R.H.tawney Religious Thought

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Religious Thought on Social and Economic Questions in the Sixteenth and SeventeenthCenturiesAuthor(s): R. H. TawneySource: The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 31, No. 5 (Oct., 1923), pp. 637-674Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1824578.

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RELIGIOUS THOUGHT ON SOCIALAND ECONOMICQUESTIONS IN THE SIXTEENTH ANDSEVENTEENTH CENTURIESII. THE COLLISION OF STANDARDS

Lord Acton, in an unforgettable passage in his inaugural lec-ture on the study of history, has said that after many ages per-suaded of the headlong decline and impending dissolution ofsociety, the sixteenth century went forth armed for untried experi-ence and ready to watch with hopefulness a prospect of incalcu-lable change. His reference was to the new world revealed bylearning, by science, and by discovery. But his words offer an ap-propriate text for a discussion of the change in the conception ofthe relationbetween religionand what would today be regardedas secularaffairs,whichtook place in the sameperiod,andwhichhad as an inevitable consequence the emergence, after a prolongedmoral and intellectual conflict, of new lines of economic thought.Its results are not fully apparent for a century and a half afterthe Reformation. But their range, when finally disclosed, isimmense. There is a sense in which the most momentous of allrevolutions in political thought is that which substitutes for asupernatural criterion of society one version or another of socialexpediency, and-a natural corollary-places religion among theprivate interests which have their places in the social order, butwhich must not overstep it. By the middle of the seventeenthcenturythat changeis in Englandfar on the road to completion.In the sphere of philosophical thought, a naturalistic theory hasreplaced that which found the ultimate sanction of the socialorder in religion, and the ground is prepared for the doctrinewhich sees the foundation of society in individual rights andsecurity for its well-being in the spontaneous play of economicinterests. In the sphere of ecclesiastical organization the timeis approaching when the idea of a church civilization, embracingall sides of life, will give way to that of the church as a voluntarysociety, concerned with what are conceived to be things of the

637


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638 R. H. TAWNEYspirit. This is not the place for a discussion of the larger aspectsof that movement. But one result of it was a radical change inthe conception entertained both previously and later of the rela-tion of religion to the common business of life. It is certainaspects of that change-the struggle of the traditional socialphilosophy with the new forces and ideas which germinated inthe sixteenth century-which form the subject of this, and ofthe following, article.

The strands in this movement were complex, and the formulawhich associates the Reformation with the rise of economicindividualism is, as I shall hope to show, no complete explana-tion. Systems prepare their own overthrow by a preliminaryprocess of petrifaction. The traditional social philosophy wasstatic, in the sense that it assumed a body of class relationssharply defined by custom and law, and little affected by the ebband flow of economic movements. Its weakness in the face ofnovel forces was as obvious as the strain put upon it by the revoltagainst the source of ecclesiastical jurisprudence, the partial dis-credit of the Canon Law and of ecclesiastical discipline, and therise of a political science equipped from the arsenals of antiquity.But it is not to underestimate the effect of the religious revolutionto say that the principal causes making the age a watershed fromwhich new streams of social theory descend lay in another region.Mankind does not reflect upon questions of economic and socialorganization until compelled to do so by the sharp pressure ofsome practical emergency. The sixteenth century was an ageof social speculation for the same reason as the early nineteenth-because it was an age of social dislocation. The practicalimplications of the social theory of the Middle Ages are statedmore clearly in the sixteenth century than even in its zenith,because they are stated with the emphasis of a creed which ismenaced. The retort of conservative religious teachers to whatseems to them the triumph of Mammon produces the last greatliterary expression of the appeal to the average conscience whichhad been made by an older social order. It is the cry of a spiritwhich is departing, and which, in its agony, utters words thatare a shining light for all periods of change.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 639The character of the change in the economic environment

canonlybe indicated. On the heelsof the commercial evolutionwhich depressedVenice and made Antwerp, came the economicimperialismof Portugal and Spain, the outburst of capitalistenterprise n commerceand bankingwhich had its headquartersin SouthGermanyand its frontin the Low Countries,the shatter-ing of customarystandardsby the risein prices,the developmentof capitalist organizationin textiles and mining, the rise of thenew systems of public finance needed by the new centralizedstates, and the reaction of all these together on the traditionalrural organization,enhancedby the mania of land speculationwhich followedthe confiscationof ecclesiasticalproperty. Eng-land felt the effects of the last three changes; but till the lateryears of the century she stood outside the main stream. Ger-man politics and literature are full of them. If one figure ismoretypical of the age than another,it is that of the South Ger-man financiers,the Imhofs, Welsers,Hochstetters, above all theFuggers,who play in the world of finance the part of the con-dottieri in war, and represent n the economicspherethe renais-sance morality typified in that of politics by Macchiavelli'sPrince. Naturally the city interest is all-powerful. Politicalpamphleteersmight write that the new Messiah was the Prince,and reformersthat the Prince was Pope. But behind Princeand Pope alike, financing impartiallyEnglish, French, and Ital-ians, the Pope, the Emperor,FrancisI, and the King of Portugal,stands in the last resort a little Germanbanker,with agents inevery city in Europe. And the financial classes are fully con-sciousof theirpower. The head of the firm of FuggerIadvancedthe money to Albrecht of Brandenburg,which made him Arch-bishop of Mainz, sent his agent to accompany Tetzel on hisfinancialcampaignto raise money by indulgencesand took halfthe proceedsin payment of the debt; provided the funds withwhich Charles V bought the imperial crown after an electionconductedwith the publicity of an auction and the morals of agamblinghell, browbeathim when the debt was not paid, and

Z For an account of the international transactions and influence of that firm,see Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger.


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640 R. H. TAWNEYdied in the odor of sanctity, a count of the empire, and a goodCatholic who hated Lutheranism, having seen his firm pay 542per cent for the preceding sixteen years, and having built achurch and endowed an almshouse for the aged poor in hisnative town of Augsburg.

The revolution in the economic environment-large scalecommerce and finance, monopolies controlling supplies and prices,commercialized land tenure and competitive rents-inevitablygave rise to passionate controversy; and inevitably, since boththe friends and the enemies of the Reformation associated it withsocial change, the leaders in the religious struggle were the pro-tagonists in it. In Germany, where social revolution had beenfermenting for half a century, it seemed at last to have come.From city after city terrified councils, confronted with demandsfor the destruction of the money-lender, consulted universitiesand theologians as to the lawfulness of usury. Luther' andMelanchthon-to mention no others-replied to them; Bullinger2produced a classical statement on the subject in his Decades,dedicated to Edward VI; Calving wrote a famous letter on it.Luther preached and pamphleteered against extortioners andmonopolists and said that it was time to put a bit in the mouthof the holy company of the Fuggers. Above all the Peasants'Revolt, with its touching appeal to the Gospel and its frightfulcatastrophe, not only terrified Luther, who had seemed at firstnot unsympathetic, into the notorious outburst of his pamphlet

Whoso can, against the thieving and murderousbands of peasants. ... strike, smite, strangle, or stab, secretly or publicly.

''Such wonderful times are these that a prince canmerit Heaven better with bloodshed than another with prayer,but stamped into Lutheranism a distrust of the common peopleand an almost servile reliance on the secular authority.

In England there was less violence, but not less agitation.The land question produced one flood of sermons and pamphlets;

I For citations see Neumann, Geschichtedes Wuchers n Deutschland,pp. 479-92.2 Third Decade, first and second sermons (Parker Society).3 Epist. et Responsa, p. 355; see also Sermon LXXXIV in Vol. XXVIII of

Opera.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 64Ithe rise in prices another; the question of capital and interest athird; the discovery that the dissolution of the monasteries andthe confiscation of part of the gild property had not producedthe golden age of low taxation, learning, piety, and poor relief,foretold in the state-conducted propaganda of Henry and Crom-well, a fourth. Latimer, Ponet, Becon, Lever, Crowley underEdward VI, Sandys, Jewel and Wilson under Elizabeth-tomention no others-all contributed to the discussion.' A clericalpamphleteer2 at the beginning of the seventeenth century issued acatalogue of six bishops and ten doctors of divinity, apart fromunnumbered humbler clergy, who had written on the subject ofusury alone. Starkey3 put into the mouth of Pole a programof conservative reconstruction drafted for Henry VIII. Bucer4prepared a radical one for his pupil, the pathetic child called KingEdward VI. Latimer supplied the moral doctrine which the ill-fated Somerset tried to apply when he set out on his attempt-which cost him his head-to undo the economic changes of twogenerations by throwing down the gentry's enclosures. What-ever the social practice of the sixteenth century may have been,it did not suffer for lack of social teaching on the part of men ofreligion. If the world could be saved by sermons and pamphletsit would have been a Paradise.

