that there is a logic to even so unhappy-appearing a situation: “If order mought there in be founde:/what were to the severall grounde?” (fol. 60v). “Order” can ultimately be found in enclosure, whatever the immediate painful consequences, his poem implies, though it also recognizes, in its citation of the complaints of the “poore,” that this “order” is not yet fully accomplished – or, at least, appreciated.
By the middle of the next century, however, when Norwood was writing his autobiography, the ostensible benefits of enclosure are widely enough assumed for it to migrate metaphorically into Leveller discourse, that emphatically claims that men should be bold to enjoy their “owne” – not just in terms of land but also of their selves alongside all other property that should be protected by laws and secured by the state. Richard Overton explains:
To every individuall in nature is given an individuall property by nature, not to be invaded or usurped by any: for everyone as he is himselfe, so he hath a selfe propriety, else could he not be himself … Mine and thine cannot be, unless this be.
(3)
Property in the self remains, even if it is one’s sole possession. As Peter Stallybrass has pointed out, however, “the radical notion of the separate individual has its cost: the reduction of the political subject, language, the author to independent atoms which preceded all social relations” (610). Obscuring this cost, John Locke will underscore and advance this already well-established idiom when, at the end of the century, he simultaneously praises enclosure in terms that are familiar from Tusser and the other “improvers” alongside a discourse of self-property drawn from the radical individualism that we see asserted during the revolution by men like Overton. Thus, Locke’s famous chapter on property concedes one of the commonplaces of the period – that “God gave the world to Adam and his posterity in common” (17), but dismisses it in favor of an individualist paradigm of property; those who make the most productive use of land – at home or in the colonies – deserve exclusive property in it, an imperative Locke models on the individual’s possession of himself: “man, by being master of himself and proprietor of his own person and the actions or labor of it had still in himself the great foundation of property” (27). The catch here is that if you are a “proprietor” of your own person and labor, you can sell it, and then it belongs to its new “proprietor”: “the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged … become my property” (18). Between the Diggers and Locke, then, we can see that two paths open up before incipiently modern subjects; the radically “individual” subject triumphed, while the radically “common” one was violently suppressed, with material consequences for the world that we still inhabit.
The writings of Richard Norwood help expose the mechanisms – and costs – of this suppression, which has a colonial as well as a domestic, a social as well as a subjective, front. He is known today, principally, as the first cartographer of Bermuda. Prior to the shipwreck of an English ship there in 1609, seamen of all nations had typically avoided it as haunted and dangerous, but life on the island proved so – unexpectedly – comfortable for the original group of English castaways who lived there for about nine months in their own version of a radical commons, that John Smith later observed: it “caused many of them utterly to forget or desire ever to returne from thence, they lived in such plenty, peace and ease” (349). The earliest writings on Bermuda, in fact, share a preoccupation with justifying the onward colonial enterprise to Virginia of this original shipwrecked population, which manifestly did not willingly leave the well-provisioned, previously uninhabited, island, for hungry Virginia, with the challenges of its large native population.9 Norwood’s strategy is to write as if the Edenic moment never happened, and to characterize the island instead as “chaos” in need of “order.”
It is worth examining closely what he obscures to take full account of the loss it entails. William Strachey’s narrative reveals that the hurricane that delivered the 150 or so women and men – including himself – on the Sea Venture to the supposed “Devil’s Islands” disrupted long-embedded social hierarchies by forcing every man – even “such as in all their lifetimes had never done hour’s work before” – equally, without sleep or food, to labor to keep the ship from sinking (16, 12). Then, after landing on the island, abundance, the lack of established property relations, and the memory of the tempest-induced equality encouraged what we might call an accidentally radical commons. For some, the unexpected diversion of the expedition permanently unsettled the apparatus of authority that had previously governed the ship that was intended to deliver them to Virginia:
… one Stephen Hopkins … – a fellow who had much knowledge in the Scriptures and could reason well therein … – alleged substantial arguments both civil and divine (the Scripture falsely quoted) that it was no breach of honesty, conscience, nor religion to decline from the obedience of the governor or refuse to go any further led by his authority (except it so pleased themselves), since the authority ceased when the wreck was committed, and with it, they were all then freed from the government of any man.
(43–44)
Hopkins and other dissidents further insisted that since they had been directed by God to a place where plentiful food could be got with little labor, and where, therefore, each man could live equally freely and comfortably, their departure should not be forced, especially since in Virginia they would likely be subjected to great want, and furthermore “might be detained in that country by the authority of the commander thereof and their whole life to serve the turns of the adventurers with their travails and labors” (44). Such arguments even infiltrated the rank of some of those whom Strachey referred to as “the better sort,” who had to be wooed back with reminders of the duty that they owed the king, their own class, and, not least, the voyage’s investors, since “the meanest in the whole fleet stood the company in no less than £20 for his own personal transportation and things necessary to accompany him” (40, 52). This divide between the (minority) defenders of traditional order, who – reasserting privilege – insisted the Virginia Company should get the bodies it paid for, and the settlers who viewed the shipwreck as giving rise to an egalitarian social order worth preserving, made manifest the tenuousness of social inequality in the absence of its material basis in unequal property.10
Strachey himself recognizes the social implications of the lack of private property in the curious metaphor that he uses to describe the glee with which the abundant fruit of the palmetto was harvested by persons who, unused to plenty, suddenly found themselves capable of having as much as they desired. He likens the trees – which are capped by fruit – to the members of the middle class (to which he belonged, precariously, himself):
Many an ancient burgher was therefore heaved at and fell not only for his place but for his head. For our common people, whose bellies never had ears, made it no breach of charity in their hot bloods and tall stomachs to murder thousands of them.
(26)
This passage’s expression of elite anxiety in the face of the unleashed appetites of the previously contained and repressed “common people,” and their symbolic “murder” of authority and privilege that the lack of private property made possible, was clearly not lost on the “common people” themselves, who, as we have seen, mounted considerable resistance to losing their newfound equality. Strachey summarizes the situation thus:
And sure it was happy for us, who had now run this fortune and were fallen into the bottom of this misery, that we both had our governor with us and one so solicitous and careful whose both example … and authority could lay shame and command upon our people. Else, I am persuaded, we had most of us finished our days there, so willing were the major part of the common sort (especially when they found such a plenty of victuals) to settle a foundation of ever inhabiting there; as well appeared by many practices of theirs (and perhaps of the better sort). … The angles wherewith chiefly they thus hooked in these disquieted pools were how that in Virginia nothing but wretchedness and labor must be expected … there being neither that fish, flesh, nor fowl which here (without wasting on the one part, or watching on theirs, or any threatening and art of authority) at ease and pleasure might be enjoyed.
(40–41)