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Edward Terrar, “A Seventeenth-Century Theology of Liberation: Some Antinomian and Labor Theory of Value Aspects of the English Catholic Laboring People's Beliefs During the Period of the English Civil War, 1639-1640.” This article originally appeared in The Journal of Religious History (Sydney, Australia), (June 1993), vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 297-321. (DM06.01.02a; 18c-ar7.doc; box 3.19, pt. 5).

            This article is about the social theology of the the English Catholic laboring people in the mid-seventeenth century, a large but, until recently, not well studied sector of the English Catholic community.[1] The article draws upon and supplements the new county studies by isolating and analyzing several significant aspects of the Catholics' beliefs that emerge from a review of the county studies. Just as the county studies have resulted in a interpretive revision about the composition of the post-reformation English Catholic community, so this article highlights the need for revising the understanding of the community's social theology.

            The picture of the Catholics that is reflected in the new county studies is a community of mainly laboring people living in the north and west of England and in the five major towns and cities of London, Norwich, Bristol, Newcastle, and York.[2] Anti-Catholic persecution was not significant in their lives. Most were not convicted recusants. They were too poor to prosecute for recusancy and probably the great majority were church Catholics, meaning they partially or occasionally conformed to the established church.[3] In their thinking, the persecution in their lives was not so much religious as economic and it came from Protestant and Catholic landlords. During the Civil War, the Catholic community took the side of the Independents, not that of the Royalists or of the Presbyterian sector of the parliamentary party. This picture of mainly laboring people turns on its head the view that prevailed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century about the community being predominantly gentry, Royalist, and dominated by anti-Catholic persecution.

            The two aspects of the community's theological history that will be of interest in this article are their antinomianism, meaning literally those "against the law," and their labor theory of value. The seventeenth-century antinomians in large measure rejected both the spiritual and material basis of the established order. Antinomian levelers and their Catholic counterparts tended to view religious, economic, and political value in terms of labor. As will be seen in their pamphlets and activities, one finds the idea that it was God's plan that since laboring people produced wealth, they should enjoy it, not landlords and monopolists.

            The levelers did not wish to abolish property rights. Some even complained that they were "levelers, falsely so called."[4] One pamphlet stated, "We profess we never had it in our thoughts to level men's estates, it being the utmost of our aim that the commonwealth be reduced to such a pass that every man may with as much security as may be enjoy his property."[5] A. L. Morton points out that at the time laboring people saw the small property of the small man menaced "not by the poor but by the rich--by monopolists, greedy entrepreneurs, and enclosing landlords."[6] It was against these that security was needed. The levelers represented and appealed in the main to the small and medium producers.

            The levelers' social theology contrasted with that of the gentry, who taught that God wanted obedience to the established order with any redistribution of wealth toward its producers to come in the next life. In the gentry's doctrine God had a special love for their class, not for laboring people.[7]

            Antinomianism. The antinomian aspect of the community's social theology will be taken up first. Four preliminary points need observation. First, antinomianism did not mean anarchism, despite the contentions of those who opposed the antinomians. The antinomians did not intend to remove the essence of the Mosaic law, that is, its political and moral content, but rather to clear the way for its realization. Second, the antinomians of the period did not generally use the term "antinomian" to describe their doctrines. It was a term of abuse used by their enemies. But scholars now use it to designate them. Third, not all historians would agree that antinomianism was a material, that is, a political and economic, as well as a spiritual doctrine. But there is no lack of authority for the materialist interpretation and it seems to best describe the developments within the Catholic community.[8]

            Illustrative of those who give antinomianism a materialist interpretation is Christopher Hill. He points out that the term meant the repudiation of "all human laws, not just Mosaic law."[9] The Presbyterian-dominated Parliament in 1646 called treasonous the teaching of antinomianism and enacted capital punishment against it.[10] The Presbyterian gentry did not fear antinomianism because of otherworldly considerations, but because, as occurred in Pride's purge in 1648, the antinomian Independents were seeking political power at the expense of the Presbyterians. Just a few years earlier the Presbyterian gentry in Parliament had themselves professed the antinomian doctrine in their battle with the crown. But once they achieved victory in 1646, they sought to exclude its further use to, among others, the laboring people who opposed not only the crown but the landlord order as well.

            A fourth and last preliminary point is that the term antinomian is most frequently used to describe Protestants, but scholars do use it for Catholics. For example, Jodi Bilinkoff in her study of religious reform in sixteenth-century Spain calls "antinomian" the teachings of Maria Vela y Cueto.[11] James Gaffney labels the program of the English Benedictine priest Augustine Baker (d. 1641) "a virtual antinomianism predicated on the belief that nothing is finally normative for human behavior but the personal experience of what is taken to be a divine inspiration."[12]

            This article suggests that the concept of antinomianism can also be fruitfully used in connection with Catholic laboring people. Some of the political, economic, and religious programs promoted by the community at the local and national level did not differ from those of the levelers. There were not as many Catholic antinomian pamphlets as there were Protestant, but they nevertheless had a presence in the community.

