As in the first two years of the Long Parliament the war years provided opportunities for those with other grievances – these were political issues, for sure, but not very directly related to the partisan political issues over which the war was being fought. Over the previous three years the absence of effective quarter sessions and assizes had made it difficult to pursue and punish rioters in the forests of Dorset and Wiltshire.30 The interruption of court activity elsewhere offered similar opportunities to reopen local disputes over resources – in fens and forests those seeking to assert traditional common rights against improvers and enclosers had another chance to stake their claims. The disputes in Waltham and Windsor extended into 1643 and there were other disputes in Duffield, Derbyshire, and in Neroche and Frome Selwood in Somerset. Forest rights were not at issue in the national dispute – attacks on prerogative courts had rendered forest jurisdictions relatively toothless, but the policy of enclosure and improvement, although contested, was not at issue between King and Parliament. John Pym, for example, had been an agent of crown forest policy in the south-west.31
The same was true in the Fens, where parliamentary policy soon came to favour agricultural improvement over established common rights and where Cromwell was no more a champion of the commoners than were the Earl of Manchester or Charles I. But in 1645 sluices were opened on the Isle of Axholme and the houses of French and Dutch settlers attacked. Here the action was explicitly linked to the interruption of effective legal authority. Rioters contemptuously dismissed a Lords order of 10 December 1645 calling for an end to the riots, saying ‘they did not care a fart for the order which was made by the Lords and published in the Churches’, insisting they would go on with their work. These events were a prelude to a sustained attack on the enclosures in the Isle. Elsewhere in the Fens rioting was more limited, but at Whittlesey and Ramsay commoners were clearly aware that an opportunity had come their way.32
Such events were made emblematic of more general problems, of course. All sides sought to mobilize opinion behind their projects, but were also quick to denounce the dangers being courted when their opponents did so. In Kent in 1643, for example, two blacksmiths were at the head of twenty men plundering the house of a parliamentarian gentleman. Parry the Smith was reported as saying, ‘we have sped well here. Let us go to Hadlow and Peckham and plunder there, for they are rich rogues, and so we will go away into the woods’. Smale objected: ‘But we must plunder none but Roundheads’, eliciting a ‘great oath’ from Smith and the riposte that ‘We will make every man a Roundhead that hath anything to lose. This is the time we look for’.33 Royalists in Kent could not be complacent about these attempts to mobilize the men without shirts.
In fact, much of what we know about demonstrations against enclosures confirms that they were disciplined, a form of communal politics familiar from before the war. They were demonstrative – summoned and processing to the accompaniment of drums and carrying arms which were, on the whole, not used against people. They represented a statement of intent. The published version of the demands of the Dorset clubmen made similar reference to the force which underlay the movement – but the point was usually forceful demonstration rather than planned violence.34 The violence which did occur was targeted primarily against property, not persons, and that against persons was not indiscriminate. Similarly, the organization was sophisticated – for example, those throwing down enclosures gathered in groups of two, since that evaded the legal definition of a riot. And they were tactically astute. In Gillingham the rioters apparently aimed at depriving the Earl of Elgin of all profits from the forest, by threats, backed up ‘where necessary’ with assault, destruction of property and seizure of cattle for ransom. Unpleasant this undoubtedly was, but it was not random or apolitical.35 It was nonetheless true that civil war was making all forms of politics potentially more lethal: those opposing the rioters during the 1640s seem more often to have been armed, and that contributed to an escalation of the violence.36
Clubmen evidently mobilized in ways that drew upon these traditions of popular protest, and those forms of protest clearly persisted. In that sense, clubman leaders were trying to inflect a more traditional form of communal demonstration as a contribution to the politics of the civil war. Whatever their actual politics, in relation to the civil war and more immediate local issues, the clubmen were an unwelcome addition to the political scene. Colonel Massey had been bemused and suspicious of the Herefordshire clubmen, noting that they had resisted his invitation to ‘join with me in observing the parliament’s commands’.37 Here was the rub – they were mobilizing without warrant, while at the same time claiming to uphold lawful regulation of violence and financial exaction. Their warrant, we might assume, derived from the local community – a claim with rather radical implications, if spelt out clearly, which it was not. Few English people relished the thought of armies being raised at the initiative of village worthies, without gentry or aristocratic leadership. It was a parliamentarian newsbook which expressed the fear that ‘They will have an army without a king, a lord or a gentleman almost’.38 It was also a practical issue, of course – Massey had noted that the Herefordshire clubmen wanted his help, ‘(for they dare trust me), but they will not yet declare themselves for Parliament but they conceive themselves able to keep off both the Parliament’s forces and the King’s also from contribution and quarter in their county’.39 Neutralism was usually interpreted negatively by partisans, as covert sympathy for the other side. In Herefordshire, when the opportunity arose, the royalists crushed the clubmen, and the New Model also dispatched those considered hostile with little ceremony. The parliamentary coverage of the movements varied between relish of their anti-royalism in Herefordshire, and contempt for their illegitimacy in Sussex and Hampshire (both movements that took off in the face of an incipient parliamentary victory). Charles, on the other hand, made reassuring noises, but could not restrain the excesses of his commanders which fed the movements.40
