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Home | 18-19th Centuries Index
BRITAIN in the mid-1700s
Britain was still predominantly rural like the continent. Fanaticism was more feared and intellect more respected. Restraint in the expression of passion had become more of a mark of a gentleman and good manners had become more valued as a barrier against conflict.
Britain's bourgeoisie debated religion and politics in coffeehouses, clubs, salons, literary societies and academies. Mostly intellectuals favored the existing constitutional monarchy -- as had Locke. But England still had its republicans and people dissatisfied with liberal revolution of 1688 -- the so-called Glorious Revolution.
As had happened among the Dutch, shifting religious beliefs and rising commerce, was accompanied by a decline in demand for religious uniformity -- a step away from the belief, prevalent in the Middle Ages, that those with views different from one's own were evil.
The orderly cosmos described by Isaac Newton in the late 1600s was seen as a model for government organization. With Copernicus, Galileo and Newton a new optimism about the benefits of learning had arisen among an intellectual elite, in conflict with the old and common belief that the world was a mystery never to be fathomed by humanity. Many continued to believe in God's interventions, including people who believed in science, but the belief that the world functioned solely by God's magic was starting to decline, as was the belief that all humanity needed to get by was spontaneity and proper religious attitude.
Britain was becoming more literate. Personal correspondence and other forms of writing were on the rise. Literate folks gathered in groups interested in science or literature. A variety of learned journals were published. Book production increased, and so too did newspaper distribution. More people believed in the efficacy of literacy. In Scotland in 1700 around 45 percent the population could read, and by the end of the 1700s it would rise to 85 percent. England's literacy rate in this period would rise from 45 to 63 percent.
Until the 1720s, England's population growth had been held in check by periodic harvest failures and by diseases such as influenza, smallpox, dysentery and typhus. At around 5.25 million in 1720, England's population would be around nine million at the end of the century. [note] London's population in this period rose from around 700,000 to over one million. [note] This was larger than Paris, despite France having more than three times England's population. With the rise in Britain's commerce, London had become busier place and had been gathering more people from England's rural areas and from Scotland, Wales and Ireland. And London also had migrants from Germany, Holland and France. London had become a great center for the arts and fashion.
Early in the century Thomas Newcomen created a steam driven piston in a cylinder, used for pumping water from mines. However, Britain remained largely unadvanced in technology. Watches, for example, were still inaccurate curiosities. People kept time by the ringing of church bells. And more importantly, Britain was still dependent on waterpower. But in the 1700s, productivity and real wages were inching upwards. People's lives were improving materially. They were able to get more in return for their labor. Britain was exporting more grain than it was importing. Britain was a big producer of woolen cloth, and it led the world in maritime trade.
Class privilege remained. A few owned much of the country's agricultural land. Some others owned small farms. Some people rented land from the big landowners, giving the landowner a share of the wealth they produced. And many others labored for wages on the landowner's property and were able to graze a pig or a cow on the village common.
The king of England still exercised executive powers. His ministers gained powers in the 1700s, the king seen as a unifying force while parliament was torn by conflict between Tories (conservatives) and Whigs (liberals). Queen Mary II had died in 1694 and her husband William II in 1702, leaving Mary's sister, Anne, as queen of Great Britain and Ireland and as governor of the Church of England. And when Anne died in 1714 her Catholic half-brother, James, was passed over in favor of a distant Protestant relative -- in keeping with Parliament's requirements. The new king was a Lutheran from Hanover, Germany, and held onto his rule there while taking on his duties in Great Britain as king George I. A rebellion by supporters of James -- called Jacobites -- was crushed. George I ruled to 1727, never having learned English, and he was succeeded by his more Anglicized son, George II, who ruled to 1760, followed by his grandson, George III.
Religion remained an issue as Great Britain moved into the 1700s. The dominant religious body remained the Church of England (the Anglicans), which conservatives considered the orthodox faith. The Church of England was favored by England's landowning elite, and parliament's House of Lords was an Anglican preserve. Referring to the Church of England, the conservative political party, the Tories, was also called the 'Church' party.
