The specter of the commonalty: Class struggle and the commonweal in England before the Atlantic world

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 63, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 221-252

  Rollison, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY   (Australia)

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EID: 53849149585     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (113)

1. [Anonymous], "On the Earthquake of 1382, " in Thomas Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History ... (London, 1859), 1: 250-52 (quotation, 250);
2. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Coriolanus, act 3, scene 1, lines38-39;
3. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994), 37.
4. J. G. A. Pocock, "The Concept of a Language and the métierd'historien: Some Considerations on Practice, " in The Language of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), 19-40.
5. Patrick Collinson, De Republica Anglorum; Or, History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge, 1990), 15-16;
6. William Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England in Its Origin and Development (1874; repr., New York, 1967), 1: 371-80 (quotation, 371).
7. Alan Macfarlane, Sarah Harrison, and Charles Jardine, Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge, 1977);
8. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978);
9. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700 (New York, 1979);
10. David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudorand Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980);
11. David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culturein England, 1603-1660 (Oxford, Eng., 1985);
12. Levine, Reproducing Families: The Political Economy of English Population History (Cambridge, 1987);
13. Levine and Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society, Whickham, 1560-1765 (Oxford, Eng., 1991);
14. David Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire, 1500-1800 (London, 1992);
15. Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, Eng., 1994);
16. Tim Harris, ed., Popular Culture in England, c. 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, Eng., 1995);
17. Andy Wood, The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country, 1520-1770(Cambridge, 1999);
18. John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution:The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge, 1999);
19. Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550-1640 (Basingstoke, Eng., 2000);
20. Pamela Sharpe, Population and Society in an East Devon Parish:Reproducing Colyton, 1540-1840 (Exeter, Eng., 2002);
21. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England(Basingstoke, Eng., 2002).
22. For the language of sorts, see Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed.Mary Dewar (Cambridge, 1982), 76-77;
23. Wrightson, "'Sorts of People' in Tudor and Stuart England, " in The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (Basingstoke, Eng., 1994), 28-51.
24. I question the assumption that these ranks below the gentry invariablyacknowledged "those upper groups ... to be the rightful rulers of society(Bailyn, "Politics and Social Structure in Virginia, " in Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, ed. Stanley N. Katz and John M. Murrin, 3d ed. [New York, 1983], 210).
25. George F. E. Rudé, The Crowford in the French Revolution (Oxford, Eng., 1959);
26. Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England, 1730-1884 (New York 1964);
27. Richard Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789-1802 (Oxford, Eng., 1970).
28. On the bourgeois and plebeian public spheres, see Jürgen Habermas, "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere" in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), esp. 424-25;
29. Arlette Farge, Subversive Words: Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford, Eng 1994),
30. Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, Mass., 1989);
31. Patterson, Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (Chicago, 1994);
32. Wendy Scase, "'Strange and Wonderful Bills': Bill-Casting and Political Discourse in Late Medieval England, " in New Medieval Literatures, ed. Rita Copeland David Lawton, and Scase (Oxford, Eng., 1998), 2: 225-48.
33. Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, ed. Alexander Chalmers (London 1994) 131.
34. Hans Kurath, ed., Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1959), 2:442-43;
35. Tim William Machan, English in the Middle Ages (Oxford, Eng., 2003), 36-37.
36. For the interlocking political contexts of the commons, see George Holmes, The Good Parliament (Oxford, Eng., 1975);
37. R. B. Goheen, "Peasant Politics? Village Community and the Crown in Fifteenth-Century England, " American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (February1991): 42-62;
38. Linda Clark, "Magnates and Their Affinities in the Parliaments of1386-1421, " in The McFarlane Legacy: Studies in Late Medieval Politics and Society, ed. R. H. Britnell and A. J. Pollard (Stroud, Eng., 1995), 127-54;
39. Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, Controlling Misbehaviour in England 1370-1600(Cambridge, 1998).
