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Cobbett’s Commons: Monastic Economies in A History of theProtestant “Reformation”

Katey Castellano∗

Department of English, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA, USA

William Cobbett’s History of the Protestant “Reformation” theorizes andhistoricizes medieval monasteries as an institutional model of common, sharedproperty and resources. The monastic practice of hospitality facilitated acts ofcommoning that redistributed wealth across local communities and created ahabitus of common rights access to property. At the same time, the monastic ruleof celibacy served as a preventative check on those who would be born into theupper class, and thus transferred the burden for limiting population to those whoconsumed the most resources. The rule of celibacy further queers conservativeBurkean intergenerational inheritance by placing it within communal,homosocial groups instead of families. Cobbett’s depiction of the monastic ruleof hospitality toward the lower class and rule of celibacy for the monks and nunschallenges the naturalization of private property in Malthus’s Essay onPopulation. As opposed to Smith’s invisible hand of the market or Malthus’sbiopolitical, punishing hand of nature, Cobbett points to the visible andhospitable hand of the monasteries in checking over-consumption and facilitatingthe distribution of community resources.

“‘Reformations,’ like comets, have tails,” Cobbett argues in A History of the Protestant“Reformation” in England and Ireland (1: para. 361).1 The comet is a historical refer-ence: Henry VIII begins cutting ties with the Catholic Church in 1531 as Halley’scomet lingers in the sky as a harbinger of starvation and doom. The figure of thecomet also illustrates the purpose of Cobbett’s History, which is to “trace it [the Refor-mation] downward through all its stages, until I show you its natural result, in theschemes of Parson Malthus . . . ” (1: para. 6). Thus the History only begins withHenry VIII’s break from the Catholic Church; the bulk of the text traces a series of trail-ing “reformations” that culminate with Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle ofPopulation.2 Cobbett’s History was initially published as 16 separate letters writtenbetween 1824–1826; these letters were later collected into a book in 1829. Due tothe time in which it was written, scholars often place Cobbett’s History within theflurry of polemical pro-Catholic texts that were published in England just before Catho-lic Emancipation (1829).3 Although Cobbett references several Catholic historicalsources and supported Catholic emancipation, I argue that the History has little to dowith championing the Catholic religion. The History does not make an argument forinclusion, integrating Catholics into national politics, rather it represents Catholic

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

∗Email: castelkm@jmu.edu

European Romantic Review, 2015Vol. 26, No. 5, 575–590, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2015.1070347

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monastic communities through antithesis, contrasting the medieval Catholic world tothat of modern Protestant liberalism. A History of the Protestant “Reformation”bears similarities to Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”: “Where we perceive achain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage uponwreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (249). For Cobbett, the event of the “Refor-mation,” specifically the Dissolution of the Monasteries, emerges as the catastrophe thatinitiates the idea of “progress” as a violent expropriation of commons from the poor. AHistory of the Protestant Reformation documents the wreckage of the Dissolution, “theenormous extent of that plunder” (2: para. 1). This plunder continues into the nineteenthcentury in ever more comprehensive forms of enclosure, finally culminating in the Mal-thusian naturalization of private property and criminalization of poverty.

While documenting the consequences of the Reformation, the History also rep-resents medieval monasteries as an institutional model of common, shared propertyand resources: “Saint Austin and his brethren, being monks, lived together incommon, and from this common home went forth over the country, preaching theGospel” (1: para. 48). Cobbett’s History represents monastic practices as a form of“commoning” that opens the great table of nature to all. Peter Linebaugh argues thatinstead of thinking of the commons as places, commons are better understood as loca-lized, communal practices. Using the word “common” as a verb more accuratelydenotes the investment of communal energy necessary to cultivating the commons.Linebaugh provocatively asks, “Is communism a theory contrived by intellectualsand utopians while practices of commoning are widespread, unlettered, and unrecog-nized?” (Stop, Thief! 86). My inquiry into Cobbett’s History attempts to address thisgap. Cobbett’s History, I argue, attempts to theorize and historicize the practices ofcommoning as dependent upon the institutional support of the monasteries.

Cobbett develops his idea that the enclosure of the commons began with the Dissol-ution of the Monasteries while writing in direct opposition to the theories of Malthus.Malthus outlined a political economy of scarcity in An Essay on the Principle of Popu-lation, in which he argued that food for subsistence increases only at an “arithmeticratio” whereas human population increases at a “geometric ratio.” Since “populationhas this constant tendency to increase beyond the means of subsistence,” humanswill always end up fighting competitively for food and space (15). Malthus uses this“natural law” to argue that it is more humane to allow the poor and propertyless tostarve, rather than provide assistance that might increase their numbers and createmore misery. He concludes, “no person has any claim of right on society for subsistenceif his labour will not purchase it” (250). Malthus’s Essay argues simultaneously forcurbing common rights, protecting private property, and criminalizing poverty. AsDavid Collings points out, “Taking it to its logical conclusion, his argument proposedthat the nation simply repeal the relations of reciprocity” between landowners and thepoor (163).

