All societies are, to some degree, stratified or divided into
different social groups. These groups may be in competition with each other for
social control or wealth. They may be functional, defined by their contribution
to society as a whole. They may share common 'values', have a common 'national
identity' or they may form part of a society in which different 'values' coexist
with varying degrees of success or conflict. What was British society like in
1780?
The working population
The labouring population made up the bulk of society consisting
of those who earned their wages largely through manual work. There were,
however, important differences within the working population. People worked in
rural or urban environments. Their employment was agricultural, manufacturing or
in the growing service sector. Some were skilled, others semi-skilled or
unskilled. They were male or female. Agricultural labourers formed a major part
of the workforce in rural Britain. There was, however, a distinction between the
low waged southern English counties where little alternative employment was
available and the higher waged northern counties where farmers had to compete
for labour with expanding urban manufacturing industries. Within rural
communities there was an important hierarchy based upon levels of skills that
paralleled levels of income. Bird-scarers, generally children, were at the base
of the hierarchy while ploughmen were at the top. Only the better-educated
shepherds had greater status.
The same hierarchy of skill existed in industrial Britain and
the distinction between skilled and unskilled or general labourers was one of
enduring importance. Artisans formed the 'aristocracy of labour', highly paid
and relatively secure in traditional trades largely unchanged by the industrial
revolution. They guarded their skills, developed through the process of
apprenticeship, against 'dilution' by semi-skilled workers who were paid less.
Skilled factory workers, like the fine-cotton spinners and weavers of
Lancashire, benefited from new technology. Others like handloom weavers and
framework knitters became redundant. The creation of new skills during the
industrial revolution led to the gradual creation of new skilled elites:
foremen, overseers, mechanics and technicians as well as managers. Semi-skilled
and unskilled manual labour was more vulnerable to economic fluctuations and to
unemployment or under-employment. Men were generally able to push women to the
lower-paid margins of manufacturing. In the textile industries, for example, men
dominated new technology like the self-acting spinning 'mule' perfected in the
early 1820s. The 'sweated trades' or the growing demands for domestic servants,
low skill, low pay, long hours, was the destination for many women.
The diversity of experience is at its starkest in the debate
over whether working class standards of living rose or fell between the 1780s
and 1840s. Some workers, like navvies, experienced rising wages while others,
for example handloom weavers, saw their income decline. This should not be
surprising. There were always winners and losers of economic change especially
when new technology made particular skills redundant. Even within the same
occupation wages varied. In the 1810s printers earned 12-19 shillings in
Scotland, 18-22 shillings in northern England, 18-24 shillings in the south east
and as much as 25 shillings in London. The difference between the skilled London
artisan and a Scottish crofter was, in many respects, as great as that between a
member of the aristocracy and a prosperous shopkeeper. Yet, both often shared a
common sense of resentment and disillusion at the inequalities in society.
The middle classes
The middle classes were increasingly defined as a 'class' in
the late eighteenth century. They were distinguished from the aristocratic elite
by the need to earn a living and from the labouring population by their
property, however small, represented by stock in trade, tools or by educational
investment in skills or expertise. As a class, they benefited from the changes
in the economy and, though not exclusively urban, were increasingly found in the
growing towns of the provinces. Their homogeneity as a class came from their
growing acceptance of a common social and political ideology. This had three
strands. First, evangelicalism, whether Anglican or Nonconformist, provided a
firm religious foundation grounded in a 'call to seriousness'. This contrasted
with the immoral behaviour of the aristocracy. It emphasised the virtues of hard
work, plain and moral living, respectable family life and above all conscience.
This converted middle class occupations like the law, medicine, the Church and
the armed forces into 'callings' or vocations. Secondly, the ideas of Jeremy
Bentham allowed attacks on the inefficiency of the aristocratic conception of
society. Tradition, restriction and 'influence', the values particular to landed
society, were compared, generally unfavourably, with middle class virtues of
order, discipline, merit and application. Finally, Political Economy provided an
economic justification for their growing power with its focus on the freedom of
the market and the virtue of enterprise. The middle classes promoted their
ideology with missionary zeal.
In the 1780s the middle classes embraced at one end city
bankers and large industrialists with incomes from investment and profits of
over £500 per year and at the other extreme small shopkeepers and clerks with
annual earnings of only £50. The provincial elites were a small group of men and
families who controlled growing industrial complexes. In London, there were the
merchant bankers. This elite, on familiar and sometimes marrying terms with the
aristocracy, was not representative of the middle class as a whole. The lower
middle class was composed of smaller manufacturers, shopkeepers, milliners,
tailors, local brewers as well as the rapidly growing number of clerks in both
business and government, schoolteachers, an emerging managerial class,
accountants, pharmacists and engineers. Aware of their status they maintained an
important distinction between themselves as salaried or fee-earning employees
and wage-earning manual workers.
The landed classes
In the 1780s, power, economic and political, still lay in the
possession and exploitation of land. Landowners did not simply farm their own
land or rent it out to tenant farmers. They exploited mineral deposits on their
estates providing stone, slate, sand, brick-clay, timber and coal for growing
industries. They rented their urban properties in response to a growing housing
shortage. They invested in government stocks, the Bank of England, in industry
and transport. The Duke of Bridgewater funded the first canal in the 1760s.
Landowners benefited from the profits of political office since they monopolised
the offices of state, their patronage and revenues. They were adaptable, if
conservative, in outlook. A peerage of three hundred wealthy families dominated
the landed classes. The estate and the country house were at the heart of their
power providing authority and status. They controlled patronage rewarding the
loyalty of friends, family and clients openly and without moral scruple to
maintain their political power. Beneath of great landowners were the gentry who
dominated the counties as squires, Justices of the Peace, poor law officials,
churchwardens and backbench MPs. Below the gentry, landed society forked. There
was a hierarchy of owner-occupiers or freeholders with incomes ranging from £700
down to as little as £30 per year; and tenant farmers who found their profits
threatened by falling food prices and were the most vocal proponents of the Corn
Laws.
The basis of landed society was mutual obligations within a
hierarchical framework. Deferential attitudes were due to those above and
paternalistic attitudes to those below. This was acceptable to most people in
rural England and Scotland where the landlord was normally of the same
nationality and culture. This was less the case in Wales and Ireland where
landlords were often both from an alien culture and religion. However, the 'bond
of dependency' between landlord, tenant farmer and labourer was beginning to
break down by the 1780s. There had always be popular disturbances like food
riots when people reminded those with power of their responsibilities and of the
need for 'just wages' and 'just prices'. Food riots in the 1790s, the rural
slump after 1815, the riots in the Fens in 1816, in Norfolk and Suffolk in 1822,
and particularly the 'Captain Swing' riots across southern England in 1830
challenged established values. Each was largely unsuccessful and harshly
repressed. This indicated of a breakdown in the dependency system, what Carlyle
called "the abdication on the part of the governors". The market, not appeals to
custom and established practice, increasingly determined the social behaviour of
the landed classes.
A diverse society
Society in the 1780s was multifaceted. Attitudes were a result
of particular circumstances, opportunities and fears created by an economy in
which there were elements of continuity as well as change. Social attitudes,
behaviour and work patterns were closely linked to support for the social
hierarchy. Power was converted into moral authority and ensured the stability of
a social hierarchy threatened by change. Deference, whether in urban or rural
settings, remained strong because family, work patterns and communities did much
to promote it. No one criterion, whether class or paternalism or dependency, can
explain the complexities of society in the 1780s.