40. The politics of vernacularism are discussed in David Rollison, "Conceit and Capacities of the Vulgar Sort: The Social History or Englishas a Language of Politics, " Cultural and Social History 2, no. 2 (2005):141-64.
41. "Comune" is used to mean community in William Langland, Piers Plowman, in Fourteenth-Century Verse and Prose, ed. Kenneth Sisam (Oxford, Eng., 1967) 90, line 20. For William Stubbs, "the term 'commons' is not initself an appropriate expression for the third estate; it does not signifyprimarily the simple freemen, the plebs, but the plebs organised and combined incorporate communities, in a particular way for particular purposes.
42. The commons are the 'communitates' or 'universitates ... and the estateof the commons is the 'communitas communitatum, ' the general body into which forthe purposes of parliament those communities are combined (Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, 2: 175-76).
43. On institutionalization of the first and second sorts, see P. R. Coss, "The Formation of the English Gentry, " Past and Present, no. 147 (May1995): 38-64;
44. Coss, The Origins of the English Gentry (Cambridge, 2003),
45. David Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity: Biology, Culture, and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000 [Berkeley, Calif., 2001], 129,
46. citing H. J. Hewitt, The Organization of War under Edward III, 1338-62[Manchester, Eng., 1966], 30).
47. For knights, see [T. Wimbledon], Wimbledon's Sermon, Redde Rationem Villicationis Tue: A Middle English Sermon of the Fourteenth Century, ed. Ione Kemp Knight (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1967), 63;
48. Holmes, Good Parliament.
49. For the yeemani and cives usage and discussion, see Thomas Wilson, The State of England, Anno Dom. 1600 ..., ed. F. J. Fisher (London, 1936), 17-21.Wilson makes a distinction between "our great yeoman" of old and"yeomen of meaner ability, " locating the latter as part of "the Cominalty" (19).
50. For the emergence of the yeoman, see Richard Almond and A. J. Pollard, "The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-Century England, " Past and Present, no. 170 (February 2001): 75.
51. The rising status, wealth, and influence of the yeomen and citizens"was no matter invented and sett downe by authority for the bettering ofthat state of the people, but rather by the subtlty of them and the implicity ofgentlemen" (Wilson, State of England Anno Dom. 1600, 38-39).
52. For "privileged access, " see Almond and Pollard, Past and Present, no. 170: 75.
53. "Descryuyng of Mannes Membres, " 65.
54. E. P. Thompson, "The Patricians and the Plebs, " in Customs in Common (London, 1993), 73;
55. Wood, Politics of Social Conflict, 260;
56. John Fortescue, The Governance of England: Otherwise Called the Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy ..., ed. Charles Plummer(1885; repr., London, 1926), chap. 12, 137.
57. "Of the Fourth Sort of Men Which Doe Not Rule, " in Smith, DeRepublica Anglorum, 76-77.
58. The "lower Class of People" was a theme in George Washington'srecruiting policies; see Michael A. McDonnell, "Class War? Class Strugglesduring the American Revolution in Virginia, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3dser., 63, no. 2 (April 2006): 322.
59. Machan, English in the Middle Ages, 34-37, 65).
60. John Corbet, An Historicall Relation of the Military Government of Gloucester: From the beginning of the Civill Warre Betweene King and Parliament To the removall of Colonell Massie from that Government to the Command of the Westerne Forces (London, 1645);
61. Brian Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640-1649(London, 1976);
62. Rollison, Local Origins of Modern Society, chap. 6.
63. Derrida, Specters of Marx.
64. I am grateful to Wythe Holt for reminding me of these continuities. Butsee Mavis Mate, "The Economic and Social Roots of Medieval Popular Rebellion: Sussex in 1450-1451, " Economic History Review, new ser., 45, no.4 (November 1992): 663-64.
65. For an example of the scarlet woman theme, see complaints against the"lewedness & evell counsell" of Alice Perrers in 1376 (F. W. D.Brie, ed., The Brut or The Chronicles of England [London, 1906], 331).
