Class, Community and Popular Rebellion in the Making of Modern England

In Kent this kare began . . .
Churles were hor chevetan
Vulgo pure dominantes.¹

Like his earlier books,² Andy Wood's The 1549 Rebellions argues for a longue durée of working-class formation in which 'closely felt local and regional plebeian identities' were central to late medieval and early modern popular politics and remained an important part of working-class consciousness in the Industrial Revolution and after. Traditions shaped in a geographically more dispersed, communalist world continued to be central to working-class identities in the age of mature nation-states. As Wood wrote in The Politics of Social Conflict (1999), recently reissued as a paperback, it used to be a precept of early modern studies that 'real class . . . lay beyond early modernity'. Conceptions of the Industrial Revolution as the gateway to modernity were the basis of an interpretation of class that made class consciousness and class struggle inconceivable in pre-industrial society. In that old model real class (class 'in and for itself', in the Marxist formulation) is national. By contrast, Wood suggests that class influenced popular (and national) politics for centuries before the industrial revolution, but its formative contexts were local and regional communities.

In The Politics of Social Conflict, a study of an early modern lead-mining community in the Derbyshire Peak District that at times was capable of seeing its society in terms of 'stark class polarities', Wood argued that the industrial revolution had led to 'a spatial reordering of plebeian politics' in which 'radicals were drawn into a wider, inter-regional political organization'. Far from being created out of nothing as a result of the Industrial Revolution, class took new forms that connected and supplemented rather than excluded older, essentially communalist, customary mentalities and rhetorical formations. 'The plebeian culture of the Peak', for example, 'started to become a working-class culture within the Peak.' The geographical and communications effects of industrialization transcended the differences that had marked early modern plebeian cultures.³

In Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics (2002) Wood reiterated his objections to the fixation with nation that had ruled class out of early modern historiography for most of the twentieth century. 'Studies of class formation have long been hampered by modern social historians' strange obsession with the nation state', he wrote.

Ever since late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European socialists linked their political project to the transformed national identities of that period, social historians have been mesmerized by that single definition of class-identity. The assumption that 'true' class consciousness can be manifest on the level of the nation-state has led historians to find in the early modern period one of the main barriers to the operations of class.

'The reductive connection between nation and class' lay behind Peter Laslett's influential argument that class-consciousness was necessarily limited to the only sections of English society that routinely operated on the national stage: the gentry and up. Yet 'the history of modern European working-class political culture', Wood insisted, 'has often been the history of regions and localities. Whether historians are describing the insurrectionists of the Paris Commune, the mining communities of the Rhondda valley or the anarchists of Catalonia, class and local identity have in many contexts been historically inseparable.'⁴

The 1549 Rebellions takes up these issues in an earlier historiographical watershed. As its title suggests, the larger argument is that the commotions of 1549 were 'the last medieval rebellions', which played a decisive role in the 'the making of early modern England'. This argument, together with those of Wood's earlier books, amounts to a redefinition of the early modern in which class and class struggle are abiding features of English society that were decisively reconfigured in two key periods: in the second half of the sixteenth century and again during the classic industrial revolution.

The tradition of popular rebellion is now a major theme...