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By Root 1018 0

the political scene. Colonel Massey had been bemused and suspicious of the Herefordshire clubmen, noting that they had resisted his invitation to ‘join with me in observing the parliament’s commands’.37 Here was the rub – they were mobilizing without warrant, while at the same time claiming to uphold lawful regulation of violence and financial exaction. Their warrant, we might assume, derived from the local community – a claim with rather radical implications, if spelt out clearly, which it was not. Few English people relished the thought of armies being raised at the initiative of village worthies, without gentry or aristocratic leadership. It was a parliamentarian newsbook which expressed the fear that ‘They will have an army without a king, a lord or a gentleman almost’.38 It was also a practical issue, of course – Massey had noted that the Herefordshire clubmen wanted his help, ‘(for they dare trust me), but they will not yet declare themselves for Parliament but they conceive themselves able to keep off both the Parliament’s forces and the King’s also from contribution and quarter in their county’.39 Neutralism was usually interpreted negatively by partisans, as covert sympathy for the other side. In Herefordshire, when the opportunity arose, the royalists crushed the clubmen, and the New Model also dispatched those considered hostile with little ceremony. The parliamentary coverage of the movements varied between relish of their anti-royalism in Herefordshire, and contempt for their illegitimacy in Sussex and Hampshire (both movements that took off in the face of an incipient parliamentary victory). Charles, on the other hand, made reassuring noises, but could not restrain the excesses of his commanders which fed the movements.40

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Derbyshire did not see clubmen, but Sir John Gell, the parliamentary commander in Derby, did meet with a similar expression of communal politics in the summer of 1645, in the form of protests against the excisemen. The excise was a particularly unpopular tax – resented for the fact that it fell on goods regarded as necessities such as meat and salt, and for the fact that it was in the hands of outsiders, not local officeholders. Worse still, those excises that fell on inland commodities were often raised in marketplaces. The arrival of commissioners, and their intrusion into the marketplace, created a potential confrontation, and in that confrontation the poor might have allies among local officeholders.41

In May 1645 the Derby Committee had written to the Speaker of the House of Commons complaining that the excise was a burden on the countrymen and the soldiers.42 This coincided with the organized demonstration encountered in Derby by John Flatchett, an excise sub-commissioner, on 23 May 1645, a market day.43 It may be that the committee invited the protest; they certainly did little to help Flatchett face it down. Flatchett and his men had been at work for five or six days prior to that, but on market day two women went ‘up and down the town’ beating drums and proclaiming that anyone unwilling to pay the excise should join them and beat the commissioners out of town. Beating a drum was a means of summoning people to work – as on the roads in Blackheath in 1640 – as well as the work of communal protest – as in the enclosure riots in Wiltshire in 1645.44 Commissioners in Haverford West had a similar experience the previous September, beaten out of the marketplace by angry women from whom the authorities were apparently unable to protect them. Women were prominent in market disputes because it was they who handled the day-to-day transactions of the marketplace.45

Seeking help from the mayor, the excisemen were told that they had brought it on themselves and could expect little help. Clearly, they could expect no sympathy either. The mayor did, however, take the excisemen to see the Recorder (the city’s legal officer), Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Gell. He said that one of the women beating the drums was married to a soldier and that he dared not interfere for fear of causing a mutiny. In