Holstun Pamphlet Wars

Prose in the English Revolution

James Holstun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134728497
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The English Revolution of 1642-60 produced an explosion of stylistically and ideologically diverse pamphlet literature. The essays collected here focus on the prose of this new revolutionary era, and the new public sphere it helped to create. They cover a wide range of topics including the Royalist attack on the Sectarian Babel and the street theatre of the Ranters.

Rational Hunger: Gerrard Winstanley’s Hortus Inconclusus

JAMES HOLSTUN

I

Gerrard Winstanley was born in Wigan, Lancashire, probably in 1609. After failing as a London cloth merchant in 1643, he moved to Surrey and found work as a cattle drover. In 1648, he wrote and published three radical religious pamplets. In January 1649, the day before Charles I was sentenced to death, Winstanley completed an astonishing pamphlet titled The New Law of Righteousness, which formulates a communist programme for peacefully revolutionizing English society. Winstanley says he heard a divine command for the poor of England to begin communal cultivation of the land: “Work together. Eat bread together; declare this all abroad.”¹ With its allusion to Genesis, its communitarian ethic and its parallels between production, consumption and prophecy, this command is a reasonable place to locate the origins of the Digger movement.

During the next 18 months, at least ten Digger communes sprang up in Northamptonshire, Kent, Buckinghamshire, Gloucestershire and Surrey.² Winstanley’s own commune took shape at George’s Hill in Surrey, near London and just outside of Kingston. On Sunday, 1 April 1649, a small group of Diggers broke ground, sowing corn, parsnips, carrots and beans. Winstanley also set to work writing: during the next year he published 14 additional petitions, manifestos, defences and meditations. Six Digger pamphlets by other hands appeared between December 1648 and May 1650. We know little about the fate of the other communes, but Winstanley’s folded in April 1650, after a series of gentry-led prosecutions, boycotts and physical attacks on the Diggers’ crops, dwellings and persons. Winstanley published his communist utopia, The Law of Freedom in a Platform, in 1652. In later life he probably became a Quaker; he died in 1676.

The Digger project forms one of the most important chapters in the agrarian history of early modern Britain, for it presents us with the most important seventeenth-century critique of the enclosure movement from the point of view of its victims – a critique which seventeenth- and twentieth-century depictions of plebeian Englishmen and women as mute traditionalists might lead us to think is all but impossible. The Diggers provide us with the fullest seventeenth-century English vision of a more humane and egalitarian collective life – not despite but because of their focus on daily life at the local level. I will approach Winstanley, the greatest Christian materialist of seventeenth-century England, by way of Ernst Bloch, the twentieth-century Marxist most fascinated by the utopian power of religion and prophecy.

II

The canon of seventeenth-century English literature is opening up to the voices of women and the writers of marginal or non-literary texts, but it seems less interested in the voices of the hungry. Some sorts of deprivation seem to be more audible than others. Erotic deprivation produces the love lament; deprivation of political power, the poem of patronage; both sorts of deprivation, the Petrarchan political sonnet. Deprivation of bodily freedom produces the prison journal or lyric, of political liberty the philippic or manifesto, of virtue the confession or jeremiad. Even deprivation of life produces, through the melodious tear of a bereft swain, the pastoral elegy. But no parallel genre responds to the deprivation of food. The cockaigne poem or narrative, whose avowedly fantastic and whimsical tone tends to deny or naturalize hunger, seems to be a view of hunger from the outside, from the position of the well fed.

This distinction between hunger and other sorts of deprivation holds even if we put “deprivation” into post-structuralist quotation marks and see it as a sort of desire dissolved in language itself rather than the exterior cause of language. As Lacan, Barthes and Derrida argue, language is not simply about sexual desire, but its cause, instrument and object. Foucault argues something similar for the will to power. But hunger does not even begin to lend itself to a talking or writing cure. So far as it suggests a primal existential lack, an absence, a nothingness that produces desire, it brings us dangerously close to an outmoded existentialism. If we dwell too long on it, we risk that indelibly damning epithet, “essentialist humanism.” However, we may also hesitate to take the arch-Foucauldian road and call hunger a mere effect of discourse. One way out of the problem is simply to ignore it, and also the mass of poor people (surely the majority of humankind throughout history) who have felt hunger and its threat as primal existential facts.

