Chapter Two
The 102 Pilgrims who in 1620 sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower to the New World were destined to be communists. Under the terms of their agreement with the Plymouth company that backed their settlement, they were to work communally for the first seven years, “during which time, all profits & benifits that are gott by trade, traffick, trucking, working, fishing or any other means . . . remaine still in ye comone stock.” After that time the proceeds would be shared with the investors in England. The arrangement was particularly welcome to the tightly knit core of migrants united by the common experience of persecution by the Church of England who had been living for more than a decade as religious refugees in the Dutch university town of Leiden. Their chief spokesman, Robert Cushman, condemned personal greed as ungodly, and pointed to the better example of the early Christian societies where property had been held “in common.”
Arriving late in the year, they spent most of the first bitter winter living aboard ship, but when the fifty-three hardy souls who survived the horrific epidemic of disease that raged through the Mayflower dragged their weary bodies onshore in the springtime, the hard business of farming for the common good aroused little enthusiasm. “The young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense,” William Bradford, their future governor, wrote. Only repeated whipping kept them at work. A rift opened between those who “thought [it] injustice” that a hard worker should receive no more food than a feeble one, and those like Cushman who denounced anyone who worshipped the “belly-god” of selfishness instead of seeking “the good, the wealthe, the profit, of others.”
This was not a problem anticipated by the merchants of London and Plymouth who invested in the company. They had expected the settlement to operate as a trading post, acquiring salt cod and beaver skins for sale in Britain. The desire for religious freedom was what drove the tiny band of separatist Puritans to accept the contract to be shipped across the Atlantic. Neither side thought the ownership of land to be of any importance. And certainly it was never supposed that the contagion of private property might enter the New World with them.
Beset by quarrels and threatened by starvation, the colony struggled on until the spring of 1623. With a new planting season at hand, the majority decided that, on the basis of the compact signed onboard the Mayflower to “combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic, for our better ordering and preservation,” they had authority to change the company rules. They persuaded the governor that “they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so,” Bradford noted in his history of the Plymouth colony, “assigned to every family a parcel of land according to the proportion of their number . . . This had very good success for it made all hands very industrious.” Smaller matters had been debated and resolved before, but that this, the first major democratic decision taken on American soil, should have been in favor of individual ownership carried a symbolism that echoes down the centuries.
The failed experiment in communal ownership convinced Bradford that it was contrary to human nature. To believe that “the taking away of property” would lead to happiness was to imagine oneself to be “wiser than God,” he concluded. Yet the new regime came at a cost. “And no man now thought he could live except he had catle and a great deale of ground to keep them all,” Bradford observed sadly, “all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scatered all over the bay quickly and the towne in which they lived compactly till now was left very thinne . . .”
Among many settled animist cultures, including the Wampanaog people on whose land the Pilgrims had come to live, parcels of ground could be used and occupied by individual families, even passed on to the next generation, often from mothers to daughters, but exclusive ownership of what was regarded as the fundamental life source was impossible. Massasoit, a Wampanaog leader who befriended later settlers, used an analogy common in such cultures to explain the relationship: “The land is our mother,” he said, “nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?”
A similar belief that people could use but not possess the earth held good under Judaic law, springing from Yahweh’s commandment in the book of Leviticus that “the land is mine” and that mortals, as mere “strangers and sojourners,” were unable to own it. Islam adopted the same view, incorporating it into sharia law. Even in cultures where land could be owned in secular terms, it belonged to the human ruler, the monarch, emperor, or khan, who represented divine power on earth. In the earliest surviving codification of laws, dating from the second millennium BC, the Babylonian king Hammurabi traced the roots of his sovereignty to Baal, “the lord of heaven and earth who decreed the fate of the land.” And the laws made it plain that just as Hammurabi owed his possession of Babylon to his devotion to Baal, so his subjects might use the land in return for service to the king. From the third century BC, when Chinese emperors began to assume the title of the “Son of Heaven,” they too acted as intermediaries between the spiritual and and material worlds, claiming the mandate of heaven to rule China, and allocating its territory to their nobles in exchange for military and governmental services that forwarded their divine mission. In similar fashion, the feudal system in Christian Europe understood the contract between lord and tenant to be part of a chain of mutual obligation leading through the chief barons to the king, who granted them use of the territory he ruled by the grace of God.
