Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), p. 317

This illuminating collection of essays will be enjoyed by readers of the Review. It offers a series of thoughtful studies of the aftermath of protest, considering how protests were remembered, and particularly how those memories were underpinned by material culture and the landscape. The essays are conceptually aware, but based on rich archival work. The voices and ideologies of ordinary protestors are once more rescued from the fog of condescension. In short, it is a book of which Edward Thompson would have approved most heartily. The focus is on agrarian protests, though there is also room for chapters relating to Peterloo and the political radicals of the French Revolutionary era.

Subjects range from the Commotion Time of 1549 up to the Chartists, with occasional nods to more modern memories of historical protests. One cluster of essays centres on some of the best known English rural riots and rebellions. Nicola Whyte, opening the collection, looks at the history of Mousehold Heath, the epicentre of Kett’s Rebellion (1549). Even as memories faded, the heath maintained a position as a ‘counter space’ for resistance, where people ‘drew meaning from the landscape as it had been inhabited by former generations, the traces of which could be seen on the ground’. Briony McDonagh and Joshua Rodda then look for the rural preconditions leading up to the ‘Midland Rising’ of 1607, and consider the aftermath in which allegations of fomenting a new insurrection were used to denigrate rural protestors. The article is particularly important in its use of the Elizabethan Star Chamber material, which shows that enclosure was nothing new in Northamptonshire. Indeed, they make the fascinating observation that many of the sites of protest in 1607 had also seen earlier conflict. They question John Martin’s assertion that there was an unusual spike in enclosure in the run up to the rebellion, but in doing so I think they do rather underplay the difficulties in making quantitative statements based on Star Chamber records. It is perfectly possible for there to have been a long history of enclosure in Northamptonshire and a major spike in the years before the revolt. Indeed, this is what was argued by Edwin Gay in an important article on the subject (not cited here) that was published back in 1905.

Agrarian protest is also covered by fine articles on the Forest of Dean by Simon Sandall and on early nineteenth-century protest in Norfolk by Rose Wallis. In Dean, memories of the ‘Book of Dennis’ and the Mine Law Courts influenced later rural conflict, while in Norfolk the prosecution of protest in 1816, 1822 and 1830 was a ‘calculated act of local government’ informed partly what had gone before. Carl Griffin, meanwhile, offers a stimulating discussion of how rural communities might try to forget those protests where they had suffered defeats, pointing out – though – that ‘nothing is ever truly lost’. Moving away from agrarian protest, Steve Poole shows how the London radicals of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries knew that memory was ‘an ideological field of conflict’. Alas though, attempts at memorializing radicals, rather than the generals and politicians of the establishment, were always hard to pull off.

The standout contributions are those by Ruth Mather and Heather Falvey. Mather considers the materiality and domesticity of protest in the aftermath of Peterloo, showing how women and men attempted to ‘live’ their radicalism by naming their children after, say, Henry Hunt, or by filling their houses with radical memorabilia. Falvey, meanwhile, is the only contributor to peer closely at the actual sources available for reconstructing protest. She uses some unusually detailed material relating to lawsuits in the Duchy of Lancaster’s equity court to show that interrogatories (the leading questions put by the court to witnesses) could introduce reliable information about events ‘on the ground’ that was later papered over in the final depositions. It is a chapter that should be read by any historian who makes use of those courts (notably Star Chamber and Chancery) that used ‘English Bill’ procedure.

The book is well produced, the articles well written and there are few factual errors (although it is rather misleading to see a crucial Edward Coke quotation dated to 1641, by which time he had been dead several years). I was unsure about the statement, made in the introduction, that ‘[B]efore the advent of protest history there was nothing, just condescension’. It is nice and pithy, but it would surprise, say, Madeleine and Ruth Dodds. There is at times a certain slipperiness as to exactly whose memory is being recovered. This is neatly encapsulated by the discussion in the introduction of the problems of the ‘archive of protest memory’ and specifically Falvey’s chapter on depositions. To the editors, this cautions us of our reliance ‘on reading the scripts of elites’. But society was more complex than just patrician and pleb. Much of the evidence we have for the early modern period in particular comes from the ‘middling sorts’: depositions, so crucial to studies of memory, tended to be taken from the established farmers of the community. But recent work, notably by Alex Shepard, has shown just how distant this group had become from their poorer neighbours. Historians need, surely, to be much more attentive to the memory of the poor, the labourers, the unsettled. Casual talk of the ‘elites’ and ‘working people’ is not really enough.

The coverage, too, is not as ‘systematic’ as the publicity claims. The title proclaims the book to cover Britain, but every single chapter is on England. Mather’s splendid essay aside, it is a book mostly about men (and surely it is to be regretted that the chief discussion of women as protesters is in a ‘domestic’ context). Moreover, the focus remains squarely on agrarian protest, which is fine of course, but one might argue that to properly understand protest in the sixteenth and seventeenth century you really cannot avoid religion, from the Pilgrimage of Grace, the Prayer Book Rebellion and the Northern Rising, to the Covenanter Rising of 1637, iconoclasm, Quakerism and the Fifth Monarchists.

Perhaps, indeed, the book itself is part of that process of remembering (and forgetting) protest. Griffin makes two very pertinent points. He notes that ‘[t]here is a tendency in protest studies to valorise and glorify all acts of social protest’ [emphasis added], whilst also reminding us that ‘memory is not a given, rather it is something created, staged, performed and mediated’. Very true. Indeed, it is mediated by historians, and staged in books like this. Remembering Protest is dedicated ‘To the memory of the wage labourer, the threshing machine breaker, the “obsolete” commoner, the radical housewife, the “utopian” Chartist, and “stowte” John Bussey’. But the history of protest is more than just these evident good guys. It also has to encompass the xenophobic Londoners who murdered immigrants on ‘Evil May Day’ 1517, the brutally misogynist apprentices who made Shrove Tuesday a regular hell for seventeenth-century sex workers, and the bigoted anti-Catholic rioters of 1780. Selecting particular forms of protest for historical study and neglecting other, more distasteful ones, could itself be seen as an attempt to forget crucial aspects England’s troubling past.