John Rous did more than record the news that reached his isolated parish in Suffolk; he also recorded the local discussions of these reports. The latter practice was potentially dangerous. Two recent royal proclamations had expressly prohibited discussions of “affairs of state,” and, as Rous's diary reveals, these private talks could easily become extended critiques of royal policy. Perhaps for that reason Rous, the local parson, consistently sought to be a moderating influence: “I would alwaies speake the best of that our King and state did, and thinke the best too, till I had good groundes” to do otherwise. Unfortunately for Rous, he found it increasingly difficult to “speake the best” in the mid-1620s as Charles I dissolved parliament after parliament, collected taxes of dubious legality, and experimented with the established church; “our Kings proceedings have caused men's mindes to be incensed, to rove, and projecte.” Popular projections, moreover, led to the edge of “an insurrection”; in such an increasingly tense atmosphere, Rous was fearful that one misplaced word would fuel reports that “the whole state were revolting.”

His most severe trial came in 1627 when Charles I interrupted an otherwise disastrous war against Spain to invade France. The motive for the Ré expedition quite simply baffled Rous's parishioners. When the parson refuted the criticism of Mr. Paine, one of his parishioners, Paine simply “would not heare it by any meanes: but fell in generall to speake distastfully of the voyage and then of our warre with France.”

A complaint among twelfth-century English moralists and chroniclers was that monarchs were choosing “men raised from the dust” to be their ministers and counselors instead of members of old noble families. They charged that the king was choosing as his courtiers or familiares low-born men—plebes, ignobiles, even rustici or servi—allowing them to usurp places that belonged to the aristocracy. This chorus of complaint began in the time of William the Conqueror's sons. Only then did nobiles and curiales begin to divide into two distinct groups, and new administrative posts provided opportunities for new men to rise to greater wealth and influence.

The early twelfth-century monastic chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, wrote that William the Conqueror “raised up the lowest of his Norman followers to the greatest riches.” Often cited is his complaint about Henry I, “So he pulled down many great men [illustres] from positions of eminence …. He ennobled others of base stock [de ignobili stirpe] who had served him well, raised them, so to say, from the dust, and heaping all kinds of favors on them, stationed them above earls and famous castellans.” The author of the Gesta Stephani also complained that Henry I took men of low birth [ex plebeio genere], who had entered his service as court pages and enriched them, endowed them with wide estates, and made them his chief officials. Another chronicler, Richard of Hexham, made a similar comment, although in admiring rather than condemning language, “He oppressed many nobles because of their faithlessness; he elevated to high honors many commoners [ignobiles], whom he found to be upright and loyal to him.”

The activities of medieval monarchs were severely circumscribed by the environment in which they had to operate. They were at the mercy of events in a more acute sense than many modern historians realize. Difficulties of communication in particular could play havoc with royal policy such that a mooted response to a problem that had arisen could be redundant before effected. Most difficult of all would be consistency in terms of royal policy except in the most general understanding of that term, and indeed it could be argued that those historians who do tend to see “consistency” in the policies of medieval monarchs are superimposing onto their subjects an order they desire for their own mental processes.

Much of what has been said so far is applicable to Henry II in his dealings with Irish Sea politics. Henry was overlord of a vast empire through which he constantly circulated and in which the Irish Sea region was but a small part. It was seldom his most important consideration. In his dealings with Ireland and its neighbors, it should always be remembered that this was a region that commanded his attention fitfully, either on its own or as part of a larger whole. It would appear that Henry did try to pursue some limited kind of consistency in areas of his Irish Sea diplomacy. He could also be inconsistent. He could and did find himself at the mercy of events and had to react accordingly.

The outbreak of the Peasants' Revolt in the summer of 1381 was arguably the most serious threat ever posed to the stability of English government in the course of the Middle Ages. All historians are agreed that government policy was in large part responsible for the rising. The failure of the crown to maintain its hold over territory in France and to defend the coasts of England, the tendency to bow to pressure from the landed classes and restrict the economic and legal rights of the peasantry, and the outrageous and inequitable taxes of the 1370s, culminating in the commissions to enforce the poll tax in the spring of 1381, all these factors combined to provoke a widespread and perhaps coordinated outbreak of rebellion in southeast England, as well as many more spontaneous and isolated revolts in the West, the Midlands, and the North. Not surprisingly, in most areas the rebellion was directed principally against the agents of the crown. The young Richard II may have been immune from attack, but this only served to increase criticism of his ministers and agents, who were believed to have usurped royal authority and abused the trust placed in them by king and community.

Considering the dramatic events surrounding this assault on royal government and the wealth of material available in the chronicles and the official records, it is surprising that so few historians have examined the specific question of how administration was affected during and after the events of 1381.

Despite the very considerable scholarly attention focused on Thomas Cromwell in recent decades, surprisingly little is known or written about his private financial affairs and, in particular, about the acquisition and management of his landed estates. His principal but badly outdated biographer, R. B. Merriman, was content with a few sweeping generalizations about immense ill-gotten wealth; the only modern biography devotes to this topic barely two paragraphs; and G. R. Elton, who began and sustains the Cromwellian renaissance, is concerned primarily with the public man.

