Book III, Chapter IV, 1

How the Commerce of Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country.

The growth and wealth of commercial and manufacturing towns contributed to the improvement and cultivation of the countries to which they belonged in three different ways.

First, by providing a large and ready market for the raw produce of the countryside, they encouraged its cultivation and further improvement. This benefit was not confined to the countries in which the towns stood, but extended in some degree to every country with which they traded. To each they offered a market for part of either its raw or its manufactured produce, and so gave some encouragement to the industry and improvement of all. Their own country, however, necessarily gained most from this market because of its proximity. Since the carriage of its raw produce cost less, traders could pay its growers a better price while still selling it to consumers as cheaply as produce from more distant countries.

Second, the wealth acquired by city dwellers was often used to buy land that came up for sale, much of which was frequently uncultivated. Merchants commonly aspire to become country gentlemen, and when they do they are generally the best of all improvers. A merchant is accustomed to using his money chiefly in profitable ventures, whereas a country gentleman who has never traded is accustomed chiefly to spending it. The one often sees his money leave him and return with a profit; the other, once he parts with it, seldom expects to see it again. These different habits naturally shape their temperaments in every kind of business. The merchant is commonly a bold entrepreneur; the country gentleman a timid one. The former does not fear to invest a large capital at once in improving his land when he has a reasonable prospect of increasing its value in proportion to the expense. The latter, if he has any capital—which is not always the case—seldom ventures to use it this way. If he makes improvements at all, he generally pays for them not with capital but with what he can save from his annual revenue. Anyone who has lived in a mercantile town surrounded by unimproved countryside must often have noticed how much bolder the merchants' efforts at improvement were than those of mere country gentlemen. Moreover, the habits of order, economy, and attention formed by trade make a merchant far better equipped to undertake any project of improvement profitably and successfully.

Third and last, commerce and manufactures gradually brought order and good government, and with them individual liberty and security, to people in the countryside who had previously lived in almost constant warfare with their neighbors and in servile dependence on their superiors. This, though least often noticed, is by far their most important effect. So far as I know, Mr Hume is the only writer who has yet taken note of it.

In a country without foreign trade or any of the finer manufactures, a great landowner has nothing for which he can exchange most of the produce of his estates beyond what sustains their cultivators; he therefore consumes all this surplus in rustic hospitality at home. If the surplus is enough to feed a hundred or a thousand men, he can use it only to feed a hundred or a thousand men. He is accordingly surrounded at all times by a multitude of retainers and dependents who can give nothing in return for their maintenance. Fed entirely by his bounty, they must obey him, just as soldiers must obey the prince who pays them. Before commerce and manufactures spread through Europe, the hospitality of the rich and great, from the sovereign to the humblest baron, surpassed anything we can readily imagine today. Westminster-hall was William Rufus's dining room, and perhaps was frequently scarcely large enough for his guests. It was counted an act of magnificence by Thomas Becket that he covered the floor of his hall with clean hay or, when in season, rushes, so that the knights and squires who could not find seats would not spoil their fine clothes when they sat on the floor to dine. The great Earl of Warwick is said to have entertained 30,000 people every day at his various manors. Though that number may be exaggerated, the actual number must have been very large to allow for such an exaggeration. Hospitality of almost the same kind was practiced not many years ago in many parts of the Highlands of Scotland. It appears common to all peoples little acquainted with commerce and manufactures. Doctor Pocock says that he saw an Arabian chief dining in the streets of a town to which he had come to sell his cattle, inviting every passerby, even ordinary beggars, to sit down and share his feast.

