Clive Holmes

The County Community in Stuart Historiography

The 1635 ship money writ elicited a “common feeling of dissatisfaction” throughout England. It was the general belief that the tax contravened “fundamental law,” and that in its imposition Charles “had deliberately treated the nation as a stranger to his counsels, and that if his claim to levy money by his own authority were once admitted, the door would be open to other demands of which it was impossible to foresee the limits.” Contrast this account by S.R. Gardiner with a more recent analysis of the response to ship money provided by J.S. Morrill, a scholar who has acknowledged a substantial intellectual debt to Alan Everitt, the progenitor and leading exponent of the concept of the “county community” in seventeenth-century England. “The Kings right to levy the rate was rarely questioned in the provinces. Ship money was hated for its costliness and its disruptive effects on the social and political calm of the communities … Above all,” the levy was detested because “it exemplified the governments insensitivity toward localist sentiment and belief.” In these divergent accounts, a fundamental difference emerges between the traditional school of English historians and the county community school of local historians. For Gardiner, seventeenth-century Englishmen were fully aware of and vitally concerned about the actions of their national rulers, actions they evaluated against the touchstone of constitutional principle. Everitt and Morrill insist, by contrast, that even the gentry were “surprisingly ill informed” about “wider political issues”; they were “simply not concerned with affairs of state.”

The Eastern Association in the English Civil War

Preface Abbreviations Introduction Part I. The Eastern Counties: Society, Religion and Politics in the Reign of Charles I: 1. Social organization in East Anglia 2. Religion and politics in the eastern counties Part II. The Creation of the Eastern Association: from the Outbreak of War to the Ordinance of 22 January 1644: 3. The outbreak of the civil war in East Anglia, and the formation of the Eastern Association, June 1642-March 1643 4. Local autonomy and military weakness: the Association under Lord Grey of Warke, January-July 1643 5. Central politics and the seven counties: the legislative establishment of the Earl of Manchesters command, August 1643-January 1644 Part III. The Hegemony of Cambridge: The Financial and Military Organization Established by the Earl of Manchester: 6. The Cambridge Committee 7. The Treasury 8. The army of the Association Part IV. The Supersession of the Army of the Association: 9. The politics of the Earl of Manchesters command, February-August 1644 10. The triumph of Westminster: the creation of the New Model Army, August 1644-March 1645 11. The Association in eclipse, 1645-8 12. Conclusion Appendices Notes Bibliography Index.

Drainers and Fenmen: the Problem of Popular Political Consciousness in the Seventeenth Century

On 19 October 1651, the emigre Huguenot inhabitants of Sandtoft, the new settlement established on the lands drained by Sir Cornelius Vermuyden on the Isle of Axholme, were approaching their church for the Sunday service. In the churchyard their passage was barred by a number of yeomen from the neighbouring villages, headed by their legal advisors, Daniel Noddel, an Epworth attorney, and John Lilburne, who acted as spokesman for the group. ‘This is our common’, Lilburne is reported to have said, ‘you shall come here noe more unles you bee stronger than wee.’ The locals entered the church, the doors of which were guarded by armed men, and Lilburne prayed and preached. The building was then sacked; Lilburne, who had appropriated the house of the French minister, subsequently used the derelict church as a stable and cowhouse. For the unhappy settlers, the incident was the culmination of a miserable year of violence and intimidation. In October 1650 the commoners had smashed their fences, devastated their crops, and seized their cattle; in the following May an all-out assault on Sandtoft had resulted in the destruction of eighty-two houses, a mill, barns, implements and crops. For Lilburne, the incident was the most theatrical moment in more than a years involvement in the affairs of the Isle, where, from the autumn of 1650, he acted as legal expert, agent and publicist for the commoners in their long-standing feud with the fen-drainers and their French and Dutch tenants.