The author of the Ecclesiastical History of the English People was the greatest historian writing in the West between the later Roman Empire and the twelfth century, when we come to William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, and William of Tyre. Bede's qualities as a historian are well known and widely appreciated, and they need no further exposition here. Instead, we propose to be perverse and to attempt to read Bede's text as though he had been a sociologist or an economic anthropologist: What can we learn from him about the “material conditions” of life in post-Roman and early Anglo-Saxon England, especially about life in the sixth and seventh centuries. This is surely a strange purpose for which to use the Ecclesiastical History. We do so both to show that Bede is so rich and so multifaceted that he is immensely valuable for many purposes besides those of greatest obvious interest to him, and because the sources for social and economic life in those years are so poor that everything available is legitimate grist for the mills of our analysis.

Actually there are two reasons why Bede might have furnished us with the kind of information we are seeking. One is that among classical and early medieval historians there was a considerable tradition of describing the barbarian world, of paying particular attention to the institutions, mores, and customs of the Germanic people or whoever might be the subject of the tale.

Ellington, Huntingdonshire, a village belonging to the estates of the abbot of Ramsey from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries, was a typical East Midlands open-field village of 2,700 acres, with a largely villein population and a mixed farming economy. In these and other respects, Ellington was fairly representative of the rural settlements that housed the vast bulk of European populations throughout the Middle Ages. In the last several decades historians have intensified their efforts to understand the economy and society of these peasant communities, using records of local provenance, primarily the minutes of the semiannual manorial courts. The present article, based upon a larger socioeconomic study of the village community of Ellington from 1280 to 1600, examines the local response of that community to the long-term crises engendered by the arrival of plague in the mid-fourteenth century. Here, we are interested in examining the social underpinnings of village government, specifically, the dynamic complex of community standards or expectations that informed the selection of local leaders in the village.

Thanks to the evidence of court rolls, which begin in the thirteenth century, and other local records uniquely available for the English peasantry, we can study a number of indices of change in peasant communities and thus identify some of the aspirations and choices that constituted one dimension of the “mental world of the non-literate folk.” A study of village government through local leadership is a direct and significant avenue of investigation, first, because the surviving data allow us to identify the village's official leaders, both as individuals and as a group.

The twentieth century has not been kind to the “Whig interpretation of history” with its emphasis on the inexorable triumph of reason and progress. Mortally wounded on the battlefields of Flanders, the liberal certainties that underpinned it were finally laid to rest in the shadow of the Holocaust. With the Whig interpretation died the tradition of seeing nineteenth-century politics in terms of the gradual, but uninterrupted, evolution of democratic principles and institutions. In its place emerged a new orthodoxy that stressed the discontinuities of popular politics during the nineteenth century and argued for three distinct phases of political development. The first, a phase of militant, semirevolutionary politics, coincided with the “industrial revolution” and led up to the defeat of Chartism in the late 1840s. This, it was argued, was followed by a period of stabilization during the mid-Victorian decades characterized by relative prosperity and political docility among the working classes. The final phase began with the economic downturn of the late 1870s and was said to have witnessed the reemergence of working-class militancy and socialist politics and to have culminated in the formation of the class-based Labour party.

This three-phase model emerged in embryonic form between the wars in the agitprop histories of Marxist writers such as Theodore Rothstein and T. A. Jackson and in the more influential works of G. D. H. Cole and the Hammonds. At the same time, many of the reductionist assumptions that underpinned it were simultaneously finding favor within Britain's emergent school of economic historians.

