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By Root 1281 0

was a political body, whose institutions, obligations and membership might be contested. Community politics were not necessarily harmonious, and values such as tradition and deference might be means to attack those in power as well as to cow those without it. Certainly, local communities in early modern England were not the happy organic bodies of later nostalgic myth. New forms of authority, and new languages of politics, provided new kinds of local political order, and the resistance to these new orders drew on tradition and the new opportunities for the pursuit of local grievances thrown up by the war. Clubmen, excise rioters and attacks on committeemen were print phenomena too, publicized for a national audience. Others engaged with the national political scene more opportunistically – in the fen and forest disturbances, for example. But even here the disputes were not separate from, or unaware of, national politics, and they too might be played out for a national audience.

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Close to the centre of these communal politics was the self-governing parish, which was under threat. The spiritual role of the parish was also threatened by the development of other forms of communion and by the loud polemical battle over the identity of English Protestantism. In some respects the ties of community might blunt the edge of religious zeal so that, for example, the abstract threat of popery was not always identified closely with actual Catholics living near by. Similarly, a frequent complaint of the godly was that the ties of neighbourliness blinded people to the dangers of religious error: that a kind of ‘popular pelagianism’ existed, in which it was thought that agreeable fellows would be saved, that a good neighbour must be a good Christian. Worse, it was said, countrymen mistook forms of idleness and sin for a virtuous good fellowship. All this said, however, it is very striking that the embrace of neighbourliness and community was provisional. Scolding women, disobedient servants, and the disreputable or vagrant poor – those who fell outside the boundaries of locally acceptable behaviour – could expect little charity or fellowship.56

On the other hand, successive attempts at purgation had corroded the legitimacy of some of the institutions through which Christian community had previously been fostered, notably the parish as a unified religious body. Partisan religious contest robbed the church, or particular incumbents, of the claim legitimately to embody the local Christian community. Ministers were ejected at the petition of their parishioners; others intruded into their places might face ‘much opposition from disaffected persons’.57 This was at the heart of the controversy over Independency, of course, and differences about the essence, and expression, of Christian community had been expressed through ejections of scandalous ministers and iconoclasm. County committees were frequently divided over what should replace bishops and parishes – to what extent membership of a congregation should be voluntary or geographically determined.58 The counterpart to that, of course, was the extent to which the parish remained a spiritual community. Church courts, previously reasonably attractive institutions through which to police local spiritual life, had ceased to function in 1642.59

This was not simply a theoretical question: at the same time that these established forms were disrupted, divisive attempts at reformation and purgation were taking place across England. The history of Suffolk was once written as an exemplification of the view that English counties were in general autonomous gentry-led political communities, and that national administrative initiatives were an unwelcome and intermittently effective intrusion. But Suffolk had seen many ejections of scandalous ministers under the authority of a parliamentary committee, and had shared in William Dowsing’s iconoclasm during 1643 and 1644. These attempts at purification of the Christian community were of much more than local significance: in each case the local was understood