The dogs do bark (1953)

From the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lowly but surely the match sellers, street singers, hawkers and blind fiddlers are coming back. Not as many as in the past, because there is still no mass unemployment; the writer, raised in East London in the years after 1918, remembers beggars in every main street. Undisguised begging is, of course, legally prohibited (nevertheless, it is still done in every big city in the world); the mendicant has to have something to play or something to sell, or, as an extra indignity if he can afford neither, he must sing for his succour. The war, which provided jobs even for the unfit, and its aftermath, which gave gratuities to the soldiers and pickings to the spivs,, took away the beggars. Now there aren’t the jobs and there isn’t the money, and the beggars are re-appearing.

Begging today is a series of unenviable one-man businesses, lacking organization or enterprise. It was not always so. The heyday of beggars was in the reign of Elizabeth the First. They went in gangs, hordes and regiments, often highly organized, with their specialists and their hierarchies. Some unknown rhymester of the sixteenth century coined a jingle which went:

“Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark—

The beggars are coming to town.”

It was no children’s song then, but a piece of grim news.

The numbers of sixteenth and seventeenth century beggars are astonishing. In London there were twelve thousand among a population of less than two hundred thousand in 1600. Holinshed recorded that

“. . . there is not one year, commonly, wherein three hundred or four hundred of them are not devoured and eaten up by the gallows in one place and other. Henry the Eighth, executing his laws very severely against such idle persons . . . did hang up threescore and twelve thousand of them, in his time.”

It was the same all over Europe. Huberman claims that a quarter of the people in Paris in the 1630's were beggars. The Low Countries swarmed with them. In sixteenth-century Switzerland, according to Renard and Weulersse:

". . . when there was no other means of getting rid of the beggars who besieged their houses or wandered in bands about the roads and forests, the wealthy even organized hunting parties against these wretched homeless ones.”

And in Spain, books like “Lazarillo de Tonnes” and Quevedo’s “Great Rogue” described in minute detail the organizations of beggars.

Where did they all come from? Many were peasants, driven from their land by enclosure and rack- renting. In the fifteenth century they had pulled down enclosures, started fires, risen in impotent protest; now they became beggars. Others were soldiers, returned penniless but with a taste for plunder from the continental wars, or set adrift from the disbanded feudal armies. The dissolution of the monasteries added former servants and retainers—"abbeylubbers,” they were nicknamed—to the ragged hordes; and took away, too, the principal source of charity to vagrants. Then there were chapmen, strolling players, gipsies, ballad-mongers, scholars—Gamaliel Ratsey and Luke Hutton, the Elizabethan highwaymen, were University men— and ever so many more. There was no work to be had, and no charity; the new owners of the land had no tradition of generosity to the poor. It was beg, steal or starve.

By the 1570’s there were huge guilds and fraternities of vagabonds; he who joined had to undergo initiation and serve an apprenticeship. The vagabonds, like the law, saw no difference between vagrancy and crime. They had their own dialect, called Pedlars’ French or the Canting Tongue, a mixture of Elizabethan English with the varied contributions of soldiers, foreign beggars and vagrant monks; some of its words—cant, foist, booze, crank—are still with us.

The head of a beggars’ fraternity was known as the Upright Man—certainly nor uprighteous, for he usually had more than one mistress, and they were called Morts or Doxies. Plain beggars were Rufflers; then there were the Clapperdogens, who blistered their flesh with arsenic and herbs to gain pity.. The Counterfeit Cranks ate soap to feign fits and the Abraham Men pretended to be mad, while Dummerers folded their tongues in their mouths to be thought dumb. If a beggar got his bread by telling tales of misfortune, he was a Freshwater Mariner. Among the petty thieves, there was the Hooker or Angler, who carried an iron- hooked staff and “fished” to good purpose with it; the Foist, who picked pockets; and the Nip, who slit purses when their owners looked the other Way—“a knight of the knife,” Ben Jonson called him. Most common of all in London was the Coney-catcher, or confidence trickster—the forefather of the spiv. There were Upright Women, too; Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse, was the head of a gang which for years terrorized the Shooter’s Hill area.

