It has been pointed out that although some sources list particularattributes of costume, appearance or weaponry as characteristic of aparticular ethnic group, close examination of the evidence, writtenand especially pictorial, appears to show considerable fluidity inreality.46 This is what one might expect. We should not assume thatthis renders insignificant our sources’ statements. Any individualmarker need not have been universal, or sufficient in itself to provesomeone’s membership of a group. On its own, carrying a francisca,or sporting a particular hairstyle, or wearing a given type of tunic ora belt-set decorated in a specific fashion, might not have automati-cally and clearly marked one out as a Frankish male, for example.All these signs together, however, probably made a much lessambiguous statement.47 More importantly, what people believesignifies a typical custom or fashion of a group is frequently not ascommonly employed in reality and is often in fact, rather thanbeing distinctive, shared with others.48 As discussed in chapters 2 to4, groups sometimes employ material culture associated with othergroups, in particular ways, to signify identities within their own

Particular types of weaponry have also been ascribed to certainpeoples. Isidore of Seville for instance, writing shortly after the closeof our period, associated the name of the francisca, or throwing axe,with that of the Franks whose warriors used it, as described in use by

As well as subscription to a group’s laws, traditions and customs,membership of the new peoples of the post-imperial world appearsto have involved other, material cultural dimensions. Costume andother aspects of appearance were employed to give unity to ethnicgroupings. Some sources refer to particular hairstyles being charac-teristic of certain peoples, for example, and there are references todistinctive dress fashions of particular groups.41 Sidonius Apollinarisdescribes Frankish costume and haircut in his works.42 This sort ofthing seems to be witnessed in the archaeological record. There are,as we have seen, styles of brooch or belt-buckles with particulargeographical distributions and it seems reasonable to associatethese with particular ethnic groups. Making this statement mustnot, however, be understood to imply the old views of ethnicity(discussed in chapter 2) as meaning genetic or racial unity or that allwearers of such costumes or hairstyles were immigrants into theEmpire from particular regions. The decision to adopt such styleswas another aspect of incorporation.

We can therefore obtain a more rounded picture of how thepromulgation of written law helped to unify and give a reality tonew ethnic groups. In their appropriation of Roman idioms ofpolitical leadership39 western kings naturally wished to continue theimperial tradition of issuing laws. The Bible gave a further impetusto this. The Hebrews, like the Romans, had been a people with awritten law. If they were to have some sort of unity, the new peoplesof the fifth and sixth centuries needed law as well as history. Thetexts symbolised this and the legal procedures they attest give an

The differences between post-imperial and classical Roman lawhave thus been explained with reference to Roman vulgar law.34Roman law did not only comprise the classical law of the jurists orimperial rescripts that had the power of law. There was also a stratumof vulgar law, the customs of the communities of the Empire,influenced by classical jurisprudence to be sure but significantlydifferent from it in many ways. The similarities between the variousbarbarian codes can then be explained by their common derivationfrom the vulgar law of the different provinces. This would not bethe same everywhere, hence the differences. One support for thisargument is the similarity between the barbarian codes and a tract,indisputably of Roman vulgar law, from Byzantine Anatolia, knownas The Farmer’s Law. The latter can have nothing to do with‘Germanic’ settlers.35 The argument that post-imperial legislationrepresents the codification of provincial Roman vulgar law bybarbarian leaders acting, on a precedent set by governors, in order tolegitimise their rule and unify a group of followers around a par-ticular ethnic identity, has much to recommend it.

The laws issued by post-imperial kings are frequently not likethose issued by the emperors but we should not forget that theVisigothic and the Burgundian monarchs also issued versions of theTheodosian code. Furthermore, it is possible to trace the influenceof imperial law even on supposedly straightforward ‘barbarian’ codeslike Salic law.32 Roman provincial governors had had the power tolegislate and it has been suggested that the law promulgated by post-imperial kings was based upon those sorts of pronouncement ratherthan upon imperial law

