A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  44 P. Oborne, ‘Magna Carta 2007 – an updated version to protect us from an overweening state’, Daily Mail, 27 September 2007.

  45 Hoffmann is quoted in the full judgement of the 2000 case of the Chagos Islanders vs Government, http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/judgmentsfiles/j501/queen_v_fco.htm.

  46 R. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free (London, 1973), p. 231.

  PART TWO: WHEN ADAM DELVED AND EVE SPAN

  CHAPTER 2

  1 Quoted in Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, pp. 11–12

  2 For these revolts see ibid., ch. 2; C. Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005), ch. 9.

  3 Channel 4 Television used the title for its series of documentaries on the period.

  4 R. S. Dobson, ed., The Peasants’ Revolt (London, 1970), p. 60.

  5 Ibid., pp. 62–3.

  6 Ibid., p. 61.

  7 http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/seth/statute-labourers.html, accessed on 20 September 2007.

  8 F. E. Baldwin, ‘Sumptuary legislation and personal regulation in England’, Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 44 (1926), 44–6; see also Alan Hunt, ‘The governance of consumption: sumptuary laws and shifting forms of regulation’, Economy and Society, 25 (1996), 410–27; Alan Hunt, The Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (Basingstoke, 1996).

  9 J. Whittle, ‘Peasant Politics and Class Consciousness: The Norfolk Rebellions of 1381 and 1549 Compared’, in C. Wickham, ed., Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages, Past and Present, Supplement 2 (2007), 233–47, at 239.

  10 A. Dunn, The Peasants’ Revolt: England’s Failed Revolution of 1381 (2nd edn, Stroud, 2004), p. 26.

  11 Parts of this law remain in force, although elements were excised in 1948; http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/content.aspx?LegType=All+Primary&Page Number=107&NavFrom=2&parentActiveTextDocId=1517690&ActiveText DocId=1517690&filesize=9654, accessed on 20 September 2007.

  12 Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 72–3.

  13 Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, p. 132.

  14 Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 83–4.

  15 Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, p. 133.

  16 Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, pp. 141–2.

  17 See on this A. Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt (Manchester, 2001), pp. 243–4; M. Aston, ‘Corpus Christi and Corpus Regni: heresy and the Peasants’ Revolt’, Past and Present, 143 (1994), 3–47.

  18 A. Prescott, ‘Wat Tyler’, ODNB.

  19 A. Prescott, ‘John Ball’, ODNB.

  20 S. Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (London, 1994), ch. 2.

  21 Quoted in Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, p. 222.

  22 Quoted in Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, pp. 81–2.

  23 Ibid., p. 103.

  24 Ibid., p. 105.

  25 Ibid., pp. 107–9.

  26 Quoted in Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, p. 184.

  27 Ibid., p. 172

  28 Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 125.

  29 Ibid., p. 174.

  30 See on this Musson, Medieval Law in Context, pp. 250–2.

  31 Dunn, Peasants’ Revolt, p. 133.

  32 Dobson, ed., Peasants’ Revolt, p. 246.

  33 Ibid., p. 258.

  34 Ibid., p. 260.

  35 Ibid., p. 261.

  36 G. Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England, 1360–1461 (Oxford, 1998), p. 234.

  37 P. B. Munsche, Gentlemen and Poachers: The English Game Laws 1671–1831 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 11.

  38 Quoted in Harriss, Shaping the Nation, p. 254.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 I. M. W. Harvey, Jack Cade’s Rebellion of 1450 (Oxford, 1991), p. 26.

  2 R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry VI (2nd edn, Stroud, 1998), p. 139.

  3 Ibid., p. 140.

  4 Harvey, Cade’s Rebellion, pp. 29–30. See also M. E. Aston, ‘Lollardy and sedition, 1381–1431’, Past and Present, 17 (1960), 1–44.

  5 M. Mate, ‘The economic and social roots of medieval popular rebellion: Sussex in 1450 to 1451’, Economic History Review, 45 (1992), 661–76, at 672.

  6 M. Bohna, ‘Armed force and civic legitimacy in Jack Cade’s revolt, 1450’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 563–82, at 578.

  7 Harvey, Cade’s Rebellion, p. 88.

  8 For a modernised text of the complaint see http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complaint_of_the_Poor_Commons_of_Kent, accessed on 7 October 2007.

