The County Community and the Making of Public Opinion in Fourteenth-Century England

Abstract

‘The “county”’, said Maitland, ‘is not a mere stretch of land, a governmental district; it is an organized body of men; it is a comnumitas ’. For the most part it has not been medievalists who have taken up that theme but historians of the early modern period. Much recent writing on the politics of sixteenth and seventeenth century England has turned on the county and its institutions, for it was there that the ambitions and loyalties of the gentry often found expression and the factions and rivalries of the 1640s first developed. The grand dénouement of the Civil War has stimulated historians to look beneath national and parliamentary affairs to the attitudes of the shires, which so frequently obstructed and distorted the policies devised at Whitehall and Westminster.