Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Context
- Part II Political language
- Part III Consequences
- 5 The decline of insurrection in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England
- 6 Memory, myth and representation: the later meanings of the 1549 rebellions
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
5 - The decline of insurrection in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Context
- Part II Political language
- Part III Consequences
- 5 The decline of insurrection in later sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England
- 6 Memory, myth and representation: the later meanings of the 1549 rebellions
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History
Summary
One may apply to the concept of passive revolution … the interpretive criterion of molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the pre-existing composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes.
(Hoare and Nowell Smith, Prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 109.)‘BASE EXCREMENTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH’ : SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN SOUTHERN AND EASTERN ENGLAND
In the later sixteenth century, facing the severe strain of demographic and economic pressure, wealthier, landed inhabitants in southern and eastern England turned on their poorer neighbours. Significantly, it was from amongst this ‘better sort’ of people that the leaders of rebellion in 1549 had been drawn. Benefiting from the increased prosperity which marked out their class, wealthier people increasingly came to see the poor as a dangerous burden. Keith Wrightson, one of the earliest historians of this phenomenon, has noted
the realignment of the vitally important middling group in rural communities, the yeomanry and minor gentry, the cocks of the parish. As the beneficiaries of economic change they had become increasingly distanced in their interests from their poor neighbours. As the officers and representatives of their communities they had learnt to identify themselves, albeit selectively, with the programme of order and social discipline with which the Elizabethan and Stuart state had attempted to contain, dampen and defuse the pressing problems of socio-economic change.
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- Information
- The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England , pp. 187 - 207Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007