Spence’s plan
In the year 1775 the American colonies were in revolt, striking a blow for freedom against the British monarchy. In the same year in Newcastle Thomas Spence, an impoverished schoolmaster, delivered a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society, ‘For printing of which the society did the Author the honour to expel him.’
The Real Rights of Man, was the title. Spence’s key insight was that poverty and injustice in an age of rapidly increasing material prosperity were the direct result of theft from the people of land, their common inheritance. ‘Spence’s Plan’ would restore this inheritance.
A day would be appointed on which all land would be reclaimed by the people, and pass into ownership and control of parish corporations. Land would then be leased out to the highest bidders, and rental income would replace all other taxation. Every parish would be self-governing, and would set its own laws, and every adult (women as well as men) with residence of a year would enjoy full citizenship rights.
Money raised locally by land taxation could provide for relief of the poor, universal education, roads, canals, hospitals, schools, ‘planting and taking in waste ground’, and training local citizens in the use of arms. There would be no standing army to oppress the people in Spence’s republic.But, he insisted, the citizens of every parish should decide for themselves, the money should be used for ‘whatever the people think proper’.
A small proportion of the tax would be sent to national government (representatives would be elected annually by every parish). Government would not interfere in local laws and decisions, except where these threatened the‘rights and liberties of mankind’
There would be sufficient income for all the needs of society, because there would be no need for an expensive centralised officialdom: in Spence’s scheme ‘the government, which may be said to be the greatest mouth, having neither excisemen, custom-house men, collectors, army, pensioners, bribery, nor such like ruination vermin to maintain, is soon satisfied.’
If someone were to arrive in need from a foreign land, they should be provided with relief by the parish, but the cost should be defrayed from the parish contribution to the national exchequer. Thus, refugees would be helped, but not looked upon with ‘an envious eye.’
Any funds left over would be distributed as equal dividends to all members of the population, the elderly and infants included. Free trade and manufacture, a flourishing agriculture, and localised democracy would combine to raise the nation to a high moral level, a people’s Jubilee.
Actors not spectators
Thomas Spence was by no means alone in his analysis that the root cause of poverty and injustice was the theft of common land from the people. Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers had come to the same conclusion a century before, and a few years after Spence Tom Paine took up the theme in Agrarian Justice.
But Spence felt that Paine failed to do justice to the subject, accusing him of erecting an ‘execrable fabric of compromissory expediency.’ [1] Above all he rejected Paine’s confidence in a centralised state: ‘instead of debating about mending the State’ it would be better, claimed Spence, to ‘employ our ingenuity nearer home’:
The results of our debates [would appear] in every parish: how we shall work such a mine, make such a river navigable, or improve such a waste. These things we are all immediately interested in and have each a vote in executing; and thus we are not mere spectators in the world, but as men ought to be, actors. [2]
Spence spoke out for the emancipation of women as well as men: he declared that women not only knew their rights ‘but have spirit to assert them.’ He even proposed that in every parish a committee of women (rather than their ‘gallant lock-jawed spouses and paramours’) would manage the business of collecting rental income and commissioning public works.
Spence was not hostile to personal wealth. He told the wealthy that they would be allowed to keep ‘all your moveable riches and wealth, all your gold and silver, your rich clothes and furniture, your corn and cattle, and everything that does not appertain to the land as a fixture’. [3]
He believed that commerce would thrive under his system: ‘the uncommon freedom, and security of property in such a happy state would operate as a stimulus rather than a check to industry.’ A multitude of small tradesmen would replace monopolising corporations, for ‘great, avaricious monopolising companies …for their private ends, disturb the peace of the whole world, setting nation against nation, and people against people, till the whole earth and sea is turned into an Aceldama.’ [4]
The ‘end of society is common happiness’, declared the first article of Spence’s proposed Constitution. He believed in minimal government, and that people should be allowed to live freely, provided only that they do not restrict the rights of other people: ‘liberty is that power which belongs to a man which does not hurt the rights of another.’ [5]
A language for all the people
Language was one means by which people were oppressed. But language could become a path to equality. If correct pronunciation were visible in the spelling, everyone would pronounce English correctly, and the distinctions of rank carried by language would cease. So in 1775 Spence published the first English dictionary with pronunciations.Later he produced phonetic versions of his pamphlets. For example, ‘The Restorer of Society to its Natural State’ was reissued as ‘Dhe Restorr ov Sosiete tu its nateural Stat
Defiance
Thomas Spence was a short man, but no-one could intimidate him, no matter how powerful. Words would sometimes turn to blows, and Spence claimed he had mastered the noble science of pugilism, but his battered profile told a different story.
A street stall in London
In 1792 Spencetravelled to London and set up a street stall on Chancery Lane. He sold saloop, [6] distributed radical propaganda and was soon arrested for selling The Real Rights of Man, but released when the authorities discovered that this was not the more famous work by Tom Paine. However, two weeks later it was found that he was indeed selling Paine’s work as well as his own, and he was re-arrested. He was ill-treated but released without charge, and then arrested twice more and acquitted on technicalities.
In 1794 Spence struck a series of half-penny trade tokens.Such tokens were produced by mining companies, whalers, circus shows, corset makers, quack doctors, stage coach operators, and town corporations, to fill a coin shortage and to advertise their wares, or to proclaim their patriotism in the counter-revolutionary war.Spence’s own tokens were of course a means to disseminate his Plan. A bonfire of land deeds signals the end of oppression. Mad King George is portrayed riding a bull, the people. William Pitt the Prime Minister is strung up from a gallows.Citizens bear arms (‘who know their rights and knowing dare maintain’). Thomas More and Tom Paine and Spence himself are acclaimed as the ‘noted advocates of the rights of man’ Sometimes Spence would sell his tokens, sometimes he would scatter them into the London crowd.
