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The Specter of the Commonalty: Class Struggle and the Commonweal in England before the Atlantic World
David Rollison
Whon the comuynes began to ryse,
Was non so gret lord, as I gesse,
That thei in herte bigon to gryse,
And leide heore jolité in presse.
Wher was thenne heore worthinesse,
Whon thei made lordes droupe and dare?
Of alle wyse men I take witnesse,
This was a warnynge to be ware.
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| —Anonymous |
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It is a purpos'd thing, and grows by plot,
To curb the will of the nobility.
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| —William Shakespeare |
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Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.
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| —Jacques Derrida1 |
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THE early historical usages of three words had great resonance in the constitutional histories of the English-speaking world. "Commons" and "commonalty," used to denote a constitutional class—the Third Estate, laboriaris, "those who work"—are now archaic, but they were central to political and constitutional discourse in precolonial England. Their emergence was part of a discourse of the commonweal that gave prominence to the constitutional and (later) economic roles of the commonalty. The provenance of commonweal as a term of political and constitutional discourse is linked to a tradition of popular resistance and rebellion that emerged from 1381 to 1450. A popular provenance for this keyword of English vernacular politics is of interest, since it offers a significant exception to the clerical authority model that has dominated the study of political discourse.2 It places popular voices and words above, or alongside, educated and classical (Renaissance) accounts of the formation of the constitutional cultures of early modern England and prerevolutionary America and suggests the existence of causal links between actual social struggles and the development of languages of politics. Comparing contemporary paradigms of popular rebellion with modern studies suggests that Karl Marx's theory of class struggle under "primitive accumulation" was foreshadowed in the responses of Sir Thomas Smith and the two Richard Hakluyts to an existing tradition of popular unrest and rebellion. How, they asked, could a problem (the emergence of a mobile and discontented proletarii and their leaders) become an advantage and benefit to the commonwealth of England? Their answer was to conquer foreign markets and create new ones by establishing plantations. The tradition of popular rebellion and the shifting class divide between the commonalty and its rulers were central ingredients in the politics and social development of precolonial England.
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| Studies of popular politics in late medieval and early modern Europe see dramatic episodes of resistance and rebellion as expressions of deep-seated political cultures and attitudes that otherwise left no traces in the archives. "Without 1381 or 1549 in England, or 1525 in Germany," writes Patrick Collinson, "we might never have suspected that there was a political culture at relatively submerged levels, well below the apexes of lordship and monarchy." Commonalty, a member of a family of English words that developed out of the Latin and French comun, requires readers to reconstitute these submerged levels, or outer circles, of late medieval and early modern governance. Popular politics must always be seen in relation to the other, less submerged and more comprehensively studied levels described by the great nineteenth-century constitutional historian William Stubbs as the inner "circle round the throne."3 Classes, and classlike formations, are always defined in relation to other classes. |
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