History Without Illusions
MOST of the books the economic historian sets store by al unfinished. They are the slender, posthumous children of schoi.,r —like Arnold Toynbee, George Unwin and Eileen Power-0 off in their prime. Fate was kinder to Sir John Clapham than to these. Half a dozen massive and stately volumes bear witness to his vast learning. When he died he was the acknowledged master, with more than one generation of pupils to carry on the tradition ; it was not left to a posthumous work to speak for him. Yet it would have been a loss to scholarship if he had not lived to write this book. His work on the nineteenth century, for which there is super-abundance of material, had already shown his talent for selection and analysis. This smaller volume on the carnet periods, the story of which has to be pieced together free fragments, exhibits his skill in weighing evidence and estimatial probabilities. High as his reputation stood, it must now stall higher. It is not to be expected that every statement or interpretatice will pass without challenge. Sir John was right to lay stress on tft industrial revolution resulting from the coming of the fulling-4 in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But in treating this
almost the sole cause of the shift of weaving from the towns to the countryside he was almost certainly wrong. Industry settles where costs are low ; it was the cheaper labour and greater freedom of enterprise in the rural areas that drew the manufacture of woollens from the gild-ridden towns. He was right in reminding his readers that apprenticeship of some sort went back to the flint-chippers ; but he seems to have under-estimated the part it played in the exclusiveness of the later gilds. He was certainty wrong in assert- ing that coal was used in iron-forging centuries before it was used as coke in smelting ; the error arose, no doubt, from a confusion of the work of the forgeman with that of the smith. And his account of the distribution of population at the end of the seven- teenth century, with its high estimate of the proportion living in London, needs revision in the light of recent work by the demo- graphers.
These, however, are small matters. It is the sweep of themind, the keenness of eye, the swiftness of phrase that one thinks of when closing the book. Clapham could pack into a sentence as much as many others could get into a paragraph. How better could the student be made to realise the duration of the decline of techniques after the end of Roman rule in Britain than by the simple assertion that " Henry Ill did not understand central heating " ? What surer proof could there be that the thirteenth-century villein was far from being a slave than is contained in the remark that " no true slave- owning society ever deliberately saw to it that the slave should bear arms " ? How could the growth of the West Country export of black cloths be more forcefully illustrated than by the terse statement that " Spanish nuns learnt to wear heretical fabrics " ? Clapham took delight in puncturing the romantic bubbles that blur the vision of the past and hence confuse thought on current issues. His scorn for the belief, still widely held, that labour has suffered, on balance, from technological progress is expressed with all his old vigour ; "as if," he wrote, "it were not better to mind a sweet-running if noisy power-loom than to warp one's breast-bone by ten or twelve hours a day over a hand-loom." And his attitude towards what may be called the greeting-card, or advertisement-poster, view of the past comes out in the last words he wrote—on the state of the poor in eighteenth-century London. " What became of the girls apprenticed into literal slavery ' until the age of twenty-one with the milk-sellers ? They were not often those charming young persons in bright frocks cut low at the neck who appear in coloured prints of ' the Cries of London.' Theirs would be other crying."
Mr. Saltmarsh. who prepared the text for the printer, tells us that the book echoes the sound of its author's spoken word. It is the voice of the mature scholar who kept to the end the directness
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