Imprisoned without trial
No-one could have been surprised when Spence was arrested for a fifth time in May 1794. Just a few weeks earlier the radical leaders of the London Corresponding Society had been tried for treason, defended by brilliant lawyers, acquitted by independent juries, and carried in jubilation on the shoulders of the London crowd. William Pitt, the prime minister of the day, acted quickly. He suspended ‘habeus corpus’, the ancient safeguard of the ‘freeborn Englishman’ which provided that no citizen could be detained in prison without trial by a jury of their peers. Pitt’s excuse was a national emergency, the war with France and the dangers presented by enemies within.Not for 200 years would a British prime minister sweep liberties aside again in such fashion.
Spence was held without trial for seven months and on his release he set up a shop he called the Hive of Liberty on Little Turnstile in Holborn and published a magazine: Pig’s Meat, or a Salmagundy for Swine. [7] When trade tokens were suppressed he defaced coinage of the realm, obliterating the portrait of King George and punching slogans into the copper: ‘no landlords you fools’, ‘Spence’s Plan and full Bellies’.
In 1798 he was arrested and held without trial on suspicion of associating with the United Irishmen [8], but the charge was not proven. Imprisoned again in 1801, and this time found guilty of seditious libel, he was held for a year in Shrewsbury jail, where his health suffered badly. On his release he remained defiant, publishing his spirited courtroom defence and reprinting the offending pamphlet, and once again trading from a barrow in the street.
Once, at a time when England feared an invasion by the French, Spence was accused of trespass while gathering nuts in a wood in Hexham. He was told by the forest keeper that the wood was not common land, it belonged to the Duke of Portland.Spence’s rejoinder was:
What must I say to the French, if they come?If they jeeringly ask me what I am fighting for? Must I tell them for my country? For my dear country in which I dare not pluck a nut?Would not they laugh at me? Yes. And you do think I would bear it? No: certainly I would not.I would throw down my musket saying let such as the Duke of Portland, who claim the country, fight for it, for I am but a stranger and sojourner, and have neither part nor lot amongst them. [9]
The keeper allowed him to gather as many nuts as he wished.
Executed, imprisoned, transported, exiled (like Paine), forced into obscurity (like Blake), the radical movement was suppressed for a generation. But somebody had forgotten to tell Thomas Spence.
William Cobbett, campaigner against state hypocrisy and exposer of the plight of the rural poor, paid tribute. ‘After he came out of prison, he pursued the inculcation of his plan, appearing to have no other care; and this he did, I am assured, to the day of his death, always having been a most virtuous and inoffensive man, and always very much beloved by those who knew him.’
The Society of Spencean Philanthropists
A band of followers gathered around Spence. This was no centralised organising body, but rather small groups of working men who met in public houses: the Mulberry Tree in Moorfields, the Carlisle in Shoreditch, the Cock in Soho, the Pineapple in Lambeth, the White Lion in Camden, the Horse and Groom in Marylebone, the Nag's Head in Carnaby Market.
They chalked slogans on the walls: ‘Spence’s Plan and Full Bellies’, ‘The Land is the People’s Farm’. In 1801 they inspired bread riots. When Spence died in 1814 he was buried by forty disciples who pledged to keep his ideas alive.
They formed ‘The Society of Spencean Philanthropists’. Its members included the Black radical Robert Wedderburn. Another was Thomas Evan who in Christian Policy the Salvation of the Empire (1816) maintained that land reform would ‘render the world a paradise, a heaven on earth.’ [10]
Frustrated in their attempts to promote Spence’s Plan through rational argument, the Society turned to armed insurrection.But in 1820 after the fiasco of the Cato Street conspiracy (a bungled attempt to assassinate members of the government), its leaders were executed or transported.
Afterwards
The ideas of Thomas Spence survived. Suppressed and condemned in his own time, his ideas were to surface time and again in succeeding generations, in the thoughts and actions of Robert Owen, Feargus O’Connor, Henry George, and Ebenezer Howard.
In anger and in compassion, in every entrepreneurial spirit, in fierce determination, in visions of self-determining communities, in belief in social justice, in the transforming power of community asset ownership, the spirit of Thomas Spence endures.
Sources
Malcolm Chase, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840 1988.
H. T Dickinson, The Political Works of Thomas Spence, 1982.
Also:www.thomasspence-society.co.uk.
[1] Thomas Spence, Rights of Infants, 1797.
[2] Thomas Spence,Description of Spensonia, 1795.
[3] Thomas Spence, Rights of Infants, 1797.
[4] Thomas Spence, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State, 1801The Aceldama or Akeldama was the ‘field of blood’ where Judas Iscariot killed himself.
[5] Thomas Spence, The Constitution of a Perfect Commonwealth, 1798.
[6] A drink made from sassafras.
[7] Edmund Burke had called the common people the ‘swinish multitude’ and the insult was adopted by radicals as a badge of pride.
[8] A group which attempted an armed uprising in Ireland on republican principles.
[9] Thomas Spence, The Restorer of Society to its Natural State, 1801.
[10] Evans know of and praised the early social enterprises of the Moravian communities: ‘none of the members of this community are ever known to want parish relief, or were ever forced to beg.’