As well as origin myths and histories, ethnic groups could crystallisearound shared law and custom. Western European law in the post-imperial period was generally presented in ethnic terms, as thecustoms of a particular people. Whether such laws were importedfrom the Germanic-speaking barbaricum is another matter of heateddebate.26 Certainly, post-imperial law was very different fromfourth-century Roman legislation in its workings, which operatearound the compensation of one group for offences and injuriesinflicted by another. It is, however, worth stressing that by the endof the period covered by this book only a few of the known‘barbarian’ codes had come into existence: as a composition, Salianlaw in northern Gaul most plausibly dates to the very early sixthcentury (although it seems to contain material originating in earlierroyal edicts);27 the Burgundian code is a compilation of 516/17 butagain contains royal enactments going back to the third quarter ofthe fifth century; the now fragmentary Visigothic code attributed toEuric probably belongs to that king’s reign (467–484); and theEdict of Theoderic, probably issued by Theoderic of Italy (althoughit has also been linked to Theoderic II of the Visigoths), is also of

Study of the processes of ethnic change has resulted in muchdebate about so-called ethnogenesis.4 Expressed, of necessity, withsome simplification, the model most widely employed envisages theformation of peoples as the result of the coalescence of diversegroups of people around a small aristocratic core, as a result of thepolitical and military success of the latter during the west’s frag-mentation. This group carried with it a number of foundationlegends, origin myths and historical traditions, for which reason ithas been dubbed the ‘Traditionskern’ (Tradition-core). In the modelproposed by Wenskus and Wolfram, recently termed the‘Traditionskern model’, the traditions of ethnic origin shared a

Discussion of the formation of new identities in the fifth century hasfocused upon the issue of ethnic change. The problem can be simplystated. In 350 most of the inhabitants (and all the politicallyimportant ones) of the territories governed by the Empire sawthemselves in some way as Roman. The later Empire’s cohesion hadbeen based largely upon the absolute dominance of a particular ideaof Roman identity, the adoption of which allowed participation inpolitics at various levels. Whoever controlled the political centre,furthermore, could validate claims to this identity. By 476, essentiallyas a result of competition for mastery of that centre, the westernEmpire had ceased to exist. It had fragmented into regional polities,in some areas quite small and based upon cities, as in Spain, butusually large-scale. In the absence of the Empire and of any claim tocontrol the legitimacy of power or the political identities based uponit, new identities had to be forged and by 550 large numbers ofpeople in the former provinces, especially those with a claim topolitical and military authority, saw themselves primarily as Gothic,Frankish, Saxon or English.3 By the early seventh century these newethnicities were as universal within particular regions as Romannesshad been in the fourth century.

All of the discussion above about the theoretical fluidity ofethnic identity would, however, be pointless if late antique peoplehad no concept of themselves except as belonging to immutablegroups. To change ethnicity, a culture must have a notion of theindividual, or the self, made up of particular identities that can bechanged. It has been claimed that the classification of societies andstyles of life into groups, which could be chosen, following modelsand becoming models for others, was a ‘discovery’ of the twelfthcentury. This does not seem to be the case.21 The Romans dividedthe world up into groups but saw membership of their own as amatter of proper conduct, which one could choose to adopt orignore. Ambrose (bishop of Milan, †397) exhorted each member ofhis flock to ‘look upon himself and his own conscience’ and follow

The fact that individuals possess a series of identities, which wemight think of as ethnic, and can order and reorder them in terms ofimportance, further facilitates such strategies. There were members ofnumerous ethnic groups within Theoderic’s Ostrogoths.18 Herepeople had been accepted as Gothic despite additional identities.Once acknowledged as having both identities, however, one mightvery well play up one at the expense of the other until, in thisexample, the individual was more Gothic than Roman. In extremecases, through marriage, name change and so on – both strategies wellattested in late antiquity – the individual might to all intents andpurposes lose his Roman identity completely.

As these examples make clear, ethnicity is, furthermore, performa-tive.15 It has nothing innate or immanent. Everything that proclaimsthe membership of an ethnic group, be it clothing, customs orwhatever, and whether learnt almost subconsciously in the process ofsocialisation or adopted more deliberately later, must to some extentbe performed. It is important, though, to note that ethnic relations arefrequently unequal. ‘Performed ethnicity’ might be forced uponmembers of one group by those of another more powerful ethnicbody. For example, many white inhabitants of the southern UnitedStates expected (and some still expect) their black neighbours tobehave in a particular way in relationships with them, and many blackpeople behaved accordingly in those circumstances as a result. Thereis nothing natural about such behaviour. As well as being enforcedupon the weak, the latter might adopt it in order either to evadeviolence or to try to improve their situation with the help of the morepowerful. It is not unlikely that Roman expectations of non-Romansproduced similar situations

