occupation, there were no exclusive
castes or orders. The fourfold orders of priests,
warriors and rulers, townsmen and peasants, were blurred by numerous more
important divisions. There were no legally separate orders of nobility or
slaves, little differentiation between townsmen and country dwellers, no
endogamous enclosures within certain ranks. There was an unusually large and
prosperous `middling' band, lying between the very rich and the very poor.
There was easy and frequent social mobility. Furthermore there was a high rate
of geographical mobility. People were constantly on the move, to
There were many striking features in the realm of
production and economic relations. Already there was a rapidly developing use
of non-human energy through steam and machinery; associated with it there was a
concentration of people into new and unusually compact groupings, urbanism and
factory organization. Throughout town and country there was a pervasive
emphasis on monetary values, on trade, profit, accumulation. The acquisitive
ethic was dominant, the division of labour was far advanced and
There were associated features in the demographic and familial structures
which would have been equally surprising to a visitor from the orient. Above
all, kinship seemed very weak; people were early independent of parental power
and most relied mainly on their own efforts. Even that crucial function of
kinship, in dealing with accident and old age, was largely eroded for there was
a highly developed and non-kinship based Poor Law. The weakness of kinship
showed itself in the household structure; this was nuclear, on the whole, with
few joint or extended
Socio-economic revolution in
families.
The marriage system also reflected the unimportance of wider kinship. Marriages
were based for the most part on personal initiative rather than parental
arrangement, on a mixture of psychological and economic considerations of an
unusual kind. Marriages occurred at a relatively late age and it was not seen
to be absolutely necessary to marry. Only one partner at a time was allowed,
divorce was almost impossible, yet remarriage after death of one partner was
extensive.
An oriental visitor would probably have been saddened at the mixture of
wealth and squalor, comradeship and loneliness, tolerance and aggressiveness of
the civilization. Yet he would have been impressed by the demographic and
economic achievement. The population was rising rapidly yet the usual positive
checks of famine, war and disease were not operating. Somehow the country had
escaped from the shadow of demographic crises. Wealth was conspicuously
increasing, even if it was unfairly distributed, and an affluence and material
ascendancy was emerging unknown elsewhere in the world. Here was a land where
the fortunate and the energetic, at least, could found dynasties and where
certain traditional forms of generalised `misery' were being eradicated.
Other differences would have struck such a visitor; in religion and
ritual, in art and aesthetics, in concepts of time and space, in attitudes to
the natural world. Yet enough has been sketched in to make the point that for
such a visitor, and for us as historians, there is something extraordinary
which needs explanation. Much of what had emerged by the first half of the
nineteenth century in
For simplicity's sake we may distinguish two ways of answering this
question. The first is the `revolutionary' theory of history. `Revolution', of
course, is a misuse of the word, for it literally means a state where things
come back full-circle, as in the `revolution' of a wheel. Thus Ibn Khaldun's
cyclical view, or Edmund Leach's pendulum theories of change in Highland Burma
are true `revolutionary' theories.2 Yet, as normally used by
historians when they talk of the `French Revolution', the `Industrial
Revolution', and so on, they mean that A has moved to B, which never existed
before. There are two constituents to the concept: newness and suddenness.
Although it would be possible to talk of `revolutions' that last for thousands
of years, as the `neolithic revolution', usually the word and
148 ALAN MACFARLANE
,
concept is used by modern
historians to describe changes which occur over a year, decades and sometimes
up to a century or so. The speed of the `revolutions' will vary with which of
Braudel's three levels of time we are dealing with. `Geographical time' moves
very slowly, over millennia; social time moves in a century or less; individual
time, including political time, often moves in a year or less.3 In
this essay we are dealing mainly with the `social' level. The element of
newness, of rejection of the past, often leads to a violence
in that process; it is not a rebirth, a gentle renaissance, or even a
rebellion, which ultimately changes only the personnel. The rules of the game
are changed, and usually many players object; hence bloody struggle. A further,
added, feature of true revolutions is that they tend to be multistranded. That
is to say, a change in one part, whether we ascribe it to the superstructure or
infrastructure, will be connected to changes in other parts. For instance, a
revolutionary change in demographic structures is likely to be linked to
equally revolutionary changes in familial, economic, legal and other
structures, since all are connected.
