英国内战

the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History The English Civil War in Geographical Perspective Author(s): Leonard Hochberg Source: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 14, No. 4 (Spring, 1984), pp. 729-750 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/203463 . Accessed: 29/05/2013 08:24 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 61.175.193.50 on Wed, 29 May 2013 08:24:24 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Journal of Interdisciplinary History, XIv:4 (Spring I984), 729-750. Leonard Hochberg The English Civil War in Geographical Perspective "I confess," wrote one of [Archbishop] Laud's informants early in 1640, "it is an honour to the kingdom to have such towns as Sunderland was, to come up and flourish from small beginnings. But . . . I think .. .that the King's Majesty had better for awhile despise that honour and profit that accrues to him that way . . . than to suffer little towns to grow big and anti-monarchy to boot; for where are all these pestilent nests of Puritans hatched, but in corporations, where they swarm and breed like hornets .. ."1 . . .the city of London and other great towns of trade, having in admiration the prosperity of the Low Countries after they had revolted from their monarch, the king of Spain, were inclined to think that the like change of government here, would to them produce the like prosperity. But in the north and west, the king had much the better of Parliament.2 Political observers and historians have long proposed a geo- graphical analysis of the causes of the English Civil War. Early commentators noted the spread of Puritanism through commer- cial England, and implied that an urban-rural cleavage was the root of the hostilities of 1642. Some contemporary historians have inferred socioeconomic causes of the Civil War from a regional Leonard Hochberg is an Instructor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University, Ohio. The author wishes to thank James Boon, Wally Goldfrank, Nathan Schwartz, Paul Seaver, G. William Skinner, Robert Somers, and, above all, Edward Fox for commenting on earlier drafts. Financial support from the Center for the Study of Political Economy (Cornell University) and the Institute for Humane Studies is gratefully acknowledged. 0022-I953/84/040729-22 $02.50/0 ? I983 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. I Quoted by Mervyn James in Family, Lineage, and Civil Society: A Study of Society, Politics, and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500-1640 (Oxford, I974), 89. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth (New York, I969; orig. pub. I682), 3-4, I26-127. This content downloaded from 61.175.193.50 on Wed, 29 May 2013 08:24:24 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 730 LEONARD HOCHBERG division of the political elite; but recent historical investigation calls into question the existence of the geographical factor and therefore its causal implications. To date no generally accepted geographical explanation for the Civil War has been established. Therefore, the purpose of this article is, in the context of the current debate, to reassess in quantitative terms the initial division of members in the House of Commons by demonstrating that the appropriate unit for a geographical analysis of the constituen- cies of the Royalist and Parliamentary parties was not the English county, but the proximity of waterborne transport. The modern debate over the geographical causes of the Civil War began with a quantitative study by Brunton and Pennington, which analyzed the personal characteristics of the Long Parlia- ment's members, in Namierite detail. To test geographical factors as an independent variable, they associated six regional groupings of parliamentary constituencies with the members' affiliation with the king or Commons (see Table I). A majority of members returned from the county and borough constituencies located in the "North" and "West" became Royalist, a majority returned from the "East," "Midlands," and "Southeast" became Parlia- mentarian; but a nearly even division occurred among those re- turned from the "Southwest." In an apparent effort to avoid the implication of these divisions, however, the authors warned that if, "the familiar geographic boundary between the predominantly Royalist north and west and the predominantly Parliamentarian south and east has some economic significance . . . it was not a rigid line between two coherent and fundamentally different sys- tems, with opposing political demands."3 In a review of Brunton and Pennington's work, Hill objected to their classification of members of parliament into two camps, thereby slighting personal motivation and intention. When Hill went on to discuss a geographical division of England, he pre- sented two small sketch maps which would demonstrate at a "glance" that "support for Parliament came from the economi- cally advanced south and east of England, the King's support from the economically backward areas of the north and west." 3 Douglas Brunton and Donald H. Pennington, Members of the Long Parliament (Hamden, Conn., I968), 178. This content downloaded from 61.175.193.50 on Wed, 29 May 2013 08:24:24 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR | 731 Table 1 Constituency Location and Political Affiliation of Long Parliament Membership AFFILIATION REGION PARLIAMENTARIAN ROYALIST East 80% 20% S.E. 68% 27% Midland 59% 37% S.W. 48% 50% North 42% 55% West 31% 67% Total 55% 43 % EAST Cambridgeshire Essex Hertfordshire Huntingdonshire Lincolnshire Norfolk Suffolk S.E. Hampshire Kent Middlesex Surrey Sussex Cinque Ports MIDLANDS Bedfordshire Berkshire Buckinghamshire Derbyshire Leicestershire Northamptonshire Nottinghamshire Oxfordshire Rutland Staffordshire Warwickshire NORTH Cumberland Lancashire Northumberland Westmorland Yorkshire WEST Cheshire Herefordshire Monmouthshire Shropshire Worcestershire Wales Hill, however, is ill at ease with his own geographical generaliza- tion, and immediately quotes a number of contemporary obser- vations to the effect that the Civil War was a class conflict between gentlemen and aristocrats for the king, and tradesmen, yeomen, merchants, and