Consider a traditional child’s history book view of the England since the Norman Conquest and what you find is pretty simple: centuries of endless, unchanging feudalism, with uncomplaining peasants held down by church doctrine toiling uncomplainingly in the fields, while the nobles fought wars among themselves, against foreign kingdoms and went on crusades. Then around Elizathan times you get the arrival of the gentleman adventurer, who starts, almost accidentally, to set the foundation for the empire on which the sun never sets. The comes the Industrial Revolution, that rapidly changes a farm-based society to a manufacturing one.
Read A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649 by David Rollison, however, and you’ll conclude that all of that is absolutely wrong, and a great deal more that you’ve been taught as “historical fact” beside. You’ll never look at a manuscript drawing of a serf at work in a fields, or read an Elizabethan account of the weaving trade in the same way.
It’s well worth the slog – but it does require some patience; this is a brilliant book of a length of about 250 pages buried in 460 pages of sometimes dizzying detail (and an awful lot of long quotes in Middle English that require lots of time for the non-expert to deceipher). An academic review referred to it as “vertiginously ambitious” and at times I did feel like I was teetering on a tottering pile of complex detail.
Although I did love some of that detail, such as the account of the importance of the hugely lucrative currant trade, contained within a long description of a sea battle off Sicily in 1586. The Turkey Company (of London merchants) had sent its five ships loaded with cloth to be sold at various Med ports, at little profit, but the return leg, packed full of currants, was the rich part. “There was an inexhaustible market in England for the little sweeteners, which went, in the 1580s, from luxury to item of mass consumption. Dearth and famine haunted England for most of Elizabeth’s long reign, not least at this time. Yet merchants could sell as many tons of currants as they could bring home… The Turkey Company agitated for a royal charter granting its members a monopoly in the currant trade. (p. 357)”
The basic thesis is pretty simple. “It is hard to find a single reign or period of English history since the Norman Conquest when ‘reverence for government’ was the dominant, passive mood of the English political community. Between 1215 and 1415 five out of eight kings fought wars with their subjects; four out of eight were captured and/or deposed, and two were killed’. When Charles I was executed in 1649 he was the fifth monarch since Magna Carta to be deposed and killed by his subjects. Revolts significant enough to merit extensive treatment in the chronicles occurred in 1381, 1439, 1450, 1470, 1487, 1497, 1536, 1549, 1554 and, of course, 1642-9.” (p. 430) Rollison sets out to debunk the Habermasian claim that a public sphere requires print technology, widespread literacy and secular rationalism. (p. 428)
But then, Rollison concludes, it all came to an end: “After the defeat of the radical Levellers and the execution of the king, England was formally constituted as a commonwealth of landed households. The words ‘commonwealth’ and ‘commonweal’ would continue to be keywords of elite (usually classical-republican) political discourse, but never again would they inspire popular resistance and rebellion.” (p. 464)
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