14) THE REVOLUTION IN THE COUNTRYSIDE (1642)
The third class of landowners was that of the yeomen who owned small plots of land which they worked themselves, usually in the good old careless manner of their forebears; this class too has disappeared from the face of England, the social revolution has expropriated it…the parcels [of land] were being attracted by the large landed estates and swallowed up by them. Alongside the yeomen there were small tenant farmers who were usually engaged in weaving as well as farming; they too are no longer to be found in modern England; almost all the land belongs now to a small number of large estates and is thus let on lease. The competition of the large tenant farmers drove the small tenant farmers and yeomen out of the market and impoverished them; they became agricultural day-labourers and weavers dependent on wages and supplied the masses whose influx caused the towns to grow with such amazing rapidity.
~Frederick Engels1
Only five of the twenty-three wealthiest peers in the land were consistent parliamentarians. Out of “700 gentry with estates of £1,000 a year or more…parliamentarians numbered 197 in 1643, falling to 172 two years later due to defections.” Many of the rest were neutral, but overall, within the ruling landowning class, there were likely twice as many royalists as parliamentarians.2 The extraordinary events of 1381 still haunted the aristocracy, and the menace of peasant unrest remained.3 Outbreaks had recurred in England in the mid-15th and 16th centuries, and the years around 1630.4 “…the German peasants’ rebellion of a hundred years earlier was a nightmare spectre lurking behind all the extreme religious and social movements of the age.”5 During the spring and summer of 1642, the king’s proclamations regularly equated the Parliamentary leadership with peasant rebel leaders of yore, Wat Tyler, Jack Cade and Robert Kett.6
As those with great stake in the feudal system could naturally be expected to rally to the king, Parliament had no alternative but to look to those middle sectors who viewed feudal social relations as an obstacle, if not outright oppression: “lesser gentry, greater yeomanry, middling merchants and larger manufacturers.”7 To pursue profits these groups all needed to throw off feudal restrictions. As time went on therefore, the war broadened into a struggle for freedom from aristocratic oppression as well as the tyranny of the king.8 This was reinforced by the accepted Puritan view “…that the common people had a very special role to play in this crisis, that they were somehow more chosen than the rich and the powerful” to fight the Antichrist.9
The contemporary “John Corbet saw the civil war of 1642-45 as having been fought between two classes, the ‘middle rank’ who ‘keepe their owne’ and the nobles and gentlemen who lived ‘in the sweat of other men.’”10 As early as the spring of 1640, the Hertfordshire trained band, in a petition regarded as scandalous by the Privy Council, gave as its reason for refusing to engage in the war with Scotland that “‘We, the yeomanry, are as freeborn as any of the gentry of this kingdom, and in this respect we know no privilege they have above us.’”11 When the king summoned the gentry of Yorkshire with their arms to the town of York in the spring of 1642, “‘thousands of freeholders’” showed up and protested their exclusion from the meeting.12 During the summer of 1642, the royalist gentry began to exclude landowning yeoman from grand juries on which they had historically sat.13
The greater gentry and nobles hated the new economic power of the middling people, and their claims to “social esteem and political rights” in both state and church. They wanted, in fact, what their French counterparts had — a guarantee of their privileges. The Puritans, well aware of this, denounced the misery of the French peasantry as villeinage and slavery.14
The 1640s certainly saw a sharp increase in many forms of protest, some new, some old. In the case of agrarian protest there was a significant increase in crowd actions against enclosure — mainly the continuation of earlier disputes in which commoners took advantage of political breakdown to resume earlier opposition. This was notably so in those areas of forest and fen which had experienced recent Crown-sponsored large-scale enclosure.15
Early modern rural England was a site of marked social change, conflict and inequality.”16 One purpose for the demand to abolish episcopacy was to eliminate tithes, particularly oppressive to the rural population.