The occupiers of land were in every respect as dependent on the great proprietor as his retainers. Even those who were not villeins were tenants at will, paying rent in no way equal to the subsistence the land provided them. A crown, half a crown, a sheep, or a lamb was, some years ago, a common rent in the Highlands of Scotland for land that supported a family. In some places it remains so today; nor can money there now purchase a greater quantity of goods than it can elsewhere. Where the surplus produce of a large estate must be consumed on the estate itself, the proprietor will often find it more convenient for some of it to be consumed away from his own house, provided those who consume it depend on him as much as his retainers or household servants do. He thereby avoids the inconvenience of having either too many guests or too large a household. A tenant at will who occupies enough land to support his family for little more than a quit-rent is as dependent on the proprietor as any servant or retainer, and must obey him just as unreservedly. Such a proprietor feeds his tenants in their own houses, just as he feeds his servants and retainers in his. Both receive their subsistence from his bounty, and its continuance depends on his pleasure.

The power of the ancient barons rested on the authority great proprietors necessarily held over their tenants and retainers under such conditions. They inevitably became judges in peace and leaders in war for everyone who lived on their estates. Within their respective demesnes they could maintain order and enforce the law, because each could marshal the entire force of the inhabitants against anyone's injustice. No one else possessed enough authority to do this, least of all the king. In those ancient times, the king was little more than the greatest landowner in his realm, to whom the other great landowners paid certain respects for their common defense against common enemies. For the king to enforce payment of a small debt on a great proprietor's lands, where all the inhabitants were armed and accustomed to stand together, would have demanded, had he tried to do it on his own authority, almost as much effort as ending a civil war. He was therefore obliged to leave the administration of justice over most of the country to those capable of administering it, and for the same reason to leave command of the country's militia to those whom it would obey.

It is a mistake to suppose that these territorial jurisdictions originated in feudal law. Not only the highest civil and criminal jurisdictions but the right to raise troops, coin money, and even make bylaws to govern their own people were held as allodial rights by great landowners centuries before Europe knew even the name of feudal law. The authority and jurisdiction of the Saxon lords in England appear to have been as great before the Conquest as those of any Norman lord after it. Yet feudal law is not thought to have become the common law of England until after the Conquest. That the great lords of France held the broadest authority and jurisdiction as allodial rights long before feudal law entered that country is beyond doubt. Such authority and jurisdiction followed necessarily from the state of property and customs just described. There is no need to reach back into the distant beginnings of the French or English monarchies to find proof, even in far more recent times, that such causes must always yield such effects. It is not thirty years since Mr Cameron of Lochiel, a gentleman of Lochaber in Scotland, exercised the highest criminal jurisdiction over his own people without the slightest legal warrant. He was neither what was then called a lord of regality nor even a tenant in chief, but a vassal of the Duke of Argyll; nor was he so much as a justice of the peace. He is said to have acted with great fairness, though without any of the formalities of justice; and the state of that part of the country at the time may well have made it necessary for him to assume this authority to preserve the public peace. This gentleman, whose rent never exceeded £500 a year, took 800 of his own people with him into the rebellion in 1745.

Far from extending the power of the great allodial lords, the introduction of feudal law may be regarded as an attempt to restrain it. It established an orderly hierarchy, with a long succession of services and duties from the king down to the smallest landowner. When a proprietor was a minor, the rent and management of his lands passed into the hands of his immediate superior. Those of the great proprietors thus passed into the king's hands. The king was charged with maintaining and educating the ward, and his authority as guardian was thought to entitle him to dispose of the ward in marriage, so long as the match was not beneath the ward's rank. But although this institution necessarily tended to strengthen the king's authority and weaken that of the great proprietors, it could not do either sufficiently to establish order and good government among the rural population, since it could not sufficiently change the state of property and customs from which the disorders sprang. Government remained, as before, too weak at its head and too strong in its lower members; the excessive strength of the lower members was the cause of the head's weakness. Even after the establishment of feudal subordination, the king was as powerless as before to check the great lords' violence. They continued to wage war at their own discretion, almost constantly against one another and very often against the king; and the open countryside remained a theater of violence, plunder, and disorder.

