Culture of the Commonwealth (Cromwell the Great)

The seed ye sow another reaps;
The wealth ye find another keeps;
The robes ye weave another wears;
The arms ye forge another bears.
(Shelley, Song to the Men of England (1819), st. 5)

The British Civil Wars (1636-1651) and the effects that followed made of the Britannia a unique cultural and social mixture different from the rest of continental Europe. Being Britannia the first to have a successful and lasting Bourgeois Revolution made it until the French Revolution source of admiration by the European Enlightenment philosophers. However, it also became a nation at odds with Europe even after the European Revolutions and a rival of France and Germany, but a close ally of the Dutch Republic and Flanders.

The incipient and lasting political republicanism of Britannia established a liberal parliamentary system. Its capitalism along free trade and Industrial Revolution led to the Britannia becoming the workshop of the World and one of the main colonial and imperial powers. Its predominantly Christian religious life and embracing religious tolerance awoke later freedom of expression and other liberties that embedded today's British Liberties. Its composition of the four home countries—England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland—each of which has a distinct customs, languages, cultures and symbolism formed part of the current and distinctive British multiculturalism.

It is usual to divide the history of the Commonwealth in the following periods: Puritan Age (1649-1659), Two Lords (1659-1718), Whig Hegemony (1718-1761), British Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution (1761-1790), Age of Reforms and Colonialism (1790-1840), ....

Society

One of the most noticeable difference in the social classes in the Commonwealth was the absence of a monarchy and royal family. However, aristocrats and nobility were still the upper class and the wealthiest. Followed by the peers, gentry, yeomen (farmers who own their own land) the latter two now involved in local government and parliamentary elections. The lower classes consisted of husbandmen, cottagers, and laborers (in rural areas) and tradesmen and shopkeepers (in urban areas). Mercantilism and later Capitalism elevated the status of merchants who would form part of the nobility by means of marriage and patronage.

As an oligarchic republic power rested in the Commonwealth in the hands aristocrats, nobility and merchants. The high suffrage requirements of a rent or property of £200 or more de facto excluded manual workers and the poor. Thereby parliamentary franchise included the wealthy and well do rural country gentlemen, prosperous merchants of all sorts and certain groups of wealthy tradesmen, shopkeepers and artisans.

Lady Arabella Blackwood-Lennox of Carstairs. Notable wool and textile merchant of the Lowlands. One of the 53 Right Honourable Ladies, the first female MPs. Elected as Radical Industrialist for the Glasgow Burghs of Scotland.

Franchise was restricted to males by custom rather than statute. However, this started to change on the outcry of Scottish peerage on the disfranchisement of landed women who also inherited noble titles and baronies and were by Scots law recognized with full legal rights. Suffrage Reforms gave, first for Scottish and later to all British women, the right of suffrage and to be elected if they had the same property requirements of men and were married or widowed. Reformed later to only property requirements regardless of civil status.

The Agricultural and Industrial revolutions brought into the social scene a a new class: the industrial workers. Its representatives and themselves become early advocates of social and political reform. Leveller like radicalism, absent for decades, was revived and enjoyed support among the artisans and raising proletariat.

In the Puritan Commonwealth social mores emphasized godly discipline, moral reformation, humility, sobriety and good order. Though after 1660 there was a general laxness in England, Wales and Ireland and overseas territories, however, Scotland and [New England kept their strict morality and Puritanism.

See also slavery in the Commonwealth

Sunday and National Commonwealth Holidays

By law, Sunday is the legal day of rest and Church attendance, so the law courts, government offices, commerce and places of entertainment are closed. All kind of work and recreational activities are banned. Marketplaces, bakeries, butcheries and fishmongers are allowed to be open until midday and must be at least eight blocks away from any Church or place of worship. A major exception are hospitals that must attend year-round. These Sunday Laws are also followed or enacted by the overseas colonies, commonwealths and dominions of the Commonwealth, but more firmly in New England.

The National Commonwealth Holidays have been subject to changes several times. In 1647 Parliament abolished the observance of Christmas, Easter and many other religious days, this measured was reversed in 1661, but keeping fewer religious festivities then 1647. A major change from before 1647 was the absolute ban and prohibition of celebrating saints in public and severe constraints in Churches and worship places. The penalties for offenders (organizers and participants) were hefty fines. At the same time it retained the Ordinance of 1647 that established the Day of Leisure (2nd Tuesday of each month) for scholars, apprentices, and other servants.

However, New England kept obligatory attendance to Church on Sundays and the prohibition of celebrating Christmas and other holidays until its repeal in the 1680s. However, even after the repeal, there were no attempts to celebrate these holidays, and the official stance continued to discourage gift-giving and revelry.

