• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

In Somerset the clubmen were drawn from among the ranks of the yeomanry, and the most significant leader was of a status just below that of the gentry. Four leading figures in the Shropshire movement, who can be tentatively identified, were village notables and a minor clergyman. In Herefordshire the leadership seems to have come from among the ranks of the village worthies, too.12 In a number of other cases, however, gentlemen and clergy joined the movements, and that may have changed their aims. Nonetheless, the clubman associations bear testimony to the traditions of village self-government that remained very important during the 1640s. They expressed their politics in demonstrative forms which were also familiar from a longer tradition. The Somerset men wore ribbons calling for peace and truth, and everywhere they generated petitions, delegations and declarations. In the south-west they often convened at the sites of ancient hill forts, places used for other such communal gatherings.13 It may be, in fact, that the clubman associations took root most strongly where gentry influence was weak – in areas with extensive smallholdings and a correspondingly more limited gentry presence – since when a gentry leadership existed these energies were likely to be channelled in other directions.14 There is some evidence of mutual awareness – the Somerset clubmen clearly acted in the light of what had happened to their fellows in Dorset, for example; there were connections between the Herefordshire and Shropshire movements, and between the events in Shropshire and rumours of a rising in Monmouthshire.15

A central concern of the surviving manifestos seems to have been the regulation of soldiers” behaviour and of garrisons. In Herefordshire the intention was to ‘have the governor and soldiers out of [the garrison at Hereford]’ but in Wiltshire the demand was more limited: that each side reduce the number of garrisons, and that those which were really necessary be maintained at local charge and put into the hands of ‘the… county’, unless command was transferred by order of both King and Parliament.16 In fact the Herefordshire demands seem more anti-war than the more formal positions stated elsewhere, but it might be significant that they are often reported from a letter from a semi-hostile observer, Colonel Massey, the parliamentary governor of Gloucester. In fact, it might be that clubmen were strong where military command was weak – where there was no authority with which to negotiate the demands of war.17

In Dorset and Sussex, where fairly full manifestos survive, clubmen do not seem to have been against formal taxation either.18 The Dorset association was mobilized to ‘preserve ourselves from plunder and all other unlawful violence’. This was to be done through local men of note: ‘the ablest men for wisdom, valour, and estate, inhabitants of the same’ were to be appointed for each town, tithing, parish and great hamlet. They would set watches, disarm soldiers caught ‘plundering or doing any other unlawful violence’. Searches would be undertaken only by local officeholders – the constables and tithingmen. In Sussex too a principal complaint, and motive for the movement, was that ‘by free quarter and plunder of soldiers our purses have been exhausted’. They also complained of

insufferable, insolent, arbitrary power that hath been used amongst us, contrary to all our ancient known laws, or ordinances of parliament… by some particular persons stepped into authority who have delegated their power to men of sordid condition whose wills have been laws and commands over our bodies and estates.

But this was not opposition to formal, warranted exactions. They distinguished between known ancient laws and ordinances, but the complaint was about completely unwarranted and arbitrary actions – they did not denounce constitutional innovation, but lawlessness, and they did not denounce the cost of the armies, but its unregulated impact. In Dorset the quid pro quo of local