Abstract
English history, and indeed much English historical writing, is strikingly self-referential. References to ‘English exceptionalism’ are legion, and reflect a widely accepted orthodoxy that state and society developed differently in England.1 At one level, of course, this emphasis on English exceptionalism is neither surprising nor objectionable: there is no one master-narrative of state formation but, rather, many historically specific experiences of it. Indeed, the more closely one probes the processes through which public institutions and political cultures are shaped, the more contingent such processes appear. When we begin to anatomize the political cultures of different societies, it rapidly becomes apparent that cultural formation is a dialectic of the generic and the unique. At one level, modern Europe — or at least modern Western Europe — might be said to have developed a common, or converging, political culture. Representative institutions, through which state power is legitimized in terms of popular sovereignty, are the norm. Pervasive bureaucratic systems regulate, provide, coerce, and arbitrate. Governments seek delicately to balance a commitment to market ideologies on the one hand, with their own desire to control and a rhetoric of popular accountability on the other.
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G. E. Aylmer, ‘The Peculiarities of the English State’, Journal of Historical Sociology, iii (1990), 91–108;
Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch. English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, new edn (Oxford, 1991);
E. P. Thompson, ‘The Peculiarities of the English’, in Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London, 1978), pp. 245–301;
David Lindsey Keir, The Constitutional History of Modern Britain 1485–1937, 4th edn (London, 1950), pp. 1–4, and passim.
For a suggestive, although different, reading of these processes, see Jeremy Black, Convergence or Divergence? Britain and the Continent (London, 1994).
The idea of ‘universal monarchy’ and the British critique of its political and illiberal tendencies has been developed most suggestively by John Robertson in his ‘Universal Monarchy and the Liberties of Europe: David Hume’s critique of an English Whig Doctrine’, in Quentin Skinner and Nicholas Phillipson (eds), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 349–73, esp. pp. 356–68. For general accounts, see Pierre Goubert’s massive and subtle L’Ancien Régime, 2 vols (Paris, 1962, 1973); and William Doyle’s compressed but suggestive The Ancien Régime (London, 1986).
John Brewer, The Sinews of Power. War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London, 1989);
P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: a Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London, 1967);
Lawrence Stone (ed.), An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689–1815 (London and New York, 1994).
This is not the place even to hint at, still less to rehearse, the vast French Revolutionary bibliography. Suffice it to say that modern readings of the Revolution have revisited traditional problems with a striking conceptual freshness. See, for example, Keith Michael Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990d);
Colin Lucas (ed.), The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988);
Colin Lucas (ed.), Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford, 1991);
Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (London, 1986).
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime, English trans., intro. Norman Hampson (London, 1988);
Alexis de Tocqueville, Recollections, intro. J. P. Mayer (London, 1971), esp. pp. 3–74.
See, for example, James Mackintosh, A Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers …, in The Miscellaneous Works of Rt. Hon. Sir James Mackintosh, 2nd edn (London, 1851), pp. 543–623, esp. pp. 605–19.
Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country [1789], printed in D. O. Thomas (ed.), Richard Price: Political Writings (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 195–6.
For an introduction to what they said, see Marilyn Butler, Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge, 1984),
and Alfred Cobban, The Debate on the French Revolution 1789–1800, 2nd edn (London, 1960).
For analysis, see Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty. The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979).
David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English State in the 1790s’, in Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 146–68;
David Eastwood, ‘E. P. Thompson, Britain, and the French Revolution’, History Workshop Journal, 39 (1995), 79–88.
David Cairns (ed.), The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (London, 1969), p. 44:
cf. also John Saville, 1848. The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge, 1987);
Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists. Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1984), pp. 307–29.
This case is brilliantly argued in Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’ in his Languages of Class. Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 90–178.
Yet again the literature is voluminous, but for a judicious, concise survey, see G. E. Aylmer, Rebellion or Revolution? England 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1986).
A different perspective is offered in John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993).
The key texts for the 1530s are as follows: G. R. Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge, 1953);
G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: the Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (London, 1972);
Penry Williams and G. H. Harriss, ‘A Revolution in Tudor History?’, Past and Present, 25 (1963), 3–58;
G. R. Elton, ‘The Tudor Revolution: a Reply’, Past and Present, 29 (1964), 26–49.
For the ‘nineteenth-century revolution in government’, key texts have been collected in Peter Stansky, The Victorian Revolution. Government and Society in Victoria’s Britain (New York, 1973).
See also Valerie Cromwell, ‘Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century Administration: an Analysis’, Victorian Studies, ix (1966), 245–55;
Oliver MacDonagh, Early Victorian Government 1830–1870 (London, 1977).