Given this preliminary specification of revolutionary
models of change, we may ask how well they worked for the most interesting of
all cases, that peculiar birth of the `modern' world on a small island off
familistic
dimensions, forward another century, into the eighteenth century, when there was invented and
propagated `affective individualism'. This was `perhaps the most important
change in mentalite to have occurred in the Early Modern period, indeed
possibly in the last thousand years of Western history', and it was particularly
linked to the rise of a particular family system from the middle of the
seventeenth century, which predominated in the eighteenth.6 The fact
that there is so much uncertainty as to when the major revolution occurred,
combined
Socio-economic revolution in
with a strong view that
whatever did occur before the nineteenth century was a failed revolution,7
makes us a little uneasy. Surely it should not be difficult to pin down the
birth of the modern world in such a well documented society?
Our uneasiness with this interpretation increases when we look briefly
at the strands elaborated above in a little more detail. Shortage of space will
force me to set boundary dates, indulge in gross simplification, and omit the
supporting evidence for the assertions. Elsewhere I have tried to discuss many
of the topics, briefly surveyed here, in more detail. The central question is
at what point, roughly, can we be certain that the features we have elaborated
did not exist in the English past? Having located this `other' world, we will
be in a position to date and perhaps to search for plausible reasons for the
revolutionary transformation.
We may start with law and government. The Common Law is known to have
reached a mature stage of development by the end of the thirteenth century at
the latest.9 Of course the law changed, but its basic structure and
principles were laid out by that time. Thus many of the peculiarities of the
law, particularly in the process and in the concepts of property, were present
by the thirteenth century. Likewise, the central political feature, namely that
The ancient legal and political foundations were early associated with
social peculiarities. Late medieval society of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries had a very ranked yet relatively open social
structure. There was no legally privileged nobility, a great contrast with
150 ALAN
MACFARLANE
half the population
working for wages rather than as family or serf labour by the fourteenth
century.
Obviously there were huge technological differences between the
thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though wind and water power were widely
used, steam power and machinery were yet to come, and to this extent
The basic features of the kinship system seem to have been early laid
down. The kinship terminology was in the twelfth century as it was to be in the
nineteenth, a bilateral `Eskimo' system that isolated out the nuclear family.
The concepts of descent were already formed into the mould that has persisted
to the present. Descent was traced through both males
and females, a cognatic system that we have today. The method of computing
kinship was the canon-law method, based, on Germanic custom. The inheritance
laws were fixed in their major principles by the thirteenth century. Male
primogeniture was already a distinguishing feature, with rights reserved for
widows. The central principle was that inheritance was not automatic, that `no
man is the heir to a living man'. There was therefore no natural, automatic,
family property, no `restrait lignager'; this was firmly outlined by
Bracton in the early thirteenth century. Likewise the idea that property always
descended and never ascended, that parents were never the automatic heirs of
their own children was accepted, there was vertical rather than lateral
inheritance.
Socio-economic
revolution in
The weakness of kinship in this egocentric, network-based kinship system
is everywhere apparent from at least the thirteenth century. In economics,
ownership, production and consumption were not based on kinship groupings.
Religion did not reinforce kinship through ritual or ancestor beliefs.
Political life below the level of the aristocracy was run on non-kinship lines
with few indications of proper blood-feud, vendetta, mafia
or clan warfare. The care of the sick, the poor, the old, had already been largely
taken over by non-kinship institutions, by the parish, manor, guild and
religious fraternities. The weakness of kinship showed itself in the household
organization. There is no sign of a fundamentally different household
structure, with a wide scale presence of complex households, as far back as the
documents will take us, which is the fourteenth century.