            At the top of the list of perhaps 5 or 10 Catholics who wrote such pamphlets was the secular priest, Thomas White.[13] White did well in terms of being published and reprinted. This was evidently because he articulated what many people believed and patronized. According to John Bossy, White was the intellectual leader of the 450 secular clergy in England during the period.[14] That he was representative of the thinking of laboring people was testified to at the time by the Royalist Robert Pugh. Pugh complained that White took the side of the "meanest of the commons, against the just rights of the king, the nobility, and a great part of the gentry."[15] Similarly Roger Coke was upset because White spoke for those with "plough-holding" hands.[16]

            One of the recurrent themes in White's pamphlets was that obedience to the established order in church and state was not God's will. The Protestant antinomian Thomas Collier wrote in 1646 that "believers are a law unto themselves."[17] White taught in like manner, "It is a fallacious principle, though maintained by many, that obedience is one of the most eminent virtues and that it is the greatest sacrifice we can offer to God, to renounce our own wills, because our will is the chiefest good we have."[18] Besides questioning the connection between God and obedience, other antinomian themes prominent in White's pamphlets included universal grace, an emphasis on the Holy Spirit, and eschatology.[19] Each theme had political-economic ramifications that were detrimental to the landlord order. For example, the gentry denied the universal grace doctrine because the doctrine meant they and their institutions were not God's conduit of grace; they were not "all things to all men."[20]

            White's pamphlets and the antinomianism of the community had a material as well as a spiritual dimension. Two significant examples of where the community gave concrete form to their material antinomianism need mention. One example is revealed in the county studies that picture the relative unimportance within the community of anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism and the continuing existence of church Catholicism. When the king was in power, church Catholics lied in taking the oath of supremacy, which acknowledged the king as head of the church. Then the Catholics lied in taking Parliament's oath of abjuration when that oath was imposed after 1642.[21] Church Catholicism was a continuing aspect of the community in England and its existence was illegal in the eyes of both the established church and Rome. Blaise Pascal in his Provincial Letters of 1656 blamed Rome and the Jesuits for teaching the doctrine of equivocation, that is, that it was licit to lie under oath. But Rome and the Jesuits were teaching just the opposite. Pope Innocent X in 1649 denounced equivocation because it was "ecclesiastically subversive."[22] If the pope had had his way, Catholics would not have taken the oaths or attended Anglican services. They would have shed their blood for Roman clericalism.

            The tendency of the English Catholics to be a law unto themselves extended to their clergy. The 450 secular clergy in England governed themselves through their dean and chapter, which was a body of elected representatives. The fraternal, not paternal or inferior relation to Rome that had always been characteristic of English Catholicism.[23] George Leyburn described the chapters 28 elected members some years after the Civil War. One was John Medcalf, who was archdean of Northumberland and Cumberland. He maintained that if he headed the English government, he would proscribe all priests who refused to take the oath of allegiance.[24] Rome asked Humphrey Waring, who was dean or head of the chapter, why he was unwilling to comply with "the decrees of His Holiness, for the keeping of which decrees one hundred and forty martyrs had shed their blood, and undergone a glorious death." He responded that he and the other clergy had made up their minds "to live for the future according to the customs of the Gallican church."[25] Chapter member and archdeacon Henry Turbervill was said by Rome to "constitute himself defender of the oath, commonly known as the oath of allegiance, in which are contained many things contrary to Catholic faith and the authority of the Roman church."[26] Thomas Carr another member of the chapter "to the best of his power promoted Jansenism."[27] Chapter member John Leyburn was a "`neopoliticus Gallus,' looking after his own rather than the public good," [the "public" being Rome].[28] The non-sectarian bent of some secular priests, such as Thomas Carter and William Johnson included attending services in the established church.

            It was not the crown, the Parliament, or the pope, the Catholics saw as supreme, but themselves. Where Catholicism did best in England it was not because of obedience to clerical doctrines promoted by Rome or the established church, but because the Catholic clergy served the pastoral needs of those who were neglected by the Protestant clergy. This is not to say that Catholics had any lack of doctrines. But, as will be seen, their doctrines centered on the value of labor.

            In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the existence of an extensive controversial literature between the Catholic and Protestant clergy was taken to signify that the Catholics were more subservient to Rome than their church Catholicism would appear. But the controversial literature did not generally arise from the ranks of the laboring Catholics or from the clergy who were engaged in the pastoral and congregational ministry but rather from those who lived abroad and to a lesser degree from those who were employed as domestic chaplains by the gentry.[29] Not a small portion Rome's "anti-Protestantism" was directed against the Catholics and their clergy rather than at the Protestants. For example, Thomas Sanchez, S.J. and Robert Persons, S.J. taught that partial conformers and the clergy who served them were apostates, schismatics, and excommunicate.[30]

            In addition to ecclesiastical policy, a second example of where the Catholic community gave concrete form to antinomian social theology was in their political program. During the Civil War they generally took an independent position that best protected their economic, political, and religious interests. Independency did not mean neutrality. Their independency like that of the Protestant Independents, including the levelers, sometimes put them in opposition to the royalist order and sometimes in opposition to the parliamentary order. The Catholics voiced the same antinomian theological justifications for their opposition that were used by the Protestants.