What all the coercive force of feudal institutions could never accomplish, however, the quiet and imperceptible workings of foreign trade and manufactures gradually brought about. These increasingly offered the great landowners something for which they could exchange the entire surplus produce of their estates and which they could consume themselves without sharing it with tenants or retainers. All for ourselves and nothing for anyone else seems in every age to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. Once they found a way to consume the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no wish to share them with anyone. For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or some equally frivolous and useless object, they exchanged the maintenance—or, which is the same thing, the price of maintaining—1000 men for a year, and with it all the weight and authority that such maintenance could give them. The buckles, however, belonged to them alone, and no other human being had a share in them; whereas under the older manner of spending they would have had to share with at least 1000 people. To those deciding which they preferred, this difference was conclusive. Thus, to gratify the most childish, the lowest, and the most sordid of all vanities, they gradually bartered away their entire power and authority.

In a country with neither foreign trade nor any of the finer manufactures, a man with £10,000 a year can hardly spend his revenue otherwise than by supporting perhaps 1000 families, all of whom are necessarily at his command. In Europe today, a man with £10,000 a year can spend his entire revenue, and generally does so, without directly supporting twenty people or commanding more than ten footmen, who are scarcely worth commanding. Indirectly he may support as many people as before, or even more. For though the precious goods for which he exchanges all his revenue amount to very little in quantity, the workers employed in obtaining and preparing them must necessarily be very numerous. Their high price generally consists of the wages of their labor and the profits of all their immediate employers. By paying that price he indirectly pays all these wages and profits and thus contributes indirectly to the maintenance of all the workers and their employers. Yet he generally supplies only a very small share of the maintenance of each: to a very few, perhaps, not a tenth; to many, not a hundredth; and to some, not a thousandth or even a ten thousandth of their entire yearly maintenance. Although he helps to maintain them all, they are all more or less independent of him, since in general they can all be maintained without him.

When great landowners spend their rents to maintain their tenants and retainers, each supports all of his own tenants and all of his own retainers entirely. When instead they spend those rents on tradesmen and craftsmen, they may collectively support as many people as before—or, because of the waste inherent in rustic hospitality, even more. Yet individually each landowner often supplies only a tiny portion of the maintenance of any one person in that greater multitude. Each tradesman or craftsman earns his subsistence through the custom not of one person but of a hundred or a thousand different customers. Thus, though he depends to some extent on all of them, he is absolutely dependent on none.

HOW TRADE IN TOWNS HELPED IMPROVE THE COUNTRYSIDE.

The growth and wealth of trading and manufacturing towns helped improve and cultivate the countries they belonged to in three ways.

First, towns provided a large, reliable market for raw produce from the countryside. This encouraged farmers to cultivate and improve their land further. The benefit did not stop at the borders of the countries where the towns stood. It reached, to varying degrees, every country they traded with. The towns offered all those countries a market for some of their raw or manufactured goods, and so encouraged work and improvement in all of them. Their own country necessarily gained the most from this market because it was nearby. Transporting its raw produce cost less. Traders could therefore pay its growers a better price and still sell to consumers as cheaply as they could sell goods from farther away.

Second, townspeople often spent the wealth they had earned on land for sale, much of which was uncultivated. Merchants commonly want to become country gentlemen. When they do, they are generally the best people at improving land. A merchant is used to putting money into profitable ventures, while a country gentleman who has done nothing else is used to spending it on his lifestyle. The merchant often watches his money go out and then return with a profit. The gentleman, once he spends it, rarely expects to see it again. These different habits naturally affect how they approach every kind of business. Merchants usually undertake projects boldly; country gentlemen are usually cautious. A merchant will spend a large stock of money at once on improving his land if he has good reason to expect its value to rise enough to justify the cost. A country gentleman, if he has any such stock at all, rarely risks spending it this way. If he makes improvements, he usually pays for them not out of stock but out of what he can save from his yearly revenue. Anyone who has lived in a trading town surrounded by unimproved countryside has probably often noticed how much more energetically merchants improve land than country gentlemen do. Business also gives merchants habits of order, thrift, and attention to detail. These make them much better equipped to carry out an improvement profitably and successfully.

