The English king sat at the top of the social pyramid and beneath him the titled nobility: prince and princess, duke and duchess, baron and baroness, count and countess, down to the lesser ranks.
Each noble family of any consequence had its own coat of arms, a castle or family mansion with servants, knights in service, and substantial landholdings with peasants to work the land. The local lord could be judge, jury, and executioner.
While there was indeed a system of loyalty built up, the reciprocal nature of the exchange of services was not entirely between equals. The romantic notion of gallant knights on horseback rescuing fair damsels in distress is a far cry from the bleak reality of English feudal society with all of its oppression, brutality, and intensive exploitation of the laboring masses, the peasantry, at the bottom of society.
There was a strict hierarchy of order and control in England as one descended down the social pyramid–the serf-like peasants at the bottom were food-producers and conscripted manual laborers who had few rights.
Some historians describe their social conditions as being little better than that of slaves: short lives of hard work and misery, fraught with crop failure and famine, deadly diseases and epidemics, ignorance and illiteracy.
The democratic notions we take for granted today–of electing a government, one person one vote, all persons equal before the law, and so on–were largely absent. It is true that the English monarch had been forced to recognize certain rights of the nobility as far back as the signing of the Magna Carta, or Great Charter, in the year 1215.
This was an expansion of power for the highest-ranking nobles and not a fundamental social change that noticeably improved the lives of the peasants, who continued to suffer economic hardships and caste-like restrictions on their freedom.
Among the laboring masses there were nevertheless occasional revolts; in 1381 the largest of these became known as the Peasant Rebellion but it was ultimately crushed, drowned in blood: the typical response of royalty to any peasant uprising.
Some four hundred years later–in 1776–the royal response would be little different: the king’s army and navy were ordered to crush the American rebellion by any means necessary and hang those traitors who dared to rebel against their monarch, King George III. The American war for independence was treason!
Around 1500, a new stage of economic development begins which sees the beginning of the end for the old feudal order, although the new social and economic order which ultimately replace it is still only partly visible.
In between the end of feudalism and the birth of capitalism, occurs an often overlooked period of social and economic transition: the High Middle Ages sees a transformation from manor self-sufficiency and the barter economy of villages to increased trade, money employed as a medium of exchange, the incubation of banks, and towns becoming larger urban areas.
In the world of ideas and the arts, the great movement is called the Renaissance which sees a rebirth of interest in learning, in exploration and experimentation, in the acquisition of scientific knowledge, and the development of various branches of arts and letters—based in part on the re-discovery of the intellectual achievements of Greek and Roman societies that had once flourished in Greece, Italy, and other countries near the Mediterranean Sea.
Europe was entering a new stage of economic development that would lead to the Age of Discovery, the Age of Reason, the Age of Science, and the great Industrial Revolution.
The feudal form of society was becoming antiquated and unable to keep up with these social changes, although the exact shape of the new society that would replace feudalism was not yet clear. For ordinary people such as peasants, farmers, and artisans, the price of change would often mean more bloodshed and hardship.
In the Low Countries (Belgium and Holland) the wool trade began to prosper. From the perspective of the wealthy landowner, it soon became far more profitable to raise sheep than to allow peasant agriculture to continue.
In England, the lesson was not lost. Soon, a determined effort was made to drive the English peasants off the land to make way for sheep enclosures. Driven forcibly away, these agricultural laborers became landless and homeless. They became vagrants who faced hardship and persecution under harsh new laws aimed specifically at them.
In due time they learned they would have to supply their labor for the benefit of others to stay alive, with few rights or legal protections.
They became part of the laboring masses who would provide the muscle for the transformation of society from rigid feudal social forms to a pre-capitalist, money-based world. It was the beginning of a movement–first a trickle, later a flood–of agricultural peoples toward towns and cities in order to find employment if they and their families were to survive.
Many of those families forced off the land would end up in workshops (the forerunner to the modern factory) to produce the goods of the nation. They typically were not educated or even literate in many instances; they did not have unions; they could not vote nor did they have political representatives in Parliament.
In the early decades of the emerging capitalist system, workers often could not afford to buy the very products which they themselves helped produce! They were becoming “wage slaves”, as the new radical writers put it.
The majority of people in England and other European nations often lived “lives of quiet desperation”, to borrow Henry David Thoreau’s phrase.
Whether in country or city, ordinary men and women suffered and endured the best they could under difficult economic circumstances exacerbated by drought, famine, and epidemics.