In his open letter to Malthus, Cobbett locates the initial erosion of the poor’s “claimon society” in the Reformation. Cobbett argues that before the Reformation, “the poorwere, according to the common law, that is, the settled law of the whole kingdom, to besustained by those who received the tithes.” He emphasizes, the right to subsistence“was the law of the land” until Henry VIII initiates the “grand robbery of the poor”with the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1037). Cobbett believed that his letter toMalthus was the most important thing he ever wrote: “for in that letter I proved, asclear as daylight, the right to the labourer to marry, to have children, to be relievedout of the land, in case of want, arising from sickness or other calamity or from

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want of employment” (“Lawyer Scarlett,” 88).4 Cobbett understands Malthus’s viewsas an attack on the commons: the right “to be relieved out of the land” especially whileill or unemployed. In his History of the Protestant “Reformation,” Cobbett fully devel-ops the idea of former monastic lands as rightful public property and, moreover, themonastic institutions as a positive example of an alternative economy that facilitatedcommoning by continually redistributing wealth across the population of England.5

According to Cobbett, with the Dissolution of the Monasteries:

the church lands became private property, the rents were raised, the money spent at a dis-tance from the estates, and the tenants exposed to the rapacity of stewards; that wholeestates were laid waste; that the tenants were expelled; and that even the cottagers weredeprived of the commons on which they formerly fed their cattle . . . (1: para. 210)

Here Cobbett attributes the loss of common rights or land to larger structural changes inthe Church. As Cobbett places the enclosure of the commons within a deeper historythan the eighteenth-century, he reveals an expansive concept of the commons as insti-tutionalized practices: commons included the right to shelter, food, and health care outof the tithes received by the Church. Moreover, Cobbett points out that the monasteriesfacilitated cooperative subsistence farming at low or no rent on monastic lands.6

In order to argue for the positive, commoning function of the monasteries, however,Cobbett’s History must first counter the pervasive Whiggish perception of the CatholicChurch in England. In his “attempt to recover popular history from the control of thedominant culture” (Dyck 125), Cobbett directly addresses the way anti-Catholic senti-ments have been inculcated through Whiggish history: “‘Monkish ignorance andsuperstition’ is a phrase that you find in every Protestant historian, from the reign ofthe “Virgin” Elizabeth to the present hour” (1: para. 28). Cobbett calls attention tothe way in which this ideology is apparent in language: simply naming the event a“Reformation,” which “means alteration for the better” reinforces a progressive bias(1: para. 3). In the title and throughout most of the History, Cobbett puts the word“Reformation” in quotation marks or italics to call attention to his mistrust of theword. At the same time, the event of the Reformation is redefined: “It was not a refor-mation, but a devastation, of England, . . . and, it is my chief business to shew, that thisdevastation impoverished and degraded the main body of the people” (1: para. 37).Peter Manning argues, Cobbett’s History “is less an idealization of the Middle Agesthan it is an act of anamnesia, an effort to combat, on behalf of those excluded fromit, the complex acts of selective memory on which the sense of English nationhooddepended” (438). Cobbett’s history reveals, in other words, the way that the selectivememory of the Reformation as “progress” denies the negative social implications thatarose from the dissolution of the monasteries – namely, the expropriation of thecommons from the mass of people. More importantly, this selective memory allowscontinuing “reformations” or enclosures to be understood as progress while the poorare further marginalized. As John Ulrich argues, “Cobbett foregrounds the textualityof history in order to assert that the ‘truth’ of history lies in the material – specifically,in the condition of laboring bodies, where he finds inscribed an all-too-legible accountof degradation, poverty, and hunger” (16).

Cobbett’s concern about ailing and undernourished worker’s bodies can be seenduring much of his writing in the 1820s. After his return from agrarian life inAmerica in 1819, Cobbett was obsessed with the lack of reciprocity within theBritish food system and the subsequent effect on laborers’ health.7 Within the trajectory

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of Cobbett’s writing, it is significant that the History of the Protestant Reformation iswritten directly after his Cottage Economy (1822). Cottage Economy deals practicallywith tips about “making do” on the edges of private property. Communal beer brewing,domestic bread baking, and surreptitious animal grazing were championed as means forgaining independence from wage labor and the global food economy.8 While CottageEconomy suggested individual tactics for commoning, soon after writing it Cobbettrecognized that commoning requires more support than the limited, individualizedspace of the cottage. What Cottage Economy addresses on the micro-level, theHistory of the Protestant “Reformation” situates within the institutional macro-level.Through writing about how to bring American homesteading practices back toEngland, he realized the impossibility of individual action in the face of the institutio-nalized spread of private property that was increasingly rendering commoning imposs-ible. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri assert that this time period was fraught withcompeting notions of democracy, and what emerged was “a republicanism based onthe rule of property and inviolability of the rights of private property, which excludesor subordinates those without property” (9). Thus individual acts of commoning such asthose represented in Cottage Economy can finally do little to mitigate absolute propertyrights. Instead of arguing that workers are at fault for their lack of commoning practicesas he does in Cottage Economy, in his History Cobbett places the failure of thecommons within the Dissolution of the Monasteries, because monasteries were insti-tutions that organized and promoted commoning practices.

