Class

Gary Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN:
  9781032296456
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134674206
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Literature

This book traces the phenomenon of class from the medieval to the postmodern period, uniquely examining its relevance to literary and cultural analysis. Drawing on historical, sociological and literary writings, Gary Day: * gives an account of class at different historical moments * shows the role of class in literary constructions of the social * examines the complex relations between 'class' and 'culture' * focuses attention on the role of class in constructions of 'the literary' and 'the canon' * employs a revived and revised notion of class to critique recent theoretical movements.

1
MEDIEVAL

This chapter describes the structure of late medieval society (roughly 1200–1500) and considers how far we can view it as a class society. To that end, it looks at the relationship between landlords and peasants and the ‘rise of the bourgeoisie’ as measured by the growth of the exchange relation of capitalism compared to the decay of the personal obligations characteristic of feudalism.

THE ESTATES MODEL OF SOCIETY

The standard view of the society of the Middle Ages is that it was divided into three estates: the clergy, whose business was with prayer and spiritual well-being; the warriors, who defended the land and the people with their arms; and the labourers who supported the other two. As one contemporary succinctly put it: ‘the cleric prays, the knight fights and the peasant tills the soil’ (cited in Medcalf 1981: 58). It was believed that these divisions were divinely ordained and that birth determined destiny. William Langland, in Piers the Ploughman (1379) says that God placed each person in their respective estates:

He gave to some men Intelligence … by which to earn their living as preachers and priests… . He taught some men to ride out on horseback and recover unlawful gains by speed and strength of arm, and some he taught to till the soil, to ditch and to thatch.

(1379 & 1966: 237–8)

Hence a person's Christian duty lay in ‘working joyfully in the role assigned to them’ (Medcalf 1981: 58).

The relationship between the three estates was strictly hierarchical. The priest came first, then the knight and then the labourer. ‘To the knight it sufficeth not that he be given the best arms and the best beast but also that he be given seignory’, that is, lordship over other men (cited in Keen 1990: 3). This lordship, however, entailed certain obligations. As Janet Coleman points out, ‘each man of each estate should be recognised to have his due, and that the rich and powerful should support the poor and virtuous’ (1981: 99). The relationship was, however, unequal. The lord's main responsibility towards his tenant farmers was to protect them in return for which he received money, food and livestock and labour on his land (Bloch 1962: 250). The lord's relation to his tenant was a class relation to the extent that he was able to exploit him by extracting his surplus labour. But the lord also had to pay homage to his liege lord, that is the person of a higher rank than himself who, in turn, would pay homage to his feudal superior and so on all the way up to the king. Known as vassalage, this homage consisted, in the first place, of military service, but it also involved attendance at the lord's court where, in return for his aid, the vassal received land, gifts and a share in the exercise of authority (ibid.: 219–30). The technical term for land granted to a lord was ‘fief’. The lord did not own this land but held it on condition that he was loyal to his liege lord, a conception of property which differs profoundly from the idea of absolute ownership which characterises capitalism (Reynolds 1994: 53–4). ‘Fiefdom’ complicates the question of class since it implies a distinction between the lord's possession of the land and his exploitation of those who worked on it. Marx, however, believed that ownership and exploitation could not be separated since the former was the basis of the latter (Marx and Engels 1848 & 1968: 47).

Just as there were distinctions within the nobility so were there within the peasantry. The main dividing line, inherited from the Classical world, was between the free and the unfree. The former were able to move from one place to another, and dispose of their goods as they saw fit; the latter, serfs or villeins, were ‘restricted as to freedom of movement, freedom of alienation of land and goods, and freedom of access to public jurisdiction’ (Hilton 1985 & 1990: 68). With the revival of serfdom in the late middle ages, many peasant families were forced into dependence on aristocratic and church landowners and this rather blurred the distinction between the free and the unfree. However, there were other divisions within the peasantry, the main one being between those who had sufficient land to pay their rents and taxes and those whose holdings yielded a mere subsistence level. The very poor depended on what they could earn, in money or kind, to supplement the little they grew.

