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This collection of inter-connected essays is concerned with the impact of social and economic change upon the rural labouring poor and artisans in England, and combines a sensitive understanding of their social priorities with innovative quantitative analysis. It is based on an impressive range of sources, and its particular significance arises from the pioneering use made of a largely neglected archival source – settlement records – to address questions of central importance in English social and economic history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Levels of employment, wage rates, poor relief, the sexual division of labour, the social consequences of enclosure, the decline of farm service and traditional apprenticeship, and th equality of family life are amongst the issues discussed in a profound re-assessment of a perennial problem: the standard of living (in its widest sense) of the labouring poor during the period of industrialisation. The author’s conclusions challenge much of the prevailing orthodoxy, and his extensive use of literary and attitudinal material is closely integrated with the quantitative restatement of an interpretation that owes much to the older tradition of the Hammonds’ Village Labourer.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Agricultural seasonal unemployment, the standard of living, and women's work, 1690–1860

2. Social relations – the decline of service

3. Social relations – the poor law

4. Enclosure and employment – the social consequences of enclosure

5. The decline of apprenticeship

6. The apprenticeship of women

7. The family

8. Thomas Hardy, rural Dorset, and the family

Appendix: yearly wages

Bibliography

Index

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On the night of 3-4 November 1839 seven thousand miners from the coalfields of south Wales set out to march on Newport. They were an organized force, armed, angry, and intent on inaugurating a brave new Chartist world. The rising proved to be the most serious clash between people and government in modern industrial Britain: in the major confrontation between Chartists and troops in Newport more than twenty miners were shot dead, and subsequently more than 250 people were arraigned in the last mass treason trial in British history.

The study tells the full story of the rising, its origins and its aftermath, and analyses the profound impact of armed insurrection on the social and political climate of the period. When the people of the coalfield took up the banner of Chartism, that movement became a political crusade. The author reveals that several revolutionary schemes were considered in the valleys, and establishes links with militants in other parts of Britain. He considers the response of the government and propertied classes – from the Special Commission that condemned three of the leaders to death, to the new interest in paternalism and the political concessions that were designed to prevent its recurrence. He concludes that contemporaries were right to regard the rising as one of the most important turning points in Welsh and British social history.

Contents

Maps

Illustrations

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. A unique society

2. A world of politics

3. The tide of revolution

4. The march

5. The rising

6. Punishment

Conclusion

Sources

Notes

Index

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Five established experts in the fields of industrial protest and industrial relations have set out to survey the historical geography of industrial protest from the 1750s to the present day. What is revealed, in the numerous maps and accompanying text, is a history of change struck through with more continuity than one might expect.

The role of communities as the bases for mobilisation for collective action over working conditions and wages runs from the textile workers' disputes in the West Country in the 1750s to the 1984/5 miners' strike. In industrial protest and strikes, geography matters.

Through the book one sees the development of trade unionism, from its regional bases to the development of national organisations. In that growth waht is apparent is the tension between the national organisation and the locality.

There is new work presented here for the first time: the sailors' strike og 1768, the machine-breaking riots of 1826, the dock strikes in the immediate post-war period. The book gives a rare insight into industrial relations through the direct collective action of workers, caught up in the transformation of the world's first industrial nation

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Section A: 1750-1850 by Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth

Industrial protest: 1750-1850

1. Strikes and popular protest in Gloucestershire, 1756-66

2. The London sailors' strike of 1768 by Richard Sheldon

3. Protests over cotton machinery in Lancashire, 1768-79

4. Protests against machinery in the west of England wollen industry, 1776-1802

5. The Luddite Disturbances, 1811-12

5.1 Luddism in the Midlands

5.2 Luddism in Yorkshire

5.3 Lancashire Luddism

6. The disturbances of 1826 in the manufacturing districts of the north of England by David Walsh

7. The General Strike of 1842

Section B: 1850-1900 by Humphrey Southall

Industrial protest: 1850-1900

8. The records of industrial protest

9. Lock-outs and national bargaining in the engineering industry, 1852 and 1897-8

10. The nine-hours movement of 1871

11. The revolt of the field, 1872-4

12. The strike at Bryant and May's match factory, East London, July 1888 by Gillian Rose

13. Organising the unskilled: the 1889 dock strike

14. The early May days: 1890, 1891 and 1892 by Chris Wrigley

15. The coal lock-out of 1893 by Chris Wrigley

Section C: 1900-39 by David Gilbert

Industrial protest: 1900-39

16. The geography of stikes, 1900-39

17. The General Strike of 1926

18. The miners' lock-out of 1926

19. Little Moscows and radical localities

20. The national hunger marches, 1921-36

21. The Jarrow Crusade of 1936

22. The Harworth dispute of 1936-7

Section D: 1940-90 by Chris Wrigley

Industrial protest: 1940-90

23. The geography of strikes, 1940-90 by David Gilbert

24. Coal disputes, 1940-45

25. Unofficial dock strikes and the 1945-51 Labour governments by Jim Phillips

26. Strikes in the motor car manufacturing industry

27. The winter of discontent: the lorry drivers' strike, January 1979

28. The 1984-5 miners' strike

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The outbreaks of collective violence arising from the tensions existing within society have long been themes in the study of British social history. Detailed studies abound — on the Levellers, the Diggers, fen rioters, food rioters, machinery riots, tithe riots, turnpike riots and so on. This book breaks new ground in that it attempts to survey the whole range of these rural riots, to compare and contrast them, and to draw general conclusions.

Seventy-five maps are included in this volume, each with an accompanying commentary written by an authority on the particular subject. Taken together, the maps show how the distribution of protest changed over time, how particular forms of protest — riots connected with land, with food and with labour — altered as Britain developed from a predominantly feudal to a predominantly capitalist society.

Contents

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. The Geography of Land Protests 1548-1860

2.1 Lowland England 1520-95

2.2 Lowland England 1596-1710

2.3 Upland England 1520-1650

2.4 Wales, Scotland and Upland England 1650-1860

2.5 Lowland England 1710-1860

2.6 1548-52

2.7 1580-1606

2.8 The Midland Revolt of 1607 John Martin

2.9 1608-39

2.10 1640-9

2.11 1650-1701

2.12 1702-39

2.13 The Levellers' Revolt in Galloway 1724 John W. Leopold

2.14 1740-79

2.15 1780-1831

2.16 1832-60

2.17 Attacks on Deer Parks 1640-1740

2.18 Opposition to Enclosure in Northamptonshire c1760-1800 Jeanette M. Neeson

3. The Geography of Food Riots 1585-1847

3.1 Introduction

3.2 1585-1649 John Walter

3.3 1660-1737

3.4 1740 Robert W. Malcolmson

3.5 1756-7 Jeremy N. Caple

3.6 1766 Dale E. Williams

3.7 1771-3

3.8 1776-93

3.9 1794-6

3.10 1799-1801

3.11 1810-18

3.12 1847 Eric Richards

3.13 North Midlands: August and September 1756 Jeremy N. Caple

3.14 Gloucestershire — Wiltshire 1766 Dale E. Williams

3.15 Devon 1795 and 1800-1 John Bohstedt

4 Turnpike Disturbances in the Eighteenth and Early-nineteenth Centuries

5 The Clubmen and Militia Protests

5.1 The Risings of the Clubmen in 1644-45 Garry Lynch

5.2 The Militia Riots of 1757 Jeremy N. Caple

5.3 Militia Riots 1795-8

6 The Geography of Protests by Agricultural Labourers 1790-1850

6.1 The Rise of an Agricultural Proletariat

6.2 The French Wars 1793-1815 and the First Oubreaks of Labourers' Protests

6.3 The Post-war Agricultural Depression and the Protests of the 1815-31 Period

6.4 The East Anglian Protests of 1816

6.5 The Agricultural Labourers' Protests of 1822

6.6 The Captain Swing Protests of 1830-31

6.7 After Swing

6.8 Anti Poor Law Movements and Rural Trade Unionism in the South-east 1835 John Lowerson

6.9 Protest in East Anglia Against the Imposition of the New Poor Law Anne Digby

6.10 The Agricultural Labourers' Protests in East Anglia in the 1840s

7 Rural Protest in Mid- and Late-Victorian Britain

7.1 Introduction

7.2 The Rebecca Riots 1839-44 David J. V. Jones

7.3 The Spread of the Rebecca Riots 1842-44

7.4 Agricultural Trade Unionism in England 1872-94 John P. D. Dunbabin

7.5 The Kent and Sussex Labourers' Union 1872-95 Felicity Carlton

7.6 The Welsh Tithe War 1886-95 John P. D. Dunbabin

7.7 The Highland Land War 1881-96 James Hunter

References

Notes on Contributors

Index

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Rafah, a town at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip, is a squalid place. Raw concrete buildings front rubbish-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. Situated on the border with Egypt, swaths of Rafah have been reduced to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this most bitter of conflicts.

Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinian refugees dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah – coldblooded massacre or dreadful mistake – reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco arrives in Gaza and, immersing himself in daily life, uncovers Rafah, past and present. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, alive with the voices of fugitives and schoolchildren, widows and sheikhs, Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy.

As in Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, Joe Sacco's unique visual journalism has rendered a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Footnotes in Gaza, his most ambitious work to date, transforms a critical conflict of our age into intimate and immediate experience.

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This book makes a major contribution to the social history of popular culture and working-class leisure.

The contributors explore important episodes in the development of cultural and associational activity in working people's leisure time. They focus on changes in cultural and associational form and highlight class situation and social conflict as key parts of those changes.

All the vivid details of historical study are here: pubs, alehouses, church bands, Methodism, street football, regulated entertainment, radical culture, Whitsun holidays, music halls, variety theatres, and working men's clubs. Bound together by general argument, these studies will substantially extend existing ideas on class conflict away from work. New research findings offer a coherent account of important areas of modern social life in England from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Preface

1. Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England, 1590-1660

Keith Wrightson

2. Methodism and the Tatterdemalions

Arnold Rattenbury

3. 'Babylonian Performances': the Rise and Suppression of Popular Church Music, 1660-1870

Vic Gammon

4. Popular Recreation and Social Conflict in Derby, 1800-1850

Anthony Delves

5. Ways of Seeing: Control and Leisure versus Class and Struggle

Eileen and stephen Yeo

6. Culture and Constraint in Working-Class Movements, 1830-1855

Eileen Yeo

7. The Taming of Whitsun: the Changing Face of a Nineteenth-Century Rural Holiday

Alun Howkins

8. The Effingham Arms and the Empire: Deliberate Selection in the Evolution of Music Hall in London

Penelope Summerfield

9. London Working Men's Clubs, 1875-1914

T. G. Ashplant

10. Perceived Patterns: Competition and License versus Class and Struggle

Eileen and Stephen Yeo

Index

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Voices echoing a revolutionary position have been audible on the margins of the Christian church in every generation. By listening to two of the most prominent revolutionaries in Christian history, Andrew Bradstock aims to discover whether there is any distinctive contribution which Christianity can be said to make to revolutionary theory and practice. His book proceeds by way of an analysis of the life an testimony of Thomas Müntzer (a preacher and pastor of the early Reformation period in Germany, who became embroiled in the Peasants' War of 1525) and of Gerrard Winstanley (leader and main theorist of the Digger Movement in England in the 1640s), who are selected in their capacity as paradigmatic figures. It emerges that not only were millenarian, apocalyptic and utopian concerns central to the thinking of both men, but both hinged the realization of their respective projects on the imminent return of Christ and the restoration of the world to something like a state of prelapsarian perfection. Whether Christianity's eschatological dimension renders it incapable of offering to politics anything other than fantastic, a-historical visions, or whether a more nuanced interpretation of the kingdom points towards a singular and contructive contribution, is the fundamental question which this book seeks to answer.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part One: Thomas Müntzer

1. Thomas Müntzer: An introduction to his life and work

2. 'Suffering the sharp edge of the plough-share': Müntzer's theology and politics

3. 'A servant of God against the godless': Müntzer as Christian revolutionary

Part Two: Gerrard Winstanley

4. Gerrard Winstanley: An introduction to his life and work

5. 'To make the Earth a Common Treasury': Winstanley's theology and politics

6. 'Christ rising in sons and daughters': Winstanley as Christian revolutionary

Part Three: Conclusion

7. Building the kingdom: towards a Christian contribution to revolutionary praxis

Notes

Further reading

Index

Bible references

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Belgian-born Masereel illustrated the works of Tolstoy, Zola, and Oscar Wilde, but he made the greatest impact with his wordless novels. These three stories reflect the German Expressionist revival of the art of the woodcut. Precursors to today's graphic novels, they also represent a centuries-old tradition of picture books for unschooled audiences. Masereel combines allegory and satire in his explorations of love, alienation, and artistic creation. Thomas Mann praised these striking Expressionistic images as "so compelling, so deeply felt, so rich in ideas, that one never tires of looking at them."

The Hernhill Rising of 1838 was the last battle fought on English soil, the last revolt against the New Poor Law, and England's last millenarian rising. The bloody 'Battle of Bosenden Wood', fought in a corner of rural Kent, was the culmination of a revolt led by the self-styled 'Sir William Countenay'. It was also, despite the greater fame of the 1830 Swing Riots, the last rising of the agricultural labourers.