John Milbank argues that the Malthusian political economy puts forth a theodicythat associates “soul formation” with “worldly success” (46). Cobbett intuits thescope and influence of Malthusian theodicy, and he finds the origins of it in the Refor-mation, while at the same time he identifies an alternative theodicy in monastic forms ofsocial organization and economy. Since it records a counter-history of commoningrather than simply condemning the enclosure of the commons, Cobbett’s Historyopens up the possibility of analyzing the basic practices and habits that enabled com-moning. In what follows I analyze two fundamental monastic commoning practices dis-cussed in the History. First, the monastic practice of hospitality facilitated acts ofcommoning that redistributed wealth across local communities and created a habitusof common rights access to property. Secondly, the monastic rule of celibacy servedas a preventative check on the people who would be born into the upper class, andthus transferred the burden for limiting population to those who consumed the mostresources. Cobbett’s argument for the monastic rule of celibacy further queers conser-vative Burkean intergenerational inheritance by placing it within communal homoso-cial groups instead of families. The monastic rules of hospitality for the lower classand celibacy for the monks and nuns illustrate an economy of commoning that chal-lenges the naturalization of private property by the Malthusian political economy ofscarcity.

Monastic Hospitality and the Commons

Cobbett initially attempted to construct commoning through a cottage economy thatwas individualized within the family unit. In the History, however, Cobbett arguesthat the commons must be supported and maintained by an institutional network, inthis case the Catholic Church, which facilitated local organization and distribution.The History depicts medieval monasticism as a great common attached to land; allchurches and monasteries cultivated a “glebe” for the subsistence of the community.9

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Moreover, the monastic rule of poverty created an example of commoning for the com-munity: “Monastics could possess no private property, they could save no money, theycould bequeath nothing . . . They lived, received, and expended in common” (1: para.151). According to Cobbett, the monastic economy is by definition and rule the antith-esis of private property. The commoning ethos of the monasteries functions as a habitusthat regulated the entire community. Cobbett’s analysis of the monasteries anticipatesPierre Bourdieu, who argues, “‘interpersonal’ relations are never, except in appearance,individual-to-individual relationships.” Instead, interpersonal relationships are regu-lated by the habitus, “this immanent law, lex insita, laid down in each agent by his ear-liest upbringing, which is the precondition not only for the co-ordination of practicesbut also for practices of co-ordination” (81). The organization and distribution ofcommon property was the central habitus of the monastery, just as enclosing and pri-vatizing land was the distinguishing habitus of the Reformation.

By contrasting the habitus of the medieval monasteries with that of liberalism andprivate property, the History employs the rhetoric of antithesis, which sets it apart fromother pro-Catholic texts arguing for Emancipation. Michael Tomko contends, “Liberals. . . supported the Catholic Emancipation as a political cause but had no social, historicalor cultural regard for Catholicism or Catholics” (41). Unlike the liberals of his time,Cobbett’s interest was focused on Catholicism’s socio-cultural effects on the poor.10

The antithesis between flourishing medieval communities and the destitute, isolatedindividuals of nineteenth-century England can be read as a form of populist medieval-ism, which, according to Clare A. Simmons, “is persistently comparative, compellingsome level of conscious contrast between the reader’s (or observer’s) present and therecreated medieval past” (12).11 Such medievalism has been criticized as mere nostal-gia: for example, Alice Chandler argues that medievalism is a “dream of order,” con-structed, in Cobbett’s case, “by exaggerating the wealth of England in the MiddleAges” (68). Yet, I argue that Cobbett’s illustration of the alternative economy of themonasteries functions as a counter-discourse to the current political economy. Themonasteries represent a type of commoning that challenges the naturalization of capit-alism and private property.

According to Giovanna Ricoveri, “Commons have the specific characteristic ofbeing and producing goods that are not transformed into commodities” (31). Cobbettdevelops his medievalist argument through a series of contrasts between commonsand commodities that can be read in the monastic ruins found in the Englishcountryside:

Go into any county, and survey, even at this day, the ruins of its, perhaps, twenty Abbeysand Priories; and, then, ask yourself, “What have we in exchange for these”? Go to the siteof some once-opulent Convent. Look at the cloister, now become, in the hands of a rack-renter, the receptacle for dung, fodder and fagot-wood: see the hall, where, for ages, thewidow, the orphan, the aged and the stranger, found a table ready spread; see a bit of itswalls now helping to make a cattle-shed, the rest having been hauled away to build aworkhouse . . . (1: para. 155)

In a passage reminiscent of Wordsworth’s reading of environmental history in poemslike “Michael” and “The Ruined Cottage,” this admonishment to read the signs of aformer culture in the land allows Cobbett to develop an exemplary contrast betweenmonastic commons and private property. Cobbett’s major contribution in hisHistory, Peter Fritzsche argues, “was to visualize social transformation in historical,indeed epochal terms, tracing as he did the scars across landscape in mournful

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remembrance of what had been and holding particular social classes responsible for theviolence done” (137). Through reading the scarred landscape, readers can see that thecurrent owners of the land are absentees, who, not willing to oversee their propertydirectly, leave it in the hands of a rack-renter, a manager who constantly raises rentsin order to create a greater margin of profit on the land. Materials to which the poorformerly had access through common rights – firewood, dung for fuel – is hoardedby landowners. In contrast to such hoarding, when the monasteries were functioning,a table was “ready spread” with food for the poor. Even the materials of the monasterieshave been repurposed by the liberal economy to create a workhouse, which forciblyremoves the poor from any claim to the common table of hospitality and traps themin the “cash-nexus” of the wage-labor economy.

