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Two of the most common types of popular disorders in late Tudor and
early Stuart England were the food riots and the anti-enclosure
riots in royal forests. Of particular interest are the forest riots
known collectively as the Western Rising of 1626-1632, and the
lesser known disorders in the Western forests which took place
during the English Civil War. The central aims of this volume are
to establish the social status of the people who engaged in those
riots and to determine the social and economic conditions which
produced the disorders. The leaders and most active participants in
riot were rural artisans - skilled men working in non-agricultural
employments. These artisans, particularly those in the major
industries of seventeenth-century England located in the forested
West, were largely wage-earners. Virtually landless cottagers who
relied on the market for food, clothworkers and other artisans
frequently engaged in food riots and attempted insurrections during
times of depression or harvest failure. These artisans exploited
the common waste of the royal forests. Enclosure of the forests by
the Crown threatened the livelihood of those workers who depended
on the forests for raw material and pasturage. The result was the
Western Rising, a series of massive anti-enclosure riots which took
place in Gillingham Forest on the Wiltshire-Dorset border, Baydon
Forest in Wiltshire and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire.
There were also concurrent riots in Leicester Forest, and Feckenham
Forest, Worcestershire. A similar series of riots followed in the
1640s. These conclusions challenge the dominant modern view that
work in rural industry was merely the by-employment of members of
peasant households. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation that
disaffected men of standing were generally behind disorders such as
the Western Rising, manipulating popular grievances for their own
ends, In Contempt of All Authority concludes that in times of
economic and social distress or political dislocation (such as the
Civil War) the "lower orders" of Tudor and Stuart England were
provoked into self-organised direct action by very basic issues of
food supply, employment, and common rights. In the course of such
actions they manifested an intense hatred of the gentry and the
well-to-do, whom they held responsible for existing conditions.
Buchanan Sharp is Professor of History at the University of
California, Santa Cruz.
Surveying government and crowd responses ranging from the late
Middle Ages through to the early modern era, Buchanan Sharp's
illuminating study examines how the English government responded to
one of the most intractable problems of the period: famine and
scarcity. The book provides a comprehensive account of famine
relief in the late Middle Ages and evaluates the extent to which
traditional market regulations enforced by thirteenth-century kings
helped shape future responses to famine and scarcity in the
sixteenth century. Analysing some of the oldest surviving archival
evidence of public response to famine, Sharp reveals that food
riots in England occurred as early as 1347, almost two centuries
earlier than was previously thought. Charting the policies, public
reactions and royal regulations to grain shortage, Sharp provides a
fascinating contribution to our understanding of the social,
economic, cultural and political make-up of medieval and early
modern England.
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