Thus a relationship with the earth that began as a spiritual connection ended as a contract on which constitutional authority ultimately rested. Ordinary Englishmen wishing to claim individually owned land in the New World were engaged in a dangerous activity.
Ten years later, the experience of the Plymouth colony played heavily on the minds of the seven hundred Puritans who assembled in Southampton in March 1630 to take ship to Massachusetts Bay. Many, including their governor, John Winthrop, had left comfortable homes that were furnished with fireplaces and private bedrooms and surrounded by enclosed fields. Indeed, one of Winthrop’s close companions even lived in a house with a cat’s slide roof, side chimney, and low beam. They had had two years to prepare, and were under no illusions about the hard conditions ahead. “Plantations are for young men that can endure all pains and hunger,” a friend had warned the forty-year-old Winthrop. “To adventure your whole family upon so many manifest uncertainties standeth not with your wisdom and long experience.”
The original Pilgrims had had nothing to lose, but this second wave were giving up security and worldly achievement. They had a pressing need to know that braving the dangers and harsh climate would not only win them the freedom to worship as Puritans, but to live in a new English society where land could be individually owned. The question was whether a concept recognized by English common law could exist in the American wilderness.
To reassure them, Winthrop put forward a revolutionary proposal, usually ascribed to John Locke half a century later. In a pamphlet published in 1629, he argued that private ownership of the earth did not depend upon the law, but was created by human toil. He constructed this novel explanation by weaving together Puritan doctrine and the pragmatic outlook of the enclosers. “God has given to the sonnes of men a double right to the earth,” Winthrop declared, “a naturall right, and a Civill Right.” The natural right to land was established by use and occupancy, and Winthrop was merely echoing the accepted view put forward by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius when he declared that land “which lies common, and hath never beene replenished or subdued is free to any that possesse and improve it.” That natural right to occupy empty land grew ultimately from God’s injunction in the book of Genesis, “Increase & multiply, replenish the earth & subdue it.”
But Grotius had nothing to say about the purely English civil or legal right to own land as private property. Winthrop was breaking new ground when he asserted that such a right came about when men “appropriated certaine parcells of Grownde by inclosing and peculiar manuerance [individual manuring or improvement], and this in time gatte them a Civill right.”
It must have seemed a convincing argument to readers who had heard from their grandparents firsthand accounts of the way enclosure had enabled common ground to be converted into legally recognized property. And few would have quarreled with Winthrop’s conclusion: “As for the Natives of New England they inclose noe land neither have any settled habitation nor any tame cattle to improve the land by, & soe have noe other but a naturall right to those countries. Soe as if we leave them sufficient for their use wee may lawfully take the rest, ther being more than enough for them & us.”
Yet because Puritans were guided by conscience in such matters, they sought their ultimate authority not in the law but in the Bible. As they waited in Southampton before sailing to America, they heard a sermon from the Reverend John Cotton that gave private property the biblical backing they needed to hear.
Cotton’s sermon, entitled “God’s Promise to his Plantation,” was based on a passage in the book of Genesis about Abraham’s search for a place to settle among the Philistines. When he was prevented from using a well he had dug in the dry land of Beersheba, Abraham appealed to the Philistine king, Abimelech, claiming that he had the right to draw water because he was the person who had sunk the well. In Cotton’s sermon, however, Abraham also made a specific claim of individual ownership, based on “his owne industry and culture in digging the well.” And, rather than simply accepting Abraham’s oath that he was telling the truth, as the Bible recounted, the Philistine Abimelech, by Cotton’s account, responded forcefully, “admitteth it as a Principle in Nature, That in a vacant soyle, hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is.” In other words, there was biblical evidence to reassure the new Americans that their right to individually owned, landed property depended on their own efforts in improving the ground, and not on English law.