The administrators of Elizabethan England tried hard to solve the problem. In 1571, a census of beggars and rogues was attempted; the following year, the famous edict was published by which "lusty and valiant beggars” were to be

". .. grevouslye whipped, and bumte through the gristle of the right Eare with a hot Yron of the compasse of an ynche about."

This seems to have offered little discouragement, and in 1598 further measures were introduced, including the instruction:

"Every vagabond found begging is to be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and openly whipped, until his or her body be bloody."

At the second offence, a beggar became a felon, and was liable to be hanged.

Whipping, branding and hanging gave no solution. In 1601, alarmed by bad harvests and what Thorold Rogers describes as “a growing disaffection,” Elizabeth’s last Parliament passed the Poor Law Act which, in general principles, remained unchanged until 1834. It made relief of the poor the task of each parish, to be paid for by compulsory Poor Rates. Did it solve the problem? Well, three years later, James the First was condemning vagrants to be branded with a large “R” on the left shoulder and. on a second offence, summarily transported to Virginia.

Some people had their own ideas of a solution. Edward Hext, a west-country Justice of the Peace, thought the beggars were merely lazy:

"Work they will not, neither can they, without extreme pains, by reason (heir sinews are so benumbed and stiff through idleness, as their limbs being put to any hard labour will grief them beyond measure."

Others said that drinking and gambling caused all the trouble; still more people put it down to the growth of London, which doubled its population between 1558 and 1600. Parliament tried to check the metropolitan spread as unsuccessfully as it tried to combat the beggars.

It was the growth of capitalism that did it. In the sixteenth century the merchants were securing the accumulations which were the starting point of industrial capitalism; and at the same time the other necessity, the class of free labourers, was coming into being. Broken away from their former security of subsistence, the beggars were part of the nascent working class, coming face to face with poverty and the freedom to starve. Gradually, as urban life developed, the vagabond fraternities fell away; in their place came organized crime and disordered medicancy. The poor were to be always with us.

In eighteenth-century Scotland there was the same problem. Fletcher of Saltoun estimated—probably too lavishly—that there were two hundred thousand “sorners,” or sturdy beggars: a sixth of the population. Some, called “gaberlunzies,” were licensed by the Kirk Sessions to beg from door to door, in country districts they were the carriers of news and the repositories of folk-lore.

And so it went on. More Acts of Parliament (usually passed in emergency or as the result of panic); the stocks, prison and transportation for the beggars. Defoe, who had reported the lives of the indigent in “Moll Flanders,” asked for work-houses in “Giving Alms No Charity”; eighteen years later, in 1722, they were set up. The nineteenth-century Poor Law Act made the workhouses places of terror. Not surprisingly, people did their best to keep out of them. The legislators tried hard to stamp out begging. Vagrancy Acts were passed in 1824, 1838 and 1873, and in 1904 a committee was set up by the Local Government Board to enquire into the whole thing.

Legally, the following activities are banned. Begging in public, or causing a child to beg; having no home or visible means of subsistence, or being unable to give a good account of oneself; telling fortunes; exposing wounds to get alms; peddling without a licence; failing to maintain one’s family. The Vagrancy Acts brought into being the street singers, the unmusical musicians and the rest.

Consider, then, the beggar. Brought into being by capitalism as the “free” labourer, without work or hope; scourged, branded, killed, hunted and ridiculed— tramping and mumping his way through four centuries, sometimes violent, sometimes obsequious, the symbol of the dispossessed. He was an angry peasant in 1553, a ruffler in 1603, a fugitive from the workhouse in 1853, a legless ex-soldier with a barrel-organ in 1923, and is a kerbside singer in 1953. Consider, too, the failure of brutes and humanitarians alike to do away with him . . .  and then consider the world that could be.

Robert Barltrop

Social contrasts. (1910)

From the December 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anatole France in one of his novels says that “the life of a people is but a succession of miseries, crimes and follies.” This is largely correct. Certainly, from the manifold volumes of historical works in existence, treating of various periods and various peoples, we may gather some knowledge of the crimes and follies perpetrated by the ruling classes of these times, and the enslavement, and consequent misery, of the other, and greater, portion of the populace. It would, indeed, appear from an examination into different historical epochs, that the greater the wealth and culture of the ruling class, the more degraded and hopeless is the condition of those they rule.