Barry Reay provides us with the first comprehensive and scholarly analysis of the abortive rising, its background, and its social context, based on intensive research, particularly in local archives. He presents a unique case-study of popular mobilization in nineteenth-century England, giving us a vivid portrait of the day-to-day existence of the farm labourer and the life of the hamlet. Dr. Reay explores the wider context of agrarian relations, rural reform, protest and control through the fascinating story of The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers.

Contents

List of Plates

List of Figures

List of Maps

List of Tables

Abbreviations

Introduction

PART I THE SETTING

1. Structures

2. Labouring Life

3. Conflict and Discontents

PART II THE RISING

4. The Rising

5. Courtenay

6. The Rioters

PART III THE AFTERMATH

7. Repercussions

8. Epilogue

PART IV IMPLICATIONS

9. Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England

Notes

Index

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Britain is in the grip of a divisive war on terror. The government is forcing through new emergency powers to imprison suspected terrorists without trial. Dissent is spilling on to the streets, where mass popular opposition to the war is suppressed with violence. Secret intelligence sources whisper of a vast international terrorist conspiracy. The year is 1798. And Colonel Edward Marcus Despard is shortly to become the last man to be sentenced to public hanging, drawing and quartering for high treason.

Despard's execution was the culmination of an extraordinary life. He had served as a soldier in Jamaica, and fought along side savage MIskito Indians — and a young Horatio Nelson — in one of the most hellish jungle campaigns in the history of warfare. Rewarded with command of the British settlement of Belize, he married a black woman and staked his reputation on giving the same rights to freed slaves as to white settlers. Summoned back to London to explain himself, he found his career put on hold. At a time when many believed that, as in America and France, the ruling elite was on the verge of collapse, Despard, cast aside by the establishment, joined the revolutionary underground.

The Unfortunate Colonel Despard moves from high adventure on the Spanish Main to the political tumult of the London underworld in the 1790s. Despard's personal drama unfolds against a background of voodoo slave revolts and naval mutinies, the French Revolution and the Irish Rebellion, the democratic ideals of Thomas Paine and the ruthless political clampdown of William Pitt's 'Reign of Terror'. Despard's contested fate was the sensational climax to a British revolution that never happened, but it was also to presage the birth of modern democracy.

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Prologue: The Hanged Man

PART ONE: The Spanish Main

1 Patriot

2 Hero

3 Colonel

4 Despot

PART TWO: The London Underworld

5 Revolutionary

6 Terrorist

7 Traitor

Epilogue: The Unfinished Despard Business

A Note on Sources

Bibliography

Index

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The Lancashire weavers' riots of April 1826 were one of the most dramatic events in the history of the English cotton industry. Although 1826 was neither the first nor the last occasion on which newly-installed powerlooms were destroyed by angry English textile workers, it was certainly the biggest. For four days, the area bordered by Chorley, Clitheroe, Bacup, and Bury was convulsed as desparate crowds attacked local weaving sheds and smashed over 1100 of the hated machines. The immediate human cost of this brief but spectacular orgy of violence was borne by the six people killed when rioters encountered the military at Chatterton; a further instalment was paid, some months afterwards, by the ten people transported for life, and the thirty others sentenced to prison terms, for their part in the disturbances. The symbolic significance of the 1826 riots — representing vividly the final vain attempt of an old way of life based on the handloom and the domestic workshop to resist by force the 'inevitable march of progress' in the shape of the steam engine and factory — has long been recognised. Yet the exciting story of what happened during these four hectic days has never been told in detail, and the Lancashire loom-breakers have attracted little attention from historians, compared with midland Luddites of 1812 and the 'Swing' rioters in Southern England in 1830. […] Now, at last, we have an exhaustive, hour-by-hour narrative of the four days of rioting, coupled with a detailed account of the fates of some of the rioters, from an enthusiastic local historian who knows the area and its past intimately.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Elephants and Chickens

Monday — The Beginnings

Tuesday — 'A Disposition to Riot'

Wednesday — Watch and Ward

Wednesday — The Chatteron 'Fight'

Wednesday — On Two Fronts

Thursday — 'Along by Botany Bay'

Dispute and Dishonour

The Quiet Which Prevails

'A Melacholy Catalogue'

'Like a Wicked Noah's Ark'

Thomas Emmet — On the Manlius

On the Harmony

A Lucky Break

A Family Story

A New Life

Surely not in Vain

Notes

Dramatis Personae

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

Appendix 5

Appendix 6

Appendix 7

Select Bibliography

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This pamphlet is a study of resistance. It describes the long drawn out fight of the commoners of Otmoor to defend their rights against enclosure, a fight which lasted for at least fifty years, from 1786, when an enclosure Bill was first mooted, to 1835, when the unity of the resistance broke up. The story of the Otmoor disturbances is already familiar in its broad outlines from the account given by the Hammonds in The Village Labourer. But it is told here by Benard Reaney with a wealth of new documents which make it possible for him to offer important new interpretations, and to place the disturbances in a context of class antagonisms and alignments. The 'possessioning' of September 6, 1830, is shown as part of a well-organised and highly-skilled resistance which in some respects reached a higher point after 1830 than before. Documents in the Oxfordshire Record Office and P.R.O. are drawn upon to show the strategies of resistance, and the pattern of militancy is related to the social structure of Otmoor's seven towns — in partiuclar the idiosyncracies of Charlton-on-Otmoor, 'the focus of all principal discontent', the home of 'the more numerous and daring of the offenders'. A valuable section on the 'break-up of the resistance' discusses the social antagonisms which undermined the popular alliance from within. The study is a critical one, and it is hoped that it may offer useful lessons to those engaged in the still unresolved struggle between property and common rights.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

The Seven Towns of Otmoor

Common Rights

The Enclosers

The 'Possessioning' of September 6, 1830 and the Riot at St Giles's Fair

Resistance Movement, 1830-1835

The Break-up of Resistance

The Serbonian Bog

This book traces the development of agrarian ideas from the 1770s through to Chartism, and seeks to explain why, in an era of industrialization and urban growth, land remained one of the major issues in popular politics. Dr Chase considers the relationship between 'land consciousness' and early socialism; attempts to create alternative communities; and contemporary perceptions of nature and the environment. He concludes that, far from being an anachronistic, utopian, and reactionary movement, agrarianism was an integral part of the working class experience and of radical politics.

The People's Farm also provides the most extensive study to date of Thomas Spence, and his followers the Spenceans. New light is thrown on the Spa Fields and Cato Street conspiracies, in which they were involved; but their true significance lies in their contribution to English radicalism—a key factor in shaping the politics of agrarian reform in the 1820s and 1830s.

Contents

Abbreviations

1. Agrarianism

2. Thomas Spence: Newcastle, 1750-1787

3. Spence in London, 1788-1814

4. Agrarians and Revolutionaries: Spencean Philanthropy, 1814-1820

5. Agrarian Ideals in Radical Politics: The 1820s and 1830s

6. Precepts in Practice

7. Designed for the Support of Mankind

Bibliography

Index

Political philosophers (such as Gramsci) and social historians (such as E.P. Thompson) have suggested that rural customs and ceremonies have much more to them than the picturesqueness which has attracted traditional folklorists. They can be seen to have a purpose in the structures of rural society. But no historian has really pursued this idea for the English folk materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the period from which most evidence survives.

Bringing together a wealth of research, this book explores the view that such rural folk practices were a mechanism of social cohesion, and social disruption. Through them the interdependence of the rural working-class and the gentry was affirmed, and infringements of the rights of the poor resisted, sometimes aggressively.

This book opens with an introductory chapter which attempts to explain the context of custom by illustrating that historical continuity was seen as the prinicipal requirement for any kind of collective action to be characterised as 'customary'. Some legal opinion in the eighteenth century strove to undermine the notion of custom and replace it with the certainties of statute law. From this it can be seen that an official culture was often in conflict with unofficial popular morality. Chapter 2 represents an endeavour to reconstruct several local customary calendars for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to show that the efforts of folklorists and others have resulted in the constructon of artificial regional or even national calendars of custom and usage which destroy local specificity. In fact, the local calendar was made up of several different kinds of calendar relating to the range of experience within village life, from work and leisure to parish or manor government. The relationship of one particular group within the community whose role was shaped by customary practice – the church ringers – to the local calendar is also examined.

Chapter 3 examines some aspects of the notion of legitimation and suggest that, in part, the collective action of the labouring poor which took place on certain customary dates until the mid-nineteenth century, was legitimated by reference to church and manor practice, particularly the annual state services which were celebrated in the parish church, and the structure of manorial organisation. Thus, parish perambulations during Rogation Week, Guy Fawkes night celebrations, and Oak Apple Day customs were reinforced. Chapter 4, by concentrating on an examination of harvest practices, considers the socially cohesive nature of custom and assesses its importance for the labouring poor. Chapter 5 illusrates the socially disruptive side of other customs and rituals and relates them to forms of collective action adopted during periods of more overtly politcal social protest, in particular the Captain Swing disturbances.

Wood gatherers whose actions had previously been legitimated by reference to custom found, during the later eighteenth century, that statute law had eroded their right and cast them in the role of wood stealer. Chapter 6 looks at the struggle between custom and law in the context of the poor's belief in a general customary right to collect wood for fuel. Chapter 7 deals with the suppression of many customs in the mid-nineteenth century, and describes the change from village feast to benefit club day (which transformed one of them). This chapter concludes with an account of the deliberate attempt to remodel some customs, such as the harvest home supper, to conform with and promote more acceptable values of sobriety and good order, and to recreate a kind of deferential community orderliness, supposed by some Victorian writers and painters to recall former times.

Contents

Introduction

1 The Context of Custom

Custom and the Past

Custom and Sources

Custom and Perspective

2 The Community and its Calendars

The Reconstruction of Local Calendars

Local Customary Groups: The Case of Church Ringers

3 Custom and Legitimation

The Chruch

The Manor

4 Custom and Social Cohesion

Harvest and Harvest Perquistes

Calendar Rituals and the Shape of the Community

5 The Rituals of Privation and Protest

Custom, Conflict and Commensality

Protest and the Enemies of the Community

6 Crime, Custom, and Popular Legitimacy

7 The Control of Custom

Appendix 1: The Development of Folklore Studies in England

Appendix 2: The Ritual of the Year

General Index

Index of Places

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The study of popular sexual attitudes and behaviour has moved far and fast in recent years, receiving momentum from historical demographers and histrorians of the family. At most times illicit sex was largely a matter for the church courts, although bastardy always posed problems for poor law administration. During the Interregnum statute law took over and placed drastic sanctions, including in some cases the death penalty, in the hands of its courts. Stephen Roberts examines the working of this remarkable act in Devon. He contributes both to our knowledge of how a statute was regarded and enforced in a particular region and to our knowledge of popular sexual attitudes and behaviour.

Avril Leadley focusses on the market place and the people who interest her would probably be regarded as cheats rather than criminals. Properly she draws attention to the central role of the market place, to the problems of its regulation by borough authorities, to the difficulties of government in gaining acceptance for uniform weights and measures and of the sensitivity of a direct action inclined populace to malpractices.

Roger Wells turns his attention to the problem of order. Crime and disturbance in teh eighteenth century took place in a society which lacked a large and professional enough police system for the imposing of prompt and effective control. Serious outbreaks of disorder needed the employment of the military either in its regular or in one of its irregular forms (yeoman, cavalry, volunteer regiments, etc). Concentrating on one of the most disturbed years, 1795, when disaffection at home, threat of invasion from abroad and high food prices seriously concerned the authorities. Dr Wells examines the problems of using the militia for crowd control when, suffering from the same strains as the population from which it was drawn, the loyalty of many of its number was in doubt.

Bob Bushaway brings together his skills as professional historian and student of folklore and customs. This combination shows to advantage in his account of conflict between wood-taking habits of forest populations and a law increasingly reflecting the property concerns of the woodland owners. Here popular attitudes and developing notions of property rights clashed with as much import as in teh most dramatic confrontations characteristic of smuggling, poaching and wrecking.

John Rule use sheep-stealing as a casestudy of rural crime c. 1740 to 1780. All capital offences create documentation but sheep-stealing was sufficiently commonplace to do so to a usable extent. The paper is exploratory: by looking at sheep-stealers it indicates something of the complexity and range of motivations which lay behind the perpetration of criminal acts in the countryside.

Contents

Introduction

Fornication and bastardy in mid-seventeenth century Devon : how was the Act of 1650 enforced?

Stephen Roberts

Some villains of the eighteenth-century market place

Avril D Leadley

The militia mutinies of 1795

Roger Wells

From custom to crime : wood gathering in eigthteenth- and early nineteenth-century England : a focus for conflict in Hampshire, Wiltshire and the south

Robert W Bushaway

The manifold causes of rural crime : sheep-stealing in England c 1740-1840

John G Rule

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A Chinese woman pushes her way to the front of a hiring queue outside a factory in Shenzhen…. A Bolivian miner, without light or ventilation, crawls deep inside a deserted mine… A group of Somali cleaners files into an investment bank in London’s Canary Wharf…

Globalisation has created a whole new working class – and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s to its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s. Along the way he provides a ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ for the anti-globalisation movement, uncovering startling parallels between the issues that confronted the original anti-capitalists and those who have taken to the streets in Seattle, Genoa and beyond.