While they waited for favorable winds, the same audience was told by Winthrop that the eyes of the world were upon them, and they should regard their settlement as an example to all those who desired freedom. They would be, he said, “a city upon a hill.” Three hundred years later, his is the talk that history remembers, but at the time it quickly slipped into obscurity. It was Cotton’s sermon on the natural right to individually owned property that was published and treasured by those about to sail for Massachusetts Bay.
Among the rest of Britain’s burgeoning number of Atlantic colonies—by the end of the seventeenth century there were seventeen from Nova Scotia to Barbados—the question of how property came into being hardly arose. The West Indies colonies were easily the most important in terms of profitability and migration, thanks to the production of sugar. The almost industrial process of growing tall-stemmed sugarcane, then extracting its juice to be boiled and crystalized into dried sugar and rum, ensured that landowners were also employers in charge of a manufacturing hierarchy of white overseers and indentured servants and a growing number of enslaved Africans. In 1650, there were forty-four thousand British colonists in the West Indies, more than in all eight colonies on the North American mainland.
Possession of the earth, in both America and the Caribbean, was deemed to be derived from the royal charter that granted the territory to a company or to a powerful proprietor, such as the Earl of Carlisle, who was given Barbados in 1627. Every charter detailed how the land was to be owned and administered, and ended with a striking phrase explaining that the monarch had made this happen by “our especiall grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion.” In other words, the king’s royal power, backed by “divine grace,” as the charter also specified, was the ultimate authority that enabled colonists to claim that particular bit of the earth’s surface as their property. This happened, as it were, with a mere wave of the regal hand. Real estate was, literally and legally, royal estate.
Against this background, the peculiarity of the New Englanders in seeking some deeper source of legitimacy drew mockery, not least from Captain John Smith in his Advertisements for the Inexperienced Planters of New England, published in 1631: “Many good, religious, devout menhave made it a great question, as a matter in conscience, by what warrant they might go and possess those countries which are none of theirs but the poor savages’.” Drawing on his own experience as governor of Virginia, where he had negotiated the colonists’ acquisition of land from the Powhatan confederacy of native Americans, Smith casually dismissed the Puritans’ doubts. America had enough space for everyone, whether native or newcomer, and so under international law as outlined by Grotius they were allowed to take possession of what was essentially unoccupied ground. “If this be not a sufficient reason for such tender consciences,” he added off-handedly, “for a copper knife and a few toys as beads and hatchets, they [the native inhabitants] will sell you a whole country; and for a small matter their houses and the ground they dwell upon.”
Smith’s scoffing at the Puritans’ search for biblical authority missed its subversive implications. If property was created by individual effort, and not just by the king’s “mere motion,” then there was another authority in the land whose power rivaled that of the royal prerogative. And it was one that everyone possessed. In which case, an awkward question arose: Where did ultimate authority lie? With the people or with the crown?
* * *
Such a question could only have arisen under English common law. In Europe, medieval legal structures grew out of Roman law whose goal, in the words of its sixth-century codifier, Emperor Justinian, “is the constant and perpetual wish to render to everyone his due.” These dues were based on mutual obligation, and the best example of how this worked was always taken to be the family. Thus parents had a duty to guard their children, an obligation matched by the children’s duty to obey their parents. And while a wife and children were subject to the authority of their husband and father, their obedience gave them inextinguishable rights to a share in his property.
The same principle applied where land was concerned. Roman law held that it had to have a lord who was obliged to guard it, as a father guarded his family, on behalf of his sovereign. In return he could expect to be obeyed by those who lived there and to enjoy their services. This was the matrix of the feudal system. Crucially, these rights of property went with the land rather than existing separately. Should an estate be confiscated, or its inheritance be disputed, the contract of mutual obligation disappeared, and with it the rights of ownership.