A common mistake is to assume that ethnicity has only one layer. Amodern male inhabitant of London might, for example, see himself asBritish, English, a ‘southerner’, a Londoner or as from Brixton. Allthese levels might be important within social interaction, either toproclaim a shared identity with individuals with whom it is advan-tageous to stress similarity or alternatively to proclaim difference fromother individuals (or even from the same individuals in other situ-ations)

The only common factor in defining ethnicity is belief: in thereality of your group and the difference of others. Ethnicity is cogni-tive: a state of mind. It is not, however, simply identity. There aremany types of social identity – religion, class, gender and age – butethnicity does not necessarily correlate with any of these. It occupies adistinct arc within the spectrum of social identities. Sometimes cer-tain classes were equated with particular ethnic identities, and eth-nicity has sometimes apparently been gendered. Nevertheless in nocase did the occupation of a particular class situation or the possessionof specific sex attributes define the ethnic group.

hat people think defines ethnicity is endlessly fluid. Belief inshared descent is common. Language can also determine ethnicity.Elsewhere, religion or unifying social customs, even law, areinvoked, as occasionally is one’s place of residence. All these factorscan be employed to give shape to an ethnic group yet, for every casewhere a particular factor is deployed, another exists where there is nocorrelation between it and ethnicity. Religious beliefs, for example,helped define late antique ethne, with the Arianism of the Goths,Burgundians and Vandals or the Anglo-Saxons’ paganism and, inthe modern world, with Catholicism or Protestantism in NorthernIreland or the Catholicism or Orthodoxy of Croats and Serbs. Thereare, however, equally numerous cases where shared religion did notprevent violently hostile relationships. The mutual Catholicism of theFrench and Spanish in the early modern period is one illustration. Atthe same time there might be religious divisions within ethnic units:again, early modern France provides an example. Equally, the sharedlanguage of Ulster Protestants and Catholics or of Serbs and Croatshas not prevented violent division. Although ethnicity might bedefined by habitation within a defined area, different ethnic groupshave overlapped geographically and shared residential locations forcenturies (the evils of ‘ethnic cleansing’ would not have been possiblewithout this fact). Distinct (often antagonistic) ethnic groups (forexample the Nuer and Dinka in eastern Africa) can share customs andother cultural practices, which in other cases define membership of anethnos. They can also be believed to delineate an ethnic group whilst inreality being little used, or shared with other people!10 Even ideas of

Attempts have been made to revive primordialist notions anddevelop instrumentalist ideas,7 as well as to bridge the gap betweenthe two camps through the use of other theory.8 By the 1980s the

By the 1960s ethnicity was seen above all as a matter of belief in one’smembership of a group. A milestone was the publication of EthnicGroups and Boundaries, edited by Fredrik Barth.4 Barth himself workedamongst the Swat Pathans of Afghanistan and Pakistan and notedthat some Pathans, finding themselves in situations where they couldno longer excel in the activities that they held to constitute Pathanidentity, ‘became’ Baluchis or Kohistanis.5 This ‘instrumentalist’ inter-pretation sees ethnicity as something one can adopt and discardaccording to social situations and has much relevance to our study.Many peoples simply disappeared from the historical record: the Gaulsin what is now France, the Britons in England and the Ostrogoths inItaly, to take three examples. Hitherto these disappearances had beeninterpreted, following statements by early medieval authors ponderingthe issue, to imply physical displacement at best and extermination atworst.6 Instrumentalist approaches to ethnicity have consequentlybecome very influential amongst scholars questioning these inter-pretations of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Rothari's Edict of 643 is the most systematic and large-scaleexposition of Germanic custom that survives from any of the Germanickingdoms, excluding only that of the Visigoths. 1l But the VisigOlhiccocle is heavily influenced by vulgar Roman law. Rothari's Edict, by

On the OIher hand, we can detect in our sources two different currentsin seventh-century Lombard kingship, which can circumstamially belinked to religious belief: on one side, the tradition of Agilulf, of aCatholic court with links to Roman and Byzantine ceremonial andculture, followed by the descendants of Theodelinda's brotherGundoald, the Bavarian dynasty, ruling on and off between 652 and712; on the other, what might be called a 'country' tradition, thekingship of men who had begun as dukes and only linked themselves tothe court by marriage, Arioald, Rothari and GrimoaJd. These twotendencies did not crystallise into political groupings; they merelyrepresented a contrast in the social origins of the men who were in aposition to seize supreme power in the state. Nevertheless, Rothari andGrimoaJd, at least, did act differently from the Bavarians. Theypromulgated and associated themselves with Lombard Jaw.