Although Cobbett begins the above passage by admonishing the reader to discernhistory within a particular place, through historical antithesis the emphasis shiftsfrom the idea of commons as place to the way of commons are maintained throughcommunal practices. Cobbett continues the contrasts:

if thus admonished of the necessity of seeking food, shelter, and a bed, lift your eyes andlook at the white-washed and dry-rotten shell on the hill, called the “gentle-man’s house;”and, apprized of the “board-wages” and the spring guns, suddenly turn your head; jogaway from the scene of devastation with “old English Hospitality” in your mind, reachthe nearest inn, and there, in a room half-warmed and half-lighted, and with reception pre-cisely proportioned to the presumed length of your purse . . . (1: para. 155)

Thus the “table ready-spread” referred to earlier is contrasted with the current gentle-man’s house, who pays his employees only through “board-wages” (giving themhousing and food in lieu of wages) and who keeps “spring guns” on his property,traps that will violently punish anyone who attempts to take food or fuel from hisland. The lack of monastic hospitality is demonstrated in this scene, as interpersonalrelationships are now governed by the alternative habitus of the cash-nexus, whichincludes institutionalized and individual violence towards the propertyless poor.Thus Cobbett concludes, “There is now no hospitality in England. Words havechanged their meaning. We now give entertainment for those who entertain us inreturn” (1: para. 183). Such an exchange is fully removed from any charity, and thisshift further points to a larger redefinition of the human in the time period: Hardtand Negri argue that under the idea of private property, “The concept of the individualis defined by not being but having . . . ” (7). The poor no longer have a right to main-tenance simply because they are alive. Their value is determined by what they have, andbeing propertyless is in effect having no value as a human being.

In Malthus’s political economy, human value is clearly tied to property: “A manwho is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from hisparents on whom he has a just demand, and if the society do not want his labour,has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business tobe where he is” (249). Instead of being able to claim hospitality because one ishuman and exists, in the Malthusian political economy governed by scarcity, thepoor will always be born into a “world already possessed.” In Malthus’s view, all prop-erty already is private, and no one lucky enough to be born into property should bewilling to share. Malthus continues:

At nature’s mighty feast there is no vacant to cover for him. She tells him to be gone, andwill quickly execute her own orders, if he do not work upon the compassion of some of

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her guests. If these guests get up and make room for him, other intruders immediatelyappear demanding the same favour. The report of provision for all that come, fills thehall with numerous claimants. The order and harmony of the feast is disturbed, theplenty that before reigned is changed into scarcity; and the happiness of the guests isdestroyed by the spectacle of misery and dependence in every part of the hall, and bythe clamourous importunity of those, who are justly enraged at not finding the provisionwhich they had been taught to expect. (249)12

Here, one of the simplest practices of commoning, the celebration of sharing a commontable with others, is recast as dangerous threat to communal happiness. As David Coll-ings argues about this passage, “Malthus transforms festivity altogether. Only some areinvited to this feast . . . As a result, this is truly an anti-feast, a horrific collapse of thetraditional celebration” (165). Not only does Malthus argue that there is not enoughfood for everyone, but he precarizes the middle-class by admonishing that hospitalitywill always promote misery, dependence, and, even worse, an enraged workingclass. Thus Malthus’s table of scarcity further introduces what Milbank identifies asa theodicy that “sees sexual and economic ‘saving’ as socially functional” (45).

In contrast, Cobbett returns to a different theodicy, one in which monastics arrangeand provide a “common table” as a matter of daily practice. The common table as amedieval, Catholic phenomenon has further resonances with the traditional harvesttable, a figure of old English hospitality. Ron Broglio argues that the common tableMalthus evokes above aggressively counters the traditional harvest table, a symbolof moral reciprocity celebrated by working class writers like John Clare and RobertBloomfield: “Traditionally, the harvest table – both in custom and in texts about theevent – is a moment when the cornucopia of the earth’s bounty is on display” (para.20). The feast after harvest required the owner to sit with the workers and share themeal. While Malthus argued that the laws of nature are constant, and that populationwill always grow too fast for the food supply to feed it, Cobbett’s History makes theargument that social institutions determine what we see as natural, and that privateproperty is not natural.13 An important consequence of Malthus, as Collings argues,is that the disaster of starvation “loses its traumatic features and becomes the normalcondition of the human species, a condition the collective palliates at the risk ofmaking it worse” (178).

As a counter-example to the anti-communal aspects of Malthusian scarcity, Cobbettargues that monastic economies had the important role of setting an example of hospi-tality for all:

But, besides this hospitality exercised invariably in the monasteries, the weight of theirexample was great with all the opulent classes of the community; and thus, to be generousand kind was the character of the nation at large: a niggardly, a base, a money-loving dis-position could not be in fashion, when those institutions to which all men looked withreverence, set an example which condemned such a disposition. (1: para. 183)

Thus the monastic economy created a different social world from that of the capitalisteconomy. The monks’ example of living in common in their own religious commu-nities served the purpose of spreading forms of common property among thoseoutside the religious community. Raymond Williams argues that the monasteriesprovide “an image of the working of a communal society as a welcome alternativeto the claims of individualism” (19).14 The communal aspect of the monasteries is acentral feature in Cobbett’s History, but Cobbett’s monastic economy is complicated

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by his assertion of certain checks that a communal society must place on itself. Cobbettis not a utopian who believes in a natural world without limits; the monastic economieslimited population growth through the rule of celibacy and checked excessive con-sumption by maintaining an economy that aimed for stability rather than unlimitedgrowth.

