A Field in England: Revolution Without the Revolutionaries

Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England (2013) has been widely praised for its visual invention, its genre‑bending strangeness, and its audacity in staging a Civil War hallucination on a shoestring budget. But beneath the surface of its black‑and‑white psychedelia lies a telling expression of the ideological exhaustion that has gripped British cultural life for decades. The film’s aesthetic ingenuity cannot conceal its profound historical emptiness. It is a work about the English Revolution in which the revolution—and the revolutionaries—have been almost entirely erased.

This erasure is not accidental. It reflects a broader intellectual retreat from the understanding of the 1640s as a decisive moment in world history, a revolution in which masses of ordinary people intervened consciously in political life, debated the foundations of power, and articulated demands for equality and democratic control that resonate to this day. Wheatley’s film, for all its technical flair, embodies the opposite outlook: a Hobbesian nightmare of isolated individuals, driven by fear, appetite, and superstition, stumbling blindly through a landscape stripped of meaning.

Hobbes Without History

The film opens with an epigraph from Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes’s famous description of life in a state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes wrote those words in 1651, as the English Revolution was reaching its climax. They expressed his fear of what humanity might become without a strong sovereign power. Wheatley, however, treats Hobbes not as a theorist of political order but as a chronicler of the age itself. The film’s world is one in which social bonds have collapsed, ideas have evaporated, and human beings exist as little more than instinctual creatures. This is not the 1640s. It projects contemporary pessimism onto the past.

The plot is deliberately slight. A handful of men flee a battle—of which we see almost nothing—and wander into a field where the rest of the film unfolds. Among them is Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), a timid alchemist’s assistant sent to apprehend O’Neil (Michael Smiley), a rogue who has stolen from his master. O’Neil soon dominates the group, forcing them to dig for treasure he claims lies beneath the soil. A meal of hallucinogenic mushrooms plunges the film into a series of disorienting sequences, culminating in a struggle between Whitehead and the diabolical O’Neil.

The film’s technical qualities are genuine. Shot in stark monochrome, it has moments of striking visual beauty. Wheatley borrows freely from Eisenstein’s montage, Weimar expressionism, and the folk horror tradition of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Flashes of dark humour and bursts of violence are genuinely unsettling. But these elements serve a narrative that is almost aggressively empty of historical content.

The Revolution That Isn’t There

Serious films about the English Civil War are rare, and Wheatley’s project attracted attention from historians and critics alike. The period remains one of the most consequential in British history: a king was tried and executed; a standing army debated the foundations of political authority; radical movements such as the Levellers and Diggers articulated demands for democracy and common ownership that would not be heard again for centuries. None of this appears in A Field in England.

Historian Annette Bullen, writing for the Institute of Historical Research, noted that religion—central to every aspect of 17th‑century life—barely registers in the film. Only one character expresses religious feeling, and others mock or ignore his prayers. Cromwell and the King are mentioned only in passing. The men have no political consciousness, no sense of the world-transforming events around them. They would rather be in an alehouse than at the Putney Debates. They fight, when they fight at all, for causes they neither understand nor care about. This is not a neutral artistic choice. It reflects a long ideological shift.

From Winstanley to Wheatley: A Cultural Retreat

The contrast with Winstanley (1975), Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s masterpiece about Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger commune, is instructive. Brownlow and Mollo approached the period with seriousness and respect, reconstructing the Diggers' world with painstaking accuracy. Their film is about ideas—ideas fought for by ordinary men and women who believed the earth should be a “common treasury” for all. Its soldiers belong to an army that debated ordinary people's rights at Putney. Wheatley’s characters, by contrast, have no ideas.

Bullen argues that each film reflects its time's intellectual climate. Winstanley emerged from the late 1960s, when Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill interpreted the Civil War as a genuine revolution—a clash of social classes that cleared the way for capitalist development. By the mid‑1970s, revisionist historians were gaining ground, recasting the conflict as an accident, a muddle of local grievances and aristocratic factionalism with no deeper social logic.