  9 I. M. W. Harvey, ‘Was There Popular Politics in Fifteenth-Century England?’, in R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard, eds, The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society (Stroud, 1995), pp. 155–74, at p. 164.

  10 Bohna, ‘Armed force and civic legitimacy’, 575.

  11 Mate, ‘Economic and social roots of medieval popular rebellion’, 674

  12 Ibid., 664.

  13 Harvey, ‘Popular politics’, pp. 167–68.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 A. Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 262–3.

  2 A good summary is offered in S. Hindle, The State and Social Change, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke, 2000), pp. 44–8.

  3 See A. C. Jones, ‘“Commotion Time”: The English Rising of 1549’ (unpublished Warwick University Ph.D. thesis, 2003), p. 33 and ch. 1 passim. Attacks on game occurred elsewhere in 1549: see ibid., pp. 113–14.

  4 C. E. Moreton, ‘The Walsingham conspiracy of 1537’, Historical Research, 63 (1990), 29–43

  5 Norwich Cathedral Ledger Book, NRO, DCN 47/1, f. 71.

  6 Norfolk Record Office, COL/9/117, f. 1.

  7 On the identity of the leader of the ‘Commonwealth of Kent’, see J. D. Alsop, ‘Latimer, the “Commonwealth of Kent” and the 1549 rebellions’, Historical journal, 28 (1985), 379–83.

  8 See Jones, ‘“Commotion Time”’, p. 167.

  9 D. MacCullough, ‘Kett’s rebellion in context’, Past and Present, 84 (1981), 36–59, at 39.

  10 Wood, 1549 Rebellions, pp. 62–3.

  11 B. L. Beer, ‘The Commoyson in Norfolk, 1549: a narrative of popular rebellion in sixteenth-century England’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 6 (1976), 80–99, at 87.

  12 NRO COL/9/117, f. 2v.

  14 MacCullough, ‘Kett’s rebellion in context’, 46.

  15 Ibid., 45–6.

  16 A. Neville, Norfolke Furies, trans. R. Wood (London, 1623), sig. I1v; and see Beer, ‘Commoyson in Norfolk’, 94; the incident is recounted in A. Wood, ‘Kett’s Rebellion’, in C. Rawcliffe and R. Wilson, eds, Medieval Norwich (London, 2004), pp. 282–4.

  17 Neville, Norfolke Furies, sig. I4r.

  18 Ibid., sig. K4r.

  19 Wood, 1549 Rebellions, p. 71.

  20 Ibid., p. 72.

  21 R. B. Manning, ‘The rebellions of 1549 in England’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 10 (1979), 93–99, at 98.

  22 Quoted in D. K. Baker, ‘Topical Utopias: radicalising humanism in sixteenth-century England’, Studies in English Literature, 36 (1996), 1–30, at 28n.

  23 Ibid., passim.

  24 Quoted in A. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 70–1.

  25 Jones, ‘“Commotion Time”’, p. 176; Somerset paid Latimer £4 for his assistance in pacifying the Kent and Sussex rebels.

  26 M. Bush, ‘Debate: Protector Somerset and the 1549 rebellions: a post-revision questioned’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), 103–12, at 109.

  27 The novelty of Somerset’s policies is clearly delineated by Ethan Shagan, ‘“Popularity” and the 1549 rebellions revisited’, English Historical Review, 115 (2000), 121–33.

  28 Jones, ‘“Commotion Time”’, p. 161.

  29 Quoted in Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, pp. 73–4.

  30 Hindle, State and Social Change, p. 47.

  31 J. Walter, A “rising of the people”? The Oxfordshire rising of 1596’, Past and Present, 107 (1985), 90–143.

  32 See
J. Walter, ‘Robert Kett’, ODNB.

  33 G. Kett, The Pedigree of Kett of Wymondham, co. Norfolk. AD 1180–1913 (Cambridge, 1913), Preface.

  34 Quoted in Wood, 1549 Rebellions, p. 261.

  35 See Justice, Writing and Rebellion, ch. 5; Wood, 1549 Rebellions, ch. 6.

  36 See, for example, A. L. Morton’s Communist Party of Great Britain pamphlet, When the People Arose: The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (London, 1981).

  37 See the work of M. L. Bush, summarised in ‘The Risings of the Commons in England, 1381–1549’, in J. Denton, ed., Orders and Hierarchies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Manchester, 1999), ch. 7; in a broader context see P. Zagorin, Rebels and Rulers, 1500–1600, vol. 1, Society, States and Early Modern Revolution: Agrarian and Urban Rebellions (Cambridge, 1982), chs 3, 7.

