A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649

by David Rollison

• ISBN13: 9780521853736
• ISBN10: 0521853737
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-02-26
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In 1500 fewer than three million people spoke English; today English speakers number at least a billion worldwide. This book asks how and why a small island people became the nucleus of an empire 'on which the sun never set'. David Rollison argues that the 'English explosion' was the outcome of a long social revolution with roots deep in the medieval past. A succession of crises from the Norman Conquest to the English Revolution were causal links and chains of collective memory in a unique, vernacular, populist movement. The keyword of this long revolution, 'commonwealth', has been largely invisible in traditional constitutional history. This panoramic synthesis of political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, economic, literary and linguistic movements offers a 'new constitutional history' in which state institutions and power elites were subordinate and answerable to a greater community that the early modern English called 'commonwealth' and we call 'society'.

Table of Contents

Preface: points of departure

Introduction: an uncommon tradition

The Emergent Commonalty

What came before: antecedent structures and emergent themes

The formation of a constitutional landscape

The power of a common language

Accumulating a Tradition: Popular Resistance and Rebellion, 1327-1549

Discords, quarrels and factions of the commonalty: an ensemble of popular demands, 1328-1381

The spectre of commonalty: popular rebellion and the commonweal, 1381-1649

The English Explosion

How trade became an affair of state: the politics of industry, 1381-1640

Touching the wires: industry and empire

The Empowered Community

'The first pace that is sick': the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus

'Boiling hot with questions': the English Revolution and the parting of the ways

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