A Field in England is the cultural expression of where that retreat has led. Its world is not merely post‑Marxist; it is post‑historical. The revolution has vanished entirely. In its place are isolated individuals, drugged and brutalised, in a field that could be anywhere. Whatever Wheatley’s intentions, the film echoes the outlook that has dominated academic life and the arts for decades: history has no meaning, grand narratives are suspect, and human beings are driven by appetite and fear.

The Political Meaning of Erasure

The 1640s were a moment when masses of ordinary people—soldiers, artisans, small farmers—intervened directly in politics. They debated questions of power, property, and equality with a seriousness that puts today’s political establishment to shame. To reduce that period to a Hobbesian nightmare is to erase precisely what made it significant.

At a time of deepening social inequality, growing hostility to the political elite, and widespread disillusionment with parliamentary politics, the revolutionary tradition of the 1640s has renewed relevance. It shows that ordinary people can think for themselves, organise collectively, and challenge entrenched power. Wheatley’s film, however, offers only despair. It mistakes hallucination for history and substitutes nihilism for political imagination.

Conclusion

A Field in England is beautifully photographed, occasionally funny, and crude and violent in equal measure. As a work of folk horror, it is striking. But as a work about the English Revolution, it is a wasted opportunity. It reflects and reinforces an ideological climate in which collective agency has been forgotten, radical ideas dismissed, and history itself reduced to a series of disconnected, meaningless episodes.

 

E.P. Thompson, the New Left, and the Politics of Historical Evasion: A Marxist Reassessment

The fiftieth anniversary of The Making of the English Working Class has triggered many commemorations, most earnest and uncritical, that avoid direct confrontation with the political implications of E.P. Thompson’s historical approach. Scott Hamilton’s The Crisis of Theory fits into this pattern. It is a thorough, often sympathetic, sometimes insightful book, but ultimately avoids addressing key issues. Its main argument that Thompson’s separation from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956 marked a “crisis of theory” from which he never fully recovered functions more as a storytelling device than a rigorous historical analysis, dramatising a rupture that Hamilton does not deeply explore.

The issue isn't that Hamilton misreads Thompson, but that he declines to engage with the political tradition that shaped him. Thompson didn't come from a Marxist movement nor break away from one. He was formed in the Stalinist environment of the CPGB in the 1940s, a Stalinism that had already lost its revolutionary essence, become nationalist, and aligned with the Popular Front’s strategy of subordinating the working class to “progressive" bourgeois sectors. Mentioning a “crisis of theory” in 1956 suggests Thompson had a revolutionary theory beforehand, which isn't true. Hamilton’s book, by neglecting this crucial context, unintentionally reveals the limitations of its preferred historiographical tradition.

The Politics Hamilton Cannot Confront

Hamilton’s early chapters stand out as some of his best, yet even they show signs of evasion. He details Thompson’s political apprenticeship in the CPGB thoughtfully, but he downplays its significance, showing leniency towards the brothers’ patriotic enthusiasm. Frank Thompson’s wartime complaint that it was “humiliating” to sit by while other nationalities fought for Britain conflicts with any notion of genuine internationalism.

This detail matters: it reflects the CPGB's political climate in the 1940s, where nationalism disguised as Marxism, Popular Frontism appeared as internationalism, and Stalinism claimed to represent revolutionary continuity. Thompson emerged from the war as a staunch Stalinist, and his subsequent record shows no indication that he confronted the Moscow Trials or the purge of the Bolshevik Old Guard.

Hamilton’s silence regarding the Trotsky–Stalin conflict is intentional, not accidental. It reflects a fundamental structural choice. Addressing this conflict would mean challenging the core ideas of Stalinism: the rejection of perpetual revolution, the promotion of “socialism in one country,” and the shift of Marxism from a scientific theory of global revolution to a nationalist, gradualist ideology. Thompson embraced this framework completely, influencing his political views, his approach to history, and his opposition to theory. Hamilton cannot openly recognise this without undermining his entire argument.

