• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1458 0

of a regime hostile to the common rights of local people, taking an aggressive view of the limits of the forest. In 1642, with the legal basis of those policies removed, local people went into the forest to kill deer. Threatened by the keeper of the forest, they joked that ‘if they complained of offenders, to complain of a good store of them, that if they went to prison they might be merry together’.71 ‘Riot’, here, was a kind of festive expression of a new, but quite specific liberty, and an adjunct to litigation. It seems clear that in breaking open deer parks, and killing deer, there was something more than the politics of hunger at work: opportunities were being taken up. At Corse Lawn, Gloucestershire, in October 1642, 600 deer were not eaten, but rather slaughtered in ‘a riotous, devilish way’. Deer hunting was central to ideals of gentility, and venison was widely used as a gift, circulating not in markets but as tokens of mutual respect and honour. The massacre of the deer at Corse Lawn was a direct, festive transgression of the ideals of gentility, a slap in the face for the aristocratic landlord, the Earl of Middlesex. His unpopular administration of the forest during the 1630s had made use of Star Chamber and was regarded locally as unjust, ignoble and unneighbourly. The massacre of his deer, a kind of desecration, was a political act, a response to the change of the times.72 A leading figure in the renewed attacks on enclosures on Berkhamsted Common in Hertfordshire in 1641 and 1642 was William Edlyn. He was also the first man in the neighbouring settlements of Berkhamsted, Great Gaddesden and Northchurch to make a voluntary contribution to support the Scottish army when it joined the parliamentary alliance in January 1644. Attacks on Wortley Park, in Yorkshire, seem also to have a partisan context.73

Such engagements with the national crisis, like the examples of gentry feuding, can appear instrumental or tactical, but they might not be so different, in their way, from Pym and Bedford’s deployment of the popish plot as a means of securing the bridge appointments to major offices of state in early 1641. They were certainly part of a longer tradition of riot, petition and demonstration, in which supplicants represented their grievances in terms of the larger ideals of government, or larger concerns of the nation’s rulers. Grain rioters, and those seeking poor relief or redress of some other material grievances, had demonstrated this capacity to take advantage of the rhetoric of their governors over previous generations, trying to persuade or embarrass them into acting on their behalf. This might be said too of the London petitions of the previous winter, or of City interests in the rest of the decade.74 It is unlikely that the allegiance of many people was simply determined by the preferences of their social superiors: that the gentry were more powerful than their neighbours did not mean that they were all-powerful. Fear of this popular agency – termed riot and disorder by hostile contemporaries – fed into the decisions about allegiance. Pamphleteers were quick to publicize these events, placing them in the context of a longer history of peasant insurrection stretching back to the Peasants” Revolt of 1381. There is plenty of evidence from around the country that this fear played well for the royalists.75

Drawing a line between instrumental and sincere appeal to these issues is difficult of course, and misses a more fundamental point – that the political argument was available throughout the provinces and down the social scale, and that creative use could be made of this opportunity. Local and popular allegiance may have had an impact on the military geography of the war then, at least in limiting what activists might achieve. Much of the war was fought in these local arenas: a series of essentially local struggles for control of garrisons and territory. This was an ongoing process as war, and politics, moved on. Mobilizations entailed continuous coalition-building.

As political negotiation foundered and the