National and Local Awareness in the County Communities

Abstract

Study of the English county communities has proved a fruitful approach to the period 1600–40. In recent work on Lincolnshire and Warwickshire, however, the notion of the county community has been sharply criticised and in a general survey of the use of the concept in Stuart historiography Clive Holmes has questioned its validity. One of the difficulties is that most writers have focused their attention upon the gentry community, that is the circle of leading members of a shire who monopolised its organs of political expression and set the tone of its administrative and religious life. But work on elections has shown that independently-minded electors sometimes held different attitudes from the gentry. We cannot, in other words, always use the term county community, assuming gentry domination of county politics and universal deference, as a synonym for the entire population of a shire. Another difficulty is that the notion of the county as a self-conscious society remains intangible and it can only be demonstrated at times of crisis when the gentry or the grand jury gave it formal expression. Critics such as Christopher Hill have pointed out the danger of sentimentalising the county communities. Another difficulty is that those who have adopted the notion as a framework of analysis have perhaps been credited with more ambitious aims than they had in mind. It was predictable that we should learn that there was much variation in the sense of identity and degree of cohesion of the county communities. ‘Generalisations’, declares Christopher Hill, ‘have proved to be premature’, but generalisations were not necessarily intended. The supposed ‘disarray’ of the county community historians is no more than a useful debating point.¹