Property: Land Law and Selfhood in Richard II

With a little good fortune and a bit of common sense, an early modern man or woman could live out their life without ever having to deal with criminal law. Not so with land law. Prior to the nineteenth century, land law was the principle arena for orchestrating just about every aspect of life. The legal historian S. F. C. Milsom writes, "From the earliest settlements to the industrial revolution, the economic basis of society was agrarian. Land was wealth, livelihood, family provision, and principle subject-matter of the law ... land was also government and the structure of society." In early modern England, land law governed the vast majority of human relationships, marshaling a variety of different forms of domestic, professional, economic, and political association, and to this extent both responded to and reinforced ideas about personal identity in the period. If we situate land law in the context of property more broadly, it enters a long philosophical tradition fundamentally concerned with questions of selfhood: Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of property forms part of his wider teachings on the nature of man; Hegel saw property as one means to fulfilling the will and, therefore, to becoming fully human; Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson understood property as a prerequisite to individual freedom, for them the essence of humanness. For figures like Thomas More, Gerrard Winstanley, and Karl Marx, on the other hand, private property was a dehumanizing force that caused people to experience their surroundings and each other in unnatural ways. Property regimes are always expressions of ideas about selfhood, and any serious theory of property involves either explicit or implicit metaphysical assumptions.

This chapter explores the relationship between property and selfhood in the context of early modern English land law. Land law offers a particularly rich framework for thinking about selfhood because it orchestrates a range of complex linkages among people, lived environments, objects, and animals. More than any other branch of early modern law, land law assumes the human subject to be inextricably bound up with a variety of other nonhuman actors, from material things like livestock, crops, mineral ore, tools, and houses, to nonmaterial things like estates, leases, and titles. Shakespeare's Richard II develops an account of selfhood from within these conceptual parameters. As I will show, the social, physical, and emotional experiences that Bullingbrook and Richard undergo in the play are never presented as private or solitary events, not even in the final act when Richard delivers his prison-cell soliloquy. Instead, Shakespeare imagines these experiences as scenes of interaction and exchange, negotiations between character and environment. Richard II is a play that uses the conceptual scaffolding of land law to model a distinctly mobile and distributed version of selfhood.

My argument will unfold in three parts. The first section of the chapter sets the scene by considering how John of Gaunt uses land law in act 2.1 to articulate a particular version of national belonging grounded in collectivity and obligation. The second section looks at how Bullingbrook invokes a range of personal possessions, both objects and geographic spaces, in order to reshape his political and personal identity upon returning from exile. The third section concentrates on Richard himself with special attention to the way the deposed king's gradual loss of property leads to a rediscovery of the basic social and material coordinates of being, rather than the austere and isolated introspection we might expect. At a number of points in the pages that follow, I examine key principles of early land law, frequently with commentary on particular cases or legal transactions. This material helps to illuminate the way a specialized vocabulary of possession, use, and jurisdiction gets woven into a language of distributed selfhood in Richard II; a language, that is, which describes the self as fundamentally linked to other human and nonhuman entities at the level of substance even while they remain distinct at the level of form. As this suggests, there are both historical and philosophical contexts for the treatment of land law in Richard II. While Shakespeare's imaginative sources are the legal reports, practices, and doctrines of early modern England, his conceptual fellow travelers are the latter-day innovators of monistic and vitalist thought, such as Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and Jane Bennett. In what follows, I will be entering these two contexts into conversation in order to craft an account of the play that is responsive to both its cultural referents and its theoretical insights.

Gaunt and Legal Identity

The first we hear of land law in Richard II is in act 2.1. John of Gaunt, lying in bed, dying, embarks on a eulogy of England that conceives both positive and negative versions of national identity in literally grounded terms:

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
...
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas'd out — I die pronouncing it —
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat'ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. (2.1.50, 57–66)

Gaunt identifies England and Englishness with land, using not only the word "land" itself, but also "plot" and "earth." We know from Richard Helgerson's influential work that the last quarter of the sixteenth century saw the appearance of "a cartographic and chorographically shaped consciousness of national power," one that "strengthened the sense of both local and national identity at the expense of identity based on dynastic loyalty." In Gaunt's speech, however, something slightly different is going on. Here, Englishness is not simply identified with a vivid sense of place, but more specifically with the legal practices, roles, and artifacts involved in land transfer and use. It's described as "leas'd out" and likened to "a tenement or pelting farm." Tenancy is the situation of using but not actually owning a piece of land and a "pelting," or paltry, farm is a smallholding. Both terms are used pejoratively to project an image of England as post-splendor, depraved, corroded by a form of tyranny that violates the systems of reciprocity, interdependence, and mutual obligation that are managed and safeguarded by land law and which Gaunt understands as essential to all that is (or has been) glorious about England. Animated by the unique social,...