In the wake of the Black Death, in which a third of the entire population of England perished, came the social upheavals that culminated in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Here, in surviving fragments of speeches by John Ball and Wat Tyler, we hear the earliest calls for social equality in England, calls that have reverberated down the years.
The Peasants’ Revolt took place during the first period of enclosures, the theft of common land from the rural poor. Time and time again people rose in rebellion against this injustice. In 1450 an insurrection in Kent known as Cade’s rebellion led to the capture of London. In 1513 a turner in a fool’s coat wandered through the City of London calling for shovels and spades, and Londoners threw down enclosures around the city. In 1516 Thomas More's Utopia castigated the wealthy for the misery caused by enclosing land, and renewed the demand for all property to be held in common.
In 1549 the largest popular uprising of all took place in Norfolk where Robert Kett and 15,000 rebels assembled on Mousehold Common outside Norwich, and drew up a manifesto for justice and community ownership under the Tree of Reformation. Again in 1607 across the Midlands great crowds gathered, led by the mysterious “Captain Pouch”, to throw down the hated fences.
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Though suppressed, the ideas never died out, and the English Civil War demonstrated how close beneath the surface they ran.
Levellers such as Richard Overton called for enclosed lands to be returned to the poor, and ranters such as Abiezer Coppe kissed beggars in the street and cried out that that the day was fast approaching when all things would be held in common. In 1649 Gerrard Winstanley and a small band of Diggers occupied a patch of waste land on St George’s Hill in Surrey, to ‘work together, eat bread together’, in the belief that ‘the Earth ought to be a common Treasury to all’.
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The seeds of the community co-operative movement were sown as early as 1696 by Quakers such as John Bellers (possibly influenced by Winstanley and his Diggers) and by other religious groups which sought to revive primitive Christianity. Notable among them were the Moravians who established their first community in England in 1743, distinguished by commercially successful enterprises trading for social purpose, which they termed diaconies.
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Who know their rights and knowing dare maintain
In 1775 Thomas Spence gave a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society, ‘for printing of which the society did the Author the honour to expel him. ’Spence’s Plan set out a practical vision of a new millennium, where poverty would be at an end and social justice would reign, founded on community ownership of land and community self-government.
Spence’s ideas contributed to the ferment of radicalism that flourished in the years following the French Revolution. In 1791 appeared Tom Paine’s Rights of Man followed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men, and a few years later by Paine’s Agrarian Justice. William Blake’s poem ‘London’ expressed the social desolation of a ‘charter’d’ urban landscape. A Society of Spencean Philanthropists was formed and one of its leaders was the Black radical Robert Wedderburn.
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The proposals of Bellers were revived in the early 1800s by Robert Owen who introduced reforms at New Lanark in Scotland and established a co-operative community at New Harmony in the United States. New Harmony was short lived but it stirred the imagination of many: even the young Abraham Lincoln was affected. He saw the colonists passing up the river near his home and pleaded, unsuccessfully, with his father to be allowed to join.
Owen’s vision (like that of Thomas Spence before him) was of a society made up of a commonwealth of self-governing and self-sufficient ‘villages of co-operation’, each of around 1,000 people, where sectarian religious views would not be allowed to take hold, and industry and enterprise for the common good would provide prosperity for all.
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From the late 1820’s the term ‘socialist’ appeared, used in this Owenite sense, rather than in the later Marxist or Fabian sense which implied nationalisation and central state control.
Owen inspired an extraordinary wealth of Owenite experiments, and some such as Ralahine in Ireland held high promise. Women, it was claimed, would achieve equal status, and some like Emma Martin played a prominent role. The first time store was created in an Owenite community by an American anarchist Josiah Warren in 1826. Owen and his followers also created the first social enterprise trade fairs (National Equitable Labour Exchanges) in London and Birmingham in 1833, where the medium of exchange was time not money.
Even the very term social enterprise was being used in its modern sense by the 1870’s, in Owenite communities.
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The first co-operative store was founded in Brighton by Dr William King in 1827, not as an end in itself but rather as a means to finance socialist communities. ‘Trading is only the ladder’ remarked King, and by 1830 there were 300 such stores.
