The English People and the English Revolution Revisited
John Walter teaches history at the University of Essex and works on early modern popular political culture and on the history of food. He is the author of various articles on early modern crowds and of Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: the Colchester Plunderers, Cambridge, 1999 and co-editor (with Roger Schofield) of Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, Cambridge, 1989, and (with Michael Braddick) of Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, Cambridge, 2001. He is preparing a monograph on the impact of the Protestation oath on popular political culture in the English revolution.
Correspondence: jwalter{at}essex.ac.uk
This article revisits the question of the popular role in the English revolution. Surveying crowd actions, it argues for the existence of a pre-revolutionary popular political culture and the need to re-examine popular roles in the Revolution in the light of this pre-existing culture. Before the Revolution, the deep structures of the English state had created the need for a political dialogue between ruler and subject which allowed the people to claim legitimation for a political agency otherwise denied them in a culture of obedience. The new political space created by the Revolution enlarged the scope for that agency. Focusing on developments in the early 1640s, the article argues for the temporary emergence of a citizenry of free-born Englishmen (and, for some, free-born women). It calls for a marriage of political history with the research strategy and sources of social and cultural history to create ‘a new political history’ which can explore the contours of participation, rejection and exclusion from that culture.