John Hales, ? -1572.

English public official and parliamentarian, one of the leading "Commonwealth" writers of Tudor England.

John Hales came from a cadet branch of a notable Kentish family. He was a relative of Christopher Hales, attorney-general of England during the Reformation parliament of Henry VIII and close associate of the powerful Thomas Cromwell,   John Hales availed himself of these family connections to buy up substantial amounts of monastic land in 1540 during the dissolution of the monasteries.  Hales used some of this land to found a grammar school in Coventry in 1545.    Hales was an ardent Protestant reformer

During the reign of the young Edward VI of England, John Hales was a member of parliament for Preston and apparently also a royal official ("clerk of the hanaper").  John Hales became a close advisor to the young king's handler, Edward Seymour (Duke of Somerset), who had assumed power as Lord Protector in 1547. With a poor harvest that year, England was gripped by a bout of inflation and agrarian discontent in 1548.  Sir Thomas Smith blamed the inflation on debasements, but John Hales blamed it on illegal land-enclosures and the ill-practices of  profiteering and colluding merchants.  In July 1548, Somerset appointed Hales to lead a commission to enforce legislation against enclosures.  Hales's commission worked through late 1548 and early 1549, chiefly in the Midlands, undoing many enclosures.  He also promoted bills in parliament against certain trading practices.  But apparently that was not enough.  Anger against enclosures erupted violently in the Kett uprising in Norfolk in 1549.  The Kett uprisings were crushed, but Hales was blamed by many landlords for encouraging agrarian resistance and fomenting a peasant war.  The Earl of Warwick, with the backing of the landed gentry, drove Somerset from power later that year (October 1549).  With his protector gone, Hales was arrested. After a brief period of imprisonment in the Tower of London, John Hales went into exile, making his way to Germany in 1551.

John Hales is the likely author of the well-known anonymous tract, the Discourse of the Common Weal.  It was originally written shortly after 1549, apparently to justify the activities of the enclosures commission, and was probably completed while Hales was in exile in Germany in the 1550s.  The earliest extant manuscript copy dates from 1565. It was first published in 1581, under the anonymous initials "W.S.". (see below)

The Discourse has been regarded by some commentators as being the "first" economics tract in the English language.  It sets itself out to identify the causes of a whole host of economic ills, such as inflation and unemployment.  The great novelty of the the Discourse is that it regards the economy as an object of "scientific" analysis, and not merely as a sounding board for political, legal or moral idealism.  Not that the Discourse refrains from moralizing -- e.g. land enclosures, monopolistic behavior, free trade and debasement are zealously condemned.  However, they are denounced not because they deviate from some metaphysical ideals, but rather because of their concrete, harmful effects on social welfare, the "common weal".  

Anticipating later Mercantilist doctrines, the Discourse blames England's actual economic difficulties on lack of money, which, in turn, is traced to unfavorable trade balances.  The Discourse articulates a very cogent "infant industry" argument for the protectionism.  No less remarkably, the Discourse deftly and presciently handles the notion of "incentives" to economic behavior.  For instance, it identifies artificially-low prices in the wheat market (relative to wool) as the principal cause of the wasteful (and thus "evil") phenomenon of enclosing arable land for pasture.

Interestingly, the anonymous editor ("W.S.") of the 1581 edition of the treatise replaces the traditional "debasement"  theory of inflation articulated by Hales in the original manuscript with the novel Quantity Theory of Money, that had been propounded by Jean Bodin in the intervening years. 

The Discourse first appeared in print in 1581 under the title Briefe Conceipt touching the common weale of this realme of England (commonly referred to as Brief Conceipt of English Pollicy, as per the headnotes), to which was affixed an elaborate title page with a longer title (A Compendius or briefe examination, etc.) and the author identified merely by the initials "W.S.".  The identity of "W.S." remains uncertain.  For a long time, some commentators (rather improbably) speculated it to be a teenage William Shakespeare, others ascribed it to William Stafford, a famous Elizabethan courtier and conspirator. But detective work by historians of economic thought (notably, Elizabeth Lamond, 1892) has revised this view. Lamond suggested the 1581 treatise was merely the publication of an original manuscript written around 1549 by John Hales, that had since been lost.  Two handwritten manuscripts, written around 1565 (during Hales's lifetime), have been uncovered (and republished 1893 under the title Discourse of the Common Weal).  The published treatise of 1581 has only minor differences from the 1565 editions - the most notable of which is the articulation of the Quantity Theory in place of the debasement theory.  It is likely that the "W.S." refers to Sir William Smith, nephew of Sir Thomas Smith, the prominent Elizabethan secretary of state and likely recipient of a copy of Hales' original tract, who made some modifications, and published it under his own initials in 1581. 

The exact details of Hales's subsequent life are obscure and a little confusing. By one account, Hales seems to have returned to England briefly, but went into exile again in August 1553, after the ascension of the Catholic Queen Mary I. John Hales remained in Germany, chiefly Frankfurt, for the duration of Mary's reign.  He returned to England only after the ascension of the protestant Queen Elizabeth I in 1558.  He died in 1572.

 (There is a possibility that there are two different "John Hales" whose biographies have been intermixed, both of whom went into exile in Germany at different times.  This conjecture proposes that the first John Hales, of Coventry, of the enclosure commission, our writer, left for Germany in 1551; the second John Hales, the clerk of the hanaper, was a different person, possibly his nephew, the son of elder brother Christopher.  It was this second John Hales who was divested of his hanaper office in 1553 at the ascension of Mary I, as a routine part of the administrative house-cleaning of the new regime, particularly since his relatives, including both his father and uncle, were among the party of Protestant exiles.  The second John left in 1553 made his way to Germany to join them.)

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