In 1844 the Rochdale Pioneers invented a new co-operative trading system, where the customer shared in the rewards of the business. One of the Rochdale pioneers was James Smithies ‘whose laugh was like a festival’ and who kept the movement merry in its struggling years - a direct descendent Keith Smithies works at the DTA today.
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William Thompson, economist and advocate of feminism, believed that finance for co-operative communities would need to come from the working classes themselves, and they should have full ownership of their assets, and in 1830 he published a pamphlet with the title: Practical Directions for the Speedy and Economical Establishment of Communities, on the principles of Mutual Cooperation, United Possessions and Equality of Exertions and of the Means of Enjoyment
Such ideas were drawn on by early trade unionists, and in the 1840’s in the Potteries, and in the Sheffield steelworks, trade unions raised money from working people, to establish rural communities in England and in America.
The greatest experiment of this kind was undertaken by the Chartist Feargus O’Connor, who founded no less than five working class communities from 1846 to 1848, all with investment drawn from working people themselves. He set up the Chartist Land Company as well as a Land and Labour Bank, and 70,000 working people from the slums of the industrial cities contributed 3d or 6d a week. In two years, nearly £100,000 was raised and 250 families were settled in five model villages.
The visionary scheme was tragically defeated by a lack of capital, an over-optimistic business plan, attacks by a hostile press, attempts to discredit the concept by commissioners of the hated Poor Law, and refusal of Parliament to allow the company legal status.
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The work of Robert Owen and O’Connor had an impact on efforts by industrial philanthropists to build model communities for working people: examples included Titus Salt at Saltaire near Bradford, George Cadbury at Bourneville near Birmingham (who declared that ‘no man ought to be compelled to live where a rose cannot grow’) and Joseph Rowntree at New Earswick outside York.
(A visit to New Earswick in 1954 led to a brilliant essay by Michael Young, who went on to found the Open University and the School for Social Enterpreneurs)
William Hesketh Lever’s model town at Port Sunlight in the Wirral was the inspiration for a West End musical, which claimed the distinction of first bringing the tango to England. Later Lever tried to establish ‘Port Fishlight’ in the Shetlands but the experiment failed, and in 1923 his offer to transfer land ownership to the islanders themselves was turned down.
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The Earthly Paradise
Many communities were founded on a religious or sectarian basis. Even the most bizarre attracted enthusiastic followers.‘Queen Esther’ built a great tower on Chatham Hill in Kent, containing shops, housing, and a restaurant. Mary Ann Girling awoke one Christmas day to discover she bore the stigmata of Christ on her hands, feet and side, and set up a community of ‘Shakers’ in the New Forest. John Roe led a community near Wakefield, inspired by the prophetess Joanna Southcott – he never cut his beard and neither did his followers. They became known as the ‘beardies’.
Not all values displayed by such communities would have found favour with Robert Owen. Excited by the thought of hard manual labour, the wealthy aesthete John Ruskin set up a community near Sheffield where working people (but not Ruskin himself) would work hard to achieve fulfilment. This was to be the start of a grandiose and hierarchical Europe-wide social system operating under the banner of his Guild of St George. General Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, established farm colonies for unemployed men from the workhouses. He did not believe in co-operative principles and required ‘universal and unquestioning obedience from those at the bottom’. The tyrannical leader of the Oneida community in the United States decided one day that all toys were sinful: all the children were gathered in front of a bonfire and made to consign their dolls to the flames.
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Communities against the state
William Morris found in medieval guilds and socialism the inspiration for a way to alleviate the soulnessness of modern industrial society, and aimed to establish small semi-agricultural communities, writing A Dream of John Ball in 1888 and News from Nowhere in 1891.
The belief that state government was inherently soul-destroying and that people could only find personal fulfilment in small self-governing communities close to nature found its fullest expression in colonies established by English followers of Kropotkin and Tolstoy, including eminent philosophers, social scientists, vegetarians and even sandal makers.