In the Commonwealth the national holidays (since 1661) are the following:

Commonwealth holidays 1661

Day	England and Wales	Scotland	Ireland	Isle of Man and Channel Islands	Observations
2nd Tuesday of each month	Day of Leisure				Shops, warehouses and commerce closed
1st January	New Year's Day
4th February		Declaration of the Tender Union Day (or Tender Union Day)
variable	Good Friday				Sunday laws apply
variable	Easter Monday				Sunday laws apply
17th March			(St. Patrick's Day)		Not officially sanctioned
24th March			Act of Irish Union
25th March	Lady Day			Lady Day	Quarter Day. Old New Year's Day (outside Scotland and Ireland)
23th April	(St. George's Day)				Not officially sanctioned
1st May	May Day (Spring Festival)				Not officially sanctioned
19th May	Declaration of the Commonwealth Day				Law courts and government offices closed. Commonwealth Era New Year's Day.
24th June	Midsummer Day				Quarter Day
5th July				Tynwald Day (Isle of Man only)
12th August				Union and Mutual Partnership
29th September	Michaelmas				Quarter Day
1st November	All Saints' Day				To be celebrated as a remembrance day
5th November	Gunpowder Treason Day
30th November		(St. Andrews Day)			Not officially sanctioned
25th December	Christmas Day				Sunday laws apply. Also Quarter Day
26th December	Boxing Day / (St. Stephen's Day, only in Wales)

Commonwealth Era

Before Charles I execution in January 1649, official government and legal documents of historical interest, notably parliamentary statutes used the regnal years of the monarchs of the Kingdom of England ("nth year of the reign of King X", etc).After 1649 the common usage was 'in the year of our Lord of' (year) for all documents.

However, it became an unofficial style and a fashion due to the Week of Celebration of the 25 years of the Declaration of the Commonwealth (1674) to use the term Commonwealth Year dated from 19 May 1649 as year one. It became customary its use in important documents, celebrations, dates of foundation and cornerstones of buildings.

Weights, Measures and Time Keeping

The customary British weights and measures were those specified by the Winchester Standards. However, concerns and troubles by the Boards of Customs and Excise on collecting duties and excise reflected the need of standardized units in calculating taxes in goods and trade across the British Isles and Dominions. The Society for Promoting and Improving Knowledge (SPIK) advocated an overhaul of the customary units with ones bases on certain physical constants. This was the case of John Wilkins's Proposals favored by the SPIK.

The Act for ascertaining and establishing Uniformity of Weights and Measure of 1730 standardized the customary units creating the British Exchequer Standards and redefined units, simplified the association of measurements. It was predated by the Standard Weights and Measures Act of 1706 that abolished obsolete, not widely used or arcane measuring units and repealed local customary units used in Scotland and Ireland. It did take in account more or less the ideas of the SPIK in the need to specify a basic unit and subunits formalized according to a basic unit (inch, pound and gallon). However, the base units were defined to certain physical constants or to easily built prototypes. It also took the provision of allocating resources for the SPIK to establish more accurate units in the scientific and engineering fields. Like the Roemer-Fahrenheit degrees (°RF) that is the usual unit of temperature were the freezing point of pure water been 0 °RF and 120 °RF its boiling point.

The Gregorian calendar was officially adopted by the British Commonwealth and its dominions and colonies in 1752. Previously double dates (Julian and Gregorian calendars simultaneously) were used by the 1680s, especially in dealing with continental foreign affairs and the Armed Forces. With the introduction of the French Republican Calendar there were proposals to adapt it as the sole calendar within the British Commonwealth by some radical and scientific circles. Some newspapers begin to used it along the Gregorian Calendar such as The Friends of the Republic, published in London. However, the European Revolutionary War and the surge of British Patriotism discarded this idea and Parliament legislated to make the Gregorian calendar the only civil calendar and prohibited the use of the Republican Calendar, or any other variant, in all public and liturgical communications or private publications.

For more details see: Measuring systems and time keeping and currencies.

Dress Codes

The Puritan Commonwealth marked a reversal from Elizabethan and Stuart extravagances of dress. Puritans advocated a conservative form of fashionable attire, characterized by "sad" or somber colors and modest cuts. Gowns with low necklines were filled in with high-necked smocks and wide collars. Married women covered their hair with a linen cap, over which they might wear a tall black hat. Men and women both avoided bright colors, shiny fabrics, and over-ornamentation. Make-up was banned and women found wearing make-up (pale complexion, and red cheeks and lips) would have their faces forcibly scrubbed.

