Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies [Paperback]

Christopher Hill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1998

There seems to be a continuing theme in English literature on the freedom of beggars and highwaymen. Beggars and highwaymen pride themselves on their relative honesty, using a rhetoric of liberty. Robin Hood and his outlaws were "free" in the Greenwood, and stole from the rich to give to the poor. Highwaymen and pirates (or writers about them) used libertarian rhetoric, and often won the sympathy and hero-worship of crowds at Tyburn. Contracting out of the state and its laws is complemented by religious dissenters contracting out of the state church. Economic changes - the eviction of the peasantry from enclosures - made many essential traditional rights illegal. Freedom was opposed to the discipline of the market and its laws. The author explores these linked themes - both in literature and in historical reality.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Christopher Hill, the peerless people's historian of the 17th century, has written a book that challenges the common history of liberty and the birth of liberal politics. While historians from Lord Acton to J. H. Hexter have written histories in which property-holding men figure as the champions of liberal freedom, Professor Hill deftly illustrates the manner in which enclosure laws and claims to property were used to deny the traditional rights of the common folk of 17th-century England. Drawing evidence from popular ballads, plays, and his extensive knowledge of the period's literature, Professor Hill demonstrates that the supposed "dawn" of liberal rights and freedoms brought economic dependence, penal punishment, and the loss of freedom for the rural poor and artisan classes who were being swiftly enveloped in a burgeoning commercial society. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Renowned English historian Hill (The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution, 1993, etc.) uses popular literature and ballads to shape a stimulating critique of the concept of liberty in 17th-century England's struggle between king and Parliament. Even today, the English Civil War, Cromwell's Protectorate, the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 are still commonly viewed as an inevitable progress toward popular liberty. But what really happened, Hill asserts, is that men of property won absolute power to overrule both the customary rights of the poor (e.g., copyhold and common land) and the restrictions of the Crown. The peasantry gained little from the new freedoms and lost much, including in many cases their land. Hill, of course, is not the first to challenge the so-called Whig view of history by seeing the English revolution as the triumph of a capitalist economy, and in his long career, which included 13 years as master of Balliol College at Oxford University, he has approached this theme before from many different angles. Here he eschews state papers (``Government statements are usually intended to deceive'') and attempts to rescue the landless ex-peasantry from posterity's silence by turning to popular culture for his source material. We move from the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher to John Gay's fiercely satirical Beggar's Opera, which boasted that only beggars, who were outside the law, were truly free. When censorship broke down in the 1640s, the uneducated--even women--could get published, and Hill guides us through his favorite terrain, that of the radical popular movements which briefly appeared, such as the Muggletonians, who denounced the law and lawyers as agents of the rich, and the Diggers, whose spokesman Gerrard Winstanley advocated a return of the land to the common people. Superbly written, Hill's account throws light on a crucial epoch in English history, one that was to have a profound influence on American attitudes. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0140240330
• ISBN-13: 978-0140240337
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #855,524 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indigenous Land Rights in England, August 10, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies (Paperback)

Christopher Hill analyses the most traumatic event in English history - the loss of Land Rights by a large part of the English population around the seventeenth century. Under the Enclosures and other related Acts, large landowners seized land hitherto under common ownership, forcing the villagers to migrate to shanty towns on the edges of cities, to wait, handily, as a pool of cheap labour for the burgeoning industrial capitalist economy, a picture now all too readily associated with the third world in this century.

The results were very similar to those found today in third world countries where indigenous peoples are deprived of their cultural heritage and their physical means of survival, by the seizing of their garden, grazing, and hunting lands, and Hill follows - as well as the cargo cults of the time - the libertarian reactions to this dispossession: the Diggers, Levellers, pirates (research Burroughs must have drawn on for his fine last book "Ghost of! Chance"), and the very considerable literary rebellion against the beginnings of what, with the final flowering of agribusiness, is today referred to as "The Killing of the Countryside" (Graham Harvey, Cape.)

This reminder of the depth and strength of the English libertarian tradition is extremely timely in a world that again gives us the poor dispossessed and legislated against under Globalisation - the expropriated Third World not just in Bougainville or the Amazon, but in James Kelman's Glasgow or Loach's Liverpool. It is small wonder that we are again seeing Levellers and Diggers. They belong to a long and deeply ingrained English tradition, as does Christopher Hill and his considerable body of work on this period, of which this book is a brilliant, readable and heartfelt synthesis.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A LITERARY LOOK AT THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN, September 9, 2007

By 

Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies (Paperback)

The late pre-eminent historian of the under classes of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, has taken the myriad literary and cultural ideas, serious and zany, that surfaced during the period between 1620-1720, the heart of the conversion of England from an agricultural to an embryonic capitalist economy, and given us his take on some previously understudied and misunderstood notions, many that have not made the conventional history books. I note that he uses as his endpoint John Gay's Beggar's Opera, a work later adapted for the stage by Bertolt Brecht, and that I have reviewed elsewhere in this space (see September 2007 archives). One of the points discussed in that review is whether the figure of one MacHealth the central figure of the work, former imperial soldier and leader of a profitable criminal gang is an incipient capitalist or the relic of an earlier age. Professor Hill's book would seem to provide ammunition for the proposition that Mac Health, like the legendary Robin Hood, was a representative figure of `freedom' from the imperatives of capitalist contract, routine and law and harked back to the values of the old pastoral society.

In this expansively footnoted book Mr. Hill, as he has done elsewhere, connects the dramatic break-up of traditional agrarian English society; the resulting vast increase of 'masterless' men not bound to traditional authority and potentially receptive to new ideas; the widespread availability of the protestant Bible brought about by the revolution in printing and thus permitting widespread distribution to the masses; the effects of the Protestant Reformation on individual responsibility; the discrediting of the theology of the divine right of kings; the role of the priesthood of all believers that foreshadow a very modern concept of the validity of individual religious expression; radical interpretations of equality and primitive communism, particularly the work of Gerrard Winstanley ; the Puritan ethic and many more subjects of interests to bring to life what the common people who hitherto had barely entered the stage of history were reading, watching, thinking and doing.

Professor Hill as well, using the extensive prose and poetic literature of the age as a guide, gives us a rudimentary cultural tour of how the under classes responded to the break down of their tradition agrarian lives (and the generally brutal reply of the ruling classes). Elsewhere he has discussed `masterless' men driven out of the villages, forests and fens by the enclosures of the land in the interest of capitalist agricultural production for the market. Here he discusses the literature developed around those men (and women). He tackles, for those who know his work, the now familiar themes of Robin Hood, highwaymen, vagrants, beggars and the like. He moreover, as always, connects trends in biblical interpretation with their effect on the on-going social changes. Furthermore he does an extensive study of the literature of English imperialist expansion during the period connecting up such subjects as the `noble savage', `going native' and the effects of imperial expansion on both the oppressed and the oppressor. While he brings in his usual cast of characters like the Seekers, Ranters and Quakers and individuals like Abiezer Coppe and others they are more background figures in this exposition. I would suggest that before one tackles this work that a reading of Professor Hill's The World Turned Upside Down is in order.