Blending exhilarating historical narrative with reportage from today’s front line, he links the lives of 19th-century factory girls with the lives of teenagers in a giant Chinese mobile phone factory; he tells the story of how mass trade unions were born in London’s Docklands – and how they’re being reinvented by the migrant cleaners in skyscrapers that stand on the very same spot.

The stories come to life through the voices of remarkable individuals: child labourers in Dickensian England, visionary women on Parisian barricades, gun-toting railway strikers in America’s wild west, and beer-swilling German metalworkers who tried to stop World War One. It is a story of urban slums, self-help co-operatives, choirs and brass bands, free love and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book.

Contents

Introduction

1. Rise like lions

The Peterloo Massacre, Manchester 1819
Shenzhen, China, 2003
Manchester, 1819

2. Everything connected with beauty

The silk weavers' revolt, Lyon, 1831
Varanasi, India, 2005
Lyon, France, 1830

3. This is the dawn…

The Paris Commune, 1871
Amukoko, Nigeria, 2005
Paris, April 1867

4. Every race worth saving

How American workers invented May Day
Basra, Iraq, 2006
Philadelphia, USA, 1869

5. A great big union grand

Unskilled unionism goes global, 1889-1912
Canary Wharf, London, 2004
London, 1889

6. Wars between brothers

How German workers tried to stop the war
Huanuni, Bolivia, 2006
Germany, 1905

7. Totally ignorant labourers

The birth of the Chinese working class
New Delhi, India, 2005
Shanghai, China, 1919

8. Heaven and earth will hear us

Jewish workers fight for cultural freedom
El Alto, Boliva, 2006
Brzeziny, Poland

9. Joy brought on by hope

When workers controlled the factories
Neuquén, Argentina, 2006
Italy, 1920
France, 1936
Flint, Michigan, 1937

Afterword: Louise Michel with fairy wings

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

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England in the long eighteenth century has often been regarded as a deferential society under aristocratic leadership, or more recently, as a society whose internal tensions were dispersed by the persistant experience of war. This book takes a different view. Drawing together the implications of recent work on demography, labour, and law, it seeks to re-explore the power relations in English society and the ongoing struggles over popular entitlements and elite privilege.

Focusing primarily on the experience of England's lower orders, Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers accord new significance to the decline of customary rights and claims, and to the triumph of market forces and the law, showing how the paternalism of the first half of the century gave way to the sharper class articulation of the second, culminating in the birth of a working-class radicalism in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

'Shuttles', to a squire or great landed patrician, meant trade, manual work, the stain on those who were not, and could never be, gentlemen. To a small master weaver, and his journeymen and apprentices, they were a proud symbol of 'the Trade', a skill and a claim to legal rights, against all those outside it.

Swords, the emblems of gentlemanly status, were still commonly worn in the streets of London in the early eighteenth century. But even when fashion made them less common, they remained an essential element of male formal dress among the upper classes, as long as the duel also remained central to the code of honour. In the eyes of the middling sort they were more likely to be either risible, or carry connotations of privilege or even tyranny. The labouring poor, increasingly through the century, and especially at the end of this period, looked up at swords in the hands of mounted soldiers and propertied volunteers as the state turned more to coercion. In 1819 at least eleven men, women, and children died of sabre wounds or were trampled to death when the yeomanry, directed by the magistracy, attacked the mass meeting for parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field, Manchester. Over 400 were wounded at 'Peterloo', many of them maimed for life. The government congratulated the perpetrators.

Contents

Preface

1. Landscapes and Perspectives

2. Hierarchy

3. The Politics of Love and Marriage

4. Political Order

5. Harvests and Dearth

6. Custom

7. The Disruption of Custom, the Triumph of Law

8. New Populations

9. The Power of the People

10. War and Peace

11. Popular Beliefs and Popular Politics

12. Class and Power in Hanoverian England

Notes

Chronology

Figures

Select Bibliography

Index

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This volume brings together a wide-ranging and seminal debate about the nature of English rural society in the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries. Previously published in The Journal of Peasant Studies, the contributions challenge many of the existing premises of rural historiography. Together with major new contributions by the editors, the collection will be essential reading for all interested in rural England in modern times.

Contents

1. Class and Conflict in Rural England: Some reflections on a Debate

Mick Reed

2. The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700-1850

Roger Wells

3. The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700-1850: A Comment

Andrew Charlesworth

4. Social Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside in the Early Nineteenth-Century: A Rejoinder

Roger Wells

5. The Wells-Charlesworth Debate: A Personal Comment on Arson in Norfolk and Suffolk

J. E. Archer

6. Social Change and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England: The Use of the Open-Closed Village Model

Dennis Mills and Brian Short

7. Social Change and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England: A Comment

Mick Reed

8. Peasants and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Rural England: A Comment on Two Recent Articles

Dennis Mills

9. Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness in the English Countryside, 1700-1880

Roger Wells

10. An Agenda for Modern English Rural History?

Mick Reed and Roger Wells

Consolidated Bibliography

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Customs in Common is a companion volume to The Making of the English Working Class. It explores the ebullient and contradictory plebian culture which preceded the formation of the working class institutions and consciousness, and its customs and practices, some of which survived well into Victorian times.

Although rooted in English evidence from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these studies have wide-ranging reference and significance. The notion of 'the moral economy', which Tompson first developed to analyse the motives of food rioters, has subsequently become influential in many fields, including peasant studies. Thompson takes up the discussion again, replies to some criticisms and extensions of his work and welcomes others. He shows how careful attention to fragmentary evidence enables one to decode some practices, such as the sale of wives, or shaming rituals like rough music, with their forgotten vocabulary of symbolism. In examining the rigorous presence of women in food riots from the sixteenth century onwards, he suggests the light which this throws on gender relations.

In a study which confronts the triumphalism of much recent history of the agricultural revolution, Thompson re-examines the ways in which villagers lost their common-rights in the face of the law's hostility to custom. Some historians have written of the riotous plebs of eighteenth century England and Wales as if they were only a problem for magistrates and governments to handle. For Thompson, the rulers, landowners and governments were a problem for the people to handle. Perhaps this is why the pages come alive for us. Using an unusually wide range of sources—legal records, folklore collections, academic studies, local record office collections, contemporary newspapers, pamphlets, sermons and poems—Thompson has once again given voices to the silent majority.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

I Introduction: Custom and Culture

II The Patricians and the Plebs

III Custom, Law and Common Right

IV The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century

V The Moral Economy Reviewed

VI Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism

VII The Sale of Wives

VIII Rough Music

Index

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Historians of protest have attempted to unlock the meaning of social unrest, studying collective violence and action as a barometer of social and political stability. John E. Archer examines the diversity of protest from 1780 to 1840 and how it altered during this period of extreme change. This textbook covers all forms of protest, including the Gordon Riots of 1780, food riots, Luddism, the radical political reform movement and Peterloo in 1819, and the less well researched anti-enclosure, anti-New Poor Law riots, arson and other forms of 'terroristic' action, up to the advent of Chartism in the 1830s. Archer evaluates the problematic nature of source materials and conflicting interpretations leading to debate, and reviews the historiography and methodology of protest studies.

'The Burning & Plundering of Newgate & Setting the Felons at Liberty by the Mob'

Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: Historiography, sources and methods

Sources, problems and methodologies

2. Agricultural Protest

Enclosures and lost rights

Collective disturbances

Post-1830

Anti-New Poor Law protest

3. Food Riots

Timing and location of food riots

The food rioter

The form of the food riot

The 'moral economy'

4. Industrial Protest

Pre-Luddite protest

Luddism

5. Political Protest

The reactionary crowd

Reformist and insurrectionary traditions

The reform movement

Post-1832

6. Policing Protest

Law Enforcement

The 'new' police

The law

7. A Revolutionary Challenge?

8. Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

'By a Flash and a Scare' illuminates the darker side of rural life in the nineteenth century. Flashpoints such as the Swing Riots have long attracted the attention of historians, but here John E. Archer focuses on the persistent war waged in the countryside, analysing the prevailing climate of unrest, discontent, and desperation.

In this detailed and scholarly study, based on intensive research among the local records of Norfolk and Suffolk, Dr Archer identifies and examines the three most serious crimes of protest in the countryside — arson, animal maiming, and poaching. He shows how rural society in East Anglia was shaped by terror and oppression in equal measure. Crime and protest were an integral part of the ordinary life of the rural poor. 'By a Flash and a Scare' dispels any lingering notions of a 'green and pleasant land', and makes an important contribution to our understanding of life in the nineteenth century countryside.

Contents

PREFACE

MAPS

ABBREVIATIONS

1. An Introduction to Rural Protest

The Categorization of Rural Crime

Crime in the Countryside

2. The Farm Labourer: Work and Wages

3. The Labouring Community and the Relief of Poverty: 'A Class Which Has Something to Lose'

4. Incendiarism: Annual Survey 1815-1834

Introduction

Incendiarism: A New Expression of Grievance

Annual Summary — 1815-1819

The 1820s

The Swing Years 1830-1833

5. Incendiarism: Annual Survey 1835-1870

1835-1841: The Introduction of the New Poor Law

The 1840s

The Mid-century Depression 1849-1852

The Era of High Farming 1853-1870

6. Incendiarism: An Analysis

The Location and Timing of Incendiary Attacks

Prices, Wages, and Unemployment

Mechanization and Incendiarism

Incendiarism and the Poor Laws

Incendiarism and Rural Crime

Victims of Incendiarism

Protection and Detection

Why Incendiarism?

7. The Myth and Reality of the Incendiary

Introduction

The Myth

The Reality

8. Animal Maiming: 'A Fiendish Outrage'?

9. The Poaching War: 'The Great Attraction'

Introduction

The Poacher

Policing and Detection

Protest and Poaching

10. Conclusion

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PLACE INDEX

SUBJECT INDEX

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The classic and imaginative account of the working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and recereates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a culture and a political consciousness of great vitality.

"This book has a clumsy title, but it is one that meets its purpose. Making because it is a study of an active process, which owes as much to agency as conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.

Class, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. There is, of course, a difference. 'Working classes' is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes.

By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is a historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships."

Contents

Preface

Preface to the 1980 edition

PART ONE : THE LIBERTY TREE

1 Members Unlimited

2 Christian and Apollyon

3 'Satan's Strongholds'

4 The Free-born Englishman

5 Planting the Liberty Tree

PART TWO : THE CURSE OF ADAM

6 Exploitation

7 The Field Labourers

8 Artisans and Others

9 The Weavers

10 Standards and Experiences

I Goods

II Homes

III Life

IV Childhood

11 The Transforming Power of the Cross

I Moral Machinery

II The Chiliasm of Despair

12 Community

I Leisure and Personal Relations

II The Rituals of Mutuality

III The Irish

IV Myriads of Eternity

PART THREE : THE WORKING-CLASS PRESENCE

13 Radical Westminster

14 An Army of Redressers

I The Brick Lamp

II The Opaque Society

III The Laws Against Combination

IV Croppers and Stockingers

V The Sherwood Lads

VI By Order of the Trade

15 Demagogues and Martyrs

I Disaffection

II Problems of Leadership

III The Hampden Clubs

IV Brandreth and Oliver

V Peterloo

VI The Cato Street Conspiracy

16 Class Consciousness

I The Radical Culture

II William Cobbett

III Carlile, Wade and Gast

IV Owenism

V 'A Sort of Machine'

Postscript

Bibliographical Note

Acknowledgements

Index

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All historical studies begin with the framing of questions to be addressed to the evidence left by the past: questions which in the process of research will be revised or abandoned, and will give rise to further or often unexpected questions. In the case of this book the questions arise from hypotheses formulated in Marxist historiography, because those are relevent to 'history from below' and focus on the 'poor', especially the wage workers, and those who claimed to speak for them.

At the time of the English Revolution it was common to make a tripartite division of society into the gentry, the 'middling sort' and 'the poor'. The first and second of these categories have occupied the attentions of historians — the first much more than the second — in assessing the causes and course of the revolution, but the third has been largely neglected. It is the intention of this book to make a preliminary attempt to remedy this omission.

The first chapter considers the economic setting and the growth of the wage earning class in the context of developing capitalism. The second chapter analyses the ideological setting, especially the important role of religion.

The Levellers provided much of the philosophy and programme of radicalism, to which the millenarian Fifth Monarchists and the Quakers added important elements. Such radicalism may be described as being on the 'left' of the revolution, being more radical than the Presbyterians, Independents and Republicans who dominated the revolution. But the focus of thsi book is upon those who stood further to the left than the leaderships of the Levellers, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. The 'far left' in the English Revolution is defined in terms of ideas, which sought to promote a shift in the revolution towards establishing and economic equality, and in terms of practice, which involved taking more militant action than the established leaders, in order to achieve some of the aims of the far left, but also of the left in general. The latter is the subject of chapter three.

Attention is concentrated on those who attempted to speak for the poor and the more depreived sections of society. Questions arise about how far they reflected attitudes and aspirations of the poor, who remain almost entirely silent in the sources. Questions also arise about cultural differences between dominant and subordinate classes, and about obstacles to revolutionay action by the poor.

