The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  EXPROPRIATION

  The wreck of the Sea-Venture occurred at a crucial moment of imperial rivalry and capitalist development. Indeed, the formation of the Virginia Company reflected—and accelerated—a fundamental shift of power taking place in the early seventeenth century, as the Atlantic maritime states of northwest Europe (France, the Netherlands, and England) challenged and overtook the Mediterranean kingdoms and city-states of Spain, Portugal, Algiers, Naples, and Venice as the dominant forces in Europe and, increasingly, the world. The faster, better-fortified, less-labor-intensive northern European ship, the most sophisticated engineering feat of the time, eclipsed the Mediterranean galley The ruling class of England was especially eager to challenge the Iberian countries’ grip on the New World and to enrich itself while doing so. A group of English investors thus in 1606 formed the Virginia Company, which according to its leading chronicler, Wesley Frank Craven, was “primarily a business organization with large sums of capital invested by adventurers whose chief interest lay in the returns expected from their investment.” Here, in the pooling of capital for a new world-trade organization, lay the origins of the voyage of the Sea-Venture.14

  The advocates of the Virginia Company engaged in a broad public campaign throughout England to rally support for colonization, explaining again and again why their private capitalist initiative was good for the nation. They advanced multiple arguments: All good Protestants in England had an obligation to help convert the savages in America to Christianity and to battle their Catholic enemies abroad; all had a duty to extend English dominion and to embrace beckoning national glory. But the most insistent, and most resonant, argument they made presented colonization as a solution to domestic social problems in England. The company, its propagandists never tired of repeating, would provide a necessary public service by removing the “swarmes of idle persons” in England and setting them to work in Virginia, as Richard Hakluyt, the main propagandist for English colonization, had been suggesting for twenty years. The New World was the place for “irregular youths of no religion,” for persons dispossessed by “ract rents,” for anyone suffering “extream poverty”—in short, for all those “who cannot live at home.” Although we do not know the names or the individual backgrounds of most of the people aboard the Sea-Venture, we know that a number of dispossessed were among them. In 1609 the Virginia Company applied to the mayor, aldermen, and companies of London “to ease the city and suburbs of a swarme of unnecessary inmates, as a contynual cause of death and famine, and the very originall cause of all the plagues that happen in this kingdome.” Robert Rich, a gentleman shipwrecked on Bermuda, would write of “those men that Vagrants liv’d with us,” while an anonymous author close to Sir Thomas Gates (perhaps even Gates himself) would complain of “those wicked Impes that put themselves a shipboard, not knowing otherwise how to live in England.”15

  The Virginia Company, like capitalism more broadly, originated in a series of interrelated social and economic changes in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England, changes that propelled the Sea-Venture toward Virginia in 1609 and informed the writing of The Tempest soon after. We can list these changes as the shift in agriculture from arable subsistence to commercial pasturage; the increase of wage labor; the growth of urban populations; the expansion of the domestic system of handicraft or putting-out; the growth of world trade; the institutionalization of markets; and the establishment of a colonial system. These developments were made possible by a profound and far-reaching cause: the enclosure of land and the removal of thousands of people from the commons, who were then redeployed to the country, town, and sea. Expropriation was the source of the original accumulation of capital, and the force that transformed land and labor into commodities. This is how some of the workers aboard the Sea-Venture had become “hands.”

  Shakespeare recognized the truth of expropriation in The Tempest when he had the “savage and deformed slave” Caliban assert his own claim to the land against his aristocratic master, Prospero:

  This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,

  Which thou tak’st from me.

  This was the crux of the epoch. As landlords dispossessed European workers and as European merchants dispossessed native peoples in the Americas, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius asked, “Can any nation . . . discover what belonged to someone else?” Whose was Bermuda? Whose was America? Whose was Africa? Whose island was England? Since the peoples of the world have, throughout history, clung stubbornly to the economic independence that comes from possessing their own means of subsistence, whether land or other property, European capitalists had to forcibly expropriate masses of them from their ancestral homelands so that their labor-power could be redeployed in new economic projects in new geographic settings. The dispossession and relocation of peoples have been a worldwide process spanning five hundred years. The Virginia Company in general and the Sea-Venture in particular helped to organize the middle passage between Old World expropriation and New World exploitation.