The English idea of property evolved separately because the laws of ownership became a battleground for supremacy between the crown and the chief barons of England. The beginning of the war dated back to the twelfth century, when King Henry II started to use “common law,” meaning applicable in the same way to everyone, to undermine the power of the barons’ manor courts. Royal judges were sent out on tour to every part of the kingdom with the power to enforce the common law and the statutes that had been enacted by the king’s council in London. The goal of these judges “on assize,” as it was termed, was to ensure that royal justice overruled the permanent local justice administered by the manor.
For four centuries a thunderous drumroll of royal statutes, edicts, and legislation, many with Latin and Norman French names, created rights for tenants that the king’s judges were expected to impose against the wishes of feudal lords: Novel disseisin enabled tenants to appeal to a royal judge against unjust eviction; Mort d’Ancestor acknowledged their right to inherit on the death of a relative; Quia Emptores permitted them to sell inherited land; a writ of ejectment prevented the landlord from coming on to the tenant’s land. By the early thirteenth century manor courts were also forced to accept the tenants’ right to trial by jury in the king’s court, and to issue a writ of habeas corpus guaranteeing them the freedom to appear there in person. But in 1215, twenty-five mighty barons turned the royal strategy on its head by forcing King John to sign the great charter, known as Magna Carta, limiting the king’s own misuse of feudal power. Effectively it gave the barons, together with all freeholders of land, the right to claim the protection of the common law against the king, just as it protected their tenants against them. “No Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned,” ran the critical clause, “or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land.”
There was nothing about mutual obligation in Magna Carta. These were absolute rights invested in the owner of freehold land
In sharp contrast to Roman law, and for that matter to the civil obligations of landowners under Chinese and Islamic custom, the version that evolved under English common law had no counterbalance. Far from subjecting rights of individual ownership to those of social obligation, throughout the sixteenth century the law heaped civil liberties, political power, and legal protection upon the freeholder at the expense of everyone else. “Day labourers, poor husbandmen, yea merchants or retailers which have no free land,” the leading Elizabethan lawyer Sir Thomas Smith wrote in the 1560s, “have no voice nor authority in our commonwealth, and no account is made of them, but only to be ruled.”
Such an approach ran counter to all civilized norms because it was so unbalanced. Throughout the development of human society, laws that defined what belongs to one person and not to another, were complemented by rules and customs that regulated greed. Thus the Judaic commandment “Thou shalt not steal” was accompanied by the injunction “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.” The very source of European law could be found, according to Demosthenes, in the outrage felt by the sixth century BC Athenian law-giver, Solon, at the avarice of the powerful, eager to “Indulge their lustful appetite of gain.” In the Republic, Plato demonstrated that unless kept in check by law the greedy part of the soul, to epithumetikon, will “enslave and rule over the classes it is not fitted to rule.” On the other side of the world, the central theme of the sixth century BC Analects of Confucius was the belief that social harmony could be achieved only if all people, governors and governed, subscribed to firm rules of conduct that inhibited selfish behavior. And the Hindu emphasis on socially moderated behavior had its roots in the second century BC Bhagavad-Gita’s warning against greed as one of the three self-centered gates to hell that, together with lust and anger, were “so destructive to the embodied self they must be abandoned.”
Yet if Winthrop and Cotton were right, and individual effort gave a natural right to property, the common law envisioned no check on the liberties and rights that the individual owner would then enjoy. The lack of limits betokened a freedom from social constraint that had never been acceptable before. By all the civilized norms that existed in the history of human society, a monster had been born.
The birth of this changeling was largely hidden behind the clutter of feudal customs that continued to surround private property transactions into the eighteenth century. But in every country where the concept of individually owned landed property has taken hold, one unmistakable indicator of its arrival has been provided by a change in the way land is measured.
On May 1, 1602, William Shakespeare paid William Combe the handsome price of £320 for four yardlands of arable land and twenty acres more of meadow in Old Stratford. A yardland was a feudal unit representing an area large enough to support a family. As a result, a yardland of good arable soil, like the Old Stratford ground, covered about twenty-five acres, as opposed to a yardland of rough pasture which could have been more than forty acres. The difference depended, Robert Thoroton pointed out, on “the lightness or stiffness of the Soil [and so] could not be equal in all Places.”
