Hope, land ownership, and Milton's "paradise within"

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 151-180

  Fenton, Mary C ^a  

^a WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950451053     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2003.0003     Document Type: Article

References (99)

1. Angus Fletcher argues that "For the actual power of the empire to accumulate, for empire to become 'real,' there has to be a broadening of power base onto a middle-class foundation" ("The Place of Despair and Hope," Social Research 66, 2 [Summer 1999]: 521-9, 528).
2. Recent critical sources that address Milton's concept of nationhood, empire, imperialism, and/or republicanism are profuse: valuable and influential studies include Milton and the Imperial Vision, ed. Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1999);
3. J. Martin Evans's Milton's Imperial Epic: "Paradise Lost" and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996);
4. Robert Thomas Fallon, Divided Empire: Milton's Political Imagery (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1995);
5. Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995);
6. Laura L. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994);
7. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993);
8. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992);
9. and Stevie Davies, Images of Kingship in "Paradise Lost": Milton's Politics and Christian Liberty (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1983).
10. Elsewhere, discussion often narrowly centers on debates about the legitimacy of specific allusions or references: Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 189-215;
11. Christopher Kendrick, Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 92-3;
12. and Jackie DiSalvo, War of Titans: Blake's Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), pp. 247-55.
13. The covenant promises that what Abraham and other faithful Israelites will receive is land (Gen. 15:18;
14. All biblical references are to KJV. For Milton, in "Upon the Circumcision," this is "the great Cov'nant" (The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998], p. 55, line 21. All subsequent references to Milton's poetry will be to this edition, with the abbreviation PL at the start of references to Paradise Lost where the source is not clear.).
15. See John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and The World (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1993), pp. 128-42
16. for discussion of types of covenants and Milton's position on these. See also Michael Lieb, "'A Thousand Fore-skins': Circumcision, Violence, and Selfhood in Milton," MiltonS 38 (2000): 198-219.
17. The arguments are complex and intricate: Alan Macfarlane's The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979)
18. provides perhaps the most succinct overview of the primary arguments from Thomas Macaulay (History of England, 1848)
19. Karl Marx (Capital, 1887)
20. and Max Weber (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1930) that have influenced modern understanding of the relationship between peasant culture/economy, landed property, and the growth of capitalism. Macfarlane, however, argues that while Marx and Weber locate the turning point away from the closed peasant feudalism toward preindustrial capitalism in the sixteenth century, he believes that private ownership was already inherent and feasible in peasant culture, and thus by the sixteenth century, "the legal and ideological framework [of capitalism] was already largely developed" (p. 94). Macfarlane documents the already active land market of the fifteenth century that had begun in the fourteenth century.
21. Helgerson adds, "Nationalism and individualism . . . are . . . deeply implicated in one another" (p. 122).
22. Milton's personal dealings with property may have increased his awareness of the issue in general, but it is unknowable to what extent his own financial and property issues influenced his larger political views of land and property law, e.g., his relations with the Powells' Wheatley Property, a legal dispute lasting over ten years, beginning in 1647, ending only in 1657; his investment in excise bonds that were not honored after the Restoration; and the financial loans made to the government "upon the Public Faith," which he was unable to later recoup. See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1:396-7
23. and J. Milton French, Milton in Chancery: New Chapters in the Lives of the Poet and His Father (New York: Modern Language Association, 1939), pp. 71-99, 167-80.
24. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953-82), 3:190-258
25. Edward Coke's THE FIRST PART OF THE INSTITUTES OF THE LAWES OF ENGLAND; OR, A COMMENTARIE UPON LITTLETON (1628), 13th edn., 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Johnson and Warner, and Samuel R. Fisher Jr., 1812), defines "Tenant by copy of court roll is, as if a man be seised of a mannor within which mannor there is a custome, which hath beene used time out of mind of man, that certain tenants within the same mannor have used to have lands and tenements, to hold to them and their heires in fee simple . . . at the will of the lord according to the custome of the same manor" (vol. 1, chap. 9, sect. 73.57b).
