Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

of using his seigneurial right to fine or arrest runaways from the villein nest, had been hunting for flaws in titles, screwing up admission fines, twisting manorial customs, and, when he dared, turning copyholds into leases. The official opposition to depopulation, which had begun in 1489 and was to last almost till 1640, infuriated him, as an intolerable interference with the rights of property. In their attacks on the restraints imposed by village custom from below and by the Crown from above, in their illegal defiance of the statutes forbidding depopulation, and in their fierce resistance to the attempts of Wolsey and Somerset to restore the old order, the interests which were making the agrarian revolution were watering the seeds of that individualistic conception of ownership which was to carry all before it after the Civil War. With such a doctrine, since it denied both the existence and the necessity of a moral title, it was not easy for any religion less pliant than that of the eighteenth century to make a truce. Once accepted, it was to silence the preaching of all social duties save that of submission. If property be an unconditional right, emphasis on its obligations is little more than the graceful parade of a flattering, but innocuous, metaphor. For, whether the obligations are fulfilled or neglected, the right continues unchallenged and indefeasible.

A religious theory of society necessarily regards with suspicion all doctrines which claim a large space for the unfettered play of economic self-interest. To the latter the end of activity is the satisfaction of desires, to the former the felicity of man consists in the discharge of obligations imposed by God. Viewing the social order as the imperfect reflection of a divine plan, it naturally attaches a high value to the arts by which nature is harnessed to the service of mankind. But, more concerned with ends than with means, it regards temporal goods as at best instrumental to a spiritual purpose, and its standpoint is that of Bacon, when he spoke of the progress of knowledge as being sought for “the glory of the Creator and the relief of man’s estate.” To a temper nurtured on such ideas, the new agrarian regime, with its sacrifice of the village⁠—a fellowship of mutual aid, a partnership of service and protection, “a little commonwealth”⁠—to the pecuniary interests of a great proprietor, who made a desert where men had worked and prayed, seemed a defiance, not only of man, but of God. It was the work of “men that live as thoughe there were no God at all, men that would have all in their owne handes, men that would leave nothyng for others, men that would be alone on the earth, men that bee never satisfied.”219 Its essence was an attempt to extend legal rights, while repudiating legal and quasi-legal obligations. It was against this new idolatry of irresponsible ownership, a growing, but not yet triumphant, creed, that the divines of the Reformation called down fire from heaven.

Their doctrine was derived from the conception of property, of which the most elaborate formulation had been made by the Schoolmen, and which, while justifying it on grounds of experience and expediency, insisted that its use was limited at every turn by the rights of the community and the obligations of charity. Its practical application was an idealized version of the feudal order, which was vanishing before the advance of more businesslike and impersonal forms of landownership, and which, once an engine of exploitation, was now hailed as a bulwark to protect the weak against the downward thrust of competition. Society is a hierarchy of rights and duties. Law exists to enforce the second, as much as to protect the first. Property is not a mere aggregate of economic privileges, but a responsible office. Its raison d’être is not only income, but service. It is to secure its owner such means, and no more than such means, as may enable him to perform those duties, whether labor on the land, or labor in government, which are involved in the particular status which he holds in the system. He who seeks more robs his superiors, or his dependents, or both. He who exploits his property with a single eye to its economic possibilities at once perverts its very essence and destroys his own moral title, for he has “every man’s living and does no man’s duty.”220

The owner is a trustee, whose rights are derived from the function which he performs and should lapse if he repudiates it. They are limited by his duty to the State; they are limited no less by the rights of his tenants against him. Just as the peasant may not cultivate his land in the way which he may think most profitable to himself, but is bound by the law of the village to grow the crops which the village needs and to throw his strips open after harvest to his neighbors’s beasts, so the lord is required both by custom and by statute to forego the antisocial profits to be won by methods of agriculture which injure his neighbors and weaken the State. He may not raise his rent or demand increased fines, for the function of the peasant, though different, is not less essential than his own. He is, in short, not a rentier, but an officer, and it is for the Church to rebuke him when he sacrifices the duties of his charge to the greed for personal gain. “We heartily pray thee to send thy holy spirit into the hearts of them that possess the grounds, pastures, and dwelling-places of the earth, that they, remembering themselves to be thy tenants, may not rack and stretch out the rents of their houses and lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines and incomes, after the manner of covetous worldlings⁠ ⁠… but so behave themselves in letting out their tenements, lands and pastures, that after this life they may be received