The mark of nearly all this body of teaching, alike in Germanyand in England, is its conservatism. Where questions of socialmorality are involved, men whose names are a symbol of religiousrevolution, stand with hardly an exception in the ancient ways,appeal to medieval authorities, and reproduce in popular lan-guage the teaching of the schoolmen. There is a familiar viewof the social history of the sixteenth century which represents

I Latimer, Sermons; Ponet, An Exhortation, or rather a Warning to the Lordsand Commons; Becon. Jewel of Joy (Parker Society); Lever, Sermonsin the Shroudsof St. Paul's (Arber's Reprints); Crowley, The Way to Wealth and Epigrams(E.E.T.S.); Sandys, second, tenth, and eleventh of Sermons (Parker Society);Jewel, Works,fourth part, p. I293 (ibid.); Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury by wayof Dialogue and Oration.

2 The English Usurer, or Usury Condemnedby the Most Learned and FamousDivines of the Churchof England, by John Blaxton, i634.

3 Dialogue betweenPole and Lupset (E.E.T.S.). 4 De Regno Christi.


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642 R. I. TAWNEYthe Reformation as the triumph of an individualist capitalismover the traditional social ethics of Christendom. It is of respect-able antiquity. As early as I540 Cranmer wrote to Ozianderprotesting against the embarrassment caused to reformers inEngland by the sanction to immorality, in the matter alike ofeconomic transactions and of marriage, alleged to be given byreformers in Germany.' Even before the plunder of the religioushouses by the Crown and its hangers-on was completed, thereformers who had hoped great things for learning and religionwere disillusioned and the cry was raised that it meant not onlysacrilege, but the exploitation of the peasantry by an odiousclass of nouveaux riches.2 In the seventeenth century an Eng-lish pamphleteer, in a partisan sketch of the history of opinion,could write that it was well known that usury was the brat ofheresy, 3 and Bossuet4 taunted Bucer and Calvin with being thefirst theologians to defend extortion. That the revolt from Romesynchronized, both in Germany and in England, with a period ofacute social distress, is undeniable. No long argument is neededto show that both in motive and in effect it had its seamy side.In England the policy of giving everyone who counted a solidmaterial interest in the new order was openly avowed, and theintention of floating the Reformation as a land syndicate withfavorable terms for all who came in on the ground floor was notconcealed. Having invested in the Reformation when it was agambling stock, the landed gentry nurse the security with a solici-tude which title deeds have done more to inspire than the NewTestament and are zealous to lay up for themselves treasures inHeaven as the best security for the treasures they have alreadyaccumulated on earth.

It is a mistake, no doubt, to see the last days of monasticismthrough rose-colored spectacles. In Germany revolts were' Gairdner, L. and P. Hen VIII, Vol. XVI, p. 35I.2 See, e.g., The Sermons of Lever.3 Brief Survey of the Growthof Usury in England, with the Mischiefs AttendingIt (i673).4 Bossuet, TraitM e l'usure; for a discussion of his views see Favre, Le Pret dinter~tdans l'ancienne France.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 643nowhere more frequent or more bitter than on the estates ofecclesiastical land-owners. In England a glance at the pro-ceedings of the courts of Star Chamber and of Requests isenough to show that holy men reclaimedvilleins, turned copy-holders nto tenants at will, and (as more complained)convertedarable and to pasture. But it is hardly doubtfulthat the trans-ferenceof great masses of property,with a capital value in ourmoney of ?30,000,000 to ?40,000,000, from conservative cor-porations to sharp business men like Gresham-the largestsingle granteeof monastic estates-followed as it was by a decadeof land speculation,pressed cruelly on many of the peasantry.The lamentations of the preachers and men of letters receivedetailed confirmationfrom the bitter struggles which can betraced between tenants and some of the new landlords-theHerbertswho obtained the lands of the Abbey of Wilton andenclosed a whole village to make their park at Washerne, theSt. John'sat Abbots'Ripton, or SirJohn Yorke, third in the lineof speculators in the lands of Whitby Abbey, whose tenantsfound their rents raised from ?28 to ?64 a year, and for nearlytwenty years were besieging the governmentwith petitions forredress.2What is sometimes suggested, however, is not merely acoincidence of religious and economic changes, but a logicalconnection of economic conduct and religious doctrine. Itis implied that the bad social practice of the age was the inevi-table expressionof its religious innovations, that one order ofsocialethicswas consciouslyabandonedand anotherintroduced,and that, if the Reformers did not explicitly teach economicindividualism, ndividualismwas, at least, the natural corollaryof their teaching. In the eighteenthcentury,which had as littlelove forthe commercial estrictionsof the agesof monkishsuper-stition as for theirpolitical theory, that view was advancedas aeulogy. In our own day, the wheel has come full circle. Whatwas then a matter for congratulation s often now a matter for

I Savine, quoted Fisher, The Political History of England I485-1547, App. ii,and in OxfordSocial and Legal History Series, Vol. II.

2Leadam, Select Cases in the Court of Requests.


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644 R. H. TAWNEYcriticism. The Reformation is attacked as inaugurating a periodof unscrupulous commercialism, which had previously been heldin check, it is suggested, by the influence of the church.The question raised is obviously fundamental. An attempt ismade in a subsequent article on the Social Ethics of Puritanismto show the effect of one branch of the reformed religion upon so-cial theory, and, through it, upon conduct. But, if it is true thatthe Reformation gave an impetus to a change in the attitude ofreligious thought to economic issues, it did so without designand against the intentions of most reformers. To think of theabdication of religion from its theoretical primacy over economicactivity and social institutions as synchronizing with the revoltfrom Rome is to antedate a movement which took another cen-tury and a half to accomplish, and which owed as much both tochanges in economic organization and in political thought-inparticular to the impact upon social theory of the mathematicaland physical sciences-as to changes in religion. In the sixteenthcentury the time had not yet come when religious teachers wouldcease to search both the Bible and the Corpus Juris Canonici forlight on practical questions of social morality. Even in the mid-dle of the seventeenth century in Holland, the most advancedcommercial country of the age, the development of banking wasto give rise to a storm of theological controversy. Even in i673,in the England of joint stock companies and high finance, Bax-ter was to write a Christian directory setting out a detailedcasuistry of Christian conduct in the manner of a medievalsumma. Naturally, therefore, as far as the first generation ofreformers was concerned, there was no intention among eitherLutherans or Calvinists or Anglicans, of relaxing the rules ofgood conscience which were supposed to control economic trans-actions and social relations. If anything, indeed, though thereare exceptions, their tendency was to make them more stringentas a protest against the moral laxity of the Renaissance, and, inparticular, against the avarice which was thought to be peculiarlythe sin of Rome.

It is true, of course, that the center of authority was shifted,and where Catholics had looked to Rome as the final arbiter,


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 645Luther looked to the state. It is true, again, and a truth whichwas to have momentous consequences in the future, that Luther'sinsistence on the essence of religion as consisting in the contactof the soul with God-a contact direct and personal, not mediatedby any divinely commissioned hierarchy-was calculated to dis-credit reliance on external institutions as a religion of works, andthat, where medieval thought had seen grace as completingnature, he was inclined to find an irreconcilable antithesis. Itis true, finally, that one conclusion which might be drawn,though it need not necessarily be drawn, from that attitude, wasthat detailed rules of conduct-a moral casuistry-were needlessor objectionable, since the Christian has a sufficient guide in theBible and in his own conscience. The first idea is fundamental,is reiterated again and again in the address to the German nobil-ity, and was embodied in the organization of the Lutheran church.The second, which had been expressed a century and a half beforeby Wyclit' in his criticism of gilds-that they disturbed socialunity by the intrusion of particular corporate interests-reap-pears in Luther's denunciation of medieval charity, of fraternities,of chantries, and of the whole body of institutions which impliedthat merit was to be acquired by some special machinery or activ-ity apart from the conscientious discharge of the ordinary dutiesof life. The third finds expression in his declaration that theCanon Law was a mischievous superfluity-because, as he said,

those who understand the Gospel might themselves judge intheir own consciences what is right and what is wrong in suchsimple and plain matters -because, in short, the Bible was anall-sufficient guide to action.

A curious example of what that attitude meant in practiceis given by Luther's intervention in the economic struggles whichwere going on in 1525 at Dantzig. The extremists on the Council

I SelectEnglish Works(Arnold): Alle false conspirators been cursed of God andman Also alle newe fraternityes and gilds made of men make men openlyto renne in this curse. For they conspiren . . . - against comyn charitie andcomyn profit of Christian men . . . . and offend other men in their right.....And alle thegoodness hat s in thesegilds eachman oweth or to do bi comynfraternityof Christendom, by God's commandments. ' The last sentence is very like whatLuther said later.