If the sacred back was not always safe from family and associates in the Anglo-Saxon period, still less was it proffered in the Norman and Angevin periods. William I endured the rebellion of one son, William II an accidental death while hunting; Henry I suppressed a baronial rebellion in favor of his feckless brother Robert Curthose; Stephen's reign was characterized by lawlessness and rebellion on behalf of Empress Matilda. Henry II found his whole family actively at war against him, Richard I met his death in a political quarrel in Aquitaine, John was constrained by a rebellion of many barons to issue Magna Carta, Henry III faced constant baronial opposition to his policies, Edward I was compelled to face magnate disquiet from 1297 to 1300, Edward II was deposed (and betrayed by his wife). Edward III alone of the kings discussed in this portion of my article reigned withal quietly (after 1341) and successfully (in terms of familial and baronial opposition, at least until 1376). This is not a happy picture, but it is one that reminds us that family relations were vital to successful kingship and that a king must, if successful, be a canny politician. Unlike Rosenthal, I have chosen to limit my discussion of royal biography for the period 1066–1377 to pointing out the sources that have appeared in print since 1945 and to book-length royal biographies; no longer is it true (in the words of Sidney Painter written in 1949 that prefaced his study of The Reign of King John) that, “when I started to write this volume, there was no adequate account of the reign of a medieval English king.

The newspaper archive is, potentially, the largest untapped source of material concerning the popular belief in witchcraft and magic for the period after the formal cessation of the witchcraft trials in 1736. Several historians have successfully exploited the newspaper archive to examine popular customs in the modern period. However, little use has been made of newspapers to examine magical beliefs in the period defined by the decline of learned belief in witchcraft during the early eighteenth century and the eventual demise of popular belief in witchcraft two centuries later. Writing some fifty years ago, L. F. Newman noted that many witchcraft cases “only appear in the local Press of each district and extensive search is necessary to trace cases.” Newman hoped that his own very brief search would act as a catalyst for more intensive studies. Unfortunately, no one has conducted such work, and our understanding of the extent and influence of witchcraft and magic in the modern period is much the poorer for it. The present discussion, which seeks to begin that task, is based on short searches through various newspapers from around the country, the following up of secondary references, and an extensive, systematic ongoing survey of Somerset newspapers.

As Gustav Henningsen has observed, the newspaper has an important advantage over the folklore record in that it “always shows us the tradition in a concrete social context” and also provides a definite chronological basis. The combined exploration of folkloric sources and newspapers provides great potential for the regional study of witchcraft and magic in defined cultural settings.

The noun “radical” as applied to reformers who held advanced views came into general use in the early nineteenth century. It was at first used in a derogatory sense, denoting, as Walter Scott wrote in 1819, “a set of blackguards.” However, it was taken up by the subjects of the intended abuse and quickly acquired a certain respectability—so much so that by 1830 one middle-class radical was recording that “the term Radical once employed as a name of low reproach, has found its way into high places, and is gone forth as the title of a class who glory in their designation.” Reformers from across the political spectrum were soon being designated “radical,” as can be seen from the application of the term to individuals as diverse in outlook as Lord Durham, Richard Oastler, and Bronterre O'Brien.

This eclecticism has led historians to pronounce the concept useless as a tool of historical analysis. If any tradition at all emerges from studies of English radicalism, then it is a tradition of liberal humanitarianism, a pattern of reform that is nonclass and nonideological. At best “radical” retains its original adjectival power of describing a root-and-branch reformer, an individual who worked to change quite substantially existing economic, political, or social structures by word or deed. But the evident contradictions and discontinuities in the so-called “radical tradition” have made historians balk at making further claims than these. This essay, however, is a provisional attempt to shift the focus away from the personalities and the specificities of reform movements in their peculiar conjunctural moments to the operation of radicalism as a powerful ideology that, far from being nonclass and nonideological and despite (or even possibly because of) its internal contradictions, has profoundly influenced class development and class relations.

In the society of late medieval Europe, where power, wealth, and influence were derived from the ownership of land, the delegation of responsibility by the ruling elite became a matter of financial, administrative, and political necessity. Not only was it physically impossible for a great rentier to oversee personally routine points of organization on his estates, but the overwhelming litigiousness of contemporary life also made it essential for any property owner of note to engage the services of men practiced in the law. Furthermore, regular consultation with leading members of his following played a crucial part in determining the success—or even the survival—of the magnate in question. Just as an astute monarch recognized the importance of the deliberative process, making himself accessible to his ablest and most powerful subjects, so too the great lord had to involve his kinsmen and supporters in questions of policy and politics. In the right hands the seignorial council could, therefore, become a formidable weapon, sometimes even providing an alternative power structure to the government itself. A striking instance of this usurpation of authority is to be found in tenth-century Japan, where the administrative council of the dominant Fujiwara clan effectively superseded the central bureaucracy of the Heian state. Indeed, it was from the chambers of this body (known as the Mandokoro) that the real government of the country was carried out. The old framework was carefully preserved, and the great council of state continued to perform a ceremonial function, but, so far as practical control was concerned, the orders of the Fujiwara advisers took the place of imperial decrees.