  How did expropriation happen in England? It was a long, slow, violent operation. Beginning in the Middle Ages, lords privately abolished their armies and dissolved their feudal retinues, while in the early sixteenth century the rulers of England publicly closed the monasteries, rooted out the itinerant friars, pardoners, and beggars, and destroyed the medieval system of charity. Perhaps most important of all were the actions taken by big landowners in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as they responded to new national and international market opportunities. They radically changed agricultural practices by enclosing arable lands, evicting smallholders, and displacing rural tenants, thus throwing thousands of men and women off the land and denying them access to commons. By the end of the sixteenth century there were twelve times as many propertyless people as there had been a hundred years earlier. In the seventeenth century almost a quarter of the land in England was enclosed. Aerial photography and excavations have located more than a thousand deserted villages and hamlets, confirming the colossal dimensions of the expropriation of the peasantry. Thomas More had satirized the process in Utopia (1516), but he himself had enclosed land and had to be restrained. Shakespeare, too, participated in enclosure. He owned a half share in a lease of tithes at Welcombe, whose open fields William Combe proposed to enclose in 1614. Shakespeare did not object since his income would be undiminished, but the would-be dispossessed objected, filling in the ditches newly dug for enclosing hedges. Combe, mounted on horseback, opposed the diggers, calling them “puritan knaves & underlings in their colour,” but Thomas Green, the leader of the diggers, returned the next day with women and children to continue the resistance. Green petitioned the lord chief justice and the Privy Council and eventually obtained a warrant to remove the enclosure.16

  Most agricultural laborers were less fortunate. Unable to find profitable employment, without land, credit, or occupation, these new proletarians were thrust upon the roads and ways, where they were subject to the merciless cruelty of a labor and criminal code as severe and terrifying as any that had yet appeared in modern history. The major statutes against robbery, burglary, and stealing were written during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as crime became a permanent part of urban life. Laws against vagabondage meanwhile promised physical violence against the dispossessed. Under Henry VIII (1509–1547), vagabonds were whipped, had their ears cut off, or were hanged (one chronicler of the age put their number at seventy-five thousand).17 Under Edward VI (1547–1553) they had their chests branded with the letter V and were enslaved for two years; under Elizabeth I (1558–1603) they were whipped and banished to galley service or the house of correction. The criminal code elaborated under Edward VI was scarcely less vicious toward the propertyless. The Statute of Artificers and the Poor Law likewise sought to legislate taking hire, or wage labor.18

  Masterless men and women were the defining feature of late Tudor and early Stuart England, producing the characteristic turmoil of the era. Vagabonds
were, A. L. Beier has written, “a hydra-headed monster poised to destroy the state and social order.” This description echoes the argument of philosopher and Solicitor General Francis Bacon, who from personal experience considered such people the “seed of peril and tumult in a state.” The combination of expropriation, industrial exploitation (through mining and the putting-out system), and unprecedented military mobilization resulted in the huge Tudor regional rebellions—the Cornish Rising (1497), the Lavenham Rising (1525), and the Lincolnshire Rebellion (1536)—as well as the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), the Prayer Book Rebellion (1549), and Kett’s Rebellion (1549), all of which took place in the countryside. Urban insurrections for their part intensified toward the end of the sixteenth century with the Ludgate Prison Riot (1581), the Beggars’ Christmas Riot (1582), the Whitsuntide Riots (1584), the Plaisterers’ Insurrection (1586), the Felt-Makers’ Riot (1591), the Southwark Candle-Makers’ Riot (1592), and the Southwark Butter Riot (1595), whose very names evoke the struggle of handicraft workers to preserve their freedoms and customs. When Oxford commoners sought alliance with London ’prentices in the Enslow Hill Rebellion (1596), Bacon and Attorney General Edward Coke tortured one of the movement’s leaders and argued that any attack on enclosure was tantamount to high treason. The largest rebellion of the age was the Midlands Revolt of 1607, which transpired partly in Shakespeare’s home county and influenced his writing of Coriolanus. Those who took direct action to remove enclosures were now for the first time called Levellers. The exuberant resistance to expropriation slowed the pace of enclosure, delayed the undercutting of wages, and laid the basis for the concession and compromise that we misleadingly term “Tudor paternalism,” as if they had been a pure gift of parental goodness.19