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646 R. H. TAWNEYhad advanced a radical social programme, including the de-mand for the complete prohibition of usury. The moderateswrote to Lutherimploringhim to send a preacherto combat theadvanced party among the reformers. The letter which Lutherdespatchedwith him is singularlymodern n tone. Its argumentis that the ChristianFaith requirescharityin the economictrans-actionsof men with each other, but that it does not requireanyparticular orm of it, that, in the question at issue, eachman mustfollow the dictates of his own conscience, that the making ofregulationsabout matters of socialpolicy is a matter, not for thechurch,but for the secularauthorities,and that in framing themdue regardmust be paid to vested interests.

The Gospel is a spiritual law and not a rule of government. Inthese matters not the sword, but the spirit of God must instruct and govern.. .. . The preacher shall preach only the Gospel rule, and leave it to eachman to follow his own conscience. Let him who can receive it, receive it:he cannot be compelled thereto further than the Gospel leads willing heartswhom the spirit of God urges forward. Thus ought men to do withinterest: they should establish aright human ordinances.'All this, the refusal to admit that Christianity invokes any partic-ular standard of economic conduct, the well-worn antithesisbetween principles and their application, the throwing off ofresponsibilityon to the state-is not this the very voice of indif-ferentismprotestingthat Religionis a thingof the spiritand thatto externalize t in institutions or rulesis to degrade t ? Has notLutherleapt in I525 to the very centerof the positionon whichmost churcheswere to take their stand two centuries later?The suggestionis natural. But it is mistaken. Nearly allLuther'sutteranceson social and economic matters were piecesd'occasion-this letter was written to quell a riot-and one mustnot look for consistency in them. In reality, Luther, no morethan his predecessors, accepted the view which afterwardbecameprevalent, that the world of business is a compartmentwith laws of its own and that the religiousteacher exceeds hiscommissionwhen he lays down rules for the moral conduct ofsecularaffairs. The germ of such a conclusionmay have been

I The letter (May 5, I525) is printed by Neumann, Geschichtedes Wuchers inDeutschland, App. F.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 647implicit in the teaching of the Reformers. But it was not theconclusion which they either drew themselves, or normally wishedothers to draw from it. Both in principle and in detail, in theirview of religion as embracing all sides of life, and their doctrinesas to the particular ethical obligations which it involved, the firstgeneration of Reformers were thoroughly medieval. ProfessorTroeltsch' is right in insisting that the Protestantism, both ofLuther and Calvin, emphasized the idea of a church-civilization,in which all departments of life, the state and society, educationand science, law, commerce and industry are to be regulated inaccordance with the law of God. Luther, in particular, acceptsthe traditional view of society as an organism of classes withdifferent rights and functions, and it lies behind his denunciationboth of covetous merchants and of revolting peasants. Hissocial conservatism has, indeed, a character of its own, which itdraws at once from the political circumstances of the age andfrom his interpretation of the scope of religion. As fully con-vinced as any medieval writer that the institution of serfdom isthe necessary foundation of society, his opposition to attemptsto abolish it is intensified by a political theory which exalts theabsolutism of secular authorities, and a religious doctrine whichdraws a sharp antithesis between the external order and the lifeof the spirit. Hence the demand of the peasants that villeinageshould be ended because Christ has freed us all horrifies himnot merely as portending an orgy of confiscation and anarchy,but because it degrades the Gospel by turning a spiritual messageinto a program of social reconstruction.

This article would make all men equal and so change the spiritual king-dom into an external worldly one. Impossible .... It is a malicious andevil idea that serfdom should be abolished because Christ has made us free.This refers only to spiritual freedom given us by Christ in order to enableus to withstand the devil .. . A Christian may be a serf, subject, nobleor prince. His condition has nothing to do with his belief.2

This dualism, which regards the social order and its conse-quences, not as the instrument through which grace is mediated,

I See Die Soziallehrender christlichenKirchen, and his shorter book, Protestant-ism and Progress.2 Luther,Works,XVIII, 3II-I19; Melanchthon,XVI, 48-50.


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648 R. H. TAWNEYbut as something external, alien and irrelevant-something, atbest, indifferent to personal salvation, and at worst the sphere ofthe letter which killeth, was to have a long and momentous his-tory before it commanded general acceptance. Luther himselfis far from consistently maintaining it. In his writings on thesocial issues of his day, insistence on the traditional Christianmorality is combined with a repudiation of the visible and institu-tional frame-work by which it had been attempted to give it apractical expression, and in the tragic struggle which resultsbetween spirit and letter, matter and form, grace and works, hisintention, at least, is, not to jettison it, but to purify it by animmense effort of simplification. As far as the content of histeaching is concerned, he is, indeed, more medieval than themedievalists. He throws overboard the qualifications by whichthe later scholastic writers had attempted to adapt their teachingto the exigencies of practical life, and reverts to the simplepatriarchal ethics of the peasant society which in his day wasbreaking up. In marked contrast to Calvin, who accepted themain institutions of a commercial civilization and based hisethical teaching upon them, Luther is opposed to the whole eco-nomic movement of the age, and denounces large scale commerce,the luxury trade with India which was becoming so important,finance speculations and credit, commercial companies and com-binations, as in their very essence belonging to the kingdom ofdarkness which the Christian will shun. He may attack theCanon Law in general. But when he speaks on economic matters,as in his long sermon on usury in I520, or his tract on Trade andUsury in I524, the doctrine to which he appeals is the straitestinterpretation of the Canon Law and nothing else. In thematter of usury he goes even farther than the orthodox teaching,since, not content with insisting that lending ought to be free,he denounces both the payment of interest as compensation forloss and the practice of investing in rent charges, which theCanon Law allowed. In the matter of prices he merely rehearsesthe traditional doctrine.

A man should not say: I will sell my wares as dear as I can or please,but I will sell my wares as dear as is right and proper. For thy selling


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 649should not be a work that is within thy own power or will, without all lawand limit, as though thou wert a God, bounden to no one. But because thyselling is a work that thou performest to thy neighbour, it should be re-strained within such law and conscience that thou mayest practice it without harm or injury to him.If a price is fixed by public authority, the seller must keep to it.If it is not, he must follow the price of common estimation. If hehas to fix it himself, he must consider the income needed to main-tain him in his station in life, his labor and his risk, and mustsettle it accordingly. He must not take advantage of scarcityto raise it. He must not corner the market. He must not dealin futures. He must not sell dearer for deferred payments.Naturally, with such a code of ethics, Luther finds the develop-ments of his generation, international finance, great companiesmonopolizing the eastern spice crops, arbitrage dealings on theexchanges, shocking beyond measure. His ideal is the conserva-tive one, a society of small matters and peasants dealing with eachother according to the laws of Christian charity, and he has nothought that the ethics of business life can be other than those ofthe New Testament. Where he differs from the medievaldoctrine is not in the content of his teaching, or in his conceptionof a certain standard of economic morality as incumbent uponChristians, but in the sanctions to which he appeals. He doesnot, it is true, exclude ecclesiastical discipline. But he is impa-tient of it. The Christian, he argues, needs no elaborate mecha-nism to teach him his duty or to correct him if he neglects it.He has the scripture and his own conscience; let him listen tothem.

There can be no better instructions in . . . . all transactions in temporalgoods than that every man who is to deal with his neighbour present to him-self these commandments: What ye would that others should do unto you,do ye also to them, and Love thy neighbour as thyself. If these werefollowed out, then everything would instruct and arrange itself; then nolaw books norcourts, nor judicial actions would be required; all things wouldquietly and simply be set to rights, for every one's heart and consciencewouldguidehim.

Everything would arrange itself. Few would deny it. Buta medieval writer might have answered: How, if it does not?


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650 R. H. TAWNEYIs it possible to overcome the tension between the individual andthe social order by suppressing one term in the relation ? If it istrue that the inner life is the sphere of religion, does it follow thatthe external order is not? To wave aside the outer world ofinstitutions, law, the social mechanism as irrelevant to the lifeof the spirit, is not this to abandon, instead of facing, the problemof making Christian morality prevail, for which the medievalwriters, with their conception of a hierarchy of values related toa common end, had attempted, however imperfectly, to offer asolution ? Nor is Luther unconscious of the difficulty createdby erecting into an absolute antithesis what had been regardedas differences of degree within a larger unity. He meets it by anappeal to the state, by a treaty of partition between secular andspiritual which assigns to the secular authorities the social ethicsfor which his philosophy can find no room in the church. Noone need think that the world can be ruled without blood. Thecivil sword shall and must be red. The maintenance of Chris-tian morality and the reform of economic abuses is to be in thehands, not of ecclesiastical authorities, but of the god-fearingPrince.