The variations within each estate suggest that, as a description of society, the model of the three estates was not entirely adequate. Indeed, within the third estate, no distinction was made between rich and poor, or between town and country. Hence, as Maurice Keen has noted, ‘the conception of the three estates and their relations to one another was an ideal vision: it never did and never could have corresponded to reality’ (1990: 3). John of Salisbury (1112–70) gives us another version of this model when he describes society in terms of the body: the priesthood as the soul, the warriors as the armed hands and the labourers as the feet. Like the three estates model, the emphasis was on harmony and cooperation. Each person, like each organ in the body, had their part to play in the smooth functioning of society. The estates model and the metaphor of society as a body are both status-based conceptions of the social order. As was noted in the introduction, status denotes an essentially static view of the social formation, with each group having a clearly defined function in relation to the whole. It will also be remembered that status was originally a legal term stipulating those marks of distinction which defined a person's place in society in relation to another: thus a knight could bear arms but a peasant could not. Similarly, a person's status determined what obligations, duties and responsibilities were owed to those above and below him or her. Within the Church, for instance, ‘the bishop demanded homage from the abbots of his diocese; the canons required it from their less well provided colleagues and the parish priests had to do homage to the head of the religious community on which their parishes were dependent’ (Bloch 1962: 348).

A status-based conception of the social order assumes that stability not change is the governing principle of society. However, the late medieval world, like all periods in history, was characterised by a number of developments that prefaced profound upheaval. One of the most important was the growing power of the mercantile bourgeoisie manifest in the growth of urban industries such as iron, paper and textiles. The growth of commodity production, together with the increase in the use of money, began to undermine the system of personal obligations that characterised feudalism (Anderson 1974 & 1996: 22). Put simply, coinage began to replace homage as the key social relation, though the full effects of this would not be felt until the nineteenth century. One sign of this change was a new conception of property. In feudalism, as we have seen, the possession or holding of land was conditional on the discharge of certain obligations but, as Anderson notes, ‘the recovery and introduction of Roman law [in the late medieval world] with its concept of absolute and unconditional private property was fundamentally propitious to the growth of free capital in town and country’ (ibid.: 24–5). In short, land began to be seen as a commodity rather than as the literal ground of a complex hierarchy of relationships. These changes led to a conflict of interest between the urban bourgeoisie and the landed nobility. The former had the economic initiative but the latter had the political power. We will look at how the rise of money affected the estates model of society when we discuss Piers the Ploughman (1379) and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1380). In the meantime we need to consider a much more obvious conflict of the late medieval period, that between landowners and peasants.

CLASS AND THE PEASANTS

The relation between landowners and peasants can be seen as a class relation to the extent that the former owned the land upon which the latter worked. As we have seen, the landlord was able to exploit the peasants, extracting from them surplus value in the form of rents, labour services or agricultural produce. Rodney Hilton (1985 & 1990) argues that the struggle between peasants and landlords over these matters was the main feature of late medieval society. This conflict was particularly sharp in the second half of the fourteenth century, culminating in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

The various tensions leading up to this were aggravated by the dramatic decline in population following the Black Death of 1348–9. This affected both rents and wages. The shortage of tenants meant that landlords were forced to rent at a lower rate, while the depleted population led peasants to demand not only a reduction of labour services but also higher wages. The landlords reacted by asserting their rights over their tenants with renewed vigour and by passing the Statute of Labourers in 1351, which sought to lay down maximum wage rates and to control the movement of labour. Peasant resistance to this took a number of forms, from legal challenges whose basis was that since they were the king's subjects, and therefore free men not villeins, landlords could not arbitrarily increase their services, to non-performance of these same services by refusing to plough the lord's land or thresh his wheat or carry his goods. There were also organised attacks in Middlesex (1351), Lincolnshire (1352) and Northamptonshire (1359), on the sessions of the Justices of the Labourers whose specific task was to enforce the statute of 1351. The revolt of 1381 was sparked by the introduction of another poll tax. Not only was this the third since 1377, it was also three times the rate of the previous two. The reason for the tax was mainly the cost of the Hundred Years War (1337–1453), which the Crown sought to pass on to the peasantry, but it was also to satisfy ‘the expanding need of the ruling class for luxury goods’ (Aers 1988: 15).

The rebels’ main demand in 1381 was for the abolition of serfdom. In practical terms this would mean ‘low fixed money rents; freedom of movement; freedom to buy and sell livestock; freedom to buy and sell land; freedom from arbitrary exactions such as tallage, marriage fines, death duties and entry fines’ (Hilton 1985 & 1990: 148). Other demands included the end of all lordship except for that of the king; the abolition of the whole Church hierarchy except for one bishop; the division of Church property among the commons; and the payment of tithes only if the priest were poorer and more worthy than the parishioners (ibid.: 149). Together, these demands amounted to a wholesale rejection of the estates view of society. The peasants wanted to abolish private property and replace hierarchy with equality. In the words of John Ball:

things cannot go right in England, and never will, until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same. In what way are those whom we call lords and masters greater than ourselves? Why do they hold us in bondage? If we all spring from a single father and mother, Adam and Eve, how can they claim or prove that they are lords more than us?

