Commoner

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A commoner, also known as the common man, commoners, the common people or the masses, was in earlier use an ordinary person in a community or nation who did not have any significant social status, especially a member of neither royalty, nobility, nor any part of the aristocracy. Depending on culture and period, other elevated persons (such members of clergy) may have had higher social status in their own right, or were regarded as commoners if lacking an aristocratic background.

This class overlaps with the legal class of people who have a property interest in common land, a longstanding feature of land law in England and Wales. Commoners who have rights for a particular common are typically neighbours, not the public in general.

In monarchist terminology, aristocracy and nobility are included in the term.

History

Various

Ancient Athens was something of an exception with certain official roles like archons, magistrates and treasurers being reserved for only the wealthiest citizens – these class-like divisions were weakened by the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes who created new horizontal social divisions in contrasting fashion to the vertical ones thought to have been created by Tullius.[3]

Both the

Roman Emperors achieved a state of total personal autocracy
, they continued to wield their power in the name of the Senate and People of Rome.

A Medieval French manuscript illustration depicting the three estates: clergy (oratores), nobles (bellatores), and commoners (laboratores).

With the growth of Christianity in the 4th century AD, a new world view arose that underpinned European thinking on social division until at least early modern times.

Fall of Man.[1] The three leading divisions were considered to be the priesthood (clergy), the nobility, and the common people. Sometimes this was expressed as "those who prayed", "those who fought" and "those who worked". The Latin terms for the three classes – oratores, bellatores and laboratores – are often found even in modern textbooks, and have been used in sources since the 9th century.[4]
This threefold division was formalised in the estate system of
medieval Europe, consisting of peasants and artisans
.

Carolingian era, clergy were generally recruited from the nobility.[7] Of the two thousand bishops serving from the 8th to the 15th century, just five came from the peasantry.[8]

The social and political order of medieval Europe was relatively stable until the development of the mobile

Reformation was a movement that aimed to correct this, but even afterwards the common people's trust in the clergy continued to decline – priests were often seen as greedy and lacking in true faith. An early major social upheaval driven in part by the common people's mistrust of both the nobility and clergy occurred in Great Britain with the English Revolution of 1642. After the forces of Oliver Cromwell triumphed, movements like the Levellers rose to prominence demanding equality for all. When the general council of Cromwell's army met to decide on a new order at the Putney Debates of 1647, one of the commanders, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, requested that political power be given to the common people. According to historian Roger Osbourne, the Colonel's speech was the first time a prominent person spoke in favour of universal male suffrage, but it was not to be granted until 1918. After much debate it was decided that only those with considerable property would be allowed to vote, and so after the revolution political power in England remained largely controlled by the nobles, with at first only a few of the most wealthy or well-connected common people sitting in Parliament.[3]

The rise of the

Pitt the Elder was often called The Great Commoner in England, and this appellation was later used for the 20th-century American anti-elitist campaigner William Jennings Bryan
. The interests of the middle class were not always aligned with their fellow commoners of the working class.

According to social historian Karl Polanyi, Britain's middle class in 19th-century Britain turned against their fellow commoners by seizing political power from the British upper class via the Reform Act of 1832. The emergence of the Industrial Revolution had caused severe economic distress to a large number of working class commoners, leaving many of them with no means to learn a living as the traditional system of tenant farming was replaced with large-scale agriculture run by a small number of individuals. The upper class had responded to their plight by establishing institutions such as workhouses, where unemployed lower-class Britons could find a source of employment, and outdoor relief, where monetary and other forms of assistance were given to both the unemployed and those on low income without them needing to enter a workhouse to receive it.[10]

Though initial middle class opposition to the

Poor Law reform of William Pitt the Younger had prevented the emergence of a coherent and generous nationwide provision, the resulting Speenhamland system did generally manage to prevent working class commoners from starvation. In 1834, outdoor relief was abolished and workhouses were deliberately made into places so unappealing that many often preferred to starve rather than enter them. For Polanyi this related to the economic doctrine prevalent at the time which held that only the spur of hunger could make workers flexible enough for the proper functioning of the free market. By the end of the 19th century, at least in mainland Britain, economic progress has been sufficient that even the working class were generally able to earn a good living, and as such working and middle class interests began to converge, lessening the division within the ranks of common people. Polanyi notes that in Continental Europe, middle and working class interests did not diverge anywhere near as markedly as they had in Britain.[10]

Trifold division breakdown

US Vice President Henry A. Wallace proclaimed the "arrival of the century of the common man" in a 1942 speech broadcast nationwide in the United States.

After the

industrialization
, the division in three estates – nobility, clergy and commoners – had become somewhat outdated. The term "common people" continued to be used, but now in a more general sense to refer to regular people as opposed to the privileged elite.

People’s Will", "Party of Popular Freedom
" and the "People's Socialist Party".

In the United States, a famous 1942 speech by vice president Henry A. Wallace proclaimed the arrival of the "century of the common man" saying that all over the world the "common people" were on the march, specifically referring to Chinese, Indians, Russians, and as well as Americans.[11] Wallace's speech would later inspire the widely reproduced popular work Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland.[12] In 1948, U.S. President Harry S. Truman made a speech saying there needs to be a government "that will work in the interests of the common people and not in the interests of the men who have all the money."[13]

Social divisions in non-Western civilisations

Comparative historian Oswald Spengler found the social separation into nobility, priests and commoners to occur again and again in the various civilisations that he surveyed (although the division may not exist for pre-civilised society).[14] As an example, in the Babylonian civilisation, the Code of Hammurabi made provision for punishments to be harsher for harming a noble than a commoner.[15]

See also

Notes and references

  1. ^ .
  2. The Republic (Plato)
    , Part I, book IV.
  3. ^ .
  4. ^ "The Three Orders". Boise State University. Archived from the original on 2014-04-07. Retrieved 2013-01-31.
  5. ^ See for example:
  6. ^ DEVAILLY, Le Berry du X siècle au milieu du XIII siècle, p. 201; CHEDEVILLE, Chartres et ses campagnes, p.336.
  7. ^ PERROY, E., Le Monde carolingien, Paris, SEDES, 2.ª ed., 1975, p.143.
  8. ^ BRETT, M., Middle Ages, Encyclopædia Britannica, 15.ª ed., 1979, 12, p.1965.
  9. ^ .
  10. ^ .
  11. ^ Henry Wallace (February 1942). "The Century of the Common Man". Winrock International. Archived from the original on 2007-09-29. Retrieved 2011-06-30.
  12. .
  13. ^ Robert Reich (2012-11-09). "The real lesson from Obama's victory". Financial Times. Retrieved 2012-11-09.(registration required)
  14. .
  15. ^ Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics, and Society By Marvin Perry, Myrna Chase, Margaret C. Jacob, James R. Jacob, page 13

Further reading

  • The common people: a history from the Norman Conquest to the present J. F. C. Harrison Fontana Press (1989)
  • The concept of class: a historical introduction Peter Calvert Palgrave Macmillan (1985)

External links