All this fits with an early developed and peculiar marriage system. We
shall outline this system in a little more detail. Marriage is the crucial link
between economics and biology, between the individual and society. As such, it
is not only a good reflection of deeper features of the economy and society,
but also the crucial determinant of demographic patterns. A `revolution' in the
socio-economic systems, for instance from a 'precapitalist' to `capitalist'
form in the sixteenth century to eighteenth century could hardly have occurred
without a concurrent revolution in the marital system, which in turn would have
altered the demographic regime. While it is not possible in a short essay like
this to analyse most of the supposed revolutionary changes in any detail, it is
worth looking more carefully at one institution. Because of its vital mediating
position between society and economy, marriage is ideal for such an
examination. We may look at the constituents of what I shall term the
`Malthusian marriage pattern'. It is so-named because it is the one that
Malthus advocated in the early nineteenth century.
If we consider the major rules which constrained marriage in
I52 ALAN MACFARLANE .
the marriage system. It is also demonstrably
ancient. Again the Germanic peoples who invaded
The rules concerning whom one should and should not marry were probably
also very early established. Jack Goody has shown that the widened rules of
forbidden marriage were established in Anglo-Saxon England." Of the
positive, prescriptive, rules about which kin one must or should marry, there
is little sign. There is thus no sign of a transformation of what Levi-Strauss
has termed `elementary structures' of kinship into the `complex structures'
which existed in the nineteenth century.12 Certainly, such
elementary structures, if they had ever existed, were gone by the thirteenth
century. To put it in another way, marriage in
The customs concerning the all-important question of
marriage payments and the economic negotiations at marriage are particularly
well documented.
These formal rules and customs are consistent with the early establishment
of a particular view of the purposes and nature of marriage. This was based on
four central premises. The first was that marriage was ultimately of concern to
the couple themselves, that it was founded on the
Socio-economic revolution in
mutual consent of bride and
groom, and not on the arrangement of others. This was a widespread view in the
early nineteenth century, but its curiosity is easily seen when we compare it
to the majority of peasant societies which have arranged marriage. There,
marriage is seen as too important a matter to be left to the personal whim of
the partners. This central feature is of very ancient standing. It had been
formally accepted into the Catholic view of marriage by the twelfth century and
was probably based on much earlier custom. :
A second feature of the attitude to marriage was equally important,
namely that to marry, or not to marry, involved a choice. Hajnal has rightly
seen this as the other major feature of the unique European marriage pattern,
indicated by the very large proportion of females, rising to one in six on
occasions, who never marry. By the eighteenth century in
A third premise was that marriage was above all to be entered into for
the mutual benefits to be achieved from the husband-wife relationship, rather
than as a means to produce heirs. Marriage in the nineteenth century was
clearly viewed as a partnership of mind and body. The husband-wife bond
superseded all others; the contractual and selected relationship which is
established curiously overrode all the relations of blood, with siblings, with
parents, with children. This is decidedly unusual cross-comparatively, and
again it is a view of marriage that is very old in
154 ALAN MACFARLANE
admonishing believers that in Paradise
Adam had realized that the creation of Eve meant that `therefore shall a man
leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall
both be one flesh'. (Genesis 2: 24). This
view fitted well with the old uxoriousness of the Germanic peoples whom Tacitus
described in the first century sharing their lives and cleaving closely to each
other. Whatever the origins, certainly the companionate view of marriage seems
to have been widely accepted by the fourteenth century. As soon as relevant
documents begin
, marriage seems to have been concerned more with the mutual
relationship than with procreation. The absence of stress on producing children
is consistent with the late age and non-universal nature of marriage and with
the absence of any formal adoption procedures.
` Finally
there is the cultural premise that marriages are to be based on the mutual
attraction of `love'. There is considerable discussion about when `love' marriage
originated. Some place the origins in the twelfth
century, some earlier, some later. What appears to be very likely from the
snatches of surviving poetry, the depositions in ecclesiastical courts, from
descriptions in early encyclopedias, is that by the fourteenth century at least
there was a widespread acceptance of `love' as a powerful constituent of
marriage among ordinary people. Certainly, when the evidence crowds in during
the sixteenth century, `love' is widely accepted as a powerful emotion linked
to marriage. There is no strong indication that this association was something
suddenly invented in the fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries. Of course
there were many other motives for marriage, as there were in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. Yet mutual liking, and preferably
`love', were widely viewed as an essential component of marriage. This
distinguishing feature was not something invented as a result of Protestantism
or a growing individualism of the, sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
The marital system was a mediating institution which
gave rise in
Socio-economic revolution in
nental Europe, India, China, Russia and
elsewhere shows up to the eighteenth century and later, the English `crises'
are relatively insignificant in the four hundred years between 1350 and 1750. A
second notable feature of mortality was its relatively low perennial level.