a sprinkling of gentry for Parliament. There is no attempt at a synthesis of these explanations.4 4 Christopher Hill, "Recent Interpretations of the English Civil War," in idem, Puritanism and Revolution (New York, I970), 17; idem, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (New York, I966), I2T. S.W. Cornwall Devonshire Dorset Gloucestershire Somerset Wiltshire This content downloaded from 61.175.193.50 on Wed, 29 May 2013 08:24:24 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 732 LEONARD HOCHBERG By contrast Moore, in his Marxist explanation of the Civil War, suggests that economic forces manifested themselves re- gionally. Commenting on Brunton and Pennington's breakdown of the loyalties of members of parliament, Moore concludes that traces of economic change associated with this new world were located where the progressive gentry consolidated their land hold- ings. Specifically, where the enclosure of common fields was most recent and socially disruptive, in the "East" and "Midlands," a majority of returned members of parliament were Parliamentar- ian. Moore uses the spatial incidence of enclosure as an indicator of an emerging capitalist economy, and as a correlate with parlia- mentary affiliation. But the widely divergent strength of Parlia- mentarians in the two areas-an overwhelming majority from the "East," and a narrow majority from the "Midlands"-suggests either that the incidence of enclosure was not uniform across the two regional groupings of county constituencies, or that enclo- sures in different areas resulted in different social structures and political outcomes. Thus, although Moore's regional formulation of the causes of the Civil War is superficially plausible, it fails to reveal how the incidence of enclosure affected the voting behavior of the enfranchised inhabitants of the parliamentary boroughs (of which most were market towns). As a result, the mechanisms of London's interaction with the towns of southern and eastern En- gland remain insufficiently specific.5 Considering this plethora of possible explanations-ideolog- ical, social, economic, and political-for the Civil War, Stone argues that the observed geographical division occurred for rea- sons which must remain indeterminate. Specifically reacting to an ad hoc inference that class antagonisms were inherent in a geographical base, Stone warns that all inferences of individual characteristics fall within the ambit of the ecological fallacy, so that the geographical division becomes for him a residual effect of the social characteristics and political responses of individuals, rather than a challenge to develop a new geographical perspective 5 Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966), 512-5 I4. This content downloaded from 61.175.193.50 on Wed, 29 May 2013 08:24:24 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR 1 733 for ascertaining Durkheimian social facts about the participants in the conflict.6 This historiographical debate over the causes of the Civil War has not moved from dead center because of two unexamined (and untenable) assumptions: first, that the only appropriate geograph- ical unit of analysis is the county; and second, that any influence exerted by the setting would produce an unvarying response from the indigenous population. Both of these questions go straight to the heart of the relationships between geography and history. When those two subjects were being transformed into academic disciplines in the mid-nineteenth century, it was widely assumed that the geographical setting of any people largely determined the lines of its development. Before long, however, historians began to find the concept of determination more and more troublesome. For one thing, the same geography would support very different institutions or cultures at different times, just as different individ- uals would react differently to the same setting. At first this variety seemed to suggest that no correlation between geography and human behavior was possible, but then it was noticed that for different people, the same geographical setting would provide a wholly different environment, because each would bring differ- ent objectives and abilities to its exploitation. Even within the population of a given geographical setting there would normally be some variation of response to the situation, with those who best gauged its potentialities enjoying the greatest success. Thus geography would not coerce aberrant individuals but reward the most responsive.7 6 For ideological explanations, see George Macauley Trevelyan, England Under the Stuarts (London, I965), 219; for political explanations, see John S. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces: Conservatives and Radicals in the English Civil War, 1603-1650 (New York, I976), 5I. Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1647 (New York, I972), 56. 7 Critical reviews of the county community model may be found in David Underdown, "Community and Class: Theories of Local Politics in the English Revolution," in Barbara C. Malament (ed.), After the Reformation (Philadelphia, 1980), I46-166; Clive Holmes, "The County Community in Stuart Historiography, "Journal of British Studies, XIX (I980), 54-73. For a discussion of the notion of the human environment, consult Carl Ortwin Sauer, "Foreword to Historical Geography," in John Leighly (ed.), Land and Life (Berkeley, 1963), 359. This content downloaded from 61.175.193.50 on Wed, 29 May 2013 08:24:24 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 734 ILEONARD HOCHBERG The concept of the environment as the product of the human response to the physiographical setting also resolves the problem of the basic geographical units. One of the most widely held misapprehensions about this subject is the assumption that the habitable globe is divided into regions, and that these have fre- quently been institutionalized as administrative entities. But if each individual or society creates its own environment, then re- gions (within any segment of the globe) will vary with the ca- pacities of its inhabitants.8 In other words-to return to the English Civil War-the counties which served a formal legal purpose may well have