This Little Britain

by Harry Bingham

  The bill was too much. It went too far for the spirit of the age, and parliament ended up settling for a more traditional bill—urging charity for those in genuine need, while at the same time imposing tough measures on the able-bodied vagabond. A succession of further bills prodded restlessly at the same barrage of issues. Should vagabonds be whipped, stocked or bound over as slaves? Should the impotent poor be prohibited from begging, allowed to beg freely or permitted to beg only under licence and if wearing a badge? But for all parliament’s vacillation, the drift was towards a more organized social response to need. In 1570—that is, while Harman’s Caveat was still selling like hot buns on a cold night—the city of Norwich launched a sweeping anti-poverty crusade that offered skills training, education, health-care, work and custodial support. The city employed thirty-four physicians and other practitioners (one third of them women) to offer care. A census was taken to establish who was sick, who old and who disabled, in order that the city authorities could take due responsibility for their care. Norwich was ahead of the game, but the country was moving fast in the same direction.

  A bout of poor harvests in the 1580s, then again in the 1590s, brought matters to a head. The displaced poor had become a serious social problem. Would the country choose to act decisively or ignore the problem? It chose to act. The Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601 were a radical step forward in the state care of the poor. Overseers were to be appointed in every parish to dispense funds for poor relief, which were to be raised by compulsory taxation. Overseers were to provide cash for food, and, if needed, medical care and housing as well. Work was to be provided for those who were poor but able-bodied.

  This was no mere paper law. The system actually did what was asked of it. Overseers were appointed, taxes were levied, poor relief funds were distributed. The Elizabethan Poor Laws—themselves the product of a long-established parish-centred tradition—formed the most generous, the most comprehensive and the most uniform system of social welfare anywhere in Europe. Indeed, one of its most striking features was its endurance. It was inevitable, for example, that from time to time those in power would become anxious about the cost of the system, and seek to restrict the payments made by parish overseers. Yet those overseers stuck to their task, and were more often than not supported by magistrates in so doing. The law required them to relieve poverty. To a highly impressive degree, that’s exactly what they tried to do. In 1696 (the date of the earliest vaguely reliable estimate), the system distributed just under 1 per cent of national income, or enough to help about 3.5 per cent of the population. A hundred years later, the system swallowed 2 per cent of national income and reached 10-15 per cent of the population. Private charitable and Church-mediated endeavours would have added signficantly to these totals.

  Migrants continued to arouse fear and suspicion. One of the great themes of poor law reform would be the tension between returning vagabonds to their parish of origin and seeking to permit the labour force enough mobility to keep up with a changing economy. But such concerns, as is amply clear to us, will never go away. Economies change. Labour moves. Generous benefit provision simultaneously helps the poor and attracts the cheats. Those Polish jokes (or Irish, Welsh or Cornish ones), like the poor, will be always with us.

  There’s a broader lesson in all this, though, and one that touches on one of the roots of British identity. One of the themes of this book is how very capitalist England, and later Britain, was. Long before the Industrial Revolution, England was the most capitalist society in Europe. Yet where is the red-in-tooth-and-claw energy of that capitalism now? The other day I listened to a radio phone-in that was discussing the need for proper regulation of estate agents. (In my defence, I should point out that it was a long journey and the only alternative was The Archers.) The presenter took it for granted that estate agents should be better regulated. The professional body of estate agents, whatever that is, agreed that regulation was needed. Every caller to the programme agreed that regulation was overdue. Not a single dissenting voice was raised. Why not? Had this been the USA, wouldn’t someone have phoned in to say something along the lines of: ‘Now I don’t like realtors any more than the next guy, but if there’s one thing I hates worse than a goldarn realtor, it’s the goldarn government poking its cotton-pickin’ nose into other people’s business’? In America, the market’s ability to weed out the scammers and incompetents is trusted more widely than the government’s. Why is this voice more or less inaudible in Britain? What has happened to those capitalist ultras of the past?

  The answer is that those capitalist ultras never forgot their social responsibilities. Ours has been a radically capitalist society for sure, but it also led the way in the protection of the needy. In part, it stood at the forefront of things because its state institutions functioned very well, very early. In Elizabeth’s England, it was possible to pull a parliamentary lever and effect the proper response in virtually every parish in the country. Less well-functioning states couldn’t have achieved that trick, even if they’d wanted to. But the English parliament didn’t simply have the power to pull that lever: it actually pulled it and made sure that it stayed pulled. Although members of parliament were property owners, and therefore would be paying for the Poor Law rather than profiting from it themselves, the swell of opinion remained solidly in favour of effective poor relief. In short, as a society, our national ideology has long been both that the government should protect the vulnerable and that it’s more than capable of doing so.

  William Bromyard, an English Dominican of the fourteenth century, wanting to remind his readers that social rank had nothing to do with intrinsic value, wrote that all ‘are descended from the same first parents and all come from the same mud’. As a society, we believed that then and very largely still believe it now, whether we’re English, Welsh, Scots—or Polish.

