Bridewells and Workhouses in Elizabethan England
This well-known passage in which Marx outlines the essential meaning of the ‘so-called primitive accumulation ’ is the key to a reading of those historical events which are the subject of our enquiry. The same process, of divorcing the producer from his means of production, is at the root of a dual phenomenon: the transformation of means of production into capital; and the transformation of the immediate producer tied to the soil into a free labourer. The process manifests itself concretely in the economic, political, social, ideological and moral dissolution of the feudal world. The first aspect of the question, the creation of capital, does not concern us here. Rather it is the second aspect, the formation of the proletariat ,2 that constitutes the more fruitful area of research.The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital; on the other hand, the immediate producers into wage-labourers. The so-called ‘primitive accumulation ’ therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive because it forms the pre-historic stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it. The economic structure of capitalistic society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former.1
The disbanding of feudal retainers, the dissolution of the monasteries, the enclosure s of land for sheep-farming and changes in the methods of tillage each played their part’3 in the great expulsion of peasants from the land in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England. But according to Dobb ’s classic thesis, the feudal mode of production was being drained by its own inefficiency even before these events4; as the system demanded heavier workloads of the peasants, the only escape routes left open to them were vagabondage in the countryside or flight to the towns. The decline of feudalism and the corresponding brutality in social relations was marked by the intensification of the class struggle in the countryside, the prime expression of which was the desertion by the peasantry from increasingly intolerable conditions.5
Thousands of dispossessed workers in the countryside flocked to the towns which, with the development of economic activity, especially commerce, already represented a notable pole of attraction; the dispossessed now became the mass of the unemployed – beggars, vagrants and in some cases, bandits.
In its quest for expansion, capital displayed its most ruthless class savagery in the movement for the enclosure of common land. When referring to the relevant eighteenth-century legislation, Marx was to define the rape of the countryside which drove the first ranks of the future proletariat into the towns, as ‘decrees of expropriation of the people’.6 Thomas More gave this lucid description of the phenomenon in his Utopia as early as 1516:
Your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves … For look in what parts of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dearest wool, there noblemen and gentlemen … leave no ground for tillage, they inclose all into pastures; … by one means therefore or by other, either by hook or crook they must needs depart away, poor, silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers, with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance and much in number, as husbandry requireth many hands … And when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly pardy be hanged, or else go about begging.7
The state’s initial response to what was at the time a social phenomenon of unprecedented proportions is quite clearly described by Marx:
Marx goes on to cite examples of the growth during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of draconian legislation against vagabondage, begging and – to a lesser extent – crime, in the face of which traditional medieval structures, based as they were on private and religious charity, proved impotent. Moreover, the secularisation of ecclesiastical wealth following the reformation in England and Europe had the twofold effect of contributing to the expulsion of peasants from church property and of leaving those hitherto dependent on the charity of the monasteries and religious orders without means of subsistence. The greater the scale of proletarianisation, therefore, the less the effectiveness of the campaign of terror,9 while, at the same time, the development of the economy, and of manufacture in particular, demanded an ever greater quantity of labour from the countryside. More pointed out the only logical solution as early as 1516 when he strongly advocated the necessity of placing this ‘idle sort’10 in useful employment. An Act of 1530 made the registration of vagrants compulsory. For the first time a distinction was made between those unable to work (‘the impotent poor’), who were authorised to beg, and the rest, who were forbidden any kind of charity on pain of being flogged until the blood ran.11 The principal instruments of English social policy remained whipping, banishment and capital punishment until the middle of the century, by which time conditions were evidently ripe for what was to prove a model experiment. At the request of certain representative clerics alarmed at the amount of begging in London, the King consented to the use of Bridewell Palace as a place where vagrants, idlers, thieves and petty criminals would be housed.12 The aim of the institution, which was to be run with an iron hand, was threefold: to reform the inmates by means of compulsory labour and discipline; to discourage vagrancy and idleness outside its walls; and, last but not least, to ensure its own self-sufficiency by means of labour.13 Work mainly centred around textiles in accordance with the need of the time, and the experiment must on the whole have been crowned with success since houses of correction, indiscriminately referred to as Bridewells , soon appeared in various parts of England.The proletariat created by the breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers and by the forcible expropriation of the people from the soil, this ‘free’ proletariat could not possibly be absorbed by the nascent manufacturers as fast as it was thrown upon the world. On the other hand, these men, suddenly dragged from their wonted mode of life, could not as suddenly adapt themselves to the discipline of their new condition. They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th century and during the whole of the 16th century throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.8
Even so a comprehensive policy was reached only under the various acts of the Elizabethan Poor Law, which were destined to remain in force without any real alteration until 1834. An act dated 1572 set up the general system of relief based on parishes. Parishioners paid a poor rate for the maintenance of their local ‘impotent poor’ whilst sturdy ‘rogues and vagabonds’ were to be furnished with work.14 Since this last provision was to be satisfied only when the impotent poor had been catered for,15 in fact no effective assistance was given to the unemployed, who simply continued to be the object of repression.16
Four years later, the entire problem was tackled by the introduction of houses of correction throughout the country so that refractory or unemployed workers could be set to work.17 As in Bridewell, the prototype, their population was extremely mixed: paupers’ children ‘so that youth might be accustomed and brought up to labour’, those looking for work, and all the categories noted in the first Bridewells: petty offenders, vagabonds, petty thieves, prostitutes and poor people refusing to work.18 If the inmates received differential treatment at all, it was based on the grading of heavy jobs. The only act to which a real criminal intention seems to have been attributed was the refusal to work. As we can see, under the Act of 1601 (wrongly judged to be the principal statute of the old Poor La...