Tim Harris, ed. The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1800. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. ix + 295 pp. $42.37 (paper), ISBN 978-0-333-72224-4; $110.38 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-333-72223-7.

Reviewed by Robert Poole (St Martins College, Lancaster)
Published on H-Albion (September, 2002)

Macmillan/Palgrave's impressive Themes in Focus series so far has been particularly strong on the social, cultural and political history of early modern England.[1] This latest welcome volume edited by Tim Harris continues the sequence, covering a long time span and seeking to colonise new territory in its chosen field.

This volume seems to have begun life as the Popular Politics companion to Harris's earlier Popular Culture volume in the series. Then, Harris was unhappy with the concept of "popular culture," which implied a bipolar model of elite/popular culture challenged by most of the contributors. Still, the phrase stayed in the title. This time "popular politics" has been discarded completely and we have instead "the politics of the excluded." "Popular politics" will no longer do for (by my count) four reasons. Firstly, because of its associations with the episodic history of popular protest, which lends it too narrow a meaning; secondly, because it is not easy to distinguish popular and elite politics (especially when we come to Whigs and Tories); thirdly, because its is not easy to distinguish between what is politics and what is not; and fourthly, because politics is principally defined by the activities of the state, by "the government and what it is doing to people" (p. 8). So, in the same way that there is no history that is just from below, there is no politics which is just popular, or even just politics. In the most inclusive definition, "politics is everywhere and in everything" (p. 5).

It is the purpose of this volume to enlarge our awareness of the scope of political culture and "to suggest ways in which the politics of the excluded can be recreated historically" (p. 25). Further still, Harris suggests that "we should not regard these types as having been excluded from politics in the first place," which raises the question of whether "the politics of the excluded" offers any better definition than the old portmanteau term "popular politics" (which several contributors are still unable to avoid). The succeeding chapters participate fully in this spirit of inclusiveness. Although presented chronologically, they fall roughly into three groups. There are studies of the exercise of authority and power at the local level (Mark Goldie, Steve Hindle, and Harris himself), studies of popular protest (Andy Wood and Nicholas Rogers), and studies of the language and literature of dissent (Ethan Shagan, Alastair Bellany, and Patty Seleski). Well-balanced in this way, the collection is less so in terms of period. Only two of the essays look significantly beyond 1715 and one of these is Seleski^Òs self-contained study of an episode of 1815, leaving the eighteenth century to Rogers. It is thus a book of essays rather than of chapters, despite the general preference of publishers for books of "chapters." Harris candidly notes that beyond aiming for a variety of approaches within a general field, "I simply invited people doing interesting and cutting-edge research to write on whatever they thought most appropriate" (p. 4). We can happily accept the book as such.

The centerpiece of the book is Mark Goldie's essay on "The Unacknowledged Republic," which surveys the work of a generation of early modern historians on the remarkable extent of public participation in government at the local level. In 1700, some one in twenty adult males served in substantial parish offices at any one time--offices such as constable, churchwarden and overseer. If these were all filled and rotated to new occupants every year, then in theory half the population might serve over a decade, but we must allow for a great deal of duplication and dilapidation. On the other hand, if we want to count all those who were in some way officially involved in governing their fellow-subjects, we must add in all the clerks, sidesmen, ale-connors, dog-whippers, beadles, vestrymen, jurymen, watchmen, JPs and militia officers, not to mention all the established clergy and many of their dissenting rivals, and the variable range of other public offices in corporate towns. Measured by the standards of participatory rather than merely electoral democracy, early modern England starts to look like a thriving body politic--a republic, in all but name, as Patrick Collinson pointed out in his well-known inaugural lecture.[2] Goldie brings together a range of research and approaches to produce a wide-ranging essay of startling scope and insight, which should make its way straight onto the reading lists for any course covering the social and political history of early modern England.

Steve Hindle's essay on "The Political Culture of the Middling Sort in English Rural Communities, c. 1550-1700" complements Goldie nicely, in that it is a case study of the development of a central institution of parish government, the vestry. Its first value is as an authoritative account of this most confusing of institutions, showing not just politically but also historically how "the little commonwealth" of the manorial court was succeeded by the more selective vestry; how the system of open and closed (or select) vestries developed in response to church and state initiatives and to social change; and how the autonomous medieval parish became part of a national system of provincial government by the early seventeenth century. "10,000 parishes became integrated into a single political society," and the vestries' "small knots of reliable men" became "agents of social and political transition in rural England." The story is similar to that told by Wrightson and Levine for Terling in Essex, where local governors increasingly formed a more socially and culturally distinctive body.[3]