66. "Monarcho-populism" is described by James Holstun, "The Spider, the Fly, and the Commonwealth: Merrie John Heywood and Agrarian Class Struggle, " English Literary History 71, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 57. Argualy, the American presidency is the closest a Republic concieved in antimonarchismcan get to monarchy (consider the days of mourning for ex-president Ronald Reagan in June 2004).
67. See sec. 61, para. 3 in Claire Breay, Magna Carta: Manuscripts and Myths(London, 2002), 54.
68. Revolts are discussed in Claire Valente, The Theory and Practice of Revolt in Medieval England (Aldershot, Eng., 2003), 163-66, 170, 242. Forknights and gentlemen, see footnote 10.
69. John Fortescue, The Difference betwene Dominus Regale and Dominium Politicum et Regale, made in the time of Edward IV, n.d., chap. 11, fol. 11, Rawlinson ms. D69, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Eng.;
70. For the occupational heterogeneity of the movement, see Jane Whittle and S. H. Rigby, "England: Popular Politics and Social Conflict, " in ACompanion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Rigby (Oxford, Eng., 2003), 72.
71. For Andy Wood's definition, see Wood, Politics of Social Conflict, 260.The modern English of Jack Carter's promise reads: "Jack Carter prays youall ... Let Piers the plowman my brother dwell at home and make us corn.
72. L. R. Poos, A Rural Society after the Black Death: Essex, 1350-1525(Cambridge 1991), 229, 231, 233, 261, 264, 266 (quotations, 232, 261);
73. see also Paul Strohm, Hochon's Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-Century Texts (Princeton N. J., 1992), 51-53;
74. Mate, Economic History Review 45.
75. David C. Fowler, The Life and Times of John Trevisa, Medieval Scholar(Seattle, Wash., 1995), 190, 196-97.
76. The Chronicle of Adam of Usk, 1377-1421, ed. and trans. C. Given-Wilson(Oxford, Eng., 1997), 88-89, 94-97, 131;
77. Rodney Hilton suggested: "The problem, especially between about 1380and 1450, was seen by these contemporaries as a general upward move of thewhole of the lower class" (Hilton, "Ideology and Social Order in Late Medieval Englan, " in Class Conflict and the Crisis of Feudalism, Essays in Medieval Social History, 2d ed. [London, 1990], 174).
78. E. B. Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England, c. 1380-c.1525 (Stroud, Eng., 1996).
79. Wimbledon, Wimbledon's Sermon; the "statesman" was Philip of Repingdon, whose letter is in Chronicle of Adam of Usk, 137-43 (quotations, 139, 141).
80. William Gregory's Chronicle of London, in The Historical Collection of a Citizen of London in the Fifteenth Century, ed. James Gairdner (London, 1876), 191-92.
81. For the quotations, see John L. Watts, "Polemic and Politics in the1450s, " in The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John Vale's Book, ed.Margaret Lucille Kekewich et al. (Stroud, Eng., 1995), 4-5.
82. John Watts, Henry VI and the Politics of Kingship (Cambridge, 1996), 205, 254.
83. "Descryuyng of Mannes Membres, " 64-68;
84. Watts, "Polemic and Politics in the 1450s, " 39;
85. See Mate, Economic History Review 45, for the radicalism of the comuynesof Sussex in the months following Cade's death.
86. Michael J. Bennett, "Henry VII and the Northern Rising of1489, " English Historical Review 105, no. 414 (January 1990): esp. 40, 45, 55 (quotations, 45, 48, 55);
87. R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s(Oxford, Eng., 2001), 17 (quotations, 427, 425).
88. For the provenance of state, see Quentin Skinner, "From the State of Princes to the Person of the State, " in Visions of Politics, vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge, 2002), 368-413.
89. Trevisa, Dialogus inter Militem et Clericum, 34-35 ("ye schuldeknowe").
90. "The Oath of 24 October 1536, " in Hoyle, Pilgrimage of Grace, 457.