In a localized, peasant economy where the earth was valued primarily for its ability to support people, measurements that varied according to the fertility of the soil provided the most useful indication of what a farmer needed to know. Around the world, the amount of seed that had to be sown to feed a family from the harvest provided a basic, and perhaps primeval, unit of measurement of the earth. Even in the twentieth century, fields in Guangdong Province next to Hong Kong continued to be measured in dou, roughly equivalent to a quarter of a bushel of rice, while up to the mid-nineteenth century land in New Mexico was computed by the fanega, approximately two bushels of wheat. Similar variable measures were used throughout feudal Europe—as late as 1789 the local council in Bourges in northern France declared that the seterée, based on a setier, or half-bushel of seed, “is the only measure known in this canton. It is larger or smaller depending on the quality of soil.”
But in a market involving buyers with no local knowledge, an objective, unchanging quality such as area allowed strangers to compare the value of different commodities. Thus one unmistakable indicator that a true market in land had developed was the appearance of exact, invariable measurements in place of local, organic units. Significantly, Shakespeare’s land at Old Stratford was also measured out as 107 acres, the amount registered by the courts.
The need for accurate measurement was met by a new breed of surveyor, not the old feudal “overseer” who ensured that rents were in line with the productivity of the land, but “measurers” equipped with instruments akin to theodolites and compasses, and employing mathematical innovations such as trigonometry. The modern, definitive Dictionary of Land Surveyors and Local Mapmakers of Great Britain and Ireland dates the beginning of the trade to 1530, and identifies by name 235 surveyors of the new kind at work in the last half of the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, the mathematical inventor Thomas Gunter provided them with what would become the surveyor’s definitive tool, a twenty-two-yard chain divided into one hundred links, an instrument perfectly suited to the measurement of traditional, four-based measurements such as the 4,840-square-yard acre, and the 640-acre-square mile. That the archaic chain should now be enshrined as a unit of measurement in the areas of almost every major city founded in the nineteenth century in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa—streets one and half chains, or ninety-nine feet, broad, blocks of five acres, eight chains long by five broad, and public squares of ten acres, eight by ten chains—indicates the symbiotic nature of its relationship to the spread of private property.
As surveyors gave shape to property, a subtle change in mortgage law allowed it to be translated into financial muscle. In its old use, a mortgage meant “dead pledge,” signifying that a borrower automatically forfeited his land if he failed to repay the money in full on the specified date. As Sir Thomas Lyttleton, the leading legal authority of the sixteenth century, put it, “If he [the borrower] doth not pay, then the land which is put in pledge upon condition for the payment of the money, is taken from him for ever, and so is dead to him.” The forfeiture of an entire property as a penalty for failing to repay every penny that had been borrowed naturally struck the new landowners as inequitable. In response to their growing political influence, sympathetic judges began to interpret the law so that failure to repay the debt at the required date did not totally extinguish an owner’s title to the land. Instead, under the principle known as “the equity of redemption,” the courts ruled that so long as a borrower paid off the mortgage, even years late, he could reclaim his property.
Modern mortgage law grew out of this interpretation, but so too did modern finance. To regain his money, the lender now had to get a writ to foreclose, forcing the borrower to sell the land. Once the debt was paid, however, the remainder of the proceeds belonged to the former landowner. This was his equity in the land. As the new idea took hold during the seventeenth century, equity, meaning fairness, would gradually morph into equity, meaning capital.
The power that translated the wish to own land individually into a legal reality could hardly have been less substantial. It is neatly summarized in a throwaway aside uttered by Hamlet as he gazes down at the gravedigger disinterring a skull that will turn out to be Yorick’s. Musing on the absurdity of a mere mortal presuming to own the earth that will shortly swallow him up, the moody Dane remarks, “This fellow might be in’s time a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries: is this the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?”
