David Underdown – författare

What have maypoles, charivari processions, and stoolball matches to do with the English Civil War? A great deal, argues David Underdown. Using three western counties as a case-study, he shows that the war was neither a dispute confined to the elite nor a class struggle of the 'middling sort' against a discredited aristocracy. It was in fact the result of profound disagreements among people of all social levels about the moral basis of their communities; commoners as well as ruler held strong opinions about order and governance. But these opinions varied from place to place, and through a pioneering synthesis of social history and popular culture, Underdown relates political diversity to cultural diversity, and shows that local difference in popular allegiance in the Civil War coincided with regional contrast in the traditional festive culture. The book is thus an important reinterpretation of both the English Revolution and the relationship between society, politics, and culture in the seventeenth century.

A Freeborn People is a provocative exploration of the ways in which the political cultures of the elite and of common people intersected during the seventeenth century. David Underdown shows that the two worlds were not as separate as historians have often thought them to be; English men and women of all social levels had similar expectations about good government and about the traditional liberties available to them under the `Ancient Constitution'. Throughout the century, both levels of politics were also powerfully influenced by prevailing assumptions about gender roles, and, especially in the years before the civil wars, by fears that the country was threatened by evil forces of satanic inversion.This dramatic reinterpretation of the Stuart period, based on the author's acclaimed 1992 Ford Lectures, begins a new chapter in the continuing debate over the historical meaning of Britain's seventeenth-century revolutions.