Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 101

John Walter has long argued that popular protests and rebellions must be understood in the context of political cultures that reveal a popular political awareness. This goes against the wisdom of earlier social historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, who had insisted that such protests were pre-political. This popular awareness is not always easy to discern because individual protests at first glance might appear to be ‘spasmodic episodes, discontinuous in time and space’ (p.3). However, interdisciplinary approaches and comparative historical studies over the last several decades have allowed social historians to recognize that members of the crowd did possess an informed political consciousness. This was especially true with regard to their knowledge of the law of public order, which made them aware of the legal distinction between protests limited in geographical extent and confined to very specific goals (which lawyers and magistrates would view as no more than the offence of misdemeanour riot if three or more persons used force or the threat of force to accomplish a goal within one community), and the more serious crime of levying war against the king, or treason, which involved going from place to place to voice their discontent. Thus, the protesters might wish to hide their awareness that their complaints were influenced by more generalized grievances than those peculiar to one community. This knowledge of the law and how to exploit it to enforce administrative orders or laws that the governors had already expounded but were not enforcing is one of the best evidences we possess of the political awareness of the crowd in popular protests. So skilfully was this done that the magistrates were often forced to recognize the legitimacy of popular complaints.

In Professor Walter’s excellent essay on the Oxfordshire rising of 1596, he recognizes that the leaders of this aborted protest made a connection between dearth, the demise of common use-rights, and the poverty of persons made homeless by enclosure. The levelling of hedges was the most common form of agrarian protest in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, although the Oxfordshire protesters later spoke of ‘cutting down gentlemen rather than their hedges’ (p.81). It seems that those Oxfordshire landlords who enclosed arable lands did not institute convertible husbandry, as Eric Kerridge insisted was usually the case, but rather pursued the unpopular course of depopulating villages and turning to the more immediately profitable business of sheep- and cattle-raising. These landlords were upstarts, recently arrived in the ranks of the gentry, who were insensitive to the expectations of their tenants concerning employment and nutritional sufficiency.

Seven essays are reprinted in this volume of which four are finely nuanced investigations of dearth and poverty in their regional and local contexts. (Regrettably, three lack endnote citations acknowledging sources). In the ‘Social economy of dearth’, Walter states that the crises of subsistence would have been worse in other parts of England besides the north-west had not gentry landlords and farmers sold corn to their neighbours at below market prices and even granted them credit for such purchases. Servants and tenants were often paid in kind or allowed to purchase grain and other consumables at below prevailing market prices. These forms of relief or even outright charity reinforced hierarchical relationships and avoided discontent, but were sometimes resorted to only after veiled threats had been made. Such endeavours often occurred in parishes that had not yet worked out systems of poor relief. Similar measures were also taken in urban communities. All of this argues that early modern England was far from being a fully developed market economy as some economic historians have insisted. However, access to the benefits of food-crisis relief required membership in the local community attested to by substantial householders, and vagrants and masterless persons were given short shrift.

Professor Walter tends to view the gentry as a monolithic class largely made up of magistrates wielding authority and determined to uphold the status quo. This is because the popular protests involving dearth which he discusses occurred most frequently in south-eastern England. Enclosure riots were the more predominant form of popular protest – especially in the Midlands – and these he discusses only tangentially. Some of these disturbances reveal that not all gentlemen possessed seigneurial authority. Especially on large Duchy of Lancaster manors, many lesser gentry were tenants, and therefore frequently shared the complaints of their more humble neighbours concerning enclosure or fiscal seigneurialism. Even when they did not share the grievances of smallholders and cottagers, the lesser gentry and their elder brothers were proficient at manipulating others, and often procured the destruction of enclosures and seigneurial deer and game or used such protests to mask the vindicatory violence of their feuds.