In her fictional description of a dinner party at ‘Milby’ (Warwickshire) in the late 1820s, the novelist George Eliot presents pen portraits of six clergymen around the table who may be regarded as archetypes of the clerical profession: the hospitable minister, at home entertaining guests in his well-appointed vicarage; the clerical magistrate, invariably feuding with his quarrelsome congregation; the misanthropic evangelical, always running into debt; the intellectually ambitious Cambridge graduate, with aspirations to be a poet; the energetic pastor, fastidious in his self-presentation; and the frustrated incumbent of an impoverished rural living, destined for a successful career as a metropolitan lecturer. A seventh clergyman seated in the Milby vicarage dining room is, however, singled out by Eliot for praise as ‘the true parish priest’:

Indeed, Eliot's ‘true parish priest’, Martin Cleves, stands as the ideal type of country parson, a man who might be described in the rough idiom of Warwickshire labourers and artisans as an ‘uncommon knowin’, sensable, free-spoken gentleman; very kind and good natur'd too’.

Eliot's vivid characterisation of the ideal parish clergyman is particularly resonant in a volume of essays dedicated to the memory of Margaret Spufford, not least because it so elegantly weaves the minister into the social and economic fabric of the local community in which he lived. Although Spufford's work on the history of religion is primarily associated with her project to establish the descent of rural dissent, her commitment to demonstrate ‘the importance of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ invariably led her back to the relationships between clergymen and parishioners as people. Although famous for her insistence that religion was primarily a matter of faith and was therefore essentially to be understood as a spiritual relationship between believers and their God, she was always keen to locate religious practice in its social and economic context.

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’.

Sir John Newdigate of Arbury, Warwickshire (1571–1610) has come to be regarded as the ideal type of ‘the public man’ in early Stuart England. Richard Cust's painstaking analysis of his commonplace books has demonstrated how Newdigate aspired to personify the conscientious magistrate fired with the zeal of civic duty. Newdigate's reading strategy arguably exemplifies the formation of the political culture of the provincial magistracy, revealing how the central themes of Renaissance political thought were internalised in the gentry parlour and on the sessions bench. Through the lens of Newdigate's early schooling and exhaustive programme of continuing education, Cust suggests, we can see how a common stock of aphorisms and examples helped inculcate the values of civic humanism – wisdom, incorruptibility, courage, love of justice, love of country and, above all, love of God – which were supposed to unite the gentry as a governing class.

Newdigate's lived experience as an active magistrate was, nonetheless, rather more controversial than this pious self-image suggests. During the very period when he was so assiduously ‘reading for magistracy’, Newdigate's personal and public roles as landlord and justice of the peace respectively brought him into conflict both with his own tenants and with the law officers of the crown. In June 1607, during the ‘commotion time’ of the Midland Rising (that series of anti-enclosure protests that convulsed the counties of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Warwickshire) Newdigate suppressed a series of riots on his own estate at Arbury. In retaliation, his neighbours subjected him to an orchestrated campaign of harassment and intimidation, characterising him not as a defender of the commonwealth but as an enemy of the people. In May 1608, Newdigate accused six of these conspirators of seditious libel in the court of Star Chamber, only to find that he was, in turn, prosecuted on behalf of the crown in the very same court by Attorney General Sir Henry Hobart, who charged him with depopulating enclosure. By unpacking the narrative implicit in this tangled skein of litigation and reading it in the context of Newdigate's own views about how a conscientious magistrate should conduct himself, this chapter analyses the complex relationship between the actual experience and the public representation of magistracy in early seventeenth century England.

The Midland Rising remains one of the most significant, yet paradoxically least explored, episodes of popular protest in the historiography of early modern England.

Understanding ourselves in time