            There are two parts to the discussion of the Catholics political activity. The first part concerns the Catholics' politics at the national level; the second is about their politics at the local level. The scholarly understanding of the Catholics as independents is a recent development, one of the results of the county and parish studies.[31] As noted earlier, in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Catholics were pictured as having been among the crown's most obedient subjects. And it was true that the Catholic gentry were often Royalists. But they were a small part (perhaps 5 percent) of the community. Keith Lindley's comments are typical of the more nuanced view that derives from the county studies:

When Catholic royalism is related to Catholics generally in the counties, it is apparent that the Royalists managed to raise only a minority of Catholic support for their body. . . Catholics were not a unified group in this period, but were divided by status and interest, and to some extent they appear to have reacted to the formation of the parties in the same way as their Protestant counterparts.[32]

            The laboring Catholics, as depicted in the county studies saw themselves as having nothing to gain in 1639 by having Scotland reduced to an English colony and by imposing a system of bishops on the Scottish church.[33] Nor did the Catholics believe there was any advantage to them in the first Civil War in helping the king to overthrow Parliament. Derek Hirst is among those who have shown that Parliament was often responsive to laboring people.[34] Yeomen, including church Catholics, through the ballot exercised considerable influence over public policy.[35]

            Among the national policies that made laboring Catholics reluctant to see the crown overthrow Parliament was the tax system. During the 1630s when it ruled without Parliament, the crown imposed a "ship money" tax to fund itself. Many believed this tax and the rule of the crown without Parliament to be illegal. The tax fell heavily on the laboring people, both rural and urban, and was resented, especially by the poor.[36] The playwright Philip Massinger (d. 1640), who bibliographer Joseph Gillow maintains was a Catholic, was typical of those who protested against the tax.[37] In his play The King and the Subject (1636), which the crown called "insolent" and refused to license, Massinger put the following lines into the tyrannical king's mouth:

Money? We'le raise supplies what way we please,
And force you to subscribe to the blanks, in which
We'le mulct you as we shall think fit. The Caesars
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws
But what their swords did ratify.[38]

In her writings the English Benedictine nun Gertrude More (d. 1633) remarked on the "unjust taxes" inflicted on the people.[39] In 1639 there was a mass refusal among Catholics and Protestants to pay "ship money."[40] Derek Hirst describes the nation-wide opposition to "ship money" taxation that was manifested in the parliamentary elections of 1640:

The likelihood is that the open challenges to aspects of government policy which took place at many of the 1640 elections were not wholly manufactured by the gentry. Unlike ordinary parliamentary taxation, which left the bulk of the population untroubled, ship money hit the pockets of a very extensive social group, and was correspondingly resented.[41]

            Not long after Parliament took over, it abolished the "ship money" tax. Beginning in 1643 an assessment tax explicitly on landowners was established as one of Parliament's main sources of revenue.[42] Tenants who paid what was due on account of their farms were entitled to deduct it from the rent. While laboring people had no objections, both the royalist and parliamentary gentry disliked the assessment, which was collected on a weekly and then a monthly basis and which equaled from 15 to 70 percent of the gentry's rent receipts.[43] It was only the New Model Army's threat of rebellion that kept Parliament from repealing the assessment after 1646.[44] The Catholic recusant gentry such as Arthur Tyrer and his wife Margaret in the parish of West Derbie (Liverpool) had a double reason to resent the tax, as it was doubled against them.[45]

            That the Catholic tenantry were inclined toward the assessment tax and the parliamentary government which the tax supported can be seen in cases such as that involving the manor of Sowerby Thirsk in Yorkshire. Sowerby Thirsk had enough Catholics that it had its own Catholic school.[46] The manor was owned by the Catholic Thomas Meynell, a "radical encloser" who had been censured by the quarter sessions court as a depopulator. His tenants were probably all Catholic.[47] These included the families of Lawrence Brown and Christopher Hawe, who stopped paying rent to him all together during the Civil War period. His other tenants turned over their rent to the county committee instead of to Meynell. Meynell disliked this. His income was about £500 per year but was normally understated as £40 per year for tax purposes.[48] Meynell was unable to dodge his taxes when his tenants handed over their rent directly to the county committee. In 1647 he called his tenants "vulgar plebeians" because they "presumed to assess the true landlord. . . as thought he had been one of their coridons. . . The lord's rent at Sowerby was never assessed or questioned until these late new times. The bushhopper tenants were never so unkind or foolish to access their lords' rent."[49]

            The support which the Catholic tenants at the Sowerby Thirsk manor showed for the Parliamentary tax system, including rejection of landlord rights, was no different from that of many Protestants. Manors were governed by assemblies of tenants, which as David Allen points out, required wide participation in government.[50] Manors dominated in areas of open field production, such as the north and west of England, where Catholics had their greatest strength. The independence which these manor governments maintained in relation to the landlord order was antinomian in the sense that that term was used of Protestants during the war.

            The tithe was another part of the crown's tax system and was no more popular than ship money. It likewise helps account for the Catholics reluctance to see the crown overthrow Parliament in 1642. Both Catholic and Protestant Independents supported the establishment of a voluntary system for maintaining the clergy and the abolition of the tithe. Such a measure was enacted by the Barebones Parliament in November 1653. But the Presbyterian and Anglican minority went to Cromwell and got him to overturn the act.[51] However, Cromwell was not able to prevent the people on their own from substantially reducing the income of the established clergy.[52]

            Besides taxation, a national policy that made laboring Catholics unenthusiastic for the royal side in 1642 was the crown's drafting and billeting of troops for the Northern War beginning in 1639.[53] Laboring people, especially the Catholics who lived in the North, were targets of the troop levies and they resented it. The wide-spread refusal to fight among the crown's conscript rank-and-file Catholic troops brought him to quick defeat.