…though townsmen generally tended to get off lightly, the burden of tithes fell disproportionately on yeomen and farmers. Furthermore, since many tithes went into the pockets of lay landowners who had impropriated them, this amounted to a tax for support of the nobility and gentry.17
The revolution gave the peasantry opportunities to fight back. By 1642 rural tenants were withholding rents. In part this was due to high taxes to pay for the war, and to losses suffered from billeted or pillaging soldiers. But the landlords’ authority was weakened during the war, and tenants took the opportunity to escape the higher rents imposed on them in recent years. Many paid only what they wished, or stopped paying altogether. Tenants abandoned their leases for cheaper ones, and new tenants could only be found at much reduced rents, if at all.18 In the Commons debate over the Lords’ peace proposals to the king at the end of December, 1642, Sir Simonds D’Ewes, now a Peace party opponent of taxation, sarcastically suggested they should pass an ordinance “to compel tenants to pay their rents.”19
Copyhold tenure was thus a burning issue in the countryside. In addition to rack rents, landlords in many places had been attempting to deny peasant families the right of inheritance to their lands, which they had often held for generations. Others imposed fines at higher levels, and/or at the landlord’s pleasure, rather than the customary duties on the death of the head of household.
A [Leveller] manifesto of 1648, claiming to speak for “many thousands” in London and the counties round about, demanded “that the ancient and almost antiquated badge of slavery, viz. all base tenures by copies, oaths of fealty, homage, fines at the will of the lord, etc…may be taken away; and to that end…all possessors of lands so holden may purchase themselves freeholders… 20
The peasants’ hostility to landlords as a result made recruitment to the Cavalier army extremely difficult in many areas. “Royalist and parliamentarian observers agreed that during the summer of 1642 the commoners of Yorkshire remained neutral or opposed to the king’s party.”21 Peasants in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the north of England, parts of Somerset in the southwest, and Cheshire and Lancashire in the northwest, refused to follow their landlords in the royalist cause, and enrolled in the parliamentary army.22 In Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire counties stretching north of London, armed peasants opened or destroyed sluices installed to drain the Fens, which had deprived them of the larger share of the commons land,23 and the fish and waterfowl they supplemented their diets with.24 “The inhabitants of Epworth threw down the banks, filled in ditches, destroyed crops and put their cattle back on the whole of their old commons, driving off the settlers, demolishing their houses and burning their ploughs.”25
Killing deer for food in the king’s protected deer park southwest of London had already begun in September 1641.26 It was copied elsewhere, including by Parliament’s soldiers later on.27 In Essex and Suffolk to the east of London, there were antiroyalist riots in mid-1642 which plundered gentlemen’s manors, pulled down fences, and killed deer and farm animals.28
…the attacks represented the pre-existing depth of a political popular culture to whose values of anti-popery and protestant patriotism Parliament was able to appeal. It was this more general fear of the threat posed to religious and political liberties that mobilized the crowds in the summer of 1642. Thus, a classed reading of…a political crisis which brought mass unemployment helps to explain the presence of clothworkers in the attacks…29
The peasants also destroyed records and estate documents relating to rents, payments, fines, etc.30 These areas were in the main strongly Puritan.31
Even in many areas where the people rose to fight they were unable to do so for lack of weapons and leaders — few gentry would lead them. “In March 1643 multitudes came to Cambridge to serve parliament but they were thanked and sent away again…”32 Many gentry were, of course, against raising the peasantry, craftsmen, and poor to battle for fear they’d be unable to put the genie back in the bottle. They advocated limited and defensive strategies, or neutrality, and in a few places signed treaties with the local royalist gentry.33
In the outlying industrial areas it was the craftspeople and independent farmers, yeomen large and small, who were the most ardent parliamentarians.
They were part-farmers and part-manufacturers, not wholly dependent on the gentry, nor wholly dependent on the merchants or larger manufacturers; men not rich, nor yet impoverished, independent in their economic life and in their opinions. The clothiers of Halifax and Bradford, the weavers of the Manchester area, the metal-workers of the Birmingham district, exhibited a close resemblance in their attitudes and actions during the civil war.34
Popular support for Parliament in the Midlands included important parts of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and Staffordshire.35 In many parts of the country during 1642-1643, crowds of armed townsmen and/or peasants ran off royalists attempting to raise troops or seize local stores of weapons and gunpowder. They were sometimes led by a parliamentary gentleman, but more often acted on their own initiative. Where local authorities sided with the “great men” the people revolted against them as well. Several nobles and high gentry were arrested and sent to London as prisoners.36 Houses of the wealthy were sacked, especially in cloth manufacturing areas and most violently in the Eastern counties. Trained bands either refused to discourage the insurrections or, more often, joined them.37 “The popular movement of resistance to the royalists was decisive in gaining parliament time in which to gather forces and mobilize resources to encounter the king’s army, and territory in which to maneuver.”38 In this way the middling people of town and country, acting as watchdogs and enforcers, suppressed royalist activities and secured large areas and substantial weaponry for Parliament.
