Philobiblon

From A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649 by David Rollison

“The institutionalisation, in the 14th century, of Sir Thomas Smith’s first and second ‘sorts of men’, the peers and the knights, was a factor in raising the question of what to call the rest. Knights and gentlemen sat at Westminster with the Commons, not the Lords, but were acknowledged members of the ruling. Class. … the rise of the House of Commons had, by 1376, expanded and formalised the ranks of citizens to encompass the burgesses of every English borough. Urban citizens were joined, from 1381 to 1450, by a more formal concept of the legendary yeoman. This rural equivalent of the urban citizen was not at first seen primarily in terms of his role as a freeholding voter in the shire and borough juries or parliamentary elections. Fifteenth-century writers were more likely to see him in military terms.” p. 242

“The economic basis of his status – freehold land and/or capital in the form of farming skills and equipment, was not yet prominent, as it would be in the more economically minded 16th to 18th centuries. … Conceived as a hands-on member of the second estate, shaping, ordering and organising the lower part or ‘4th sort’. When 16th-century writers …observed that yeomen and citizens had betrayed their prescribed constitutional role, they meant yeomen were no longer unquestioningly loyal and deferential.” p.243

“The collective nature of the rebellion of 1381′ which involved many communities in communicayon with each other, acting under common banners and slogans, expressed in a common tongue, may be the point at which, in the common mind, commun(it as), which customarily designated a specific, local community, began to be extended, in concept and word, to the common weal, designating (if only tacitly) the entire national community under the authority of a single ruler.” p264

“The spectre of popular rebellion haunted every generation from 1381 to 1649. Like parliamentarians in 1376 and the rebels of 1381 and 1450, the leader of a rising in 1469 ‘denounced the ‘covetous rule’ of ‘sedicious persones’ and called for ‘reformacioun’. The stated object of the [1469] rebellion, writes Wood , ‘was to protect the ‘comonwele of this lond’ against the ‘singular loucour’ of its rulers. Tax, evil advisers and the duty of the ‘trewe commons’ to rise for the commonweal were, by now, familiar themes.” p278

“Between the 14th and the 16th centuries, the cloth industry gradually … Leaked away from the medieval urban centres like Salisbury, Gloucester and Bristol and reproduced itself … Around a large number of market towns in many parts of England. … They we linked, practically, by trafike, [trade] … Thus emerged England’s first national industry… By the mid-15th century it was becoming clear that whole commodity production moved around it was a permanent feature of the English landscape. .. A Trade Policy, a lybel distributed among parliamentarians in 1463, but written earlier, possibly by John Lydgate…. gives us a systematic account of the ideas that influenced that parliament when it introduced legislation regulating cloth making and introducing basic protections for wage workers … claims to be the earliest document of English economic history. It’s topic, explicitly, was ‘the welth of ynglond’.” p.316

Sir John Fortescue in 16th century saw as crucial for Egland’s well being “that the commune people of thys londde are the best fedde, and also the best cledde of any natyon chrysten or hethen.” Some had argued that the commons would be less rebellious if they be poor, he said, as they would rebel less. But in contrast to France, where the power of the nobility was not strongly balanced by a vigorous, independent commonality, the king was too frightened to tax his nobles for fear of rebellion. p. 340

In a minorly curious coincidence, this week’s Radio Four’s In Our Time was on the Putney debates, just as I finished reading The Agreements of the People, the Levellers and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution, by Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon eds.

It’s a highly academic collection of essays, but some of them I found fascinating even as a lay reader…
In D. Alan Orr’s chapter
p. 76 “the tumultuous events that overtook England and its neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland during the 17th century saw the first significant attempts to produce a written constitution in the English- speaking world. Unsurprisingly, the position of the Agreements of the People in the development of modern constitutionalism is problematic. Their very written-ness has suggested them as important precursors to the US constitution and the emergence of modern constitutionalism, a development that historians of political thought have traditionally situated at the close of the 18th century; however, these curious documents were the product of a different culture in which memory, custom and the spoken word were as important to the process as the printed and written word.”

There were a number of versions of the Agreements … Says “the key to the success of the Levellers’ Agreements was political accountability, and they had a much more developed sense than most of their fellow radicals that this required not merely elections and the rotation of officers, both at a national level and a local level, nor even merely political and financial accountability. It also required active popular participation.” (p61, Jason Peacey’s chapter)