Abstract
From the late 1830s, the Anti-Corn Law League launched a blistering attack on the landed classes in Britain which was unparalleled in scale and intensity, at least until its lineal descendant, the Land Campaign of Lloyd George in Edwardian Britain.1 Not only were the aristocracy held up as a rapacious set of tyrants who deprived the people of food, but they were also depicted as an oppressive class of landlords, who shirked their share of national taxation, whilst demanding excessive rents from their tenants, and held the agricultural labourers in near feudal bondage. In part, this rhetoric was designed simply to undermine the Corn Laws as the most obvious and objectionable sign of aristocratic self-interest but for many opponents of the League, and some of its supporters, repeal of the Corn Laws was simply the prelude to a wide-ranging attack on ‘the interests, the revenue, and the political power of the land owners’.2 Within this wider anti-aristocratic carapace, the League attack on the landlords also contained its own programme of rural reform. At its most extreme this was based on an alternative model of agrarian organization, that of continental peasant proprietorship, with the eventual goal of ‘the division of the land among the body of the people’. For as Richard Cobden, the leader of the League, affirmed, ‘If the land be held by a few nobles, the people are destitute of energy, self-respect, & intelligence — where on the other hand the soil is shared by the population at large, as in Switzerland, I found a thriving, frugal, & intelligent community.’3 But contrary to the fears of many landlords, repeal of the Corn Laws did not act as the curtain-call to a Jacobin-style expropriation of the landed aristocracy and for the Manchester radicals, the primary means towards any such division of the land rested upon the less dramatic achievement of ‘free trade in land’, through the reform of the laws of entail and inheritance, especially the abolition of primogeniture.
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Notes
G. R. Porter to Cobden, 22 December 1845, Cobden Papers, West Sussex Record Office [hereafter CP] 1, fo. 114; F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963), p. 283.
J. Hampden Jnr [W. Howitt], The Aristocracy ofEngland: A History for the People (London, 1846);
cf. D. Martin, ‘Land Reform’, in P. Hollis (ed.), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London, 1973), pp. 140–1, 146; idem, John Stuart Mill and the Land Question (Hull, 1981 ).
P. Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, 1997), pp. 51–64.
See especially P. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (Leicester, 2000).
For Fox’s ‘blister to the aristocracy’, see R. Garnett, The Life of W. J. Fox, Teacher and Social Reformer, 1786–1864 (London, 1910), pp. 259–61; for typical speeches, see The League, 27 January, 9 March and 10 August 1844.
M. E. Turner, Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain (Westport: CT, 2004), esp. pp. 27–73.
For the persistence of anti-aristocratic rhetoric see A. Taylor, Lords of Misrule: Hostility to Aristocracy in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2004).
D. Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), p. 353.
M. Blaug, Ricardian Economics (New Haven, 1958), pp. 202–9;
D. Winch, ‘Between Feudalists and Communists: Louis Mallet and the Cobden Creed’, in A. Howe and S. Morgan (eds), Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism: Richard Cobden Bicentenary Essays (Aldershot, 2006 ), pp. 247–63.
Cobden to C. P. Villiers, 4 February 1840, A. Howe (ed.), The Letters ofRichard Cobden Volume One 1815–1847 (Oxford, 2007), p. 179.
F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Changing Perceptions of Land Tenure in Britain, 1750– 1914’, in D. Winch and P. K. O’Brien (eds), The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688–1914 (Oxford, 2002), p. 130, n. 21; Daily News, 16 March 1846, p. 6 and 6 November 1846, p. 2.
A. Offer, Property and Politics, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 23–34;
J. E. T. Rogers, Cobden and Modern Political Opinion (London, 1873), ch. 3.
Hansard, 3rd ser., 61 (14 March 1842), cols. 558–63; A. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League (London, 1853), i, pp. 264–7. See also Howe, Letters of Richard Cobden, pp. 250–1.
Cf. R. Hilditch [a Manchester barrister], Aristocratic Taxation: Its Present State, Origin, and Progress, with Proposals for Reform (London, 1842).
See A. Kadish (ed.), The Corn Laws (London, 1996), i, esp. pp. xxxix–xlv, vi.
Burdens Affecting Real Property, Parl. Papers 1846, VI, Greg, q. 4356. For the League’s comparable efforts to stir up the Game Law question, see C. Kirby, ‘The Attack on the English Game Laws in the Forties’, Journal of Modern History, 4 (1932), 18–37.
It was Cobden’s speech (13 March 1845) on the impact of protection on the farmers and labourers which Peel famously asked Sidney Herbert to answer, ‘for I cannot’: J. Morley, The Life ofRichard Cobden (London, 1881), i, p. 318.
[J. W. Croker], ‘Agriculture–France–Division of Properties’, Quarterly Review, 79 (December 1846), 237.
I. G. C. Hutchison, A Political History of Scotland, 1832–1914 (Edinburgh, 1986), pp. 87, 104–8.
Cf. C. Dewey, ‘The Rehabilitation of the Peasant Proprietor in English Political Economy’, History of Political Economy, 6 (1974), 17–47, esp. 19–21.
M. Taylor (ed.), The European Diaries of Richard Cobden, 1846–49 (Aldershot, 1994), p. 25.
H. Passy, On large and Small Farms, and their Influence on the Social Economy: Including a View of the Progress of the Division of the Soil in France since 1815 (London, 1848). De Lavergne’s works included Essai sur L’économie de l’Angleterre, de l’Ecosse et de l’Irlande (Paris, 1854), and L’Economie Rurale depuis 1789 (Paris, 1860).
Bright to Cobden, Add MS.43383 fos 207–10, 25 September 1851; G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London, 1913), p. 164.
Anti-Bread Tax Circular, 24 January 1843; R. D. Collison Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817–1870 (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 33–44.
See Cobden to E. T. Simpson, 5 February 1864, widely reported in the press, for example Leeds Mercury, 3 March 1864, p. 4.
B. Kinzer, ‘The Failure of “Pressure from Without”: Richard Cobden, the Ballot Society, and the Coming of the Ballot Act in England’, Canadian Journal ofHistory, 13 (1978), 399–422; idem, The Ballot Question inNineteenth-Century English Politics (New York, 1982 ).
M. Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995), p. 230; Cobden to W. W. Mitchell, 13 December 1855, West Sussex Record Office (WSRO), Add. MS 13886/23.
J. E. T. Rogers (ed.), Speeches by John Bright (London, 1869), pp. 445–58. Chamberlain added ‘free land’ to the programme of the National Education League in 1872: P. Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain (New Haven, 1994 ), p. 53.
Speech at Rochdale, 23 November 1864: J. Bright and J. E. T. Rogers (eds), Speeches by Richard Cobden (London, 1878), pp. 479–96, at 493.
See esp. Martin, Mill, and ‘Land Reform and Class Conflict in Victorian Britain’ in H. Perkin (ed.), The Structured Crowd (Hassocks, 1981), pp. 100– 35;
M. Finn, After Chartism (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 267–71; Winch, ‘Between Feudalists and Communists’.
A. Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 124, 128.
R. Quinault, ‘John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 632.
E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform (Cambridge, 1992), p. 190.
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Howe, A. (2010). The ‘Manchester School’ and the Landlords: The Failure of Land Reform in Early Victorian Britain. In: Cragoe, M., Readman, P. (eds) The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248472_5
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