Monastic Celibacy and the Limits of Population

Of all the consequences of the Reformation, Cobbett argues, “introducing a marriedclergy has, perhaps, been the most prolific in mischief ” (1: para. 127). Cobbett advo-cates for the rule of celibacy among priests and religious functionaries because it wouldserve as a preventative check on the population of those who consumed the greatestamount of community resources. The History records that many of the children ofthe upper class who were female or not first-born were sent to the monasteries, anddue to this practice, “These institutions tended, too, to check the increase of the raceof nobles; to prevent persons connected with that order from being multiplied to theextent to which they naturally would, otherwise, be multiplied” (1: para. 154). Cob-bett’s counter-discourse to Malthusian scarcity removes the responsibility for popu-lation control from the multitude of the poor and attributes the problem of scarcity tothe unchecked and excessive consumption of the upper classes. Thus the monasticrule of celibacy emerges within the History as another point of antithesis that attemptsto expose the hypocrisy of Malthus’s urging “moral restraint” for the poor: “So that,here are these people reviling the Catholic Church for insisting on vows of celibacyon the part of those who choose to be priests, or nuns, and, at the same time proposingto compel the laboring classes to live in a state of celibacy or to run the manifest risk ofperishing (they and their children) from starvation!” (1: para. 127). The distinction hereis important. For the religious, choosing to obey the rule of celibacy allows them toenter a form of life and alternative form of communal relationship, whereas compellingthe poor into a life of celibacy turns them into isolated individuals desperately avoidingdeath.

Cobbett’s championing of the law of celibacy suggests that the commoning of themonastic economy allowed hospitality for all who claimed it, yet any form of common-ing, if it is to be successful, must impose some limits on consumption. Cobbett recog-nizes limits in nature’s ability to support the population in part because he was an earlysupporter of Malthus. Cobbett changed his mind about Malthus after a discussion aboutthe Poor Law with William Hazlitt at a coffeehouse in London in 1807. As Duncan Wurecords, after a discussion, Hazlitt wrote an article opposing Malthus’s politics of scar-city for the Political Register 14 March 1807 (114–15).15 Due to Hazlitt’s influence,Cobbett became more critical of Malthus, yet as an early sympathizer, and as afarmer himself, Cobbett understood that commons must have limits to avoid overusingthe land. If the law of hospitality facilitated commoning, or a redistribution of food andresources to the poor, then another limit would be needed. Cobbett, however, was notconcerned about population so much as consumption. He argues, “let us look at themonasteries as a resource for the younger sons and daughters of the aristrocracy, andas the means of protecting the government against the injurious effects of their clamor-ous wants” (1: para. 153). Cobbett was so certain that this check on the “clamourouswants” of the upper class was effective that in the History he repeatedly asserts thatEngland’s population in the medieval period was more numerous and healthy thanthe current population. The idea, of course, is erroneous. Cobbett arrived at this

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conclusion through what Charles H. Kegel has called Cobbett’s “church capacitytheory”; Cobbett estimated that the seating available in medieval churches wasbetween three and ten times greater than current churches (353).16 The limit on con-sumption imposed by the rule of monastic celibacy allowed monasteries to engage inthe intergenerational commoning of hospitality without rapidly depleting communalresources.

In the History, Cobbett revises the Malthusian nightmare. He records stories of thesons and daughters of the upper classes marrying and creating ever multiplying sine-cures and livings to support the burgeoning population of wealthy people.17 Allowingthe clergy to have families “absolutely created an order for the procreation of depen-dents on the state; for the bringing into the world thousands of persons annually whohave no fortunes of their own, and who must be, somehow or other, maintained bythe burdens imposed upon the people” (1: para. 127). Under the Protestant system,moreover, tithes are distributed to the clergyman’s burgeoning family instead ofbeing distributed back to the people; he insists that a wife’s “bickerings” would inter-fere in the attempts that her clergyman husband might make to distribute money toanyone other than her own children.18 Through this example, Cobbett critiques theBurkean notion of the nuclear family as the center of morality. Whereas Burkeargues, “We begin our public affections in our families . . . ” (315), Cobbett suggests,“What priest, who has a wife and family, will not think more about them than about hisflock?” (1: para. 123). Cobbett depicts the nuclear family as a place of greed associatedwith protecting property rights. Thus in Cobbett’s History, the monastic economybecomes a method of intergenerational inheritance based on institutional regulationrather than autochthony. For Malthus, as Maureen McLane points out, “sexualpassion is largely constant; desire heteronormative” (353). In contrast, Cobbett’s depic-tion of the medieval monastery depicts individuals choosing a homosocial communallife rather than marriage and family, and that desire has an overall positive effect onthe community. Transforming “the association between Catholicism and transgressivesexuality” so often seen in Gothic novels of the period (Haggerty 55), Cobbett suggeststhat homosocial monastic communities functioning outside familial reproduction aresocially desirable, indeed moral regulators of consumption and the innate greedinvolved in the bourgeois family.