While much higher than today, as compared to many 'pre-transition' populations,
we have here one of the two features of what Wrigley has termed a `low
pressure' demographic regime.15 Infant, child and adult mortality were
not as high as they are
in many 'pre-transition' populations, a feature that is apparent from at least
the fifteenth century.
The fertility rates were also controlled and below their theoretical
maximum. This can be seen in several ways. Firstly, there was a curious absence
of those spurts of population after a period of high mortality which happened
in
This last feature is one aspect of an even more interesting demographic
peculiarity of a very long-lived kind. This was the way in which fertility
somehow adjusted to economics, rather than being inflexibly linked to
biological pressures. It has recently been shown by Wrigley and Schofield that
there was a long-term association between fertility rates and real wages
between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.16 With a curious twenty-year
lag, when real wages rose, so did fertility. The lag allowed a certain economic
growth to occur and the association meant that population adjusted to economic
forces in a beneficial way, producing the labour supply that was needed;
through the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, fertility was severely
controlled. So powerful were
156 ALAN MACFARLANE
: the inhibiting pressures
that in certain parts of England at this period the mean age at first marriage
for women rose as high as thirty years; women had put off childbearing for
about fifteen years after puberty and many did not marry at all. Then, where
there occurred that spurt in productivity and demand
for labour which we term the Industrial Revolution, the fertility rate
responded. The marriage age fell and
It is clearly necessary to add qualifications to this very brief sketch
of some of the central features of English history from the fourteenth to
nineteenth centuries. Some might argue that the dating of many of the traits is
either too late or too early. Yet a very strong case can be made for saying
that most of the central legal, political, economic, social and demographic
premises that were observable in the early nineteenth century were already
formed by the fourteenth century at the latest. If this is true, it is not
surprising that early modern historians have been undecided as to whether the
`revolution' occurred in the sixteenth, seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. A
second obvious qualification is to stress that we are here looking at the
middle-level, `social' changes, not at the deepest-level geographical time, nor
at the ripple of events. Even so, we also need to bear in mind these other
levels, for they are all interconnected. There were numerous political,
economic and religious J `events'
that had a profound influence, positive and negative, on the characteristics we
have isolated. Many of these `events' could have reshaped the whole situation
which we have discussed. Cultural premises are shaped by the ripples, as much
as the other way round. To stress continuity is not the same as believing in
inevitability. The `shape of Cleopatra's nose' school of history is perfectly
compatible with a realization that things did, in a particular case, change
less in their fundamentals than many suppose. To take one instance, the
success of the Spanish Armada, bringing in its wake Roman law, Roman religion
and Roman absolutism, might well have created a genuine revolution which would
have broken all those continuous strands which we have elaborated.
Nevertheless, as it was, the Armada was defeated, Charles I was beheaded, and,
through a curious set of fluxes and chances,
Socio-economic
revolution in
remained a peculiar land which became a revolutionary force in the world not
because it had undergone a revolution, but precisely because it had not. There
is nothing inevitable about this, except in the distorting mirror of hindsight.
We are not forced to return to a revised Whig evolutionism.