  38 For example, G. Fourqin, The Anatomy of Popular Rebellion in the Middle Ages (Amsterdam, 1978), p. 25; A. D. Wall, Power and Protest in England, 1525–1640 (London, 2000).

  39 Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 45. In a broader European context see S. K. Cohn, ‘Popular Insurrection and the Black Death: A Comparative View’, in C. Wickham, ed., Rodney Hilton’s Middle Ages: Past and Present, Supplement 2 (2007), 188–204, at 203–4; S. K. Cohn, Lust for Liberty: The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe: 1200–1425, Italy, France and Flanders (Cambridge, Mass., 2006).

  40 A. Fletcher and D. MacCullough, Tudor Rebellions (5th edn, Harlow, 2004), p. 13.

  PART THREE: THE POOREST HE … THE GREATEST HE

  1 Quoted in Burgess and Festenstein, eds, English Radicalism, p. 4.

  2 Tony Benn, ‘The Levellers’ legacy’, extracts from speech given at the second ‘Levellers’ Day’ in 1976, at http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/a-b/benn.html.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 The same source claimed that Den or Denne was in fact the ‘Emissary’ of the Grandees: J. Wood, The Levellers falsely so-called (1649), p. 8.

  2 The Declaration of the Prince of Wales to the Commissioners of Scotland … also The Declaration and Speeches of Cornet Thompson and the rest of the Levellers (1649), p. 3.

  3 T. Vallance, ‘Celebrating England’s radical history’, newstatesman.com, 23 May 2007; see also J. Blundell, ‘The invention of a radical tradition: the case of the Levellers and “The Business at Burford”’, paper presented at the British Marxist Historians and the Making of Social Movements conference, Edgehill College, 2002.

  4 B. Manning, The Far Left in the English Revolution (London, 1999), pp. 105–6. But the executed mutineers were certainly claimed by the Leveller movement as ‘martyrs’: J. White, The Levellers (fals’y so called) Vindicated (1649); and their opponents also thought they had suppressed a ‘Leveller’ mutiny: see Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, MS X. d. 483 (38), ‘Sir H Waller at his retourne to London fro leveling ye levellers May 29th 1649’.

  5 For Godwin see W. Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England from its Commencement, to the Restoration of Charles the Second, with an introduction by John Morrow (8 vols, Bristol, 2003), i, p. 5.

  6 B. Worden, ‘The Levellers in History and Memory c. 1660–1960’, in M. Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 256–82.

  7 The work of Colin Davis is very important here; J. C. Davis, ‘Religion and the struggle for freedom in the English Revolution’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 507–31; J. C. Davis, ‘The Levellers and Christianity’, in B. Manning, ed., Politics, Religion and the English Civil War (London, 1973), pp. 225–50.

  8 For these connections see the manuscript cipher key discovered by S. Barber, A Revolutionary Rogue: Henry Marten and the English Republic (Stroud, 2000), p. 30. Much of the new research on the Levellers is detailed in P. Baker and E. Vernon, eds, Foundations of Freedom: The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution (London, forthcoming).

  9 J. Morrill, B. Manning and D. Underdown, ‘What was the English Revolution?’, History Today, 34 (1984), reprinted in P. Gaunt, ed., The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (Oxford, 2001), ch. 1, at p. 19.

  10 G. Burgess, ‘Radicalism and the English Revolution’, in Burgess and Festenstein, English Radicalism, p. 69.

  11 For the Family of Love see C. W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1993); on antinomianism in pre-civil-war England see D. R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, 2004).

  12 On Denison see P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001).

  13 N. McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford, 2003), p. 4.

  14 See D. Como, ‘Secret printing, the crisis of 1640, and the origins of civil war radicalism’, Past and Present, 196 (2007), 37–82, at 69 for the evidence.

  15 A. Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 263.

  16 Quoted in C. Russell, ‘John Hampden’, ODNB.

  17 For Popery see P. Lake, ‘Anti-Popery, the Structure of a Prejudice’, in R. Cust and A. Hughes, Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–42 (Basingstoke, 1989), ch. 3.

  18 This is the position developed in J. S. A. Adamson, The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I (London, 2007).

