Channel Talent. History: Radicalism During The English Revolution, 1641-1660 With Dr Ariel Hessayon From Goldsmiths, University of London
These years were marked by rebellion in Ireland; bloody Civil Wars in Britain; political, religious and social radicalism; regicide; eleven years of republican rule; and the de facto restoration of the monarchy. One would think that by now there is nothing new for historians to learn about the English Revolution, that all the important issues have been resolved. Yet the opposite is true, for there remains a lack of consensus as to the causes of events, the manner in which some of them occurred and their significance. Even the name is in dispute. Moreover, whereas class and ideological conflict once seemed a plausible explanatory tool, it has been a major achievement of the so-called revisionist interpretation of early modern England to shift the emphasis away from tension towards consensus and contingency.
One outcome of this approach has been the attempted marginalisation of radicalism during the English Revolution. Thus prominent figures within what might be termed the canonical English radical tradition (itself largely a twentieth-century historical construction) have been regarded as unrepresentative of the conforming, traditionalist, uncommitted majority; their extreme opinions apparently advocated for only a brief period of their lives; their influence upon society supposedly exaggerated both by panicked political elites and skilled propagandists preying on fears of property damage or cautioning against introducing religious toleration and its corollary, moral dissolution (abhorrent beliefs begat aberrant behaviour).
Similarly, conventional forms of popular protest such as food, enclosure and tax riots were reduced in scale and scope and drained of radical ideological content. Instead these incidents were presented as sporadic, uncoordinated, locally specific, largely bloodless and sometimes richly symbolic examples of conservative disorder.