(cited in Froissart 1388 & 1978: 212)

The mouthpiece of political and social criticism was the ploughman, who emerged as a radical and disturbing figure in this period (Hilton 1985 & 1990: 176–7). The anonymous poet of Pierce the Plowman's Crede (1396) challenged the clergy by claiming that the ploughman could teach the creed better than friars or monks. ‘Ploughing’, wrote Iolo Goch, a Welsh contemporary of Langland, ‘is “wisdom's way”’ (cited in Hilton 1985 & 1990: 176). The prologue to The Ploughman's Tale (1400) complains that while the ploughman provides for the clergy, he gets nothing in return: ‘They have the corn and we have the dust’ (ibid.: 177); a sentiment echoed by the speaker in Gode Spede the Plow (1409), angry that those who ‘mayntayne this worlde’ (ibid.) should receive so little reward for their labour. Ploughmen are thus represented as supporting the world with their labour and questioning how the fruits of their labour are distributed. This ‘working-class’ critique of social organisation will echo, in different forms, down the centuries, as will the contrast, in many of these poems, between the industrious many and the idle few.

Marx claimed that there was no class consciousness among the peasantry because they lived in scattered communities which rarely came into contact with one another (1859 & 1968: 171). Although the existence of poetry which placed the ploughman in opposition to the nobility and the clergy would suggest otherwise, it is the case that we cannot really describe the peasant's sense of grievance in terms of class consciousness. Compared to the nineteenth-century industrial working class, peasants lacked the means to organise themselves and to promote their cause. Of more immediate relevance, however, is the fact that the hierarchical nature of feudal society prevented that polarisation of the ‘classes’ which Marx regarded as an important constituent of class consciousness, others being an awareness of oppression and an awareness of the role of class in the revolutionary transformation of society (1844 & 1961: 178–87). It was not just the diffusion of power through the various ranks of society which inhibited the development of class consciousness but also the divisions within the peasantry itself. Those at the top end of the scale, the yeomen, identified more with the nobility than with their own group while their chivalric ballads, celebrating the exploits of ‘gentleman outlaws’, were rejected by ‘ploughman poets’ on the grounds that their romantic idealism was ‘inapplicable to the problems of everyday life’ (Morgan 1993: 17): a criticism that reveals an early preference for the ‘realism’ which will characterise much ‘working-class’ writing. The value attached to chivalry in yeoman ballads also reminds us that, broadly speaking, what mattered to contemporaries were social relationships based on status rather than economic relationships based on class. In the end, it was not the class consciousness of peasants that was crucial to the development of capitalism but changes in their condition of labour. Briefly, the custom-based relation to the lord was slowly commuted to a cash-based relation with a guild master or merchant. The latter represented the new productive forces, the technical and commercial advances, that would slowly erode the political order of feudalism.

Capitalism requires that individuals be free to pursue their own economic interests irrespective of the condition into which they are born. The expansion of capitalism in the late medieval period, therefore, undermined the idea that people should remain in the station to which God had appointed them. Similarly, the demands of the market diversified social life beyond the capacity of the estates model to represent it. Inventors, merchants, manufacturers, artisans and journeymen did not really fit into a scheme devised for clerics, knights and peasants. Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales (1387 & 1992), tried to extend the estates model to include new social types such as the man of law, the Franklin, the Merchant, the Shipman and the Wife of Bath. There were also legal attempts to defend the traditional hierarchy by making people dress according to their rank, not their inclination. The sumptuary laws of 1363 and 1463, for example, aimed to regulate ‘the outrageous and excessive apparel of divers people, against their estate and degree’ (Edward III cited in Bolton 1980: 321). However, neither literature nor legislation, nor even dire warnings that any violation of the social order would lead to natural disaster, could save the estates conception of society. Contemporaries were aware of the growth of commodity production and of the power of money to usurp traditional values. ‘Wynne whoso may’, declares the Wife of Bath, ‘for al is to selle’ (1387 & 1992: 169), while Langland observes that ‘the cross on the back of a gold coin is worshipped above the cross of Christ’ (1379 & 1966: 194). What happens in the late medieval period is that money begins to usurp the estates model as a representation of the social order in a process which is still continuing today. It is not simply that a society is judged by its wealth, or that money becomes the measure of a person, it is rather the way in which the exchange mechanism, an essential part of the bourgeois rise to power (Marx 1849 & 1968: 80), moulds all social experience.