Some of the problems involved in this picture are extremely detailed,and not relevant to this narrative . But the picture Bagnetti presents isone of dearly defined groups allached to conscious political ideologiesand would be crucial for our analysis ifit were true. There are problemsabout it, however. The first is the absence ofevidence for any particularferven cy for religion along the Lombards at all. Authari's anti-Catholicedict we have already referred to: it was limited to refusing to Lombardsthe right 10 baptise their children Catholic. Authari certainly hadCatholic followers, however; Gregory tells us about one. 13 Arioald andRothari can be seen in surviving actions 10 respect at least the rights ofthe Church of Rome over Catholics in Lombard territory. OfGrimoald 's religious sensibilities we know nothing whatsoever - thoughPaul, our major source here, never admitted any of his kings to be Arianwith the sole exception ofRothari. The late seventh and eighth-centurykings, by now dearly Catholic, are no more zealous than the Ariankings were. Even the use of the Church as a political force 10 support thestate, a commonplace among early medieval monarchies, is almostwholly absent until the Frankish conquest. 14 Albain converted toArianism for transparently political reasons, and the last king to supportArianism militantly died in 590, only twenty-five years later. This is notenough time, in such a confused period, to instil into the Lombardpeople much of a sense of the potential of Arianism as a nationalistrallying-call.

The Lombards were certainly for the mosl part pagan when theyentered Italy in 568, though we know little about their pranices-sacrificing 10 a goat's head , as Gregory the Great says, or at a woodlandshrine, followingJonas ofBobbio (writing in the 6400), or firing at a hidehung on a tree, as in the ninth-century life of Barbatus, bishop ofBenevento, who lived in the 670S.' 2 Superimposed on this, the religionof at least some of the aristocracy was Christian. They were largelyCatholic in the 5400, but from Albain onwards beginning to be Arian, atleast in the royat entourage . Authari we know was ani\'dy Arian.Agilulf may have been - he was at least not Catholic, though much ofhis co urt was; Arioald (626- 36) and Rothari (636-52) were certainlyArian. Thereafter, we cannot show any king to have been Arian ,though Grimoald (662-7t ) should probably be included in the list .Adaloald (6t6-26), Aripert I (652-61 ), and Grimoald's successors wereall Catholic. Bognetti saw a large-scale break between 'progressive'elements, who wished to introduce Catholicism into the Lombard courtand society, and traditionalist nationalist warrior groups, who usedAlboin's and Authari's Arianism as a touchstone. Agilulf couldsurround himself with Catholics, like his wife Theodelinda, orAgrippinus bishop of Como, or the Irishman Columbanus (whofounded the monastery of Bobbio in 61 3), because Catholicism innorthern Italy had been attached to the schism of the Three Chapters

In the North, though, Agilulf at least achieved recognition of hissupremacy from all other Lombard power groups, and on this basis hebegan to consolidate his state, which for the first time begins to takeshape in our evidence. He did so with a careful eye to the imitation ofRoman and Byzantine forms and ceremonies, and certainly used

Droclulf was clhnically a Sueve, and the Lombard con-federalion included a large number ofdifferent ethnic groups - Saxons,Gepids, Bulgars, Sarmalians, Sueves, Thuringians, PannonianRomans - and the Saxons can actually be seen acting as a homogeneousgroup in our sources. Such a mix cannot have helped Lombard politicalcohesion in the period.

The earl y history of the Lombards. before 568, is not of directrelevance to Ital y. It suffices to say that they were a West Germanicpt'Ople, like till' Franks, speaking a language relatm to Old HighGerman. They were first recorded by Tacitus o n the Lower Elbe,subsequelllly mO\'ing 10 what is now Bohemia , then to Lower Austria;finall y, in the carl y sixth celllury (c.52 7)seuling in the Roman fronti erprovince of Pannonia.