There were thus several elements in Luther's social teaching,the repudiation of the traditional ecclesiastical discipline, theemphasis on righteousness in economic dealings as pairt of theChristian morality of the individual, and the appeal to the stateto introduce the reforms needed to insure it. These two latterpoints of view were destined in the future to fall apart, socialmorality becoming a problem of policy not of conduct, and,because it was regarded as a problem of policy, ceasing to beregarded as the concern of religion. In the sixteenth century,when church and state were not clearly separated, when member-ship of the church and citizenship were normally identified, andwhen it was assumed to be the function of the secular ruler toenforce the rules of Christian morality, the future division wasnot apparent, and both points of view are represented in the writ-ings of the period. The former continued to produce treatises onmoral casuistry in the medieval manner, written by reformers aswell as by Romanists. Three excellent examples would be Bul-linger's Decades, Dr. Thomas Wilson's Discourse Upon Usury, or


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 65Ithe less well-known book of Nicholas Heming on The Lawful Useof Riches, which became a standard work on social morality fromthe reformers' standpoint, was translated into English, freelyquoted by Anglican divines and incorporated in its entirety in atreatise on usury which was published in I578, and of which thetitle itself is a sermon.'

Heming's book is intended to do for Protestants what manualslike the Pupilla Oculi or Dives et Pauper had done for Catholics.Starting from the thesis that either to have riches, or to bargain,is in itself no sin, but that many both in the getting, possessing,and using of riches do offend, the author goes on to give rules forthe practical guidance of human affairs, whereby the godly dis-posed person may both know how to attain riches commendably,and, being attained, to use them virtuously as becometh a Chris-tian; and also to deal so in the contracts now used as neither him-self shall be troubled with guiltiness of conscience, nor his neigh-bour hindered, much less impoverished by extreme oppression.The Christian is bound to labor for his living: he may be a mer-chant, an husbandman, an artificer, according to his fancy: idlehe may not be, if he be a Christian. He must use his wealth forthe glory of God and to adorn the Commonwealth. In all hisbargains he must study to give not less than he gets. Not everyprice is lawful, but only that which is approved by indifferen-and wise men in authority, or paid according to the commonestimation of the thing, at such tyme as the bargain is made.Engrosser and regrators are grievous offenders. But one willsay to me: 'The ware is mine . . . Hath not the buyer choiceeither to buy or not to buy?' Cloak the same by what title youlist, your sin is exceeding great.... . He that hurteth oneman is in a damnable case. What shall be thought of thee,which bringest whole households to their graves? As forinterest, whatever be lent, if more be received back for thebounden duty of lending than was lent, the same is usury, thetaking of which overplus is wicked.

I A GeneralDiscourse against the damnable Sect of Usurers, groundedupon theword of God and confirmedby the authority of doctors both ancient and new, necessaryfor all times, butspecially profitable or these atterdays, in whichcharity beingbanishedcovetousnesshathgottenthe upper hand.


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652 R. H. TAWVNEYThis line of thought, a moral casuistry designed to supply

guidance to conduct in the practical affairs of business, so farfrom being interrupted by the Reformation, was continued by oneProtestant writer after another-one need mention only Puritanslike Ames and Baxter-down to the end of the seventeenth cen-tury. But it is increasingly accompanied by another, the appealto the Godly Prince to reform the evils of society by legislation,which sprang naturally from the recognition of the sovereigntyof the secular state as against the Pope, and which contained, ina religious dress, the germs of the political doctrine that afterwardbecame known as mercantilism. Bucer's De Regno Chlristi is anearly specimen of it. Bucer, the ex-Dominican and Reformer ofStrasburg, had taken refuge in England in I548 and became tutorto Edward VI. What sort of ideas that poor child had absorbedcan be read in his journal: they are the commonplaces of thetraditional social morality-society an organism of classes withdifferent functions, gentry not to encroach on commons or com-mons on gentry, economic greed the ruin of commonwealths.What sort of teaching was in the air can be seen from the epi-grams of Crowley, or the sermons of Lever and of Latimer, whoin the spring and summer of I549 was thundering against thestep-lords at Paul's Cross. Bucer was in England when theagrarian agitation was at its height, when the gentry were ter-rified by the concessions which Somerset made to it, when thepeasants under Ket were saying that they would leave as manygentlemen in Norfolk as there were white bulls, and Sir WilliamPaget, the secretary to the Council, was telling Somerset thatunless enough blood were let, there would be another, and aworse, German Peasants' war in England.' His book, which owessomething to Plato and the classical renaissance, is a manualof Christian politics, a half-way house between the traditionalteaching as to Christian conduct and the state organization ofeconomic life. The identity of church and state is assumed: thepower which is to establish the rule of the Saints is to be theChristian King. And the rule of the saints is no trifle. Wilfulidlers are to be excommunicated by the church and punished bythe state. The government is to insist on pasture being put under

I Letter of July 7, I549, in Strype, Ecclesiastical Memorials.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 653the plough, is to revive the woolen industry, is to introduce thelinen industry. Trade in itself is honorable. But most of themerchants who conduct it are such that, after the shaven priests,no class of man is more pestilential to the commonwealth:their works are usury, monopolies, and the bribery of govern-ments to overlook both. The remedies are simple. The Statemust fix a just price, a very necessary but an easy matter.Only pious persons, devoted to the commonweal more than totheir own interests, are to be allowed to engage in trade at all.Finally in every parish a school is to be established. The govern-ment of Edward VI, like all Tudor governments, made its experi-ment in fixing just prices and forbidding depopulation by en-closures. What they thought about restricting trade to personsof piety we do not know, but can guess. As for the schools, whatthey did for them Mr. Leach has told us. They swept away theirendowments wholesale. King Edward VI's Grammar Schoolsare the grammar schools which King Edward VI, or rather hiscourtiers, did not destroy.Both the teaching of personal economic ethics, representedby Heming, and the emphasis on the state as the guardian ofa righteous moral order, represented by Bucer, are not exceptionalbut typical, and were followed by a long line of writers in bothmanners. If the conception of religion as embracing all interestsand activities of life is to be called medieval, then in England astream of medievalism, though a dwindling one, runs on to theCivil War. The view of religion as a thing private and individualmay appear to us today to have been the natural end of the pro-cess which began with the Reformation. But if so, it was anend which was neither anticipated nor desired by reformers, andno Protestant need feel that to emphasize the social ethics ofChristianity is to betray his spiritual ancestors, since the obliga-tion and right of the church to claim the whole world of socialinstitutions and economic activity as the province of religion wasground common in the sixteenth century to Protestants andCatholics.

In England the collision of religious thought with the neweconomic tendencies and its gradual defeat can be traced in theagitation caused by enclosures and pasture-farming. It revealed


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654 R. H. TAWNEYboth the strength and the weakness of the attitude toward eco-nomic issues inherited from the Middle Ages. Faced with a notdissimilar crisis two centuries later, the leaders of the church,with hardly an exception, were silent; for they were not consciousof pressing any body of social doctrine which could serve as acriterion for the economic practice of their age. If, in the earlierperiod, men of religion from Latimer to Laud met the powerfulclass interests of the squirearchy with admonitions against lay-ing house to house and field to field, after the manner of covetousworldings, the reason was not merely the social weight of therural middle classes. It was still more the influence ot a socialphilosophy which admitted no antithesis between individualmorality and an impersonal social order, and which still aspiredto treat all human activities and interests as the province ofreligion. In face of a movement in which human relations seemedto be sacrificed to pecuniary gain, men felt that not merely mate-rial interests, but the moral foundations of society were menaced.The preachers took the lead in denouncing it, not only becausewhere we see the natural operation of economic forces, they sawplain moral issues--covetousness, extortion, the greed which

brings the livings of many into the hands of one, the defeat ofChristian charity by a cynical egotism which recognizes the lawsneither of man nor of God-but even more because, behind par-ticular acts of oppression, there was thought, and thought rightly,to be a view of social relations incompatible with what had beenregarded to be the standards of a Christian commonwealth.Society is an organism-if landlords grind their tenants, how canthey live as they be joined in one body politic under the King ?The property owner is a trustee whose rights are derived from thefunction which he discharges, and are limited by the rules of chari-table dealing toward those dependent upon him. If he repudi-ates the obligation and claims to make what profit of his own thathe can, a vista is opened of illimitable extortion in which the veryfoundations of society will be dissolved. It was the consciousnessof a collision between incompatible ethical conceptions, betweenproperty as a responsible office and property as a mere aggregateof economic rights, even more than social compunction, which


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 655made the land question for a century the theme of the moralist,and Crowley did not exaggerate when he argued that the sponta-neous doctrineless communism of the peasantry was closer in spiritto the traditional teaching of the church than the individualismwhich recognized no limitations other than the letter of the law.The appeal to the moral law was impressive: most men wouldrather fail with Latimer than succeed with Paley. Its weaknesswas that of all political philosophies which meet the triumphantonset of economic forces with a generalized appeal to traditionalmorality and an idealization of the past: it was never made con-crete enough to supply detailed rules of social and economicconduct. In insisting that the rights of landowners were con-tingent and derivative, not unconditional, the church failed tomake evident how in an age when customary restraints had beenshattered, the supremacy of moral standards could in practicebe reconciled with a recognition of new economic facts.