26. In enumerating the multiple types of fees and manners of tenancy, the INSTITUTES also illuminates just how powerful landlords/superiors were: Fee Simple (vol. 1, chap. 1, sect. 1-12)
27. Fee Taile (vol. 1, chap. 2, sect. 13-31)
28. Tenant in Taile after Possibility of Issue extinct (vol. 1, chap. 3, sect. 32-34)
29. Tenant by the curtesie of England (vol. 1, chap. 4, sect. 35)
30. Tenant for Term of Life (vol. 1, chap. 6, sect. 56.41b-57)
31. Tenant for Years (vol. 1, chap. 7, sect. 58-67)
32. Tenant at Will (vol. 1, chap. 8, sect. 68.55a-72)
33. Knights Service (vol. 2, chap. 4, sect. 103-116)
34. Of Socage (vol. 2, chap. 5, sect. 117-32)
35. Of Frankalmoigne (vol. 2, chap. 6, sect. 133-42)
36. Of Homage Ancestral (vol. 2, chap. 7, sect. 143-51)
37. Grand Serjeantie (vol. 2, chap. 8, sect. 152-8)
38. Tenure en Burbage (vol. 2, chap. 10, sect. 162-72)
39. Of Fealtie (vol. 2, chap. 2, sect. 91.68a-4)
40. Of Escuage (vol. 2, chap. 3, sect. 95-120).
41. Additionally, John Rastall, An Exposition of Certain Difficult and Obscure Wordes and Termes of the Lowes of This Realme (London, 1579; rprt. New York: Da Capo, 1969), also briefly defines different types of fees with less legal terminology, and provides useful and comparative information.
42. Christopher Hill, Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth Century Controversies (London: Allen Lane, 1970), p. 275.
43. Related to this study, but beyond the immediate scope of my thesis, is Milton's ideological connection with radical groups, an important dimension of Milton's overall view of liberty as it relates to land and property. See Christopher Hill, Liberty, for analysis of the fundamental role that land plays in the Leveller and Digger platforms, pp. 273-97.
44. See also Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1975)
45. for extensive analysis of the radical and utopian movements of the mid-seventeenth century, and Christopher Hill's sometimes controversial Milton and the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1977), for his views on Milton's allegiance with the more radical sects such as the Muggletonians.
46. See also Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 263-9.
47. Bush notes that while Milton criticizes James Harrington in The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Commonwealth, Milton's "aristocratic republicanism - and his view of Cromwell - had something in common with Harrington's" (p. 270).
48. See also Bruce McLeod, "The 'Lordly Eye': Milton and the Strategic Geography of Empire," in Milton and the Imperial Vision, pp. 48-66.
49. See Theodore Plucknett, A Concise History of the Common Law (London: Butterworth, 1956);
50. C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England, 1500-1700 (Volume I: People, Land, and Towns) (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984).
51. Goldwin Smith, A History of England, 4th edn. (New York: Scribner's, 1974), p. 314.
52. F. W. Maitland, The Constitutional History of England: A Course of Lectures Delivered by F. W. Maitland (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1908; rprt. 1974), p. 13.
53. Smith, History, p. 314.
54. Charles Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 192.
55. See also George Hammersley, "The Revival of the Forest Laws under Charles I," History 45, 154 (June 1960): 84-102.
56. George Broderick, English Land and English Landlords; An Enquiry into the Origin and Character of the English Land Systems, with Proposals for Its Reform (New York, 1881; rprt. 1968), p. 45, notes that the abolition of military tenure, "effected by one of the first Acts passed by Charles II's first Parliament (12 Charles II., cap 24) operating retrospectively, turned all military tenures into 'free and common socage' from the 24th of February, 1645."
57. Christopher Hill, Liberty, p. 335.
58. Additionally, at the highest level of governance, Cromwell's Humble Petition and Advice, the 1657 agreement that there should be no land tax, demonstrates the centrality of domestic land issues and was one form of reconciliation by the revolutionaries with "the natural rulers" according to Christopher Hill, Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution: The Curti Lectures, 1976 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1980), p. 17.
59. The pioneering of "empire" really begins with Henry VIII with Poyning's Law, named after Henry's Lieutenant in Ireland who established British rights and policy in Ireland in very aggressive ways. Elizabeth subsequently enacted an aggressive planting of the Protestant presence in Southern Ireland, transferring lands in the south to British hands, most notably perhaps, her plantations in Munster. James I's plantation in Northern Ireland also meant the transference of lands from Irish to British hands. What was emerging during Elizabethan times was a concentrated, powerful concept of state: the idea of "Great" Britain that would culminate in the union of Scotland and Ireland with Britain in 1707. Policy, law, and general political strategies reveal that Ireland was, in many ways, the proving grounds for the British presence in America. See Plucknett; Maitland; Christopher Hill, The World Upside Down.
60. John Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership, 1650-1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994);
61. James Holstun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987).
62. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 453.