91. Christopher Tomlins, "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting"(unpublished conference paper from "Class and Class Struggles in North America and the Atlantic World, 1500-1820, " conference Bozeman, Mont., Sept. 19-21, 2003), 19.
92. Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, Conn., 2000), 10-13;
93. Holstun, English Literary History 71: 53, 56.
94. An answere unto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge made by Willyam Tindale (London, 1531).
95. John Gough Nichols, ed., The Boke of Noblesse Addressed to King Edwardthe Fourth on His Invasion of France in 1475 (1860; repr., New York, 1972), 56-60, uses "common profit" three times, comon wele twice, and cites Cicero to the effect that Res Publica est res populi, res patriae, res communis("The Republic is the condition of the people, the substance of the nation, the state of the Community").
96. Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement: Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford, Eng., 1999), 6-7, notes that commonwealth usages occur"in early Tudor legislation, notably on enclosure in 1489, and inproclamations from 1490, including a clutch of six, between 1514 and 1516."State Papers Domestic, Sept. 10, 1549, records that the country "isapprehensive of the new party called commonwealths men" (popular rebels)thought to be favored by Protector Somerset.
97. G. R. Elton, "Reform and the 'Commonwealth-Men' of Edward VI's Reign, " in The English Commonwealth, 1547-1640: Essays in Politics and Society Presented to Joel Hurstfteld, ed. Peter Clark, Alan G. R. Smith, and Nicholas Tyacke (Leicester, Eng., 1979), 23-38, rejected the idea that there wasever a party called "the Commonwealth-Men" at court.
98. David Starkey, "Which Age of Reform?" in Revolution Reassessed:Revisions in the History of Tudor Government and Administration, ed.Christopher Coleman and Starkey (Oxford, Eng., 1986), 13-28, traces the ideaback to the crisis of 1459.
99. Whitney R. D. Jones, The Tudor Commonwealth, 1529-1559: A Study of the Impact of the Social and Economic Developments of Mid-Tudor England upon Contemporary Concepts of the Nature and Duties of the Commonwealth (London, 1970), is the best general account.
100. For contrasting uses of the learned and literary discourse of thecommonweal, see Robert Crowley, An informacion and peticion against theoppressours of the pore Commons of the Realme ... ([London], 1548);
101. John Cheke, The hurt of sedition howe greueous it is to a Commune welth([London, 1549]);
102. Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, ed. T. F. Mayer(London, 1989).
103. Neal Wood, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley, Calif., 1994);
104. Wood, "Foundations of Political Economy: The New Moral Philosophy of Sir Thomas Smith, " in Political Thought and the Tudor Commonwealth: Deep Structure, Discourse and Disguise, ed. Paul A. Fideler and T. F. Mayer(Cambridge, 1992), 140-68.
105. For Smith and the social science outlook, see Arthur B. Ferguson, "Renaissance Realism in the 'Commonwealth' Literature of Early Tudor England, " Journal of the History of Ideas 16, no. 3 (June 1955): 287-305;
106. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 154-56.
107. David Rollison, "Discourse and Class Struggle: The Politics of Industry in Early ern England, " Social History 26, no. 2 (May 2001):166-89.
108. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slanes, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), esp. chap. 2, describes the exploding embrace of this key image from thelate sixteenth century.
109. Christopher Hill, "The Many-Headed Monster, " in Change and Tragedy of Coriolanus, act 1, scene 1, opening direction, lines 20, 23-25, act2, scene 3, line 16-24.
110. Corbet, Historicall Relation, 8-9, 14-18, 104, 121;
111. William H. Sherman, John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., 1995), chap. 7;
112. Hakluyt, "Notes for a Factor at Constantinople by Richard Hakluyt, Lawyer, 1582, " in Taylor, Original Writings, 2: 184-95.
113. Slightly modifying Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991), 121.