The collision of religious thought with the forces of the newworld and their gradual defeat, of which one aspect is revealedby the agrarian agitation, can be traced even more clearly in thecontroversy over what was called good conscience in bargaining.The issue over which the struggle between new economic move-ments and the traditional teaching of the church was most defin-itely joined and continued longest was not, as the modern readermight have supposed, that of wages, but that of prices and moneylending. The reasons were partly practical, partly theoretical.On the one hand the wage-earners were still a minority scatteredamong the interstices of a distributive state based upon a widediffusion of property, and the medieval wage problem, which con-sisted in the scarcity of labor, had not yet been replaced by themodern wage-problem, which consists in its abundance. To thepeasant farmer or small master who, outside certain branches ofthe textile industries, mining and commerce, was the typicalfigure, the crucial problem was still the power of the middle-manor the money-lender, often the same person, to whom he pledgedhis crops or his wares in return for immediate accommodation,and it was the more crucial in the sixteenth century, because thedevelopment of foreign trade, of joint stock enterprise, and of


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656 R. H. TAWNEYlarge scale finance, both private and public, were confrontinghim with the alien environment of an increasingly commercialcivilization. The farmer must borrow money when the seasonis bad, and when his beasts die on him, or merely to finance theinterval between sowing and harvest. The craftsman must buyraw materials on credit and get advances before his waresare sold. The young tradesman must scrape together a littlecapital before he can set up shop. Even the cottager who buysgrain at the local market must constantly ask the seller to giveday. For almost everyone the partition between comfort andactual want is thin-a village may be half-starved through a localfamine when in the next county there is actually a surplus offoodstuffs. Almost every one, therefore, at one time or another,has need of the money-lender. And the lender is often a monopo-list- a money-master, a master or corn-monger, a richpriest, who is the solitary capitalist in a community of peasantsand artizans. Naturally he is apt to become their master.The problem was particularly acute in connection with the landquestion of the day. Apart from the transactions of the greaterland-owners, in which considerable sums of money changed hands,borrowing was a normal and necessary incident in the life of thepeasantry. Like the peasant proprietor in Germany and Russia,before the depreciation of money had wiped out mortgages, thecopyholder or yeoman of Tudor England was apt to slip into aposition in which he was little more than the caretaker of thecreditor from whom he had borrowed to stock his farm. Some-times he gets an advance from his landlord and must work offthe debt in personal labor on the demesne. Since he has hardlyany capital of his own, he cannot afford to wait for his money tillhis produce is sold. He therefore pledges his crops while theyare still standing for immediate accommodation, or sells themoutright. The dealer acts in the manner sometimes ascribed toa modern elevator company. He buys corn cheap because thesale is forced, and sells it dear because he can wait till prices rise.'

x See, e.g., The death of usury or the disgrace of userers, compiled more pithilythan kath hithertobeen published in English (Cambridge, I594): He that laith out?ioo in come doth sometimes gain above 50, yea ioo, in the ioo, for not long since


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 657Nor is it only the peasant farmer who is at the mercy of themoney-lender. In the textile industry of East Anglia and of theWest of England, in addition to a highly developed credit systemamong the capitalist clothiers and merchants, the cottager is con-stantly in debt not only to the peddler who distributes wool butalso to the employer who acts as his banker, advances him moneyfor his weekly outgoings before an order is completed and some-times provides him with a loom. In the hardware industry thecraftsman is almost to the same extent dependent on a merchant.In the tin-mining industry of Cornwall not only does the greatconcessionaire -the tin-master draw on the buyer for advancesto finance his operations but, since the yield of ore is slow anduncertain, the working miner is constantly in debt to the tin-master.'

In such circumstances it is not surprising that there shouldhave been a popular outcry against usury, or that both publiceffort and private charity should have tried to restrain the money-lender or to turn his flank by providing opportunities for borrow-ing on easier terms than he offered. It is still less surprising thatreligious opinion should have reiterated its denunciation of usury.Medieval teaching was repeated in the sixteenth century because,in spite of the agrarian and commercial developments of theperiod, economic conditions continued over a wide range of eco-nomic life to be what they had been when it was first formulated.Its essence had been the insistence on equity in bargaining-acontract is fair, as St. Thomas says, when both parties gainthe price of corne so increased that necessitie willed many to pay the penaltie of theirbond, than to make delivery of their bargains; hereupon some unreasonable corn-mongers, malsters, or such like were grieved that they took no bond, as discontentof double gain by the bonder ... . It is a common practice in this country, if apoor man come to borrow money of a malster, he will not lend any, but tells him,if he will sell some barley, he will give him after the order of fore-hand buyers; theman being driven by distress sells his corn for underfoote that, when it comes to bedelivered, he hath halfe in halfe, oftentimes double the value.

I The best account of credit in the woolen industry is in S.P.D. James I, lxxxI3 (i6I5), of which part has been printed by Unwin, Industrial Organization in theSixteenth and SeventeenthCenturies, App. A: See also S.P.D. Eliz., cvi, 48, andVictoria County History of Suffolk. For credit in tin mining see Lewis, TheStanuaries, pp. 2I4-20.


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658 R. H. TAWNEYequally from it-and the prohibition of usury had been the kernelof it, not because the gains of the money-lender were the onlyspecies, but because, in the economic conditions of the age, theywere the most conspicuous species of extortion. Alike in theMiddle Ages and in the sixteenth century, the word usury hadnot the specialized sense which it carries today. Like the modernprofiteer, the usurer was a character so unpopular that mostunpopular characters could be called usurers, and by the averagepractical man almost any form of bargain which he thoughtunfair would be classed as usurious. Not only the taking ofinterest for a loan of money, but the raising of prices by a monopo-list, the beating down of prices by a keen bargainer, the rackrenting of land by a landlord, the subletting of land by a tenantat a rent higher than he himself paid, the cutting of wages and thepaying of wages in truck, the refusal of discount to a tardy debtor,the insistence on unreasonably good security for a loan, the exces-sive profits of a middleman, all these had been denounced asusury in the very practical thirteenth-century manual of St.Raymond:' all these were among the unlawful chaffer, thesubtlety and sleight which was what the plain man who saton juries and listened to sermons in parish churches meant byusury three centuries later. If he had been asked why usurywas wrong, he would probably have answered with a quotationfrom scripture. If he had been asked for a definition of usury,he would probably have been puzzled, and would have repliedin the words of a member of Parliament who spoke on the billintroduced in I57I: It standeth doubtful what usury is: wehave no clear definition of it. 2 The truth is that any bargainfrom which one party obviously gained more advantage than theother and used his power to the full was regarded as usurious, andthe description which best sums up alike popular sentiment andecclesiastical teaching is applied in the comprehensive indictmentapplied by his parishioners to an unpopular divine who lent at id.

I Summa Pastoralis (printed by Ravaisson, Catalogue generale de M.S.S. desbibliothequespubliques des departements,I, 592 ff.).

2 D'Ewes, Journals of the House of Commons,sub anno 157I.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 659in is.-the cry of all poor men since the world began- Dr.Bennett is a great taker of advantages. ' Hence the controversyover usury among men of religion which goes on from the Refor-mation to the Civil War is something much more important thanthe discussion of a legal technicality. It raises, in connectionwith what had been the central doctrine of medieval teaching,the whole question of the social ethics of the Christian faith, ofthe practical conduct which they involve, and of the duty of thechurch to expound them. It reveals, more clearly even than theland question, the character of the internal weaknesses and exter-nal criticism which caused this aspect of Christian teaching to betemporarily obscured.