The Communist Party Historians’ Group: The Missing Foundation

The most noticeable omission in Hamilton’s book is the absence of the Communist Party Historians’ Group and, most importantly, Dona Torr. It is difficult to credit an account of Thompson’s formation that omits the person most responsible for it. Torr was not merely a mentor. She was the architect of the CPHG’s national‑radical historiography, the intellectual bridge between Popular Front politics and “history from below.” Her biography of Tom Mann, situating him as “a late representative in a story of England’s long-running struggle,” is the template for The Making of the English Working Class. The working class appears not as a class defined by its objective position in capitalist production, but as the bearer of an instinctively radical national tradition. This is not Marxism. It is Popular Frontism translated into historiography.

Thompson’s later rejection of the CPHG’s approach as “quaintly empirical" was more of a stylistic critique than a fundamental disagreement. The core assumptions, such as nationalism, empiricism, scepticism of theory, and opposition to internationalism, remained consistent in his work. Hamilton’s lack of comment on Torr is therefore deliberate. Addressing her would mean challenging the entire Popular Front.

1956 and the New Left: A Break Without a Rupture

Hamilton’s most compelling chapters explore Thompson’s exit from the CPGB and the establishment of The New Reasoner. However, even here, the key question remains unasked: was Thompson’s departure a move toward revolutionary Marxism, or just a change within a non-revolutionary political context? At the Wortley Hall Conference in April 1957, John Saville stated that the goal was to develop a body of Marxist ideas relevant to the British working class, which involved examining “our own working-class movement and its history.” David North’s response is particularly impactful: The real problem was not insufficient knowledge of Manchester or Liverpool in the 1820s, “but what had happened inside the Russian Communist Party in the 1920s.”

Thompson and Saville shifted their focus from the international class struggle to the national radical tradition. However, this was not a departure from Stalinism but a continuation of it. Thompson’s antagonism toward Trotskyism further supports this, as he told The Newsletter that Trotskyist views “tend toward the petrification and perpetuation of sectarian division.” Slaughter remembered Thompson describing Trotskyism as “sectarian, ultra-left and anti-revolutionary," indicating that he was still embedded within Stalinist ideas rather than emerging from them.

Hamilton’s interpretation of the Thompson–Anderson dispute is proficient yet lacks depth. Your review observes that neither party framed their arguments within an internationalist Marxist perspective. The entire debate centred on nationalist ideas. Anderson’s claim of an ‘epochal bourgeois revolution’ spanning from the twelfth to the nineteenth century was a Ptolemaic construct, a theoretical framework designed to uphold English exceptionalism. While Thompson’s counterargument, backed by stronger archival research, also remained confined to national boundaries, neither addressed the crucial question: how the English Revolution integrates into the global development of capitalism and international class struggles. The conflict did not reflect lively theory; rather, it reflected fatigue within theoretical approaches.

The Making of the English Working Class: Achievement and Limit

The Making remains a significant work, yet its focus on subjective experience comes at the expense of downplaying the objective, international, and scientific aspects of Marxism. This tension is at the core of Thompson’s approach. While his effort to preserve the stories of “the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver” from “the enormous condescension of posterity” is compelling, it results in portraying the working class as a moral subject rather than a revolutionary force. Their radicalism appears instinctive rather than rooted in theory, their history remains national instead of international, and their struggle is cultural rather than political. This is not Marxism. It is radical liberalism with a working‑class accent.

Hamilton’s The Crisis of Theory is an important yet ultimately vague book, often enlightening but evasive in key areas. By excluding the Historians’ Group, Dona Torr, and the Socialist Labour League’s critique, it omits the crucial material needed to evaluate what Thompson’s 1956 “crisis” actually addressed or left unresolved. The reality, which is simpler and more uncomfortable, is that Thompson did not face a theoretical crisis because he never truly had a revolutionary theory to start with. His split from the CPGB was organisational rather than ideological. His politics stayed nationalist, empiricist, and opposed to the internationalist Marxism he knew only through Stalinist distortions. This essay aims to contribute to the view of Thompson not as a tragic figure who lost a theory, but as a symbol of a political tradition that never actually held one.