Yet at the time of his arrest in 1540, Cromwell was one of the biggest landowners in the southeastern home counties, the end result of an active decade of buying and selling lands, augmented by large monastic and other royal grants. With Cromwell's creation as earl of Essex, his appointment as lord great chamberlain, and his son Gregory's marriage into the Seymour family (becoming thereby uncle to the future Edward VI), the uninitiated might well be pardoned for seeing here the origin of still one more powerful landed political dynasty which, like the Seymours themselves, the Russells, the Paulets, and the Cecils, owed its beginning to political skill and the opportunities of a fluid sixteenth-century land market.

Certainly this new style of service aristocracy, founded first on office in the central government and concentrating on London and the court, with landed wealth frequently coming later as a reward rather than first as a birthright, was perfectly consistent with the major realignment of relations between king and nobility which characterized the reigns of the first two Tudor monarchs and their leading ministers.

Debates about poverty in mid-seventeenth-century England have, for some years, been a staple of historical studies. In our own time, where the numbers of the dispossessed continue to challenge the success of current modes of social and economic organization, such an interest is understandable and to be welcomed. But the relevance of studies of past problems and solutions and their applicability to present purposes is more complex than is usually recognized.

The immediate benefit of studying discussions for change in mid-seventeenth-century England is that they provide an unusual insight into how members of that society conceived of it. In particular, their observations about the problems of poverty and the role of the poor offer us an understanding of the perceived social structure, the ethical bases for social differentiation, and the degree to which the future could be envisioned as differing from the past or present. Such understandings of proposed social change are invaluable for historians wishing to grasp the underlying assumptions on which past thought and action was predicated.

Past proposals for social reform, however, have also been the focus of a significantly different enquiry by historians. In order to render those past programs more comprehensible (and more directly “relevant”) to modern readers, they are often placed on a “conservative” versus “radical” continuum, one end of which has sometimes been marked “extreme left wing.” This article argues that any such classification inevitably leads to misunderstandings of the authors and of their programs and, consequently, misrepresents both to the present.

Sir Geoffrey Elton has breathed new life into the putrefying corpse of Elizabethan parliamentary history. In conjunction with others, notably Michael Graves, Norman Jones, and David Dean, he has succeeded in demolishing the standard interpretation of high politics, spirited opposition, and principled conflict perfected by Sir John Neale. Elton's analysis of the early Elizabethan Parliaments provides, for the first time, the detailed revisionist argument, one capable in many respects, moreover, of logical extension over the remainder of the reign and buttressed by a series of general overviews. For all the necessary emphasis on cooperation, bill procedure, and “business as usual,” Elton is well aware that politics intruded on legislative affairs, and at no time was this more obvious than during the troubled 1566 session. Neale had devoted forty-seven printed pages to his interpretation of constitutional crisis during these three months. Elton provides a far briefer, more taut, coverage but nonetheless the session figures very prominently in his portrayal of “great affairs.” It is not the intention of this article to dispute Elton's general interpretation of a political crisis orchestrated in good measure by privy councillors intent on exerting pressure on the queen to settle the succession issue. That portrayal is sensible and, in its broad outlines, generally supported by the known evidence. Nevertheless, in his desire to purge Neale's interpretations from the corpus of Elizabethan parliamentary history, Sir Geoffrey has, in a number of instances, permitted his arguments and beliefs to outrun his evidence. These occasions are important for the understanding of events and themes within Parliament.

Under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts the English developed a relationship to time—current time within the cycle of the year and historical time with reference to the past—that set them apart from the rest of early modern Europe. All countries followed a calendar that was rooted in the rhythms of ancient Europe and that marked the passage of time by reference to the life of Christ and his saints. But only in England was this traditional calendar of Christian holidays augmented by special days honoring the Protestant monarch and the ordeals and deliverances of the national church. In addition to regulating the seasons of work and worship, the calendar in England served as a reminder of the nation's distinctiveness, of God's mercies, and of England's particular religious and dynastic good fortune. Other Protestant communities, most notably the Dutch, enjoyed a comparable myth of historical exceptionalism—a replay of the Old Testament—but no other nation employed the calendar as the English did to express and represent their identity. Early modern England, in this regard, had more in common with modern America, France, or Australia (with Independence Day, Bastille Day, Australia Day, etc.), than with the rest of post-Reformation Europe.

This article deals with changes in calendar consciousness and annual festive routines in Elizabethan and Stuart England. It examines the rise of Protestant patriotism, and the shaping of a national political culture whose landmarks were royal anniversaries, the memory of Queen Elizabeth, and commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot. It opens a discussion on the vocabulary of celebration and the degree to which festivity was sponsored and orchestrated in the interest of national consolidation or partisan position. And it will show how calendrical observances that at first helped unite the crown and nation became contentious, politicized, and divisive.

