Abstract
This book is about protest and the multiple and contested ways it is remembered, about the work protest memories do and the uses of the past in the (historical) present. While several chapters speak to the present en passant, it is not a study of the way protests past are mobilised today – that worthy subject awaits its author – but rather a broader and temporally deeper analysis of the rememberings and tellings of protest in Britain in the period between roughly 1500 and 1850. Drawing on work in social and cultural history, cultural and historical geography, psychology, anthropology, critical heritage studies and memory studies, this collection of essays seeks for the first time to consider systemically the ways in which protest is remembered, not least by early modern and modern protestors themselves. This is not to say that this is the first study of protest memory: recent studies by Steve Hindle and Andy Wood, along with the ‘Tales of the Revolt’ project led Judith Pollman at Leiden examining memories of the Dutch Revolt, take precedence. Paul Roberts’ study of the prominent Chartist William Aitken also shows the power of autobiography as a tool in how protest memories were produced. Inspired by Andy Wood’s pioneering The Memory of the People, the purpose of this book is to consider the dynamic and lived nature of the past protests, in communities and at large. In so doing, it emphasises the contested and shifting nature of the meanings of past episodes of conflict, revealing how the past itself was (and remains) an important source of conflict and opposition. The book is thus novel in that it draws together the early modern and the modern, in that it considers the legacy of both the dramatic and the (relatively) mundane, and that it offers the first showcase of the variety of approaches that comprise the vibrant and intellectually fecund ‘new protest history’.
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Notes
- 1.
Steve Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection in seventeenth-century England: representations of the Midland Rising of 1607’, History Workshop Journal 66 (2008), 21–61; Andy Wood, The 1549 Rebellions and the Making of Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press: 2007). On ‘The Tales of the Revolt’ project see https://vre.leidenuniv.nl/vre/tales/emm/Pages/Home.aspx, accessed 25 August 2017.
- 2.
Robert Hall, ‘Chartism remembered: William Aitken, liberalism, and the politics of memory’, Journal of British Studies 38 (1999), 445–70.
- 3.
Andy Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press: 2013).
- 4.
See note 15.
- 5.
Barbara Bender, ‘Introduction: Contested Landscapes’, in Barbara Bender and Margot Winer (eds), Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place (Berg: 2001), 1–18, 3; Doreen Massey, ‘Landscape/space/politics: an essay’, 8 and 22, Massey’s essay was produced as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘The future of landscape and the moving image’ and appeared on the project website http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com. See also Briony McDonagh and Stephen Daniels, ‘Enclosure stories: narratives from Northamptonshire’, Cultural Geographies 19 (2012), 107–21.
- 6.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press: 1990).
- 7.
Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin: 1968/1963), 13.
- 8.
John C. Cairns, ‘Sir Lewis Namier and the history of Europe’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 1 (1974), 22.
- 9.
Donald Grove Barnes, A History of the English Corn Laws, 1660–1846 (Routledge: 1930), xiv–xv.
- 10.
Thomas S. Ashton and Joseph Sykes, The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester University Press: 1929), 126, 131.
- 11.
John Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760–1832: A Study in the Government of England Before the Reform Bill (Longmans: 1911); Idem., The Town Labourer, 1760–1832: The New Civilization (Longmans: 1917); Idem., The Skilled Labourer (Longmans: 1919); Frank Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England: Being an Account of the Luddite and Other Disorders in England During The Years 1811–1817 and of the Attitude and Activity of the Authorities (Oxford University Press: 1934).
- 12.
Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester University Press: 1959).
- 13.
The following references are indicative of the approach of each individual and the oeuvre rather than an exhaustive bibliography: Andrew Charlesworth, An Atlas of Rural Protest 1548–1900 (Croom Helm: 1983); Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (University of California Press: 1995); Peter Linebaugh, Douglas Hay, John Rule, Edward P. Thompson and Cal Winstow, Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Allen Lane: 1975); Roger Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509–1640 (Oxford University Press: 1988); Jeanette Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge University Press: 1993); Adrian Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge University Press: 1991); Mick Reed and Roger Wells (eds), Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside, 1700–1880 (Alan Sutton: 1990); John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (Croom Helm: 1981); Buchanan Sharp, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586–1660 (University of California Press: 1980); Paul Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press: 1984); John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1832 (Routledge: 1992); David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 1987); John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (Cambridge University Press: 1999); Roger Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803 (Alan Sutton: 1983); Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580–1680 (Routledge: 1982). Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (Lawrence and Wishart: 1969); George Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England (Wiley: 1964); Edward P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present 50 (1971), 76–136; Idem., Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (Allen Lane: 1975).
- 14.
Andrew Charlesworth and Adrian Randall (eds) Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (Macmillan: 2000).
- 15.
Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester University Press: 2007); Idem., 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester University Press: 2013); Carl Griffin, The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest (Manchester University Press: 2012); Idem., Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700–1850 (Palgrave: 2014); Paul Griffin, ‘The spatial politics of Red Clydeside: historical labour geographies and radical connections’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2015); Ruth Mather, ‘The home-making of the English working class: radical politics and domestic life in late-Georgian England’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2017); Briony McDonagh, ‘Subverting the Ground: private property and public protest in the sixteenth-century Yorkshire Wolds’, Agricultural History Review 57.2 (2009), 191–206; Idem, ‘Making and breaking property: negotiating enclosure and common rights in sixteenth-century England’, History Workshop Journal 76 (2013), 32–56; Katrina Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815 (Oxford University Press: 2009); Idem.,. Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1848 (Manchester University Press: 2015); Iain Robertson, Landscapes of Protest in the Scottish Highlands After 1914: The Later Highland Land Wars (Ashgate: 2013); Simon Sandall, Custom and Popular Memory in the Forest of Dean, c.1550–1832 (Scholars’ Press: 2013); Wood, The 1549 Rebellions; Idem., The Memory of the People; Rose Wallis, ‘The relationship between magistrates and their communities in the age of crisis: social protest c. 1790–1834’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of the West of England, 2006); Nicola Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape: Place, Custom and Memory, 1500–1800 (Windgather Press: 2009).
- 16.
For useful overviews of new protest history, see Katrina Navickas, ‘What happened to class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain’, Social History, 36.2 (2011), 192–204; Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work.
- 17.
Hindle, ‘Imagining insurrection’; Wood, The 1549 Rebellions. On transhistorical approaches to the commons, see Briony McDonagh and Carl Griffin, ‘Occupy! Historical geographies of property, protest and the commons, 1500–1850’, Journal of Historical Geography 53 (2016), 1–10.
- 18.
On the memorialisation of Peterloo, see: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/aug/19/manchester-event-marks-peterloo-massacre-anniversary, http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/peterloo-massacre-event-albert-square-13503827 and, http://www.peterloomassacre.org, all accessed 23 August 2017.
- 19.
Iain Robertson, ‘Memory, heritage and the micropolitics of memorialisation: commemorating the heroes of the land struggle’, in E. Cameron (ed.), Recovering From the Clearances (Kershader, Isle of Lewis: The Islands Book Trust, 2013); Idem., ‘Hardscrabble heritage: The ruined blackhouse and crofting landscape as heritage from below’, Landscape Research 40 (2015), 993–1009.
- 20.
Carl Griffin, ‘As lated tongues bespoke: popular protest in south-east England, 1790–1840’, (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 2002), 1–2. This is especially noticeable in the case of rural protests. For instance, see: http://www.bordonpost.co.uk/article.cfm?id=112705&headline=NOSTALGIA:%20Workhouses%20were%20unusual%20target%20of%20‘Swing’%20rioters§ionIs=news&searchyear=2017, accessed 23 August 2017.
- 21.
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/local-news/chartist-mural-demolished-protesters-vent-6134407, accessed 23 August 2017.
- 22.
Christina Jerre, ‘Event-making the past: commemorations as social movement catalysts’, Memory Studies, in press (2017), doi https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698017709871.
- 23.
On this point, see McDonagh and Griffin, ‘Occupy!’, 9.
- 24.
Daniel Levy, ‘The future of the past: historiographical disputes and competing memories in Germany and Israel’, History and Theory 38 (1999), 51–66.
- 25.
Pierre Nora, ‘Between memory and history: les lieux de memoire’ in Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (eds), Histories: French Constructions of the Past (The New Press: 1995), 633, 636.
- 26.
Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press: 1983), see esp. Hobsbawm’s introduction, 1–14.
- 27.
Peter Mandler, History and National Life (Profile Books: 2002); John V. Beckett, Matthew Bristow and Elizabeth Williamson, The Victoria County History 1899–2012: a Diamond Jubilee celebration, 2nd edition (University of London, Institute of Historical Research: 2013). On the challenge to the idea of writing the past see: Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History (Routledge: 1992) and Michael S. Roth, The Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction of History (Columbia University Press: 1995).
- 28.
Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in Idem. (eds), The Myths We Live By (Routledge: 1990), 4–5.
- 29.
Brian Conway, ‘Active remembering, selective forgetting, and collective identity: the case of Bloody Sunday’, Identity 3 (2003), 309.
- 30.
J. Brockmeier, ‘Introduction: searching for cultural memory’, Culture and Psychology 8 (2002), 5–14, 9–10.
- 31.
Maurice Halbwachs, Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire (Librarie Félix Alcan: 1925); Idem., On Collective Memory, translated by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, Chicago University Press: 1992). For the long and complex history of memory studies and the wider context for Halbwachs’ writings see: Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy, ‘Introduction’ in Idem., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford University Press: 2011), 3–62. On local, vernacular and counter-memory, see for example George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (University of Minnesota Press: 1990); on counter memory and the local: Guy Beiner, Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory (University of Wisconsin Press: 2007).
- 32.
