Your remarks on Goldman’s study of Tawney’s career are
important and deserve a considered response. It is true that Tawney was a
Christian Socialist and that his historical works were informed by his profound
moral convictions.
He preferred the more collective society of the
late-medieval English peasantry to what he took to be the increasingly
market-orientated economy of the post-Reformation period. Similarly, he was
even more critical of the capitalist economy and society that existed after the
Industrial Revolution and throughout his lifetime.
It was for these reasons that he thought the comments of
critics of the societies of these post-1540 periods compelling and valuable. It
is, however, also true that his economic analysis of these societies owed a
large debt to Marx’s class analysis and could not have been expressed without
using Marxist terminology
Valerie Pearl, who knew Tawney, once remarked to me that
he had an “aura of sanctity”. By 1940, he was widely regarded in left-wing
circles as an oracle of wisdom and, as Christopher Hill’s obituary tributes
showed, a person not to be criticised. I very much doubt whether this was a
desirable position for an historian, however distinguished, to be in.
I am also doubtful whether much of Tawney’s corpus of
works really qualifies as “history” since its subscription to Marxist tenets
and the moral condemnation of social changes in the past lies outside the
proper remit of the discipline. What the “storm over the gentry” from c.1948 to
c.1958 did was to expose Tawney’s contentions about the rise of the gentry as a
cause of the English Revolution to long overdue examination and critical
evaluation.
The controversy stimulated an immense raft of research in
the succeeding period, little of which supported the contentions of the
participants. That is something for which Trevor-Roper and J.P.Cooper.
Lawrence Stone’s case was rather different. He had indeed
been Trevor-Roper’s pupil. In fact, it was Trevor-Roper who had lent Stone the
transcripts from the Recognisances for Debt in the Public Record Office in
Chancery Lane which Stone used, without Trevor-Roper’s advance knowledge or
permission, in his 1948 article in The Economic History Review.
It was this action
– this “act of thievery” as Menna Prestwich described it – that prompted
Trevor-Roper’s ferocious language in his immediate response and later comments.
Reading the works of Tawney and Stone is an enjoyable
experience. Both were consummate writers and had exciting propositions to put
to their readers. But Tawney’s moral approach to the past was underpinned by a
crude economic determinism and entailed an overtly political analysis of the
past. Stone, by contrast, was an adventurer at large in the past, always
seeking to be the focus of attention and at the forefront of historiographical
fashion.
He was not, in the
strict sense, a scholar at all and was perfectly prepared to lie about his
critics. It is no surprise that both have ceased to be relevant to the
historiography of the early modern period.
