Centre and Locality: review reflections

 Quite by chance, I was browsing on Twitter last Friday (9^th April) when I spotted on Edward Vallance’s site a reference to a video conference organised by William Clayton of the University of East Anglia at the end of last month. Further searches led me to William Clayton’s review of the book edited by Chris Kyle and Jason Peacey, Connecting Centre and Locality: Communication in early modern England, which appeared under the auspices of the Manchester University Press in 2020 and which Clayton had reviewed for The Seventeenth Century in its most recent issue.[1] This is a subject which interests me and I did give some thought to responding to William Clayton’s largely laudatory comments. However, I was also conscious that I had not read this collection of essays and was thus less well equipped than I should be for assessing either the book or William Clayton’s review.

There was, however, one historiographical issue upon which I did feel qualified to comment. Right at the start, Clayton began by observing that the work did not aim to repeat or criticize old Revisionist arguments about a gap between the centre and locality but rather to explore aspects of the relationship between the two that a dichotomous approach had served to obscure. Interestingly, he went on to argue that they were not fixed, universal concepts in practice but subject to intense negotiation and renegotiation during the seventeenth century. From there, he went on to analyse briefly the contributions of individual authors and to conclude that political communication offers a framework of thinking creatively about historiographical concepts and issues that had lost much of their vitality. This is, I hope, a fair summary of points made in the review.

In fact, the analytical challenge posed by ideas about a struggle between the ‘centre’ and England’s ‘localities’ goes back to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay in 1953 on The Gentry 1540-1640: he postulated a struggle between ‘Court’ and ‘Country’ leading up to the English Civil War as an alternative to the economic and social determinism of R.H.Tawney and Lawrence Stone. This hypothesis stimulated a raft of theses by scholars like Joyce Mouseley, J.T.Cliffe and Gordon Blackwood on the fortunes of the gentry in counties like Suffolk, Yorkshire and Lancashire as well as in other places. Just over a decade later, Alan Everitt’s study, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion 1640-1660, appeared in print advancing an equally bold argument about deep-seated provincial particularism  in an England of partly independent county-states or communities reacting against political and social pressure from outside. Inevitably, Everitt’s work in turn initiated the production of further academic theses and books exploring such ideas.

It was from the latter well that Conrad Russell drew one of his major arguments in his studies of the Parliaments and politics of the 1620s. In general, men returned to the House of Commons in those years put the interests of their counties or corporations ahead of those of the state as a whole and, in particular, were insensitive to exigencies faced by monarchs and their advisers. This appropriation of Everitt’s localist hypothesis was already old by the mid-1970s and, in the works of other county historians like Brian Quintrell, Anthony Fletcher and John Morrill, becoming more difficult to detect if it could be detected at all. In any case, Russell’s ‘revisionism’ itself had a relatively short shelf life. By the mid-1980s, certainly by 1990, Russell, Morrill and other front-line figures had moved on to explore the implications of the quarrels within and between the Stuarts’ three kingdoms first elaborated by C.V.Wedgwood, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Helli Koenigsberger. By then, ‘revisionism’ was largely defunct.

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[1] William Clayton, Connecting Centre and Locality: Political communication in early modern England. Edited by Chris R.Kyle and Jason Peacey (Manchester. Manchester University Press. 2020). The Seventeenth Century, Volume 36, Issue 2. Pp.359-361.