Most Puritans and Calvinists did not wear black for everyday, especially in England, Scotland, and colonial America. Black dye was expensive and faded quickly, and black clothing was reserved for the most formal occasions (including having one's portrait painted), for elders in a community, and for those of higher rank. Richer puritans, like their Dutch Calvinist contemporaries, wear it often, but in silk, often patterned. More typical colors for most were brown, murrey (mulberry, a brownish-maroon), dull greens, and tawny colors. Wool and linen were preferred over silks and satins, though Puritan women of rank wore modest amounts of lace and embroidery as appropriate to their station, believing that the various ranks of society were divinely ordained and should be reflected even in the most modest dress. William Perkins wrote "...that apparel is necessary for Scholar, the Tradesman, the Countryman, the Gentleman; which serveth not only to defend their bodies from cold, but which belongs also to the place, degree, calling, and condition of them all" (Cases of Conscience, 1616).

Some Puritans rejected the long, curled hair as effeminate, and favored a shorter fashion which led to the nickname Roundheads for adherents of the English Parliamentary party, but the tastes for lavish or simple dress cut across both parties in the English Civil War.

The period of the Two Lords and Whig Hegemony, late 1660s, marked the gradual end of these austere dress codes and more colorful clothes and fashion from France and Netherlands, with the exception of New England that kept a more austere dress style until the 1700s.

Fads and Trends

The Dutch Summer, started by the state visit of Stadtholder Willem III in july 1681, initiated the fondness of ornamental gardening by aristocrats and gentry. It also was a trend against the style and practices of the jardin à la française creating a an English garden style (jardin à l'anglaise).

British Name Conventions

The British name convention consists of two widely used forms.
The traditional also called common or old convention consists of a given name, commonly referred to as a first name or Christian name, and a (most commonly patrilineal) family name or surname, also referred to as a last name. There can be several given names, some of these being often referred to as a second name, or middle name. Customs also established that women and men acquire the father's given name and married women the husband's given name.

Examples of old convention: John William and Mary William, children of Henry William. If Mary Williams marries John Stephenson she becomes Mary Stephenson.

The modern convention or women's form consists of a double-barrelled name. The family or surname name of each parent joined with a hyphen. The modern convention were mostly taken in order to preserve a family name which would have become extinct due to the absence of male descendants bearing the name, connected to the inheritance of a family estate in Scotland and Ireland and later spreading its usage to England and Wales. In the early 18th century it became common its usage by women in order to preserve or mark inheritance of property or status, becoming in the 19th century the common form used by most women regardless if they were married or not.

Examples of women's form: Elizabeth Brown-Spencer, taken from her parents John Brown and Sarah Spencer.

The two above forms are the only ones accepted by the Parish Civil Registry. Regulations of the 18th and 19th century prohibited the use of foreign names (i.e. French).

Entertainment

The Commonwealth advocated an austere lifestyle and restricted what they saw as the excesses of the previous regime. Most prominently, holidays such as Christmas and Easter were suppressed between 1647-1661 Pastimes such as the theatre (until 1662), horse racing and gambling were also banned. However, some forms of art that were thought to be "virtuous", such as opera, were promoted.

Curiously when theatres open again, in Declaration of the Commonwealth Day a popular play attracting wide audiences everywhere was Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. Theaters would be allowed but some plays would be censored or prohibited if they were pro-royalist or ungodly. However, its enforcement and list of plays censored would be inconsistent throughout the Commonwealth.

All kind of sports and recreations were prohibited on Sundays or religious holidays (Christmas, Easter Monday, Good Friday, All Saints' Day and St Andrews Day). Banned were cockfighting, bear- and bull-baiting.

For the Days of Leisure all activities or meetings that degenerated into a drunk and disorderly conduct were prohibited. However, what was allowed or not as an honest recreation in leisure days was a contingent affair during the Puritan Commonwealth with contradictory actions taken by magistrates depending on the pressure of their local communities or ministers. In most instances all sports, maypoles and dancing would be banned or some allowed, and those allowed would not necessarily be the same across the parishes of a county.

However, sports became the preferred leisure and was advocated by the majority of the churches, especially for the monthly day of leisure. In the countryside the favorite sport was cricket.

The British Isles have given birth to a range of major sports including: football, rugby, cricket, netball, darts, croquet, fives (hand-tennis), bowls, modern rowing, hockey, boxing, water polo, snooker and curling. The origins of tennis, table tennis, badminton, squash, golf and billiards are disputed with France were similar games developed. Modern Polo, originally from India, is also a played.

See also for more details Sports in the Commonwealth

Perception of the British by Continental Europeans

Their state is like Venice but with a whole island for themselves (a quick description given by a French diplomat).

La République anglaise est une abomination et une exception. Il doit en être ainsi! Rien de bon ne peut en sortir! (From an early 18th French pamphlet)

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.(Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Volume II, Book IV, Chapter VII, Part III.)

