An Aristocratic Pillage

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 37, 30 September 1925, Page 15

An Aristocratic Pillage

(By Joseph Husslbin, in America.)

The width and breadth and depth of the economic disaster implied in the Reformation is only now beginning to be understood. “We talk with a great deal of indignation of the Tweed ring,” says a Protestant divine, the Rev. Dr. Jessopp, in The Great Pillage. “The day will come when some one will rite the story of two other rings: the ring of the miscreants who robbed the monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII was the first; but the ring of the robbers who robbed the poor and helpless in the reign of Edward VI was ten times worse than the first.” From the closing of the monasteries, as the havens of all human miseries and the open inns of God’s poor, the world has never recovered : They burnt the homes of the shaven men, that had been quaint and kind, Till there was no bed in a monk’s house, nor food that man could find. The- inns of God where no man paid, that were the walls of the weak, The King’s Servants ate them all. And still we did not speak. So sang Chesterton of the first of the great deeds of pillage, which took place at the same time with the looting of the churches, and whose spiritual consequences extended with the most dreadful results into the domain of economics. The second act was the robbing of the guild property devoted to religious purposes, which practically implied a complete act of confiscation, since the great funds which the guilds devoted to works of charity and similar objects, were usually most intimately associated with religion and held and administered in its name. Hence the writer upon “Guilds” in the nonCathelic Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics rightly affirms that: “The Reformation by disendowing the religious and social guilds and crippling the organisation of the craft guilds, prepared the way for Poor Law reform and the changes in the industrial revolution which were then shaping.”. The immediate consequences of the royal pillage are thus forcefully described by Dr. Jessopp : “Almshouses in which old men and women were fed and clothed were robbed to the last pound, the poor alms-folk being turned out into the cold at an hour’s warning to beg their broad. Hospitals for the sick and needy, sometimes magnificently provided with nurses and chaplains, whose very raison d’etre was that they were to look after and care for those who were past caring for themselvesthese were stripped of all their belongings, the inmates sent out to hobble into 'some convenient dry ditch to lie down and die in, or to crawl into some barn or hovel there to be tended, not without fear of consequences, by some kindly man or woman who could not bear to see a suffering fellowcreature drop down and die at - their own doorposts.” - ’ . The same results followed in Germany, and Luther’s complaints that people, "after adopting the v “true” religion of his own making

no longer interested themselves in. charity ’ as they had done before, were unavailing, y The princes and their hirelings had eaten : up and spent in horses, luxuries, and vice the dowries of the poor. ‘ f ■ The Royal Bolshevists. -T "3 The looting of the guilds began with the act of Parliament of Henry VIII entitled: “An acte for dissolucion of colleges, chauu- • r‘- m. 5 V LEWISHAM: RETURNS MUST BE SENT ... IN BEFORE 13T: 24th OCTOBER J tries, and free chapelles, at the king’s majestie’s pleasure,” and was brought to its completion in the next reign when the new act, 1 Edward VI c. XIV, demanded that:' “All payments by corporations, misteryes or ; craftes, for priests’ obits and lamps,’ be thenceforth paid to the king. The law itself was entitled ( “An acte whereby certaine chauntries, colleges, free chapelles, and the possessions of the same be given to the king’s majestic.” Writing of the effect of these acts in his work on The Livery Companies of' \ London, William Herbert says: “The effects of the Reformation were severely felt by the livery companies. It had been customary in making gifts and devises ■ to these societies in Catholic times, to charge ; such gifts with annual payments, for supporting chauntries for the souls of the re- ; spective donors; and as scarcely an atom of J property was left without being so restricted, at a period when the supposed efficiency of ; these religious establishments formed part of * the national belief, almost the whole of the .; companies’ Trust Estates became ; liable, jat the Reformation, to change masters with the . change of religion.” , ' ' What was true of these companies, which ; represented the wealthier middle class, was all the more true of the ordinary.craft guild. Enormous loans were next exacted of the | companies and a number of “sponging s expedients” resorted to, by which; as this : writer says; “That ‘mother of her people,’ - Elizabeth, and afterwards James and Charles, * contrived to screw from the companies their wealth.” When forced loans and levies had been pushed as far as they would go, Elisa* beth granted “patents for monopolies arid for ’ the oversight and control of different trades,” Thus in 1590 one of the. Queen’s courtiers, Edward Darcy, sued and obtained a patent : against a leathersellers’ company. This empowered him to set his seal upon all the leather that was to be sold in England, for ! which “he sometimes received the tenth part, v the ninth part, the seventh- the sixth, * the | fourth, and sometimes, and often, the third - part of the value of the commodity.” (Stripe’s .Stow). We are not therefore surprised that - the establishment of guilds was still en- j couraged in Elizabeth’s reign. They were a constant source of revenue to the crown or . the courtiers. The guilds were not discontinued at once:with the Reformation, many . of, them sufficiently recovered from the; confiscation of their property after redeeming