The monastic vows of celibacy reposition Burkean intergenerational social respon-sibility within same-sex institutions instead of families.19 Celibacy among monks andnuns further contributed to their intergenerational commoning energies, as commoningfor future generations is detached from producing heirs, thus ensuring emphasis oncommunity and not individual family inheritance. Cobbett argues,

The monastics built as well as wrote for posterity. The never-dying nature of their insti-tutions set aside, in all their undertakings, every calculation as to time and age. Whetherthey built or planted, they set the generous example of providing for the pleasure, thehonour, the wealth and greatness of generations upon generations yet unborn. (1: para.155)

The intergenerational aspect of this sounds like the Burkean model of “temporary pos-sessors and life-renters” and it avoids the possibility, which Burke feared, that an indi-vidual generation “might think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commitwaste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric oftheir society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an

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habitation” (192). The monastic economy facilitates intergenerational responsibility,but due to its institutional nature, detached from families, it never allows an individualheir to create chaos:

The monastery was a proprietor that never died; its tenantry had to do with a deathlesslandlord; its lands and houses never changed owners; its tenants were liable to none ofthe many of the uncertainties that other tenants were; its oaks had never to tremble atthe axe of the squandering heir. (1: para. 152)

The example of the “squandering heir,” which is the subject of much fiction in theperiod, challenges Malthus’s idea that common land is quickly overused and degradedby the poor unless it is privatized. “The squandering heir” stands for private property asan ecological threat, whereas the commoning of the monks and nuns preserve for thefuture paradoxically because they do not have offspring for whom they might hoardproperty. In Cobbett’s History, the inheritance of healthy land from one generationto the next must be facilitated by and directed toward communal institutions.

The “squandering heir” further functions as a metonymy for the event of the “Refor-mation.” The History describes how agents of the Reformation robbed church patri-archs’ tombs for their gold and jewels as they defaced Catholic institutions. Just aspast generations have been looted, future generations have been robbed through theincreasing privatization of the commons, that blazing comet that continues until thetime Cobbett is writing. Even more importantly, the people are robbed of their virtueas well:

There can be no morality, no virtue, no sincerity, no honesty, amongst a people continu-ally suffering from want; and, it is cruel, in the last degree, to punish such people foralmost any sort of crime, which is, in fact, not crime of the heart, not crime of the perpe-trator, but the crime of his all-controlling necessities. (1: para. 457)

Here Cobbett points to the criminalization of poverty that occurs while the commonsare being expropriated from the people. While Malthus’s theories are ostensiblyarguing for population control to limit the suffering of the poor, at the same time,they evince a rigid defense of private property. Cobbett notes that one of the ideologicalshifts that must take place in order to maintain the privatization of public property is ashift from thinking of the poor as virtuous to criminalizing the commoning behavior ofthe poor. The Reformation “has brought barracks, taxing-houses, poor-houses, mad-houses, and jails, to supply the place of convents, hospitals, guilds, and alms-houses. . . ” (1: para. 449). Protestantism, instead of redeeming people as it promised, crimi-nalized the poor for not being able individually to help themselves. The criminalizationof poverty can only occur, however, after “hospitality [is] banished for ever from theland” (1: para. 155). When the monasteries were destroyed, the emphasis on individualaccumulation proceeded to criminalize poverty and recognize property only when itwas individually owned.

Through depicting modernity as full of violence and confinement for the poor, theHistory consciously transforms the gothic trope of medieval monasteries, in AnnaLetitia Barbauld’s words, as “dark places of the earth in which are the habitations ofcruelty” (217). Simmons argues, “While Cobbett describes a Middle Ages devoid ofGothic horrors, he simultaneously ascribes violence, imprisonment, and oppressionto the agents of the Reformation” (164). Cobbett indeed represents the Reformationitself as incredibly violent: “that the thing, impudently called the ‘REFORMATION,’

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was engendered in beastly lust, brought forth in hypocrisy and perfidy, and cherishedand fed by plunder, devastation, and by rivers of innocent English and Irish blood . . . ”(1: para. 192). Yet Cobbett also repeatedly locates cruelty and confinement in contem-porary, “Enlightened” England, in poor houses, mental institutions, and prisons. Byascribing violence and imprisonment to the contemporary system of church and statecontrol over the poor, Cobbett recovers monasteries from the “self-authenticating mod-ernity” of the trope of “history as nightmare” in Gothic representations of monasteriesin the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Mighall 25).20 If, however, as Mighallargues, the Gothic demonstrates how “the past can survive into and threaten thepresent” (25), then Cobbett’s depiction of the commoning monastic economy mightrender it viable again.

Volume two of A History of the Protestant “Reformation” attempts to give tangibleproof of the theft of the Reformation: “Here are about three hundred pages of close printfilled with a bare list of pieces of once public property, now worth from one hundredpounds to upwards of fifty thousand pounds a year each!” (2: para. 7).21 Cobbettargues that he aims for the second volume to be “a very interesting historical and stat-istical document, and will be found very commodious as a work of reference” (2: para.6): organized in alphabetical order with separate sections for England, Wales, andIreland, each entry gave the location of the institution, its founder, the yearly valueat the time of the confiscation, and its estimated current value. The entries end withthe name of King or Queen who gave the land away and to whom they gave it. Thislist attempts to provide tangible rather than rhetorical evidence for Cobbett’s argumentby naming great families as the beneficiaries of an intergenerational theft of both cul-tural and natural resources.22 Cobbett argues again that “Church property” had its originin “the portion of the poor, the infirm, the aged, the widow, the orphan, the stranger, andof all the necessitous” and this property remained “in the hands of the clergy for just andwise distribution” (2: para. 17). He even suggests that such commoning might still belegally viable in the present: “the claim had lain DORMANT for a long while, it wasBY NO MEANS EXTINCT” (2: para. 33).23 This exposes Cobbett’s purpose in writingthe history, which is to lay claim to the dormant commoning practices modeled by themedieval monasteries, and hold them up in opposition to Malthusian scarcity. Thefigure of the historical ruin expresses two ideas at once, both “continuity andrupture,” Fritzsche suggests (133). Cobbett depicts the rupture of the Reformation asa violent expropriation of commons and common rights from the poor and thentraces the continuity of that violence into the present in order to empower laborerswith the historical knowledge that might aid their demand for a re-institutionalizationof the commons.

