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

by David Rollison

• ISBN13: 9780521139700
• ISBN10: 0521139708
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• 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'.

Author Biography

David Rollison is an independent scholar and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500-1800 (1992).

Table of Contents

Preface: points of departure	p. x
Introduction An uncommon tradition	p. 1
A study of social revolution	p. 1
Meanings of commonwealth	p. 13
Revolutions of politics: revolutions of commonalty	p. 21
Timescapes: defining the early modern	p. 29
The emergent commonalty	p. 31
What came before: antecedent structures and emergent themes	p. 33
A new longue duree	p. 33
War bands, indigenes and the causes of change	p. 36
The last conquest, 1066-c.1150	p. 39
The Norman yoke	p. 41
Return of the repressed: tyranny and the commonweal in John of Salisbury's body politic	p. 47
Remembering landscape: a story-map of c.1190	p. 60
The formation of a constitutional landscape, c.1159-1327	p. 63
Demographic depression: population trends, 1066-1650	p. 64
Signs of life: trafike	p. 69
Elementary particles: enterprise and the resourceful family	p. 73
Circling the king: the birth of resistance theory	p. 77
Enter the middle people	p. 84
Meanings of 'commonalty': Peatling Magna, 1265	p. 91
The armed hand	p. 100
Commons versus nobles: news from Courtrai (1302)	p. 105
The deposing of kings: the afterlife of Edward II	p. 109
The power of a common language	p. 119
Vernacular populism to c.1400	p. 119
Native tongues	p. 125
'Middle' English	p. 129
Storytelling: public opinion before the invention of print	p. 136
The common voice	p. 143
Lollarene man: Piers Plowman's quest for truth	p. 148
Individual souls in a communal landscape	p. 157
Ubiquitous vernacular heterodoxy: the case of Julian of Norwich	p. 167
Reactionaries	p. 171
Obedience and authority: the great chain of meaning	p. 181
Two ideas of politics in the disputation between William Tyndale and Sir Thomas More	p. 184
Accumulating a tradition: popular resistance and rebellion, 1327-1549	p. 203
Discords, quarrels and factions of the commonalty: an ensemble of popular demands, 1328-1381	p. 205
Populism as a way of understanding the history of politics	p. 205
Peasant resistance: Thornbury, 1328-52	p. 209
Mocking the king's justice: Ipswich, 1344	p. 211
The heretical hermit of Hertfordshire: Richard of Fulham against the Statute of Labourers, 1357	p. 214
The great rumour of the 1370s	p. 219
Westminster: the Good Parliament of 1376	p. 222
Collecting the poll tax: Nottingham, 1377	p. 227
Reactionary fear and loathing: the Church and common rebels	p. 232
The spectre of commonalty: popular rebellion and the commonweal, 1381-1549	p. 236
Res plebeia	p. 236
The spectre of the commonalty	p. 240
'If the end be wele then all is wele': birth of a common keyword	p. 247
Unnatural heat: the crisis of 1381-1450	p. 252
Good old cause or 'premature reformation': Jack Sharpe's rebellion	p. 267
The crisis continues: rising for the commonweal, 1450-1549	p. 273
The tradition of rebellion	p. 284
The English explosion	p. 293
How trade became an affair of state: the politics of industry, 1381-1640	p. 301
The propensity of industrial districts for resistance, riot and rebellion	p. 301
Industry transforms the landscape	p. 311
A recurring theme: 'deindustrialization'	p. 316
The emergence of the political economy outlook	p. 326
Jack Winchcombe's political economy	p. 329
Deindustrialization again: the 1620s	p. 335
Touching the wires: industry and empire	p. 339
A new way of seeing the constitutional landscape: Fortescue, Smith and the political economy outlook	p. 339
Old empire and new: the battle of Pantalarea	p. 350
Touching the wires: Old Hakluyt and the conjuncture of industry and empire	p. 361
Mobilizing an imperial economy	p. 370
England is not bounded by its horizon: the 'theorick part of commerce'	p. 378
Global interdisciplinarity: Elizabethan intelligence	p. 383
The empowered community	p. 397
'The first pace that is sick': the revolution of politics in Shakespeare's Coriolanus	p. 399
'Take but degree away'	p. 399
Mocking the body politic	p. 402
The spectre of comparison: Shakespeare's prophecy	p. 414
'Boiling hot with questions': the English revolution and the parting of the ways	p. 416
To defend God's empire of England: 'the empowered community'	p. 416
The middle sort: Elizabethan incorporation or recurring pattern?	p. 423
One-way traffic: the fallacy of court-centred history	p. 427
The explosive public sphere	p. 435
Behemoth versus Leviathan: the revolutionary public sphere	p. 443
Rascability rising: precipitating rebellion	p. 451
The constitutional landscape redefined: settlement versus mobility	p. 455
Index	p. 465
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.