If you look at the subtitle of Edward Vallance's A Radical History of Britain, it's clear where he's coming from. He's, in his own term, a radical, and sympathises greatly with those before him who he regards as falling into the same camp. The good news is this has not destroyed his critical faculties. He's wary of painting the present too closely on the past, of regarding former radicals as "just like us," and keen to point out that many fond legends of the left and the right, such as the exact place of the Magna Carta in "British freedom" (largely constructed in the 14th century, when Parliament passed six acts that reinterpretted chapter 29 far beyond its original intent, making, for example "lawful judgement of peer" mean trial by jury).
Vallance clearly explains his aims in the introduction for the book: "First, it aims to evaluate radicalism in its specific historical contexts, uncovering in many places the formerly secret history of both its successes and its failures. Second, it evaluates the enduring power of the idea of a 'radical tradition,' by examining how each age has reinvented it to suits its own ends."
Some of the names and events here will be familiar, at least in outline, to anyone with a smattering of school history: the Peasants' Revolt, the Levellers, Thomas Paine, the Tolpuddle Martyrs and the suffragettes. Yet most will have little more than a sketch of these events — and often an inaccurate one.
So Vallance concludes that the Peasants' Revolt had a different impact than suggested by the "bitter invective of the boy-king Richard, often invoked to show the futility of popular insurrection." In fact, wages rose after the revolt, many serfs were released from villeinage, rations improved,with labourers' rations at harvest often including up to a pound of meat a day, and life expectancy rose to about 35 (higher than industrial workers in the mid-19th century). And for the first time, Vallance said, there was an awareness in the elite that the Commons had a place in public life, as the anonymous poem "God Save the King and the King's Crown" said: "The leste lygge-man with body and rent/He is a parcel of the Crown."
But the core of this book, as with any book about English radicals, is around the Revolution. and the core of that is the Levellers, subject of much historical revisionism, antirevisionism, anti-anti-revisionism, etc... This is Vallance's conclusion: "...the key Leveller writers, Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn and John Wildman, were at the centre of the political turmoil of the civil war and the revolution. Far from being marginal figure, individuals like Wildman were, in fact, well connected to radical MPs within the Commons such as Henry Marten and Thomas Rainborowe. By cautioning against seeing their politics as reflecting a simple diichotomy between radicals and conservatives, recent work has also directed our attention to those moments when the army grandees themselves seriously considered radical solutions, such as the Levellers' various Agreements of the People, for settling the nation."
Article comments
1 - Bob Lloyd
A minor detail: the East end battle in the 30s was Cable Street, not Able Street. By the way, the modern equivalent was the Battle of Lewisham in August 1977.
Civil liberties are always an area of contest because rights only exist in reality to the extent that they can be claimed so it is interesting that radical movements are seen as individualist. Certainly in both Cable Street, and Lewisham, it was the voluntary mobilisation of very large numbers of people that opposed fascism on the streets, in very much a collectivist way.
It's also curious that radical movements are seen as venerating the law as the embodiment of liberties. In the UK, the growth of legislation against trade unions, the right to free speech, the right of assembly, the powers of arrest and monitoring, are all targets for radicals and have been for decades.
One wonders about whether Vallance is too much the ivory tower academic. He seems to be keen on the radical individual rather than the radical masses who, I suspect, he somewhat fears. Radical individuals can only be effective if they are backed by radical movements with collective strength.
2 - Natalie Bennett
Thanks for the noting of the Cable Street typo - now corrected in the copy.
I don't think Vallance is individualist, in fact the opposite. He thinks that British radicalism has traditionally (and here of course he is talking over centuries) been too resistant to any communalist action or approach.
I didn't much go into it in the review, but in terms of today, Vallance is clearly standing against the great ongoing erosion of civil liberties.