The parallel politics of incorporation and of conflict are dealt with in Tim Harris's essay on "The King's Friends and the Battle for the Allegiance of the Common People in Restoration England." Harris surveys the enormous range and variety of forms of political engagement in the later seventeenth century. The Duke of Newcastle, mindful of the early Stuarts' fatal awkwardness on the public stage, advised Charles II to "show yourself to your people like a God" (p. 202).[4] The civil wars, suggests Harris, had created "a social space for the public discussion and criticism of the state; once it had come into being, those who ruled the country had no option but to engage with it." This was only fully established, however, when the political elites chose to mobilise public opinion during the Exclusion crisis, establishing a popular political culture which was to continue, with variations, until well into the nineteenth century. In a long view, Harris's study of the origins of this political culture complements James Vernon's study of its end, his revisionist Politics and the People, 1815-1867, a work which rejects the Whig story of the rise of democracy in favor of an account of the loss of older forms of political participation as politics, which came to be defined as the occasional psychological behavior of selected adult males.[5]

The two studies of popular protest here both emphasise the reciprocity of language and action between protest and authority. Andy Wood's fine account of "Plebeian Languages of Deference and Defiance in England, c. 1520-1640" focuses on East Anglia, and in particular the rebellions of 1525 and 1549. He skilfully reconstructs the language, the actions and the context of protest, both religious and economic, attentive to the tone of defiance behind deference, alert to regional difference, recovering "a partly submerged plebeian language of class" in thoroughly Thompsonian manner. Echoing Christopher Hill's warning that the language of deference should not be taken at face value, he suggests that even as defeated tenants abased themselves before their lords, they were setting out the conditions of their obedience.

Nicholas Rogers surveys the rich culture of political ritual and celebration over the long eighteenth century. In the early decades of the eighteenth century, the calendar of political ritual continued to be developed by the lower orders, threatening increasingly to run out of control as the better sort withdrew with distaste. The rise of counter-celebrations after 1770, and the wars against France, alarmed the Hanoverian establishment into re-mobilising the crowd from above behind loyal banners, rather as their Whig and Tory forbears had done a century before. The post-1815 radical movement responded by developing new, disciplined and peaceful forms of mass demonstration, leaving the older style of drink and donkeying to the Tories--and of course to the folklorists. Rogers perhaps overstates the novelty of the radicals of 1815-21, but much less so than writers in the now-exhausted "forward march of labour" tradition. Those who have not read Rogers's important monograph Crowds, Culture and Politics will find here a useful synopsis, but those who have will still find it well worth going to for its greater emphasis on calendar customs and ritual forms and its more clearly stated argument of continuity.[6]

The third group of essays is distinguished by their authors' more thoroughly text-based approach. Ethan Shagan's study of "Rumours and Popular Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII" follows through with remarkable ingenuity the persistent rumours of the king^Òs death, an end to taxes, and the beginning of "a merry world." Trivial stuff, one might think, but Shagan makes out a case for treating such rumours seriously. "Rumour is unofficial or improvised news," he argues, "extraordinary communications along ordinary routes" and "truly a medium of the people" (pp. 36-39). What we have is "part of a popular discourse concerning the future of the English crown," deployed as part of a process of political negotiation and throwing light on the wider issue of reformation and resistance. If we are inclined to dismiss such rumors as wishful or unthinking conservatism, Shagan warns that "substantial elements of the English nation were not nearly so sure of what constituted conservatism as many historians seem to be." Wood's essay takes a similar line, although Shagan's essay would have been more convincing had it been able to correlate the eruption of rumor and of resistance.

Alistair Bellany's contribution is called "Libel in Action: Ritual, Subversion and the English Literary Underground, 1603-42." It deals with three high-profile episodes of libel: the rabbling of Archbishop Whitgift in 1604; the celebration of Felton, the Duke of Buckingham^Òs assassin, in 1628; and the trial of the anti-Laudian writers Burton, Bastwick and Prynne in 1637. Eclectic in his trawl of material, Bellany argues that "we should look for politics in symbols and in ceremonies; on hearses and on corpses; at the end of ropes and on the points of knives; in churches and on church doors; in words and in images; on walls and on paper; in print and in script; indoors and outdoors; among the elites and among the plebs; among the powerful and among the excluded, the marginal, and the dissident" (p. 117). Politics is indeed everywhere and in everything. Bellany's confidence in the importance and scope of his material ("we can offer new solutions to our oldest historical problems" [p. 117]) is not however matched by his use of it, for beyond describing (very usefully) the episodes in question he does not connect them firmly with the events to which they refer, falling back instead on the somewhat Whiggish suggestion that "the pre-revolutionary literary underground had helped educate the London populace for its new and ultimately destabilising political role." Christopher Hill might (yet again) murmur: "I told you so."

