第一章：斯图亚特的社会与经济生活

原书简介

牛津通识读本系列的《斯图亚特英国》，”Stuart Britain：a very short introduction”，又是一本纯正的英国人写英国人出版英国的历史，语言读起来有一点难，也是意料之中了。斯图亚特是英国的一个王朝，统治时间为1603-1714，囊括了英国政治现代化的重要步骤——英国内战和光荣革命。因为我关心的话题是政治现代化，所以最初本来是想找一本讲光荣革命的VSI的，结果一番搜索之后惊讶发现，这个英国人自己出的书系居然没有专门讲光荣革命的读本，我认为这反映了英国人自己看待英国历史时与我作为一个外人的浅薄了解的不同视角。

英国从绝对君主制转向君主立宪、议会共和——注意，不是民主政治，民主政治是实现了宪政框架之后逐步演变出来的，即中文语境里的所谓 “英国道路”——的过程长而弥散，并不能为一两个突然爆发的单独事件所概括。所以我选择了这一本最有可能包含我想探索的话题的VSI，事实证明我选对了。不过还是需要注意一下，这本书不是专讲政治进程，也用大量篇幅描述了当时的社会生活，毕竟很多政治的变动首先是基于生活形态的变动。

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Chapter 1 Society and Economic Life

p1 The population of England had been growing steadily from the early sixteenth century, if not earlier. It continued to grow in the first half of the seventeenth century. …… The reasons for the rise in population, basically a steady progression with occasional setbacks resulting from epidemics before 1650, and the subsequent relapse, are very puzzling.

• 16世纪英格兰，即1500-1600年间，出现了基本稳定的长期人口增长趋势。但到了17世纪中叶往后，即1650年后，生育率开始转而下降。
• 人口对于经济和社会各方面，乃至政治结构的影响是根本性的，不遑多论。东西方的社会经济重要进程很多都是和人口涨跌相关联的。中国改朝换代的人口波动历来惊人，但我不知道这可能在多大程度上应该归因于东亚水土环境养育的人口密度历来相当的高。
• 工业革命以前，欧洲的人口变化大致逃不出马尔萨斯陷阱（Malthusian trap），就是人口增长导致人均生活水平下降，然后人口缩减，直到下一轮增长循环，社会的总体生产力大致保持不变——相对于工业革命后的爆炸式增长。

1.Consequences of Population Growth

p4 Because, however, labour was plentiful and cheap, because most manufacturing relied exclusively on muscle power rather than a form of energy that would draw workers to its source, because raw materials walked about on, grew up out of, or lay dormant within the land, ‘industry’ in the seventeenth century took place in cottages and outbuildings of rural village communities.

p4 Textiles were by far the largest ‘manufacture’, with perhaps 200,000 workers scattered throughout England, above all in the south-west, in East Anglia, or in the Pennine region. It was a particularly volatile industry, however, with high food prices dampening the domestic market, and war and foreign competition sharply reducing foreign markets in the early seventeenth century.

• 那时的“制造业”主要是纺织业，形态还相当初级，劳动力相当密集，远不同于我们今天可能会想到的大工厂流水线。

p5 One effect of the difficulties of rural employment was to drive large numbers of men and women into the cities – above all to London – where the problems were no fewer but rather more volatile.

p5 Once more, the government had been drawn in to organize and superintend a national scheme of poor relief, and ancillary codes of practice governing geographical mobility, house building, and the promotion of overseas trade. Thus a growing population greatly increased the duties and responsibilities of the government – arguably beyond the Crown’s resources and capacity. …… No wonder the Crown found itself disparaged and increasingly distrusted.

• 人口增长导致食物短缺，资源（如土地）紧张，失业率攀升。粮价上涨，对其他制造业产品的需求则下降，不自己种地的手工业者受到严重的经济压力。过不下去的人们向大城市聚集，给福利体系和行政管理带来大量挑战。那么多人依赖慈善和救济来维持生存，统治者总得想办法从哪抠出钱和物资来维持基本的社会保障，不然就要引发极大民怨。但是显然，没有人会愿意自己的获利手段成为被管控以维持民生的对象。

2.Agricultural Changes

p6 Almost all the ideas which were to transform English agriculture down to the early nineteenth century were known about by 1660; indeed most of them had been tried and tested in the Netherlands. The problem is to discover how rapidly they were taken up. There was stubborn conservatism, especially among the yeomen; the good ideas lay mingled in the textbooks with some equally plausible ones which were in fact specious; the most effective methods required considerable rationalization of land use and some of them required high capital outlay.

• 17世纪后半叶，伴随着生产力提高和人口减少，先前的问题大多得到了缓解。

p6 In the early part of the century, it seems likely that the most widespread innovations were not those which increased yields, but those which soaked up cheap surplus employment – especially ‘industrial’ cash crops that had to be turned into manufactures: dye crops, tobacco, mulberry trees (for silkworms).

3.Trade and Manufacturing

p9 In 1600, England still consisted of a series of regional economies striving after, if not always achieving, self-sufficiency. Problems of credit and of distribution hindered the easy exchange of produce between regions. Most market towns, even the large county towns, were principally places where the produce of the area was displayed and sold. By 1690 this was no longer the case. …… Gradually, a single, integrated national economy was emerging. No longer did each region have to strive for self-sufficiency, producing low-quality goods in poor-grade soil or inhospitable climate. Regional specializations could emerge, taking full advantage of soil and climatic conditions – specializations which could then be exchanged for surplus grain or dairy products from elsewhere. Hence, the spread of market-gardening in Kent.