Nor need we argue that there was no change. Clearly many things did
change. The oriental visitor stepping back from the early nineteenth century to
the early fourteenth would have found many differences in the physical
landscape, the technology, the arts and crafts, the language, the overseas
dominions, the world of thought and belief. Even those features which we have
looked at were constantly fluctuating, growing more complex or simple, or
withering away. Nevertheless, the most accurate way
to conceive of this history is not through the `revolutionary' metaphors of
sudden and catastrophic breaks which have become so fashionable during the
last fifty years. While such models are no doubt helpful and appropriate for
the history of many other European nations, applied to
Yet historians require ways of conceiving of change and, if we are
persuaded that the revolutionary models are of only very limited use in : English history, how are we to explain that very
unusual world which had emerged by the early nineteenth century? An alternative
approach is provided if we consult those who studied the history of
A second advantage of these writers was that
they still suffered under what we might now consider to be a delusion, namely
that what the oriental visitor found so surprising was in fact not surprising
at all. These English historians, whatever their acquaintance with the works of
158
ALAN
MACFARLANE
comparative law
and anthropology, still really believed that it was the others who were
peculiar. The full impact of comparative anthropology and the unsettling
influence of Marx and Weber had not yet been felt. The capitalist and
individualistic system of
Thus the greatest of these historians,
Stubbs and Maitland, approached English history with a long and broad vision,
with an unrivalled grasp of the technicalities of the documents and the
institutional world that had produced them, and no prejudice against believing
that nineteenth century
The legend told by Stubbs is indeed one of
unbroken continuity. In his Constitutional History o f
Socio-economic revolution in
[sic], the long labour that extends from the
Reformation to the Revolution [i.e., 1688), leaves the organization, the origin
of which we have been tracing, unbroken in its conscious identity, stronger in
the strength which it has preserved, and grown mightier through trial'.19
There is no notion of any `revolution' in Stubbs's work, no hint of a
cataclysmic change from a `medieval' to a `modern' world. This was not because
he was blind to changes when they did occur. He noted that the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries `witnessed a series of changes in national life, mind,
and : character, in the relations of the
classes, and in the balance of political forces, far greater than the English
race had gone through since the Norman Conquest. 120 These changes he listed as the Reformation, the `transformation
of the baronage of early
The continuities were strongest in
the middling and lower ranks in which over 99 per cent of the English
population lived, `As we descend in the scale of social rank the differences
between medieval and modern life rapidly diminish', he wrote.21
Stubbs was aware that the balance of ownership changed, yet there were always
the same major groupings, the gentry, the tradesmen and artisans, the
labourers, and that peculiar middling English estate known as the `yeomanry'.
Two features of the ancient yeoman tradition especially struck Stubbs, their
wealth and their social mobility. He wrote that `the wills and inventories of
the well-to-do freeholder and farmer furnish similar evidence of competency;
and these are an irrefrageable answer to the popular theories of the misery and : discomfort of medieval middle-class
life . . .'. The house of the freeholder
was substantially but simply furnished, his store
of clothes and linen were ample, he had money in his purse and credit at the
shop and at the market.22 This is no miserable subsistence peasant,
but a small capitalist farmer whose cash and credit indicates his involvement
in the market economy.
The second major feature
Stubbs noted is the early and easy social mobility. Before the close of the
middle ages the rich townsmen had begun to intermarry with the Knights and gentry,
and many of the noble families of the present day trace the foundations of
their fortunes to a lord mayor of London or York ... it is probable that there
was no period in English history at which the barrier between the knightly and
mercantile class was regarded as insuperable ... 23
This was a society of closely
spaced ranks with no insuperable barriers between them from very early on.
The city
magnate formed a link between the country squire and the tradesman; and the
tradesman and the yeoman were in position and in blood closely akin.
160 ALAN MACFARLANE
Even the villein might, by learning a craft, set
his foot on the ladder of promotion…24. One final feature
of a `medieval' world that looks surprisingly like that of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries is the widespread use of wage labour and craft activity;
there were, Stubbs tells us, `whole classes of labourers and artisans, whose
earnings never furnished more than the mere requisites of life . . .'25
The same
legend is told by F.W. Maitland. In his many works we look in vain for any sign
of a belief that a vast and revolutionary change had occurred at some specific
point in English history, dividing off `medieval' from `modern' England.