The third chapter deals with two attempts at armed insurection arising from the radical or left milieu of the 1650s, and at the same time puts the focus on two individual revolutionaries who emerged from the ranks of plebians. The poor generally did rise in revolt against the republican governments established by the revolution. But viewing the period from below brings with it analysis of the formation of classes, the appearance of class conflicts, and explanation of the course which the revolution eventually took. It is also the purpose of this book to consider aspects of Marxist historiography that relate to its themes, and to place the English Revolution in the history of struggles for social justice.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: LABOUR

The extent and limits of proletarianisation

Resistance to proletarianisation

Divergence between small producers and wage workers

Resistance by wage workers

Chapter 2: EQUALITY

Religion and the poor

The search for equality

Decentralisation of power

'Practical Christianity'

Redistribution of wealth

God and revolution

Resistance

Restraints on popular revolutionary action

Chapter 3: REVOLT

The Corporal's Revolt, 1649

The Cooper's Revolt, 1657

Chapter 4: THE ENDING

Index

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Southern England has been studied considerably less than the industrializing north and midlands in the debate on the standard of living in the period up to 1850. Yet it is becoming clear that it was in the south and in the countryside that the greatest poverty and deprivation was to be found.

These essays examine responses to the struggle to live. The responses ranged from, at the most extreme, sheep-stealing and incendiarism to joining in food riots in an attempt to impose a "moral economy". More sustained protest is to be seen in passive and sometimes active resistance to authority, and in particular in the opposition to the introduction of the New Poor Law of 1834. Finally the appeal yet limitations of Chartism in the south is demonstrated.

From the authors' preface:
Our formative years were in the great era of 'History from Below'. Although we acknowledge that it left some 'silences', especially over gender and ethnicity, it still hugely enlarged the historical subject. We have no reluctance in continuing to write within the tradtion of George Rudé, Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson and Gwyn 'Alf' Williams.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Abbreviations

1 Crime, Protest and Radicalism

John Rule and Roger Wells

2 The Revolt of the South West, 1800-1

Roger Wells

3 The Perfect Wage System? Tributing in the Cornish Mines

John Rule

4 The Chartist Mission to Cornwall

John Rule

5 Richard Spurr of Truro: Small-Town Radical

John Rule

6 Resistance to the New Poor Law in the Rural South

Roger Wells

7 Southern Chartism

Roger Wells

8 Social Crime in the Rural South in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

John Rule

9 Crime and Protest in a Country Parish: Burwash, 1790-1850

Roger Wells

10 The Manifold Causes of Rural Crime: Sheep-Stealing in England, c. 1740-1840

John Rule

Index

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Controversial and complex, without an understanding of Thomas Müntzer it is impossible to gain a full understanding of the Reformation.

Hitherto Müntzer has not been fully understood. He has often been characterised simply as an extremist: some have seen him as a theologian steeped in mystic piety, others as a rabid apocalyptic, or a relentless antagonist of Martin Luther, or an intrepid revolutionary. He has been deprecated as a restless fanatic and utopian; and just as often honoured as a selfless fighter for truth and justice.

Professor Goertz has found the key to understanding the many controversial aspects of Müntzer's life in Müntzer's extraordinary ability to relate social conflicts with theological thinking, in a world where changing medieval traditions took on profound spiritual dimensions, created new social conflicts, and ultimately revolutionised the social and spiritual lives of ordinary people.

Goertz shows how Müntzer was inseparably apocalyptic mystic and revolutionary.

—

Scholars are at odds over Thomas Müntzer. Some condemn him as an 'unrestrained fanatic', while others defend him as a 'selfless fighter for truth and justice.' Responses to Müntzer are characterised by fascination and repulsion. It has been like this for some hundreds of years, and it was the case even during the course of his life. His name, in his own words, 'to the little band of the poor and needy, […] has the sweet savour of life, while to those who pursue the pleasures of the flesh it is a gruesome abomination presaging their speedy downfall.' Then as now, he polarises opinions. However, it is only in a precise theological sense that the battle-lines may be defined as the poor versus the pleasure-loving. For some time now the contrast between 'bourgeois' and 'socialist' judgements of society has entered the dispute about Müntzer and has lent a new and, to us, more immediate sense to the concepts of poverty and hedonism: in the former German Democratic Republic Müntzer was an historic hero, the visionary of a more just society, but in the West he is seen rather as a utopian hot-head, the very pattern of unheard-of recalcitance.

It is not possible to avoid this conflict, for it determines the context in which Thomas Müntzer addresses and challenges us today. Since his day we have come to a better understanding of the social struggles in which he was involved, and of the theological insights which he embraced. Anyone who wishes to portray Müntzer must be free of any compulsion to seek principles of interpretation based exclusively either on the social issues or on the movement of theological thought. This biography seeks to resolve this tension and use the best arguments of both approaches: Müntzer's theological reflections led him by their own logic into social action, and likewise, the social tensions of the early Reformation period created the atmosphere in which his thinking gradually took shape — not in a detached or arbitrary way, but closely related to the actual experiences of his time. And in this form his declarations and writings had in their turn an effect on the general course of events.

Müntzer wanted to bring about 'a full and final reformation in the near future' and placed his theology at the service of the 'transformation of the world.' From this sprang — for the first time on German soil — a theology of revolution. It was a sharp attack on the spirtual and temporal authorities; and Müntzer's way of reflectng on society's experiences confronts us today with a challenge which has yet to be taken up: 'the people will go free and God alone will be their Lord.' This is the challenge made by the 'theologian of revolution' to all who step within his circle of influence. We should not meet him either with our defences bristling, or with uncrtical adoration, but with critical sympathy.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

I Distorted Images

II Changing Times

III Blurred Tracks

IV In The Reformers' Camp

V An Early Movement

VI A Personal Manifesto

VII 'In the wretchedness of my expulsion'

VIII Pastoral Care and Political Correspondance

IX Lords, Commoners and Resistance

X Absolute Incompatibilty

XI 'Eternal Alliance' and 'Eternal Council'

XII Battle Under the Rainbow

XIII Apocalyptic Mystic and Revolutionary

XIV Unfinished and yet fulfilled

Bibliography

Index of Names and Places

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This is a study of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic of all seventeenth-century figures. Like its famous predecessor The Cheese and The Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, it explores the everyday life and mental world of an extraordinary yet humble figure. Born in Lincolnshire with a family of Cambridgeshire origins, Thomas Totney (1608–1659) was a London puritan, goldsmith and veteran of the Civil War. In November 1649, after fourteen weeks of self-abasement, fasting and prayer, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation. Taking the prophetic name TheaurauJohn Tany and declaring himself 'a Jew of the Tribe of Reuben' descended from Aaron the High Priest, he set about enacting a millenarian mission to restore the Jews to their own land. Inspired prophetic gestures followed as Tany took to living in a tent, preaching in the parks and fields around London. He gathered a handful of followers and, in the week that Cromwell was offered the crown, infamously burned his bible and attacked Parliament with sword drawn. In the summer of 1656 he set sail from the Kentish coast, perhaps with some disciples in tow, bound for Jerusalem. He found his way to Holland, perhaps there to gather the Jews of Amsterdam. Some three years later, now calling himself Ram Johoram, Tany was reported lost, drowned after taking passage in a ship from Brielle bound for London.

During his prophetic phase Tany wrote a number of remarkable but elusive works that are unlike anything else in the English language. His sources were varied, although they seem to have included almanacs, popular prophecies and legal treatises, as well as scriptural and extra-canonical texts, and the writings of the German mystic Jacob Boehme. Indeed, Tany's writings embrace currents of magic and mysticism, alchemy and astrology, numerology and angelology, Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Christian Kabbalah – a ferment of ideas that fused in a millenarian yearning for the hoped for return of Christ on earth. The English Revolution freed men and women both self-taught and formally educated to speak their minds and challenge their times. But only by contextualizing and then unravelling the mind of this exceptional person can we truly appreciate what it meant to be living in a world turned upside down.

See also: TheaurauJohn : A Name, Not The Thing

Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction: TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution

Part I: Genesis

1 Genesis

Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire: The Totneys

South Hykeham, Lincolnshire: John Totney the younger

Apprenticeship: Thomas Totney

The Goldsmiths

2 The bitterness of the godly

St. Katherine Creechurch, London: The bitterness of the godly

3 The wilderness of Zin

The times of trouble

The wilderness of Zin

4 Birth of the Prophet

Ecstasy

The heart prepared

The penitent puritan

Purgation

Illumination

Union

The prophet armed

Part II: Genealogy of the High Priest

5 TheaurauJohn

Genealogy and heraldry

The transmutation of Totney into Tany

TheaurauJohn

6 Genealogy of the High Priest

Genealogy of the High Priest

The High Priesthood

7 Justice

The coming of the prophets

Justice

8 Hell

Coming forth in glory

The prophet outcast

The trial

Manifest error

The Muggletonians

Prison of Stone

Aurora

Part III: King of the Jews

9 King of the Jews

Theauroam Tannijahhh

The seal signatory

10 Canonical and extra-canonical sources

Canon and Apocrypha

The Books of Enoch and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

11 Son of the morning stars

Prisca theologia

Mysterium Magnum

Son of the morning stars

12 The book of Theos-ologi according to TheaurauJohn

The book of Theos-ologi according to TheaurauJohn

13 To your tents, O Israel

To your tents, O Israel

King of the Seven Nations

The grand idols of England

The thousand-year reign of Christ

A third great and terrible fire

14 Gold Tried in the Fire

Gold Tried in the Fire

Bibliography

Index

Index of names

Index of places

Index of signs

Index of canonical and extra-canonical texts

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During the seventeenth century, attempts at fenland drainage projects provoked bitter opposition and widespread rioting. In this book Keith Lindley relates the disturbances to their wider political context, showing how they contributed to the causes, course and consequences of the English Revolution.

The implementation of drainage schemes in the 1630s confirmed the absolutist direction of government during Charles I's personal rule. Fenmen were preoccupied with preserving their commons from large-scale enclosure and their traditional economy from transformation, and a broad spectrum of local society from peasant to gentry was drawn into the resistance.

Fenland disturbances helped to raise the political temperature country-wide, as the political elite became convinced that the King must be supported as a bulwark against anarchy. Yet the fenmen were not revolutionaries. The riots themselves were essentially defensive, conservative and restrained. For the vast majority of those involved, the chief significance of the political crisis was the ideal opportunity it afforded to level enclosures and regain their commons.

By the end of the seventeenth century they could claim a large measure of success: courtier-dominated schemes were not revived after the Restoration and fenland drainage projects became subject to parliamentary approval.

Contents

Dating and Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

1. The Fenland Undertakings

The Hatfield Level

The Great Level and the Deeping Level

The Ancholme Level

Courtier-dominated undertakings: the East, West and Wildmore Fens; the Lindsey Level; and the Holland Fen

2. Commoners, Undertakers and the Privy Council

The Hatfield Level, 1627-40

The Great Level, the first phase: 1632-3

The East and West Fens: 1635-9

The Great Level, the second phase: 1637-8

The Holland Fen, 1638; The Lindsey and Ancholme Levels, 1639

3. Lords, Commons and Commoners

The Short Parliament and its aftermath

The Long Parliament

4. Civil War Allegiance and Regained Commons

5. Commoners, Adventurers and Soldiers

6. Levellers and Fenmen

7. The Restored Undertakings

Courtier-dominated undertakings

The Ancholme Level

The Great Level and the Deeping Level

The Hatfield Level

Conclusion

Index

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Some of the liveliest and fruitful debates in recent historical writing have been about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Rodney Hilton's vast and distinguished body of work on medieval society has been a major reference point in these debates. Throughout his work the dominant theme has been has been his argument that the 'prime mover' in the development of medieval society was the conflict between landlords and peasants over the appropriation of the peasants' surplus product. This is the class conflict that gives the present volume its title.

The wide ranging collection, updated to include some of Hilton's most recent writings, explores not only the peasant economy and peasant movements but also the nature of towns and their principal classes. Essays include a fascinating study of women traders in medieval England, and an account of medieval tax revolts — all informed by his lucid, undogmatic attention to broad theoretical issues as well as empirical detail. This is a book not only for historians, but for anyone interested in the evolution of capitalism or the larger questions of historical process and social change.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Feudalism in Europe: Problems for Historical Materialists

2 Unjust Taxation and Popular Resistance — Marxist Theory and Practice on a Historical Problem

3 Small Town Society in England Before the Black Death

4 Medieval Peasants: Any Lessons?

5 Peasant Movements in England Before 1381

6 Reasons for Inequality Among Medieval Peasants

7 Popular Movements in England at the End of the Fourteenth Century

8 Some Problems of Urban Real Property in the Middle Ages

9 Towns in English Feudal Society

10 The Small Town and Urbanisation — Evesham in the Middle Ages

11 Lords, Burgesses and Hucksters

12 Women Traders in Medieval England

13 Social Concepts in the English Rising of 1381

14 Feudalism or Feodalité and Seigneurie in France and England

15 Was there a General Crisis of Feudalism?

16 Ideology and Social Order in Late Medieval England

17 Some Social and Economic Evidence in Late Medieval English Tax Returns

18 Capitalism — What's in a Name?

19 Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism

Notes

Index

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On three successive mornings in February 1652, God spoke to a London tailor by the name of John Reeve. Consequently he and his cousin Lodowicke Muggleton believed that they were the Last Two Witnesses prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Over the next six years the pair attracted a small but dedicated band of followers that, following the death of Reeve, became known as the Muggletonians.