            On the other hand, as set forth in the county studies, Parliament sometimes found favor with laboring people because as it gained increasing power in the early 1640s, it abolished many crown monopolies and patents, eliminated a number of rotten boroughs to improve Parliament's representativeness, abolished the Star Chamber, which had been used by the crown to control the county justice of the peace network, eliminated the House of Lords in 1647, which was a landlord institution, outlawed slavery (servitude) and the incidents of post-conquest feudal tenures in 1646, released poor debtors from prison, and in some cases allowed the landless to take over royal and common land.[54] Because the peerage was abolished Catholic nobles like Henry Arundell were denied trials in the house of peers. They had to appear in the local courts, which were more accessible and receptive to the needs of laboring Catholic tenants.[55]

            Because of such considerations it is not surprising to see in the county studies a not infrequent reference to laboring Catholics who served in the parliamentary army or held offices such as assessor, collector, or magistrate under the parliamentary government.[56] John Hippon was even a member of Cromwell's own regiment in the New Model Army.[57] Hippon referred to himself as a "Catholic and a Parliamentarian." Allen Prickett was a church papist who served first in the trained band for "part of St. Sepulchers parish and other parts adjacent to the city of London" and on March 8, 1642, he joined the parliamentary army.[58] Another was a weaver, who was mentioned by Richard Baxter in his account of the war. Baxter was a chaplain in the same unit with this follower of "Thomas More":

When I came to the Army, among Cromwell's soldiers, I found a new face of things, which I never dreamed of. I heard the plotting heads very hot upon that which intimated their intention to subvert church and state. Independency and anabaptistry were most prevalent; antinomianism and arminianism were equally distributed; and Thomas More's followers (a weaver of Wisbitch and Lyn, of excellent parts) had made some shifts to join these two extremes together. . . I perceived that they took the king for a tyrant and an enemy and really intended absolutely to master him or ruin him; They said, what were the Lords of England but William the Conqueror's colonels, or the barons but his majors, or the knights but his captains?[59]

            Thomas Clancy, S.J. suggests that after the crown's defeat in 1646, Catholics "overwhelmingly" supported the Independent or antinomian party within Parliament.[60] This included the Catholic gentry who wished to benefit from the religious toleration offered by the Independents. Charles II complained in 1657 about the support which the Catholics had given Parliament:

It is necessary to take notice of the general temper of the kingdom and of the fact that the majority of the king's friends have an aversion for Catholics. This aversion is a natural consequence of the Catholics having "more than an ordinary zeal for Cromwell."[61]

            The community's clergy were not least in using antinomian arguments in resisting the crown. For example, the secular priests William Rushworth and Henry Holden wrote that it was wrong to look to the law and scripture like the pharisee, "We should look to our own hearts: Christ's law is written in a Christian's heart."[62] In justifying the overthrow of the crown, Holden remarked that the royalist "sycophants" did "basely flatter all supreme power and act as if we ought to look upon them as to be worshiped and adored as Gods."[63] One even sees in their pamphlets millennialist ideas about the imminent rule of the saints on earth during which wealth would be redistributed to producers, social injustice would be eradicated for a thousand years prior to the final judgment day and a "third age of the church" would be established.[64]

            The laboring Catholics took an independent position because they had little to gain by the crown overthrowing Parliament and because parliamentary programs in some measure served their needs. But most of the community also had nothing to gain by the abolition of the monarchy in 1649. This was the other half of their national policy, besides independency from the crown, where the Catholics followed their own light, not unlike the antinomians. The crown was sometimes seen by laboring people as an asset. The existence and aggression of the crown forced the gentry in Parliament to seek the aid of and make concessions to the working people, especially those in the army, in order to gain their support against the threats of the crown. Some of the concessions that were won by laboring people from Parliament and that can be attributed at least in part to their playing the crown off against the Parliament included toleration of opinion, expanding voting rights, and elimination of taxes that hurt the poor, not the least of which was the excise.[65]

            The opposition of laboring people against the excise tax illustrates how they used the crown against Parliament and why they took a stand independent of Parliament concerning the crown's execution. The excise was a tax on consumer goods and, unlike the assessment, had a direct impact on laboring people in raising prices. It was often protested by the Moderate, which was the newspaper of the Leveler movement, although sustained opposition to the tax also came from overseas traders and merchants. Rioting in 1646 and 1647, the opposition of the soldiers in the New Model Army who opposed its application to the poor and their necessities, and the threat that the population would join with the recently defeated Royalists forced Parliament to remove the excise tax on salt and meat in June 1647. The widespread refusal to pay it on other items thereafter lessened its usefulness as a revenue measure.[66]

            Because it eliminated some of their leverage against the gentry, opposition to the king's execution came especially from the levelers and artisans, including weavers, painters, and journeymen in the city companies.[67] The Catholics' independent strategy of playing the crown off against Parliament was illustrated when they, including the Catholic gentry, joined the Independents in 1647 in winning increased religious toleration against the wishes of the Presbyterian gentry within the parliamentary party. The effectiveness of their tactics was reflected in the animosity shown by the Presbyterian gentry who baited Cromwell and the Independents for their neglect to enforce the anti-Catholic laws:

Is not this like the practice of Garnet the Jesuit who did lay his commands on the papists to obey their king and keep themselves quiet, and all in order that the plot might not be suspected? If Cromwell follows Garnet's steps, I would have him take heed of Garnet's end.[68]

Cromwell took pride in stating that citizens of all creeds enjoyed liberty of conscience under his rule, provided they did not use religion as a cloak for rebellion.[69]

            The Catholics took an independent political position at the national level like their their antinomian counterparts; and they did likewise at the local level. The other half of this discussion of the community's political activity concerns the local level. Like the levelers, a sector of the Catholic community at the local level turned the Civil War into a war of economic leveling against landlords, monopolists, and enclosers. Illustrative were the troubles which Cecil Calvert and his Arundell in-laws had with their tenants, which seem not to have been unusual. Calvert and the Arundells were Catholics and lived in southwest Wiltshire. Some if not all of Arundell's tenants were Catholic.[70] The records are silent about the religious denomination of Calvert's tenants, but it was common for a Catholic landlord to have Catholic tenants.[71]

            Both Arundell and Calvert identified with the crown and were in large measure leveled during the war. Their tenants took part in the leveling. Derek Hirst finds that assaults on the gentry's houses in the early part of the war were often a pretext for forays against the manorial records.[72] Tenants took the war as an opportunity to settle economic grievances. The leveling in May 1643 of Wardour castle, which was the Arundell's residence, was precipitated by the siege there of Edward Hungerford, Edmund Ludlow, and their parliamentary troops. The Catholic tenants and neighbors took a hand when it came to confiscating from the castle and its surrounding lands some £100,000 worth of cattle, farm animals, tools, furniture, cartloads of fish from ponds that were drained dry, and oak and elms worth £5 per tree that were felled and sold at 4d per tree.[73] Likewise, Cecil Calvert's tenants turned the Civil War into a rebellion against him.[74]

            During the war thousands of gentry houses, woods, and parks were plundered and at least 200 houses "of major importance" were reduced to ruins.[75] This looting was directed at both royalist and parliamentary, Catholic and Protestant gentry, and it was natural that the levelers sometimes included Catholic tenantry and laborers. Copyholders and tenants-at-will refused to pay rent or paid less than was customary. They ploughed up the landlord's pastures, put in improper crops, and neglected normal manuring and repairs. Christopher Clay comments, "Tenants threw up their farms, pressed for reductions in rent, ignored husbandry covenants, and encroached on their landlord's rights in other ways."[76] J. P. Cooper documents the "irrecoverable rent arrears piling up."[77] David Underdown quotes as not unusual the complaint by a landlord at seeing the "massive arrears" in rents being run up:

Now men are are lawless, trees and hedges are carried away without controlment; tenants use their landlord how they list for their rents, taking this to be a time of liberty.[78]

Most large landowners according to one study were forced to sell land because of lack of rental income in order to pay their debts and taxes.[79] Many were bankrupted and in counties such as Lancashire that had many Catholics, about half the gentry families disappeared permanently as landlords.[80]

            Part of the community's leveling activity at the local level concerned enclosures. Enclosures and depopulation were long-standing grievances among copyholders and tenants-at-will in areas with relatively heavy Catholic concentrations, such as the northern and western part of England. Landlord-dominated courts and parliamentary legislation had allowed land to be confiscated by landlords and turned into pasture on which to raise sheep. In these areas there was more profit for the landlord in wool production than in the income that could be gained by a tenant's production of grain crops.[81] The tenantry's complaint against enclosures was part of the Grand Remonstrance to Parliament in 1641.[82] According to R. C. Richardson, "the central agrarian issue in the English Revolution was whether the landlords or the small farmers should control and develop the wastes."[83]

            During the war independent Catholic tenants along with their Protestant counterparts tore down many of the enclosures and retook their land.[84] One of the examples of this involved the Catholic landlords John Wintour and Basil Brooks in Gloucestershire's Forest of Dean. Their tenants in 28 parishes and 24 manors leveled the enclosurers and reoccupied the common land that had been taken from them over the previous quarter century. Many of the levelers were no doubt Catholic.[85]

            The community's activity in leveling at the local level extended to the relation of master and servant. During the war servants found opportunities to make use of the political system which had traditionally been unsympathetic to their rights. The masters' world was so turned up-side-down that they sometimes complained of being slaves of their servants. An illustration of a Catholic servant who turned the tables on his master is given in the following account:

There were obvious dangers in sending away discontented servants at a time of national tension. One Lancashire servant "was required to go, as did his master and mistress, to hear a Jesuit preach. He did not go." He was presumably dismissed as a consequence. Naturally enough he turned informer. "As these times go," one lord was told by his son in similar circumstances, "all servants are masters, and we their slaves."[86]

            To the claim made by some masters that the master-servant relation was God-ordained, unchangeable, and not subject to contractual rights by laboring people, Thomas White responded, "None think a husbandman, who is hired to till or fence a piece of ground, obeys the hirer more than he that sells a piece of cloth obeys the buyer, because he takes his money; but they are said to contract and perform their part of the bargain."[87] White praised those who stood up to undue market domination, as he put it, "seeing their labors disposed on to people, of whom they have opinion that they are idle, vicious and unworthy, therefore desire freedom from such a yoke and become masters of their own goods and labors."[88] He pointed out:

What are people better than a herd of sheep or oxen, if they be owned, like them, by masters? What difference is there between their masters selling them to the butcher, and obliging them to venture their lives and livelihoods for his private interest?[89]

            The community's leveling also extended to the support of market regulations against monopolists and landlords. During the period Catholics no less than Protestants supported legislation and, when necessary, rioting and armed struggle to make the market more responsive to their needs.[90] Their achievements extended to the termination of foreign and domestic trade monopolies in cloth, and the public regulation of dealers in grain, cattle, cheese, candles, beer, port, and sheepskin.[91] They helped increase through their parish governments the provision of jobs for the unemployed and job training in industries such as the spinning and weaving of wool, fisheries, municipal brewhouses, draining of fens, and working up of flax.[92] Catholic coalminers, apprentices, and field workers helped gain legislation that limited the amount of time they worked.[93]

            Thomas White was one of those who echoed the antinomians in articulating the community's reasons for supporting the measures taken against private interests subordinated the market at the expense of the public:

When I see the same person work for a commonwealth, in a free way doing it good, and again for a private person, I see a vast distance between his pretended ends. There is an eminent generosity in one over the other. Whence, I believe it comes that heroes and heroical virtues are chiefly taken in respect of doing good to the whole society.

When I see it thought that good is the same, I find it an intricate labyrinth of equivocation wherein we endless err. To cry the common good is a mere deceit and flattery of words unless we can show that the common good is as great to us as we make it sound.[94]

White's defense of market regulation was part of what Hirst calls the philosophy of the "ordered, inter-dependent commonwealth," which had favor among the Independents.[95]

            Most of the community were laboring people. No doubt there were a some who acted against their own economic interests or found it in their economic interests to believe that the established landlord order in church and state was God's design, and that obedience to it was a sacred duty. This was not the doctrine that Rome was teaching at the time, so far as England was concerned, but versions of this doctrine were voiced by the royalist Catholic gentry.[96] If it would not be surprising to find some who identified with the gentry, it should also not be surprising to find that most resisted ship money taxes, tithes, enclosurers, rent, and market monopoly. That they would have been attracted to the antinomian religious beliefs that were part of resistance should be no less surprising.

            Labor Value. In class-divided societies, there always seems to be at least two elements to any theology of liberation. One element is resistance, which in seventeenth century theological terms was the doctrine of antinomianism. The second element is related to the first, an assertion of the labor theory of value: labor creates value and it is God's plan for the universe that labor should enjoy its fruit. St. Paul (2Th. 3:10) put it negatively: those who do not work, which in seventeenth-century terms were the gentry, should not eat.

            It was the classical political economists who defined labor value in a scientific manner.[97] The seventeenth-century Catholic community was not generally concerned about formulating a scientific theory of economic activity, but as Ronald Meek points out, throughout the period the "habit of thinking of `value' in terms of producers' cost remained firmly rooted in the consciousness of the direct producers themselves."[98] Not only direct producers but employers and merchants generally believed their income derived soley from their own labor. Meek writes:

It very often happened at this time that the employers of labor had risen from the ranks of the direct producers and still participated more or less actively in the actual process of production. Therefore they naturally persisted in regarding the differences between their paid-out costs and the price they received for their commodities as a sort of superior "wage" for their own personal efforts rather than as a "profit" on the capital, often very meager, which they had supplied. Even when such employers came to confine themselves to merely supervisory functions, it might still seem plausible to speak of their net reward, as so many economists at this time actually did of it, as the "wages of superintendence."[99]

It was because the earnings of merchants who profited from stock investments were commonly associated with labor, that Adam Smith in the eighteenth century went to considerable lengths to show that the profits of stock were not "the wages of a particular sort of labor, the labor of inspection or direction," but were "all together different," being "regulated by quite different principles."[100]

            It might appear that belief in the value of labor was so commonplace that it deserves little comment. But in the context of the seventeenth-century English Catholic community, the value of labor was contested in the social theology of the landlord class. In their educational, political, and cultural institutions, the gentry devoted considerable resources in minimizing the role of labor in society and in glorifying themselves and their life of living idle and without labor.[101] The negative view of labor promoted by the Catholic gentry accounts in part for the notion which still echoes of the "Protestant work ethic."[102] Protestants, not Catholics, had positive views about labor.

            Just as the county studies have turned on its head the notion of the community as being gentry, so they turn on its head the idea that the community held gentry beliefs about labor. As reflected in their work-lives, in their political and religious activity, and in their pamphlet literature, most Catholics viewed labor in a positive light, both as a means to an end and as a way of life. The "Protestant ethic" was also the "Catholic ethic." Most Catholics had the work ethic, but as Laura O'Connell and Paul Seaver point out concerning the Puritans, the work ethic was not the capitalist ethic, but just the reverse.[103] Despite Max Weber, the capitalist ethic was that of the privileged monopoly companies, which achieved wealth, as the Catholic and Protestant laboring people pointed out, through unjust wages and prices, and through excessive profits. The capitalist ethic involved robbing laboring people of the fruit of their labor. The London merchant Nehemiah Wallington (1598-1658) summed up the work ethic as it applied to merchants in a list of new years resolutions recorded in his diary, "I take not the least pin nor anything else from anyone and if I do, then I restore fourfold and give one farthing to the poor." He resolved not to stand "idle at anytime nor negligent in my calling and not to conceal the faults of my ware nor speak words of deceit" nor to "take any more for my ware than it is worth."[104]

            The community's beliefs about labor are perhaps best seen in their pamphlet literature, songs, feasts, and cultic activities. But the community's antinomianism is also testimony to their positive views about labor. Behind the defense of their independence during the Civil War, the Catholic laboring people had class interests: a defense of their labor. They made the war an opportunity to distribute back to themselves some of the wealth which their labor had created.