What was the attitude of the English Church toward questionsof economic morality during and after the Reformation? It isclear, in the first place, that there was no intention, at least, ofbreaking with the traditional doctrine. There is an immensemass of literature on these matters. Nearly all of it is by ecclesi-astics. Some of it is by very eminent ecclesiastics. There arethe sermons of Archbishop Sandys.2 There is the book of ThomasWilson,3 Doctor of the Civil Law, Master of the Court of Re-quests, for a short time secretary of State. There are the Decadesof Bullinger,4 the Swiss reformer, of which three English transla-tions were made in the ten years following his death (I574), andwhich convocation in I586 required to be obtained and studiedby all the inferior clergy. To the critic who objects that themoral discipline of the church has been abrogated by the newreligious dispensation, no less a person than a secretary of statereplies that the dissembling Gospeller who for private gainundoeth the welfare of man, is as reprehensible as the wilfuland obdurate Papist ; that men ought not altogether to beenemies to the Canon Laws . . . . because the Pope was authorof them, and that there be some such laws made by the Pope

I S.P.D. Eliz., cclxxxvi, i9 and 20.2 Sandys, second, tenth and eleventh of Sermons (Parker Society).3 Wilson, A discourse on Usury by way of Dialogue and Oration (I572).4 Bullinger, Third Decade. First and second Sermons (Parker Society).


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66o R. H. TAWNEYas be right godly. ' Medieval schoolmen, councils, and papaldecretals ate quoted freely as evidence that extortion is againstthe law of the church. The assumption throughout is that itstraditional teaching as to economic ethics is as binding after theReformation as before it.

Pamphlets and sermons do not deal either with sins which noone commits or with sins that every one commits, and the literaryevidence is not to be dismissed as mere pious platitudinizing.But the literary evidence does not stand alone. It is evident,in the second place, that the assumption, not of all, but of most,churchmen throughout the sixteenth century is that the CanonLaw is to be administered, and the Canon Law includes the wholebody of legislation as to equity in contracts to which referencewas made in a previous article. True, the clergy after I535administer it no longer as the agents of Rome, but by the author-ity of the Crown. True, after the prohibition of the study ofCanon Law-after the estimable Dr. Layton had sat Dunce inBocardo at Oxford-it languished at the universities. True,for the five years from I546 to I55I, and again-and on this occa-sion for good-after I57I, parliamentary legislation expresslysanctioned loans at interest, provided that it did not exceed thestatutory maximum. But the convulsion which changed thesource of Canon Law did not, as far as these matters are con-cerned, alter its scope; and its validity was not the less becauseit was now enforced in the name, not of the Pope, but of the King.As Maitland2 has pointed out, there was a moment toward themiddle of the century when the civil law was pressing the commonlaw hard. The civil law, as Sir Thomas Smith assured the yetbriefless barrister, offered a promising career since it was practicedin the ecclesiastical courts.3 The civil law had much to say aboutusury; it was a doctor4 of the civil law under Elizabeth by whomthe most elaborate treatise on the subject was compiled. Byan argument made familiar by a modern controversy on whichlay and ecclesiastical opinion have diverged, it is argued that the

I Wilson; op. cit.2 Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance.3Quoted, ibid., p. i8. 4 Dr. Thomas Wilson.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 66ilaxity of the state does not excuse the consciences of men who arethe subjects not only of the state but of the church. Thepermission of the Prince , it was urged, is no absolution fromthe authority of the Church. Supposing usury to be unlawful.. . .yet the civil laws permit it and the Church forbids it.In this case the Canons are to be preferred .. . By the lawno man is compelled to be a usurer, and therefore men must paythat reverence and obedience otherwise due to them that havethe rule over them in the conduct and obedience of their souls. 'It was this theory which was held by almost all the ecclesiasticalwriters who dealt with economic ethics in the sixteenth century.Their view was that, in the words of a pamphlet, By thelaws of the Church of England, usury is simply and generallyforbidden. 12 When the lower House of Convocation petitionedthe bishops in I554 for a restoration of their privileges, theyurged, among other matters, that usurers may be punishedaccording to the Canon Law as in time past hath been used. 3In the abortive scheme for the reorganization of ecclesiasticaljurisdiction drawn up by Cranmer and Foxe, usury was includedin the list of offenses with which the ecclesiastical courts were todeal, and for the guidance of judges in what must often have beensomewhat knotty cases, a note was added explaining that it wasnot to be taken as including the profits derived from objectswhich yielded increase by the natural process of growth.4 Arch-bishop Grindal's injunctions to the clergy and laity of the Prov-ince of York (I57i) expressly emphasized the duty of presentingto the Ordinary those who lend and demand back more than theprincipal, whatever the guise under which the transaction maybe concealed. Bishops' articles of visitations down to the Civil

xJ. Blaxton, The English Usurer, or Usury Condemned, 634.2 Miles Moses, The Arraignment and Conviction of Usury, 1595.3 Cardwell, Synodalia, II, 436 (Burnett, History of the Reformation, Vol. II,Part II, p. 320, has common lands for canon laws, which presumably is a mis-

print).4 Cardwell, Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum, pp. 206, 323.5 London (Burnett,II, 2,308), I554; Chichester Wilkins),Concilia, V, 3I8)?Sarum (IV, 32I), 1588, Wells (ibid., IV, 4i6), I605.


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662 R. H. TAWNEYWar require the presentation of uncharitable persons and usurers,together with drunkards, ribalds, swearers, and sorcerers. Therules to be observed in excommunicating the impenitent promul-gated in I585, the Canons ot the Province of Canterbury in i604,and of the Irish Church in i637, all included a provision that theusurer should be subjected to ecclesiastical discipline.'

These things, no doubt, were largely matters of common form.That they were not wholly so is suggested by the fact thatthroughout the century cases of contracts continue to come beforethe ecclesiastical courts. Even in I578 a case of clerical usury isheard in an archdeacon's court in Essex., Even in i6i9 twomoney-lenders are cited before the Court of the Commissary ofLondon for taking excessive interest and are compelled to amendtheir ways.3 But proceedings before ecclesiastical courts aretoo scanty for any opinion to be offered on the question how farsuch cases were typical. Nor is it primarily to them that weought to turn to trace the operation of the ideas which I havedescribed. It is not merely that at all times religious disciplineis a shadowy measure of the influence of religious opinion, or thatuncharitable covetousness continues, in the sixteenth century,as in earlier ages, to provide abundant business for municipalauthorities. It was that, under the Tudors, the essence of thesituation was an identification of church and state which for atime made it almost a matter of indifference whether socialmorality was enforced by the ecclesiastical or the secular authori-ties. In transferring power from the former to the latter, theReformation had not destroyed the conception of a single societyin which church and state were coterminous; and when CanonLaw became the ecclesiastical law of his Majesty, the jurisdictionof both inevitably tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiasticaljurisdiction into itself, the monarchy had its own reasons ofpublic policy for endeavoring to enforce traditional standardsof social conduct as an antidote for what Burleigh called the

TCardwell, Synodalia, I, I44, 308; Wilkins, Concilia, IV, 509.2 Hale, Precedents in Criminal Couris.3 Commissary of London Correction Books i6i8-25 (H i841). I am indebted

to Mr. Fincham of Somerset House for kindly calling my attention to these cases.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 663license grown by liberty of the Gospel. ' One effect, in short,of the maturity of the secular state was the more stringent insist-ence on rules of conduct which were based ultimately on claimsthat it would have repudiated as treason, and derived theiroriginfrom a conception of the universe almost as alien to the age ofElizabeth as to our own. In the sphere of poor relief the govern-ment relies for two generations on appeals to Christian charity,backed by gentle persuasion of parson and bishop, as a substitutefor a poor-rate. In its effort to control prices, it deploys a wholearsenal of religious exhortation. Without any sense of incon-gruity, the Privy Council2 writes to the Bishop of Exeter urginghim to persuade a money-lender to show more Christian andcharitable consideration for his neighbours and to the justicesof Norfolk to arrest the unconscionable dealings of an usurer.Ecclesiastical authorities, in their turn, rely on secular machineryto enforce not only religious conformity but Christian morality,because both are elements in a society in which secular and spirit-ual business has not yet been disentangled. Naturally, it is inthe ill-fated alliance between Crown and bishops which reachedits climax in the thirties of the seventeenth century that thefusion is most complete. If any man be so addicted to his pri-vate interest that he neglects the common state, preached Laudon June ip, i621, he is void of the sense of piety and wishespeace and happiness for himself in vain. For whoever he be, hemust live in the body of the commonwealth and in the body ofthe Church. The attempt to repress economic individualismis as natural in the author of these words as the attempt to repressreligious individualism. For both seem incompatible with thestability of a society in which commonwealth and church are one.It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, to find Laud sitting on theCourt of High Commission, which had intervened before topunish usurers, and which in i63i hears the case of a clergymanaccused of preaching false doctrine as to usury;3 or, when the

I Hist. MSS., Com., MSS of the Marquis of Salisbury, pp. i62-63. Considera-tions delivered to the Parliament, I559.2 Acts of thePrivy Council, New Series, sub ann. I586, i6oo and i6oi.3 Gardiner, Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamberand High Commis-sion: a cause against Mr. Viccars of Stamford; ibid., Attorney General v. Casenand others.