If, for example, we turn back to the so-called “golden” age of Greek civilisation, we find that at the time of the greatest prosperity of the Attic state, the whole number of free Athenian, citizens, women and children included, amounted to about 90,000 ; the slaves of both sexes numbered 365,000 ; the balance of the people being made up of aliens—foreigners and freed slaves—these numbering about 45,000. History tells us little or nothing of the lives of these 365,000 human beings on whose toil practically the whole structure of the much-vaunted Greek culture rested. We have had handed down to us the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle, the lyrical dramas of Aeschylus and Euripides; the sculpture of Pheidias can yet be seen in the British Museum ; in the glowing pages of Pluttarch (to say nothing of William Smith) are to be found the records of all the heroic deeds performed by Pericles and Alcibiades ; but the life of a slave does not make such pretty reading as that of a philosopher or artist, and so the historians have been very careful not to disturb the sleek complacency of their readers by a recital of the doings of the mere wealth-producers. The blood and sweat of the slaves would soil the classical purity of Greek culture, so the blood and sweat must be buried beneath the traditional glory of the slaves’ taskmasters.

Coming down to later times a very similar contrast may be observed between the status of the rich and the poor, between the dominant class and the class dominated. In another “golden” age—that of the “virgin”‘ queen Elizabeth—wealth, we are told, increased to an enormous extent. Green, in his “Short History of the English People,” says,

“The lavishness of a new wealth united with a lavishness of life, a love of beauty, of colour, of display, to revolutionize English dress. The Queen’s three thousand robes were rivalled in their bravery by the slashed velvets, the ruffs, the jewelled purpoints of the courtiers around her. Men ‘wore a manor on their backs.’ The old sober notions of thrift melted before the strange revolutions of fortune wrought by the New World. Gallants gambled away a fortune at a sitting, and sailed off to make a fresh one in the Indies. Visions of galleons loaded to the brim with pearls and diamonds and ingots of silver, dreams of El Dorados where all was of gold, threw a haze of prodigality and confusion over the imagination of the meanest seaman.” English literature, following in the wake of the Italian Renascence, took on. a new lease of life through such men as Spenser, Shakespeare, [Bacon and the numerous other poets and writers who graced the Elizabethan age. A scientific knowledge of natural laws was spreading.”

“It was only in the later years of the sixteenth century that the discoveries of Copernicus were brought, home to the general intelligence of the world by Kepler and Galileo.”

Drake, Raleigh, Hawkins and Frobisher, between the intervals of “singeing the King of Spain’s beard,” were circumnavigating the globe, breaking into the charmed circle of the Indies, or discovering the North-West passage.

And yet there is very distinctly another side to the medal. During the reigns immediately preceding that of Elizabeth, a great and ever increasing number of the people had been forcibly expropriated from the soil and thrown out upon the highways to exist as best they might.

“They were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe, a bloody legislation against vagabondage The fathers of the present working class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as voluntary criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own goodwill to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.” (Marx in “Capital.”)

Marx further tells us that

“In Elizabeth’s time ‘rogues were trussed up apace, and there was not one year commonly wherein three or four hundred were not devoured and eaten up by the gallowes.’ (Strype’s ‘Annals of the Thee-formation and Establishment of Religion, and other Various Occurrences in the Church of England during Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign,’ Second ed., 1725, Vol. ‘2.) According to this same Strype, in Somersetshire, in one year, 40 persons were executed, 35 robbers burnt in the hand, 37 whipped, and 183 discharged as ‘incorrigible vagabonds.’ Nevertheless, he is of the opinion that this large number of prisoners does not comprise even a fifth of the actual criminals, thanks to the negligence of the justices and the foolish compassion of the people ; and the other counties of England were not better off in this respect than Somersetshire, while some were even worse. . . . Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded by laws grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage system.”