Anyone who declared for the king instantly lost all influence with the populace in these areas, who rightly feared for their property and liberties at the hands of the Cavaliers. But the alliance between Parliament and the people was an uneasy one, as neither fully trusted the other. The latter’s power could make or break any leader, and they sometimes went further than the former, forced to accept them, liked.39 “The fact that some of the ruling class took the side of the people rather than of their own class was welcome and gratifying, if somewhat suspect.”40 Thus, to a considerable extent, middling people, acting out of fear and hostility to the ruling aristocracy, took the opportunity to settle accounts with them.
The king relied on feudal ties for recruits, but landlords who responded to the king were often no longer able to command much loyalty from their cash-paying rural tenants. The peasants’ grievances made it difficult to enlist them as troops on the king’s behalf.41 In much of the country the traditional loyalty and deferential respect of the tenantry had been undermined by high rents and enclosures. By 1640, “deference and obedience were no longer sufficient to command popular allegiance.”42 Large numbers of peasants thus either refused any support to the royalists, or actively supported Parliament. Tenants of royalist landlords requested the government to order that their rents be paid to London “‘to save us harmless from our landlords hereafter.’” This began the process of Parliament sequestering royalists’ estates.43
Parliamentary committees in each county took over and administered the estates, collecting rents and fines, leasing, etc., until the land could be sold. In the meantime they stripped them of assets for the benefit of Parliament, being careful to first pay off creditors. Appointees to the commission in charge of sequestration in London included Maurice Thomson, his brother Robert, Pennington’s deputy Randall Mainwaring, Richard Shute, and the “dangerous Deputy,” Daniel Taylor. “Of the commission’s twenty-three citizen members, eight had taken part in the Additional Sea Adventure to Ireland and twelve were later political independents (while three were later political presbyterians).”44 The result was a massive redistribution of wealth from the aristocracy to the business class, as Parliament gave contracts to meet the needs of the war.45
After the war, through a complicated process called compounding or composition, former landlords (but not bishops or churches) were given the opportunity to buy back their lands. They were required to forfeit a chunk of acreage, and had to pay whatever punitive prices and fines were imposed. Many royalist aristocrats did not have the cash to do so, and their lands were sold to whoever did, often for speculation. In either case, the customary tenants who worked the land by copyhold had no recourse if they were thrown out by the old or new owners. This helped accelerate the amalgamation of land into large estates, and the conversion to purely capitalist farming.46
In September 1642, Charles began to confiscate the arms of those trained bandsmen who appeared at musters he himself had ordered.47 “…a cavalier confessed: ‘our Maxime is not to trust the trained bands, but we will make the best use of them we can, and that is of their arms.’”48 Midlands gentry and commoners alike opposed giving up their weaponry to the king because it would leave their areas defenseless. “The decision to disarm the trained bands was disastrous for the king’s reputation. … The arbitrary way the king seized men’s arms belied all his protestations of constitutionalism.”49 The action was denounced as tyrannical by Parliament and its supporters.50
The king claimed to be fighting for the Protestant religion, but he and his party were associated in the popular mind with papists,51 for good reason. Flouting his own previous proclamations, at the end of September 1642 Charles ordered that armed Catholics be enrolled in his army.52 Even some of the king’s partisans were shocked by this move.53 “There are no exact figures of the numbers of catholics who fought for Charles but of the 500 officers who fell in his cause during the Civil War, 198 were catholic.”54 The welding together, if any was needed, of royalism with popery was permanently fixed with the arrival in England, between September 1643 and June 1644, of some 20,000 Irish Catholics to fight for the king.55
The court believed all Puritans to be parliamentarians, and parliamentarians believed all Catholics to be royalists. The armies of each attacked and plundered the homes of the other’s wealthy supporters, although some parliamentary officers attempted to curb this.56 In predominantly royalist areas, Puritans were subject to attack by mobs, as well as soldiers, causing them to seek safety in Parliament’s garrison towns, or enroll in the Parliamentary army.57 Catholics, perennially suspected, faced similar threats in some Puritan areas. Puritans in the army fought for the cause, unlike many of the poor who were only interested in the money and plunder.58
Nobles who responded to the king’s appeal called, in good feudal fashion, on their tenants, kinsman, servants, neighboring gentry, their tenants, and any others in their vicinity that they might influence. Semifeudal gentry in outlying regions in the north and Wales defended the old order all the more fiercely as their positions were undermined.