At first a shock for a nation that beheaded its legitimate ruler, then skepticism that it could exist and prosper without one. Finally envy to what they had done. These were the perceptions made by many in Europe. It was the usual talk and topic in salons to discuss the merits of virtue or fault of the république anglaise.

Religious tolerance was denounce in pulpits, specially France, as the road to decadence and moral looseness. How can a nation with a thousand religions hold its feet? various priests claimed. Save for Ireland that the Catholics envisioned in a crusade against the Protestant and heretic English and Scots there was no sympathy for the whole of the Commonwealth.

English pragmatism and lack of royal and aristocratic grandeur (for short honour and virtue) was most often associated with Britain being a nation of shopkeepers therefore people without morals and at best seeking their own selfish interest. The same criticism could be applied to the Dutch but it was lessen in virtue of being a new nation.

However, during the Enlightenment, particularly in France and Germany, the sole idea that kings had no divine attributes and a nation could be governed by its aristocracy and prosper in its trade, science and military in the same way has the Dutch, rose serious questions and praise on the virtues and achievements of republican statesmanship, free commerce and religious tolerance.

The Cult of Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth

The Cult of Queen Elizabeth refers to the civic worship of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603). It arose and was created in the 1700-1710s and flourished until the 1730s. It was as a means to idealise the English Renaissance of the Tudor Golden Age and heroic images of Queen Elizabeth, Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake and the intellectual merits of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser and the Elizabethan Religious Settlement.

Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) was praised as a heroine of the Protestant cause and the ruler of a Golden Age of England. Her reign was idealised as a time when the crown, church and parliament had worked in a constitutional balance. Her successors James I and Charles I were depicted as a Catholic sympathizers, presiding over a corrupt court and clergy and decadent cultural epoch.

Queen Elizabeth was rendered as the first Tudor to be recognised as a monarch ruled by popular consent and against a background of religious and political factionalism and military and economic difficulties. In the 1700s this was a parallel to the absolutism of the Stuarts (1603-1649), the chaos of the British Civil Wars and the redemption, triumph and national consent of the Commonwealth.

The Creation of Britishness or Britannia

The Latin name Britannia long survived the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, and yielded the name for the island in most European and various other languages, including the English Britain and the modern Welsh Prydain. After centuries of declining use, the Latin form was revived during the English Renaissance as a rhetorical evocation of a British national identity.

In the Renaissance tradition, Britannia came to be viewed as the personification of Britain, in imagery that was developed during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) and its later Commonwealth Cult of the early 18th century.

This imaginary was deliberately revived in times of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorship. It cautiously started to appear in medals and later in Government proclamations and orders, in sentences like ‘’In the name of the British people and their liberties, we...’’.

Under Lord Protector Scott (1696-1718) the peerage and honours acquired its sobriquet of British when its recipients were by birth or residency Americans and restriction of granting it on the Irish nobility were removed.

Inauguration of the first statue of Britannia, as an allegory of the Commonwealth. Part of the celebrations of the 75th Year of the Commonwealth (1724)

The inauguration of civic statues of Britannia or personifications of it, by city and borough corporations in the 1680s marked a popularity that would have its zenith with the celebrations of the 75th Year of the Commonwealth (1724) and European Revolutionary Wars. The revival of the legacy of the Roman Republic across Europe and the Americas firmly set the common usage of Britannia and also of Caledonia, and Hibernia as the romantic or poetic name and allegorical representations of the Home Nations.

Britannia also came handy as a symbol of the union of the Three Nations in the Commonwealth and a strong rallying point among Britons. It began to appear in coinage also by the late 1680s. Its representation began as a fair and beautiful nymph, and later as British power, which depended on the supremacy of the Navy, lent these attributes to the image of Britannia. Patriotic fervour that began with the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) and particularly during in the European Revolutionary Wars (1790-1810) in later the rivalry between the Commonwealth and the revolutionary French Republic installed Britannia and related images and themes as the identification of the Commonwealth against the Frisian hat, tricolour flag, revolutionary mottos and liberty trees of the French.

The Colonial and Empire building became a ‘’British’ enterprise viz the French and Dutch colonial ventures. The fall of the Spanish and French Empire in America also illustrated the uniqueness to many of the British geniuses.

The Romantic movement would later adopt and use the older Celtic names of Brittonic or Brythonic pertaining to the Celtic people inhabiting Britain before the Roman conquest, and to their language, culture and religion and also against the rational spirit of its time. The Scottish, Irish and Welsh national romantic revivals would also produce Alba, Éire and Cymru respectively and later Anglia for England.

See also

National Symbols of the Commonwealth

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