In this lively and engaging history, the origins of the sect during the religious turmoil and freedoms of the 1650s are described in detail. Their unique theology, beliefs and practices are described and traced throughout the changing circumstances of the centuries. Yet the book offers much more than a history of another puritan sect, for unlike many of their contemporaries, the Muggletonians persisted until the latter years of the twentieth century. Moreover, they preserved a comprehensive archive, rescued from the Blitz by a Kent farmer who transported the papers in empty apple boxes on his way back from market. Discovered by E.P. Thompson in 1974, this archive paints a vivid picture of the Muggletonians from their earliest days until the death of their last member in 1979.

By following the history of the Muggletonians from the heady post-civil war days through to the 1970s, this work offers a unique perspective on radical Christian belief and practice, and how it adapted to the changing world around it. More than this, however, it tells the fascinating story of how a small religious group, which eschewed active proselytising and believed in the mortality of the soul, managed to overcome persecution and obscurity, to survive for 320 years.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements and Sources

Bibliographical Abbreviations

1 Introduction: The Archive Discovered

2 'Lodowick Muggleton Was Also Included': 1652–1658

Encounter with God

The Two Last Witnesses

Blessings, Curses, Prison and Death

3 'Great Muggleton' Declares the Truth: 1658–1661

Putting down Clarkson

Changing A Divine Looking Glass

Rewriting Revelation

4 The Prophet of Letters: 1661–1698

The 1671 Rebellion

Delamaine's 'Great Book'

Imaginary Witches

Prison, Release, Death

5 Witnesses Against the Beast: 1698–1837

Life Without a Prophet

William Blake, Benjamin Franklin and the London Muggletonians

Putting Down a False Prophet

6 The Victorian Crisis: 1837–1901

Redefining the Faith: 'Reevonians' versus 'Old Believers'

Redefining the Faith: From 'Ancient' to 'Modern' Muggletonianism

Last Curses

7 Last Days: 1901–1979

8 Conclusion: Muggletonians – the Proper Historical Context?

Bibliography

Index

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Master and servant acts, the cornerstone of English employment law for more than four hundred years, gave largely unsupervised, inferior magistrates wide discretion over employment relations, including the power to whip, fine, and imprison men, women, and children for breach of private contracts with their employers. The English model was adopted, modified, and reinvented in more than a thousand colonial statutes and ordinances regulating the recruitment, retention, and discipline of workers in shops, mines, and factories; on farms, in forests, and on plantations; and at sea. This collection presents the first integrated comparative account of employment law, its enforcement, and its importance throughout the British Empire.

Sweeping in its geographic and temporal scope, this volume tests the relationship between enacted law and enforced law in varied settings, with different social and racial structures, different economies, and different constitutional relationships to Britain. Investigations of the enforcement of master and servant law in England, the British Caribbean, India, Africa, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, and colonial America shed new light on the nature of law and legal institutions, the role of inferior courts in compelling performance, and the definition of "free labor" within a multiracial empire.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Citations

1. Introduction — Douglas Hay and Paul Craven

English Origins

Taking Statutes Seriously

Labor and the Law in the Older and Newer British Empires: An Outline

Free Labor and Unfree Labor

Uses of the Law

An Example: The Cape Colony

Enforcement, Repression, and Resistance

Master and Servant as Imperial Law

2. England, 1562-1875: The Law and Its Uses — Douglas Hay

The Law to the Eighteenth Century

Enforcement by the Magistracy before the Eighteenth Century

Parliament and the Judges to 1823

Enforcement in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Written Contracts and Testimonials

Magisterial Justice and the Growing Taint of Criminalization

The Judges and an Increasingly Oppressive Legal Regime

The Last Years

3. Early British America, 1585-1830: Freedom Bound — Christopher Tomlins

The Chesapeake: Virginia and York County

New England: Massachusetts and Essex County

The Delaware Valley: Pennsylvania and Chester County

Postscript

4. Law and Labour in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland — Jerry Bannister

Master-Servant Relations in a Fishing Society

The Development of Naval Government

The Newfoundland Law of Master and Servant

The District Courts: A Case Study of Trinity, 1760-1790

Contextualizing Labor Disputes and Court Actions

Paternalism Reconsidered

Conclusion

5. Canada, 1670-1935: Symbolic and Instrumental Enforcement in Loyalist North America — Paul Craven

Atlantic Canada

Quebec

Ontario

The West

Conclusion

6. Australia, 1788-1902: A Workingman's Paradise? — Michael Quinlan

Employment Regulations in the Australian Colonies: An Overview

Assisted Immigrants and Indentured Non-European Labor

Coverage, Penalties, and Procedure

Due Process and the Magistracy

Patterns of Use and Resistance

Conclusion

7. The Colonial Office, 1820-1955: Constantly the Subject of Small Struggles — M. K. Banton

The West Indies and Africa in the Early Nineteenth Century

The Origins and Consequences of Cape Legislation

An Alternative Model: The Gold Coast, 1877

West Indian Reform

Reform Frustrated: The Colonial Labour Committee

Managing the "Primitive" Worker

The ILO: Abolishing the Relic of Slavery

Conclusion

8. The British Carribbean, 1823-1838: The Transitionfrom Slave to Free Legal Status — Mary Turner

Reforming the Slave Labor Laws, 1823-1833

Defining Labor Laws for Free-Status Workers, 1833-1838

9. Urban British Guiana, 1838-1924: Wharf Rats, Centipedes, and Pork Knockers — Juanita De Barros

Postslavery Labor Law: The Nineteenth Century

Pressures for Change in the Twentieth Century

The Logic of Labor Law and Labor Markets

Evidence of Enforcement

10. South Africa, 1841-1924: Race, Contract, and Coercion — Martin Chanock

Passes

Master and Servant Law: Content and Interpretation

The Political Ecology of Labor Law

Conclusion

11. Hong Kong, 1841-1870: All the Servants in Prison and Nobody to Take Care of the House — Christopher Munn

The Political Economy of Master and Servant in Hong Kong

The Servant's Interest

The Master's Sanctions

Regulation and Registration

Conclusion

12. Britain: The Defeat of the 1844 Master and Servants Bill — Christopher Frank

13. India, 1858-1930: The Illusion of Free Labor — Michael Anderson

The Labor Market and New Employment

Discipline and Advances

Penal Contracts in the Workplace

Judicial Construction of a Working Class

Towards a Formally Free Labor Market

Conclusion

14. Assam and the West Indies, 1860-1920: Immobilizing Plantation Labor — Prabhu P. Mohapatra

Indentured Labor and the Plantation System

Penal Contract Legislation in Assam and the West Indies

Enforcing the Penal Contract

Enforcement in Assam

15. West Africa, 1874-1948: Employment Legislation in a Nonsettler Peasant Economy — Richard Rathbone

Labor and Its Regulation

16. Kenya, 1895-1939: Registration and Rough Justice — David M. Anderson

Master and Servants Legislation in Kenya, 1985-1923

Overlapping Legislation, 1910-1939

Prosecution and Punishment

Discussion

Bibliography of Secondary Works Cited

Contributors

Index of Statutes

General Index

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This is a comparative study of the role of English and French towns in feudal society in the middle ages. Professor Hilton challenges the view that 'a town is a town wherever it is', and takes issue with the perception of the medieval town as a harbinger of capitalism.

Differences between English and French feudalism are taken into account; but these differences, as well as those between English and French medieval towns, existed within sufficiently similar cointexts to justify the kind of comparison pioneered by Marc Bloch in his Seigneurie française et manoir anglais. Medieval France was much larger than medieval England, and contained a far larger number of towns. French town populations were bigger than those in England, although it is possible that England had a higher proportion of small market towns. Comparisons are made between the feudal presence within the towns of both countries, and between their urban social structures. Conflicts arising from urban demands for freedom and autonomy are examined, together with frictions between various levels of society, such as mercantile elites, craft masters, journeymen, the unskilled and marginals. Finally, the mercantile domination of English town governments is contrasted with tht acquired by lawyers and officials in late medieval French towns — the 'trahesion de la bourgeoisie', as one French historian has described it.

In bringing together much material which dissolves old categories and simplifications in the study of medieval towns, Professor Hilton provides an important new perspective on medieval society and the nature of feudalism.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

England and France: a useful comparison?

The town and feudalism: preliminary definitions

A town is a town wherever it is?

What was feudalism?

Urban classes — a preliminary view

The feudal presence in towns

Towns in the transition from anient to feudal society

Small towns as feudal foundations

The feudal element in bigger towns

Urban social structures

Small towns

Larger towns

The artisans

Urban rulers

How urban society was imagined

The ideology of the orders

Urban society within the system of orders

Urban perceptions of the system of orders

Civic ceremony

'Gladman's insurrection'

Urban communities and conflict

Communes and borough franchises

Revolts against taxation

Artisan protest and political faction

Common rights

Masters and journeymen

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

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From the 16th to the 19th century, Moslem corsairs from the Barbary Coast ravaged European shipping and enslaved many thousands of unlucky captives. During this period, however, thousands of Europeans also converted to Islam and joined the pirate "holy war". Were these men (and women) the scum of the seas, apostates, traitors — "Renegadoes"? Or did they abandon and betray Christendom as a praxis of social resistance?

Peter Lamborn Wilson focuses on the corsairs' most impressive accomplishment, the independent pirate republic of Salé, in Morocco, in the 17th century. Corsairs, sufis, pederasts, "irresistable" Moorish women, slaves, adventurers, Irish rebels, heretical Jews, British spies, a Moorish pirate in old New York, and radical working class heroes all populate a book which intends to entertain and to make a point about insurrectionary communities.

Contents

I Pirate and Mermaid

II A Christian Turn'd Turk

III Democracy by Assassination

IV A Company of Rogues

V An Alabaster Palace in Tunisia

VI The Moorish Republic of Salé

VII Murad Reis and the Sack of Baltimore

VIII The Corsair's Calendar

IX Pirate Utopias

X Afterword: A Moorish Pirate in Old New York

Bibliography

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Vagrancy in the Tudor and early Stuart period was regarded by contemprary authorities as one of the most serious social problems thay had to face, and it figured prominently in the many Poor Laws passed by Parliament.

This book examines the nature of vagrancy, why it was felt to be such a threat to the stability of the country and the steps taken to overcome the problem. Based on detailed research into the judicial records of the time, particularly justices' examinations of 'masterless men', it scrutinises many aspects of vagrants' lives: their origins; patterns of movement; family and occupational patterns and the professional criminals found among them. A particularly fascinating aspect of the book is the author's extensive use of real-life incidents taken from the evidence of vagrants.

The increasing concern of the authorities to curb the growth of itenerancy led to the introduction of new measures, not least of which was the establishment of bridewells. [The author] examines the success or otherwise of these various attempts and society's changing attitude to the poor. In conclusion, he sets the problem of vagrancy in its historical context and discusses how far the government was successful in combating the problem of the poor.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

PART ONE: THE ORIGINS OF VAGRANCY

Chapter 1 The New Poverty

The de-sanctification of the poor

A vagrant underworld

The magisterial position

Conclusions

Chapter 2 The Growth of Vagrancy

The numbers issue

Poverty: dimensions and structures

Population growth and dispossession, 1500-1650

Wage-labour: a way out?

Conclusions

Chapter 3 Migrants and Vagrants

The rise of subsistence migration

The geography of vagrancy

Explanations

'London cannot relieve England'

Provincial towns

Conclusions

PART TWO: THE STRUCTURE OF VAGRANCY

Chapter 4 A Promiscuous Generation

Fragmented families

Alternative societies

Conclusions

Chapter 5 On the Road

The road goes on

Objectives

Haunts and habitats

Seasonal shifts

Getting around

Hospitality

Conclusions

Chapter 6 Dangerous Trades

The mutable world of work

Traders and craftsmen

Military men

Entertainers

Itinerant healers

Errant clerks

Wandering wizards

Conclusions

PART THREE: VAGRANTS, SOCIETY AND THE STATE

Chapter 7 The Seminary of Vagabondage

The beggar's burden

Licensed and illicit gains

The pitfalls of charity

Conclusions

Chapter 8 The Underworld Uncovered

Reality or illusion?

Crime in the underworld: an overview

Professional crime

Crimes against persons

Crimes against the state

Conclusions

Chapter 9 State policy: from Utopia to the penal colony

The enforcement issue

Modest proposals

Inventions of absolutism

Retribution

Bridewell: a proto-penal institution that failed

Conclusions

Conclusions

Notes

Appendix: Tables

Index

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In this meticulously researched, award-winning book, James Holstun details seventeenth-century England's first capitalist revolution, and its first anti-capitalist revolutions, in a stirring project of Marxist history from below.

From the author's preface:
In an essay on Spenser, Louis Adrian Montrose analyses some subversive statements that an Essex laborer named John Feltwell made about Queen Elizabeth, then comments, "The Rantings of a rural malcontent would perhaps be unworthy of such attention if they did not serve to make a point of larger significance about the relations of power in Elizabethan society." No doubt. But perhaps it's also true that modern theories of power in early modern society aren't worth much attention if they don't make a point of larger significance about ranting rural and urban and vagabond malcontents. Pretty often, these malcontents already have a theory of social power that we may have mistaken for mere ranting. After all, critical reflection wasn't invented last week by academic theorists. And sometimes, if we listen hard, they seem to be throwing their voices—ranting at us from a future that's better than theirs, better than ours, too.