Once money became the measure of all things their local omnipotence would be ended. For the same reason it was perfectly logical for some at least of the tenants of this type of old-fashioned landlord to fight against the introduction of market rents.59
Still, many copyholders were blackmailed into fighting for the royalists, as crossing their landlords meant running the risk their leases might not be renewed or the rents increased. “Fear and force lay in the background, if loyalty and deference failed.”60 The Earl of Derby, Lord Lieutenant, used his position to overawe men on the king’s behalf. “Derby deftly confiscated most of the county magazines and then marched bandsmen of Cheshire, Lancashire and North Wales to Shrewsbury to join the royal army.”61 Other nobles provided money, horses, men, and equipment.
Parliamentarians generally wanted a wider franchise, and royalists a narrower one. This reflected both sides’ desire to control social policy, especially taxation. All sides were aware that the middling classes were overtaxed, and the landlords undertaxed.62 The former looked to Parliament for redress of this grievance, knowing full well they would not receive any from the royalists. The issue would become a part of the Levellers’ political arsenal after the war.63
Social trends are hardly ever absolute, and “it is true there were many yeomen and handicraftsmen in the king ranks,”64 just as there were upper class aristocrats, and even a very few Catholics,65 who backed Parliament. Exactly how many of the middling sort voluntarily joined Charles cannot be determined, but the king’s army was initially filled by rural tenants from the north and west, Cornwall and Wales, many of whom willingly or unthinkingly followed their landlords. This does not, however, change the qualitative class nature represented on either side, and their corresponding political programs, as not a few contemporaries noted.66 “At the start of the war popular support was crucial to the parliamentarians’ strength.”67 As we have seen, it was the urban middling people who were Parliament’s chief adherents at the outbreak.68 In the windup for war, the discrepancies between the intentions of the parliamentarian leadership, and the demands of their petty bourgeois supporters, were tacitly submerged.
The polarization that drove people of all social classes to take sides, based on what they perceived to be their interests, need not obscure the fact that a majority of the gentry and peasantry, including Catholics, opted to remain defensively neutral if they could.69 They often couldn’t: preference for a neutral stance by peasants or gentry was rendered moot when the troops of one side or the other occupied their areas. This argument, however, was grossly overstated by some Revisionist historians:
Indeed so great has been the stress on neutrals and neutralism and on the general reluctance to take sides and to begin fighting at all in 1642, that we are in danger of having to explain how a mere handful of obstinate or fanatical extremists on each side contrived to drag the country down into the abyss of Civil War.70
The privations imposed on the agricultural population by the several armies (including the Scots’), forced to live off the land as they criss-crossed England, would become increasingly devastating as the war dragged on.71 Peasants often received little if any compensation for the produce carried off by hungry soldiers, sometimes in the form of well-meaning but worthless IOUs from parliamentarians. The resentment of “free quarter” would become clamorous after the end of the first civil war, when the Presbyterian Parliament, for political reasons, refused to pay the New Model Army unless it disbanded; and the soldiers refused to disband unless they were paid, and their political demands satisfied.72 The hard political core of the Army ranks came from those same middling yeomen and artisans,73 many of them recruited by Cromwell himself.
1 “The Condition of England, Part I The Eighteenth Century”
2 Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 41
3 Hill, Century, 21; Rollison, “The Specter of the Commonalty,” 242, 249-250
4 Hill, Reformation, 70
5 James, “The Political Importance of the Tithes Controversy,” 6
6 Fletcher, Outbreak, 296
7 Manning, English People, 254; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 11
8 Tyacke, “Revolutionary Puritanism,” 764-766; Manning, English People, 255
9 Hill, World, 33; Como, “Secret Printing,” 63; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 73-74
10 Rollison, “The Specter of the Commonalty,” 250. This was the Puritan theologian and preacher John Corbet (1620-1680), not to be confused with the Scottish anti-presbyterian minister of the same name (1603–1641), or Sir John Corbet (1594-1662), MP in the Long Parliament.
