‘Democracy’ is not a word that appears too often in early modern historiography – not in political histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; not in histories of political thought, where it perhaps might be expected to crop up; not in social histories of politics, of which John Walter has been such an important and influential exponent. One exception is debates about the democratic credentials, influences, and ambitions of the London Levellers. Others are studies of the trope of mixed government during the 1640s and claims about the democratic potential of the revolutionary ‘public sphere’. But even in works committed to establishing political consciousness and practices outwith the monarchical paradigm, democracy is mainly notable for its absence. Since the revisionism of the 1970s, political historians have preferred to talk in terms of principles rooted in common law and positions based on religious ideology. From this perspective, to talk of ‘democracy’ seems an anachronistic and dangerously ‘Whiggish’ thing to do. Intellectual historians have drawn out the ‘republican’ elements and moments of early modern political thought and traced the conceptual rise of ‘the state’, but they have not discerned an especially ‘democratic’ imaginary or way of thinking; quite the opposite. In the meantime, social historians have observed the increasing participatory extent of local governance, especially from the later sixteenth century, and observed its ‘quasi-republican’ qualities. They have also noted the forms of political agency available to social groups on the wrong side of material inequalities and asymmetries of power: riots, rumour, petitioning, and, in some instances, popular print. In his reconstruction of ‘the Colchester plunderers’, John Walter does both. What he and others have not done, by and large, is regard these politics as ‘democratic’ in any meaningful sense of the term.

The main aim of what follows is to establish just what a historically meaningful sense of democracy might be. It does so not in order to unearth the origins of modern democratic culture or to impose retrospectively modern democratic principles and practices – most obviously universal suffrage – onto early modern actors. On the contrary, the impulse behind the discussion is historicist. The chapter looks to establish whether or not English people living in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries knew the term ‘democracy’, in what contexts they did so, and what they meant by it.

In 1642, Anne Read's husband died of grief. In the same year, Sir Con Magennis died tormented by his evil deeds and ‘much … affrighted with the apprehension and conceipt that … Mr Tudge [a minister he had slain] was still in his presence’.Early modern people attributed huge consequence to ‘passions’ (they would not have used the word ‘emotion’) like grief, anger and fear. When uncontrolled, ‘passion’ started wars and ended life. Little wonder that contemporaries urged the restraint of potentially damaging feelings. However, there were times when emotions were particularly difficult to check.

John Walter's recent work on the collection of documents called the 1641 Depositions has assisted in building a new understanding of the outbreak of waves of violence in Ireland in 1641–2 and subsequently. The depositions contain testimonies from about 3,000 people, mostly British Protestant settlers, who had been dispossessed of their lands, homes and goods by Catholic rebels. Some had been confronted by crowds of local people, though as the rebellion continued, gentlemen tended to take over the leadership of these attacks. Either way, most of the deponents could identify at least some of those involved. The majority had been threatened with violence, and many bore tales of loss of property, personal injury and the torture and violent deaths of their family members, friends and neighbours. There were also accounts of incidents of desecration of sacred space and iconoclasm and of the deliberate humiliation of victims, who were routinely stripped and insulted. The depositions also contain a later set of ‘examinations’, usually conducted to probe particular crimes that had occurred in the early 1640s. The testimonies here included those of both settler and native witnesses and alleged perpetrators. It is no surprise, therefore, that Nicholas Canny should have described the depositions as ‘a body of material which is emotional’. Historians of the period often reflect on the emotional state of the Gaelic Irish and Old English participants, to paint a picture of simmering humiliation, shame, resentment, hostility, fear, hatred, anxiety and despair that led to outpourings of vengeful rage. Though economic and other grievances are pinpointed as arousing these emotions, they are regularly fathered above all on religion: Inga Jones argues that ‘religion has the capacity to arouse passions which go beyond what political and localist concerns can stimulate, a passion which … could and did spill over into unrestrained slaughter’.