In this book I talk about some seventeenth-century malcontents, what upset them, what they said about it, and what they did about it. I argue that the radical praxis of working people played a crucial role in the English Revolution, the first capitalist and anti-capitalist revolution, and that it can help us better understand that struggle and the struggles of our own time.
…

Contents

PREFACE: Apology, Summary, and Thanks

PART ONE: HIERARCHY AND ASSOCIATION

1 Cornet Joyce's Commission

2 Historical Revisionism and the Perils of Chronism

Introduction

Con: A Prioris, Opposition, and Whiggery

Pro: Multiple Kingdoms, Religion, and Personalities

Revisionism as New Conservatism

3 Foucault, the New Historicism, and the Base Curiosity of the Plebs

Damiens's Remonstrance

Genealogy and Power

Structure and Subject

Change, Containment, and Subversion

Post-revisionism and Its Prospects

4 Class Struggle and the English Revolution

The Usual Suspects

Base, Superstructure, and the Hierarchies of Determination

Status and Class

Class Consciousness and the Public Sphere

Original Theft and the Transition

Small Producers and the English Revolution

Early Modern Studies and the British Marxist Historians

PART TWO: RADICAL PROJECTS

5 The Deference of John Felton

Introduction

Good Clients Gone Bad: Patronage and Tyrannicide

Buck, King of Game

"God Bless Thee, Little David!"

Felton at Colunus

Noble Felton Resolutions

6 New Model Soviets: The Agitators and the Martial Praxis

Armed Prophets

Something New: The Emergence of the Agitators

"No Courtesy!": Consensus vs Conflict at Putney

Possessive Individualism and the Expense of Blood

Contingency and Martial Law at Corkbush Field

7 The Public Spiritedness of Anna Trapnel

Handmaids Discovered and Revealed

Fifth Monarchy Woman

God's Handmaiden vs the Little Horn: The Prophecy at Whitehall

A Gazing Stock: Cornhell and Bridewell

Britomart II

8 Forlorn Hope: Edward Sexby and the Republic

Centrifugal Charisma

Strange Engines: Serial Conspiracy

Sardonic Ethics in Killing Noe Murder

Aftermath: Tyrannicide as Critique

9 The Diggers' Hortus Inconclusus

Rational Hunger

Paternalists, Improvers, and Fellow Creatures

Natural Law in Locus Parentis

Green Millenialism

Georgic Prophets and Pastoral Prophets

Common Futures: The Diggers and the Forest People

INDEX

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Bandits is a study of the social bandit or bandit rebel — robbers and outlaws who are not regarded by public opinion as simple criminals, but rather as champions of social justice, as avengers or primitive resistance fighters. From Balkan haiduks to Brazilian cangaçeiros, Robin Hood to Jesse James, their spectacular exploits have been celebrated and preserved in story and myth.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Portrait of a Bandit

1 Bandits, States and Power

2 What is Social Banditry?

3 Who Becomes a Bandit?

4 The Noble Robber

5 The Avenger

6 Haiduks

7 The Economics and Politics of Banditry

8 Bandits and Revolutions

9 The Expropriators

10 The Bandit as Symbol

Appendix A: Women and Banditry

Appendix B: The Bandit Tradition

Postscript

Notes

Further Reading

Index

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Throughout the English revolutionary period of 1642-60, the press was at least as important a site of conflict as Parliament, the pulpit, and the battlefield. In the 20 years following the de facto breakdown of censorship in the early 1640s, and unprecedented number of men and women of all classes found their way into print. British presses produced a flood of more than 20,000 books and pamphlets, almost all of them prose: satires, sermons, almanacs, newsbooks, prophecies, autobiographies, works of political and religious polemic and theory. The result was the birth of a new public sphere of publication and debate that permanently transformed Anglo-American literary culture.

None the less, the period continues to be one of the most neglected episodes in the cultural history of early modern Britain. Pamphlet Wars is the first collection of literary critical essays on the prose imagination of the English Revolution. All nine authors focus on language and literature in the new revolutionary public sphere, but they examine an unusually wide array of works and writers. These range from Royalist satires on sectarian "Babel" to accounts of Ranters' street theatre and the Diggers agrarian communism, from Clarendon's construction of a new public identity for Charles to the public self-fashioning of radical women prophets and petitioners, from Roger Williams, to Henry Marten, to Henry Neville, to later reflections on the English Revolution by Burke and Coleridge.

Contents

Notes on the Contributors

James Holstun

Introduction

Sharon Achinstein

The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution

Joan E. Hartman

Restyling the King: Clarendon Writes Charles I

Byron Nelson

The Ranters and the Limits of Language

Keith W.F. Stavely

Roger Williams: Bible Politics and Bible Art

Ann Marie McEntee

"The [Un]Civil-Sisterhood of Oranges and Lemons": Female Practioners and Demonstrators, 1642-53

Rachel Turbowitz

Female Preachers and Male Wives: Gender and Authority in Civil War England

Susan Wiseman

"Adam, the Father of all Flesh": Porno-Political Rhetoric and Political Theory in and After the English Civil War

James Holstun

Rational Hunger: Gerard Winstanley's Hortus Inconclusus

Peter J. Kitson

"Sages and patriots that being dead do yet speak to us": Readings of the English Revolution in the Late Eighteenth Century

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Taking a new approach to the history of utopia, A Rational Millennium integrates the political analysis of literary form with the literary study of political rhetoric. Professor Holstun begins with a discussion of early modern utopias in general, both literary and non-literary, Old World and New, arguing that these utopias all share a desire to submit displaced populations to a program of rational domination. Writings and practices ranging from Utopia and Machiavelli's Discourses to Protestant church and military discipline appropriate the displaced populations of Europe and North America as an imaginative raw material — a tabula rasa on which they must write.

Turning to Puritan utopia in particular, Holstun reconstructs its transatlantic language by concentrating on two utopian projects of the mid-17th century: the political platforms and Algonquian "praying towns" of John Eliot in colonial Massachusetts and the republican political writing of James Harrington in Protectorate England. Moving between these primary texts and modern analyses of rationalization by Weber, Horkheimer and Adorno, and Foucault, he shows that Puritan utopia shares the modern Western longing for universal discipline and domination. Analyzing Puritan utopia's theocratic rhetoric, he shows that it envisions this discipline as the rational means to the Millennium.

Contents

1 Introduction

Vasco de Quiroga Misreads Utopia

Rationalization, Enlightenment, and Discipline

2 Paradise New-Modeled

Millenial Demographics

Enlightenment and Utopia

Cain and Agrarian Utopia

Lamech and Martial Utopia

The Body Politic and the Rex Absconditus

3 John Eliot's Empirical Millennialism

New English Utopia

The Scraped Board of Puritan Anthropology

Utopian Scripture and Jethro's Judges

Theory to Practice: Praying-Town Discipline

Enlightenment and the Sachems

Practice to Theory: The Christian Commonwealth

Retractions, Extinctions, and Transformations

4 James Harrington's Commonwealth for Increase

Oceana and England

Fortuna as King People

Foundation, Superstructure, amd Utopian Discipline

Conversations with Particular Commonwealths

Popular Erastianism and Secular Millennialism

Lycurgan Oliver: Legislation as Sovereign Suicide

But No Goose-Quill, No Scribbling

5 Ordo Anima Rerum: The World Turned Rightside Up

Jeremiah versus Lycurgus: Milton's The Ready and Easy Way

Satire, Utopia, and the Future Imminent

Hobson's Contract: Utopian Discipline and the Right to Make Promises

Enlightenment Comes to the Modt Dull-witted

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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This book by the legendary Situationist activist and author of The Revolution of Everyday Life is a fiercely partisan historical reflection on the ways religious and economic forces have shaped Western culture. Within this broad frame, Raoul Vaneigem examines the heretical and millenarian movements that challenged social and ecclesiastical authority in Europe from the 1200s into the 1500s. Although he discusses a number of different groups such as the Cathars and Joachite millenarians, his main emphasis is on the various manifestations of the movement of the Free Spirit in northern Europe. At the core of these heresies, Vaneigem sees not only resistance to the power of State and Church but also the immensely creative invention of new forms of love, sexuality, community and exchange. Vaneigem vividly portrays the radical opposition presented by these movements to the imperatives of an emerging market-based economy and he evokes crucial historical parallels with other anti-systemic rebellions throughout the history of the West. This book is particularly valuable for its translations of original texts and source materials.

Contents

Preface to the American Edition

Introduction: The Perspective of the Market and the Perspective of Life

I From the Twilight of the Bureaucrats to the Dawn of Divine Economics

Economic Totalitarianism and Its Self-Destruction

The Gods

History

Kings and Priests

Language

Christian Syncretism

II The Church Struggles to Evolve

On Philosophy

Joachite Millenarianism

Catharism

The Poverty Market

The Penitence Market

The Market in Fear and Death

On the Exorcised Woman or the Cloistered Nun

III The Principal Manifestations of the Movement of the Free Spirit from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century

The Amaurians

William Cornelius of Antwerp

The New Spirit in Swabia

Bentivenga of Gubbio

Margaret Porete

Heilwige Bloemardine

Sister Katrei

The Movement of the Free Spirit Among the Beghards and Beguines

Walter of Holland

Voluntary Poverty in Cologne: John and Albert of Brünn

The Nuns of Schweidnitz

Thomas Scoto

John Hartmann

The Men of Intelligence

The Picards or Adamites of Bohemia

Herman of Rijswick

The Alumbrados

The Loyists and Eloi Pruystinck

Quintin of Tournai and the Spiritual Libertines

IV Outline for an Anarchy of the Self

The Creation of the Self

The Materia Prima

The Athanor

The Negative and Its Treatment

Refined Love as the Basis for the Creation of a New World

Notes

Index

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From one point of view eighteenth-century England, with its settled aristocracy and gentry, its polite arts and culture, its urbane politics of interest and influence, appears as a stable, self-assured civilization. Historians have often described it as such. From another point of view it appears very differently. Year after year new capital offenses were enacted. In the heart of London great crowds assembled at the regular public hanging days, and there were riots beneath the gallows at Tyburn for the possession of the bodies of the condemned. Highwaymen beset the roads of London. Large parties of armed smugglers invested parts of the coast. The estate papers of the great sometimes reveal that they were more concerned about wholesale poaching on their lands than about rentals or crops.

This book explores these contrasts: a settled ruling class which could only rule through forms of judicial terror; a population deferential by day but deeply insubordinate by night; a class justice which defended property through the fair form of law. Instead of general description, the authors offer a number of detailed studies. An important introductory chapter discloses the way in which the law replaced religion at the center of the ideology of England's rulers, and analyzes the astonishing adaptability of the legal system to the same pressures of influence, interest, and property which dominated political life.

Contents

List of Illustrations and Maps

Abbreviations

Preface

[1] Douglas Hay: Property, Authority and the Criminal Law

[2] Peter Linebaugh: The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons

[3] Cal Winslow: Sussex Smugglers

[4] John G. Rule: Wrecking and Coastal Plunder

[5] Douglas Hay: Poaching and the Game Laws on Cannock Chase

[6] E. P. Thompson: The Crime of Anonymity

Appendix: A Sampler of Letters

Index of Persons and Places

Index of Subjects

About the Authors

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This is a fascinating study of Elizabethan rogues and vagabonds which draws much of its material from the actual pamphlets of the time, in particular the Conny-catching series of Robert Greene and the Caveat for Common Cursetors of Thomas Harman. Central and local records have also provided the author with relics of the age, such as Proctor's Licenses, forged passports, the London orders of 1517 for restraining beggars and vagabonds, and licenses for Jacobean gaming houses, from which he has been able to paint a vivid picture of an elaborately organized profession of roguery with a language of its own and a large number of well-defined methods and traditions.