  THE LAWMAKERS

  A BETTIR LAWE

  To judge them by their constitutions, most states are short-lived creatures, generally living no longer than a single human lifespan. Germany, Italy and Japan all acquired their founding documents in the wake of the Second World War. Since the fall of the Bastille, France has been through two empires and five republics, and has existed in its current incarnation only since 1958. Canada, being somewhat British, is something of an oddity and only formally acquired authority over its own constitution in 1982. Seen through this lens, the ‘New World’ of the United States is really no such thing, as the country boasts the oldest written constitution still operative today.

  And Britain? It’s a conventional politeness to say that we have no written constitution, but the phrase is a figleaf, concealing nakedness. The point of a constitution, after all, is to place limits on politicians. Ordinary legislative acts generally need just a simple majority to get them into law. Changes to the constitution require something much more significant: two-thirds majorities, approval by states or provinces, plebiscites or whatever. Britons enjoy no such protections. If a prime minister wanted to repeal Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights or any of the Representation of the People Acts, he could do so, with no more legal machinery in his way than would exist if he wanted to tinker with the last Fisheries Act but one.

  If our attitude to our own state machinery looks almost shockingly laid back, then the state opening of parliament suggests one possible reason: namely that the whole thing is just some giant kitsch pantomime thrown together as a joke played on passing Americans. The cast list includes the Lord Great Chamberlain, Black Rod, the Serjeant-at-Arms, the Lord Privy Seal and the Yeomen of the Guard (who are made to hunt for imaginary barrels of gunpowder in the cellars). The props list incorporates the Royal Standard, the Great Sword of State, the Imperial State Crown, the Cap of Maintenance, the Mace and very much more. All this sounds like Harry Potter crossed with Alice in Wonderland; it certainly seems like no way to run a modern state.

  That shouldn’t come as a surprise. If the system looks medieval, that’s because it is medieval. If an unwritten consituti
on seems dangerously lax, that’s because our traditions arose aeons before anyone had thought of putting such things in writing. If we agree for a moment to permit the oxymoron of an unwritten constitution, then Britain’s constitution is by far the oldest in the world, its parliamentary tradition so old that, as with so many British things, it’s meaningless even to ask when it first arose. To get a sense of how far and deep this tradition stretches, consider the way acts of parliament are passed. The conventional preamble to a modern act of parliament reads as follows:

  Be it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows…

  The first Statute of Westminster, passed in 1275, opened in almost exactly the same way:

  These are the Acts of King Edward, son to King Henry, made at Westminster at his first general parliament after his coronation…by his council and with the assent of the archbishops, bishops, abbots, priors, earls, barons and the community of the realm being thither summoned…*

  Those archbishops, bishops, abbots and priors equate to today’s ‘Lords Spiritual’. The earls and barons represent today’s ‘Lords Temporal’. The ‘community of the realm’ may not have had a precise formal meaning, but Edward’s parliament on that occasion contained commoners—knights and burgesses—from which seed the modern House of Commons would grow.

  The similarities between the parliament now and its predecessor of seven centuries back don’t end there. It would be easy, for instance, to dismiss those commoners at Edward’s parliament as merely bystanders to the main event, as inconsequential to proceedings as the pretence of ballot boxes in Soviet Russia. Yet it would be wrong to do so. That 1275 parliament was significant because it brought into being the Statute of Westminster, which ordered, among other things, that, ‘because elections ought to be free, the king commandeth on pain of his great forfeiture that no one, great man or any other person, by force of arms, nor by malice shall disturb any from making free elections’. Those elections were genuinely national affairs. Edward had, after all, summoned, ‘from each of the cities, boroughs and market towns of your bailiwick six or four citizens, burgesses or other good men’, all of whom were to be elected. Indeed, at that 1275 parliament, elected representatives would have been in a clear majority of those present. That’s not to suggest, of course, that English government back then was an entirely democratic affair. It plainly wasn’t, yet it remains a stunning thought that the principle of free elections in England is more than seven hundred years old.

  Although parliament as we recognize it today had its birth in medieval times, our tradition of consultative government arose far earlier still. When King Ine of Wessex passed a new set of laws in around 694, they were documented as having been enacted by:

  Ine, by the grace of God, king of the West Saxons, with the advice and instruction of…[my bishops] along with all my ealdormen and the chief councillors of my people.

  Queen Elizabeth hardly says anything different today. That’s as far back as we can trace this particular formula for enacting laws, but the tradition of consultation goes as far back into the past as it is possible to peer. When King Edwin of Northumbria encountered the Christian gospel in 627, he was moved to accept it, but was well aware that such a decision, in a king, was a matter not merely of private faith, but of public policy too. Edwin therefore did what any Anglo-Saxon monarch would have done: he took advice. Bede reports the moment as follows:

  [King Edwin] answered that he was both willing and bound to receive the faith which [Bishop Paulinus] taught; but that he would confer about it with his principal friends and counselors, to the end that, if they also were of his opinion, they might all be cleansed together in Christ, the Fountain of Life. Paulinus consenting, the king did as he said; for holding a council with the wise men, he asked of every one in particular what he thought of the new doctrine and the new worship that was preached…

  Edwin’s counsellors advised in favour. The rest is history: approximately fourteen Christian centuries of it. Before the seventh century, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (mostly sitting at home in Angeln, Saxony* and Jutland) were non-Christian and non-literate. Although their consultative traditions certainly long pre-dated Christianity, we just don’t have the written records to say much about that earlier period.

