The European World, 1500-1700
NP/BK
Popular Politics: Case Studies
1. Riots and public executions in early modern England
Popular politics?
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Ordinary people often overlooked as actors in political process.
Cultural historians, e.g. E. P. Thompson ‘The moral economy of the English Crowd’ – food
rioters not just upset about loss of resources, but identifying what customs and practises
violated.
Patrick Collinson – a ‘new political history, which is social history with the politics put back in,
or an account of political processes which is social’.
The Oxfordshire Rising, 1596
• Bartholomew Steer, a carpenter, plans an uprising against local gentry
The plan:
• to meet 21 Nov. on Enslow Hill; ‘a rising of the people to pulle down the enclosures’
• Would march to London and get support from London apprentices
• But plan changes: plot to raid homes of gentry responsible for enclosure and assassinate them
and families
• A rising of the people? Only four men showed up, wait for 2hrs, then disband at 11pm.
The setting of the revolt:
• Four years of harvest failure > high prices and food shortages
• 1590s – discontent across England. Food riots in Kent and London.
• September 1596 – people of Oxfordshire petition Lord Lieutenant, Lord Norris for relief.
Complain about illegal enclosures. Petition ignored.
• Enslow Hill site of another popular uprising in Oxfordshire in 1549.
• Plans to attract London apprentices shows awareness of political climate in rest of country
• 21 Nov. chosen because local yeoman would be absent from the county to sit on King’s Bench
The aftermath
• Conspirators and ringleaders arrested, brought to London and tried. Sentenced for high
treason and to be hanged, drawn and quartered on Enslow Hill.
• Tudor state takes action against enclosure – anti-enclosure statutes issued 1597.
Crowds and public executions
• Public execution = ceremony and ritual; drama of execution enhanced through pardons.
• Dying words reinforced values and ideas about good behaviour, obedience and repentance
• Michel Foucault: executions ‘a theatre of punishment’; ‘spectacles of power with the physical
strength of the sovereign beating down upon the body of his adversary and mastering it’.
• Thomas Laquer: crowd = central and willing participants
Bibliography
On the Oxfordshire rising:
 John Walter, ‘A Rising of the People’? The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596’, Past and Present, vol. 70,
no. 1, (1985).
On the riots, rebellions and popular politics in early modern England
 John Walter, Crowds and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2006)
 Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2001)
On public executions and the scaffold:
 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975)
 Thomas Lacquer, ‘Crowds, Carnival, and the State in English Executions, 1604-1868,’ in Lee
Beier, David Cannadine, and James Rosenheim, eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in Honor
of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989).
 J. A. Sharpe, “Last Dying Speeches’: Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in SeventeenthCentury England’, Past and Present, vol. 70, no. 1 (1985).
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The European World, 1500-1700
NP/BK
Case Study 2:
Popular Politics in the Holy Roman Empire
Setting: often associated with absolutist/authoritarian regimes (Brandenburg Prussia), but highly fragmented
character of Empire allowed considerable scope for popular politics.
Aim: to illustrate three prominent forms / levels of collective political agency:
1. Local Government
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Communal organization in towns, villages and parishes (based on principles like election of
officials, accountability and the common good) provided a degree of local autonomy
(symbolized e.g. in seals and halls), esp. in imperial free cities (like Augsburg), but also a
few rural ‘republics’ (Dithmarschen on the North Sea coast, imperial villages like
Gochsheim in Central Germany and Gersau in the Swiss Alps).
2. Representation at higher levels
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Delegation of powers documented at regional, territorial and imperial level;
Republics (like the Swiss Confederation or the Dutch Provinces) governed themselves by
means of federal assemblies or ‘diets’; a 1618 pamphlet speaks of ‘democratic’ government
in the Three Leagues of the Grisons in the Alps
In many monarchical territories, delegates of local communities (mainly towns) had the right
to join members of the clergy and nobility in so-called ‘representative assemblies’
(precursors of modern ‘parliaments’) called by princes (usually to obtain taxation). Here
they had the chance to alert the central authorities to grass-roots concerns.
Meetings of the Imperial Diet, composed of electors, princes and imperial free cities, formed
the most visible manifestation of the Empire and issued Abschiede (legislation).
3. Resistance
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Usually local and ‘conservative’ in orientation (defence of custom, protest against new
dues);
Case study of Fettmilch rising in the Imperial Free City of Frankfurt a.M. 1612-14 reveals
complexity of motives (incl. anti-Jewish feeling), several stages of development (incl.
violence), involvement of Emperor and harsh punishment of ringleaders;
German Peasants’ War (1524-26) represents the largest rising in the history of the Empire.
Distinctive features are its supra-regional spread, the mixture of socio-economic concerns
with Reformation fervour and the vision of an alternative society.
Conclusion
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In the early modern period, popular political agency used informal and formal channels,
operated at different levels (including symbolic representation) and revealed core values like
subsistence, custom, community and (sometimes) freedom.
Black, Antony, ‘Communal democracy and its history’, in: Political Studies 45 (1997), 5-20
Blickle, P., From the Communal Reformation to the Revolution of the Common Man (Leiden, 1998)
Coolidge, William, ‘The Republic of Gersau’, in: English Historical Review 4 (July/1889), 481-515
Friedrichs, Christopher R., The Early Modern City 1450-1750 (London: Longman, 1995)
Head, Randolph C., Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons: Social Order and Political Language in a
Swiss Mountain Canton (Cambridge, 1995)
Kümin, Beat, The Communal Age in Western Europe c.1100-1800 (Basingstoke, 2013), esp. ch. 2
Scott, James C., Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985)
Wilson, Peter H., The Holy Roman Empire 1495-1806 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)
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