Instead, his view that the legal and social structure of
We are told
that `at the end of Henry III's reign our Common Law of inheritance was rapidly
assuming its final form. Its main outlines were those which are still familiar
to us ...'26 By the death of Henry II ~I2~2), `English
law is modern in its uniformity, its simplicity, its certainty
. ..'2~ Lawyers from the fourteenth century onwards
believed that `the great outlines of criminal law and private law seem to have
been regarded as fixed f or all time. In the twentieth century students of law
will still for practical purposes be compelled to know a good deal about the
statutes of Edward I . . .'28 This continuity, he believed, had been
of great advantage to English historians, setting them off from those of
continental nations where it had not occurred.
So continuous
has been our English legal life during the last six centuries, that the law of
the later middle ages has never been forgotten among
us. It has never passed utterly outside the cognizance of our courts and our
practising lawyers. We have never had to disinter and reconstruct it in that
laborious and tentative manner in which German historians of the present day
have disinterred and reconstructed the law of medieval Germany.29
This
continuity is shown in the treatment of particular subjects. For instance, when
analysing the forms of action at Common Law, Maitland took the period 1307-1833
as one period. He admitted that this was `enormously long', yet wrote that `I
do not know that for our present purpose it could be well broken up into
sub-periods.' 30
The most
important area of all, as Marx would have agreed, was the property law which
governed relations of production. Here were the deepest continuities. This
`most salient trait' of the `calculus of estates which even in our own day, is
perhaps the most distinctive feature of English private law', Maitland thought
very old. It has been a characteristic for six centuries, having taken a
`definite shape' in the second half of the
Socio-economic revolution in
thirteenth century,
drawing on much older customs. 31
In his Constitutional History o f England, which covered the period from Anglo-Saxon England
up to the 1880's, Maitland made no substantial modifications to Stubbs's
general vision of continuity.32 For instance, he wrote `take an
institution that exists at the end of the Middle Ages, any that exists in i
800 - be it parliament, or privy council, or
any of the courts of law - we can trace it back through a series of definite
changes as far as Edward's reign ... '33 It was because English
constitutional and legal principles had been laid down so early that the
history of English law which he largely wrote could amazingly end in 1272.
Maitland pointed to many respects in which
thirteenth-century
We may wonder whether this `legend' of
continuity, so powerfully undermining of revolutions, has been destroyed by
subsequent research on those documents, many of which Maitland himself first
brought to light.
In the reprinting of the History o f English Law in 1968, Milsom describes it as a `still living
authority'.37 Nowhere in his lengthy introduction
does Milsom challenge Maitland's view of the thirteenth century. Indeed Milsom
concludes that `there can be no doubt that by the end of the period covered by
the book, the world was as Maitland saw it ...'38 Maitland,
writes Milsom, `would probably wish his work to be superseded. There is little
sign that this will happen soon.'39 The
world Maitland saw was `essentially a flat world inhabited by equal neighbours.
Lordship is little more than a servitude over the land
of another ... '40
If Maitland rejects a
revolutionary interpretation of English history, how does he visualize the
process of time as changing? It is certainly not in a crude evolutionary
pattern, through a series of organic `stages', as advocated by a number of the
evolutionary anthropologists and sociologists of the later nineteenth century.
This evolutionary framework, which influenced Marx through the works of Morgan,
has had a considerable influence on twentieth-century historiography. Yet, in a
memorable passage, Maitland calmly shatters such necessary, single-path, evolutionism.41
What alternative, then, can he offer? Maitland
does not usually
162. ALAN
MACFARLANE
address the problem directly, but
often indicates obliquely how one might use an organic-growth model, yet
without any necessity for things to have occurred in a certain way. An
illustration of this approach is shown in his treatment of one of the central
and enduring features of English history, the system of local government.
Maitland writes that
Certainly to any one who has an eye for historic
greatness it is a very marvellous institution, this Commission of the Peace,
growing so steadily, elaborating itself into ever new ideas, and yet never
losing its identity ... we shall hardly find any other political entity which
has had so eventful and yet so perfectly continuous a life.42
Maitland
holds here in a delicate balance both `newness' and `identity' over time, an
institution whose history is both `eventful' and yet `continuous'. Such an
approach allows us the flexibility to admit that by a strange
paradox things can both remain the same and also change.