Third and finally, trade and manufacturing gradually brought order and good government, together with personal freedom and safety, to country people. Before that, they had lived almost constantly at war with their neighbors and in servile dependence on their superiors. This effect has attracted the least notice but is by far the most important. As far as I know, Mr Hume is the only writer who has yet pointed it out.

In a country with no foreign trade and no finer manufactures, a great landowner cannot exchange most of the produce left over after supporting the farmers for anything he wants. Instead, he consumes it all by feeding guests at home in a lavish, rustic way. If the surplus can support a hundred or a thousand men, he can put it to no other use than supporting a hundred or a thousand men. So he is always surrounded by a crowd of retainers and dependents. They give nothing of equal value in return for their support and live entirely on his generosity. They must therefore obey him, just as soldiers must obey the ruler who pays them. Before trade and manufacturing spread through Europe, the hospitality of the rich and powerful, from the ruler down to the smallest baron, went far beyond anything we can easily imagine today. Westminster-hall served as William Rufus's dining room and may often have been barely large enough for his guests. Thomas Becket was considered splendid for covering the floor of his hall with clean hay or rushes in season. Knights and squires who could not find seats could then sit on the floor for dinner without ruining their fine clothes. The great Earl of Warwick is said to have fed 30,000 people each day at his various manors. This figure may be exaggerated, but the true number must have been very large for such an exaggeration to be possible. Not many years ago, people offered almost the same kind of hospitality in many parts of the Highlands of Scotland. It seems common wherever trade and manufactures are little known. Doctor Pocock says that he saw an Arabian chief eating dinner in the streets of a town where he had come to sell his cattle. The chief invited everyone passing by, even ordinary beggars, to sit with him and share his feast.

People who occupied land depended on the great landowner in every way, just as his retainers did. Even those who were not villeins rented at the owner's pleasure. Their rent was nowhere near the value of what their land provided for their living. Some years ago in the Highlands of Scotland, a crown, half a crown, a sheep, or a lamb was a common rent for land that supported a family. That is still true in some places today, and money does not buy more goods there now than elsewhere. In a country where a great estate's surplus produce must be consumed on the estate, the owner often finds it easier for people to consume some of it away from his house, as long as they depend on him as much as his retainers or household servants do. This saves him from hosting an unwieldy crowd or maintaining too large a household. A tenant who may be dismissed at will, whose land supports his family for little more than a token rent, depends on the landowner as much as any servant or retainer and must obey him just as fully. The owner feeds his servants and retainers in his own house and his tenants in theirs. Both groups live on his generosity, which he can withdraw whenever he pleases.

The power of the old barons rested on the authority that great landowners necessarily held over their tenants and retainers in these circumstances. They inevitably became judges in peacetime and military leaders in wartime for everyone living on their estates. They could keep order and enforce the law on their own lands because each could turn all his residents against anyone who did wrong. No one else had enough authority to do that, least of all the king. In those times the king was little more than the biggest landowner in his realm, whom the other great landowners respected to some extent so they could defend themselves together against shared enemies. On a powerful lord's land, the people were armed and used to supporting one another. For the king to collect even a small debt there by his own authority would have taken almost as much effort as ending a civil war. He therefore had to leave the administration of justice across most of the country to people who could actually carry it out. For the same reason, he left command of the rural militia to those whom it would obey.

