II
Religious and Social Policy
If a philosophy of society is to be effective, it must be as mobile and realistic as the forces which it would control. The weakness of an attitude which met the onset of insurgent economic interests with a generalized appeal to traditional morality and an idealization of the past was only too obvious. Shocked, confused, thrown on to a helpless, if courageous and eloquent, defensive by changes even in the slowly moving world of agriculture, medieval social theory, to which the most representative minds of the English Church still clung, found itself swept off its feet after the middle of the century by the swift rise of a commercial civilization, in which all traditional landmarks seemed one by one to be submerged. The issue over which the struggle between the new economic movements of the age and the scheme of economic ethics expounded by churchmen was most definitely joined, and continued longest, was not, as the modern reader might be disposed to expect, that of wages, but that of credit, money-lending and prices. The center of the controversy—the mystery of iniquity in which a host of minor scandals were conveniently, if inaccurately, epitomized—was the problem which contemporaries described by the word usury.
“Treasure doth then advance greatness,” wrote Bacon, in words characteristic of the social ideal of the age, “when the wealth of the subject be rather in many hands than few.”222 In spite of the growing concentration of property, Tudor England was still, to use a convenient modern phase, a Distributive State. It was a community in which the ownership of land, and of the simple tools used in most industries, was not the badge of a class, but the attribute of a society, and in which the typical worker was a peasant farmer, a tradesman, or a small master. In this world of small property-owners, of whose independence and prosperity English publicists boasted, in contrast with the “housed beggars” of France and Germany, the wage-earners were a minority scattered in the interstices of village and borough, and, being normally themselves the sons of peasants, with the prospect of stepping into a holding of their own, or, at worst, the chance of squatting on the waste, were often in a strong position vis-à-vis their employers. The special economic malaise of an age is naturally the obverse of its special qualities. Except in certain branches of the textile industry, the grievance which supplied fuel to social agitation, which evoked programs of social reform, and which prompted both legislation and administrative activity, sprang, not from the exploitation of a wage-earning proletariat by its employers, but from the relation of the producer to the landlord of whom he held, the dealer with whom he bought and sold, and the local capitalist, often the dealer in another guise, to whom he ran into debt. The farmer must borrow money when the season is bad, or merely to finance the interval between sowing and harvest. The craftsman must buy raw materials on credit and get advances before his wares are sold. The young tradesman must scrape together a little capital before he can set up shop. Even the cottager, who buys grain at the local market, must constantly ask the seller to “give day.” Almost everyone, therefore, at one time or another, has need of the moneylender. And the lender is often a monopolist—“a money master,” a malster or corn monger, “a rich priest,” who is the solitary capitalist in a community of peasants and artisans. Naturally, he is apt to become their master.223
In such circumstances it is not surprising that there should have been a popular outcry against extortion. Inspired by practical grievances, it found an ally, eloquent, if disarmed, in the teaching of the Church. The doctrine as to the ethics of economic conduct, which had been formulated by medieval Popes and interpreted by medieval Schoolmen, was rehearsed by the English divines of the sixteenth century, not merely as the conventional tribute paid by a formal piety to the wisdom of the past, but because the swift changes of the period in commerce and agriculture had, not softened, but accentuated, the problems of conduct for which it had been designed. Nor was it only against the particular case of the covetous moneylender that the preacher and the moralist directed their arrows. The essence of the medieval scheme of economic ethics had been its insistence on equity in bargaining—a contract is fair, St. Thomas had said, when both parties gain from it equally. The prohibition of usury had been the kernel of its doctrines, not because the gains of the moneylender were the only species, but because, in the economic conditions of the age, they were the most conspicuous species, of extortion.
In reality, alike in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth century, the word usury had not the specialized sense which it carries today. Like the modern profiteer, the usurer was a character so unpopular that most unpopular characters could be called usurers, and by the average practical man almost any form of bargain which he thought oppressive would be classed as usurious. The interpretation placed on the word by those who expounded ecclesiastical theories of usury was equally elastic. Not only the taking of interest for a loan, but the raising of prices by a monopolist, the beating down of prices by a keen bargainer, the rack-renting of land by a landlord, the subletting of land by a tenant at a rent higher than he himself paid, the cutting of wages and the paying of wages in truck, the refusal of discount to a tardy debtor, the insistence on unreasonably good security for a loan, the excessive profits of a middleman—all