In the Romantic period, absolute notions of private property instead of the commonsor common rights are still in an unstable discourse formation. The idea that thecommons are a tragedy, and that private property is the answer to that tragedygained ground in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing upon the work ofMalthus, in 1970 Garrett Hardin famously wrote “The Tragedy of the Commons,”based on an ahistorical caricature of competitive, striving herdsmen who overuse andruin the commons. The existence of commons, according to Hardin, produced a particu-lar kind of “logic,” which from a historical perspective is practically indistinguishablefrom ideology of capitalist growth and accumulation: “Each man is locked into asystem that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that islimited” (1244). The fable does not accurately reflect history: the commons inBritain were not destroyed by commoners, but rather through enclosure and

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privatization through acts of Parliament. Cobbett’s historical account of commoningpractices demonstrates, instead, that that those who lived in common were in no waycompetitive or “increasing without limit.” That kind of expansionist thinking belongsto a capitalist economy, not the localized, subsistence economies of the commons.Rob Nixon notes,

The omission in Hardin’s writing of any acknowledgement of communal stewardship ismore than an oversight: it is premised on a categorical mistake, whereby Hardin conflatescommon property (res communis) with unowned resources (res nullius). Access to rescommunis is typically managed though institutionalized practices . . . (595)

While we know Hardin’s arguments are based on a false premise, very little has beendone to record what institutionalized practices and communal stewardship went intocooperatively maintaining the commons that remained in the Romantic period. Thisessay merely begins by considering one historical narrative of the commons in orderto provide a positive counter-example, not just negative critique, of “rational” indivi-dualistic beings in a fierce competition for profit. Although perhaps painting a nostalgicview of the Catholic church, Cobbett is not interested in championing the Catholic reli-gion so much as countering the naturalization of private property through Malthusiandiscourse about the poor. As opposed to Smith’s invisible hand of the market or Mal-thus’s biopolitical, punishing hand of nature, Cobbett points to the visible and hospita-ble hand of the monasteries in checking over-consumption and facilitating thedistribution of community resources.

Notes1. Following the convention in Cobbett studies, citations for A History of the Protestant

“Reformation” are given by volume and paragraph number.2. For a summary of the five different reformations Cobbett outlines, see Peter Manning’s

excellent essay (435–37).3. R.J. Smith argues that Cobbett was primarily influenced by John Milner’s The History of

Winchester (1798) (“Cobbett” 113). Most other scholars seem to agree that John Lingard’sHistory of England (1819) was the central influence. Leonora Nattrass suggests thatCobbett was part of “the political argument on civil and religious equality [that] was con-ducted with much historiographical reference” (158). Similarly, Phillip Connell arguesthat the History is part of “The emancipation debate that refocused old questions concern-ing the relationship between endowed learning and economic modernization” (241).George Spater records that Cobbett’s History was endorsed by the Catholic Associationand the Irish activist Daniel O’Connell (2.466).

4. Thomas Pfau argues that one of the consequences of Malthusian political economy is “thepsychology of poverty is conditioned by the market, whose fluctuating assessment of thevalue of labor and the cost of provisions has been, in turn, determined by the quantity ofbodies as either capable of labor or in need of maintenance by the state” (349). Cobbettlikewise discerns the psychological effect that Malthus’s naturalization of scarcity willhave on workers: “The labourers in distress are to be told, that they are to be left to thepunishment of nature; the punishment of severe want. They are to be told, that the lawsof nature have doomed them to be STARVED! They are to be told that they have NOCLAIM ON SOCIETY, for the smallest portion of food . . . ” (“Lawyer Scarlett” 93).

5. E.P. Thompson notes that Cobbett’s History put forth the argument that the lands of themedieval church were for the poor, and they are still public lands (761). Moreover,James Mulvihill argues that in Rural Rides, “Cobbett frequently draws his readers’ atten-tion to the fact that many of the properties he describes in their variously careered tales ofownership are in fact, or were before their quasi-legal metamorphoses, public lands” (837).Cobbett argues throughout his work that the poor still have a legal claim to private land;

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however, the History adds the analysis of how those public lands were managed throughthe monastic system.

6. Cobbett argues, “All historians, however Protestant or malignant, agree, that they [themonasteries] were ‘easy landlords’; that they let their lands at low rents, and on leasesof long terms of years; so that, says even Hume, ‘the farmers regarded themselves as aspecies of proprietors, always taking care to renew their leases before they expired’”(1: para. 151). Malcolm Chase explores a larger swell of arguments between 1775–1840 that similarly assert that British land should be used as the “People’s Farm”:“Continued access to the countryside was hence an important element in workers’ attemptsto retain control over their environment and general quality of life” (14). Cobbett is influ-enced by these arguments, but he believed that “obligations adhered to private property,”and thus he “endorsed private property in land, as long as there existed beside it a continu-ing framework of use-rights which both recalled and maintained in its essence the originalstate of nature, and thus permitted a property in the soil to those who, privately, possessednone” (182).