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664 R. H. TAWNEYStar-Chamber fines an engrosser of corn, improving the occasionwith the remark that he had been guilty of a most foul offence,which the prophet hath in a very energeticall phrase 'grindingthe faces of the poor, ' and that dearth was caused not by Godbut by cruel men ;, or taking part in the proceedings of the PrivyCouncil at a time when it is trying to compel the clothiers toraise the wages of spinners and weavers2 and to goad reluc-tant justices into a more effective administration of the poorLaws; or inclined, as Claredon says, a little too much to coun-tenance the Commission for Depopulation, 3 which, ostensiblyat least, protects tenants against landlords. The history of therise of individual liberty-to use a question-begging phrase-ineconomic matters, is, it may be suggested in short, somewhatsimilar to its growth in the more important sphere of religion andis not unconnected with it. The conception of religion as a thingprivate and individual does not emerge until after a century inwhich religious freedom normally means the freedom of the stateto prescribe religion, not the freedom of the individual to followwhat religion he pleases. The assertion of economic liberty as anatural right comes at the close of a period in which, whilereligious phraseology remained and a religious interpretation ofsocial institutions was, in some cases, sincerely held, the super-natural sanctions of social morality had been increasingly mergedin doctrines based on reasons of state and public expediency.

For, though the assertion of the traditional economic ethicscontinued to be made by one school of churchmen down to themeeting of the Long Parliament, it was increasingly the voiceof the past appealing to an alien generation. The expression ofa theory of society which had made religion supreme over allsecular affairs, it had outlived the synthesis in which it had beenan element, and survived, an archaic fragment, into an age towhose increasing individualism the idea of corporate moralitywas as objectionable as that of ecclesiastical discipline was becom-ing to its religion. The collision between the prevalent practicesand what still purported to be the teaching of the church is almost

I Ibid.2 Privy Council Register, Charles 1, Vol. I (i630), pp. 350-5 I.3 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, I, 206.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 656the ommonest theme of the economic literature of the periodfrom I550 to i640: indeed of much of it, it is the occasion.Whatever the church might say, men had asked interest for loans,and charged what prices the market would stand, in the veryzenith of the Age of Faith. But then, except in the great com-mercial centers and in the high finance of the papacy and ofsecular governments, their transactions had been petty, individ-ual, an occasional shift to meet an emergency or seize an oppor-tunity. The new thing in the England of the sixteenth century-and one must remember that economically England was still anew country-was that devices which had been occasional werenow a system. In the reign of Elizabeth, the textile industry,mining for tin and lead, the improvement of land, are financedwith borrowed capital. Adventurers speculate on the foreignexchanges and there are regular arbitrage dealings - dryexchange, as contemporaries called them-between Englandand the Continent. In London, in particular, apart from thelarge financial transactions carried through on the Exchange andby great commercial houses, even the credit represented by loansto impoverished land-owners and necessitous tradesmen hadbecome a recognized, if somewhat disreputable, form of businessenterprise. There was a regular class of pawnbrokers. Theraising of mortgages was largely in the hands of the scriveners,who, from being notaries, had taken on the profitable business ofacting as financial middlemen, and who, as they made money,became money-lenders themselves. If there were not bankerswho made a trade of accepting and lending deposits-andthere are some indications that there were-there were atany rate men who borrowed to lend again and who made theirprofit on the difference. All this meant the existence of a money-market, and the growth of a money-market was enormouslystimulated by the necessities of the government. During thereigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and for the first twenty yearsof that of Elizabeth, it was in the hands of foreign financiers,mostly at Antwerp, the Fuggers, Schetzes, and Rellingers; afterI570 or so it relied mainly on the City.' In both it normally

I See Burgon, Life of Gresham; Ehrenberg, Das ZeitalterderFugger; and Scott,English Joint-Stock Companies.


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666 R. H. TAWNEYpaid through the nose. A volume might be written from TudorState Papers on the morbid pathology of public finance.

An organized money-market has many advantages. But it isnot a school of ethics. Finance, being essentially impersonal,a matter of opportunities, securities, and risks, acted among othercauses as a solvent of the sentiment fostered by the teaching ofthe church and the decencies of social intercourse among neigh-bors which regarded keen bargaining as sharp practice. Wesee, wrote Malynes,' how one thing driveth or enforcethanother, like as in a clocke where there are many wheels, the firstwheel being stirred driveth the next and that the third, and soforth, till the last that moveth the instrument that strikes theclock; or like as in a presse going in a strait, where the foremostis driven by him that is next him, and the next by him that fol-loweth him. The spirit of modern business could hardly bemore aptly described. Conservative writers denounced it asfostering a soulless individualism, but, needless to say, theirdenunciations were as futile as they were justified. It might bepossible to put fear into the heart of the village pawnbroker whotook ioo quarters of wheat when he had lent go, with the warningthat the devices of men cannot be concealed from AlmightyGod. To a great clothier, or to a capitalist like Pallavicino,Spinola, or Thomas Gresham who managed the governmentbusiness in Antwerp, such sentiments were foolishness, and usuri-ous interest appeared, not bad morals, but bad business. Gres-ham appears, indeed, to have made frequent stipulations thatfinanciers who advanced money to the government should be re-lieved of any penalty to which they might be liable under thestatutes against usury.2 Nor could he well have done otherwise,for the sentiment of the city was that of the merchants in Wil-son's Dialogue: What man is so mad to deliver his money outof his own possession for naught, or who is he that will not makethe best use of his own that he can? With such a wind ofdoctrine in their sails men are not far from the days of completefreedom of contract.

I G. de Malynes, Lex Mercatoria. (The passage is quoted by him, almostverbatim,from a much earlier work, The Commonwealof This Realm of England,I549.).

2 Ellis, Original Letters, second series, II, 3I3-I4.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 667The effect of practical exigencies was seen in the public hand-

ling of money-lending. In the very year in which those wordswere published, the Act of I55I, which prohibited all interest asa vice most odious and detestable, as in divers places of HolyScripture it is evident to be seen was repealed. Interest wassanctioned provided it did not exceed I2 per cent, and both beforeand after the new measure, the government itself had on severaloccasions to suspend the Act in order to borrow above the legalrate.' But it was seen also in a change in the tone of religiousdiscussion. The Crown was supreme ruler of the Church ofChrist, and it was not easy for a loyal church to be more virtu-ous than its head. Moderate interest was at any rate lawful, andit is difficult to damn vices of which the degrees are adjusted on asliding scale fixed by Parliament. Objective economic sciencewas beginning its disillusioning career. Religious opinion wasnecessarily affected by it, and, even before the end of the six-teenth century, though it did not dream of abandoning its denun-ciation of unconscionable bargains, it was surrounding it withqualifications. Bullinger,2 for example, while denouncing oppres-sive contracts, which grind the poor, is obliged to concede, withCalvin, that before usury is condemned, it is necessary to con-sider both the terms of the loan and the position of borrower andof lender. The straiter sort cling to the letter of the traditionaldoctrine. Even D'Ewes, who, though fastidious to the point ofpedantry, was a man of the world, ascribed the fire which de-stroyed his father's house, savings and title deeds to the fact that

the greatest part of the sum which he paid for those lands wasgotten by the receiving of interest, having a scruple not to giveor take and use was unable himself to borrow in the ordinaryway, and in his will provided that the capital left his daughterswas to be used to buy either land or annuities, not to be lent for afixed, and therefore a usurious, interest.3 A scrupulous parsonrefuses a cure till he is assured that the money which will pay himcomes from the rent of land, not interest on capital.4 But even so

I E.g. S.P.D. Mary, Vol. XII, No. 52, and S.P.D. Eliz., Vol. i9, No. 2.2 Bullinger, Third Decade.3 The Autobiographyand Correspondenceof Sir Simonds D'Ewes, Bart., editedby Halliwell, 1, 206-I2, 322, 354, and IT, 96, I53-4.4 Blakeway, Hisirry of Shrewsbury,II, 364 and 412.


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668 R. H. TAWNEYthere are difficulties. The parson of Kingham' bequeathed a cowto the poor of Burford, which is set to hire for 4s. a year and themoney used for helping them. But the arrangement has itsinconveniences. This particular communal cow is very liketo have perished through casualty and ill-keeping. Will notthe poor be surer of their money if the cow is disposed of for cashdown? So it is sold to the man who previously hired it and theinterest spent on the poor instead. Is this usury ? The booksof Dr. Wilson, Miles Mosse, Fenton and a score of others werewritten to answer such questions. They are learned and someof them are good reading, but it may be doubted whether theysatisfied any one but their authors. The truth is that, in spiteof the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions ofbusiness must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the codeof practical ethics which that claim implied had been hammeredout to meet the conditions of a very different economic environ-ment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth cen-tury. It had tried to moralize economic relations by treatingevery transaction as a case of personal conduct involving per-sonal responsibility. In an age of impersonal finance and world-markets, it had no specific to offer-granted that I shouldlove my neighbor as myself, the question which, under modernconditions of large-scale organization, remains for solution is,Who precisely is my neighbor ?-and it was merely restated whento be effective it should have been recreated. Religion had notyet consoled itself for the practical difficulty of applying its prin-ciples, by clasping the comfortable formula that for the dealingsof economic life no moral principles exist. But for the problemsof large-scale organization it offered, in its traditional form, littleguidance. Its practical ineffectiveness prepared the way forits theoretical abandonment.