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Derbyshire did not see clubmen, but Sir John Gell, the parliamentary commander in Derby, did meet with a similar expression of communal politics in the summer of 1645, in the form of protests against the excisemen. The excise was a particularly unpopular tax – resented for the fact that it fell on goods regarded as necessities such as meat and salt, and for the fact that it was in the hands of outsiders, not local officeholders. Worse still, those excises that fell on inland commodities were often raised in marketplaces. The arrival of commissioners, and their intrusion into the marketplace, created a potential confrontation, and in that confrontation the poor might have allies among local officeholders.41
In May 1645 the Derby Committee had written to the Speaker of the House of Commons complaining that the excise was a burden on the countrymen and the soldiers.42 This coincided with the organized demonstration encountered in Derby by John Flatchett, an excise sub-commissioner, on 23 May 1645, a market day.43 It may be that the committee invited the protest; they certainly did little to help Flatchett face it down. Flatchett and his men had been at work for five or six days prior to that, but on market day two women went ‘up and down the town’ beating drums and proclaiming that anyone unwilling to pay the excise should join them and beat the commissioners out of town. Beating a drum was a means of summoning people to work – as on the roads in Blackheath in 1640 – as well as the work of communal protest – as in the enclosure riots in Wiltshire in 1645.44 Commissioners in Haverford West had a similar experience the previous September, beaten out of the marketplace by angry women from whom the authorities were apparently unable to protect them. Women were prominent in market disputes because it was they who handled the day-to-day transactions of the marketplace.45
Seeking help from the mayor, the excisemen were told that they had brought it on themselves and could expect little help. Clearly, they could expect no sympathy either. The mayor did, however, take the excisemen to see the Recorder (the city’s legal officer), Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Gell. He
said that one of the women beating the drums was married to a soldier and that he dared not interfere for fear of causing a mutiny. In any case, the mayor said that he had not heard any drums, although the effect of that intervention was rather spoiled when one of the women beat her drum on the market cross, underneath his window. The mayor did then go out to speak to her, and the drumming stopped, but it turned out that he had promised that the excise would not be collected until a reply was received to the letter sent to Parliament. Admitting defeat, the excisemen left it at that.46
Six weeks later they returned, and again there were no problems until market day. On that day, however, 4 July, Edward Burrow, a soldier who had been assisting the excisemen in delivering warrants and distraining goods for non-payment, was chained to the bullring by protesters from 4 a.m. to 2 p.m. It is this detail that suggests that the hostility was here directed against the excises on meat. The drumming was also heard again, but when the excisemen went to Colonel Sir John Gell, one of whose troopers it was who was chained to the bullring, they got no help in collecting the excise (or, as they put it, upholding Parliament’s ordinance and authority). Gell, asked either to punish the women or to take them into custody, replied instead that ‘he did not use to meddle with women unless they were handsome’.47
This disturbance was clearly more than an uprising of the dispossessed, unable to bear the burdens of the war any longer. The tensions between the excisemen and the local authorities were not uncommon. Neither was the apparent sympathy of local governors, who were perhaps accepting their much-stated obligations to protect their poorer neighbours or entering into an unusual alliance in order to protect their own authority from encroachment.48 At the same time the intertwining of military and civil authority was not necessarily easy, but the ambiguity also meant that soldiers were not necessarily the enemies of the people, or anonymous outsiders. Although the armies depended on the excise for their pay, soldiers were sometimes associated with resistance to its collection, and in 1647 the attitude of a radicalized army to the proposed abolition of the excise was ambiguous.49 In Derby there was at least a four-way tension: between army, excisemen, local civil authority and the local population. Again this may not have been unusual, and in these multi-dimensional local conflicts appeal to authority was common. It was Parliament that should reply, the presence of their representatives should ensure collection and refusal to pay was an affront to Parliament’s authority. As with the fen and forest disturbances, there was order within the disorder – the protest was organized, targeted and employed a symbolism that communicated a specific grievance.
Authority in English villages was exercised personally and its effectiveness rested as much on local reputation as formal warrant. The civil war created new offices, staffed by people who did not have the qualities of a natural governor, or the local reputation and influence to mediate conflicts. Arbitrariness was often a personal quality as much as a formal one – as the clubmen’s petitions had made clear. Here the poor and disaffected could find common cause with their social superiors whose own pre-eminence was challenged by these new offices. Excisemen were denounced in terms of a biblical plague – caterpillars devouring local crops to feed their own insatiable appetites. Behind this hostility lay a brute fact – they were earning a living through the collection of taxes rather than collecting taxes as part of the obligations of a prominent local man.
