SOCIAL HISTORY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVII, Issue 119, 23 May 1939, Page 11

SOCIAL HISTORY

THE' RECENT PAST IN

ENGLAND

GROWTH OF MERCHANT

CLASS

The first W.E.A. lecture in a series of ten on "The Social' History of the English People in the Last 150 Years" was given by- Dr. W. B. Sutch at Petone last week. Dr. Sutch opened his lecture by describing eighteenth century England as typically sheep country and a country" which exported! food. He described "the domestic sysr tern of production .whereby every farmer was a manufacturer.. Each, small holder in his. own house, which, was workroom, and kitchen combined, owned his own loom and his own raw. material, and made up the cloth purely for himself» He himself .owned his means of production; he also was a landed proprietor in the- sense.^ftiat he: owned a few acres, the production of which served; to supply his family in food for- a year.- In short/the-typical-country-dweller was a self-contained unit supplying himself with his own needs.

Dr. Sutch went' on to describe the development of markets. He quoted from' Daniel Defoe's book describing his tour* of: England. Defoe described a market village Where trestles were set up in the street to form counters1. The farmers would each bring one piece of cloth, "at 7 o'clock in the morning t bell rang, the street filled, the counters were covered with goods, each clothier standing behind his piece of cloth. The merchants and their clerks walked up and down between the trestle displays choosing and buying,, and by 8 o'clock in the morning it was all over." This system of production and selling was still the rule over, a great part of England even 'in the time of Nelson, but it was the. coming in of the merchants from the ports which led to the break-up of the self-contained system, so that the merchant not only disposed of surplus cloth, but often supplied the funds for the farmer-manufacturer when he got into debt and later supplied him with raw material and even with the weaver's loom.

Gradually , the domestic system changed to a system where the merchant owned the wool, the yarn, the loom, the stuff, and the mill where the cloth was finished and the shop where it was sold. The farmer-manu-facturer was reduced to being a man who supplied labour only, though he still worked in his own home. It was not the factory system which produced the proletariat. Dr. Sutch also mentioned that on the occasions when knitting frames had been smashed by the knitters, this was not so much a reaction to machinery as a protest against the employer who rented the machines out to them. In England then it had been the growth of the merchant class and the trading class that had established the beginnings of the capitalist system.

In those days the typical food of the people of England -was bread made of rye, barley, oats, and in good times wheat, cheese, and occasionally milk (but mainly water), some beer, and on very rare occasion^ meat. In those times also it was impossible to go, say, from Liverpool to London otherwise than on horseback or on foot. Bristol was then the second town of England and its merchants had amassed wealth as a result of the extensive trade in slaves, 60 ships a year coming into the port laden with slaves. This practically stopped in 1806. London was the biggest city in the world, but there was no provision for lighting the streets or cleaning the \ streets or paving the streets, and three-quarters of- the children born died before they reached five years old.

Dr. Sutch will lecture on Thursday on the dispossession of the free .cottagers from their land in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.