Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the late Marxist professor, Christopher Hill.
Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By and Films To While Away The Class Struggle By-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin
Book Review
Order & Disorder In Early Modern England, edited by Anthony Fletcher & John Stevenson, Cambridge University Press, 1985
Blame on the late British Marxist historian of the 17th century English Revolution, Christopher Hill, who exposed us to every oddball sect from panters to ranters, shakers to quakers, and then some. Blame it on Gerrard Winstanley and his primitive communist experiment up on Saint George’s Hill in the midst of the English revolution in 1649. Hell, blame it on Oliver Cromwell or the historical materialist trend that drove me to an intense interest in all aspects of the 17th century English revolution, and the threads that led up it. And thus to this book that deals, in a group of several essays, with various aspects of the creation of the British bourgeois order in the wake of the English segment of the Protestant Reformation.
It is no mean task to separate out various trends, various customs, various traditions and examine them closely to see where they fall in the scheme of society, any society, as it turned away from an earlier, more traditional and ceremonial (and, frankly, more laid back) way of organizing society, and controlling it so that things do not totally get out of hand as new forces come to the fore. That is the essence of the essays here as subjects as diverse as the role of the emerging Puritan ethic in keeping the social order at the local level, the inertia of the old ways, the changing ethos (and personnel) of the local governing bodies, interesting thing on the women question (scolds, witches, and hen-pecked husband, cuckolds, and various community shaming rituals, of men and women, but mostly women, for example), the struggle for agricultural modernization (the drainers and the fens men, primitive rural capitalists, and other tidbits to round out the picture as far as the records and historical speculation permit). A nice feature, one that could be usefully employed more widely in academic circles, is that the copious footnotes for each essay are on the same page as the notation. Praise be.
My favorite essay of the lot is J.S. Morrill and J.D. Walter’s Order and Disorder in the English Revolution, as could be expected. The authors are well-known to me from previous monograms. Obviously, revolution, almost be definition, is gong to create disorder and order (a new order, if you can keep it, and keep state power long enough to stabilize it). What is interesting in this essay is their analysis of the ebb and flow of “disorder” that reflected the various stages of the unfolding revolution (and its demise by the restoration in 1660 with the return of kingship, lordship, and state church still, disturbingly, with us today). Much of this had to with proximity with military action, but not always. The more interesting point, and one that I tend to agree with, is not how much disorder the revolution brought but how much order remained during the whole period, especially at the local level and outside the "hotbed" cities. Many historians, including revolutionary historians like Leon Trotsky, have noted this phenomenon. Some places are physically left untouched, others have already had their local revolution bringing no overt opposition, or those on the fence have decided to wait and see which way the winds will blow. The point for revolutionaries, in this case those like Oliver Cromwell, John Milton and the Levelers who defended the overthrow of the monarchy, was to avoid rankling local sensibilities. When they couldn’t the cry for a return to monarchy came through. Copious footnotes on this essay also give one plenty of sources to research further on this key aspect of revolution.
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