  19 In A. Sharp, ed., The English Levellers (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 38–9.

  20 Quoted in Cromartie, Constitutionalist Revolution, p. 33.

  21 Sharp, English Levellers, p. 39.

  22 Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, p. 130.

  23 A. J. Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007), p. 38.

  24 On this see D. Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (Oxford, 2006), p. 426.

  25 Quoted in K. Lindley, The English Civil War and Revolution: A Sourcebook (London, 1998), pp. 89–90.

  26 Ibid., p. 73.

  27 R. J. Acheson, Radical Puritans in England, 1550–1660 (London, 1990), p. 96.

  28 See A. Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2004), p. 37.

  29 Ibid., p. 88.

  30 Ibid., pp. 88–9.

  31 Quoted in J. S. Morrill, Cheshire 1603–1660: County Government during the ‘English Revolution’ (Oxford, 1974), p. 50.

  32 Quoted in Cressy, England on Edge, p. 247; J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1986), p. 20.

  33 [John Milton,] Of Reformation (1641), in R. Fletcher, ed., Prose Works (Harvard, 1835), pp. 11, 13.

  34 Milton’s commonplace book revealed early support for popular rebellion: J. Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), p. 114.

  35 Quoted in Lindley, Civil War and Revolution, pp. 83–4.

  36 J. Peacey, ‘Popularity and the Politician: An MP and his Public, 1640–1644’, paper delivered at University of Liverpool, 30 March 2007.

  37 Cressy, England on Edge, p. 218.

  38 P. Gregg, Free-born John: The Biography of John Lilburne (London, 1986), p. 89.

  39 Cressy, England on Edge, pp. 392–3.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 The best account of the experience and impact of the fighting is Charles Carlton’s Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–51 (London, 1994).

  2 Quoted in Sharp, English Levellers, p. 122.

  3 For the army preachers see A. Lawrence, Parliamentary Army Chaplains, 1642–1651 (Woodbridge, 1990).

  4 James Holstun brilliantly explores the various meanings of this encounter in Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London, 2000), ch. 1.

  5 Sharp, English Levellers, p. 120.

  6 See W. Walwyn, Toleration Justified (1646), in Sharp, ed., English Levellers, p. 11.

  7 [R. Overton,] The Arraignement of Mr Per
secution (‘Europe’, 1645), p. 11; elsewhere, Overton does employ the more familiar tolerationist argument that, by persecuting, the civil magistrate usurps Christ’s jurisdiction by presuming to judge those who reject him before the last day, p. 16. However, this is in the midst of mainly secular arguments for tolerance.

  8 Walwyn, Toleration Justified, in Sharp, ed., English Levellers, p. 20.

  9 Ibid., p. 20.

  10 Ibid., pp. 22–3.

  11 See McDowell, English Radical Imagination, p. 3.

  12 My discussion of Edwards’s work is here based on the work of Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle, esp. ch. 4.

  13 Sharp, English Levellers, p. 161.

  14 D. Farr, Henry Ireton and the English Revolution (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 86–9.

  15 W. Lamont, ‘Puritanism, Liberty and the Putney Debates’, in Mendle, ed., Putney Debates, ch. 12, pp. 243–5.

  16 Sharp, English Levellers, p. 103.

  17 Ibid., p. 116.

  18 Ibid., p. 112.

  19 Rainborowe’s famous words look very similar to J. Lilburne, The charters of London, or the second part of London’s liberty in chaines discovered (1646), p. 4.

  20 Sharp, English Levellers, pp. 93–4.

  21 [Edward Sexby?,] The Case of the armie truly stated (1647), p. 15. For the authorship of this document see J. S. Morrill and P. Baker, ‘The Case of the Armie Truly Re-Stated’, in Mendle, ed., Putney Debates, pp. 103–24.

  22 Sharp, English Levellers, p. 112.

  23 See Burgess, ‘Radicalism and the English Revolution’, in Burgess and Feisenstein, eds, English Radicalism, p. 70.

  24 See Johannes Dillinger’s important article, ‘Comparing communities: local representation and territorial states in early modern Europe and New England’, German Historical Institute Bulletin, 27 (2000), reproduced at http://www.ghi-dc.org/publications/ghipubs/bu/027/b27dillingerframe.html.

  25 On this see Farr, Ireton, pp. 112, 153.

  26 Hopper, ‘Black Tom’, p. 99.

  27 Quoted in A. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution 1625–1660 (Oxford, 2002), p. 397.