One of the perennial concerns of social, cultural and political historiography is the interrogation of the categories of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ politics and their relationship to each other. This has gone hand-in-glove with the exploration of why and how different sorts of people engaged with politics and behaved politically. Historians have been particularly concerned with understanding how ordinary people framed political questions (for example, the languages they deployed and the ways in which they arrived at their understanding of the issues) and the actions available to them to act on that understanding (for example, the repertoires of individual and collective action, the legal and other means of asserting political agency). While such issues are timeless, they hold especial importance for a society like early modern England experiencing rapid political and social change. In English historiography in the 1970s and 1980s, however, the concurrent development of political revisionism and of the ‘new social history’ made the connections between these questions at once less clear but also more open to creative reinterpretation. On the one hand, historians of early modern English politics became very suspicious of accounts of political change which ‘reduced’ politics to a consequence of economic and social change, searching instead for explanations which placed greater weight on contingency and the logic of institutional procedures, and on the effects of religious and political ideas. On the other hand, social historians turned their attention away from the conflicts which dominated standard political narratives to the politics of everyday life: social relations in the household and the village. As a result, connections that had previously been made between the political and social history of early modern England were severed.

More recently, new connections have been found between these realms of experience. The deep roots of English governance and its reliance on broad voluntary participation meant that the actual exercise of power was relatively open to influence. Rumour, news and print, as well as official channels of communication such as assize sermons and royal proclamations, made the discourses of politics, and of particular political and religious debates, widely available.

In 1621 Robert Burton moaned that ‘The Low countries have three cities at least for one of ours, and those far more populous and rich’, singular in their ‘industry and excellency in all manner of trades’. England, in contrast, had ‘swarms of rogues and beggars, thieves, drunkards and discontented persons, many poor people in all our Towns, Civitates ignobiles as Polydore calls them, base cities, inglorious, poor, small, and rare in sight, and thin of inhabitants’. In sum, ‘England … (London only excepted) hath never a populous city, and [is] yet a fruitful country.’

Until recently this depiction of English towns and cities has resonated with English urban historians of the early modern period in at least three respects. First, just as Burton invoked a depleted urban culture haunted by the spectre of poverty, so the prevailing interpretative paradigm has been ‘crisis’. The thriving communities of the medieval era are understood to have experienced cultural decline, economic trauma, and pronounced social stratification and conflict during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was only after 1660 that an English ‘urban renaissance’ is thought to have seen the rejuvenation of many older settlements and the emergence of new industrial centres that broke the mould of the traditional urban system. Secondly, just as Burton singled out London as the exception to this rule, so historians have viewed the metropolis as an English urban anomaly – a place that experienced its own problems but also had a distinct and, indeed, positive impact on English society and economy more generally. The division of labour between metropolitan and provincial historiography has only served to compound this sense of London's uniqueness. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, just as Burton described a relative urban deficit in England so ‘the urban’ is a less than conspicuous feature of English social historiography. Peter Laslett did not regard towns and cities as a prominent part of ‘the world we have lost’, describing early modern England as ‘a rural hinterland attached to a vast metropolis through a network of insignificant local centres’. Even metropolitan London was less ‘a civic site’, than a landscape of ‘village communities’.

In early 1629 Elizabeth Sanderson sued Alice Wilkinson for defamation in the church courts. Both women ran alehouses in Stonegate, York, with their respective husbands (William Wilkinson and Ralph Sanderson). Elizabeth Sanderson's main witness was her cousin, Anthony Carthorne. He deposed that in August 1628, Alice Wilkinson had sent for him at her alehouse, ostensibly about money he owed her but really to challenge him over her husband's recent arrest ‘at the suit of Ralph Sanderson’. Thomas Prainge, a shoemaker then ‘drinking two pots of ale’, described how Alice Wilkinson told Carthorne ‘you have now gotten your desire, for you have gotten my husband laid in the low gaol’. When Carthorne ‘answered and swore that he did not know of the arrest’, Alice retorted that ‘your drunken wey-necked Jade your cousin [Elizabeth Sanderson] hath caused it to be done, her neighbours take notice of her drunkenness’. It was these menacing words, spoken in anger before witnesses, which gave Elizabeth Sanderson the chance to initiate legal proceedings against Alice Wilkinson.

That Sanderson decided to act on the opportunity is unsurprising. Thanks in large part to Keith Wrightson and other practitioners of the ‘new social history’ it has long been appreciated that one striking – indeed defining – characteristic of early modern England was the increasing willingness of ordinary men and women to appropriate legal institutions to resolve interpersonal conflict. In this respect Ralph and Elizabeth Sanderson were archetypal. Nor is it unexpected that it was an attack on Elizabeth's public reputation which precipitated the suit.