See, for example, Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: a Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge, 1992);
A. Hassell Smith, County and Court. Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1603 (Oxford, 1974);
A. M. Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660 (Leicester, 1966);
David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973);
David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion. Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985);
Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge, 1987);
J. S. Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (London, 1974).
Amongst general works which attempt to think structurally about the relationships between centre and locality are the following: Paul Langford, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman 1689–1798 (Oxford, 1991);
John Prest, Liberty and Locality. Parliament, Permissive Legislation and Ratepayers’ Democracies in the Mid-nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1990);
David Eastwood, Governing Rural England. Tradition and Transformation in Local Government (Oxford, 1994).
See also Ruscombe Foster, The Politics of County Power. Wellington and the Hampshire Gentlemen 1820–52 (London, 1990);
J. Money, Experience and Identity. Birmingham and the West Midlands, 1760–1800 (Manchester, 1977);
and Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class. The Glamorgan Gentry 1640–1790 (Cambridge, 1983).
James Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (London, 1986);
H. R. Loyn, The Governance of Anglo-Saxon England 500–1087 (London, 1984).
Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity Before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., vi (1996); Patrick Wormald, ‘Engla lond: the Making of an Allegiance’, Journal of Historical Sociology, vii (1994), 1–24.
R. J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest. Medieval Institutions in British Thought, 1688–1863 (Cambridge, 1987), esp. pp. 97–170;
Margot C. Finn, After Chartism. Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge, 1993), esp. pp. 36, 320–1.
Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Hill, Puritanism and Revolution. Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1958), pp. 50–122;
E. P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, Penguin edn (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 84–110.
Joseph Arch, From Ploughtail to Parliament. An Autobiography, new edn, intro. Alun Howkins (The Cresset Library, 1986), pp. 74–5. Arch wrote his autobiography between 1897 and 1899.
James Montagu, Charge to the Grand Jury and other Jurors of the County of Wiltshire, 26 April 1720, reprinted in Georges Lamonie (ed.), Charges to the Grand Jury 1689–1803, Camden Fourth Series, xliii (London, 1992), p. 142.
Richard Witton, A Charge to the Grand-Jury at the Quarter Sessions Held at Barnsley [15 October 1741], printed in Lamonie, Charges to the Grand Jury, p. 319;
Henry Fielding, A Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury at the Sessions of the Peace Held for the City and Liberty of Westminster [29 June 1749], printed ibid., pp. 325–43.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790], ed. C. C. O’Brien (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 117.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge, 1993), p. 83.
Frank O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties. The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989);
H. T. Dickinson, The Politics of the People in Eighteenth-century Britain (London, 1995), pp. 13–55;
Nicholas Rogers, Whigs and Cities. Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford, 1989);
John Phillips, Electoral Behaviour in Unreformed England, 1761–1802 (Princeton, NJ, 1982).
Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution, ed. R. H. S. Crossman (London, 1963), pp. 59, 267.
Rudolph Gneist, The History of the English Constitution, Eng. edn (London, 1891). Gneist had published extensively on English ‘self-government’ in the 1850s and 1860s. For Tocqueville’s position, see his Recollections and Ancien Régime, passim;
and Larry Siedentop, Tocqueville (Oxford, 1994), pp. 41–68.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man [1791–2], ed. Eric Foner (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 194, my italics.
Paine, Rights of Man, p. 126. On Paine’s career in local government, see Ian Dyck, Citizen of the World. Essays on Thomas Paine (London, 1987), pp. 20–1.
Hippolyte Taine, Notes on England, trans. Edward Hyams (London, 1957), p. 162. Taine travelled to England on three separate occasions between 1859 and 1861.
W. A. Morris, The English Medieval Sheriff to 1300 (Manchester, 1927);
Irene Gladwin, The Sheriff: the Man and his Office (London, 1974);
Esther Moir, The Justice of the Peace (Harmondsworth, 1969).
Julia Boorman, ‘The Sheriffs of Henry II and the Significance of 1170’, in George Garnett and John Hudson (eds), Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 255–75;
W. L. Warren, Henry II (London, 1973), pp. 290–1.
The 1237 issue was a confirmation by Henry III of the Charta: see J. C. Holt, Magna Carta, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 378–405.
More generally, see J. R. Maddicott, ‘Magna Carta and the Local Community 1215–1259’, Past and Present, 102 (1984), 25–65;
K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1978);
R. A. Griffiths, The Reign of King Henry the Sixth (London, 1981);
S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross, and R. A. Griffiths, Fifteenth Century England 1399–1509, 2nd edn (Stroud, 1995).
