People who lived off absurdly small wages and in disgusting conditions. In fact it was this very reason why the prevalent philosophies involving equality, the purpose of government and blah blah, where so popular with the masses. In other words, due to the disenfranchised and mistreated English people the ideals of the Enlightenment were received well and adopted into their politics.
In England the poor lived in dreadful conditions.
For example, in England’s 1600’s the bottom 40% of the population in term of income spent 69.2% of their expenditures on food alone (Real Inequality in Europe since 1500). If 70% of your expenses are devoted to food you will not have any money left for your living conditions of your clothes. Moreover, 18.5% of the same peoples expenditures were devoted to clothing. Thus the poor could only spend 10% of their measly income on housing, furniture, or other things. In fact their, homes could be described as “very small and crowded”, furthermore, “most of the poor lived in huts of 2 or 3 rooms. Some families lived in just one room.’(Lambert). The conditions described above are miserable at best. Additionally the “mass of the population” were “craftsmen, tenant farmers and laborers”(Lambert) who had no chance of changing their lifestyle because they spent all of their money on food and clothing. To recap, the majority of England was in poverty and the people of poverty lived in shambles, spending practically all of their money on food alone. This is why when they heard of the philosophies developed in the Enlightenment, which stressed equality of men and personal freedoms, they embraced them with open …show more content…
arms.
Not only did the majority of England’s poverty, but they were mistreated and taken advantage of by the government. In the Middle Ages England practiced feudalism and the poor survived by, “Gathering wood, pulling wool from sheep’s backs, and pocketing bit of grain”(Olson-Raymer). This supplementary income helped the poor live more comfortably. However, once England ended feudalism in the 1500s, these behaviours, “became criminalized by the government”(Olson-Raymer). The upper class lawmaker, who had no idea of the struggle that the average man face criminalized those actions and in doing so, prevented the poor from supplementing their minimal income. This is indicative of the overall sentiment toward the lower class in england, harsh and uninformed. Another similar example is the The Poor Act of 1598. This Act “defined migratory worker as a social threat and an economic liability to England”(Olsen-Raymer). As shown above the majority of the England population was laborers and tenant farmers so naturally they were required to migrate based on the seasons. This once again demonstrates the ignorant and unfair policies passed by the English Parliament which took advantage of the lower class. Moreover, any step toward charity by England’s parliament was stifled by local law, because, “it left administration to the local town or parish” (Olsen). The leaders of these local towns or parishes where very unfair, often leaving orphaned children “condemned to death by their [their] indifference”(Olsen). This kind of brutality was becoming ingrained in English culture. Peter the Great took note of this during his travels of Europe. In Robert Massie’s biography of Peter the Great, he talks about how executions had become a public event; “Wealthy ladies and gentlemen paid for place with windows and balconies overlooking the rout where executions took place”(Massie).
The setting created above allowed for mass acceptance of the ideas of equality generated by the Enlightenment.
Many of John Locke’s theories revolved around the relationship between a government and its subjects. Locke asserted that it was“the right of a people to change a government that did not protect the natural rights of life, liberty and property"(Impact of Enlightenment on
Europe).
In the 15th through 18th centuries the English government and English upper class oppressed the English lower class which created a setting in which the ideals of the Enlightenment were indoctrinated in the poor masses. The poor lived in terrible condition filled with hardship and struggle. Furthermore, this struggle was largely exacerbated by the people in power at that time. Those people passed policies that exploited the poor working lower class. Thus, when the masses heard the ideas the Enlightenment preached, personal freedoms, natural equality among men, and the government helped preservation of a man’s liveliness, they accepted them and backed them strongly. An important aspect of this time was that this phenomenon was not singular to England, rather it happened in numerous places all over Europe. A similar set-up in France led to a drastically different outcome, the French Revolution. But it nonetheless led to the democracy we now know. To generalize a bit more, in various other people’s revolutions there was a similar setting; a government repressing the masses, a large poor population, and a new ideology breaking free of the current school of thought.