Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780-1850

Abstract

Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780-1850 Editors: Arhtur Burns and Joanna Innes Cambridge University Press, 2003 Everywhere the focus is on Democracy nowadays, and one constantly hears references to the significance of Magna Charta in this context, but Magna Charta was not specifically a progressive or democratic document. It was important to the extent that it reasserted some of the ancient privileges of Anglo-Saxon England, but it primarily asserted the rights of feudal barons against an overbearing feudal monarch. Prior to the tenth century Norman Conquest, the Anglo-Saxon populace enjoyed a form of constitutional, virtually elective, monarchy they had brought with them from their German homeland. The king was king of the English (the cyning or 'father of the kin'), and he was aided by a council of nobles whose authority originated in their descent from the kings of lesser, local tribes. The common freemen had their rights as blood members of the overall polity. The election of a king required the approval of the people and, in theory at least, even war required the assent of the people, who had a right to be called to a witangemoot and be consulted in all matters of significance. But the Norman conquest of England brought fully developed feudalism to England. The victorious Norman king came as a conqueror, and (although related by blood as a Norseman to the people and royal family of England) now called himself king of England, not of the English. Under feudalism he claimed ownership of the land, and of all who were born on it (hence the subsequent legal right of anyone born in Britain, the USA or other countries that originated in the course of British overseas colonial settlement, to receive the nationality of the country in which he was born, rather than the nationality of his forebears, as is still the case in modern Germany). These historical observations are quite germaine to an understanding of the contents of this book: the thirteen articles it contains trace events which heavily influenced the spread of popular democracy throughout the Western world, and particularly in Europe. Under Henry the Fifth, the English governmental system largely returned to its Anglo-Saxon roots, but while the House of Commons, representing the people, from then on met more or less regularly as a part of Parliament, and the nobility themselves became more English (notably during the reign of Henry the Eighth), election to the House of Commons was restricted to a limited electorate comprising mainly owners of land and the senior burgesses of the urban boroughs that had received royal recognition. Feudalism, centering power on the aristocracy and on the primates of the Catholic Church, was overthrown in France by militant revolution, followed by years of chaos and bloodshed, but Britain escaped this, largely because the power of the Catholic church had been destroyed by Henry the Eighth, and because the British aristocracy tended to reside on their estates, managing these first hand in an enlightened way. …