“There is no locus of great
Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the
revolutionary. Instead, there is a plurality of resistances, each of them a
special case.”
Michel Foucault,
May the weary traveler turn
from life's dusty road and in the wayside shade, out of this clear, cool
fountain drink, and rest
R. E. Speer, “Robert Burns,”
Nassau Literary Magazine 43 (1888): 469.
“Cultural Studies originated
as part of an attack on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its
contemporary expression, Trotskyism”.
Paul Bond
Disaffection and Everyday
Life is a significant addition to our knowledge of how the English Revolution
and the subsequent Interregnum impacted the daily lives of "ordinary
people."
Caroline Boswell's work
harnesses previous work by other social and political historians such as Christopher
Hill and David Underdown. She gives us a much closer approximation of how national
politics impacted the daily lives of the population. Her book shows that there
was a significant radicalisation amongst the poorer sections of the population.
Through her formidable study
of the mass production of pamphlets situated in a large number of urban
archives, she was able to get at "the heart of popular experiences of
revolution." As Carla Pestana states in her
review of the book “anyone who has read the social history of
seventeenth-century England produced over recent decades knows that scholars
have unearthed a rich archive of confrontations in marketplaces, animated
disagreements in taverns, and riots in the streets. Such moments of social and
political tension come to the attention of the authorities, make their way into
court documents and other sources, and await industrious modern researchers'
efforts to come again to light. Numerous
works recount such tales, in order to understand attitudes toward gender,
economic justice, and a host of other issues. In these sources, the voices of
common men and women emerge, mediated though they are by the often fraught
occasions that caused them to be recorded.[1]
Much of the material
uncovered showed that rich people on both sides of the barricades still used everything
in their power to retain or grab back their wealth. Boswell highlights the case
of Sir Arthur Haslerige's treatment of his tenants.
The Royalist’s exploited the
state of flux in society during the Interregnum in order to seek the overturn
of the revolution and re-establish the monarchy. Utilising popular drinking
venues Royalist balladeers and pamphleteers spread their propaganda far and
wide.
While Parliament also used
the printing presses to counter the Royalist propaganda, they were not averse
to using military force to suppress discontent. Boswell relates how Colonel
Hewson ordered his troops to fire at London apprentices playing football in
1659, killing at least four of them.
While Boswell is careful not
to exaggerate the hostility to the Cromwellian regime, the significant amount
of discontent amongst the population was an indication of the narrow social
base that Cromwell rested on. The army played a pivotal role in keeping things
under control. There seemed a general hostility towards the soldiers, who were "despised" for their heavy-handed
action[2]
While Boswell has collected
a formidable array of information, her reading of the numerous pamphlets is at
times uncritical as this example from a previous essay shows “In January 1650,
the royalist pamphleteer John Crouch described a scuffle between a group of
Londoners and a troop of soldiers in his scurrilous newsbook The Man in the
Moon. Though Charles I’s execution had
been carried out a year before, Crouch continued to employ tropes long drawn
out by royalist pens in an attempt to undermine the nascent Commonwealth.
Themes of subversion, sexual slander and humiliation pervade this anti-Puritan
narrative. Crouch related how ‘two or three Companies’ of ‘Rebell’ soldiers had
seized a group of stage players on St John’s Street. Having deprived the
players of their garb, the troopers marched them to Westminster for breaking
Parliament’s ordinance against stage-plays. One soldier stayed behind the crowd
with design of gaining ‘some plunder’, at which time he happened across a
‘skimmington’ riding near Smithfield Market. This popular shaming ritual
involved a man imitating the army’s Lord General Thomas Fairfax on horseback.
The ‘General’ held a skimming ladle while ‘Baskets’ of Colonel Thomas Pride’s
‘Graines’ were held out in front of him. Fairfax’s ‘Doxie’ sat behind him, her
face to the horse’s tail.”[3]
Her account of the shooting
at the football match relies heavily on Royalist news pamphlets as does much of
the book. While there was undoubted dissatisfaction amongst the poorer section
of the population, it is hard to figure how much Royalist publications
fabricated this.
Historiography
Boswell’s book is part of a
veritable cottage industry of works that examine the social and cultural history
of the Seventeenth Century. Even a cursory look at her footnotes and
bibliography, it is clear as Carla Pestana points out Boswell “plumbs the rich
records of English localities to uncover arresting stories. The book includes
many vignettes. Altercations in streets, taverns, doorways of private homes,
and elsewhere all came to the attention of authorities who recorded them for
Boswell's perusal. She offers a thoughtful and sensible analysis of these
altercations and their meanings, by and large.”
Her use of an eclectic
mixture of historians ranging from Steve Hindle, Michael Braddick, Andy Wood, while
a delight for the reader shows a historian who has yet to establish her take on
the debate. The book also has shades of John Morrill's(1976) Revolt of the
Provinces about it.
As John Reeks points out, “Morrill's
argument that national politics "took on local colours and [was]
articulated within local contexts" has become Boswell's
"intersection" of "quotidian politics" with the
"politics of revolution". Nevertheless, the fundamentals are very
similar, and the disaffection of Boswell's 1650s bears more than a passing
resemblance to what Morrill uncovered for the 1630s and 1640s.”[4]
While acknowledging a debt
to the past left-leaning historians such as Christopher Hill, Boswell’s
historiography is also heavily influenced by modern-day genres of Linguistic Cultural
and Spatial turns. All these genres emanate from the Post Modernist school of
historical study, and all three are hostile to a Marxist understanding of
historical events.
John Reeks writes he “was
left with no clearer understanding of the difference between a "site"
and a "space" at the end of the book than at the beginning, or the
historical significance of such distinctions. At times this tendency reads like
amusing idiosyncrasy, but it can also give rise to mind-bending tautology:
"to understand the politics of disaffection, we must consider how
disaffection transformed – and was transformed by – the politics of everyday
life".
The application of Cultural
Studies in British universities is now very pervasive. It would seem that every
new book that comes out has a dash of Cultural Studies about it. Many of the
conceptions contained within the genre are borrowed from the Italian left-wing
figure Antonio Gramsci, particularly the latter’s notion of cultural hegemony
in addressing popular culture as a preferred sphere of political activity.
As Paul Bond points out in
his obituary of Stuart Hall “Cultural Studies originated as part of an attack
on revolutionary Marxism, directed above all against its contemporary
expression, Trotskyism. The academic field sought to shift the focus of social
criticism away from class and onto other social formations, thus promoting the
development of identity politics. Its establishment, in the final analysis, was
a hostile response to the gains made by the Trotskyist movement in Britain from
the 1950s onwards.”[5]
Conclusion
The book is exceptionally
well-researched and contains valuable material for future study but I agree
with John Reeks that Boswell needs to cut out the Spatial Turn language and
just present her readership with “ a straightforward piece of political history”.
[1]
Reviewed by Carla Pestana
(University of California, Los Angeles) Published on H-War (January 2019)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air War College)
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=53344
[2] Page 145
[3] Popular Grievances and Royalist
Propaganda in Interregnum England-Caroline Boswell- The Seventeenth Century -Volume
27, 2012 - Issue 3
[4] John Reeks (2019) Disaffection and
everyday life in Interregnum England, The Seventeenth Century, 34:1, 129-130
[5] Cultural theorist Stuart Hall
(1932-2014): A political career dedicated to opposing Marxism
By Paul
Bond-5 March 2014- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/05/hall-m05.html