Such a model of change is more subtle and less crude than a revolutionary
one, at least when applied to English history. No doubt it will be unattractive
to those historians who agree with Butterfield that `the chief aim of the
historian is the elucidation of the unlikeness between past and present ... It
is not for him to stress and magnify the similarities between one age and
another ... '43 If we are dedicated to hunt for dissimilarities,
then `revolutions' before which things were very different are what we shall
hope to find, and we can safely dismiss Stubbs and Maitland as poor historians.
In that case, all that has been put forward in this essay, even if true, is of
no interest. It is a species of that `so what' history to which my former
teacher, Lady Rosalind Clay, used to allude. On the other hand, if we are
concerned to find out how things have come to be as they are, we . may well
find that for certain societies the `continuity with change' paradox is the
most flexible way of looking at the past. This approach can best be stated as a
contradiction, the `Changing Same', as the jazz singer
Leroy James called a song. This changing same is another way of speaking of the
parable of the philosopher’s shoe, whose various parts were replaced bit by
bit. At the end, was it the same shoe or another one? In another form, it is
the metaphor used by the great historian of the Common Law, Sir Matthew Hale,
when he likened the changing law to the Ship of the Argonauts. `The ship went
so long a voyage that eventually every part of it decayed and was replaced; yet
[says the paradox of identity in spite of change] it remained in a meaningful
sense the same ship.'44 For English history, we would need to modify
these metaphors, for the new heel, or the new planks were of a different shape
and length to the ones they replaced. It was still a ship or a shoe, but the
overall measurements had shifted very considerably. Put in another metaphor, an
organic one, the tree had not changed from being an oak. But a small oak is
very different in many respects from a large one.
Socio-economic revolution in
One could express this model in a more modern idiom. In trying to
account for the way in which behaviour is generated in a North African society,
the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu has developed the notion of habitus, that is the idea of a system of
invisible, general, but powerful rules which guide everyday behaviour .45 This
is curiously similar to what is meant by that central English idea of `custom',
as when Bracton wrote of the Laws and
Customs o f England in the early thirteenth century. These are an
assemblage of the `way things are done', the fundamental and guiding
principles, the rules of the game. If we turn
Bourdieu's idea from a static one into a changing model over time, we would
argue that the habitus of the English
was very early established. How it expressed itself would vary and change, but
the expressions would be in conformity to fairly basic rules which are not
easily changed. One might liken these to the tides, which are unaltering. The
storms and stillnesses on the surface, the individual waves, are just as
important for the sailor as are the tides. Yet ultimately, the ebb and flow
remains within various bounds constrained by deeper laws. No one would argue
that `revolutions' never occur, and historians should of course describe them
when they do so. Yet to assume that they occur in every nation's history, and
frequently, cuts short the historian's ability to respond to what the evidence
tells him. It debases the historical coinage and it warps the historian's
observation of the past.
Two final questions may be raised, but not satisfactorily answered in
the space available. The first concerns the degree to which the nonrevolutionary
nature of the English past is representative or exceptional when compared to
the rest of
164 ALAN MACFARLANE
If it is true that a misleading paradigm of the
English past has established itself in certain quarters during the first two
thirds of the twentieth century, we are left with an intriguing
historiographical question as to why this should have been the case.
Naturally, the reasons lie at many levels. Some of these have been hinted at
above: the need to make the past very different in order to make it
problematic, the influence of European sociologists and particularly Marx and
Weber, the self questioning doubt induced by comparative anthropological
knowledge. Other causes could be suggested, including the obvious use of the
past to help predict the future. For instance, if all that exists now can be
shown to be the result of a recent `revolution', then it is easier to consider
changing present institutions. What exists around us can be seen to be an
artificial, almost accidental, creation. It is a part of culture, not nature.
If the family system or the capitalist ethic is only a few hundred years old,
it is easier to feel that it may not last long either. The vision of numerous
revolutions in the recent past is essentially optimistic, utopian. The premise
of continuity can conversely be attractive to those who wish to stress enduring
values, who dislike profound change. Thus the
fluctuations in historical interpretation tell us a great deal about the
changes in political ideology in this century. Recent errors are not the result
of a lack of ability among twentieth-century scholars, even if it is difficult
to point to historians of the stature of Stubbs and Maitland. As
historians know, theories of change, for instance the move from cyclical to linear
concepts of time, from static to progressive and from evolution to revolution,
are deeply influenced by changes in the environment within which historians
work. While it is possible to analyse the reasons for such shifts in
interpretative paradigm at the Renaissance, Enlightenment or the Evolutionary
phase of the nineteenth century, it is more difficult to understand the reasons
for the rise and imminent decline of what might be called `Revolutionism'. We
are still too close to the shift, some of us having even within our lives
switched into and out of Revolutionism. All we can do in this short paper is to
see how a useful model in other settings is inappropriate when applied to
English history, distorting the evidence to fit into preconceived structures.
NOTES
All books are published in
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy
in America (first published in 2 parts, 183 S, 1840), and L'ancien regime (1856).
2 Ibn Khaldun, An
Introduction to History, and Muqaddimah, various editions; Edmund Leach, Political Systems of
' Socio-economic
revolution in
3
Fernand Braudel, The
o f Philip
II (1976),
4 `Tawney's century' is the
title given to the first essay, by F. J. Fisher, in the Essays in the Economic and Social History o f Tudor and Stuart England (
5. Christopher Hill, The Century of
Revolution 1603-1714 (
7 The failure of the English Revolution of
the seventeenth century to change the social structure is stressed by Perry
Anderson and Tom Nairn; see E. P. Thompson, `The peculiarities of the English',
in The
Socialist Register, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville (I965), especially p. 314.
8 More detailed discussion of
continuities in property law and social structure are contained in my The
Origins o f English Individualism (
9 An excellent outline of
English Common Law history is J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (I979).
I0 John Hajnal, `European
marriage patterns in perspective', in Population in ;
History (1965), ed. D. V.
Glass and D. E. C. Eversley.
11 J. Goody, The
Development o f the Family and Marriage in
12 C. Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures o f Kinship (I969), p. xxiii.
13 J. Goody and S. J. Tambiah, Bridewealth
and Dowry (
14 E. A.
Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, `English population history from family
reconstitution: summary results I 600-1799', in Population Studies (1983),pp. I57-84.
15 Ibid., p. 184.
16 E.
A. Wrigley, `Marriage, fertility and population growth in eighteenth
century
17 Perry Anderson, Lineages o
f the
I8 William Stubbs, The Constitutional History o f
I9 Ibid., p. 682.
20 I bid., vol. 3,
p. 3.
21 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 570.
22 Ibid., vol. 3, P. 573.
23
Ibid., vol. 3, p. 615.
24
Ibid., vol. 3, p. 626.
25
Ibid., vol. 3, p. 6I9
26
Sir F. Pollock and F. W.
Maitland, The History o f English Law Before the
Time o f Edward I (2nd ed.,
27 Ibid., vol. I, p. 225.
166 ALAN MACFARLANE
28 Selected
Essays o f F. W. Maitland (
29 Pollock and Maitland, History, vol. I, p, civ.
30 F. W. Maitland, The Forms o f Action at Common Law (Cambridge,
I968), ed.
A. H. Chaytor and W. J. Whittaker, p. 43.
31 Pollock and Maitland, History, vol. 2, pp. 10-11.
32 F, W.
Maitland, The
Constitutional History o f
33 Maitland, Select Essays, p. I z7
34 Pollock
and Maitland, History, vol. 2, pp. 438,
242ff, 13,19,27.
35 Ibid.,
vol. 2,, p. 233.
36 Ibid., vol. 2, p. 402.
. 3 7 Pollock and Maitland, History,
vol. r, p. xxiii.
38 Ibid., vol. I, p. xlvii.
39 Ibid.,
vol. I, p.
Ixxiii
40 Ibid.,
vol. I, p. xlvii.
41 F. W.Maitland, Domesday
Book and Beyond (
42 F.
W. Maitland, Collected Papers (
43 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation o f History (Pelican
ed., 1973),p.
17.
44 Charles Gray in the preface to Sir Matthew Hale, The History o f the Common Law o f
45