And this is easy enough to do. For one thing, the hungry and the literate tend to be mutually exclusive groups. Even if hungry people are literate, they tend to be more interested in finding food than in writing about their hunger. And when well-fed literate people record the voices of the hungry, they are typically more interested in hearing their legal testimony, religious confessions, contractual obligations and deferential greetings than in such stark cries as “We want to eat!” – an utterance that provokes embarrassed deafness, not archival attentiveness. Hunger’s object of desire, if not exactly a brute fact free of symbolic systems, remains somehow vulgar, material, unworthy of sustained critical reflection or analysis. Remarkably enough, thanks to some of the more florid literary critical appropriations of Bakhtin, we pay more heed to Renaissance repletion, festive gorging, vomiting and defecation than to Renaissance hunger.

A quick explanation for this view of hunger might juxtapose critic and canon – it is only natural that modern critics with more experience of the sex and power drives than of the hunger drive should turn to early modern writers with similar experience. The latter typically invoke hunger as the vehicle for metaphor, as when they speak of the communicant’s spiritual hunger for the Eucharist, or the Petrarchan devoto’s erotic hunger. When they treat hunger itself, it usually appears as the condition of the other, as in that astonishingly cruel Renaissance epithet starveling, which almost suggests an elective character type or profession, like the melancholic scholar or the mountebank. In drama and satirical poetry, we see the poor depicted again and again as mouths without brains – perhaps a vision of their actual hunger, perhaps a displacement of guilty, upper-class voraciousness. Even in those works such as More’s Utopia that register a sort of paternal and humane concern for the hunger of England’s displaced and wandering poor, the concern tends to be objective, not subjective: the real terror of hunger is not hunger itself, but the threat that it will breed a mobile, ravenous army. This objectivizing point of view reappears in the modern study of “the vagrancy problem” in early modern England, which might be (but seldom is) more sympathetically described as “the next meal problem.”

I want to approach this question through a portion of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope – the 1400-page Expressionist prose poem that is his magnum opus. Bloch works out a critique of various psychoanalytic theories based on their conceptions of the fundamental human drives. All these drives are regressive in orientation, motivated by some primordial and fixed layer of existence or consciousness:

The unconscious of psychoanalysis is … never a Not-Yet-Conscious, an element of progressions; it consists rather of regressions. Accordingly, even the process of making this unconscious conscious only clarifies What Has Been; i.e., there is nothing new in the Freudian unconscious. This became even clearer when C.G. Jung, the psychoanalytic fascist, reduced the libido and its unconscious contents entirely to the primeval.³

Bloch goes on to criticize Alfred Adler for his Nietzschean theory of a psychological will-to-power (57). The drives animating these various models of the unconscious – Freud’s Oedipal/sexual drives, Jung’s frenzy-drive, Adler’s power-drive – all face backwards, and Bloch links them with what he calls the “filled emotions (like envy, greed, admiration) … whose drive object lies ready, if not in respective individual attainability, then in the already available world” (74).

In the contemporary study of Renaissance culture, we can see versions of these familiar psychological drives at work. After the brief and contained heyday of Frye, polite literary critical society seems to have banished myth criticism as improperly ahistorical and universalist (and perhaps something darker, given the political associations and proclivities of Jung, Eliade and Campbell). But a similar archetypalism – albeit with a distinct arche – survives among the more thematic sorts of deconstructive criticism and the critical celebrations of Bakhtinian carnival. Freud’s analysis of the sexual/Oedipal drive flourishes, particularly as linguified by structural psychoanalysis and as criticized and adapted by feminist Shakespeareans. Adler’s theory of a power drive has had no great impact on literary studies, but its Foucauldian sibling (Nietzsche is the common parent) has certainly proved influential in new historicist and other modes of post-structuralist literary analysis. And the accompanying “filled emotions” of envy, greed and admiration have received sustained critical attentioon in studies of literary patronage, the literary market-place, and theatricality inside the theatre and out.