            The community's beliefs in the value of labor was reflected in their patron saints, feast days, street pageants, pilgrimages, and prayers, which celebrated labor.[105] In rural areas the symbolic rituals were related to the productive cycle, that is the harvest year. These rituals glorified labor and productivity.[106] For example, Lady Day (March 25) marked the initiation of sowing and was the first day of the year in the old calendar. Michaelmas (September 29) was the beginning of reaping.[107] Martinmas (November 11) was the original harvest and thanksgiving day celebrating the filled barns and stocked larders. On Martinmas the farming people went to mass and observed the rest of the day with games, dances, parades, and a festive dinner, the main feature of which was the traditional roasted goose (Martin's goose).[108] The  rituals of the Catholic laboring people included a cycle of eight feast-days, distributed throughout the year at intervals of about six weeks: Christmas, the first Sunday of lent, Easter, Whitsun, St. Peter and Paul (June 29), the Assumption (August 15), Michaelmas (September 29), and All Saints (November 1).[109]

            Rural religion among both Catholics and Protestants was characterized by work-related songs, ballads, and jigs, which were sung while laboring. These songs concerned among other things, cultivated crops set in straight rows, well-kept homesteads, and satisfaction with the completion of the days' labor.[110] Perhaps also in the category of celebrating productivity were the Whitsun Ales, may-poles, morris dancing, village pipers, plays and drama, and pilgrimages.[111] The May festival commemorated full spring and nature's triumph, when the crops were beginning to come up and trees stood in their early foliage and flowers blossomed in abundance. Cottages were adorned with flowers and the branches of pale-green tender leaves. A "May Queen" was chosen by vote of the young men, who led a procession to the place of the spring festival, where she presided over the celebration. She was often crowned with a wreath of flowers and held a wooden scepter adorned with flowers in her hand.[112]

            These customs in seventeenth-century England were strong in Catholic areas, such as Lancashire and North Riding and were led by among others, Catholic laboring people.[113] Frederich Blundell remarks that both Catholic adults and their children enjoyed dancing around the maypole and flowering the marl pits.[114] Part of the festival included children burning their puppets with great solemnity.

            In urban areas also, Catholic artisans celebrated their craft skills and labors on religious feast days in the common hall of their companies.[115] Every profession of men and women had its own patron saint whose productive virtues were held up for emulation.[116] Pride in labor was manifested in coats of arms: cloth workers had a coat of arms with a tezel on it, merchant taylors had one with a robe, grocers a clove, merchant-adventurers an anchor.[117] Such religion dated back to the pre-Reformation era, the guild system, and confraternities.[118] Guild priests were those who were employed by the guild and looked to the needs of laboring people.[119] The relative strength of Catholicism within some of the northern coal-mining communities was due to traditional habits like the observance of saints' days by coal miners.[120]

            Besides their feast days, rituals, customs, and saints, the value in which Catholics held their labor was reflected in the apparently widely held belief that labor accounted for progress and civilization. It was taught within the community that without those like Tubal Cain, the iron worker, hammer-smith, and founder of the guild of metal-workers, described in Genesis 4:22 and Ecclesiasticus, "there can be no civilization."[121] Labor was an honor wrote a Catholic pamphleteer:

Some say London is a place of vice and should be reduced to servility. But they are wrong. Industry and civil virtue are the lawful things of this life. Their nearest object is honor and honest wealth. It is a foul note to brand them as associated with bondage, or give them any the least disparagement at all. The ancient excellent policy of England did and does constitute corporations of artisans and adorns companies with banners of arms.[122]

            One sees a positive view of labor in the community's catechism, written by Thomas White in 1637 and published several times during the Civil War period. White pictured God as a producer, the maker of the universe.[123] The same image was used elsewhere about Jesus and his followers, "Each in scripture has a trade and exercises it daily," Paul the tentmaker, Peter the fisherman, Joseph the carpenter.[124] Kings, bishops, and popes claimed their positions were God's charism. The community claimed their own skills were God's charism:

The virtuous industrious are to be cherished, yea, God himself (the only best pattern of governors) has made it known, that mechanical qualities are his special gifts and his infused, as it were charismata.[125]

            Genealogy, a favorite theme used by the the gentry to justify itself, was made to honor labor: "Scripture not only makes the skill of laboring people immortally famous, but puts down their parentage, and birth places in contrast to that of many princes. Thus in Hiram's case (1 Kings 7:13-47; 2 Chronicles 2:14), the brass-founder's family is recorded."[126] According to the London Catholic lawyer Edward Bolton, Solomon was satisfied with nothing less than the best in building the temple. This was because there was a religious quality in work well done. Thus Hiram, who was not even a Jew, but was an artisan of great skill, was asked to come from Tyre to make the bronze pillars for the temple.

