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The County Community in Stuart Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Clive Holmes
Clive Holmes*
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

The 1635 ship money writ elicited a “common feeling of dissatisfaction” throughout England. It was the general belief that the tax contravened “fundamental law,” and that in its imposition Charles “had deliberately treated the nation as a stranger to his counsels, and that if his claim to levy money by his own authority were once admitted, the door would be open to other demands of which it was impossible to foresee the limits.” Contrast this account by S.R. Gardiner with a more recent analysis of the response to ship money provided by J.S. Morrill, a scholar who has acknowledged a substantial intellectual debt to Alan Everitt, the progenitor and leading exponent of the concept of the “county community” in seventeenth-century England. “The King's right to levy the rate was rarely questioned in the provinces. Ship money was hated for its costliness and its disruptive effects on the social and political calm of the communities … Above all,” the levy was detested because “it exemplified the government's insensitivity toward localist sentiment and belief.”

In these divergent accounts, a fundamental difference emerges between the traditional school of English historians and the county community school of local historians. For Gardiner, seventeenth-century Englishmen were fully aware of and vitally concerned about the actions of their national rulers, actions they evaluated against the touchstone of constitutional principle. Everitt and Morrill insist, by contrast, that even the gentry were “surprisingly ill informed” about “wider political issues”; they were “simply not concerned with affairs of state.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , Spring 1980 , pp. 54 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1980

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References

This paper was originally presented at the Middle Atlantic regional meeting of the Conference on British Studies in November 1977. I am grateful to David Underdown, the commentator, and to J.H. Hexter, Derek Hirst, Linda Levy Peck, and Lawrence Stone for their criticisms.

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51 Foster, E.R., “The Procedure of the House of Commons against Patents and Monopolies, 1621-1624” in Aiken, W.A. and Henning, B.D. (eds.), Conflict in Stuart England (New York, 1960), pp. 59–85Google Scholar, especially pp. 61-62.

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