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churchwarden ‘about the beginning of the late troubles’. It was a replacement for one taken by soldiers and was itself destroyed. Smith claimed he had counselled against ordering a replacement, but had been overruled by the minister, Mr Jewell, ‘one not well-affected to the proceedings of the parliament’.57 Richard Harrymon, a butcher from Beverley, was known five years after the war as ‘a notorious delinquent who has been in actual arms against the parliament and a great plunderer of the goods of divers persons that were well-affected’. Disputes over actions during the war might persist for years: men were prosecuted for taking horses seven or eight years later, and such law suits could be a considerable expense.58 After the war, ordinances excluded malignants from office, and this gave scope to those like the ‘well-affected inhabitants’ of St Ives, Cornwall, to invoke central authorities against local officeholders. They claimed to lie ‘under a heavy burden and great oppression by reason of the insolency of these magistrates who now bear office… who for the most part were in actual rebellion against the parliament’.59

Larger principles could be made relevant to particular issues as easily in the Lincolnshire fens or the forests of the West Country as by politicians in Parliament. Iconoclasm offered a practical means of demonstrating the progress of reformation, but also threatened the triumph of ignorant zeal; the clubmen mobilized in order to mediate the new realities with more established institutions of local politics. Both had significance in every village and town, and both were almost immediately contested print phenomena. Pamphlets were an adjunct to these campaigns, and a response to these practical problems, not a separate world.

Print contributed to the mobilizations which rendered institutional politics unstable and, feeding off itself, fostered a lush and confusing world of comment and polemic. In that world there was an intertwining political and cultural crisis with implications for the practical order of local communities. And this was an accelerating problem because the cacophony of opinion fostered tremendous intellectual creativity which in turn became the basis for further practical political mobilization. Presbyterians, religious independents, political mavericks, astrologers, witch-hunters and natural philosophers all found a voice in a freer intellectual environment – robbed of its commonsensical certainties and the practical means to choke off dangerous public debate. At the same time it placed a premium on establishing fundamental truths. Sceptical commentators forced Hopkins and Stearne to defend themselves; Hartlib encouraged communication among natural philosophers in order to speed up the improvement of human understanding; innumerable authors theorized on the nature of the Christian community. Those with a solution to peddle could look to the world of print, and to support from the churches, the Covenanters, Parliament, and the City, or from wider publics. The excitement is impossible to separate from the trauma and anxiety from which it resulted, and to which it contributed.

In the months before and after Naseby, clubmen movements had creatively interpreted traditional forms of authority in differing though related ways, while others had pursued old material grievances or grudges against the committeemen. In East Anglia, in the summer of the New Model’s victories, witches were purged from local communities in unprecedented numbers. By the end of the war Samuel Hartlib thought he could see the opportunity to promote his vision of universal reform through practical proposals leading towards full reformation. Those with more-concrete constitutional and religious demands were by then sharpening their quills, or rather their moveable type. For it was not just the content of the argument that rendered politics unstable; it was the use of these ideas to mobilize opinion among competing and overlapping publics.

Edwards, Prynne, Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton inhabited a world in which arguments