Bloch’s critique of these psychoanalytical drive theories blends his-toricism and humanism. On the one hand, he insists that human beings and their drives are historically determinate products – that Freud’s “libido man lives – together with his dreamed wish-fulfillments – in the bourgeois world a few decades before and a few decades after 1900 (the key year of the secessionist ‘liberation of the flesh from the spirit’)” (68). At the same time, he proposes an alternative candidate for the primal drive in what he calls “the drive that is always left out of psychoanalytical theory” (64) – the drive to self-preservation, with hunger as its primary expression:

Very little, all too little has been said so far about hunger. Although this goal also looks very primal or primeval. Because a man dies without nourishment, whereas we can live a little while longer without the pleasures of love-making. It is all the more possible to live without satisfying our power-drive, all the more possible without returning into the unconscious of our five-hundred-thousand-year-old forefathers. But the unemployed person on the verge of collapse, who has not eaten for days, has really been led to the oldest needy place of our existence and makes it visible.… In the late bourgeoisie, to which Freud’s psychoanalysis also belongs, hunger was deleted. Or it became a subspecies of the libido, its “oral phase,” as it were; subsequently, self-preservation does not occur as an original drive at all. (65, 67)

While the will-to-power (sexual and political) is very much in evidence, the will-to-eat is all but invisible, and hunger seems almost to lie below the threshold of historical visibility.

But at certain striking moments, early modern literature presents hunger more sympathetically as the condition of the self: the plebian hunger of Coriolanus; the labouring, sweating, hungering and eating cosmos of Paradise Lost; the hungry Christ of Paradise Regained. The example I want to concentrate on for the moment, however, is less familiar. It is a Digger broadside written in 1650 by nine Northamptonshire starvelings, with a typically verbose seventeenth-century title: A Declaration of the Grounds and Reasons why we the Poor Inhabitants of the Town of Wellinborrow, in the County of Northampton, have begun and give consent to Dig up, Manure and Sow Corn upon the Common, and Waste Ground, called Bareshanke, Belonging to the Inhabitants of Wellinborrow, by those that have Subscribed, and Hundreds more that give Consent. The authors note that there are 1,169 receivers of alms in the parish, and that even though the justices at the recent quarter sessions ordered that a stock be established for their relief, charity does not yet reign in Wellinborrow:

We have spent all we have, our trading is decayed, our wives and children cry for bread, our lives are a burden to us, divers of us having 5.6.7.8.9 in family, and we cannot get bread for one of them by our labour; rich men’s hearts are hardened, they will not give us if we beg at their doors; if we steal, the law will end our lives, divers of the poor are starved to death already, and it were better for us that are living to die by the sword then by the famine: And now we consider that the earth is our mother, and that God hath given it to the children of men, and that the common and waste grounds belong to the poor, and that we have a right to the common ground both from the law of the land, reason and scriptures; and therefore we have begun to bestow our righteous labour upon it, and we shall trust the spirit for a blessing upon our labour. (650)

The indictment-like rhythm of the opening clauses of this passage leads to the painful non-choice of death by famine or death by sword. But a third option appears, as the tenant commoners threaten to take up the patrician sword, only to beat it immediately into the plebeian ploughshare. I particularly like the image of these plebeians, with filial piety, “bestowing” their labour on their mother earth – a bit grandiose, but then, what do any givers have to “bestow,” except their own labour, or the appropriated labour of others?

Even more important, this manifesto shows us the hungry poor articulating themselves with utopian force. They aim to end not only their hunger but also the social structure that allows it to exist in the first place. Even in the midst of great physical need, this voice constructs a rational utopian critique of one social totality and a proposal for a humane alternative. This is a rebellion of the belly, which Bacon calls the worst kind, but it is also a rebellion of wounded reason.⁴ As E.P. Thompson argues, early modern ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution
• Restyling the King: Clarendon Writes Charles I
• The Ranters and the Limits of Language
• Roger Williams: Bible Politics and Bible Art
• “The [Un]Civill-Sisterhood of Oranges and Lemons”: Female Petitioners and Demonstrators, 1642–53
• Female Preachers and Male Wives: Gender and Authority in Civil War England
• “Adam, the Father of all Flesh”: Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and After the English Civil War
• Rational Hunger: Gerrard Winstanley’s
• “Sages and patriots that being dead do yet speak to us”: Readings of the English Revolution in the Late Eighteenth Century