As one of the most famous beneficiaries of England’s land revolution, William Shakespeare knew whereof he wrote. Hamlet’s list includes four centuries of statute law, evidence of the buyer’s financial resources in the form of recognizances, records of the fines or fees he had to pay for transfer of ownership, invoices or vouchers in duplicate of the purchase price, and receipts or recoveries for the deposit he had put down. Missing from the recital is the deed of sale registered with the Court of Common Pleas, and the complications of surveys, mortgages, and conveyancing that had grown since the 1540s. But this was the hidden weapon of private property, paper. Everything was written down. The title deeds described how the property had been created and come into the owner’s hands, and any incursion upon it brought the whole panoply of the law against the perpetrator. Paper recruited the power of government to the side of the property owner.
The decisive shift occurred during the parliamentary struggle of the 1530s and 1540s between the king and the upstart, property-acquiring members of the House of Commons. Despite exercising greater personal power than any other monarch in British history, Henry VIII was forced to negotiate to obtain the Commons’ consent to taxes to fund his insatiable taste for military spending.
“If you will not take some reasonable end now when it is offered,” the king threatened, “I will search out the extremity of the law, and then I will not offer you so much again.” But “the frowarde and wilfull” members of Parliament, as a contemporary reported, “woulde neither consent to the byll [to increase the royal revenue] . . . nor yet agree to no reasonable qualificacion of the same.”
By the 1540s they had forced the monarchy to accept crucial changes to property law, affecting wills, mortgages, inheritance, and conveyancing. The guiding principle of the new laws was to make it simpler for two individuals to negotiate the exchange of a property, by purchase or inheritance, without interference by lord or monarch. The result was to erode and largely destroy the core of the contractual structure of feudalism, leaving in its place a system of rights.
To explain the new rules, a raft of manuals on property law began to appear. It was important to know what was happening, Thomas Phayer pointed out in The New Boke of Presidents [Precedents] published in 1543, because “without [these] thynges there can no tytle lawfully be claymed, no landes nor houses purchased.”
Each of these incremental changes helped give the monster of private property its shape. But the most dramatic indication of its break with past standards of fairness and mutual obligation came with the law of “couverture” enacted in 1542. This obliterated the right of a wife to a “reasonable part” of the family property that had been enshrined in Roman law and feudal practice, and transferred everything she owned to her husband’s name. In the bleak words of the great legal authority William Blackstone, the law of couverture meant that “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing.”
In The Merchant of Venice, written in the 1590s, Portia dresses the idea in more romantic guise when she promises herself to Bassanio:
Myself and what is mine to you and yours
Is now converted. But now I was the lord
Of this fair mansion, master of my servants,
Queen o’er myself; and even now, but now,
This house, these servants, and this same myself
Are yours, my lord’s. I give them with this ring.
In practice, resourceful wives often found a way around the couverture law by insisting on a prenuptial or “church-door” agreement guaranteeing some control over their share of the property. But in disposing of his own property, William Shakespeare illustrated how the land revolution inexorably pushed women to the margin. The family share guaranteed under Roman law played no part in his plans. Only one person would inherit his land. Having lost his son, Hamnet, Shakespeare willed his many properties to his daughter Susanna, but detailed minutely who would inherit them from her. After her death, they were to go “to the first sonne of her bodie lawfullie yssueing, and to the heires males of the bodie of the saied first sonne lawfullie yssueinge.” In case there was a problem, the land would go to her second, or third, or fourth, or even to her seventh son, and after his unborn grandson’s death, William Shakespeare specified that it would pass to that distant descendant’s first, second, or even seventh son. Women played no part in that uncertain future.
Step by step, the political influence of the new landowners had succeeded in creating a monopoly. This was what was contained in Hamlet’s mordant list of documents. The traditional rights of villeins and laborers were overturned. The claims of the feudal superior, whether lord or king, were frozen out. The needs of wives and children were subsumed. All those who might have challenged the solitary male owner’s right to exclusive possession of the land were sidelined.