• 分工出现了，不同的地区不必为了自给而去勉强生产所有生活必需品——他们可以跨区域的买——以需求而不是本地有什么产出为导向的集中商贸分销点出现了。经济交换和物质生产的效率大幅提升，发展加速了，不同地区的分化（分工专精，同时也伴随着贫富分化）也开始了加速。这一切背后当然都是商旅、富民，和发明创造者的努力。

p9-10 One consequence of and further stimulus to this was a retailing revolution – the coming of age of the shop. The characteristic of market towns was the market-stall or shambles, in which the stall-holders or retailers displayed their own wares which they had grown, made, or at least finished from local raw materials. By 1690, most towns, even quite small ones, had shops in the modern sense: places which did not distribute the produce of the region but which met the variegated needs of the region. The shopkeeper met those needs from far and wide.

• 商店的出现大大加速了大城镇的发展，一些原本就因为地理原因而成为人口重镇的地点加速发展，就像是吸收了周围小城镇的发展力一样。

4.Large Towns

p10-11 Gentlemen and prosperous farmers came to town for business or for the shops, and would stop to take professional advice from lawyers, doctors, estate agents; or bring their families and stay over for a round of social exchanges linked by visits to the theatre, concerts, or new recreational facilities.

• 大城镇不仅开始发展更现代化的商品交换点，也开始发展服务、娱乐，和金融业，毕竟人都聚在一起了很方便。同时，因为不难理解的原因，很多乡绅和高知人才也常常聚集在大城镇里，这些地方也理所当然的成为一地的治理核心。

p11 London was bigger than the next 50 towns in England combined. It is hard to escape the conclusion that London was growing at the expense of the rest. Its stranglehold on overseas trade, and therefore on most of the early banking and financial activity, was slow to ease; in consequence much of the trade from most of the outports had to be directed via London.

• 此外，中世纪以前的欧洲，对于许多金融活动有严厉的限制，金融活动的空间都是被需求逼着，慢慢打开的。

5.Migration

p12 The seventeenth century is probably the first in English history in which more people emigrated than immigrated. …… The pattern of emigration was a fluctuating one, but it probably reached its peak in the 1650s and 1660s. For most of those who went, the search for employment and a better life was almost certainly the principal cause of their departure. For a clear minority, however, freedom from religious persecution and the expectation that they could establish churches to worship God in their preferred fashion took precedence. An increasing number were forcibly transported as a punishment for criminal acts or (particularly in the 1650s) simply as a punishment for vagrancy.

• 有很多人在一生中都会迁徙一段距离，但是往往距离不远。迁徙分两种：年轻人在别处获得了更好的发展机会而离开，“betterment migration”，类似于现代人被外地大学录取；另一种是在本地找不到工作，只能出去闯四方，这种叫 “subsistence migration”。
• 这也就是说，人们在国内或跨国迁徙的首要原因是寻找就业或改善生活，其次才是躲避宗教迫害（宗教就是那时的身份政治）。还有一些人是因为流浪而被惩罚性遣送的，还有一些人是在战争年间回国参战或出国避难的。（English Civil War 1642-1651）

p13 If the alehouse had always been a distraction from that other social centre of village life, the parish church, it now became much more its rival in the dissemination of news and information and in the formation of popular culture. In the early years of the century, national and local regulation of alehouses was primarily concerned with ensuring that not too much of the barley harvest was malted and brewed; by the end of the century, regulation was more concerned with the pub’s potential for sedition.

• 除了迁徙人群，全国到处跑的人增加的更多——送货的、跟船的、卖书报的、卖艺表演的… 这带来一个有意思的影响，酒馆的社交生活变得很有吸引力，在文化生活和信息交流上的地位开始能和教堂掰手腕了。

6.Redistribution of Wealth

p14 Only two groups had ‘social’ status in seventeenth-century England – the gentry and the peerage. Everybody else had ‘economic’ status, and was defined by economic function (husbandman, cobbler, merchant, attorney, etc.). The peerage and gentry were different. They had a ‘quality’ which set them apart. That ‘quality’ was ‘nobility’. Peers and the gentry were ‘noble’; everybody else was ‘ignoble’ or ‘churlish’. Such concepts were derived partly from the feudal and chivalric traditions in which land was held from the Crown in exchange for the performance of military duties. These duties had long since disappeared, but the notion that the ownership of land and ‘manors’ conferred status and ‘honour’ had been reinvigorated by the appropriation to English conditions of Aristotle’s notion of the citizen. The gentleman or nobleman was a man set apart to govern. He was independent and leisured: he derived his income without having to work for it, that income made him free from want and from being beholden to or dependent upon others, and he had the time and leisure to devote himself to the arts of government.

• 16-17世纪前后，有产的大地主和最底层的无地劳工、佃农实际上的收入都在缩减，财富流向了能灵活调整自己的生产行为的中产者。
• 当时的 “中产” 和现代的中等收入人群并不一样，更类似于今天的企业家或工厂老板。他们的上位是有固定地产的绅士贵族，下位是无地的劳工或佃农。

p15 Few yeomen now aspired to the trappings of gentility, while many minor gentlemen abandoned an unequal struggle to keep up appearances. On the other hand, professional men, merchants, and town governors became bolder in asserting that they were as good as the country gentleman and were entitled to his title of respect. The definition of ‘gentility’ was stretched to include them without a prior purchase of land. This ‘pseudo-gentility’ became increasingly respectable and increasingly widely recognized, even by the heralds. It was not, however, recognized by many country gentlemen, who bitterly resented this devaluation of their treasured status. …… The century between 1540 and 1640 had seen the consolidation of those in the middle of society at the expense of those at the bottom and, to some extent, of those at the top.

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原书信息：Morrill, John. (1984). Stuart Britain: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-285400-3