ABSTRACT
William Temple’s contemptuous references to the working classes of the clothworking districts were extreme public utterances of centuries-old prejudices. In the verse etched on the memorial to Cirencester’s Parliamentarian hero, the clothier Hodgkinson Paine, in 1643, the language was that of pious paternalism. Tyndale took for granted that the servant class should be ‘as an ox to its master’. The proverbial culture of the middle rank of the Vale of Berkeley thought the landless poor should be seen and not heard. John Smyth saw landless cottagers as ‘slaves in nature though not in lawe’. Corbet’s Vulgar multitudes’ were already ‘dangerous classes’, but could be put to good use under the guidance of their prudent superiors, the ‘yeomen, clothiers and the whole middle rank’. As numbers increased, concern intensified.1 ‘Where there are very many poor,’ wrote another native of the Vale of Berkeley, Sir Matthew Hale, ‘the rich cannot safely continue as such.’2 In 1740 a correspondent wrote in the pages of the Gloucester Journal that ‘should the multitudes around us, enraged with hunger, and despairing subsistence, rise to support existence, too feeble would then be the civil power, and useful then the military only, to put starving wretches out of their misery’.3 Compassion was a variable, but distance and disdain were all-but-universal elements in the ideology of the middle rank with respect to the landless labouring classes. Only among the Quakers, resolute believers in ‘perfectibility’, was this theme muted. There is no suggestion in what we know of John Roberts that he looked down on anyone as naturally or inherently inferior to himself. Another Cirencester Quaker, John Bellers, wrote disapprovingly in 1699 that ‘the masters and their workmen are, unhappily, in a perpetual war with each other’.4 Marx did not invent the language of class struggle.
