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25 results

Page 1 of 2

  • A Reply to John Morrill

  • David Underdown
  • Journal:
    Journal of British Studies / Volume 26 / Issue 4 / October 1987
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    09 January 2017, pp. 468-479
    Print publication:
    October 1987

  • As readers of the book will know, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion owes a lot to John Morrill. He asked the crucial question over the teacups; he has taught me a lot about localism and popular conservatism; and he has been an unfailingly generous source of advice and stimulating ideas. I am glad that he has considered the book so carefully and that when he is not entirely convinced by it he has expressed his reservations so temperately. It is gratifying to know that someone whose opinion I respect thinks that I have “changed the agenda of Civil War studies.” His review reinforces my hope that Revel, Riot, and Rebellion may indeed help to widen, rather than limit, the endless debate over the causes and significance of the English Revolution.

  • The Problem of Popular Allegiance in the English Civil War* (The Prothero Lecture)

  • David Underdown
  • Journal:
    Transactions of the Royal Historical Society / Volume 31 / December 1981
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 February 2009, pp. 69-94
    Print publication:
    December 1981

  • The belief that the common people of England had little real sympathy for either side in the civil war—that they were mere cannon-fodder, targets for plunder, at best deferential pawns—has a long and respectable ancestry. Many of the combatants believed it, noting the automatic changes of local attitudes when news came of distant vic-tories or defeats. In postwar politics too they knew it was ‘safest to be in favour with the strongest side’. When they fought, it was because they had no alternative. How often, Anthony Ascham lamented, ‘ambitious or angry men forme subtilties and pretences, and afterwards the poore people (who understand them not) are taken out of their houses … to fight and maintaine them at the peril of one anothers lives’. Survival on the margin of subsistence was the universal motive. ‘The people,’ Sir Arthur Haselrig declared, ‘care not what Government they live under, so as they may plough and go to market.’ Looking back after 1660, men as various as Hobbes and Baxter took the same line. ‘There were very few of the common people that cared much for either of the causes, but would have taken any side for pay or plunder,’ Hobbes tells us. Baxter has been as often quoted: ‘The poor plowman understood but little of these Matters; but a little would stir up their Discontent when Money was demanded.’

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