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By Root 1111 0

disputes in Waltham and Windsor extended into 1643 and there were other disputes in Duffield, Derbyshire, and in Neroche and Frome Selwood in Somerset. Forest rights were not at issue in the national dispute – attacks on prerogative courts had rendered forest jurisdictions relatively toothless, but the policy of enclosure and improvement, although contested, was not at issue between King and Parliament. John Pym, for example, had been an agent of crown forest policy in the south-west.31

The same was true in the Fens, where parliamentary policy soon came to favour agricultural improvement over established common rights and where Cromwell was no more a champion of the commoners than were the Earl of Manchester or Charles I. But in 1645 sluices were opened on the Isle of Axholme and the houses of French and Dutch settlers attacked. Here the action was explicitly linked to the interruption of effective legal authority. Rioters contemptuously dismissed a Lords order of 10 December 1645 calling for an end to the riots, saying ‘they did not care a fart for the order which was made by the Lords and published in the Churches’, insisting they would go on with their work. These events were a prelude to a sustained attack on the enclosures in the Isle. Elsewhere in the Fens rioting was more limited, but at Whittlesey and Ramsay commoners were clearly aware that an opportunity had come their way.32

Such events were made emblematic of more general problems, of course. All sides sought to mobilize opinion behind their projects, but were also quick to denounce the dangers being courted when their opponents did so. In Kent in 1643, for example, two blacksmiths were at the head of twenty men plundering the house of a parliamentarian gentleman. Parry the Smith was reported as saying, ‘we have sped well here. Let us go to Hadlow and Peckham and plunder there, for they are rich rogues, and so we will go away into the woods’. Smale objected: ‘But we must plunder none but Roundheads’, eliciting a ‘great oath’ from Smith and the riposte that ‘We will make every man a Roundhead that hath anything to lose. This is the time we look for’.33 Royalists in Kent could not be complacent about these attempts to mobilize the men without shirts.

In fact, much of what we know about demonstrations against enclosures confirms that they were disciplined, a form of communal politics familiar from before the war. They were demonstrative – summoned and processing to the accompaniment of drums and carrying arms which were, on the whole, not used against people. They represented a statement of intent. The published version of the demands of the Dorset clubmen made similar reference to the force which underlay the movement – but the point was usually forceful demonstration rather than planned violence.34 The violence which did occur was targeted primarily against property, not persons, and that against persons was not indiscriminate. Similarly, the organization was sophisticated – for example, those throwing down enclosures gathered in groups of two, since that evaded the legal definition of a riot. And they were tactically astute. In Gillingham the rioters apparently aimed at depriving the Earl of Elgin of all profits from the forest, by threats, backed up ‘where necessary’ with assault, destruction of property and seizure of cattle for ransom. Unpleasant this undoubtedly was, but it was not random or apolitical.35 It was nonetheless true that civil war was making all forms of politics potentially more lethal: those opposing the rioters during the 1640s seem more often to have been armed, and that contributed to an escalation of the violence.36

Clubmen evidently mobilized in ways that drew upon these traditions of popular protest, and those forms of protest clearly persisted. In that sense, clubman leaders were trying to inflect a more traditional form of communal demonstration as a contribution to the politics of the civil war. Whatever their actual politics, in relation to the civil war and more immediate local issues, the clubmen were an unwelcome addition to