  When it came time to sort out and analyze the dispossessed, Sir John Popham, chief justice of the King’s Bench from 1592 to 1607 and a leading organizer of the Virginia Company, listed thirty different types of rogues and beggars and classed them into five main groups. First there were the chapmen, the tinkers and peddlers, the men and women whose little transactions constituted the commerce of the proletarian micro-economy. Second were the discharged or wounded, or the pretended discharged and wounded, soldiers and sailors, whose labors provided the basis of the expansionist macroeconomy. Third were the remnants of the surviving substructure of feudal benevolence: the procurers, the proctors, the pardoners. The entertainers of the day—the jugglers, fencers, minstrels, keepers of dancing bears, athletes, and players of interludes-made up the fourth group. Next, in mentioning those feigning knowledge of a “crafty Scyence” such as palmistry or physiognomy, as well as fortune-tellers and “persons calling themselves Schollers,” Popham designated a fifth group that supplied the intellectual and philosophical wants of the people. Finally, his preamble named “all wandring persons and common Labourers being persons able in bodye using loytering and refusing to worke for such reasonable wages as is taxed or comonly given in such Parts where such persons do or shall happen to dwell or abide, not having lyving otherwyse to maynteyne themselves.” Thus falling within the statutory meaning of “sturdy rogue and beggar” were all those outside of organized wage labor, as well as those whose activities comprised the culture, tradition, and autonomous self-understanding of this volatile, questioning, and unsteady proletariat. Marx and Engels called the expropriated a motley crowd.20

  Expropriation and resistance fueled the process of colonization, peopling the Sea-Venture and many other transatlantic vessels during the first half of the seventeenth century. While some went willingly, as the loss of lands made them desperate for a new beginning, many more went unwillingly, for reasons explained by Bacon in the aftermath of Midlands Revolt: “For the surest way to prevent Seditions” was “to take away the Matter of them. For if there be Fuell prepared, it is hard to tell, whence the Spark shall come, that shall set it on Fire.” Arguments in favor of colonizing Ireland in 1594 or Virginia in 1612 held that the “rank multitude” might thus be exported and the “matter of sedition . . . removed out of the City.” An entire policy originated from the Beggars Act of 1597 (39 Eliz. c. 4), whereby vagrants and rogues convicted of crimes (mostly against property) in England would be transported to the colonies and sentenced to work on plantations, within what Hakluyt saw as a “prison without walls.” Here was the place for the inmates of London and indeed the whole realm. The first known English felon transported to the Americas was a dyer’s apprentice who took his master’s goods and absconded from a workhouse before being sent to Virginia in 1607. Thousands more would follow.21

  ALTERNATIVES

  The partisans of the Virginia Company knew that expropriation created “swarmes of idle persons” who had once been sustained by the commons. The merchant, investor, and publicist Robert Gray recalled a time when the

  commons of our Country lay free and open for the poore Common[er]s to injoy, for there was roome enough in the land for every man, so that no man needed to encroach [on] or inclose from another, whereby it is manifest, that in those dayes we had no great need to follow strange reports, or to seeke wild adventures, for seeing we had not onely sufficiencie, but an overflowing measure proportioned to everie man.

