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The inseparable intimate relationship between politics, production and trade in the years preceding the Civil Wars has often been underplayed or even ignored.
However, historians now increasingly recognise that the links between occupation and religious beliefs were fundamentally important in nurturing opposition to the King and his government in the years prior to the Civil War.
Recently, Dr Ed Legon of the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University, London, has explored the connection between religion and occupations in the cloth trade. In this programme, he discusses what his research reveals.
[00.53]
For as long as there have been historians of the British Civil Wars, there have been debates about what caused them. Now, most historians would accept that religion was a potent force in the unprecedented polarisation and bloodshed that ensued in the 1640s. This ‘politics of religion’ offers a helpful tool with which to make sense of the ideological complexities of Britain’s seventeenth-century civil conflict. But political identities cannot be reduced to religion alone. Early modern people were products of multiple environments and experiences. One important element of social identity was what people did for a living: their occupations; their work; their means of bare survival and, in rarer cases, their routes to considerable fortunes. Nor can these fundamental features of early modern existence be isolated from politics and religion: what people did for a living related closely to who they knew and how they thought.
An account of the politics of religion in seventeenth-century Britain is potentially richer when we acknowledge that it is inseparable from a politics of production and trade. Thousands of British people populated one particular sector, the making and marketing of textiles. The kinds of activities that were involved are notoriously diverse: from rearing sheep, and sorting and dealing in wool; to carding or combing, spinning, weaving, fulling, dyeing, draping, and integrating some or most of these activities (the work of the ‘clothier’ employer). In some towns, like Stroudwater in Gloucestershire, textiles were by far the largest single employer of both men and women. To this should be added the array of commodities in which regions specialised: fabrics were made from sheep’s wool, flax and hemp (which made linens), cotton, silk, and sometimes combinations of these fibres.
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What do the processes of converting fibres into fabrics have to do with the Civil Wars? Well, a rare point of consensus for the era’s historians is that the regions in which textiles were made tended also to be regions that produced popular support for Parliament in the 1640s. These were, though, tendencies; there is no absolute link. Nonetheless, studies of textile centres in the West Country and the South East, and what would become the industrial heartlands of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, all illustrate forms of politics and religion that nurtured opposition to Charles I and his government’s policies in the 1630s and 1640s.
The connection between occupation and belief is perhaps a more familiar feature of histories of later periods. In Britain, modern historians would point to a close relationship between certain sectors and certain ideological tendencies, especially as a result of the labour and union movements that fed from workers’ experiences of the Industrial Revolution. According to one reading, ideological tendencies in the industrial era mapped onto divisions between capital and labour, exploiter and exploited. Historical development could thus be traced in terms of conflict between classes that possessed equal and opposite interests. Early modern historians can view ‘class conflict’ as too blunt an instrument with which to interpret Britain’s revolutionary decades. Even so, historians do recognise that economic dislocation, particularly in the form of biting trade depression during the reign of Charles I, fuelled unrest and polarisation before the 1640s.
Few industries were as precarious as the textile industry. Its numerous workforces were utterly dependent upon continual demand for their products on the European mainland and further afield and, in many cases, they relied upon the ability of their clothier employers to find routes to these markets. When trade was interrupted – be it by war, disease, shifts in the policies of foreign rulers, or unwise economic measures at home – the effects could be catastrophic for local populations. The 1630s were marked by one of the deepest crises in the industry’s history. To quote the economic historian Barry Supple, ‘[t]he story of the textile industry during the [1630s] is not a happy one, and it merges into the misery and confusion of the years of Civil War.’ Such misery was evoked in the tragic words of an Essex clothmaker who petitioned for relief in the mid-1630s:
“my charg[e] is soe great that I can make shift noe longer for I ha[v]e 4 ch[i]ldren to keep & I had much [ado] to keep them when I had worke enough.”
[06.21]
For clothmakers and traders, such material woes blended with the better-known political and religious issues of the Caroline period. In the frenetic months before the outbreak of Civil War in England, these workforces had a visible role in the flood of petitions that descended upon King and Parliament as tensions mounted. Take, for instance, the clothiers of Suffolk and Essex, who produced a widely-publicised petition to the King, dated February 1642, which opined ‘the great and manifold dangers and distempers of this Kingdome’. The source of these ‘dangers and distempers’ did not require elaboration. Ireland’s Roman Catholics had been in open, violent Rebellion against Protestant settlers since 1641 and lurid reports of massacres provoked deep-seated fears that the same would happen elsewhere in the Stuart Kingdoms. It was also widely speculated that any army raised under the pretext of quelling the Rebellion could be deployed against supporters of Parliament’s advancing campaign for political and religious reforms. Popular disquiet reached fever pitch in London over the winter of 1641-2, where crowds had swarmed to protest the influence of so-called ‘popish’ bishops, the King’s apparently ‘evil counsellors’ in the House of Lords.
For the clothier petitioners of Suffolk and Essex, all of this had
“so sad influence upon the harts of your Majesties most loving Subjects: especially upon the Marchants and Tradesmen in the City of London, who are the breath and life of your Petitioners Trading, that they have discontinued their Trades, and your Petitioners Cloaths for the most part have laine upon their hands for these eighteen months, and their stocks therein lain dead.”
The consequences of the trade stoppage were reportedly dire:
“many thousands of poor, whose dependance is wholly upon the Trade of Clothing [are] not set on work: their cryes daily come unto our ears for food, not without threatnings, and some beginning of mutinies; so that unlesse some speedy course be taken for their relief, your Petitioners can expect nothing but confusion.”
Starker still was a further petition by the London Company of Silkthrowsters, whose members ‘threw’ or ‘twisted’ raw silk. Like their counterparts in the Essex and Suffolk woollen and worsted industries, the petitioners laid blame for economic dislocation on
“the great distractions in the Kingdom, first fomented by the [Bishops], Popish Lords, evil Councellors, and others disaffected to the true Religion, […] and by those other desperate and wicked plots attempted since the begining of this Parliament, against the peace and welfare of Parliament, City and Kingdome, and all Reformation in Church and Common-wealth”.
More explicitly than the petition from Essex and Suffolk, the supplication of the Silkthrowsters described
“numerous multitudes [who] are […] the subjects of great penury, and extreame want, whose lamentable complaints and desperate resolutions, the Petitioners heare with much griefe, and whose dangerous thoughts and opinions of those who shall be found causers of these their extremities, will, the Petitioners feare, ere long be, too aparently expressed.”
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By early 1642, then, fears were circulating publicly that, unless Parliament be allowed to pursue its ‘reformation’, some reckoning was inevitable. If not a thinly veiled threat, then the petitioners’ allusion to ‘dangerous thoughts and opinions’ and ‘mutinies’ certainly conjured the spectre of the potential forces that would be unleashed if workers’ desperate ‘cryes’ were not addressed. Here, explicitly or otherwise, petitioners evoked a matter of fact that had long become apparent to Britain’s rulers. In the words of historian David Rollison, clothiers and other employers in the heavily populated textile industries ‘could mobilize […] large numbers of people’ with the power to ‘disrupt the realm’. This is not to mention the speed with which such workforces could be mobilised.
When tensions escalated into military conflict in August 1642, something of the ‘mutinies’ envisaged by the petitioning clothiers, and no doubt feared by Charles I’s counsellors, manifested itself in popular support for Parliament in clothing regions. Contemporaries were struck by this pattern of allegiance, including in the borderlands between Essex and Suffolk, the source of one of the petitions in early 1642. One anonymous commentator, writing after the Siege of Colchester in the summer of 1648, resolved that clothiers there had
“such a continuall jealousie of the decay of trade, that the Parliament—whose constant stile was tenderness of commerce—found them allwayes disposed to receive their impressions and to derive them to their workmen, so that the clothiers through the whole kingdome were rebells by their trade.”
Clothiers, then, were not just employers of spinners, weavers, and others, but something like industrial colonels who marshalled armies of employees in their defences of parliaments and Protestantism.
Parliamentarian allegiance in clothing regions has been noted by several historians. John Walter provides a lucid account of ideological escalation and what he calls ‘popular violence’ in Essex, one of the counties that contributed to the petition of 1642. We can find comparable cases from the West Country to the West Riding of Yorkshire. In the latter of these regions, the Parliamentarian commander Ferdinando, Lord Fairfax, was moved to report to the Committee of Safety in London that the clothing towns of Bradford, Halifax, and Leeds hosted what he called ‘the only well-affected people’ in the area. Occasionally, the link between the craft and political identities of towns manifested materially. We read separate reports from Bradford, Devon, Gloucestershire, and Liverpool that bags of wool were used in each of these locations as makeshift shields and shock-absorbers against Royalist artillery.
[13.19]
The reasons why clothing regions tended towards Parliamentarianism are diverse. Such workforces had been conspicuous in their consumption of dissident ideas long before Britain’s revolutions. As historians have speculated, the connectedness of clothmakers within the domestic supply chain, but also abroad to vendors and markets in places like the ‘reformed’ Dutch Republic, allowed for the circulation and reception of ideas that structured opposition to church and state policies during the reign of Charles I. That textile workers were apparently enthusiastic recipients of such ideas may also reflect the higher rate of literacy which historians have identified within such workforces.
That clothmakers and traders were well-represented in public campaigns for reform at the outbreak of Civil War reflects not only how many of them thought about the world, but also how they thought about themselves. Perhaps more than any other occupational grouping, textile manufacturers were acutely aware of their importance to the kingdoms’ economic fortunes and, with them, the social fabric itself. In the early seventeenth century, it was a near-universal truth that the economic and financial security of England and Wales, and the social benefits that flowed from these, relied in no small part on the reputation of the nation’s fabrics abroad. As one commentator effused in 1656,
“There is nothing in this flourishing Nation of England so universally good, and beneficial to the people thereof, as is the conversion of Wooll into its several Manufactures; […] the consequences whereof relate as well to the Sover[ei]gn, as to the subject, to the Noble as well as to the Ignoble, comprising all conditions of men, women, and children.”
The esteem in which the textile industry was held appears to have placed clothmakers and traders in an unusually powerful position when it came to persuading those with power to reform the sector. Special commissions had been established from the 1620s onwards with the specific remit to consider how the fortunes of the then ailing textile industry might be improved. On the advice of the earliest such commission, which met in 1622, James VI and I proclaimed his displeasure at two issues that beset clothmakers and traders: the illicit export of raw materials like wool, which furnished rival industries abroad; and the ‘false and deceitfull making, dy[e]ing, and dressing of Our Cloth and Stuffes heere made of Woolles’. These were, James had concluded, ‘matter[s] of very great importance to the Wealth and Welfare of this Our Kingdome’, but especially to ‘the honest Clothiers, and those painefull Workfolkes that depend upon them’. When the King proclaimed a successor to this commission, it invited petitions from clothmakers and traders throughout the realm, a number of which survive.
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By the 1640s, then, a culture of industrial lobbying had developed. It was propelled by the belief that textile manufactures were vital to the nation’s welfare. In turn, clothmakers and traders appear to have conceived of Parliament as the institution in whom remedies for both economic and social ills could be entrusted. A poignant emblem of this political moment is the shooting to death of Richard Perceval, a Mancunian linen weaver, in July 1642. Perceval was killed for assaulting a follower of Lord Strange, who had been sent to the town to secure its arms magazine for the King. Afterwards, a prophetic pamphlet circulated that described this, and wider violence that ensued upon Strange’s arrival in Manchester, as ‘the beginning of Civill Warre, being the first stroke that hath bin struck, and the first Bullet that hath bin shot’.
The War itself was bleakly disruptive to the nation’s staple trade. The Royalist blockade of London – the principal location of the export of English textiles – proved particularly devastating. Parliament’s press was quick to pin blame for worsening wartime conditions on the Royalist war effort. Between 1642 and 1646, there are numerous news stories about marauding supporters of the King who robbed wagons laden with bundles of cloth. So it was that, in Gloucestershire in February 1643, troops under Prince Rupert (Charles I’s nephew and General of Horse) were accused of
‘t[aking] away Cloth, Wooll, and Yarne, besides other goods from the Clothiers, about Stroudwater, to the utter undoing, not [only] of them and theirs, but of thousands of poore people, whose very livelihood depend on that trade.’
Royalists stood accused not only of disrupting the nation’s stock in trade, but also of meting out barbaric violence upon those who had rebelled against the King. In 1644, news circulated that fourteen Wiltshire clothiers had been captured and summarily hanged at Woodhouse Castle, blame for which was attributed variously to ‘Irish Rebels’ and the King himself. In a parliamentary fast sermon of 28 August 1644, Christopher Tesdale, the vicar of Hurstbourne Tarrant (some thirty miles from Woodhouse Castle) preached hopes that ‘the good blood of those honest Clothiers, that cries loud for vengeance in Gods eares’, would also stir MPs to action. Apparently cruel acts like these cast a long shadow: a mound of earth at Woodhouse Castle continued to be known as ‘the clothiers’ grave’ into the mid-nineteenth century.
Appeals for justice, like those of Christopher Tesdale, resounded in the ears of Parliament’s supporters and came to influence efforts to ensure that the expenditure of so much ‘blood and treasure’ for Parliament would be adequately recompensed. So it was that clothmakers and traders were among those who lobbied for a share in the spoils of the New Model Army’s prodigious triumph in 1646. A striking example is a mass petition of the nation’s clothiers, conceived as early as August 1645. The petition took advantage of Parliament’s ascendancy to remedy several issues that had plagued the sector for decades, but which the Jacobean and Caroline states had failed to resolve. The petitioners’ complaints included two issues that James VI and I had attempted to forestall in 1622: so-called ‘deceits’ and ‘frauds’ in manufacturing cloth; and the export of wool and other raw materials. The petitioners had some success in their publication of the sector’s ills. In January 1648, a parliamentary ordinance was passed prohibiting the illicit transportation of essential raw materials like wool.
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That the affection of clothmaking communities for Parliament deserved legislators’ attention and reward was stated explicitly in petitions to the Commonwealth and Protectorate after 1649. In an address to the new republican Council of Trade in around 1650, the Citizens of York detailed various local economic issues and those affecting the cloth trade featured prominently. The petitioners reminded the Council of the role of the North in the Civil Wars and implored that their ‘Freedome and Libertyes from […] oppressions and Abuses’, as they called them, should be among the republic’s priorities. In their own petition to the Commonwealth’s Council of State in November 1652, the clothiers of Coggeshall in Essex likewise alluded to ‘their ardent affection to the Parliam[en]t’, which had led them to lend ‘greater summs of money’ to the war effort ‘than any place in the nation (they could ever heare of)’.
If lowlier clothmakers looked to formal supplication as a means to secure a small share of the spoils of Parliament’s victory, then those whose hands were much closer to the levers of power could expect rather more. One of these was the West Country clothing magnate, John Ashe of Freshford, who had been MP for Westbury, Wiltshire since 1640. Ashe had been an ardent supporter of Parliament and, as early as 1636, stood accused of distributing Puritan literature in Somerset, including to others in his trade. Although Ashe did not lend his name to Charles I’s death warrant in January 1649, he was a recipient of high office, including membership to the republican Council of Trade.
Ashe’s notoriety as an employer of workforces turned him into a target of supplication for petitioners, including thousands of women who spun gold and silver thread in and around the City of London. Decrying those who used wheels to spin such thread in the capital, a technology that threatened the petitioners’ own employment, the spinners appealed to Ashe’s sense of fairness as an employer:
“wee most humbly desire that honorable Gentleman Master Ash, one of the Commissioners, who hath and doth set so manie thousand poor people on work in the West by spinning and working of Cloth, to declare, that if he could finde an Engine that could spin with 500 men, that which is the labor of 5000, whether he would suffer four thousand and five hundred of his poor work-men to perish for his own private profit, or els be a means to suppress such an Engine?”
[24.03]
Other tradespeople secured lucrative contracts from Parliament. The linen draper Joshua Woolnough, who had served as an intermediary for the payment of Parliamentarian troops in Essex, was in receipt of massive contracts to supply the Navy with canvas throughout the Commonwealth and Protectorate. The linen drapers, Thomas Andrewes and Francis Warner, meanwhile, provided almost 5,500 shirts to the Commonwealth’s Army in Scotland at a price of three shillings each, the equivalent of well over £100,000 in total in today’s money. Elsewhere, the woollen draper, Richard Downes, who had attended the trial of Charles I in January 1649, secured several contracts worth thousands of pounds to clothe the Commonwealth’s soldiers in Ireland.
It is tempting to infer that cynical motivations lay behind the Parliamentarianism of those who would profit so considerably from a ‘world turned upside down’. Some contemporaries certainly did. Perhaps with local clothiers like John Ashe in mind, the Royalist historian and future Earl of Clarendon, Edward Hyde, railed against Somerset men who
“were a people of an inferior degree, who by good husbandry, clothing, and other thriving arts, had gotten very great fortunes; and, by degrees, getting themselves into the gentlemen’s estates, were angry that they found not themselves in the same esteem and reputation with those whose estates they had; and therefore, with more industry than the other, studied all ways to make themselves considerable.”
For Hyde, the most fruitful means for clothiers and others to ‘make themselves considerable’ was by being ‘from the beginning […] fast friends to the parliament’.
Clarendon’s laconic reflection on allegiance tapped into a veritable trope of Royalist propaganda during the 1640s: Parliament was, at its core, a rag tag assortment of artisans and tradespeople who had absolutely no business interfering in matters of church and constitution that lay far above them. Here, commonplace ideas about hierarchy, station, and the ‘element’ into which men and women were born, were effective cudgels with which to beat down anyone who should stray from their allotted position. It was thus common for attacks on Parliamentarian MPs and military commanders to draw attention to and often to exaggerate their low-born origins, including those who had risen from the textile industry. Edward Ashe, the export merchant brother of the aforementioned John and MP for Heytesbury, Wiltshire since 1640, was thus styled a mere ‘Clothier’ in one publication. The same hostile source, the Royalist newssheet Mercurius Pragmaticus, was less guarded in a memorable attack on the Dorset Parliamentarian Denis Bond, who it described as “the buffle headed Booby Dennis Bond the Clothier”.
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The fiercest and longest lasting censure of the Royalist press was reserved for another, even more deviant figure. This was the ‘mechanic’ or artisan who turned to preaching God’s word; those who had risen from the ranks of trades, especially clothmaking and trading, and took to evangelising in public, and even usurped the pulpits of ministers who had been thrust out of their livings by Parliament in the 1640s and 1650s. In the evocative words of one anonymous author:
“all order and discipline is taken away, the ministers of God are murthered and silenced, and mechanick Scums, viz. Tailers, weavers, and mopmakers, take upon them the sacred function of the ministery, and infect the people, with nonsense, blasphemy, and Treason, while the Rebels squeeze out the hearts bloods of the poore”.
The mechanic preacher became one of the most powerful tools in the Royalists’ arsenal of anti-Parliamentarian and anti-Puritan abuse. Such was its effectiveness that it influenced more ‘moderate’ supporters of church reform, like Presbyterians, in their efforts to pour cold water on those fiery separatists who favoured the lay ministry. So it was that the Presbyterian Thomas Edwards became one of the most obsessive chroniclers of artisanal evangelists in his famous tract of 1646 entitled Gangraena. In his words, ‘Mechanicks’ had ‘tak[en] upon them[selves] to preach and baptize’ amid ‘all the confusion and disorder in Church-matters both of opinions and practices, and particulars of all sorts’.
Edwards recorded several clothmakers who turned to preaching. Among the most infamous was Samuel Oates, a travelling preacher, who had undertaken something akin to a baptismal tour of the eastern counties of England during the First Civil War. Oates is likely to have been a worsted weaver by trade and his mobile ministry featured prominently in Edwards’ Gangraena. He was, according to Edwards, a ‘Dipper’ or unlicensed baptiser, an ‘Emissary’ of the Baptist church of Thomas Lambe in London, a preacher of ‘erroneous Doctrines’, and, Edwards insinuated, ‘a young lusty fellow,’ who ‘hath traded chiefly with young women and young maids’. Oates’s pretensions to evangelism cast a long shadow, including over his more famous son, Titus, who is best known as the fabricator of the ‘Popish Plot’ in 1678. As late as 1683, at the height of his public ridicule, the younger Oates was still attracting derision as ‘the Son of a Canting Sedition-Preaching Weaver’.
The trope of the preaching weaver was standard fare for loyalist satire well into the eighteenth century, especially when it heaped scorn on the topsy-turvy world of revolutionary Britain. Another chronicler of such behaviour, albeit this time within a staunchly Anglican camp, was John Walker, an Exeter clergyman, who undertook an extensive programme of research to uncover the ‘sufferings’ of his coreligionists during the Civil Wars, which he published in 1714. Walker’s details of preaching artisans were as colourful as Edwards’ seventy years earlier. One of his cast of rogues was Giles Say, vicar of Catherington, Hampshire, who was apparently presented with a weaver’s shuttle by his parishioners in mocking reference to his former trade.
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But such popular stereotyping and, no doubt, exaggeration on the part of those with a vested interest to overstate the extent of social inversion, was not mere invention. There really were clothmakers and traders, as well as other ‘mechanics’, who saw in the revolutionary decades an opportunity to flex their evangelical muscles. When John Price of Radnorshire came to the defence of Hugh Evans, a Baptist preacher in mid-Wales, he was not shy in detailing Evans’ early life as a clothier’s apprentice in which trade he later laboured before joining Coventry’s Baptist congregation. Elsewhere, Thomas Moore of Wells, Norfolk, rebuffed Presbyterian attempts to bare his ‘Loose Opinions, and Licentious Tenets’ in 1646 by acknowledging that he had been ‘a Weaver some twenty yeares since,’ but that ‘he hath no cause to be ashamed of it’.
The presence of an evangelical strand of Protestantism within communities of clothmakers and traders implies that these were not only venues of Parliamentarianism, but also for the circulation of radical ideas. Of these, the agenda of those styled the ‘Levellers’ appears to have been received with particular enthusiasm. John Lilburne, the most famous of the Levellers, was bound apprentice to a member of the London Company of Clothworkers and appears to have shared their concerns about the illicit transportation of the industry’s raw materials. Incidentally, Lilburne was a member of Henry Jacob’s congregation of London Baptists with one Edmund Rozier, himself a Clothworker, who had been centrally involved in the clothiers’ lobbying campaign of 1645 to 1647, mentioned earlier.
Clothmakers also mobilised in support of the Levellers’ Agreement of the People in late 1647. Several weavers were named among those who assembled in the voluminous concourse of the Bull and Mouth Inn at Aldersgate, London, where speakers professed admiration for the recent rising of thousands of silkweavers in Naples, they having ‘hanged at [their] Doore’ anyone who ‘st[ood] up for Monarchie’. Shortly after the meeting at the Bull and Mouth, Sir Thomas Fairfax was informed of a plan for ‘neare upon twenty thousand Weavers’ to join a ‘Grand Councell’ of the New Model Army at Mile End, to the east of London, where they were to march to Ware, Hertfordshire, the scene of a Leveller-inspired mutiny on 15 November.
The historical evidence tempts us to identify clothmakers and traders as loyal constituents of Parliament’s campaigns in the 1640s, perhaps even eager recipients of the movement’s more radical ideological offshoots. But such affinities were neither unanimous nor unconditional. Historians have shown that, when kingdom became republic in 1649, and when Oliver Cromwell became Protector in 1653, popular royalism drew strength from weariness at continuing economic dislocation, including in the textile industry. Such circumstances may have provoked Cornelius Bell, an Essex weaver, to declare his belief in July 1651 that
“there would be a change of governmente in this nation, and [I know] of Thousands in this county and els where [who] would rise for [th]e Kinge of England.”
[35.07]
There is also evidence that Royalism was sufficiently potent within clothmaking communities that it provided a basis for popular risings against the Republic. In February 1651, a report emerged from Reading prison that a plot had been hatched in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire involving local ‘Gentlemen and Clothiers’. Later on, during the summer of 1658, Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe, detailed a conspiracy of clothworker apprentices and journeymen that would have had them rise up at Leeds market. Strikingly, the plot had apparently involved the circulation of instructions for a rising in and between clothworkers’ premises in the town’s Mill Hill district.
So, any identification of ideological affinities with particular occupations or even ‘classes’ involves extreme caution. On balance, however, evidence that Royalism took root in clothmaking communities is outweighed heavily by that which shows a quite remarkable uptake of both Puritanism and Parliamentarianism within such workforces. As we have seen, this phenomenon was sufficiently marked to have invited the commentary of contemporaries. Another famous observer was the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who remarked in his 1679 tract Behemoth that textile workforces were ‘most commonly […] the first Encouragers of Rebellion’.
Hobbes’ comments were published amid a new political crisis, which brought England and Wales to the brink of renewed civil conflict and bore considerable influence from memories of revolutions four decades earlier. This was the so-called ‘Exclusion Crisis’ when attempts were made to bar Charles II’s brother and heir, the Roman Catholic James, Duke of York, from the succession. The Exclusion Crisis saw a reanimation of Parliament’s ‘Good Old Cause’ in anxious imaginations, but also within communities of dissidents whose explicit objective was to recover some or all of that which had been lost since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Among these were, once again, clothmakers and traders. When, in 1685, James, Duke of Monmouth, led the ill-fated Rebellion against his uncle, formerly the Duke of York and now James II, his support was, according to the diarist John Evelyn, drawn from the West Country’s ‘Anabaptists and poor cloth-workers’. For contemporaries, such details mattered. The politics of production and trade had continued to play a substantial role in the politics of religion.
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You can learn more about the insights that Dr Legon’s research have revealed in the recommended publications that accompany this talk.
Also do visit our website, www.worldturnedupsidedown.co.uk, where you will find more than 100 discussions and talks by leading academic historians discussing the events which shaped the lives of men, women and children living through the turbulent years of the seventeenth century.
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