On the politics of the parish, see Keith Wrightson, ‘The politics of the parish in early modern England’, in Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox and Steve Hindle (eds), The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England (Macmillan: 1996), 10–46.
- 33.
Nuala Johnson, ‘Cast in stone: monuments, geography, and nationalism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13 (1995), 51–65.
- 34.
Clare Griffiths, ‘Remembering Tolpuddle: rural history and commemoration in the inter-war labour movement’, History Workshop Journal 44 (1997), 144–69.
- 35.
Shanti Sumartojo, ‘Commemorative atmospheres: memorial sites, collective events and the experience of national identity’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41 (2016), 541–53.
- 36.
Duncan Bell, ‘Agonistic democracy and the politics of memory’, Constellations 15 (2008), 148–166, 149.
- 37.
Yvonne Whelan, ‘The construction and destruction of a colonial landscape: monuments to British monarchs in Dublin before and after independence’, Journal of Historical Geography 28 (2002), 508–33.
- 38.
Robertson, ‘Memory, heritage and the micropolitics of memorialisation’.
- 39.
For a fascinating study of the politics of politics in museums, see Tom Carter and Iain Robertson, ‘“Distilling more than 2000 years of history into 161,000 square feet of display space”: limiting Britishness and the failure to create a museum of British history’, Rural History 27, (2016), 213–37.
- 40.
On the ‘Arm Bone’ see: http://museums.bristol.gov.uk/details.php?irn=152065, accessed 3 October 2017.
- 41.
https://www.wcml.org.uk/our-collections/object-of-the-month/ernest-jones-commemorative-jug/, accessed 3 October 2017.
- 42.
Whyte, Inhabiting the Landscape; Wood, The Memory of the People.
- 43.
Sarah Tarlow and Zoe Dyndor, ‘The landscape of the gibbet,’ Landscape History 36 (2015), 71–88.
- 44.
Wood, The Memory of the People, esp. ch. 4.
- 45.
John Clare, Selected Poetry and Prose: John Clare; edited by Merryn and Raymond Williams (Methuen: 1986), 90.
- 46.
Nicola Whyte, ‘Custodians of memory: women and custom in rural England c.1550–1700’, Cultural and Social History 2 (2011), 153–73.
- 47.
Wood, The Memory of the People, 259, 14, emphasis added.
- 48.
On this concept see: W. Kansteiner, ‘Finding meaning in memory: a methodological critique of collective memory studies’, History and Theory 41 (2002), 179–197.
- 49.
Robertson, Landscapes of Protest, esp. ch. 6. Mnemonics could take other non-material forms too, especially song: Heather Falvey, ‘The articulation, transmission and preservation of custom in the forest community of Duffield (Derbyshire)’, in Richard Hoyle (ed.), Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain (Ashgate: 2011), 83–4.
- 50.
Thompson, ‘Moral economy’, passim; Alan Everitt, ‘Farm labourers’, in Joan Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, Volume IV: 1500–1640 (Cambridge University Press: 1967), 459.
- 51.
As Brian Short notes, the version of events detailed might have been distorted by ‘cued recall’, the cues to aid recall acting to frame the past in partial ways: ‘Environmental politics, custom and personal testimony: memory and lifespace on the late Victorian Ashdown Forest, Sussex’, Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004), 470–495, 488.
- 52.
Edward P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New Press, 1994), 102.
- 53.
Hall, ‘Chartism remembered’, 449.
- 54.
Erika Kuijpers and Judith Pollmann, ‘Introduction’, in Erika Kuijpers, Judith Pollmann, Johannes Muller and Jasper van der Steen (eds), Memory Before Modernity: Practices of Memory in Early Modern Europe (Brill: 2016), 11, 21. On the distinctions some earlier scholars have drawn between pre-modern (cyclical) and modern (linear) temporalities, see Mircea Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press: 1971). Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages (University of Chicago Press: 1982).
- 55.
Thompson, Customs in Common, 100–1.
- 56.
Wood, The Memory of the People, 30.
Acknowledgements
The editors of Remembering Protest organised with Dr Katrina Navickas and Dr Iain Robertson a series of three well-attended and very successful conferences held at the University of Hertfordshire (2011), the University of the West of England (2012) and the University of Gloucestershire (2013). While the chapters in this book do not come directly out of the conferences, it was at the final conference in Cheltenham that the idea for this book was hatched. We would therefore like to pay thanks to all those protest historians – a heady mix of the salaried academic, the student, those involved in heritage industries and trade unions, and that bastion of British social history, the enthusiastic amateur historian – who made the conferences such an intellectually fecund space. Katrina and Iain deserve our particular thanks for their inspiration and dedication to researching critical protest histories. Iain was also involved in the early stages of this publication project and we hope the finished book meets with his approval.
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Griffin, C.J., McDonagh, B. (2018). Remembering Protest. In: Griffin, C., McDonagh, B. (eds) Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74243-4_1
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