Significant change in the relationships between rulers, elites, and political authority is a common feature of the major European states in the last half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries. In Russia, under Peter III and Catherine II, the nobility was released from the obligation to serve the state as established by Peter the Great and allowed to own property, engage in trade and manufacturing, and participate in local assemblies. In the course of the nineteenth century the hereditary landowning nobility, particularly the wealthiest elements of it, became firmly entrenched in the upper reaches of the bureaucracy without ever being able to dominate it. In Prussia, under Frederick the Great and Frederick William III, noble and gentry landowners were allowed to filter into the ranks, especially the higher ranks, of the bureaucracy; this reversed the embourgeoisement that had occurred under Frederick William I, but not so far as to threaten seriously the bureaucracy's loyalty to the Hohenzollerns or to weaken its reputation for efficiency. Thus the great reforms that followed the defeat by France in 1807 and were designed in part to lay the basis for recovery were executed by a combination of noble and non noble officials, and the latter were especially encouraged in order to ensure that merit rather than birth prevailed as the qualification for state service. In both cases, it could be argued, rulers found it necessary to recruit officials as well as an officer corps from the landed classes when war and territorial aggrandizement expanded the scope of government; they were loath to encourage the idea that landed wealth could automatically bestow political authority.

Political legitimacy was a shifting concept in medieval England. On the one hand were the tangible aspects of power such as control over appointments and the purse; on the other were the symbolic attributes of power. Baronial rebels were able to gain control over the material aspects of political power on more than one occasion, and they also tried to establish control over the symbolic aspects of legitimacy. Here, they usually failed, for medieval people generally failed to accept baronial use of political symbols as legitimating future developments. Monarchs, on the other hand, were more successful in exploiting the symbolic aspects of kingship to further legitimate their power.

The simultaneous success and failure of royal and baronial efforts at establishing legitimacy bear further scrutiny. After viewing the problem of the establishment of legitimacy, this essay focuses on two related episodes during the reign of Richard II: the attempted canonizations of King Edward II and Richard FitzAlan, earl of Arundel. Richard II's reign is chosen for three reasons. First, there was a clearly articulated struggle between king and barons that was fought out in both the physical and symbolic arenas. Second, the process of political canonization produced a royal and a baronial saint during the reign. Although not premeditated on either side, there was a conjunction of events and a desire by the king and the barons to manipulate the symbolic aspects of these events during the reign. The final reason for subjecting saintly symbolism in Richard's reign to examination is that the process of political canonization reached its zenith then.

Historians have seen the mid-1660s as a period of significant distress in many sectors of the English economy. With population pressure diminishing, agricultural prices moved away from the benefit of producers, and rent and land values stabilized. Indeed, landowners were futher burdened by the imposition of higher levels of taxation in the wake of debts generated by the Civil War and the Commonwealth. Moreover, English merchants complained that Dutch competition limited the expansion of their overseas commerce, while the Second Dutch War (1664–67) severely dislocated trade and incurred heavy public expenditure and even higher levels of taxation. The outbreak of plague in London, followed by the Great Fire, further interrupted trade at the commercial and transport nexus of the economy. Hence, war finance and the rebuilding of London put pressure on the stock of loanable funds in a period characterized by a generally low level of prices. Interest rates had fallen gradually with the increase in the availability of capital in the first half of the seventeenth century, yet this trend, according to Christopher Clay, “was unquestionably retarded by the extensive government borrowing associated with the succession of civil and foreign wars between 1642 and 1674.” Of course, in seventeenth-century England, a maximum rate of interest was set by statute. The medieval prohibition on usury was first broken in 1545, setting a ceiling of 10 percent per year.

The relationship between population growth and growing social differentiation and the appeal of Puritanism to—and its effect on— parts of English society has been the subject of much debate ever since the publication of Christopher Hill's Society and Puritanism. The problem was reformulated and elaborated by Keith Wrightson and David Levine, whose studies focused on the village level. They described in detail the effect of Puritan preaching on local society and what parts of local society were particularly attracted by Puritan preachings, taking as an example the village of Terling, Essex. From the late sixteenth century on, Puritanism proved to be a means to enforce public discipline. Keith Wrightson pointed out the concern for order in Puritan preachings. Puritan preachers reminded assize juries of their responsibility to enforce morals and to restore order. Thus they provided a mental framework for the local “better sort,” who wished to readjust their relations to the growing number of local poor. The enforcement of morals was carried out by wealthy local officeholders by means of sweeps of the alehouses, for example, and served as such an adjustment in the village of Terling. Religion, then, ceased to be a vertical bond tying local society together but added instead a cultural dimension to the already existing differences in property and income.

In recent years both Margaret Spufford and Martin Ingram have questioned this connection of Puritanism and the growing difference between rich and poor in many villages. Spufford claims that, despite growing social differentiation, religion still worked as a common bond for poor and wealthy villagers alike.