Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 [Paperback]

David Underdown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 12, 1987

What do maypoles, charivari processions, and stoolball matches have to do with the English civil war? A great deal, argues Underdown in this provocative reinterpretation of the English Revolution. Underdown uses case histories of three western counties to show that the war was, above all, the result of profound disagreements among people of all social levels about the moral basis of their communities--that commoners as well as rulers held strong opinions about order and governance. Through an original synthesis of social history and popular culture, Underdown links these regionally diverse political opinions to cultural diversity and shows that local differences in popular allegiance in the civil war strikingly coincided with regional contrasts in the traditional festive culture.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Powerful...Offers unusual insights into the social and political processes driving cultural change in the English Renaissance."--Shakespeare Quarterly

"Offers much fascinating evidence about English popular culture and politics."--American Historical Review

"Underdown's richly detailed and fascinating book analyzes the behavior of the common people in the early Stuart and Interregnum periods."--Church History

"Superb...trailblazing."--Christopher Hill.

"Fascinating and revealing."--Seventeenth-Century News

About the Author

David Underdown is Professor of History at Yale University. His other publications include: Fire From Heaven: Life of an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (1992).

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 12, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192851934
• ISBN-13: 978-0192851932
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #532,409 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Look At The English Revolution, June 17, 2010

By 

Alfred Johnson (boston, ma) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 (Paperback)

No question, to my mind at least, that the late Professor Christopher Hill did yeoman's, no, more than yeoman's work in opening up the subject of the English revolution of the mid-1600s beyond the disputes between the various upper classes who defended and opposed the rule of Charles I. Professor Hill brought to life all sorts of information about the plebeians masses, their religious (and irreligious) seekings, their support to new political ideas and their attempts to eke out a space for themselves in the upheavals of those times. Of course Hill's long-lived ground-breaking work was just that, a start.

Naturally the vast amount of material on the English revolution that Professor Hill wrote about in his long career from the religious and literary interpretations of the Bible, the infant democratic political struggles by the Levellers and Diggers, the embryonic emergence of primitive communist doctrine around the figure of Gerrard Winstanley, the unraveling of the myriad religious sects and quasi-sects from Quakers to Shakers, the reaction against the plebeian masses in the post-Restoration period under the guidance of Charles II, and above all, the place of poet and revolutionary propagandist, John Milton, in the scheme of Commonwealth politics and the literature of defeat begged for more work. And Professor Underdown's work here reflects one aspect of that scheme. Here the good professor looks at popular politics at a level below the surface and more localized that Professor Hill only got a chance to sketch out.

Revolutions, as a rule, produce more varied and exotic ideas in a short period than are produced in decades during less turbulent times. Some of the more outlandish ones never even see the light of day during peaceful times. Thus, Professor Underdown's task would have been rather daunting if he hadn't limited his investigation to a few counties, and those in a particular geographic area that permits both a close analysis of why one side or the other went with Parliament or the crown and of the thinking of the plebeian masses. Moreover, he has grounded his work in an understanding of the way inhabitants of different locales (forest lands, arable land, clothing urban areas, etc.) created there own political traditions from church-ales, to "skimmingtons", to all manner of local customs, church-based or secular, including popular sports. This work is not for a reader who is not somewhat familiar with the period of the English revolution. If you are not go read a little of Professor Hill then come back here for an in-depth view of what the fuss was all about.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Drinking in church and other pastimes, July 13, 2008

By 

Harry Eagar (Maui) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 (Paperback)

The last of the English Civil Wars, from 1642 to 1649, which coincided with the last period of exhaustion in the European civil war of 1618-48, was notoriously a time when "the world turned upside down." But how, exactly, did that work? Who turned it over and who resisted?

Professor David Underdown examines three counties in southwest England -- Wiltshire, Somersetshire and Dorsetshire -- and attempts to derive the politics of the 1640s from the culture of England under James I.

He was not the first. John Aubrey famously divided Wilts between the "chalk" and the "cheese," that is, between the corn-growing area of nucleated villages with ancient individual traditions and the cheese-making areas where settlement was spread out more and where industry -- in the form of handloom weaving -- was expanding.

Supposedly, the chalk downs were more conservative, more royalist, more under the influence of the squire and the parson, while the "wood-pasture" areas were more individualistic, more parliamentarian (and perhaps more Puritan) and less amenable to influence.

Underdown examines this hypothesis under the microscope of the old, rambunctious festivals that the Puritan killjoys were intent on eradicating: church ales, maypoles, football, cudgeling, bear baiting, morris dancing, all the disorderly, convivial rituals by which villages reinforced their sense of themselves and exerted social pressure on any who deviated from accustomed ways: the sense of neighborhood, which was different from the way we understand that word today in America.

In general, Underdown finds that, indeed, cultural traditions differed between chalk and cheese and that they helped predict which side country people and, to a lesser extent, townsmen would take as between King and Parliament, Laudian Protestantism and Puritanism and -- to borrow an American phrase -- rum (or beer) and rebellion. But there are so many exceptions that all Underdown claims is a tendency.

In fact, for most the preferred political stance was neutralism, when it could be managed.

He uses ecclesiastical court records, pensions and a list of enemies of the Protectorate to attempt to quantify the results, but the records are skimpy enough that the statistics don't do very much to validate the impressionistic conclusions.

Underdown denies that he is an environmental determinist. The cultures differed because the ancient patterns of settlement differed and the ways of making a living differed. This sounds like environmental determinism's second cousin.

Oddly, he takes the deep Protestantism of the populace for granted although English Protestantism was hardly a century old at the time. Perhaps, although he does not say so, he believes that Anglicanism was the old religion in the minds of the people while Catholicism was the innovation. There were recusants in the southwestern counties, though perhaps not as thick as in the North.

The times were out of joint and the pressures on any individual were far more varied than can be comprehended in a simple formula like chalk-or-cheese, as Underdown is careful to point out. Many people were on both sides at different times.

Like Keith Thomas' "Religion and the Decline of Magic," which covers some of the same ideas and is often cited by Underdown, the book is full of fascinating -- though tantalizingly brief -- vignettes of life as lived by the people who never made it into the Dictionary of National Biography. For that reason, it maintains its readability even for those who do not have a special interest in Stuart politics. But it is a specialist book.