Krelenko on the storm over the gentry

 

Tawney, Trevor-Roper and the ‘Storm over the Gentry’

The dispute over the fortunes of the aristocracy and gentry in England in the period before the Civil War was one of the features of academic life in the 1950s. The protagonists were in their different ways historians of fame and distinction, figures like R.H.Tawney, Lawrence Stone, Hugh Trevor-Roper, J.P.Cooper, J.H.Hexter and others. Their exchanges are still used to illustrate the problems of linking economic and social changes to the explanation of political and religious events. Needless to say,academic history has moved on a long way since then but it is interesting to read the views of Natalia Stanislavovna Krelenko in a thesis submitted to Saratov State University in 2010. She had clearly read the bulk of the secondary works on this subject in English and also used the verdicts of Russian works on the period. Most of the latter – people like M.A.Barg, M.I.Bazer and T.A.Pavlova – were not known or, at best, barely known to their U.K. counterparts although Krelenko offers them a good deal of respect.

Krelenko begins with an analysis of the Whig explanation of the English Revolution adopted by S.R.Gardiner before shifting her attention to the rise of economic history in the history departments of provincial universities and thus to the kind of analysis favoured by Marx and Weber. R.H.Tawney, although an Oxford man as an undergraduate, exemplifies this transition with his work on agrarian problems in the sixteenth century, on the significance of Protestantism for the rise of capitalism and the consequences in the rise of the gentry who were committed to the efficient management of their estates in contrast to the wasteful methods of the nobility. This development was consistent with Marxist ideas about the origins of the English bourgeois revolution, ideas which could be sustained by Tawney’s examination of the arguments of James Harrington in Oceana (1656) that the form of government in the state depended on the distribution of land: changes in that distribution necessitated changesin England’s government, hence the Civil Wars. Tawney’s case was buttressed by statistics covering the period up to 1640 showing that major changes of this kind had occurred with the nobility losing manors and the gentry gaining them. It did, however, takethe support of Lawrence Stone for Tawney’s thesis to precipitate Hugh Trevor-Roper’s counter-assault.

Her account of Trevor-Roper’s analysis of the weaknesses in Tawney’s calculations and his assertions about the capacity of large landlords to re-organise their estates whether they were aristocrats or gentry was fair enough. So, too, was her description of Trevor-Roper’s claims about the importance of the Court as a sources of income for rising landowners, lawyers and officials and of the reaction of thelesser gentry denied these perquisites. But when she came to J.H.Hexter’s famous essay of 1958 which gave its title to the whole dispute, she considered that he had taken much too critical a view of Tawney’s case and had treated Trevor-Roper much more lightly. That said, she then moved on to a brief survey of the historiography of the next two or three decades. Ideas about continuity and stability in English society, about the importance of religious quarrels in stimulating the crisis of the 1640s came to the fore displacing an understanding of the English Revolution as a seminal moment in the creation of a new world.

It is not altogether surprising that the author’s sympathies appear to have lain with Tawney even if he was a Christian Socialist rather than a Marxist. That, after all, was the view of Christopher Hill and the broad conclusion of studies of historians in the Soviet Union and in Russia after the collapse of Communism. These findings show how the views of one generation in one country can be echoed decades later in another because they appeal to its inherited intellectual traditions.