This difficulty was fundamental. It made itself felt in coun-tries where there was no Reformation, no Puritan movement,no common law jealous of its rights and eager to prune eccle-siastical excesses. But in England there were all three, and fromthe beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth century eccle-siastical authorities zealous to enforce traditional morality had to

I Hist. MSS Com., MSS of Burford, p. 46.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 669reckon with a temper which denied their right to exercise anyjurisdiction at all, above all any jurisdiction interfering in eco-nomic matters. It was not merely that there was the familiarobjection of the plain man that parsons know nothing of business-that it is not in simple divines to show what contract is lawfuland what is not. ' More important, there was the oppositionof the common lawyers to part, at least, of the machinery ofecclesiastical discipline. In the last resort appeals from ecclesi-astical courts went either to the Court of Delegates or theCourt of High Commission, which was, as Whitgift said, theonly means we have to punish and restrain persons which refuseto observe laws and keep order.'2 And from the eighties of thesixteenth century the judges were from time to time stayingproceedings before the Court of High Commission by prohibi-tions. Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a theoryof the church which denied the very principle of a disciplineexercised by bishop and archdeacons. In what light the juris-diction of the ecclesiastical courts had been regarded in the laterMiddle Ages is shown by the frequent by-laws which municipalauthorities made forbidding burgesses to plead before them.The acquiescence of the laity in the moral jurisdiction of theclergy had been accorded, in fact, with less and less readiness fortwo centuries before the Reformation. With the growth underElizabeth of a vigorous Puritan movement, which had its strong-hold among the trading and commercial classes, it became to a con-siderable proportion of the population little less than abhorrent.Their dislike of it was based, of course, on weightier grounds thanthe occasional interference of ecclesiastical courts in matters ofbusiness. But it had as an inevitable result that with thedisparagement of the whole principle of the existing ecclesi-astical jurisdiction, that particular use of it was also discredited.It was not that Puritanism implied a greater laxity in socialrelations. On the contrary, as is suggested in a subsequentarticle, it stood, in theory at least, for a stricter discipline ofthe life of the individual, alike in his business and in his pleas-ures. But it repudiated as anti-Christian the organs through

I Wilson, A Discourse of Usury.2 Quoted Usher, The Rise and Fall of the High Commission, p. 99.


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670 R. H. TAWNEYwhich such discipline had in fact been exercised. When theUsury Bill of I57I was being discussed in the House of Com-mons, reference to the Canon Law was met by the protestthat the Canon Law was abolished, and that they shouldno more be remembered than they are followed. ' Two genera-tions later the whisper had become a hurricane. In a tractwritten in i637, Breviate of the Prelates' Usurpations, by oneW. Huntley, a pseudonym used by Prynne, the interference ofthe church with matters of trade and money-lending is selectedfor special animadversion. And Laud himself lived to be remindedin the days of his ruin of the sharp words with which he hadbarbed the fine imposed by the Commission of Depopulationupon an enclosing landlord.2 Not many good days, wrotePenn, since ministers meddled so much in laymen's business. 3That sentiment was a dogma on which, after the Restoration,both Cavalier and Roundhead could agree. It inevitably re-acted not only upon the practical powers of the clergy, which,in any case, were feeble, but on the whole conception of religionwhich regarded it as involving the control of economic self-interestby what Laud had called the body of the church. The resultwas that denial of spiritual significance in the relations of organ-ized society which may be called Indifferentism.

The change had begun before the civil war. It was com-pleted with the Restoration and, still more, with the Revolution.In the eighteenth century it is superfluous to examine the teachingof the Church of England as to social ethics, for it brings no dis-tinctive contribution, and, except by a few eccentrics, the veryconception of the church as an independent moral authority,whose standards may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions,has been abandoned. An institution which possesses no philoso-phy of its own inevitably accepts that which happens to be prev-alent. What set the tone of social thought in the eighteenthcentury was partly the new Political Arithmetic which had cometo maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was natural in thefirst great age of English natural science-the age of Newton,

I D'Ewes, Journal of the House of Commons,sub. ann. I57I.2 S.P.D. Charles 1, Vol. 437, No. IO.3 Penn., No Cross No Crown, Part I, chap. xii, ? 8.


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 67Iof Halley, of the Royal Society-drew its inspiration, not fromreligion or morals, but from mathematics and physics. It wasstill more the political theory associated with the name of Locke,but popularized and debased by a hundred imitators. Societyis not a community of classes with varying functions, united toeach other and to God by mutual obligations arising from theirrelation to a common end. It is a joint stock company ratherthan an organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders arestrictly limited. They enter it in order to insure the rightsalready vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. Thestate-a matter of convenience, not of supernatural sanctions-exists for the protection of them, and fulfils its object in so faras, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full scope fortheir unfettered exercise. But the most important of thoserights are property rights, and property rights attach mainly,though not, of course, exclusively, to the higher orders of men,who hold the tangible, material stock of society. Those whodo not subscribe to the company have no legal claim for a sharein the profits, though they have a moral claim on the charity oftheir superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which treats allbelow the nobility and gentry as the poor -and the poor, it iswell known, are of two kinds, the industrious poor, who workfor their betters, and the idle poor who work for themselves.Hence the unending discussions as to whether the laboring poorare to be classed among the productive or unproductiveclasses-whether they are, or are not, really worth their keep.Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that any sub-stantial amelioration of their lot could be effected by any kindof public policy. It would be easier, where property was wellsecured, to live without money than without poor, .... who,as they ought to be kept from starving, so should they receivenothing worth saving ; the poor have nothing to stir them upto labour but their wants, which it were wisdom to relieve, but follyto cure ; to make society happy, it is necessary that greatnumbers should be wretched as well as poor ; such sentencesfrom a work' printed in I720 are not typical. But they are asstraws which show which way the wind was blowing.

MMandeville, The Fable of the Bees.


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672 R. H. TAWNEYIn such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low and

equable, and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was an intellec-tual solecism and an error in taste. Religious thought was notimmune from the same influence. It was not merely that thechurch, which, as much as the state, was the heir of the Revolu-tion settlement, reproduced the temper of an aristocratic societyas it reproduced its class organization and economic inequalities.The significant thing was that, apart from certain groups andcertain questions, it accepted the prevalent social philosophyand adapted its teaching to it. The age in which political theorywas cast in the mold of religion had yielded to one in which reli-gious thought was not an imperious master, but a docile pupil.Conspicuous exceptions like Law, who reasserted with matchlesspower the idea that Christianity implies a certain way of life, orprotests like Wesley's sermon on The Use of Money, merelyheighten the impression of a general acquiescence in the conven-tional ethics. The prevalent religious thought, which might notunfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, andsoftened, on occasion, by a rather sentimental compassion forinferiors, had as its rational counterpart a social philosophywhich repudiated teleology and substituted the analogy of a self-regulating mechanism moved by the weights and pulleys of eco-nomic motives for the theory which had regarded it as an organ-ism composed of different classes united by mutual obligationsspringing from their common relation to a common end. Such aview, with its emphasis on the economic harmony of apparentlyconflicting interests, left small scope for moral casuistry. Thematerials for the moralist or the reformer were, indeed, abundantenough. The phenomena of early commercial capitalism-con-sider only the orgy of financial immorality which culminated inI7V9-were of a kind which might have been expected to shockeven the not oversensitive conscience of the eighteenth century.Two centuries before the Fuggers had been denounced bypreachers and theologians; and, compared with the men whoengineered the South Sea Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents.In reality religious opinion was quite unmoved by the spectacle.The traditional scheme of social ethics had been worked out in a


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SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 673simpler age; in the commercial England of Banking, and Ship-ping, and Joint-Stock enterprise, it seemed, and was called aGothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was quietlydropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from episcopalcharges. In the popular manual called The Whole Duty of Man.first published in i658 and widely read during the following cen-tury, extortion and oppression still figure as sins, but the attemptto define what they are is frankly abandoned. If preachers havenot yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the naturalman expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words

Trade is one thing and religion is another, ' they imply a notvery different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility ofcollisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one,in fact, which left little room for religious teaching

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R.H.tawney Religious Thought