In an age of ignorance and superstition, the peasants and town workers had very little of an uplifting nature to cheer their lives: lives which could easily be cut short by disease, malnutrition, or outright starvation–to say nothing of violent repression if they tried to protest their deplorable living and working conditions.
Besides natural disasters, they could easily become victims of man-made disasters, such as war at home or abroad. Some of the earliest immigrants to America were escaping these extremely high levels of intolerance, violence, and poverty found in England and other European nations.
Feudalism did not give up without a struggle: its political forms (kingship, royalty, aristocracy) continued on even after the new economic order began developing more and more rapidly.
The monarchy and aristocracy believed that this traditional social order—of wealth based on land (not trade or commerce) of luxury and privilege for the few (and poverty and misery for the masses)–had been ordained by a higher power.
There were conservative forces resisting change, just as there were new liberal voices championing it: future clashes between the two sides, reactionaries and progressives, were inevitable.
The Status Quo always looks fine to the wealthiest beneficiaries of the existing society; they were brought up to believe in their own superiority and exhibit attitudes of condescension and ridicule toward the lower classes; they need not trouble themselves over the lives of those families far less fortunate than their own.
The ruling class under feudalism was prepared to meet challenges to its authority and to use all of its armed power to maintain its own privileged positions.
When the independence-minded American colonists first came into political conflict with King George III, they surely would have been aware that it was a crime to criticize the king by speaking out against the abuses of his power.
The rights we take for granted today, such as freedom of speech and of the press, did not yet exist; any talk of independence would have been viewed in Buckingham Palace in London as nothing less than rebellion and treason, crimes punishable by torture and death!
The colonists seeking change–amelioration of their conditions in response to their expressed grievances–understandably did not jump straight away to the revolutionary conclusion that the colonies should be free and independent states; to the contrary, they made repeated efforts to petition the English king to recognize their rights as Englishmen.
As the revolutionary decade of the 1770’s began, Americans thought it a reasonable request that they be allowed to send representatives to Parliament in London to vote on matters concerning themselves and the governance of the colonies.
King George III, however, reacted to such requests as a personal insult and as a dangerous threat for colonial subjects to be making–creating, as it would, an intolerable precedent. Such insolence simply could not be tolerated!
From 1765 to 1775 disobedient Americans began moving from “asking for respect” to preparation for a more concerted effort for independence.
The King and Parliament, in turn, concluded that they would crush any attempt at rebellion; they would use their army and navy—both considered the “best in the world”—as they always did, to teach all rebels, including the American colonists, a lesson they would not soon forget: war was coming!
In retrospect, we can perhaps argue that King George misjudged the depth of American determination for independence, but he certainly was in keeping with the temper of the times to insist that he, as the English monarch, did not have to say “yes” to any such request for colonial representation in Parliament.
The very idea of it must have struck him as absurd; it no doubt rankled his nerves that anyone would question the vast sway of his undisputed authority. He was an “absolute monarch” who knew how to crush treason: or so he thought. Eight years of bloody war would prove otherwise.
What the American colonists were about to do would send shock waves around the world: the new nation would deliver a mighty death blow to feudalism and prevent its transplantation and further growth on the American continent.
The misbehaving rebels would champion instead a new creed of democratic principles not dependent upon the power or whim of a monarch at all.
The idea of human rights, of freedom and equality, was about to receive a tremendous “yes!” as the American Revolution created a new nation: the United States of America.
The rights contained in our Declaration of Independence came at a high, high price, one paid in blood, sweat, and tears. The form of our government, outlined in the United States Constitution, was not given to us as a gift: it was something the fighting Americans of that first revolutionary generation earned by risking their own lives and fortunes.
The rights contained in the Bill of Rights did not spring up magically from the ground overnight: they came from the adoption of the new thinking found in the ideas of natural law and natural rights. Human beings aren’t given their rights by monarchs; they are entitled to dignity and freedom simply by being born human.
This was a new way of thinking among many rebellious and forward-thinking Americans who were increasingly willing to risk it all in order to break from the past.
The fledgling United States thus gained for itself both the honor and responsibility of protecting this new-found commitment to individual freedom and social justice.
The author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, reminded people of how precious this obligation was when he wrote: “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” He also wrote the single most eloquent line of the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
In 1775 the armed struggle to achieve freedom–and to create safeguards to protect it for all future generations–had begun in earnest. The next year, in July of 1776, Americans published their reasons in the Declaration of Independence.
Against great and sometimes seemingly impossible odds, the American Revolution had begun. Nothing less than the freedom of “All Great Humanity” was at stake!
