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Local Affairs in Seventeenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Derek Hirst
Derek Hirst
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
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Type
Review Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , June 1989 , pp. 437 - 448
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 Leicester, 1966.

2 Hunt, William, The puritan moment. The coming of revolution in an English county (Cambridge, Mass., 1983)Google Scholar, and to a lesser extent Underdown, David, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973)Google Scholar and Morrill, John, Cheshire 1630–1660 (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar, constitute honourable exceptions.

3 Smith, A. Hassell, County and court. Government and politics in Norfolk 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar and MacCulloch, D., Suffolk and the Tudors (Oxford, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar are the exceptions to this rule; but there has been nothing to match them for the post-Restoration period save Holmes's, CliveSeventeenthcmtury Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980)Google Scholar which, covering as it does the whole century, is necessarily rather brief.

4 The argument parallels – and is more socially extensive than – Conrad Russell's insistence that the division between Arminians and predestinarian protestants (whom others might call puritans) was the only ideological gap which extended from 1628 to 1642. Russell, C., Parliaments and English politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 417–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Hurwich, J., ‘A fanatick town: Coventry 1660–1720’, Midland History, IV (1977), 15–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, establishes the necessary continuity in Warwickshire.

6 Brooks, C. W., Pettyfoggers and vipers of the commonwealth (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 57–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; this finding suggestively parallels the contention that over half of practising lawyers came from similar social groups: Prest, W., ‘The English Bar’, in Prest, W., ed., Lawyers in early-modem England and America (New York, 1981), pp. 70–1Google Scholar, and, more generally, his The rise of the barristers (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar.

7 Herrup, , Common peace, p. 195Google Scholar; MacCulloch, , Suffolk, pp. 315–37Google Scholar.

8 Morrill, J., ‘William Davenport and the “silent majority” of Stuart England’, Journal of the Chester Archaeological Society, LVIII (1975), 118–22Google Scholar; for an example of the appeal to parochialism, see Russell, Parliaments and English politics, passim.

9 Cust, R. and Lake, P., ‘Sir Richard Grosvenor and the rhetoric of godly magistracy’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, LIV (1981), 42–8Google Scholar.

10 Underdown, , Somerset, p. 40Google Scholar.

11 Buggs, S., Miles mediterraneus. The mid-land souldier (1622)Google Scholar.

12 Sharpe, J. A., Crime in early modern England 1550–1750 (London, 1984)Google Scholar.

13 The comparison between rates of crime and rates of punishment in neighbouring Surrey and Sussex in a slightly later period is instructive: see Beattie, J. M., Crime and the courts in England 1660–1800 (Princeton, 1986)Google Scholar, passim.

14 Beattie's more impressionistic study of Sussex noted a steady fall in indictments from the middle of the century: Crime and the courts, p. 204.

15 See eg. Outhwaite, R. B., ‘Dearth and government intervention in English grain markets, 1590–1700’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XXXIII (1981), 389–406Google Scholar.

16 She notes a similar wave of judicial activism in 1616–18: it seems plausible to assume that this was connected to James's Star Chamber speech.

17 Thus, despite Cust's otherwise meticulous researches, he accepts James Howell's Epistolat Ho-Elianae as a contemporary source, though Annabel Patterson dismisses it as ‘topical, royalist statement’ of the 1640s, masquerading as 1620s news: Patterson, A., Censorship and interpretation (Madison, 1984), pp. 210–18Google Scholar. Similarly, he pays tribute (p. 188) to the ‘customary eloquence’, when dismissed from the Yorkshire custos-ship, of Sir Thomas Wentworth, who was not above doctoring the record when it suited him: see C. V. Wedgwood's decision to write a second, and more critical, edition of her biography; and see too Clarke, A., ‘28 November 1634: a detail of Stratford's administration’, Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland Journal, XCIV (1963), 161–7Google Scholar. I am grateful to James Robertson for discussions on these points.

18 To appear as ‘The blessed revolution’: English politics and the coming of war 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989)Google Scholar.

19 Russell, Conrad, reviewing The forced loan and English politics in History Today, XXXVIII (03 1988), 53Google Scholar; Seddon, P. R., ed., Letters of John Holles 1587–1637, II (Thoroton Soc., XXXV, 1983), 345Google Scholar: I am grateful to Tom Cogswell for this reference.

20 As Underdown, David, Revel, riot and rebellion (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar has shown.

21 See Hutton, R., The royalist war effort (London, 1981)Google Scholar.

22 Lest it be thought that all religious contacts in Warwickshire were dourly purposive, Hughes also gives striking evidence of the ideological confusion of some ecclesiastical patronage.

23 Her account of the depth of divisions in the 1650s would, however, have been strengthened had she been able to use the poll list for the 1656 election in the Temple papers in the Huntington Library (HEH, STT MSS, Elections box 1, folder 1).

24 In this regard, Roberts and Coleby make a valuable modification of the arguments of Reece, Henry, ‘The military presence in England, 1649–1660’ (unpublished Oxford D.Phil, thesis, 1981)Google Scholar.

25 Quintrell, B. W., ‘The making of Charles I's Book of Orders’, English Historical Review, XCV (1980), 561CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slack, P., ‘Books of Orders: the making of English social policy 1577–1631’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., XXX (1980), 13–16, 19–20Google Scholar.

26 Fletcher, A., Reform in the provinces (New Haven, 1986), p. 358Google Scholar.

27 The gathered churches of Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Oxfordshire which in 1657 lamented the fall of the major-generals evidently did not see them as quite the irrelevance which some recent scholars have done. Nickolls, J., Original letters and papers of State (London, 1743), p. 140Google Scholar.

28 Brooks, C., ‘Public finance and political stability: the administration of the land tax 1688–1720’, Historical Journal, XVII (1974), 281–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Although the readiness of Tory apprentices in 1680 to contemplate pulling down the brothels suggests that Harris may sometimes be in danger of reading in too much national politics and too little local tradition.

30 It remains true to say, however, that more could have been done with the loyalist appeal, with lord mayors' shows, for example; and what were the implications of Charles's plans to move his palace to Winchester?

31 De Krey, Gary S., A fractured society. The politics of London in the first age of party 1688–1715 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 45–73Google Scholar.

32 Conversely, and perhaps not unconnectedly, his discussion of the City elections of 1680 and 1681 remains curiously contorted.

33 And of course an increasingly contentious one: both Harris and De Krey make clear the role of elections in fostering partisanship; see too Rosenheim, J., ‘Party organization at the local level: the Norfolk sheriff's subscription of 1676’, Historical Journal, XXIX (1986), 716–17Google Scholar. In this connexion it is worth noting that Cust's analysis of the 1628 elections suggests that partisanship was not wholly lacking in the early seventeenth century.

34 It is of course far from the case that alignments of the 1640s determined loyalties in the later years of Charles II, but it is equally obviously true that the issues of the later period tended to be interpreted in terms of recent history. See Jenkin, P., ‘“The old leaven”: the Welsh Roundheads after 1660’, Historical Journal, XXIV (1981), 807–23Google Scholar; Roberts, S. K., ‘Public or private? Revenge and recovery at the restoration of Charles II’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, LIX (1986), 172–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Holmes, , Seventeenth-century Lincolnshire, p. 235Google Scholar.