  The age of our constitutional tradition is exceptional enough, but its nature perhaps still more so. Ours was that rarest of things: a political custom by which the supreme ruler was meant to listen to his counsellors and actually did so. The Norman Conquest came closest to snuffing the idea out for ever. William the Conqueror, coming from a politically unsophisticated and relatively young state, was too savvy an operator simply to dismantle the political institutions of England, already the most politically developed country in Europe. But the institutions he did most to retain (the hundred and shire, the shire court and sheriff, the Anglo-Saxon writs, and so on) were all valuable to a king seeking firm political control. The key mechanism by which a king consulted his people was the old Anglo-Saxon witan. In William’s day, those witans were still used (though under the new name of council), but they had undergone a subtle yet important shift. Though William certainly had advisers and listened to what they had to tell him, the idea that the king might be constrained by any such advice would have struck him as barmy. William, like the current governor of California, was no ‘girlie-man’, and he wasn’t about to start acting like one.

  Nevertheless, as time passed, the older pre-Norman tradition bubbled up again, too strong to be resisted. Partly, it was necessity. All across late medieval Europe, the existence of weak kings and strong barons virtually demanded some kind of formal body to reconcile arguments between the two. Institutions that enabled kings to treat with their principal subjects as a group were a more or less standard feature of late medieval states. The French had their parlement and Estates-General. Comparable structures existed in Spain, the Netherlands, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire and elsewhere. Such similarities shouldn’t, however, disguise the way in which England was utterly exceptional. The Estates-General might look a bit like an English parliament, but it wasn’t the same beast at all. It was more like a tool of royal propaganda, a megaphone that allowed the king to project his voice farther and louder than he otherwise could.

  Not so in England. The English parliament, uniquely in Europe, came to possess an iron grip over taxation. Although the king controlled his own ordinary revenues (from his estates, the sale of lands and offices, and so forth), any special tax required consent, and that consent was by no means always forthcoming. The English parliament likewise came to have legal authority too. No law would be recognized unless passed by both houses of parliament—including, vitally, the elected representatives of the people—and agreed by the king. In 1327, a parliament even went so far as to depose a king,* more than three centuries before a later parliament would come to execute one.

  English parliaments also reached much farther down the social strata than any comparable European body. In the (admittedly exceptional) moment of Simon de Montfort’s victory in 1265, commoners were called upon to deliberate on issues of the very highest statecraft. As Simon Schama puts it: ‘So a cloth merchant or a Suffolk knight with a few acres now got to judge the terms on which the son of the king might safely be released from captivity!’ In short, that Anglo-Saxon tradition of consultation ran so deep that the incoming Normans never managed to quash it. Rather the opposite: kings learned to use it as a way of resolving disputes and overcoming crises. The more the old tradition was revived and re-established, the more impossible it became to imagine other ways of doing things.

  The English system wasn’t just different, it was better: better at conveying the people’s feelings to the monarch, better at making sure that the monarch respected them. 1470, Sir John Fortescue wrote that there were two different sorts of kingdom: the absolute monarch
y and the constitutional one, represented for him by France on the one hand, England on the other.

  The first kynge mey rule his peple bi suche lawes as he makyth hym self. And therefore he may sett uppon thaim tayles [taxes] and other imposicions, such as he wol [desires] hymself, with owt thair assent. The secounde kynge may not rule his peple bi other lawes than such as thai assenten unto. And therfore he mey sett upon thaim non imposicions with owt thair owne assent…Blessyd be God, this lande [England] is rulid under a bettir lawe; and therfore the peple therof be not in such peynurie, nor therby hurt in thair persons, but…have all thinges nescessarie to the sustenance of nature.

  This book is about British exceptionalism, forty-three short chapters picking out various aspects of our history where the British way has differed sharply from the ways of others. The book ranges across everything from Anglo-Saxon English to the development of men’s fashion. But if you want to know where the very heart of our exceptionalism lies, then it’s right here, in John Fortescue’s ‘bettir lawe’: a people’s right to assent to the laws that govern them, Britain’s chiefest protection through the ages, her most important contribution to the world.

  * The passage has been translated from Norman French, and was the first statute not to have been written in Latin. Since change for change’s sake is not a British vice, medieval French is still in use today. When the Lords assent to a bill sent from the Commons, the endorsement is phrased: ‘A ceste Bille les Seigneurs sont assentus.’ The standard formula for royal assent is, ‘La Reyne le veult.’