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found considerable influence, they often sought to present themselves in ways that conformed to convention – the relative independence of these women did not necessarily lead them to call for, or enact, radical action or social transformation. Within the Independent churches men often continued to claim a spiritual superiority, and the Levellers did not seek to extend the parliamentary franchise to women; their claim was for a spiritual rather than civic equality. For the Levellers, the cornerstone of political decency was the household, and their view of that institution was in many ways conventional. This was more generally true of women’s writing during the period, which claimed a voice for women without, on the whole, repudiating male authority. Much the same has been said of the women who petitioned and demonstrated, notably Elizabeth Lilburne, wife of John. Women active in print, and politics more widely, often worked for ‘less spectacular, all-consuming goals, such as sustaining businesses, households, and families’.82

John Taylor famously claimed that the world was being turned upside down and many of his readers may have believed him. We know that there were even some people who actually did want to see the world turned upside down. There is also little doubt about the practical disruption of the routines of local life: the absence of quarter sessions and assizes, the absence of established governors, the disruptions caused by tax demands and troop movements. In many ways, however, the routines of social life survived. In 1645 clubmen movements were to claim a voice for the rural middling sort, and even some of their poor neighbours, but in a respectable political idiom. The same was true of many of the women who emerged into public view, and may have been true of most men too. Established habits survived in a more profound sense too: in the persistence of familiar languages and metaphors of political life. Cheap print is full of the same stock of ideas which had served to make sense of the world before 1642: that no new languages had been found which could deal with the new circumstances was in fact an important part of the problem. Honour codes had emerged and survived, albeit under strain; order had been imposed, more or less, on the exaction of resources to support the war. We will never have any quantitative certainty about these things, but it seems likely that the fears were much worse than the reality.

That is not the main, or only, point, however: anxieties were probably of more political significance than realities, and fuelled a desire to protect these fundamental values. Moreover, our difficulty in assessing how seriously to take the fears expressed in these pamphlets mirrors a widespread contemporary uncertainty about the trustworthiness of cheap print. Lack of certainty is no reassurance in the face of anxiety; and anxiety, however unjustified by actual conditions, is a potent political force.

By 1645 there were no signs of a social revolution, despite contemporary fears and satirical attacks on upstart governors. Clearly, military, economic and governmental opportunities arose for relatively humble men and some women. Some eminent men lost their shirts, or their offices. The New Model Army officer corps included men of middling status, but continued to be leavened by the sons of the gentry and aristocracy,83 local government and Parliament were still peopled by the landed classes. There were mechanic preachers, of course, but they were heavily outnumbered by Oxbridge graduates in possession of church livings. Nonetheless there were clearly benefits as well as costs, and Self-Denial was not a confected political issue: fortunes were being made and opportunities taken up as others suffered dreadfully.

15

Remaking the Local Community

The Politics of Parishes at War

Speaking on 9 December 1644 about the previous summer’s campaigns, Oliver Cromwell had warned that ‘the people can bear the war no longer’. His point was that it was important to win the war before that point was reached, although