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Garden cities
Most nineteenth century community enterprise experiments were on a small scale. This was certainly not the case, however, with Ebenezer Howard, creator of the Garden City movement in Letchworth, Welwyn and elsewhere. Drawing on visionaries such James Silk Buckingham, one of Howard’s core principles was that land would be community-owned, and income from the land would fund community amenities.
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Land value taxation
Henry George in his book Progress and Poverty in 1879 had explained how the expropriation of land and other common assets by the few was creating poverty for the many. His solution (drawing indirectly on Thomas Spence a century earlier) was a single tax, on increases in land value.
The Liberal politician Joseph Chamberlain was an advocate for these measures, and Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer, supported by Winston Churchill, tried to introduce a land tax based on Henry George’s ideas in his budget of 1909. The House of Lords, scandalised by this assault on hereditary property rights, blocked the budget, and provoked a constitutional crisis.
A further attempt was made in 1913 but was abandoned on the outbreak of the First World War in the interests of national unity. Ramsey MacDonald introduced the 1931 Land Valuation Act, but his Labour government fell and the Act was repealed within four months. In 1975 Labour introduced a Community Land Act giving local authorities power to borrow money for compulsory purchase of land at a price which discounted development gain, but a financial crisis prevented application of the Act and the legislation was later repealed by the Conservatives.
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Three acres and a cow
At the end of the nineteenth century, in response to rural depopulation and the plight of the urban working classes, Joseph Chamberlain took up ‘the Right to Dig’ as his campaign slogan, claiming that with three acres and a cow, working people could become self sufficient. An Act was passed in 1908 and as many as 30,000 families were settled on the land as a result.
George Lansbury and the Board of Guardians at the Poplar workhouse founded farm colonies in Essex in the early 1900s. During the First World War, there were renewed calls to provide allotments for ex-servicemen, and in the 1930s the Land Settlement Association was founded by a combination of Quaker groups and the National Council of Social Service (later to become the National Council of Voluntary Organisations), to provide working communities on the land for the unemployed. Government investment was provided and many local councils transferred assets for this purpose.
In the years leading up to and during the Second World War there were many small agricultural communities established by poets and pacifists – few survived for long.
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The growth of a ‘community sector’
The first settlements were founded by Oxford and Cambridge colleges in the 1880s as a form of missionary work, not in darkest Africa but in the darkest East End. However they soon became something more than this, developing a new profession of social work, campaigning for universal pensions and social security, and emerging as a focus for neighbourhood community action.
In 1934, in the deprived community of Brynmawr in South Wales, a community-led regeneration programme was underway, with a community audit, amenity improvements, and community businesses providing work and income. This was perhaps the first development trust.
In the 1930s and 1940s there were high hopes that state action (municipal housing, town planning, nationalisation of key industries, universal education, health and welfare services) would eradicate poverty and social inequality. The achievements were indeed huge, but in the 1970s and 1980s came a devastating critique from the community development movement: municipal welfarism was creating a dependency culture and failing the poor.
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The development trusts movement
In 1992 the Development Trusts Association was founded by a small group of strong-willed community practitioners. Some had cut their teeth in the community development or co-operative movement. Others looked overseas to CDCs (community development corporations) in the United States and to the ideas of community activists such as Saul Alinsky. Many were inspired by the work of Paddy Doherty in Northern Ireland.
They were determined that regeneration should be community-led. They were also convinced that enterprise and assets were the means to sustainable regeneration. Acquisition of land and buildings would provide the foundation for community-based economic activities, where profits would be reinvested in social goals. This would restore self determination, pride and prosperity to communities where the public and private sectors had failed.
This has proved a vigorous set of ideas and practices. The DTA’s annual survey shows that there are now over 400 development trusts across the UK, with a combined turnover of £240m and assets in community ownership of £430m, serving a quarter of the entire population.
In Scotland the Land Reform Act 2003 introduced a ‘community right to buy’, and while this has yet to be extended south of the border, asset transfer has been promoted in England by the Quirk Review and a series of steps to reduce regulation, to provide new investment, and to establish community land trusts.
Alongside colleagues in the Community Alliance and the Social Enterprise Coalition, development trusts are keeping alive the simple and profound ideas of a tradition that has endured, through despair and through hope, for more than six hundred years.
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