In modern capitalist society these same sardonic contrasts prevail. In the Daily Chronicle of June 6th, 1903, it was pointed out that “the whole volume of British Trade has increased from 764 millions sterling in 1898 to 877 millions in 1902,” and in the same issue appeared a report of a speech delivered by the late Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman, in which he declared that about 30% of the population were underfed, were on the verge of hunger. (Vide SOCIALIST STANDARD, August this year.)

During the first nine months of 1910, official trade returns show that :

Imports rose by £37,530,000,

Exports of British goods rose by £41,239,000, and Exports of imported goods rose by £11,063,000

as compared with January to September 1909. In the same issue of the paper (Morning Leader 8th October) in which these figures are given, is a short paragraph, headed “Pea-pickers Hardships,” giving an account of a meeting held at Romford, at which “the lamentable conditions under which the pea-pickers live in Essex” was discussed, Canon Ingles remarking at this meeting that the way the pickers lived while on the farms was a disgrace to a Christian country and Canon Lord William Cecil supporting the view that employers should be compelled to provide pure water for drinking and clean straw for beds.

In spite of the great increase in trade that has taken place since the beginning of 1910, at the present time there is perhaps more dissatisfaction among the industrial workers of this country than for some years past. The boiler-makers, the miners, the cotton operatives, the chain-makers and the railwaymen. to mention only a few, are seething with discontent. And yet exports of British goods rose by £41,239,000 !

Historical research shows that, no matter at what period—ancient, medieval or modern,—no matter what may be the wealth and culture, the spread of knowledge, the goodwill even (if such there be) among the dominant class, the condition of the class dominated is, in the main, one of base and degrading servitude, of physical and mental misery. Using the words of the before-mentioned French author, we may epitomise the history of the members of the slave-class by saying that “they were born, they suffered, they died.” Suffering has been their only heritage since slavery was first instituted ; whether it he chattel slavery or wage-slavery does not make very much difference, except that perhaps the chattel-slave was, in some respects, better off than the modern wage-worker.

The Socialist Party exists for the purpose of abolishing, once and for ever, both slave-class and master-class. We of course recognise that natural inequalities between individuals do and must exist. But we know further that social inequalities and contrasts between individuals or classes are an anomaly. To help do away with these social inequalities and contrasts, to raise society to a higher plane, where equality of opportunity shall be accorded to all, irrespective of race or sex, is the reason for our existence as a party. We ask for the intelligent co-operation of our fellow wage-slaves to assist us in this work, so that the day may be hastened when such terms as slave and master, owner and owned, working class and capitalist class, will be, without meaning. When society has evolved into this stage, when the Socialist Commonwealth has at last been established, then for the first time will a period of real culture and intellectual activity be possible to all, and not to, comparatively, a mere handful of men and women, such as have monopolised all the best things of life up to the present.

F. J. Webb

Interpreting Shakespeare (1950)

Book Review from the February 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

New books on the life, works and ideas of Shakespeare are continually added to the enormous literature on the subject. Recent additions have included Ivor Brown's "Shakespeare," Duff-Cooper's “Sergeant Shakespeare" (in which it is suggested that be must have served in the army to have gained his familiarity with military matters), and a reprint of Hesketh Pearson's lively and entertaining "Shakespeare" that Ivor Brown catalogues under the heading "Imaginative.” Pearson seeks to interpret Shakespeare’s writings in the light of political and other happenings at the time, and of Shakespeare's likely reactions to them. Writing during the recent war when, as Pearson puts it, the world had before its eyes in the persons of Hitler, Mussolini, etc., a large number of modem Julius Caesars. Pearson claims that Shakespeare, with a similar example to study at first hand in Queen Elizabeth, had a much better understanding of Caesar and of all dictators than is shown by G. B. Shaw in his idealised version of the ancient Roman dictator.

But for Socialists a much more profitable study is "Shakespeare—A Marxist Interpretation,” a short work by A. A. Smirnov, translated from the Russian and published in 1937 by the “Critics Group” (96, Fifth Avenue. New York).

