BOOKS

Our peculiar habits

Ferdinand Mount

MARRIAGE AND LOVE IN ENGLAND 1300-1840 by Alan Macfarlane

Blackwell, £19.50

he English are different. It is a fright- ful thing to say. Dr Macfarlane has been saying it for quite a time now too, ever since The Origins of English Individualism, for which he received the traditional roast- ing from Marxists and Maricy historians and sociologists. It is not the sort of thing one says; it has an imperialist, self-satisfied ring to it. Yet it is what some of the greatest of all historians and social obser- vers have thought, from Tacitus to Montes- quieu down to Maitland who declared 'long ago we chose our individualistic path; what its end will be, we none of us know.' By 'long ago', he meant before the time of Edward I.

In his earlier book, Dr Macfarlane was concerned to demolish the romantic image of feudal England — a stable place of communal roots and manorial loyalties in which the dreadful social solvent of money was still blessedly unsniffed. He demons- trated that in reality the English were freely buying and selling property long before the supposed New Classes and New Men came on the scene; what's more, English men and women could dispose of their property more or less as they liked; as a result, they moved around freely, seldom stayed in the same parish for more than a generation or two, did not feel obliged to marry within the parish, and generally behaved much as people do nowadays.

In Marriage and Love in England, Mac- farane turns to the field first tilled by Peter Laslett, Richard Smith and the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure but extracts a still more Pointed lesson. Nobody now doubts that England — and north-west Europe gener- ally — has had, as far back as we can go, a set of marriage customs which differ markedly from most of the rest of the World. For a start, we marry much later. We frequently choose not to marry at all. And we choose whom we wish to marry. Except for the upper classes, child mar- riage was always a rarity in this country. Until the Hardwicke Marriage Act of 1753 (repealed in 1823), there was no legal requirement for parental consent. The blacksmith at Gretna Green prospered because Scotland had been omitted from the meddlesome new law and kept to the old ways.

English marriage took little account of the wider family. It was always severely nuclear. Thus all those complicated rules about intermarriage between kin, so be- loved of of anthropologists, are virtually irrelevant in England. There was very little intermarriage here in any century — con- trary to the beliefs of even the most distinguished social historians, such as W. G. Hoskins and Stanley Bennett. The Table of Kindred and Affinity — listing which relations one may not marry — is much, the same as it was in the seventh century (with the exception of it now being open season on deceased wife's sister). In this country, newly wed couples al- ways set up their own establishments. The idea of the two- or three-generation family living together in an extended family is a myth. Arthur Young in the 18th century wrote that 'the poor abhor' living with their parents 'as much as their betters'. Nor did the young acknowledge any moral duty to share their earnings with their parents, or to look after them in old age. Blackstone claimed 'the patriarchal roof is unknown in England. Children able to maintain their parents seldom redden to see them become suppliants for parish and other mendicant relief.'

While the testator was free to leave most of his estate as he pleased, he was well advised to think twice before handing any of it over during his lifetime. Defoe, in order to foil his enemies (like a present-day journalist seeking to foil libel plantiffs), conveyed his property to his son Daniel Jr. for the benefit of his wife and two unmar- ried daughters, with the most awful results.

I depended upon him, I trusted him, I gave up my two dear unprovided children into his hands; but he has no compassion, and suffers them and their poor dying mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave, as if it were an alms, what he is bound under hand and seal, besides the most sacred promises, to supply them with: himself, at the same time, living in a profusion of plenty.

It could never have happened on the Continent.

All these peculiar habits — unchanging through the centuries, it seems — add up to what Macfarlane calls `Malthusian mar- riage': in England, individuals have always calculated the costs and benefits of mar- riage and children; getting married is a prudential decision, not the natural thing to do. The result, according to Parson Malthus, was that England's prosperity grew because the population never ex- panded too fast to support itself. This built-in check was not the result of chang- ing rates of mortality (because of better public health), still less of contraceptive practices; it has been due almost entirely to changes in the age of marriage; if people start marrying a year or two older or younger, the effect on the birth rate is rapid and momentous. And in a Malthu- sian system the birth rate responds to the economic prospects, whereas in a Third- World system everyone continues to marry — or rather to be married — as soon as possible and have as many children as they can, since children are regarded as a source of wealth and not as an expense. But in England it was always accepted by all classes that, as Defoe wrote in The Com- plete Tradesman, a young man should not marry `till, by a frugal industrious manage- ment of his trade in the beginning, he has laid a foundation for maintaining a wife and bringing up a family.'

When Darwin summed up in a famous doodle the pros and cons of marriage, he gave full weight to the emotional pleasures and solaces of marriage:

Children — (if it please God) — constant companion, who will feel interested in one (a friend in old age) — object to be beloved and played with — better than a dog anyhow — Home, and someone to take care of house — Classics of Music and female Chit Chat — These things good for one's health . . .