The proliferating committees of Parliament’s local administration also prompted this kind of hostility. Rancorous conflicts between established local gentlemen and committeemen, or between committees and sub-committees, have been documented in Cheshire, Staffordshire, Kent, Cheshire, Sussex, Somerset and elsewhere. They all resonated more deeply, with a more humble objection to these forms of authority and the burdens they imposed. In fact, in most counties there was no dramatic difference in the status of the county’s governors, but there was a proliferation of offices, complicating the relationships between them and fostering jurisdictional disputes and rivalries. These arguments were not only about the personal qualities of this emergent group of governors – there were clear worries too about how their powers might be formally limited, an important concern in discussions about excisemen too.50
It seems that 1645 was an important year for the development of these disputes, as a campaign to abolish the committees built up a head of steam, creating common cause among partisans with quite different views on what the national settlement should look like.51 It is again striking how the new conditions of the 1640s also offered opportunities for new kinds of mobilization – in print, for example. Humphrey Willis, the clubman leader of whom we know most, published a pamphlet denouncing the Somerset county committee in 1647, and many of these county disputes were retailed for a national audience. As with the exemplary stories of providential judgements, local political battles were retold to a national audience through the London presses. Local battles in the parliamentary administration were pursued at Westminster, and used there as emblematic of the larger issues in the conflict.52 The basis of local order was experienced as a local issue, but was of national significance, and had significance for the national political battle.
Times Whirligig, by a former clubman leader, satirized Somerset’s new low-born governors
In Warwickshire, however, these disputes had an ideological dimension – they resembled a local version of the national debate about what costs were acceptable to secure a victory. The county committee was dominated by militants and their defence of their powers against the Earl of Denbigh’s association early in the war was in their eyes a defence of the county’s capacity to fight the royalists. Similarly, their defence of themselves against the sub-committee of accounts, which was dominated by Denbigh’s supporters, was a defence of their capacity to fight the war. Taking accounts in that context was a more loaded political statement, and both moderates and militants could identify their local cause as part of the larger national argument. As John Bryan argued in a sermon in 1646, people should not resent or murmur at the impositions of Parliament, ‘seeing we enjoy our lives, liberties, privileges, estates and religion (all which were at stake and almost lost)’. The great difference between these taxes and ‘those which formerly our taskmasters laid upon us’ was that ‘Those were in design to ruin and enslave us to arbitrary power, these are to preserve us from it’.53 Willingness to pay could be a test of commitment: as two Lancashire constables complained to the Justices, they had collected a rate and paid it to the benefit of the ‘public’, but could not collect it in full because some refused and also ‘withdrew others (honestly affected) from co-operation’.54 During the war, both nationally and locally, a desire to take accounts was often closely linked with a criticism of policy – it was how the money was being spent which was at stake.55
These disputes were not necessarily localist in the sense of inhabiting a narrowly bounded political world, oblivious to the larger battles being fought out in London and Oxford and on the battlefields. They might also reflect a habit of seeing the big issues in terms of local arrangements. This was a habit of thought familiar to all those who had heard a local sermon or read any seventeenth-century legal writing – small transgressions threatened the gravest sins or contraventions of the most fundamental principles. As with any other political argument in the 1640s, the attack on committeemen might be a vehicle for a number of purposes.
These local movements to defend or attack the powers of individuals or institutions were not a retreat into an apolitical bucolic idyll, but a resort to forms of solidarity and authority common before the war. A community, however, was a political body, whose institutions, obligations and membership might be contested. Community politics were not necessarily harmonious, and values such as tradition and deference might be means to attack those in power as well as to cow those without it. Certainly, local communities in early modern England were not the happy organic bodies of later nostalgic myth. New forms of authority, and new languages of politics, provided new
kinds of local political order, and the resistance to these new orders drew on tradition and the new opportunities for the pursuit of local grievances thrown up by the war. Clubmen, excise rioters and attacks on committeemen were print phenomena too, publicized for a national audience. Others engaged with the national political scene more opportunistically – in the fen and forest disturbances, for example. But even here the disputes were not separate from, or unaware of, national politics, and they too might be played out for a national audience.
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Close to the centre of these communal politics was the self-governing parish, which was under threat. The spiritual role of the parish was also threatened by the development of other forms of communion and by the loud polemical battle over the identity of English Protestantism. In some respects the ties of community might blunt the edge of religious zeal so that, for example, the abstract threat of popery was not always identified closely with actual Catholics living near by. Similarly, a frequent complaint of the godly was that the ties of neighbourliness blinded people to the dangers of religious error: that a kind of ‘popular pelagianism’ existed, in which it was thought that agreeable fellows would be saved, that a good neighbour must be a good Christian. Worse, it was said, countrymen mistook forms of idleness and sin for a virtuous good fellowship. All this said, however, it is very striking that the embrace of neighbourliness and community was provisional. Scolding women, disobedient servants, and the disreputable or vagrant poor – those who fell outside the boundaries of locally acceptable behaviour – could expect little charity or fellowship.56
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