it at a. high cost, but their economic efficiency was a thing of the past. Their soul ( was reft from them with their religion. They Lgradually passed away, or became mere capitalistic societies. : V The way was row open, both for. political autocracy and for individualistic capitalism. What followed is too well known to call for description here. The domestic system, the factory' system, and the industrial revolution are the successive milestones. With each step forward towards a loudly acclaimed national prosperity, the toiling masses were LEWISHAM HOSPITAL ART UNION: SUPPORT IT I SUPPORT IT! ground more helplessly beneath the feet of that merciless idol of modern commercialism to which the Reformation had surrendered them. The free craftsman of the Middle Ages, who could lift up his head as a man and a Christian, without envy of lord or king, had now become the merest slave of the machine and an instrument of wealth. And all this, thanks to the Reformation ! What Might Have Been. But could this catastrophe have been averted by the Church, in view of the great progress in mechanical invention and in other material conditions ? It certainly could have been.- As John L. and Barbara Hammond state the case in their book, The Town Laborer: —• “Religion, in one form or another, might have checked this spirit by rescuing society from a materialistic interpretation, insisting on the conception of man‘as an end in himself (i.e., dependently . upon God), and refusing to surrender that revelation to any science of politics or any law of trade. Such a force was implicit in the medieval religion that had disappeared, good and bad elements alike, at the Reformation.” It had not indeed disappeared with the Reformation, but its voice had for the time been disregarded in the political and economic life of the nations. There was nothing “bad” in the elements of this religion itself. The evil was all, then as now, in the hearts of men and in their Avant of conformity to its teachings. By the unhappy separation from the Church founded by Christ upon Peter men had lost the one and only authority that could with certainty guide and direct them in the principles of social justice and of charity. Under Catholicism,

however unworthy individual representatives of the Church might at times be found, the principles which- they were 'obliged to admit and to teach ever embodied the true spirit of Christian brotherhood. There was consequently not merely the possibility, but the moral certainty of reform. Christian Economics. As a teaching body, the clergy remained true to the unadulterated Gospel of Christ. The doctrine of the Church insisted upon the rights of the workingman, the just and reasonable distribution of earthly goods and the universal law of helpfulness and brotherly dove. It repudiated the claim of the capitalist to dispose at pleasure of his property, without regard to the common good, and! denied in all its phases the theory of a false individualism. So, too, the monk was kept within his strict, but - voluntary, vow of poverty and the ecclesiastic might not appropriate for his own vanity or pleasure the proceeds of his. benefices without defrauding the poor. • To all alike was applied the principle so clearly expressed by St. Thomas in the famous passage quoted by Pope Leo Leo XIII in his Labor Encyclical: “Man should not consider his outward possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to share with them without difficulty when others are in need.” This doctrine has found its practical industrial expression for our own times in the concluding words of the pastoral on Social Reconstruction by the American • bishops: “The laborer’s right to a. decent livelihood is the first moral charge upon industry. The employer has a right to get a reasonable living out of his business, but he has no right to interest on his investment until his employees have obtained at least living wages. This is the human and Christian, in contrast to the purely commercial and pagan, ethics of industry.” So the unbroken tradition is handed down and the inviolate teaching of the Church still continues from the Middle Ages, as it began with the preaching of Christ and the Sermon on the Mount.