            Scripture that was quoted within the community included that about Noah, the ark builder, and Genesis 4:20, which honored Jabel (Iabel), the father of agricultural husbandry: "Moses put into eternal monuments that Jabel was pater pastorum, the most ancient of increase."[127] At one point Edward Bolton compiled a list of various "secondary" trades given praise in the bible, such as iron workers, hammer-smiths, engravers, furniture makers, and metal founders. He remarked that if these non-essentials were delighted in by God, how much more were the essential trades to be honored:

If then such honor be done by God not only to those which are necessary hand-crafts, but to those also which are but the handmaid of magnificence and outward splendor, as engravers, metal founders and the like, he shall be very hardy who shall embrace honest industry with disgraceful censures, and too unjust who shall not cherish, or encourage it with praise and worship.[128]

            Protestant and Catholic laboring people shared these sentiments about labor. This was despite efforts at times to outlaw such religious traditions by both the established church and the Roman establishment.[129] One of the objections raised by some Protestant clergy to these traditions was that the religion of laboring people was based more on popular "Catholic" devotions than on scripture, that is, upon scripture as interpreted by clergy who had little regard for labor.[130] Christopher Haigh points out that the hierarchy and landlords attempted without much success to replace "socially-minded" religion with an easily manipulated type of personal devotion.[131] As a substitute for laboring saints, the seventeenth-century Catholic hierarchy offered a list of Roman ecclesiastical saints, such as popes, bishops, and members of religious orders. But these were not popular.[132]

            From the perspective offered by the county studies, it is just about impossible to distinguish the Catholics from the Protestants concerning their views of labor. John Bossy summarizes his study by stating that Catholic opinions were "perfectly compatible with an entrepreneurial approach to agriculture or anything else."[133] In his study of the Yorkshire community, Hugh Aveling finds the Catholics were prospering in every part of the county because of their love for labor and skills at husbandry, crafts, estate management, trade, or the professions. Catholic improvers such as Richard Weston of Surrey and Robert Wintour of Gloucestershire wrote scientific treatises on how to increase crop productivity in sandy soil by planting flax, turnips, and clover.[134] In his 1650 treatise Weston expressed his belief that God wanted and favored husbandry.[135] In Wintour's writings, agrarian husbandry was called the root of all riches.[136]

            Edward Bolton's 1629 Cities Advocate, which has already been quoted, defended those such as himself who worked for a living. He held up for emulation Martin Calthorpe, who started out as an apprentice, became mayor of London, and to whose skills even Queen Elizabeth had paid homage:

Queen Elizabeth acknowledged Martin Calthorpe, the Lord Mayor of London, who started as apprentice. I pray to resemble the worthies of this city, out of whatever obscure parentage, than being descended of great nobles, to fall by vice far beneath the reckoning of the poorest prentiser.[137]

            Even some of the gentry families, such as the Winthams at Cliffe, the Yoward, Crosland, and Wycliffe families, and Thomas Middleton of Stockeld took an active role in managing and improving their estates.[138] Bertrum Bulmer of Wilton, who was one of the trustees for the funds of the secular clergy, started a lead mine at Marrick in the 1630s and the Lawson family started a coal mine about the same time.[139] Hugh Smithson of Cowton Grange was a yeoman and tenant of Anthony Cotterick. He went to London, prospered in the haberdasher trade, returned to the county in 1638, and bought a farm called Stanwick from his former landlord.[140] Among the Yorkshire professional families were many Catholics: the Applebys of Clove Lodge, the Swales and Inglebys of Rudby, the Jacksons of Knayton, the Pudseys and the Metcalfes of Hood, the Tophams, Lawsons, and Pudseys, all of whom had successive generations of lawyers.[141] Ambrose Appleby did well enough in the law that he bought farms at Larrington and Linton on Ouse in 1640.[142] Two of his sons were ejected from Gray's Inn in London in 1638 for persistent non-communicating. Solomon Swale of Grinton entered Gray's Inn in 1630 and his son went there in 1648.[143] Among the professional Catholic women was Jane Grange who ran a private school at Bedale and was also a housewife.[144] Aveling sums up his study by saying that "there was no universal or necessary connection between Puritanism, the `new gentry' or officials, and economic progressiveness--and, in fact, comparatively little actual connection."[145]

            Conclusion. To sum up, the article has pointed out a liberating aspect of the social theology of a sector of the seventeenth-century English Catholic community. In doing this, it builds upon historiography that has established the community's laboring nature. The community's resistance to the established order was not unlike that of the antinomian Independents who believed they were oppressed by taxes, rents, market relations, and similar burdens. Along with and part of their resistance was a belief in the value of labor and laboring people.

            The study has been ambitious in going beyond its particular geographic and time limitations to suggest that there is a connection between past Catholic history and present-day theological developments. Liberation theology, it is argued, has had a long history and an apparently wide popular acceptance. It would appear that in one form or another, liberation theology might always be present among the laboring majority in class-divided societies. The landlord or slave-holding or capitalist class often dominate the pulpit, education, the media, and the government. The liberating beliefs of the laboring majority are marginalized, outlawed, distorted, and ridiculed. But they are probably always there, inspiring and guiding toward a descent society. A. L. Morton's remarks about the levelers might also in part be said of the Catholics:

A party that held the center of the stage for three of the most crucial years in our nation's history, voiced the aspiration of the unprivileged masses, and was able to express with such force ideas that have been behind every great social advance since their time, cannot be regarded as wholly a failure or deserve to be wholly forgotten.[146]