63. For debate about the purpose and function of Cromwell's Western Design, see, most notably, Christopher Hill, God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), pp. 158-62
64. and Fallon, "Cromwell, Milton, and the Western Design," in Milton and the Imperial Vision, pp. 133-54, who disagrees with Christopher Hill's assertion that the Western Design was one piece of Cromwell's global vision.
65. See also Fallon, Divided Empire, p. 130.
66. See also Janel Mueller, "Dominion as Domesticity: Milton's Imperial God and the Experience of History," in Milton and the Imperial Vision, pp. 25-47, about the notion of translatio imperii as it relates to the Son's messianism.
67. See Geoffrey Hartman, "Milton's Counterplot," ELH 25, 1 (March 1958): 1-12;
68. Elizabeth Fuller, Milton's Kinesthetic Vision in "Paradise Lost" (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell Univ. Press, 1983), p. 15;
69. T. S. Eliot, "Annual Lecture on a Master Mind: Milton," Proceedings of the British Academy 33 (1947): 61-79, 75;
70. and D. M. Hill, "Satan on the Burning Lake," N&Q 201, n. s. 3. (1956): 157-9 .
71. As in Job 24:8;
72. Augustine of Hippo, The Augustine Catechism: The Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love (New York: New City Press, 1999), p. 39.
73. For a succinct discussion of Augustine's theory of property, see Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 105-13.
74. Lieb, e-mail to the author, 1 July 2002.
75. Mark Stoll, in Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1997), p. 56
76. notes that in the seventeenth century "the English often referred to their new settlements in America and elsewhere not as 'colonies' but 'plantations.' They crossed the seas and 'planted' new communities. The Puritans 'planted' the Gospel in a heathen wilderness." Further, see Edward Johnson, A History of New England from the English Planting in the Yeere 1628, until the Yeere 1652: Wonder-Working Providences of Sion's Savior in New England (London, 1653), which like many other books from the period, works on "plant," "seed," "plantation," and "providence." My concern with "plant" is less with the colonial/imperial connotations than with how Satan uses it as an iteration of power and hope.
77. See De Doctrina Christiana, chap. 18, for Milton's connection between the process of "REGENERATION and INGRAFTING IN CHRIST" (YP, 6:461).
78. For the promise to Abraham, see Genesis 12:1-2;
79. the promise is reaffirmed to Isaac (Gen. 26:3);
80. Jacob (Gen. 28:4, 13;
81. Gen. 35:11-2);
82. Joseph (Gen. 48:4);
83. and Jacob's other sons (Gen. 50:24).
84. Renewal of the promise is given to Moses in Exodus 6:5-8;
85. Robert Booth Fowler, The Greening of Protestant Thought (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 80-2, succinctly clarifies differences among biocentric, anthropocentric, and theocentric stewardship in contemporary versions of Protestant thinking and political policy.
86. See also Ralph L. Smith, "Old Testament Concepts of Stewardship," Southwestern Journal of Theology 13 (Spring 1971): 7-13.
87. Further, New Testament versions of stewardship are articulated by Jesus in three parables: Matthew 21:33-41
88. For a brief discussion of stewardship in Paradise Lost, see Anne Lake Prescott, "Naming and Caring: The Theme of Stewardship in Paradise Lost," in Approaches to Teaching Milton's "Paradise Lost," ed. Galbraith M. Crump (New York: Modern Language Association, 1986), pp. 157-64.
89. Milton's iteration of Matthew 25:14 in his sonnet 19 articulates a related, if personal, sense of stewardship.
90. John A. Hoyt, "A Matter of Choice," Congregationalist 136 (March 1976): 13-6, 13.
91. For further discussion of this important issue see Lynne A. Greenberg, "Paradise Enclosed and the Feme Covert" in Grounds of Contention, ed. Shawcross, Lieb, and Mark Kelley (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, forthcoming 2003);
92. Eric Hobsbawm, "Scottish Reformers and Capitalist Agriculture," in Peasants in History: Essays in Honour of Daniel Thorner, ed. Hobsbawm et al. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1960), pp. 7-19;
93. R. C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992);
94. The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Vol. 4 (1500-1640), 8 vols., gen. ed. H. P. R. Finberg (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967-2000), pp. 417-25, 462-3;
95. and J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure, and Social Change in England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993).
96. That faith must originate internally, and that hope, therefore, must also be an internalized state, Milton states in a variety of works, but perhaps nowhere more succinctly than in his analogy of the material vs. the rational church, in The Reason of Church-Government Urg'd against Prelaty (YP, 1:757-8).
97. See also Stephen R. Honeygosky, Milton's House of God: The Invisible and Visible Church (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1993).
98. Peter De Vos et al., EarthKeeping: Christian Stewardship of Natural Resource (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1980), p. 235, discusses how stewardship must profit not only the self, but must also aid the community.
99. See also Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, regarding Milton's "resilience, toughness in defeat" (p. 89).