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers were called Dissenters. In England in 1689, religious pluralism had been legalized, but the Blasphemy Act of 1698 had made denial of the Trinity punishable by imprisonment. Denying that Christianity was the truth or denying the authority of the Scriptures was also made illegal. But these laws were rarely invoked. In England, the last execution for heresy had been in the early 1600s, and the last to have been executed in Scotland for heresy was a nineteen year-old student at Edinburgh in 1698.
From 1710 to 1714, conservatives tried to revive the union between the state and the Church of England. They feared that if people were left free to choose their religion there would be a dramatic spread of Dissenters. Also they thought that religious disunity was an affront to God, that it threatened the salvation of individuals and national security. Some Anglican conservatives also blamed crime and vice on religious disunity. But the conservatives failed to pass their legislation. In the 1720s they also failed in their effort to strengthen the laws against blasphemy.
To the surprise of the conservatives, the number of Dissenters remained stagnant. The Church of England remained dominant in rural England, in the universities and in grammar schools, while the Dissenters remained strongest in the cities and with the middle class. And from the Anglicans a small new denomination emerged. Two Anglicans at Oxford University, John Wesley and George Whitefield, started a movement dedicated to nurturing spirituality through prayers, devotional readings, self-examination, fasting, frequent communion and good works, which won them the nickname of Methodist.
Catholics remained a persecuted minority, largely clustered in remote parts of the country, as Protestants remained fearful of plots to bring Catholicism back via England's enemies abroad -- Spain or France.
Protestant "dissenters" continued to be able to run for a seat in parliament, but their representation there was small, and Dissenters did not enjoy legal equality with the Anglicans. A law passed in 1753 held that only marriages performed by an Anglican clergyman were legal. Dissenters might be denied the right of burial in a churchyard. They might receive discriminatory consideration in a court of law. And Dissenters had to pay a special tax.
People in Britain drank, gambled and fought duels. Moralists worried about the rise in sexual promiscuity and a decline in family values. They preached on the need of women to resist men inflamed by libertine principles and pornographic literature and the need of women to remain virgins until marriage. Prostitution was rampant. A German visitor to London complained of passing a "lewd female" every ten yards on a December evening along Fleet Street, including girl prostitutes as young as twelve. [note]
Crime was increasing with the advancing economy. In London were habitual offenders and gangs of delinquent youths. Responding to crime, politicians made more offenses punishable by death. Capital crimes numbered in the dozens, including horse and sheep stealing and shoplifting to the value of five shillings. But rather than being hanged, many deemed guilty of a capital crime were sent to the Americas.
English law had been created across centuries. It was a gathering of complexities and contradictions -- void of elegant simplicity. The influence of Roman law on English law remained a rumor -- Roman law used only occasionally as a mere ornament to the considerations of jurists. Law in England was drawn from English experience, and it was criticized for its anomalies, complexity, uncertainties, its slowness, its tedious forms, its confounding of simple matters into confusing language that helped enrich lawyers at the expense of honest people.
In the mid-1700s, a lawyer named William Blackstone made a name for himself writing and lecturing in praise of English law. And in writing about the law he improved it. He tried to bring the law into conformity with science and the age of reason. Blackstone mapped the law's tortuous complexities and depicted the nation's constitution and laws as a reflection of the natural order of the cosmos and the nation's development across history. British law and liberty he wrote was the "noblest inheritance of mankind."
Blackstone approved of law which held that husband and wife were one person and that the husband was that person. In other words, Blackstone approved of law that held that a wife had no right to own property in her own name and that the wages she earned belonged to her husband.
Blackstone was not without his contradictions. He claimed that the power of parliament was absolute and elsewhere in his work that the legislature could not destroy human rights. But he advanced the use of such phrases as crimes and misdemeanors, ex post facto law, due process, and judicial power. Blackstone denounced slavery as inimical to "natural rights" and to British law. He advanced the idea that the instant any slave landed in England he or she was free. And acting on general principles of "God-given right," English law, he claimed, protected "a Jew, a Turk or a heathen as well as to those who press the true religion of Christ." He described freedom of the press as "essential to the nature of a free state." And trial by jury he called the "glory of the English law."
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Copyright © 2001 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.