7. Cobbett’s stay on Long Island for two years (1817–1819) after being released fromNewgate Prison inspired many of his ideas about self-sufficiency. In A Year’s Residence,he praises the U.S. because “Here, Governors, Legislators, Presidents are all farmers. Afarmer here is not a poor dependent wretch that a Yeoman Calvary man is, or that aTreason-Jury man is” (iii).

8. In Cottage Economy, Cobbett argued that workers should take responsibility for raisingtheir own food and for teaching their children to do so as well. He argues, “I purpose toshow, that a large part of the food of even a large family may be raised, without any dim-inution of the labourer’s earnings abroad, from forty rod, or a quarter of an acre, of ground”(para. 35). For more information about Cobbett’s cottage economy, see my chapter, “Sub-sistence as Resistance: William Cobbett’s Food Politics.”

9. Cobbett makes clear that these commons were attached to land: “When they built thechurches, they also built a house for the priest, which we now call the parsonage-house;and, in most cases, they attached some plough-land, or meadow-land, or both, to thepriest’s house, for his use: and this was called his glebe, which word, literally taken,means the top earth, which is turned over by the plough” (1: para. 49).

10. James Grande and John Stevenson would agree, Cobbett’s interest in Catholicism “wasless a question of belief than of material well-being” (105).

11. The popular medievalism in Cobbett’s History, according to Simmons, “uses the MiddleAges as a way to challenge class structures rather than to justify them” (6). James Grandesimilarly notes Cobbett’s use of antithesis as he reads Cobbett’s History intertextually withRural Rides (1830), “Anticipating the method and medievalism of Pugin’s Contrasts (pub-lished the year after Cobbett’s death), this vision of a bountiful and benevolent pre-Refor-mation society forms the antithesis to the impoverished country chronicled in Rural Rides”(166). R.S. Smith argues that John Milner’s The History and Survey of the Antiquities ofWinchester (1798) is the prominent influence on Cobbett’s use of antithesis, or “contrasts”:“that Cobbett’s medievalism polemic holds together as well as it does, despite the multi-farious influences it contains, is a sign of the dominance within it on the ideas of BishopMilner, and the power as an organizing principle of his didactic contrast between pre- andpost-Reformation society” (“Cobbett” 132).

12. This paragraph is from the 1803 version of Malthus’s essay. It was removed in the 1806version.

13. Hardt and Negri argue about private property: “Its claim to naturalness, in fact its silent andinvisible daily functioning, makes it extremely hard to recognize, analyze, and challenge”(5).

14. R.S. Smith also argues, “Cobbett’s main interest was in the social consequences ofCatholic doctrine” (Gothic 158). Cobbett’s contrasts between medieval monasteries andthe nineteenth century were enormously influential on medievalist critiques of modernityin response to the Condition-of-England question. Authors such as A.W. Pugin, ThomasCarlyle, and John Ruskin wrote similar critiques of contemporary England in order tocounter policies that would “reduce social to individual questions” (Williams 139).

15. Charles H. Kegel states, “As late as January, 1806, therefore, Cobbett can be called a fol-lower, even a promulgator, of Malthusian doctrine.” Kegel also argues that the change in

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Cobbett’s position occurs with William Hazlitt’s publication of his anti-Malthusian pos-ition in the Political Register in 1807 (349).

16. Cobbett conjectures, “what motive could there have been for putting together such largequantities of stone and mortar, and to make walls four feet thick, and towers and steeples,if there had not been people to fill the buildings?” (1: para. 453).

17. As an example of such a nightmare, Cobbett provides the example of the Bishop ofWinchester, who in one generation found his children and their spouses “twenty-fourlivings, five prebends, one chancellorship, one archdeaconship, and one mastership,worth, perhaps, all together, more than twenty-thousand pounds a year.” When thebishop died, he left his family £300,000. Cobbett argues that if the Bishop did not havechildren or grandchildren that money would have been used to endow some publicgood such a church, hospital, or educational institution (1: para. 124).

18. Without children or families to care for, clergy “should have as few as possible of othercares, and should, by all means, be free from those incessant, and, sometimes rackingcares, which are inseparable from a wife and family” (1: para. 123).

19. Malthusian doctrine, moreover, required that the poor individually exercise “‘Preventativeforesight’ – the power of thinking futurity, of calculating costs and benefits” when makingdecisions about family planning, whereas Cobbett puts the emphasis on collective regu-lation of the population (McLane 347).

20. Mighall attributes the coinage of the phrase “self-authenticating modernity” to E.J. Clery.Cobbett’s representation of Catholicism is so positive that “Cobbett’s History has steadilybeen kept in print by publishers who seek . . . to convert Cobbett’s ‘blow at the church-parsons’ into a pro-Catholic tract” (Manning 440).

21. This list was compiled by Reverend Jeremiah O’Callaghan, and the remainder of the textwas written by Cobbett himself (Manning 439–40). Manning further points out that thesecond volume of the History has been eliminated from copies of text published by Catho-lic publishers.

22. Linebaugh argues, “Cobbett understood the Protestant Reformation simultaneously as alandgrab, as a cause of pauperism, and as a violation of Magna Carta” (Manifesto 49).

23. Cobbett is discussing Thomas Ruggles’s The History of the Poor (1793). According toCobbett, Ruggles called on all owners of former church property to give up a quarter oftheir income for the poor. Smith argues, “Ruggles had held, as did Cobbett, that the pre-scriptive rights of the poor in the produce of former church land remained law, and were inany case morally imperative” (“Cobbett” 124).

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