But on the Not Marry side, he returned again and again to the economic factors: . . . to have the expense and anxiety of children — perhaps quarrelling — Loss of time — cannot read in the evenings — fatness and idleness — anxiety and responsibility — less money for books etc — if many children forced to gain one's bread . . .

The Malthus-Macfarlane thesis is itself a sort of Darwinian one. This practical, prudential attitude towards marriage is a strategy for survival. Those peoples which adopt such a strategy seem to have a better chance of prospering. Those which don't, risk extinction. And it is striking that, as the 20th century progresses, it is the strategy which more and more peoples seem to be adopting — whatever the psychic losses and emotional disorienta- tions which it may entail. It is not by vasectomy alone nor by abortion or gov- ernment fiat that 'the population problem' will be solved but by Malthusian marriage. In country after country in the Third World — Morocco, Malaysia, Korea, China — fertility has sharply decreased over the past half century, and almost everywhere it is largely because the average age at mar- riage has risen so sharply, often from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties.

Was England really so peculiar? Are there not echoes of 'English practices' in many other countries, not all of them in Western Europe? Quite possibly, and no doubt Macfarlane is vulnerable here or there on the sharpness of the contrasts he makes. But it is hard to upset his central thesis: that English marriage practices and English attitudes to commerce and indi- vidual liberty have altered very little throughout recorded history and that these practices and attitudes are now spreading rapidly throughout the world wherever they are given the chance. And this must inflict grievous bodily harm on all theories of history, from Condorcet to Marx, which are structured in stages of development that every nation has to go through, like a grub turning into a butterfly or children learning to swim or play the piano: Grade I Pastoral, Grade H Feudal, Grade III Bourgeois Capitalism etc. Social and eco- nomic history begins to look much more like the history of technology: chap discov- ers wheel, other chaps copy it, some chaps too far away don't hear about it for centuries, others forget about it, then rediscover it. It is a process of discovery and diffusion, haphazard, erratic, halting, yet very powerful — a thing of jerks, leaps and floods, not a process of inescapable stages of development.

The quarrel is much more than a battle of academic blueprints. Marx's rhetorical trick was to transform all human institu- tions and social theories into transient effusions of History — a single world process. No product of such a process can claim lasting worth since it arose from the conditions of its times and must be trans- formed by the passing of those times.

But this is a fantasy. There is no such single process. History is simply everything that has happened. Some peoples, ideas and institutions prosper and endure. Others don't. And there are usually good reasons why, just as there are reasons why round wheels roll faster than square ones. Those reasons have nothing to do with 'the rise of the bourgeoisie', nor do they cease to be valid because 'early capitalism' is on the way out. Everything is not connected to everything else. And feudalism does not mean the same in every country which historians have saddled with that important and useful term. Not the least merit of Dr Macfarlane's book is that it drains some of the field which historians have swamped over the past century or so and returns us to the terra firma which Maitland trod.

Like The Origins of English Individual- ism, this is a spirited and authoritative work. If it is slightly less deliciously shock- ing than its predecessor, that is because some of the ground is now better trodden. Every year now, two or three books seem to come out hammering home the same lessons about love and marrige and paren- tal attitudes towards children. Linda Pol- lock's Forgotten Children is a particularly effective demolition of the myths that parents in past times were either brutal or indifferent to their children and remained unmoved by their deaths. Some of these scholarly polemics play up the differences between North-Western Europe (particu- larly England) and the rest of the world; others try to draw out the universality of certain attitudes and practices. But what is common to all these works of historical demolition is that they find relatively little change over the centuries — at least until recently. However the inhabitants of Pang- bourne or of Pango-Pango behave, they seem to have been behaving in much the same manner for a long time; their courtships seem pretty undisturbed by the invention of compound interest or the spinning jenny.

Among those historians who prefer to study the doing of armies and parliaments and kings, there remains considerable scepticism about the value of social and even of economic history of this kind, particularly where it relies on the analysis of complicated statistics. 'We need more English history . . . more kings and bishops than wool in the 15th century', declared Sir Geoffrey Elton at last month's rally of the Historical Association. Profes- sor Elton's The Practice of History includes a splendid diatribe against the aspirations of sociologists to turn the history faculty into a number-crunching factory. Yet this rather misses the point. The number- crunchers have been tunnelling into the senior common room ever since Das Kapit- al. And they must be confronted and chased back up their own tunnels; other- wise they will continue to get away with writing off the activities of kings and parliaments as mere masks or facades concealing the real world. It is only by showing that neither the economic nor the social realities of the past conform to their theoretical stages of development that minds can be cleared sufficiently to study Pride's Purge and the Gunpowder Plot with the attention they deserve.