Thomas Spence

Thomas Spence (June 21 Old Style/ July 2 New Style, 1750 – September 8, 1814) was an English Radical and advocate of the common ownership of land.

Spence was one of the leading English revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spence was born in poverty and died the same way, after long periods of imprisonment, in 1814.

The threatened enclosure of the Town Moor in Newcastle in 1771 appears to have been key to Spence's interest in the land question and journey towards ultra-radicalism. His scheme was not for land nationalization but for the establishment of self-contained parochial communities, in which rent paid to the parish (wherein the absolute ownership of the land was vested) should be the only tax of any kind. His ideas and thinking on the subject were shaped by a variety of economic thinkers, including his friend Charles Hall.

At the centre of Spence's work was his Plan, known as 'Spence's Plan'. The Plan has a number of features, including:

Spence's Plan was first published in his penny pamphlet Property in Land Every One's Right in 1775. It was re-issued as The Real Rights of Man in later editions. It was also reissued by, amongst others, Henry Hyndman under the title of The Nationalization of the Land in 1795 and 1882.

Spence may have been the first Englishman to speak of 'the rights of man'. The following recollection, composed in the third person, was written by Spence while he was in prison in London in 1794 on a charge of High Treason. Spence was, he wrote,

Spence left Newcastle for London in 1787. He kept a book-stall in High Holborn. In 1794 he spent seven months in Newgate Gaol on a charge of High Treason, and in 1801 he was sentenced to twelve months' imprisonment for seditious libel. He died in London on 8 September 1814.

His admirers formed a "Society of Spencean Philanthropists," of which some account is given in Harriet Martineau's England During the Thirty Years' Peace. The activists William Davidson and Robert Wedderburn were drawn to this political group. The Society of Spencean Philanthropists (including Arthur Thistlewood) were involved in the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820.

...
Wikipedia