THE ‘INDIVIDUAL’

The development of the idea of the individual is closely related to the rise of the bourgeoisie; however, the term obscures its relation to class because it emphasises how people are different rather than what they have in common. I put the term ‘individual’ in inverted commas because, strictly speaking, the late medieval period did not have a concept of the ‘individual’, at least not in our sense of the term. The word ‘individual’ was generally found in theological argument and meant ‘indivisible’ particularly in disputes about the Trinity. It could also mean ‘a vain or eccentric departure from the common ground of human nature’ (Williams 1988: 162). It was not until the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the modern meaning of the word – unique, singular – came into being. We have already seen that the medieval conception of society saw people in terms of their functions rather than their being, and their duties rather than their qualities. To this we must add that the dominant mode of medieval thought was allegory, which saw things not as they were but as the signs of some other reality. Hence the value of the phenomenal world lay in what it revealed about the spiritual world: red and white roses blooming amid their thorns were not merely flowers but ‘virgins and martyrs shining with glory in the midst of their persecutors’ (Huizinga 1924 & 1968: 196). The personal was subsumed under the universal: ‘all individual suffering is but the shadow of divine suffering, and all virtue is a partial realization of absolute goodness’ (ibid.: 199). A similar pattern is discernible in the poetry of courtly love where ‘individual’ feelings are made to fit conventional expressions. ‘Even when an actual love affair is described’, writes Huizinga, in his classic The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), authors ‘cannot free [themselves] from the accepted style and technical conceptions’ (ibid.: 118). By subordinating the earthly to the spiritual, the particular to the general, medieval allegory mirrored the hierarchic conception of society.

However, a number of developments combined to undermine these mutually reinforcing views of the world, the most important of which, for our purposes, was the growth of the market. Its encouragement of ‘individuals’ to take charge of their own economic destiny was complemented by two related developments: the beginnings of national self-consciousness and the first stirrings of humanism (Bloch 1962: 106 & 433). Very generally, the spread of trade nurtured a nascent sense of nationhood already apparent in such things as the increased use of English rather than French as the language of the court from about 1250 (Anderson 1974 & 1996: 22). Similarly, the rediscovery of antiquity led to the ‘growth of a new self-consciousness’ (Bloch 1962: 434) which took many forms, including the spiritual autobiography of the wife of a King's Lynn burgess, The Book of Margery Kempe (circa 1427). Such cultural expressions of ‘individualism’ served to underpin the entrepreneurial activity of capitalism. The idea of the ‘individual’ entailed mobility rather than stability and personal responsibility rather than social obligation hence, as we have seen, it posed a threat to the estates model of society (Aers 1988: 16). We can see how the experience of social mobility affected the estates model of society by looking at Thomas Malory's tale in Le Morte Darthur (1470), ‘Sir Gareth of Orkney’.

‘SIR GARETH OF ORKNEY’ AND SOCIAL MOBILITY

‘Sir Gareth of Orkney’ relates how the hero, initially known as Beaumains, hides his true identity in order to prove himself a knight by his actions alone. Working in the kitchen earns him the scorn of Sir Kay, who dismisses him as ‘a villein born’ (Malory 1470 & 1998: 121). More vitriolic is the abuse he receives from the ‘damosel Lyonet’ who says that he ‘stinkest all of the kitchen’ and that his clothes are ‘bawdy of the grease and tallow’ (ibid.: 125). This alerts us to how those lower down the social scale are often represented in terms of the body. The poet Gower, for example, sees peasants as ‘defying reason’ and ‘obeying no law but natural urges’ (cited in Coleman 1981: 134). Beaumains’ forbearance towards Lyonet, however, and his prowess in combat with other knights, convince her that he comes ‘of gentle blood’, which he soon afterwards...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: MEDIEVAL
• 2: THE RENAISSANCE
• 3: THE CIVIL WAR AND AFTER
• 4: THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
• 5: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
• 6: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY