The County Community in Seventeenth-century England and Wales extract
Table of Contents
Preface: A personal memory of Alan Everitt DAVID HEY
Introduction: The impact of the county community hypothesis ANDREW HOPPER
1 Alan Everitt and The community of Kent revisited JAQUELINE EALES
2 A convenient fiction? The county community and county history in the 1650s JAN BROADWAY
3 The cultural horizons of the seventeenth-century English gentry IAN WARREN
4 Fashioning communities: the county in early modern Wales LLOYD BOWEN
5 The Restoration county community: a post-conflict culture DAVID J. APPLEBY
Conclusion: County counsels: some concluding remarks STEPHEN K. ROBERTS
Extract from The County Community in Seventeenth-Century England and Wales
Taken from Introduction: The impact of the county community hypothesis by Andrew Hopper
The community of Kent and the Great Rebellion met with immediate critical acclaim: Christopher Hill declared it ‘a model of its kind’ and full of ‘local observations with national reverberations’, while R.C. Richardson hailed it as a ‘refreshingly different and stimulating approach’.1 With its conclusions broadened and reinforced by two further essays,2 Everitt’s book did much to inspire a series of county studies, many of which first appeared as doctoral theses. Like Everitt, they unearthed much new evidence by taking full advantage of the newly opened county record offices.3 Scholars such as David Underdown for Somerset (1973), John Morrill for Cheshire (1974) and Anthony Fletcher for Sussex (1975), influenced by Everitt’s concept of the ‘county community’, delivered a new body of local scholarship based on impeccable archival research. Underdown concurred that many of parliament’s committee in Somerset ‘were men who put the unity of their county above partisan considerations’.4 Despite differing from Everitt on several points, Morrill’s work on Cheshire uncovered a strong county identity among the gentry, who endeavoured to remain neutral or keep their county out of the civil war in 1642, when their previous moderate opposition to Charles I became no longer viable.5 Of the three, Anthony Fletcher’s book on Sussex lent Everitt the strongest support. He argued that, of the leading gentry families in Sussex, only ten were ‘Tudor newcomers’, and that the established county gentry constituted a source of social stability, with their shared pursuits of hunting, bowling, falconing and horse racing.6 Fletcher saw the Sussex gentry’s custom of marrying at home within their own county as generating a vast and intricate network of cousinage, which tended to limit their social contacts to those within their own shire. He also argued this was the case with Dorset, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Suffolk and Yorkshire. He saw kinship as the dominant principle in this community, which encouraged introversion and to some extent determined allegiances.7 Everitt heartily approved of Fletcher’s argument for ‘the overriding sense of cohesion in Sussex society’, suggesting that the continuity and stability of Sussex county administration was the key theme of Fletcher’s book.8 Although Fletcher and Morrill extended Everitt’s chronology earlier and did not agree with all his findings, Morrill reminisced in 1999 that they worked ‘within the paradigms created by Everitt’.9 The subsequent highly successful careers embarked upon by these historians, along with the unit of the county appearing so conveniently suited to gentry studies of this nature, ensured that by the 1990s few counties were left uncovered.
Despite its influential and far-reaching impact, by the 1970s the county community hypothesis began to attract serious criticism. In 1972, Derek Hirst’s study of Sir Edward Dering, Kent’s knight of the shire in the Long Parliament, argued that by 1640 Kent’s political polarisation suggested that Everitt’s county community was exaggerated.10 In 1977 Clive Holmes indicated his discomfort with Fletcher’s ‘infatuation with the nebulous “county community” concept’, arguing that rather than being ‘forged exclusively in the local arena’ the Sussex gentry were capable of viewing ‘political and religious controversies’ in a ‘national context’.11 In a seminal article of 1980 Holmes depicted Everitt’s hypothesis as having neglected contrary evidence while also underplaying popular politics and ideological divisions to engender a ‘roseate aura of mutual love, charity and unity’ in the Kentish community.12 He considered that Everitt’s patriarchal inclination to the ‘politics of deference’ was ‘misleadingly elitist’, and criticised his assumption that groups below the gentry shared their concerns.13 In this Holmes has been supported by subsequent studies of civil-war allegiance that have argued the gentry could not automatically rely upon the mobilisation of their tenants.14...
...Everitt made little attempt to defend himself from these criticisms. In 1996 he wrote a postscript to a reprint of his 1969 essay The local community and the Great Rebellion. It showed his dismay at how he felt he had been misrepresented by his critics. He pointed out that he had never suggested Kent was typical of the whole kingdom, and that he had never denied the importance of idealism behind the events of the 1640s.15 He shied away from responding to criticism by pointing out his research had moved in other directions. Yet he expressed satisfaction that his idea of the county community had influenced the research of scholars writing on earlier periods ... questions over the validity of the ‘county community’ framework have continued to dominate discussion of medieval landed society for the past 20 years...
...the debate among medievalists continues but there has been a shift towards arguments of much greater complexity and an increased acceptance of the variety of local experience. Mark Arvanigian has recently argued for a rethinking rather than discarding of the ‘community’ concept. His research contested that although county boundaries made little practical difference to gentry careers in Durham, baronial service was not necessarily erosive of cooperation and community among the county’s gentry. He has argued for a regional rather than a county framework, seeing Durham’s gentry engaged across the whole north-east in crown service, baronial affinities and the administration of the Palatinate’s bishops.16
In contrast, discussion of the seventeenth-century ‘county community’ has remained relatively muted. Therefore this volume intends both to reignite this debate among early modernists and to awaken an appreciation of the new directions arguments might take over the ‘county community’, its absence, or what new form it might take. While this volume is intended to honour the memory of Professor Everitt, the editors do not seek to endorse his interpretation or advance any one particular or exclusive approach. Rather, it is hoped that these essays will offer up-to-date and innovative interpretations of the concept of the ‘county community’ that reflect the variety of approaches, methods and theories generated by Everitt’s legacy. Through all the criticism and debate provoked by this hypothesis, one certainty emerges. It is quite rare and remarkable for a historical monograph written 45 years ago to have such a long life, wide readership and prolonged impact beyond its own period. Even Everitt’s strongest critics recognised that he was the ‘most influential of modern local historians’.17 Indeed, much of the subsequent criticism was unthinkable when The community of Kent was first published. In inspiring both its supporters and critics, the concept of the ‘county community’ has undoubtedly enriched the field of local history. Above all, it shows how the best local history, although determined by place, ought to remain driven by wider questions and concepts.
1. C. Hill, review of Everitt, The community of Kent, in Economic History Review, 20 (1967), p. 169;Richardson, Debate, p. 119.
2. Everitt, The local community; A. Everitt, Change in the provinces: the seventeenth century, University of Leicester, occasional papers, 2nd series, 1 (1972).
3. J.S. Morrill, Revolt in the provinces: the people of England and the tragedies of war, 1630–1648, 2nd edn(London, 1999), p. 10.
4. D. Underdown, Somerset in the civil war and Interregnum (Newton Abbot, 1973), p. 69.
5. J.S. Morrill, Cheshire 1630–1660: county government and society during the English revolution (Oxford, 1974).
6. A. Fletcher, A county community in peace and war: Sussex 1600–1660 (London, 1975), pp. 25, 29–30.
7. Ibid., pp. 44–8, 53.
8. A. Everitt, ‘Downland and weald’, Times Literary Supplement, 17 September 1976, p. 1180.
9. Morrill, Revolt, p. 12.
10. D. Hirst, ‘The defection of Sir Edward Dering’, Historical Journal, 15 (1972), p. 195.
11. C. Holmes, review of A. Fletcher, A county community in peace and war: Sussex 1600–1660, in American Historical Review, 82 (1977), pp. 632–3.
12. C. Holmes, ‘The county community in Stuart historiography’, Journal of British Studies, 19 (1980),pp. 55, 68.
13. Ibid., pp. 71–2.
14. A. Hopper, ‘Black Tom’: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English revolution (Manchester, 2007), p. 93; M.Stoyle, Loyalty and locality: popular allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War (Exeter, 1994), p. 143;J. Walter, ‘The English people and the English Revolution revisited’, History Workshop Journal, 61(2006), p. 178; A. Wood, ‘Beyond post-revisionism? The civil war allegiances of the miners of the Derbyshire “Peak Country”’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), pp. 32–3, 39.
15. Ronald Hutton agreed that Holmes had ‘slightly exaggerated the obscurantism of his predecessors’: A. Everitt, ‘The local community and the Great Rebellion’, in R.C. Richardson(ed.), The English civil wars: local aspects (Stroud, 1997), p. 34; Hutton, short notice of Holmes, Seventeenth-century Lincolnshire, p. 871.
16. M. Arvanigian, ‘A county community or the politics of the nation? Border service and baronial influence in the palatinate of Durham, 1377–1413’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), pp. 42, 44, 60.
17. Hughes, Politics, society, p. 20.