Helen M. Jewell, English Local Administration in the Middle Ages (Newton Abbot, 1972), pp. 42–68.
I owe this reference to James Campbell’s richly suggestive Stenton Lecture, Stubbs and the English State (Reading, 1989), p. 10.
See also William Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, 3rd edn, 3 vols (London, 1880), i, pp. 544–638; ii, pp. 165–316.
A. L. Brown, The Governance of Late Medieval England 1272–1461 (London, 1989), pp. 100–55.
A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown, and R. H. Tawney (eds), English Economic History. Select Documents (London, 1914), pp. 164–68; Corrigan and Sayer, The Great Arch, p. 39.
For a balanced view, see Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979).
Williams, Tudor Regime, pp. 253–92; J. Bettey, ‘The Reformation and the Parish Church. Local Responses to National Directives’, The Historian, xliv (1995), pp. 11–14;
Christopher Haigh, English Reformations. Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993);
J. H. Gleason, The Justices of the Peace in England 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1969).
G. E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants. The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–1642 (London, 1961), p. 7.
Williams, Tudor Regime, pp. 218–35; J. S. Cockburn, A History of English Assizes, 1558–1714 (Cambridge, 1972), esp. chs 1–3.
Gladys Scott Thomson, Lords Lieutenant in the Sixteenth Century. A Study in Tudor Local Administration (London, 1923).
See Christopher Dyer’s important ‘The English Medieval Village Community and its Decline’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 407–39.
On the formal constitution of the parish, see Charles Arnold-Baker, Parish Administration (London, 1958), pp. 1–14.
E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871. A Reconstruction, new edn (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 208–9.
Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1988), esp. pp. 114–31;
Paul Slack, The English Poor Law 1531–1782 (Basingstoke, 1990).
David Underdown, Fire From Heaven. Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1992);
Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700, new edn (Oxford, 1995);
V. M. Larminie, The Godly Magistrate: the Private Philosophy and Public Life of Sir John Newdigate, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, 28 (1982).
Penry Williams, ‘The Crown and the Counties’, in C. Haigh (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth (London, 1984), p. 128;
Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (London, 1982), esp. pp. 152–5.
Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680, pp. 164–73, 180–2; Keith Wrightson, ‘Two Concepts of Law’, in John Brewer and John Styles (eds), An Ungovernable People: the English and their Law in the 17th and 18th Centuries (London, 1980), pp. 21–46; Slack, English Poor Law 1531–1782, esp. pp. 56–8.
Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales 1500–1700 (London, 1994), p. 170.
A. Hassell Smith, County and Court. Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1559–1603 (Oxford, 1974), p. 333.
This is carefully argued and well illustrated in Clive Holmes, Seventeenth-century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980), esp. pp. 65–79, 96–101.
This case is well made in Joan Kent, ‘The Centre and the Localities: State Formation and Parish Government in England, c. 1640–1740’, Historical Journal, xxxviii (1995), 363–404;
Anthony Fletcher, Reform in the Provinces; the Government of Stuart England (New Haven, CT, 1986); and Christopher Hill, ‘Parliament and People in Seventeenth-century England’, Past and Present, no. 92 (1981), 100–24.
David Underdown, ‘Settlement in the Counties 1653–1658’, and Austin Woolrych, ‘Last Quests for a Settlement 1657–1660’, both in G. E. Alymer (ed.), The Interregnum. The Last Quest for Settlement 1646–1660 (London and Basingstoke, 1972), pp. 165–204;
Andrew M. Coleby, Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire 1649–1689 (Cambridge, 1987);
J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725, Penguin edn (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 67–74;
W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries. Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 139–65, 213–40.
Norma Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1689–1760 (Berkeley, CA., 1984);
Lionel K. J. Glassey, Politics and the Appointment of Justice of the Peace, 1675–1725 (Oxford, 1979);
E. G. Dowdell, A Hundred Years of Quarter Sessions. The Government of Middlesex from 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1932).
J. R. Jones, The Revolution of 1688 in England (London, 1972), pp. 176–287, 311–31.
Dickson, The Financial Revolution; Edward Hughes, Studies in Administration and Finance 1558–1825 (Manchester, 1934), pp. 116–224;
C. D. Chandaman, The English Public Revenue, 1660–1688 (Oxford, 1975).
Williams, ‘Crown and Counties’, citing Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 70–84, 324.
This case is well argued in Joanna Innes, ‘Parliament and the Shaping of Eighteenth-century English Social Policy’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., xl (1990), 63–92.
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© 1997 David Eastwood
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Eastwood, D. (1997). English Exceptionalism. In: Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700–1870. British Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25673-0_1
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