Mr Aydelotte describes the Art of Begging employed by the vagrants and masterless men who roamed through the countryside at this time with a wealth of picturesque detail. He distinguishes between the 'Upright Men' who were strong enough to act as chiefs among their fellow vagabonds and the ordinary rogues; and deals with all the many vagabond types, the 'Abraham men', 'hookers', 'palliards' and 'counterfeit cranks', and their companions, the 'doxies' and 'bawdy baskets'. In another chapter he studies the art of conny-catching, and the endless devices of the London sharpers, dice-swindlers and cut-purses to swindle simple people of their money. Finally there is an account of the laws against vagabonds and their enforcement which includes an especially interesting discussion of the whipping campaign which began in 1569.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I : ORIGINS

Size of the vagabond class

Enclosures and sheep-farming

The change from the mediaeval to the modern system of land tenure

The sixteenth-century literature of economic protest

The breaking up of the bands of feudal retainers

The dissolution of the monasteries

The question of gipsy origin

CHAPTER II : THE ART OF BEGGING

Traditional methods

Prevalence of indiscriminate charity

Licences to beg

Harman's twenty-four orders of vagabonds

Rufflers and upright men

Hookers or anglers

Rogues

Counterfeit cranks

Dommerers, palliards, and Abraham Men

Priggers of prancers

Counterfeiters of licences

Pedlars and tinkers

Minstrels

Jugglers

Movers of sedition and speakers of false rumours

Popish spies

CHAPTER III : LAWS AGAINST VAGABONDS

Summary of legislative tendencies

1530-47 : Legislation

1530-47 : Enforcement of the laws

1547-72 : Legislation

1547-72 : Enforcement of the laws

1572-97 : Legislation

1572-97 : Enforcement of the laws

The poor laws of 1597 and 1601

Conditions at the end of the century

CHAPTER IV : THE ART OF CONNY-CATCHING

The trustworthiness of the conny-catching pamphlets

The tribe of gulls

The haunts of the conny-catchers

The conny-catcher's busy season

The conny-catching 'laws'

Conny-catching proper

Cheating law

Vincent's law

The nips and foists

Crossbiting law

Petty thieves and brokers

High law

The spirit of Elizabethan roguery

CHAPTER V : LAWS AGAINST CONNY-CATCHING

Royal protection of 'unlawful games'

The patents of Thomas Cornwallis

Efforts to restrain the manufacture and sale of false dice

Patents for playing cards

Laws against pickpockets

Cozening versus stealing in law

CHAPTER VI : THE ROGUE PAMPHLETS

Influence of foreign rogue literature

Early trustworthy English rogue pamphlets

The Manifest Defection

Harman's Caueat

Greene's Conny-catching pamphlets

The fashion of exposing rogue life

The Groundworks of Conny-catching

The Defence of Conny-catching

Mihil Mumchance

Dekker's rogue pamphlets

Greenes Ghost and Martin Mark-all

Rid's Art of Iugling

Roguish lore in other books

The literary value of the rogue pamphlets

APPENDIX

A. DOCUMENTS

1. London orders of 1517 for restraining vagabonds and beggars (Journal, xi. 337)

2. Proclamation of Henry VIII against rogues and vagabonds, June 1530 (Bod. press-mark, Arch. F.C. 10,2)

3. John Bayker's letter to Henry VIII accounting for the multitude of vagabonds in the realm (S.P. Henry VIII, 141 : 134-5)

4. Proclamation of Henry VIII against the stews, April 13, 1546 (S.A. Proclamations, ii. 164)

5. Rogues in Harman's list whose names are found in official records, 1571-89

6. Letter from the Privy Council to the London Aldermen ordering searches for vagabonds, June 20, 1569 (Journal, xix. 171^b ff.)

7. Articles agreed upon by justices in Devon for supressing rogues and vagabonds, November 5, 1569 (Bod. MS. Rawl. B. 285, II verso–12)

8. Letter from the Privy Council to Shrewsbury ordering watches and searches for rogues and masterless men, July 30, 1571 (Shrewsbury Corporation Muniments, Petitions to the Bailiffs, No. 2,621)

9. Characteristic certificates of the punishment of vagabonds :
A. Ewellme, Oxon., August 251571 (D.S.P. Eliz., lxxx. 45)
B. Eccleshall, Stafford, August and September, 1571 (D.S.P. Eliz., lxxxi, 25, I)
C. Several hundreds in Cambridgeshire, August and September, 1571 (D.S.P. Eliz. lxxxiii. 36, v)

10. Table of searches, 1571-2

11. Order for search for false dice in London, 1598 (Repertory 24, fo, 349 ff.)

12. Letter about corrupt brokers in London, December 1, 1601 (Remembrancia, ii, 213)

13. A licence to keep a gaming-house in the time of James I (Petty Bag, Cert. Var., Bundle i)

14. Hext's letter, 1596 (British Museum, MS. Lansdowne, 81, Nos. 62 and 64)

B. PLAGIARISM IN ELIZABETHAN PAMPHLETS

Manifest Detection, sig. B₈ verso–C₁ verso

Mihil Mumchance, sig. B₄ verso, ff.

Dekker, Belman of London, 1608, sig E₃ verso

Rid, Art of Iugling, 1612, sig. C₄

INDEX

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Villains of All Nations is a people's history of piracy — a history that emphasizes how common seamen who turned pirate built for themselves, beneath the Jolly Roger, a multicultural, democratic, and egalitarian society. This social history of Atlantic piracy focuses on its colourful "Golden Age," from 1716 to 1726. This infamous generation featured the dreaded black flag, the Jolly Roger, as well as swashbuckling figures such as Edward Teach, better known, of course, as "Blackbeard." These "outcasts of all nations" imagined — and succeeded in forging — a better world than they had found on the merchant and naval ships on which they had previously worked: for instance, they democratically elected their officers, they divided their booty in egalitarian ways, and also fought against the vicious abuse of sailors common to their day. Marcus Rediker argues that the historical truth about what pirates actually did proves more compelling than the romantic fiction that has grown up around them.

Contents

One: A Tale of Two Terrors

Two: The Political Arithmetic of Piracy

Three: Who Will Go "A Pyrating"?

Four: "The New Government of the Ship"

Five: "To Do Justice to Sailors"

Six: The Women Pirates: Anne Bonny and Mary Read

Seven: "To Extirpate Them out of the World"

Eight: "Defiance of Death Itself"

Conclusion: Blood and Gold

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Two of the most common types of popular disorders in late Tudor and early Stuart England were the food riots and the anti-enclosure riots in royal forests. Of particular interest are the forest riots known collectively as the Western Rising of 1626-1632, and the lesser known disorders in the Western forests which took place during the English Civil War. The central aims of this volume are to establish the social status of the people who engaged in those riots and to determine the social and economic conditions which produced the disorders.

The leaders and most active participants in riot were rural artisans — skilled men working in non-agricultural employments. These artisans, particularly those in the major industries of seventeenth-century England located in the forested West, were largely wage-earners. Virtually landless cottagers who relied on the market for food, clothworkers and other artisans frequently engaged in food riots and attempted insurrections during times of depression or harvest failure. These artisans exploited the common waste of the royal forests. Enclosure of the forests by the Crown threatened the livelihood of those workers who depended on the forests for raw material and pasturage. The result was the Western Rising and a similar series of riots in the 1640s.

These conclusions challenge the dominant modern view that work in rural industry was merely the by-employment of members of peasant households. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation that disaffected men of standing were generally behind disorders such as the Western Rising, manipulating popular grievances for their own ends, In Contempt of All Authority concludes that in times of economic and social distress or political dislocation (such as the Civil War) the "lower orders" of Tudor and Stuart England were galvanized to direct action by very basic issues of food supply, employment, and common rights. In the course of such actions they manifested an intense hatred of their social betters, whom they held responsible for existing conditions.

Contents

Abbreviations

Preface

I. Introduction

II. Food Riots, 1586-1631

III. The Crown's Response to Food Riots

IV. The Western Rising, 1626-1632

V. The Participants in the Western Rising

VI. Artisans, Cottagers, and Rural Distress

VII. The Dean Forest Community and the Policies of James I

VIII. The Government of Charles I and Dean Forest to 1641

IX. A Second Western Rising: Riot during the Civil War and Interregnum

X. Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

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Whigs and Hunters plunges into the murky waters of the early eighteenth century to chart the violently conflicting currents that boiled beneath the apparent calm of the time. The subject is the Black Act, a law of unprecedented savagery passed by Parliament in 1723 to deal with 'wicked and evil-disposed men going armed in disguise'. These men were pillaging the royal forests of deer, conducting a running battle against the forest officers with blackmail, threats and violence.

These 'Blacks', however, were men of some substance; their protest (for such it was) took issue with the equally wholesale plunder of the forest by Whig nominees to the forest offices. And Robert Walpole, still consolidating his power, took an active part in the prosecution of the 'Blacks'. The episode is laden with political and social implications, affording us glimpses of considerable popular discontent, political chicanery, judicial inequity, corrupt ambition and crime.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction: The Black Act

PART 1: Windsor

1. Windsor Forest

2. The Windsor Blacks

3. Offenders and Antagonists

PART 2: Hampshire

4. The Hampshire Forests

5. King John

6. Awful Examples

7. The Hunters

PART 3: Whigs

8. Enfield and Richmond

9. The Politics of the Black Act

10. Consequences and Conclusions

i. People

ii. Forests

iii. The Exercise of Law

iv. The Rule of Law

Appendix 1: The Black Act

Appendix 2: Alexander Pope and the Blacks

Note on Sources

Postscript to the Peregrine Edition

Index of Persons and Places

Subject Index

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This remarkable book shows how long standing restraints against tyranny — habeas corpus, trial by jury, due process of law, prohibition of torture, and the commons — are being abridged.

In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful essay demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize hold of a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on a breathtaking array of primary sources to construct a wholly original history of the Great Charter and its scarcely known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created at the same time to protect the subsistence rights of the poor. Linebaugh points to this historic document as a means to redress the circumstances of today's victims of rampant globalization.

In detailing the way in which these charters have been used for centuries, across oceans and empires, in their moments of being forgotten and in current opportunities for revitalization, Linebaugh recounts the history of racism, the story of dispossession, the formation of class societies, and the constitutional histories of democracies and republics. The people's history of Magna Carta makes vivid the breadth of age-old struggle — from the streets to the parliaments, and in prisons, slave ships, and the press — and triumphantly shows how the restoration of political rights can be achieved by the recovery of economic rights.

Contents

Illustrations

Preface

1. Introduction

2. Two Charters

3. The Commodity and the Commons

4. Charters Lost and Found

5. The Charters in Blackface and Whiteface

6. 1776 and Runnamede

7. The Law of the Jungle

8. Magna Carta and the U.S. Supreme Court

9. Icon and Idol

10. This Land Was Made by You and Me

11. The Constitution of the Commons

12. Conclusion

Appendix

1. Magna Carta

2. The Charter of the Forest

Glossary

Further Reading

Index

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According to W. E. B. Dubois, the slave trade was 'the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history'. Marcus Rediker demonstrates the truth in this statement by uncovering the magnitude of the human drama that was played out on the slave ship during history's greatest forced migration.

The Slave Ship focuses on the so-called 'golden age' of the slave trade, the period 1700-1808, when more than six million people were transported out of Africa — most of them on British and American ships — across the Atlantic, to slave on New World plantations. Marcus Rediker tells poignant tales of life, death and terror as he captures the shipboard drama of brutal discipline and fierce resistance. He reconstructs the lives of individuals, such as John Newton, James Field Stanfield and Olaudah Equiano, and the collective experience of captains, sailors and slaves. Mindful of the haunting legacies of race, class and slavery, he offers a vivid and unforgettable portrait of the ghost ship of our modern consciousness.

In his introduction Marcus Rediker ends with, 'To conclude on a personal note, this has been a painful book to write, and if I have done justice to the subject, it will be a painful book to read. There is no way around this, nor should there be. I offer this study with the greatest reverence for those who suffered almost unthinkable violence, terror and death, in the firm belief that we must remember that such horrors have always been, and remain, central to the making of global capitalism.'

Contents

Introduction

1. Life, Death, and Terror in the Slave Trade

Captain Tomba

"The Boatswain"

Name Unknown

"Sarah"

Cabin Boy Samuel Robinson

Sailor and Pirate Bartholomew Roberts

Sailor and Petty Slave Trader Nicholas Owen

Captain William Snelgrave

Captain William Watkins

Captain James Fraser

Captain and Merchant Robert Norris

Merchant Humphry Morice

Merchant Henry Laurens

"The Greedy Robbers"

2. The Evolution of the Slave Ship

Malachy Postlethwayt: The Political Arithmetic of the Slave Trade, 1745

Joseph Manesty: A Slave Ship Built, 1745

Captain Anthony Fox: A Slave Ship's Crew, 1748

Thomas Clarkson: The Variety of Slaving Vessels, 1787

Jon Riland: A Slave Ship Described, 1801

3. African Paths to the Middle Passage

The Slave Trade in Africa

Senegambia

Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast

Gold Coast

Bight of Benin

Bight of Biafra

West-Central Africa

A Social Portrait of the Captives

Grand Pillage: Louis Asa-Asa

Kidnapping: Ukawsaw Gronniosaw

The Point of No Return

4. Olaudah Equiano: Astonishment and Terror

Equiano's Home

Kidnapped

On the Magical Ship

Middle Passage

Barbados

Long Passage

Terror in Black and White

5. James Field Stanfield and the Floating Dungeon

What an English Tar Should Be

Forging the Chain

Savage Rigour

The Demon Cruelty

In "Proud Benin"

Middle Passage

One Dreadful Shriek

Real Enlightenment

6. John Newton and the Peaceful Kingdom

From Rebel Sailor to Christian Captain

First Voyage, 1750-51

Second Voyage, 1752-53

Third Voyage, 1753-54

Lost and Found

7. The Captain's Own Hell

The Path to the Ship

Merchant Capital

"The Guinea Outfit"

Bully

Trader

Brother Captain

Jailer

The Savage Spirit of the Trade

8. The Sailor's Vast Machine

From Port to Ship

The Culture of the Common Sailor

Work on the Ship

Sailors, Slaves, and Violence

The Dead List

Mutiny and Desertion

End of the Voyage

Insurrection: Liverpool, 1775

The Return of the Dancing Sailor

9. From Captives to Shipmates

Boarding the Ship

Working

Fighting

Dying

Building Babel

Communicating Belowdecks

Singing

Resistance: Refusing to Eat

Jumping Overboard

Rising Up

Going Home to Guinea

Bonding

10. The Long Voyage of the Slave Ship Brooks

The First Image: Plymouth

Transit: Philadelphia and New York

An "Improved" Image: London

"First-Rate Nautical Knowledge"

The Brooks in the Debate

A New Debate

Impact

Final Port

Epilogue: Endless Passage

The "Most Magnificent Drama" Revisited

Reconciliation from Below

Dead Reckoning

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Illustration sources and credits

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This book is an intensive exploration of the hidden and mysterious world of the Family of Love in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. The Familists, devoted followers of the Messianic Dutch mystic, Hendrick Niclaes, were passionately denounced by many literate contemporaries, and an association with extremism, subversion and hypocrisy has endured.