11 Cressy, England on Edge, 74-75
12 Manning, English People, 257; Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 254
13 Manning, English People, 257
14 Manning, English People, 255-256; Hill, Reformation, 133-134
15 Walter, “the English Revolution Revisited,” 177
16 Blomley, “Making Private Property,” 1
17 Manning, “The Godly People,” 109
18 Manning, English People, 212-215
19 Gardiner, Great Civil War Vol. I, 92
20 Manning, English People, 316
21 Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 258
22 Manning, English People, 203-206
23 Manning, English People, 206-207; Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 259-260
24 Sharp, “The Place of the People in the English Revolution,” 107
25 Manning, English People, 206; Hill, Reformation, 134
26 Manning, English People, 207-210
27 Manning, English People, 210-212
28 Manning, English People, 189-196, 209-210
29 Walter, “the English Revolution Revisited,” 178
30 Manning, English People, 205-206
31 Manning, English People, 266
32 Manning, English People, 244
33 Manning, English People, 242-243; Hill, Reformation, 133-134
34 Manning, English People, 235
35 Manning, English People, 221-222
36 Manning, English People, 196-197
37 Manning, English People, 184-196
38 Manning, English People, 198
39 Manning, English People, 197-199
40 Manning, English People, 201
41 Manning, English People, 202-203
42 Walter, “the English Revolution Revisited” 178
43 Manning, English People, 203; “March 1643: An Ordinance for sequestring (sic) notorious Delinquents Estates,” Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp106-117 Accessed May 23, 2017
44 Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 435
45 Christopher Hill, “The Agrarian Legislation of the Revolution,” in Puritanism and Revolution (London: Pimlico, 1958, 2001), 141, 146; “Land in the English Revolution,” 34-35
46 Hill, “The Agrarian Legislation of the Revolution,” 170-171; “Land in the English Revolution,” 35-36; Century, 125-126; Reformation, 148-149; “February 1647: An Ordinance for establishing Commissioners of Lords and Commons to sit at Goldsmith Hall to Compound with Delinquents…,” Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660, British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp914-915 Accessed June 5, 2017
47 Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 268; Fletcher, Outbreak, 327
48 Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 267
49 Fletcher, Outbreak, 327-328; Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 267
50 Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 69
51 Manning, English People, 181
52 Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 270-271; Fletcher, Outbreak, 332-333; “The King’s Order for Papists to provide Arms,” Rushworth Historical Collections: October 1642, British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/rushworth-papers/vol5/pp25-52#h2-0010 Accessed January 14, 2020
53 Gardiner, Great Civil War Vol. I, 29; Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 259; Clifton, “The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution,” 25. Different sources are given in the similar essay by Robin Clifton, “Fear of Popery,” in The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Education, 1973), 145 fn. 3
54 Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 271. See the study in Lindley, “The Part Played by the Catholics,” which found the majority of English Catholic gentry remained neutral during the war.
55 Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 272
56 Manning, English People, 183-184; “The Godly People,” 93; Fletcher, Outbreak, 328
57 Manning, “The Godly People,” 94
58 Manning, “The Godly People,” 95-99
59 Hill, “Land in the English Revolution,” 30-31
60 Manning, English People, 254
61 Malcolm, “A King in Search of Soldiers,” 268; Christopher Hill, “Puritans and ‘the Dark Corners of the Land,’” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 13 (1963): 101, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3678730 Accessed April 29, 2020. Reprinted in Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in 17th-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, 1991)
62 Manning, English People, 257-258
63 Manning, “The Godly People,” 108-109
64 Manning, English People, 264
65 Lindley, “The Part Played by the Catholics,” 173-174
66 Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 11-13
67 Fletcher, Outbreak, 417
68 Brian Manning, “Introduction,” The English People and the English Revolution (London: Bookmarks, July 1991), 32-37; Hill, “Parliament and People in 17th-Century England,” 101-102; Christopher Hill, “Parliament and People in Seventeenth-Century England - A Rejoinder,” Past & Present, no. 98 (February, 1983): 156 and fn. 3, http://www.jstor.org/stable/650692 Accessed 15 December 2016
69 Manning, English People, 181, 247; Brailsford, The Levellers, 13; Hill, Century, 102; Lindley, “The Part Played by the Catholics,” 174-175
70 G. E. Aylmer, “Presidential Address: Collective Mentalities in Mid Seventeenth-Century England: IV. Cross Currents: Neutrals, Trimmers and Others,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 39 (1989): 1, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3678975 Accessed June 16, 2019
71 Brailsford, The Levellers, 166-167
72 Brailsford, The Levellers, 147, 173-175, 257; Hill, 1640, 62-64; Century, 96; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, 79, 81
73 Brailsford, The Levellers, 146-147