survived their original socioeconomic raison d'etre. For medieval peasants, the environment would usually be the village and its fields, or at most the market town with its dependent villages. For the feudal knight it would be the manors lying within a day's ride (two at the most) of a castle or central strong point. Most of feudal Europe was divided into such entities known as counties or provinces. For centuries they represented the basic units of military-governmental organization of the subsistence economy; as a result social institutions grew up within their geographical framework. The medieval county was the working environment of local feudal authority; and although it continued to serve the interests of those landed elites without commercial ties to London, a quite different socioeconomic organization was, by the seven- teenth century, making its appearance along the waterways and coasts of southeastern England. Unlike the counties, it did not integrate contiguous territory into self-contained areal units, but connected commercial farms with waterside corn markets which forwarded their grain to London in a linear pattern of waterborne transportation. The tentacles of this commercial society reached into all of the counties of southeastern England; but it remained a distinct and separate economic environment for its members. This analysis depends on a theory of social organization which can hardly be elaborated here. Its character, however, can be suggested by establishing some key definitions. The first is that societies develop within patterns of the exchange of goods and 8 James W. Fesler, Area and Administration (University, Ala., I949), 14-20. This content downloaded from 61.175.193.50 on Wed, 29 May 2013 08:24:24 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions THE ENGLISH CIVIL WAR | 735 messages, the former to provide the economic base and the latter, the organizational (administrative, military, etc.) structure. Fur- ther, goods in this context refers to the basic staples: fuel and building materials but especially food, which sustain any society. Because of their inherent bulk, the- cost of moving these com- modities more than very short distances over land strictly limited the territorial base of social units. At this point, however, it is necessary to introduce two critical distinctions, the first between transport and travel and the second between overland and water- borne communications. If the overland transport of heavy goods is prohibitively costly beyond a few miles, its movement across water can be relatively cheap even for long distances. At the same time it should be noted that unencumbered travel over land (where supplies are available en route) is subject to few serious logistical limitations, whereas over water it is much more cum- bersome and limited.9 The implications of these distinctions govern the possibilities of social development. Given the obvious fact that all human societies depend first on food, the size and location of their sup- porting agricultural units limit their possibilities for action beyond mere subsistence. At least until the industrial revolution and the mechanization of transportation, farmland lying more than a few miles from navigable water could not be organized into units larger than a traditional village or market town (that is, within a radius of ten to twenty miles). Further, this limitation in size restricted the possibilities for specialization and increased produc- tion of surplus food to support whatever activities the society might wish to undertake. The relative facility of travel, however, meant that such basic subsistence units could be organized over 9 For a full discussion consult Edward Whiting Fox, History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York, 1971), 19-71. Idem, "The Range of Communications and the Shape of Social Organization," Communication, V (1980), 275-287; Colin Clark, "Transport-Maker or Breaker of Cities," Town Planning Review, XXXVII (I957), 240- 241. For England, consult Peter Bowden, "Agricultural Prices, Farm Profits, and Rents," in Joan Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 15oo-1640 (Cambridge, I967), IV, 6o6, 6io-6i6. Norman J. G. Pounds, An Historical Geography of Western Europe, 1500-1840 (Cambridge, 1979), 58-59, 352-353; Robert A. Dodgshon, "A ISpatial IPer- spective," Peasant Studies, VI (I977), 12; C. Clark and Margaret Haswell, The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture (New York, 1964), 166-167; Clifford T. Smith, An Historical Geography of Western Europe before 18oo (London, I978), 344. This content downloaded from 61.175.193.50 on Wed, 29 May 2013 08:24:24 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 736 | LEONARD HOCHBERG large areas for common social-frequently military or adminis- trative-action which did not involve land transport. These, in short, were the elements of feudal and monarchial societies which dominated inland preindustrial social organization. Where water transport was readily available, however, the relationship between the economic and governmental-military ac- tivity was often roughly reversed. The possibility of moving heavy goods indefinite distances enabled the specialized produc- tion of staple necessities in favorable circumstances and their ex- change and concentration in population centers (ports) where the division of labor could be extended indefinitely. For such a system there were no hard and fast limits on its size comparable to those that operated in the hinterland, nor did the economic base involve contiguous territory but rather separate units connected by water transport. Such an economic system could be far ranging in extent and still inconsequential in terms of territory. That in turn made its military-governmental administration difficult. As a result, the basic (urban) units of a commercial society were frequently au- tonomous (i.e. originally city states) and their most congenial mode for common action was negotiation and accommodation.10 The commercial society of seventeenth-century England was characterized by the interdependent development of commercial farming in southeastern England and the urban agglomeration of London. In