Advocates of the “new social history” have buttressed their efforts to recreate the past lives of ordinary people with concepts, models, and quantitative methods taken from the social sciences. These new approaches have allowed scholars to extract vivid and dynamic reconstructions of past human experiences from the dry folios of civil and ecclesiastical registers. Their successes, as exemplified by the many publications of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, have focused largely on the demographic and familial histories of the early modern era. The manipulation of parish listings of baptisms, marriages, and burials is now a fairly precise science that has taught us much (and will doubtless teach us more) about the daily lives of common people and their families in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. But the tracing into the past of the social, familial, and demographic characteristics of the English people need not start abruptly with the auspicious advent of parish registers in 1538. Indeed, we can only hope to trace the origins of fundamental features of Tudor-Stuart life (such as the pronounced tendency towards late marriage and the high incidence of persons who never married) if we develop accurate techniques for analyzing the pre-1500, pre-parish register materials at our disposal. From the perspective of a medievalist, this work is clearly essential; most medieval people, quite simply, were peasants, and we shall better understand the histories of medieval parliaments, towns, and universities when we have successfully uncovered their rural underpinnings.

In the militia ordinance of March 5, 1642, the houses of Parliament declared an emergency and “ordained” a solution. The emergency was the “imminent Danger” posed to king, Parliament, and kingdom by the “Rebellion and Insurrections” of “Papists, and other ill-affected Persons.” The solution was the selection of suitable county lieutenants, who were authorized to appoint deputies and officers and otherwise perform their duties.

Charles rejected the ordinance, ensuring a double confrontation: an arms race and the public exchanges known as the “war of words.” The Civil War—the predictable outcome of the rattling of words and swords—was bound intimately to the defense or attack of the three propositions stated or implied by the militia ordinance: that there was an emergency, that to address it the two houses required control of the militia, and that an “ordinance” was the appropriate constitutional strategy for the occasion.

The third matter is the focus of this study. But the genius of the militia ordinance and, more generally, the central constitutional assertion of the two houses on the eve of civil war was that the emergency, the mobilization of force, and the ordinance were intertwined beyond untangling. It was not merely that the militia ordinance was a response to an emergency situation beyond the reach of exact precedent. It was equally true that the constitutional thinking of parliamentary leaders, developed well before the militia ordinance and the train of events to which it specifically refers (the Irish rebellion of October 1641 and the attempt upon the five members of January 1642), more or less obliged them to produce an emergency as the grounds for the type of action they took.

This was the confident opening passage in Charles Pooter's entry for 2 November in George Grossmith's famous satire, The Diary of a Nobody, serialized in Punch in 1888. Simultaneously it celebrated the lower-middle-class husband's eager commitment to domesticity and marital harmony and acknowledged, in its reference to an equally popular contemporaneous correspondence series running in the Daily Telegraph, avid lower-middle-class engagement with routine popular press debates on marriage and domestic issues. The Diary's readers are invited to relish the irony in Charles's characteristic exaggeration of his domestic felicity, since they know that before long Carrie's patience will again be tried by another of his pretentious and interfering domestic schemes and ineffectual efforts to assert his household mastery. Such tensions in the Pooter marriage were emblematic of wider insecurities in the lower-middle-class identity.

For over a century Charles Pooter's transparent claim to a gentility, independence, and mastery far above his actual station of a struggling suburban bank clerk has provided the dominant metaphor for lower-middle-class pretension, weakness, and diminished masculinity. His bogus authority was exposed as much at home as at his workplace, the bank, where he paraded as the pompous chief clerk. Indeed it was that theme of false authority, both in private and public, palpable even in his dress, that satirists delighted in puncturing. Grossmith was gratified by the range of the Diary's readership, especially among upper-class personalities.