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Introduction An uncommon tradition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

David Rollison
David Rollison
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Summary

In sum, all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth.

A study of social revolution

How swift does evolution have to be before we can call it revolution?

For most of the age of the commonweal – 1381 to 1649 – England's population was less than three million, about a twentieth of its population today and about a sixth of the current population of Australia. It is necessary to imagine the inhabitants of greater Sydney or Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2008 dispersed unevenly across the landscape of England in hamlets, villages, market towns and boroughs, provincial capitals, regional capitals like York, Bristol, Southampton, Norwich, Canterbury and the twin-cities on the Thames, London and Westminster, which were firmly, by the fourteenth century, the national capitals. This was the locale of the long social revolution that is the subject of this book. It was a ‘country’ just about small enough to be known, experienced, travelled and explored by one person in one lifetime. It was more than an ‘imagined community’. It was a country that could be (and has been) walked, run, rowed, swum, ridden, hunted, stalked, journeyed, camped and fought over, a comprehensible and rememberable piece of the world in which the ensuing vision is something other than just ‘imagined’. Imagining England is a central theme of this book.

Type
Chapter
Information
A Commonwealth of the People
Popular Politics and England's Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649
 , pp. 1 - 30
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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