General elections occurred in mid-19th century Britain for various reasons. Sovereigns died; prime ministers tried to enlarge their xsmajorities in the House of Commons—or to reduce their miniorities; and, of course, the Septennial Act put an outside limit upon the length of time a given Parliament might last. The seven year limit has since been replaced by a five year limit. Also, the death of a sovereign no longer requires the summoning of a new House of Commons. These changes are important. They have often been noted. But they are far less important than certain other changes to which less attention has been given. As a rule today a contest takes place in every constituency on every possible occasion. But at some general elections in the mid-19th century a contest took place in fewer than half of the constituencies.

Presumably, historians have always been vaguely aware that such was the case. But until fairly recently this awareness was indeed rather vague. To my knowledge Professor Gash was the first person to make a systematic count of the numbers of constituencies from which candidates were returned to Parliament without opposition. He made the count for each of the general elections between 1832 and 1847. And then, in a way that suggests his uncertainty what the phenomenon of the uncontested election really meant, when he published his figures in 1953 in his Politics in the Age of Peel, he did so not in the body of the book but in an appendix to which no significant reference was made. Since then others have continued to count. In 1965 Trevor Lloyd published a short piece entitled “Uncontested Seats in British General Elections, 1852-1910.”

Enclosure riots were a prominent manifestation of social tension in England in the 1530's and 1540's. Although enclosures of land for pasturage and tillage had been undertaken since the beginning of English agriculture and did not usually cause social conflict, the rapid increase in population of the sixteenth century pressed hard on the available supply of land. The necessity of increasing the food supply speeded up the process of enclosure. The supplies of corn and meat could not be increased significantly without the year-round use of enclosed and consolidated plots of land, which was inconsistent with communal access to common and waste land and the stubble remaining after the harvest on arable lands. Other causes of friction in agrarian society included the greater fluidity in the land market resulting from the dissolution of the monasteries together with revolutionary methods of exploiting the land. The social relationships existing among great landlords, small holders and tenants could not remain unaffected.

The main purpose of this essay is to analyze the early Tudor enclosure riot as a primitive or pre-political form of social protest. This will necessitate: (1) describing the forms and extent of violence employed; (2) distinguishing between those riots that accompany the Pilgrimage of Grace and the rebellions of 1548-49 and those riots that occur outside of the years of rebellion; and (3) modifying the assumption that the typical enclosure riot was perpetrated by an exasperated peasantry venting their rage upon the hedges and ditches of a commercially-minded, grasping gentry.

Students of British history continue to experience a certain haziness as to what precisely differentiated the Liberals and Conservatives of the mid-Victorian era, a haziness by no means allayed by the plethora of recent publications on the social and organizational structure of the nineteenth-century political party system. In 1832 political reform had constituted an apparently decisive issue—at least Grey and Russell had strongly favored it and Peel and Wellington had forthrightly opposed it. In the mid-1840s the Corn Laws had supplied a comparable cause for division. The Whigs and Radicals had provided Peel with his majority, and two-thirds of the Tories had disavowed their leader and resisted the abolition of the Corn Laws to the last.

Yet neither of these issues would seem to provide a key to the party rivalry of the 1860s. The manner in which Disraeli played the role of political magician in 1867 and pulled the Reform Act of that year out of his hat provides prima facie evidence that political reform as such was not then fundamental to inter-party rivalry. Nor was agricultural protection, the plank that Derby and Disraeli had quietly removed from their party platform a decade-and-a-half earlier. The cause of Italian unification, which had briefly divided parties in 1859 and had spurred Gladstone to cast his political lot once and for all with Palmerston and Russell, had become a fact and was no longer an issue.

The guiding policy of James I, as King of England and the acknowledged leader of Protestant Europe, had been since his accession one of rapprochement with the great Catholic powers. To this end he had determined to marry his son and heir, Prince Charles, first to a Bourbon, and then a Hapsburg princess. James saw himself not as the leader of a bloc, but as a mediator impartial in the interests of peace. To his mind this was the most exalted function of Christian kingship, and it was his hope that Spain and England, the leaders of Christendom's two camps of faith, could preserve the peace of Europe by acting in concert.

Yet James was no dreamer. While courting Spain, he retained hegemony among his fellow Protestants. If he proposed to marry Charles to a Catholic, he had matched his daughter Elizabeth to a Calvinist, the Elector Palatine Frederick V. The latter alliance, however, was to prove to be his fatal mistake, for it sucked him inextricably into the maelstrom of German politics and precipitated not only the gravest foreign crisis of his reign, but a domestic one of ultimately far greater significance as well.

Frederick was the leader of the most important alliance of Protestant powers in Germany, the Evangelical Union. He was also one of the seven electors who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. Three of these were Catholic bishops, three secular Protestants, and the last, the King of Bohemia, had for a hundred years been the emperor-designate himself, to wit, the senior male representative of the House of Hapsburg. It was evident, therefore, that any disturbance in the orderly succession to the Bohemian crown would immediately jeopardize the traditional Hapsburg claim to the imperium, and with it the entire European balance of power.