It is wrong to think these landowners' powers of local judgment began with feudal law. For several centuries before Europe even knew the name of feudal law, great landowners held such rights through outright ownership of their lands. Their rights included the highest powers to judge civil and criminal cases, raise troops, mint money, and even make local laws for their own people. Saxon lords in England appear to have had as much authority and power of judgment before the Conquest as Norman lords had afterward. Yet feudal law is not thought to have become England's common law until after the Conquest. There is also no doubt that great French lords held very extensive authority and powers of judgment through outright ownership long before feudal law reached France. This authority and these powers necessarily arose from the pattern of property ownership and ways of life just described. We do not need to go back to the distant origins of the French or English monarchies to find proof that these causes always produce these results. Much more recent times provide many examples. Less than thirty years ago, Mr Cameron of Lochiel, a gentleman of Lochaber in Scotland, exercised the highest power to judge crimes among his own people without any legal authority at all. He was not what was then called a lord of regality or even a tenant in chief, but a vassal of the Duke of Argyll. He was not even a justice of peace. He is said to have judged very fairly, though without any formal legal procedures. Conditions in that part of the country may well have required him to assume this power to keep the public peace. Although this gentleman's rent never exceeded £500 a-year, in 1745 he took 800 of his own people with him into the rebellion.

The introduction of feudal law can be seen as an effort to limit the power of great lords who owned their lands outright, not to increase it. It set up a regular chain of authority, with a long series of services and duties, from the king down to the smallest landowner. When a landowner was a minor, the income from his land and the management of it went to his immediate superior. The income and management of great landowners' estates therefore went to the king, who had to support and educate the young ward. As guardian, the king was also supposed to have the right to arrange the ward's marriage, provided the match was suitable to the ward's rank. This system did tend to strengthen the king and weaken great landowners, but not enough to bring order and good government to the countryside. It could not change enough of the pattern of property ownership and ways of life that had caused the disorder. Government remained, as before, too weak at the top and too strong at lower levels. Indeed, the lower levels' excessive strength was what made the top weak. Even after the feudal hierarchy was established, the king could no more restrain the powerful lords' violence than he could before. They still made war whenever they wished, almost constantly against each other and very often against the king. The open countryside remained full of violence, robbery, and disorder.

Foreign trade and manufactures gradually achieved, quietly and almost unnoticed, what all the force of feudal institutions could not. They gave great landowners things for which they could exchange the entire surplus from their estates and consume it all themselves, without sharing it with tenants or retainers. "Everything for ourselves and nothing for anyone else" seems to have been the wretched rule followed by those who rule humanity in every age. Once they could consume the entire value of their rents themselves, they no longer wanted to share it with anyone. For a pair of diamond buckles, perhaps, or something equally trivial and useless, they exchanged the food for 1000 men for a year, or the money that would pay for it. With that they gave up all the power and authority those men would have given them. The buckles, though, belonged entirely to them and nobody else had a share. Under the older way of spending, they had to share with at least 1000 people. For the people making this choice, that difference settled the matter. To satisfy the most childish, petty, and selfish vanity, they gradually traded away all their power and authority.

In a country with no foreign trade or finer manufactures, a man with £10,000 a-year can hardly spend his revenue except by supporting perhaps 1000 families, all of whom must obey him. In Europe today, a man with £10,000 a-year can spend all his revenue, as he generally does, without directly supporting twenty people. Nor can he command more than ten footmen, who are not worth commanding. Indirectly, perhaps, he supports as many or even more people than he could have supported under the old way of spending. The costly goods he buys with all his revenue may amount to very little in physical quantity, but many workers must gather and prepare them. The high price largely consists of those workers' wages and the profits of their immediate employers. By paying it, he indirectly pays all those wages and profits and helps support all those workers and their employers. But his share of any individual's support is generally tiny. For very few people, perhaps, is it as much as a tenth; for many it is less than a hundredth; and for some it is less than a thousandth or even a ten thousandth of their yearly support. So although he helps support them all, they remain more or less independent of him. In general, they can live without his custom.

When great landowners use their rents to support tenants and retainers, each owner fully supports all his own tenants and retainers. When they spend their rents on traders and craftspeople instead, together they may support as many people as before, or even more, given the waste involved in lavish country hospitality. But each landowner on his own often provides only a tiny fraction of the support of any one person in this larger group. Each trader or craftsperson earns a living through the business of not just one customer but a hundred or a thousand. Though each depends to some extent on all of them together, none depends completely on any single one.