God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [251]
These national arguments were refracted through the prism of local concerns for the regulation of religious and civil life. The clubmen were not anti-government, or apolitical, but they were focused on immediate local realities. They have been dismissed as apathetic and untouched by the great issues of the war, or celebrated as the moderating voice of the local community. In general, however, they were not turning their backs on the war and its practical needs, nor on the issues: they were clearly engaged with national politics at the same time that they sought local regulation of the demands of the war. Their demands were publicized in print, as were denunciations of them by their opponents. Their local campaigns were prompted by, and fed back into, developments in national politics.26
These movements were a creative adaptation of traditions of self-government at the King’s command, an attempt to accommodate new realities, and pressing political concerns. They combined formal and informal aspects of village authority – patterns of government and of collective action. It is quite likely that they wanted an end to war, armies and taxes, but they did not say so: these local initiatives sought an accommodation with national politics, not immunity from them.
Although there is hardly any evidence about the identity of individual clubmen, their habits and activities in Dorset and Wiltshire bore close resemblance to those of enclosure rioters. In April 1643 men from Mere in Wiltshire had issued a proclamation summoning the inhabitants to assemble at White Hill on market day. From there they were to march, with drums and muskets, to throw down enclosures in the forests. Over the next couple of months groups of up to 300 assembled to do this work – a forceful, organized demonstration akin to the later clubman mobilization, rather than a spontaneous riot indiscriminate in its targets. Those rioters who can be identified in these years (not many of the total number involved) come from the ranks of artisans and smallholders, like those who can be identified among the clubmen.27 The connections were even closer in May 1645, when men from Gillingham and Motcombe, en route for a general rendezvous of clubmen near Shaftesbury, tore up hedges and other enclosures. On the way home they did the same, beating a servant of Thomas Brunker (agent to the Earl of Elgin, a major local encloser) and leaving him for dead. As with many other civil war mobilizations, then, the clubmen movement was probably a coalition, and it afforded opportunities to pursue other agendas. Brunker himself said as much: ‘The club army which I feared would put boldness into them concerning our forest business, hath brought them to this insolency, before they stood in some awe of commanders and soldiers, now they respect no man nor will give any obedience to any but contemn all superiors whatsoever and do what they please’.28 The clubman leaders, in fact, may have been rather unusual figures.29
As in the first two years of the Long Parliament the war years provided opportunities for those with other grievances – these were political issues, for sure, but not very directly related to the partisan political issues over which the war was being fought. Over the previous three years the absence of effective quarter sessions and assizes had made it difficult to pursue and punish rioters in the forests of Dorset and Wiltshire.30 The interruption of court activity elsewhere offered similar opportunities to reopen local disputes over resources – in fens and forests those seeking to assert traditional common rights against improvers and enclosers had another chance to stake their claims. The