Understanding popular violence in the English Revolution

the long version

This is a critical re-evaluation of one of the best-known episodes of crowd action in the English Revolution, in which crowds in their thousands invaded and plundered the houses of the landed classes. The so-called Stour Valley riots have become accepted as the paradigm of class hostility, determining plebeian behaviour within the Revolution. An exercise in micro-history, the book questions this dominant reading by trying to understand the interrelated contexts of local responses to the political and religious counterrevolution of the 1630s and the confessional politics of the early 1640s.