In 1450 about 60 percent of the twelve million acres of farmland in England had been held by the crown, by the church, and by some thirty dukes, earls, and barons. By 1700, the nobility, church, and crown together owned less than 30 percent of the cultivated land. Almost three quarters of what had grown to be fourteen million acres of farmland now belonged to the heads of more than two hundred thousand families of gentry, yeomen, and tenant farmers with land worth more than forty shillings a year in rent. And perhaps 150,000 more families rented less valuable properties. Out of a population that had increased to almost five million in 1700, about two million had an interest in landed property.
Not only did the adult males of some two hundred thousand landowning families vote for the members of Parliament, they provided the magistrates who enforced Parliament’s laws, and the officers of the cavalry that ensured compliance with the magistrates’ orders. Statutes intended to protect a tenant’s rights, such as novel disseisin or quia emptores, had become part of a property owner’s defense against the king’s exactions. The common law’s writ of ejectment originally used to keep feudal landlords from invading their tenants’ land was now employed to keep trespassers off private property. The hedges that anti-enclosure legislation had repeatedly ordered to be torn down had become sacrosanct, boundaries that no poacher or paperless claimant, nor even a royal writ, could cross without the owner’s permission.
The priorities of the land revolution fostered a change of temper in England’s growing population. It is possible to see the new spirit in the sheer verve of the Elizabethan age, from the freebooting exploits of Sir Francis Drake and Sir John Hawkins pirating away Spanish treasure to the flowering of English poetry and above all in the drama of William Shakespeare.
What seems perpetually modern in Shakespeare’s drama is the consciousness of an individual self, heard most clearly in Hamlet’s doubts and inner turmoil, but traceable from the farcical confusion of identities in The Comedy of Errors through the spectacular gore of Titus Andronicus to the great tragedies of King Lear and Macbeth. Consistently his protagonists, from vendetta-entrapped Romeo to racially snared Othello, struggle to escape an enveloping past and achieve a goal of personal autonomy. “Men are at some time masters of their fate,” Cassius asserts in Julius Caesar. “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.”
The erosion of old communal values also triggered unmistakable anxiety about the materialist outlook of the new order. It was most evident in the rising popularity of Puritanism. Appalled by the lack of social conscience in the new age, Thomas Becon, one of the founders of Puritanism and no friend of Catholicism, declared that the selfish behavior of property speculators who bought monastic lands made even the corrupt old monasteries look good: “They [the new owners] abhorre the names of Monkes, Friars, Chanons, Nounes [nuns], etc., but their goods they gredely gripe [grasp]. And yet where the [monastery] cloysters kept hospitality, let out their fermes at a reasonable pryce, noryshed scholes, brought up youths in good letters, they [the new owners] doe none of all these thinges.”
Hostility was not confined to the Puritans. In 1597, the self-centered indulgence of the day drew a reprimand from the highest power in government, Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council. In a royal proclamation, the children of the land revolution were condemned for their “lack of hospitality” caused by “the immeasurable charges and expenses which they are put to in superfluous appareling of their wives, children and families.”
Even in Shakespeare’s plays, the struggle for autonomy is fraught with anxiety. Once selfishness takes over, says the Earl of Gloucester in King Lear, it destroys every emotion holding families and communities together: “Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide. In cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond crack’d ’twixt son and father.” The unease is even more apparent in the dramas of inheritance such as Hamlet, King Lear, Henry IV, and Richard III, where a new order is about to displace the old. But it is in Troilus and Cressida when Ulysses rails against the self-centered behavior of the Greeks at the battle of Troy that Shakespeare expresses best his contemporaries’ deep-seated apprehension about the ravening world where “insaciable gredyness of mynde,” as an antiproperty pamphlet put it, has been unleashed:
. . . the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf . . .
Yet there was no going back. The individualized ethos of the property owner influenced government, the law, and everyday life. And in Shakespeare’s drama can be sensed a psychological development that no previous society had experienced. Allowing greed to be unconstrained by law had forced its battle with moderation to become internalized. The beginnings of a modern sensibility had begun to emerge.