Finally, Patty Seleski writes on "Eliza Fenning, Public Opinion and the Politics of Private Life." Eliza Fenning was a London servant controversially executed for fatally poisoning the family for which she worked in 1815. This was one of those episodes which, in this repressive period, were the focus of semi-coded outbursts of reform politics, comparable in some respects to the later Queen Caroline affair, "championing Caroline of Brunswick or Eliza Fenning over the state--by disguising radical politics as gender politics" (p. 279). Gatrell has already dealt with this episode in some depth in his book The Hanging Tree, and Seleski strains for a distinctive interpretation, attacking the imaginary claim that the affair offered "an automatic way of mobilizing the many" for radical reform (p. 286) and emphasising instead gender and melodrama (both also considered by Gatrell).[7] The melodrama of the wronged woman, she suggests, represented a contemporary interpretation distinct from the radical one, with gender-busting implications for which public opinion was not ready. "A public that could not yet reform its private life was hardly ready to participate in meaningful political reform," she chides in conclusion. In the Queen Caroline affair, the really radical position was the amoral one; here, it seems, it was the moralising one. One cannot help feeling that the issues here have been (quite un-necessarily) penned in to do service to a particular theme. Nonetheless, set alongside Gatrell's wider-ranging discussion, this is a useful exploration in a particular context of the theme of melodrama--a theme whose political and cultural importance is now rapidly becoming recognised.

All of the essays here are well-written, clearly presented, jargon-free, and never less than well-researched and suggestive. All make important (and sometimes formative) contributions to their own subjects, and some range well beyond. The editor is to be congratulated on bringing it all together, and offering such a stimulating framework for discussion. His own introduction works both as a synopsis of the field and as a manifesto for a new outlook. Seeking to find a way of writing about change without falling back upon Whiggish language ("evolution," "rise of...," "progress," "development," etc.), he proposes that we should instead think of historical phenomena varying in "density" over time. This simple shift of language--simple once it has been said--seems fruitful; if in a few years time we are all talking about "density" as often as about "discourse" we will have Tim Harris to thank. Two points may be made in conclusion.

First, there are two processes occurring in the making of these new histories of the excluded (or the not-really-excluded). On the one hand areas and sub-specialisms of history are being reintegrated to give a more holistic view of the past, as several of these essays (notably Goldie's) demonstrate. Keith Wrightson's call for an end to "the enclosure of English social history" has been heeded, and his pioneering work on "the politics of the parish" has been built upon by his pupils.[8] But (as Wood demonstrates) it would be a mistake to slide from this to the assumption that popular politics itself was as integrated and cohesive as the methods used to reconstruct it. Goldie's evidence for the integration of middling-order citizens into the political process is impressive, but one has to remember that these assimilated citizens fought a civil war against each other. The experience of office clearly prepared people for conflict at the same time as it integrated them into the apparatus of government. Incorporation, no less than exclusion, can be a politicising experience.

Secondly, this new polymathic social history is not necessarily as attractive to the wider public as the old drum-and-trumpet variety. "Rather than seeing deference and class at opposite ends of a long historical process, we ought rather to perceive of them as in constant, trans-historical friction," writes Wood. Fine: but whilst the discovery (or synthesis) of class in the historical laboratory once created excitement in the world outside, the revelation of "constant trans-historical friction" at varying levels of social density over time is hardly likely to sell more books. If revisionism has taught us one thing, it is that the history of what did not happen after all is not nearly as interesting as the history of what might have happened. Those who have spent so much time painstakingly disassembling and reassembling whatever it is that lies in the historical engine-room are well-placed to make it run again, demonstrate the steam valves and whistles, and even let people ride on it. We need, in short, new narratives as well as better analysis. Some of the essays here (notably those of Wood, Shagan and Harris) are bold enough to offer them; let's have more. But perhaps "Themes in Focus" has now performed its service, at least for early modern England. How about a series of "Events in Focus"? Now there's a challenge.

Notes

[1]. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle, The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (New York: St. Martin's Press,1996); Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales, The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560-1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Patrick Collinson and John Craig, The Reformation in English Towns, 1500-1640 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998); Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); Tim Harris, Popular Culture in England, c. 1500-1850 (New York, St. Martin's Press, 1995). I reviewed the last of these in the Social History Society's Bulletin (Autumn 1995).

[2]. Patrick Collinson, "De Republica Anglorum; or, History with the Politics Put Back In", and "The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I", both in his Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994).

[3]. K. Wrightson and D. Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525-1700, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

[4]. This may have been what James I had in mind in a curious remark. When asked to show his face at his carriage window to the waiting crowds, he replied: "I shall pull down my breeches and they shall see my arse." When Moses gathered the people before God, God had said to him: "While my glory passes by thou shalt see my back parts, but my face shall not be seen" (Exodus 33:23). It was James's idea of a joke.

[5]. James Vernon, Politics and the People, c. 1815-1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

[6]. Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).

[7]. V. A. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770-1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 353-367.

[8]. Keith Wrightson, "The Enclosure of English Social History" in A. Wilson, ed., Rethinking Social History (Manchester University Press, 1993); Wrightson, "The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England," in Griffiths, Fox and Hindle, Experience of Authority, pp. 10-46.

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Citation: Robert Poole. Review of Harris, Tim, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500-1800. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. September, 2002.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=6771

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