Abstract
This volume forms a powerful antidote to the view that human life is determined by apparently impersonal forces such as price movements and demographics. Rather, it represents a decisive statement as to the political agency and cultural creativity of working people over five hundred years of English history. Throughout, the radical imagination is at work. Memory appears as politicised: detailed examples of early modern commoners and nineteenth-century radicals mustering memories of earlier struggles in the legitimation of their own conflicts demonstrate the point.
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Notes
- 1.
Jeremy Boulton observes that in the early modern period ‘The fortunes of labouring people were ultimately determined by population trends’ (‘The “meaner sort”: labouring people and the poor’, in Keith Wrightson (ed.), A Social History of England, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: 2017), 314). The chapters gathered in the current collection suggest a very different picture.
- 2.
This is true of some important recent work by contemporary social historians: see, for instance, Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor, Moving Histories of Class and Community: Identity, Place and Belonging in Contemporary England (Palgrave Macmillan: 2009); Ben Jones, The Working Class in Mid Twentieth-century England: Community, Identity and Social Memory (Manchester University Press: 2012).
- 3.
K. D. M. Snell, ‘The culture of local xenophobia’, Social History 28.1 (2003), 1–30.
- 4.
Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (University of California Press: 2002), 104.
- 5.
Michael Savage, ‘Space, networks and class formation’, in Neville Kirk (ed.), Social Class and Marxism: Defences and Challenges (Routledge: 1996), 58–86.
- 6.
James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press: 1991).
- 7.
For a study that emphasises both the formation of subaltern politics within a locality, and the practical difficulties it faced in advancing beyond that locality, see Anthony E. Kaye, ‘Neighbourhoods and Nat Turner: the making of a slave rebel and the unmaking of a slave rebellion’, Journal of the Early Republic 27.4 (2007), 705–20.
- 8.
For popular memories of the 1816 Littleport riots, see Andy Wood, ‘Five swans over Littleport: fenland folklore and popular memory, c. 1810–1978’, in John H. Arnold, Matthew Hilton and Jan Rüger (eds), History After Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the Twenty-first Century (Oxford University Press: 2018), 225–41.
- 9.
For more on memory and the home, see Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: a Story of Two Lives (Virago Press: 1986); Joëlle Bahloul, The Architecture of Memory: a Jewish–Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962 (1992; Eng trans., Cambridge University Press: 1996).
- 10.
Dave Douglass’s essay is full of implications: ‘“Worms of the earth”: the miners’ own story’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s history and socialist theory (Routledge: 1981), 61–7.
- 11.
That utter alienation is made clear in Carl J. Griffin, ‘“Cut down by some cowardly miscreants”: plant maiming, or the malicious cutting of flora, as an act of protest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rural England’, Rural History 19.1 (2008), 29–54.
- 12.
I draw here on Milan Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting (Penguin, 1980, 3): ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.
- 13.
Elly Robson, ‘Improvement and epistemologies of landscape in seventeenth-century English forest enclosure’, Historical Journal 60.3 (2017), 604.
- 14.
Mousehold Heath cries out for a long-term social and environmental history. Whyte’s essay in this volume is, amongst other things, a highly significant contribution to the currently limited literature on urban commons. On this subject, see most recently Christian D. Liddy, ‘Urban enclosure riots: risings of the commons in English towns, 1480–1525’, Past & Present 226.1, (2015), 41–77.
- 15.
The best discussion of these issues is John Arnold’s inspirational book, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2001).
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Wood, A. (2018). Afterword: Landscapes, Memories and Texts. 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_10
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