Smirnov set out to relate Shakespeare's views to the basic economic and political changes and class struggles taking place in the 16th century.

He argues alike against those who see Shakespeare as "the ideologist of the feudal aristocracy” as against those who see him as "the ideologist of that section of the nobility which was acquiring bourgeois trappings.” To Smirnov, “Shakespeare was the humanist ideologist of the bourgeoisie, the exponent of the program advanced by them, when, in the name of humanity. they first challenged the feudal order, but which they later disavowed ” (Pages 92 and 93). According to this interpretation, which Smirnov supports with many quotations from the plays, Shakespeare in the early years portrayed in a favourable light the absolutist monarchy needed by rising Capitalism as a protection against the warring feudal barons. Later, that need became less urgent, the Monarchy and Court degenerated and leaned towards feudal reaction, and at the same time the narrow Puritan group emerged as a representation of capitalist interests and outlook.

Then Shakespeare, who was particularly antagonised by the Puritan hostility to the theatre, found himself, like other "humanists,” faced with the dilemma of the contrast between early bourgeois ideals and the sordid money-grubbing of the bourgeois way of life. To some extent he then "surrendered his former position and yielded to the taste of the reactionary aristocracy which held such triumphant sway over the London stage in 1610.” (P. 85.)

The evidence adduced by Smirnov is necessarily partly speculative and may or may not convince the reader; but those who follow his argument will at any rate appreciate that here is a serious study worth many of the more usual superficial interpretations.

It is not made clear whether Smirnov is, or was. a supporter of the Stalin regime in Russia and he wrote very guardedly when expressing dissent from views on Shakespeare held by some Soviet writers. But one of his tributes to Shakespeare would certainly now give offence to Stalin worshippers. He praises Shakespeare for having had the insight to realise "three centuries before the appearance of scientific history,” that the battle of Agincourt was not won by “a little group of well-born heroes, but by the English soldiers.” If Shakespeare lived in Russia now and wrote plays dealing with the war he would have to reshape his ideas and become a groveller. He would have to pay slavish tribute to "the great leader and supreme commander of genius. Generalissimo of the Soviet Union. Stalin." “the greatest man of our planet." "creator of Soviet military science.” etc., etc.

Edgar Hardcastle

About Books (1953)

From the July 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Plato, Aristotle and others of their day spoke about Greece and the Greeks, they did not include the slaves; when historians of the 18th and 19th centuries wrote about Americans, they gave no heed to the negro slaves. Likewise today, when there is so much blather about the Elizabethan age, our super-patriots and political quacks refer only to the upper crust of the late 16th century society, not to the Toms, Dicks and Harrys who had to strive to earn a meagre living by the sweat of their brows. Not only are the humble workers not mentioned, they are not even considered. A picture of prosperity and regal pageantry is painted against a background of period architecture and costume, with farthingales, ruffs and fancy pants much in evidence. To have painted against a background of masses of hungry, oppressed serfs and workers would have spoiled the colourful effect, and destroyed the object of the painting.

We Socialists are inoculated against this “Elizabethan fever,” but living daily in the very heart of the epidemic it is hard to avoid becoming slightly infected. So we find ourselves pulling books from the bookshelves and reading about the age of Elizabeth I. Some most illuminating reading we can assure you.

We passed over the history books that deal with such world-shattering events as the gallantry of Sir Walter Raleigh in spreading his cloak over a mud puddle for his queen; the cool, casual courage of Sir Francis Drake, finishing his game of bowls whilst the Spanish Armada was in sight, and the heart-flutterings and hand-holdings of Good Queen Bess and her noble lovers. We selected books that told of the domestic tragedy of a certain Joan Wynstone who, on February 6th, 1575, was whipped and branded as a vagabond, on July 26th was saved from being hanged by being set to service to her husband, and on October 3rd, having run away from the husband, was caught and hanged. We browsed into books that gave records of the rates of wages paid and the cost of living during the years of the reign of Elizabeth I. And we read how many a noble lord, whose descendants were privileged to be inside Westminster Abbey on June 2nd this year, laid the foundations of the family fortunes by indulging in practices that would have brought a blush of shame to the cheek of an 18th century highwayman, and by investing in schemes that to this day give off a strong smell of working class blood and sweat.