The author tracks the English Familists into their houses, fields and places of work. The imaginative and highly detailed methodology makes possible an especially fruitful interaction with the past, and ensures that no single social context dominates the emerging picture. For instance, although the full extent of Familism at the court of Elizabeth I is revealed for the first time, the members there are discussed side by side with their 'loving friends' in the fields and fens of eastern England.

This study is, however, most significant for what it reveals about the nature of wider society. The processes by which the Family of Love came to be represented to posterity are examined carefully and placed alongside less accessible evidence. This approach brings into play a compelling and hitherto unsuspected dialogue between the forces of hostility and the lesser-known forces of tolerance: one surprising conclusion is that most English men and women seem to have possessed an impressive capacity to tolerate known 'heretics' in their midst.

Contents

List of illustrations

List of tables

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

1. Introduction

Hostility and historiography

Problems of access

A microscopic method

Emerging themes

2. Familist belief: the quest for perfection

The voice of H. N.

Precedents and influences

Voices raised in hostility

Extracted 'confessions'

Voices raised in self-defence

Wills

Knowing them by their fruits

3. Seedbeds and first shoots (1550-1565)

Marian Protestants

Conservatives

Anabaptist 'sectaries'

Enthusiastic conformists

A background in astrology

Mysticism: a common thread?

4. Development and consolidation (1565-1579)

Books and ballads

Internal organisation

'Parlour meetings' and Familist sociability

Behaviour before 'the World'

'Progress'

5. Crisis (1576/1582)

Chronicle: the Familist crisis

Animus

The need for a scapegoat

Courtiers

Country people

The puritan crisis

John Knewstub versus Robert Seale

Outcomes

6. Resolution: the pursuit of internal cohesion (1582-1603)

The wills of Creake and Raven (part I)

Familist households

Economic networks and material prosperity

Mutual support

The lie of the land

Friends in high places: the courtier Familists

Office-holding in the country

7. Resolution: the pursuit of external integration (1582-1603)

The wills of Creake and Raven (part II)

Faith and social relations

Outward charity and social responsibility

Religious tolerance in country and court

The Familist paradox

8. Crisis renewed (1603-1610)

Basilikon Doron (James VI/I)

A supplication of the Family of Love (Robert Seale?)

The Family of Love (Thomas Middleton)

Ely repercussions: William Safford's books

Balsham repercussions: the burial of Thomas Lawrence

Resolution

9. After the first generation (1610-1700)

10. Conclusion

The house that Robert Dorrington built

Appendix: the membership of the Family of Love

Bibliography

Index

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There can be no doubt that the Ranters were the most radical and the most peculiar sect of the Cromwellian interregnum. Coming into prominence about 1649, the Ranters captivated the minds of many Englishmen for the next decade. They were the incarnation of the Hobbesian nightmare of masses running wild in the streets, and even Gerard Winstanley, the leader of the equally detestable and feared Diggers, considered the Ranters an abomination. Other contemporaries and subsequent authorities have been no more friendly. The 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote that the Ranters were the dregs of the Seeker movement. Rufus Jones, the mild mannered and tolerant historian of mystical sectarianism, concluded "The Ranters got a bad name from everybody who came into contact with them, and there is no question that it was a degenerate movement." In their own day, George Fox fumed about the immorality of those Ranters he met in prison. He observed how they drank, smoked, derided common concepts of God and, worst of all, "they sang, whistled and danced."

Despite such disagreeable statements, the Ranters were important for a variety of reasons. For a few crucial years Ranter leaders found a large following in London's urban poor, though Ranter activity was also reported in virtually every corner of England as well. The Ranters' appeal was to the lowest strata of English society: the urban poor and the landless rural population, street people, criminals, and prostitutes. The Ranter message was varied. Religious institutions were a sham and God was within you. There was no heaven, no hell, and, hence, no need to live as if there were. All governance and property were theft, corruption, and extortion. All institutions emanated from and fostered class dominance and were thus of no significance to the poor Englishman. There were neither licit not illicit forms of behaviour, just deeds. In a word, the Ranters were the first recognizable movement expounding the ideas that might be called class conscious anarchism. Tame and civil Ranters wanted merely to destroy all religious institutions. More radical Ranters called for the abolition of all government and private property, and the most extreme of all hoped for a universal conflagration to destroy everything.

The Ranters were more than mere malcontents feeding upon the inability of a revolutionary society in turmoil to reach political and religious consensus. They were also the heirs of the long and wonderful traditions of ancient and medieval heretical dualism found in the Brethren of the Free Spirit and in the Cathari, Bogomils, Messalians, Paulicians and Gnostics before them. Much as the Gnostics were considered a plague by early Christians, and the Cathari, Bogomils and Paulicians in later centuries, the Ranters, too, were thought by their contemporaries to be an infection and social disease. Ranters were neither polite nor modest and caused a good deal of trouble, but they were not dismissed by their contemporaries as they have been ignored by historians. The Blasphemy Act of 1650 was aimed exclusively at prosecuting and persecuting the Ranters, and almost every Ranter treated in these pages was tried, found guilty in a court of law and sent to jail. Some, like Bauthumley, were more unfortunate; for speaking blasphemy his tongue was bored through with a hot poker.

It is difficult to make too many generalizations about the Ranters for most were fierce individualists who found no need for common confessions or lists of dogmas. Some, like Coppe or Robins, were probably insane, and Tany was absolutely mad. Freeman and Norwood were upstanding gentlemen dreaming of a free England, while others such as Coppin were theologians of high caliber. Bauthumley was a spokesman for a religious quietism lost in the din and drumming of Presbyterian politics and intolerance. Foster was a political arsonist ready to pitch England into a worldwide bonfire in which all would be destroyed so that a new society, Phoenix-like, could emerge from the ashes. All the while, Clarkson preached redemption through sin as the surest path to salvation. [...]

Philosophical Ranters, [...] more than other Ranters, were concerned with the religious, conceptual, and intellectual implications of dualism and its meaning for creation, good and evil. They were the premier religious thinkers of the movement, and both Bauthumley and Coppin were required reading among Ranters. The Sexual Libertines accepted the philosophical foundations of dualism but were more concerned with how mankind should live life on earth while awaiting death and the merger of the soul with God. That they are called Sexual Libertines tells us something about the conclusions they drew. Thus, whereas philosophical Ranters were overwhelmed by the dualism of matter and spirit, good and evil, and were often very ascetic, the Libertines accepted the same dichotomy but decided to make the best of their temporary sojourn in this corrupt world of physical matter. The Libertines Coppe and Clarkson were many things, but no one called them ascetic.

Revolutionary Ranters were philosophical dualists who drew social implications from their thought. Hence, most were concerned with the religious, political and economic institutions all of which were understood to be Satan's tools for the control of mankind in this evil world. To be a revolutionary Ranter simply meant that one wished to put an end to Satan's control of the world by any means possible. Where Parliament wished to use the army against the King, the Ranters wished to use the army against everyone starting with the King and then Parliament, and then the nobility and then. . . . Gentlemen Ranters were a branch of the revolutionists but with one important difference; they were officers in the army and enthusiastic about the army's ability to hasten the destruction of England.

Divine Ranters were individuals considered Ranters by contemporaries and by their followers as well; but they differed somewhat from other Ranters in that they believed they were the actual living God. To an extent these Ranters represented the Free Spirit wing of the Ranter antecedents rather than the influence of medieval dualism. Additionally, some were insane. Thomas Tany, or Theauraujohn His Aurora, as he preferred to be called, was the consummate Ranter, combining all Ranter elements into a bizarre and fascinating intellectual system which included his own language, logic, grammar and sources. Some might point out that Tany was stark raving mad but Nietzsche was not well balanced and Schopenhauer was very depressed and finally he committed suicide.

Tales of Two Parsons concerns the lives, loves and writings of two notorious Ranters, John Pordage and Thomas Webb. Alone among the Ranters, these two gentlemen held appointments as pastors until, for a variety of incredible offenses, they were thrown out of their positions.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE: THE RANTERS

1. The Civil War, Sectarianism and the Ranter Family Tree

Philosophical Ranters

2. Richard Coppin

3. Jacob Bauthumley

4. J. F.

Sexual Libertines

5. Abiezer Coppe

6. Lawrence Clarkson

7 Anonymous

Revolutionary Ranters

8. George Foster

9. Joseph Salmon

Divine Ranters

10. John and Mary Robins: Joshua Garment

11. William Franklin and Mary Gadbury

12. Thomas Tany

Gentlemen Ranters

13. Captain Francis Freeman

14. Captain Robert Norwood

Tales of Two Parsons

15. Thomas Webb

16. John Pordage

PART TWO: THE ANTI-RANTERS

17. The Anti-Ranter Offensive

18. Orthodox Critics

19. Sectarian Critics

20. Scandalous Tracts

21. Anti-Ranter Fun: Poems, Pictures and a Play

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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How did ordinary people, caught up in the violent political and social dislocation of the English Revolution, perceive such astonishing events? Miracles and the Pulp Press During the English Revolution attempts to answer this question through a close study of newsbooks and pulp publications produced from 1640 to 1660. Like The Great Cat Massacre and The Cheese and the Worms, this fascinating and original work enters the world of enchanted belief, superstition, folk religion and magic.

Jerome Friedman investigates why Englishmen outside Parliamentary circles were in fact only incidentally concerned with the political, economic, and religious questions that have so preoccupied scholars of the period. And why, instead, the bestselling issues concerned witches, prodigies, apparitions, divine curses, the readmittance of Jews to England and an obsession with converting the Turks to Christianity. For the great majority of people the period seems to have caused an upswelling of credulous superstition and bizarre prophecy, rather than the radicalization often assumed, and a vivid picture emerges of a frightened, confused society.

Friedman examines, too, the Puritan "battle for morality," the attempts to combat ale-drinking, prostitution, pornography, and the new fascination with marijuana, and how these issues became entangled in popular assessments of the revolution. Finally, by relating all these concerns to the popular astrological and prophetic literature of the day, the author provides convincing answers as to why so many Englishmen ultimately greeted the return of Charles II with joy and relief.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Preface

1. Censorship, Popular Publication, and the Pulp Press

Part I – How England Fell

2. Order Within the Universe: The Rebellion Against Charles

3. Signs of the Times: Portents, Prodigies, and Other Indications of God's Unhappiness with England

4. Ancient Prophecies

Part II – Religion in Fallen England

5. The Sectarian Cancer

6. Religious Impostors and Charlatans

7. Catholics, Turks, and Jews

Part III – Sin and Society in Fallen England

8. Signs of Sin Everywhere: Alehouses, Alcohol, Drugs, and More

9. Naughty Women and Worse

10. Bawdy Men and Better

Part IV – England Redeemed

11. More Ancient Prophecies

12. Events in 1660: The Battle of the Frogs and Fairford's Flies

13. Conclusion

Notes

Alphabetical Title Listing of Pamphlets Cited in this Study

Index

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The Ranters came into prominence after the defeat of the Levellers at Burford in 1649 had put a final end to the most serious political and military challenge to Cromwell from the left. With their direct appeal to the outcast urban poor, coupled with a flagrant and often blasphemous defiance of traditional Christian morality, the Ranter sect provide a striking illustration of the continuing radical political and theological opposition to the Cromwellian Commonwealth.

This book contains the first full length study of this, the most radical of all left-wing sects that flourished in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. It also includes studies of outstanding Leveller leaders — like John Lilburne, Richard Overton and William Walwyn — as well as the first biographical portrait of the pamphleteer Laurence Clarkson, whose life provides a guide to virtually all the independent and radical sects of the period.

Contents

Foreword

Religion and Politics in the English Revolution

John Lanseter of Bury St. Edmonds

John Saltmarsh: a Type of Righteousness

The Ranters

Laurence Clarkson and the Everlasting Gospel

A Still and Soft Voice

Leveller Democracy — Fact or Myth?

Index

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In 1831 England was going through a time of great political turbulence. People desperately wanted changes in the system of government, more say in the management of their lives. They wanted Reform, and nowhere more than in the city of Bristol.

In the Autumn the place erupted when a protest rally became an uprising. For three days, Bristol was the scene of fierce rioting, looting and arson. Faced with such unexpected fury the lawmen dithered; frightened by the consequences of taking firm action they did nothing, and the city went up in flames. By the time the fires had died down hundreds of people had died.

In the aftermath the Mayor was put on trial, a colonel and two captains were Court Martialed, four citizens were hanged and dozens of people were imprisoned or deported to Australia. But the really guilty men got away with it.

Contents

Prologue

Saturday, 29th October, 1831

Sunday, 30th October, 1831

Monday, 31st October, 1831

Aftermath

The Trials

The Trial of Charles Pinney, Esq.

The Commanding Officer called to Account

The Trial of the Young Officers

The Felons

Epilogue