  His tendentious view that encroachment and enclosure had been caused solely by population growth and overcrowding notwithstanding, Gray understood that many people in England had once lived differently—more freely, sufficiently, even abundantly. When the commoners of the Sea-Venture decided that they wished to settle in Bermuda rather than go on to Virginia, they explained to the Virginia Company officials that they wanted the ease, pleasure, and freedom of the commons rather than the wretchedness, labor, and slavery awaiting them in Virginia.22

  Inspired by the actions of the shipwrecked commoners, Shakespeare made alternative ways of life a major theme in The Tempest. Gonzalo, a wise old counselor in the play who is cast away with the king and other aristocrats on Bermuda, muses about the ideal “commonwealth” he would establish “had I plantation of this isle”:

  I’ th’ commonwealth I would by contraries

  Execute all things; for no kind of traffic

  Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

  Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,

  And use of service, none; contract, succession,

  Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;

  No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;

  No occupation: all men idle, all;

  And women too, but innocent and pure:

  No sovereignty—

  He continues,

  All things in common Nature should produce

  Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,

  Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,

  Would I not have; but Nature should bring forth,

  Of it own kind, all foison, all abundance,

  To feed my innocent people.

  His commonwealth, he concludes, would “excel the Golden Age.”23

  The people of the Sea-Venture shared with Shakespeare numerous sources of knowledge about alternative ways of life, including the classical Golden Age, the Christian Garden of Eden (Gonzalo’s “innocent people”), and a broad array of popular traditions: antinomian (no law, or felony, or magistracy); anarchist (no sovereignty or treason); pacifist (no sword, pike, knife, or gun); egalitarian (no riches or poverty); and hunting and gathering (no mining or agriculture). A society without succession was one without aristocracy of birth, while a society without use of service was one without wage labor. These traditions were enacted in pageants of the “world turned upside down,” featuring motley-clad jesters such as Shakespeare’s Trinculo amid the banners, horses, artwork, and extravagance of courtly carnival, incorporating pagan rites, peasant traditions, and otherworldly utopian settings (alterne terrae, like Bermuda) into new, inclusive, spectacular entertainments. George Ferrers, lord of misrule at Edward VI’s celebrations of 1552, entered the festivity “vppon one straunge beast,” as “the serpente with sevin
heddes cauled hidra is the chief beast of myne armes.” Comic fables such as the “Land of Cockaigne” deriving from medieval satire kept a type of utopia alive, painting a picture of indolent pleasure and absolute satiation.24

  The most immediate alternative, of course, was the experience of the commons, with its absence of the private property suggested by words such as tilth and bourn. Tilth was an ancient Frisian word referring to a plowing or a harrowing—that is, to specific labors, and by implication to the condition of cultivation that stood in contrast to pasture, forest, and waste. It evoked, by association, a return to woodland conditions, which still existed in England and especially in Ireland, where English conquerors had already begun to defoliate the woods to defeat a kin-based society that shared its principal resources. Bourn was a more recent term signifying the boundary between fields, much used in the sixteenth century in the south of England and hence associated with enclosure. Those who had been expropriated had not only a grievance but a living memory and lore of open-field agriculture and commoning. Thus for many people the absence of “bourn, bound of land, tilth” was not an ideal dream but a recent, and lost, reality, an actual commons.

  Open-field farming in Laxton, England, 1632. Booke of Survaye of the Manor of Laxton (1635).

  When Governor Thomas Gates complained that the mutineers of the Sea-Venture retired to the woods and lived like savages, what precisely did he mean? How did savages live? For Gates and his entire generation of Europeans, the classless, stateless, egalitarian societies of America were powerful examples of alternative ways of life. Virginia Company spokesman Robert Gray sounded an often-repeated note about Native Americans: “There is not meum and tuum amongst them.” They had no conception of private property and precious little notion of work itself, as William Strachey discovered: Virginia’s Indians were, he noted, “now for the most parte of the year idle.” Idle, perhaps, but not starving: Sir Henry Colt wrote in 1631 that he saw in St. Christopher, in the West Indies, “many naked Indians, & although their bellyes be to great for their proportions, yett itt shewes ye plentye of ye Hand in ye nourishinge of them.” Such discoveries inflamed the collective imagination of Europe, inspiring endless discussion—among statesmen, philosophers, and writers, as well as the dispossessed—of peoples who lived without property, work, masters, or kings.25