For the benefit of anyone who may wish to follow our example and try to get a true picture of the conditions of life for the vast majority of people during the reign of Elizabeth I, we will list a few books.

First there is a book that is completely lacking in sensational writing but crammed from cover to cover with facts and figures of rates of pay for workers in various trades in different parts of the country at different times of the year, together with details of the cost of necessary commodities, fluctuations in price with their causes, and comparative figures with other periods. It will not be possible to buy this book now-a-days but it can be obtained from public libraries. It is entitled, "Six Centuries of Work and Wages” by Professor James E. Thorold Rogers, M.P. The book was originally published by Swan Sonncnschcin and Co., Ltd., but there have been many editions. It has, as its subtitle, “ The History of English Labour,” and that is just what it is.

In another book by Thorold Rogers there appears an interesting statement.

"... from 1260 to 1540 poverty was a distant risk in England.”—(“The Industrial and Commercial History of England,” page 10.)

This very concise statement throws the poverty of Elizabethan days into bold relief in contrast with the nearly three centuries to which Mr. Rogers refers.

Another book that tells a very gruesome story of working class suffering is “An Economic History of England, 1066 to 1874,” by Charlotte M. Waters, published by Oxford University Press. The author deals, interestingly and with numerous illustrations, with the causes of working class poverty during the latter fifty years of the 16th century; the break up of the feudal system, tenants turned from their land by landlords who enclosed large tracts for sheep farms, bands of feudal soldiers dismissed from their service, manufacture replacing handicraft, etc. A very, very useful book indeed.

If one would thoroughly understand that period of change that culminated with the English revolution during the 17th century and was at its highest tempo during the reign of Elizabeth I, one should read “Thomas More and his Utopia” by Karl Kautsky published by A. & C. Black, Ltd. Sir Thomas More died in 1535, two years after Elizabeth I was born and twenty-three before she succeeded to the throne. He cannot be classified as an Elizabethan, but Karl Kautsky, in writing of him and his work, devotes a large portion of his book to sketching a background of the social conditions of the 15th and 16th centuries in order that his readers may see the life of More in its proper perspective. So, we get a splendid history of the times and conditions under which the poor of the Elizabethan age lived.

To keep the list as short as possible we will mention only one more work, a well known one; “Capital” by Karl Marx. In Volume I of this great work, part VIII, Chapter XXV111, entitled, “Bloody Legislation against the expropriated from the end of 15th Century. Forcing down Wages by Acts of Parliament,” Marx tells of the cruelty of the oppressive working class legislation of the period and gives us chapter and verse of a number of the acts that were passed and enforced.

Other books dealing with this period of English history can be traced through the bibliographies in the ones we have mentioned should anyone wish to study the period in greater detail. There are also constitutional histories, political histories and social histories of recent publication dates that will help to build up a complete picture of the age.

When one realises that the Elizabethan period was a time of acute class struggle between the rising capitalist class and the decaying feudal groups one is better able to appreciate the works of men like William Shakespeare 1564-1616, and Miguel dc Cervantes, 1547- 1616. Both of these men, although they probably did not understand the social events that were taking place around them, at least saw those events and wrote about them. In novels, poems and plays they joined in the popular ridicule of the expiring feudal aristocracy. Shakespeare lampoons them with his Sir John Falstaff and Cervantes does likewise with his Don Quixote.

There are numerous works of Shakespeare to be had now-a-days and there is a cheap issue of Don Quixote published by Penguin Books at 8s. 6d.

Equipped with the knowledge contained in these books we can better understand what our masters desire when they prate about the second Elizabethan age being as glorious as the first. They are not interested in our living conditions. They are looking with shining eyes to the prospect of expanding trade and commerce, to enterprises that produce such astounding profits as did the Levant Company and the East India Company, to support and encouragement by the state, and to a docile and disciplined working class. That is what they mean when they talk of the Glory of Britain, that is what all the flummery and speech making of the coronation period indicate.

W. Waters