This tendency is crystallised in the other great Roman socio-economic legacy, the city. The Roman constitution was traditionallyone ofsemi-independent city-states or municipia, run by their own (uria(or city councils. Though by 400 this was no more than an oppressivemyth (the 'independence' of city councils resting in their responsibilityto underwrite the heavy taxation of the late Empire), the local identityof the cities ' persisted, and acted as a permanent focu s for theirtraditional territories. Some ofthese territories remain nearly :.maheredwithin modern provincial boundaries. When the Italian state in theNorth eventually fell , in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the networkof cities survived and replaced it. City-states also replaced many of theregional states of the peninsula, where the cities were strong enough.Italy itself did not survive, but the persistence and permanence ofItalian cities is one of the crucial and particular features of the history ofthe early medieval period. As we shall see, it is a constituent element ofalmost every theme that here follows.

States can perform theiressential functions without too much hindrance from the geography(except perhaps in the southern Appennines), but the regions of Italythey have ruled have been almost wholly localised, with few permanentlinks with each other. This was true even under the Roman Empire, andhas been ever since, until the middle ofthe present century. When stateshave weakened, they have tended to lose control of everything thatkeeps Italy together as a single entity. When the state falls, Italy itselfsprings apart.

Franks had been settling heavily in Gaul long before Clovis,probably in fact before they were Franks. As we have seen, theconquest of Syagrius's kingdom may have been as much a re-sponse to thissituation as aprecipitator of it. Some Franks grad-ually moved, a few fa"milies at a time and a few kilometers at atime, into the Roman world. But some peoples living in theRoman world, whether laeti or federates, gradually turned intoFranks. Given the paucity of written evidence, it is extremelydifficult to determine just how those regions of northern Europebecame "Frankish." Our best evidence lies in the cemeteries ar-ranged in rows about which we spoke in Chapter Two. In thelate fifth century these cemeteries show an important change.Prior to that time row cemeteries within the Empire had beengenerally poor in grave goods. Now, increasingly one began tobury the dead with more weapons or jewelry, indicating thegreat wealth that came with military service and increased raid- ·ing. Moreover, to judge from the great differences in the qualityand variety of grave goods found in these late fifth-century tombs,military service, either to Childeric and Clovis or to the variouscompeting Gallo-Roman commanders, or even independent raid-ing could result in real wealth for leaders of warrior bands.

The Fi:anbthemselyes were likewise deeply. RoJnanized. Evenprior to the victory at Soissons, Clovis and lhe .Franks had beenaccustomed to the discipline of Rome. Generatjons of Romanservice had taught the }4'ranks. inuch about Roman organizationand control. This heritage is eyen visible in .that supposedlymost Frankish tradition, the Salic Law. Sometime between 508and 5ll Clovi~ ~.~sued what is known a5 the Factus Legis Salicae,-a. capital and contrc;>versial text which we shaU be mentioningo£~en in. our discussion of Frankish society. The Pactus, in itsoldest extant form, consists of sixty-five chapters and is, after theVisigotpic Law, the oldest example of a written code for abarbarian kingdom. WritteJ! law was certainly not a barbarian .tr.aditiou; the very act of codifying traditional custom, in what-.. ever hapha,zarcl manner, could. only originate under the influ-ence of Rpman law and could have .been done only by .persdnstrained in that tradition. The text is in Latin, and scholars havelong.~bandoned the hypothesis that the.Latin was a translationof a now-l()~t Frankish version. Concepts of Roman law and Ro-man legal orgal):ization appear in the very form of the text. Inissuing the text, Clovis was acting not as a barbarian king butas the legitimate ruler of a section of the Roman~ed world.Moreove;r, the Pactus appli s not simply to Franks. It is intendedfor all the barbati in his re lm.

During the long period of service to Rome, punctuated byshort-lived rebellions or skirmishes, the Frankish identity andtheir political and military structure could not but be greatly in-fluenced by contact with imperial traditions. Service in the mili-tary was long the primary means of Romanization, and theFrankish tribes of the middle and lower Rhine were more af-fected by this process than .most. This deep penetration andtransformation is dearly seen in such evidence as the third-century funerary inscription erected for a soldier in Pannonia:Francus ego cives, miles romqnus in armis ("I am a Frank by na-tionality, but a Roman soldier under arms").3 That a barbarianwould employ the Roman term civis to describe his identity, aterm incomprehensible without some sense of the tradition ofRoman statecraft and law, indicates forcefully how much Frank-ish society was being molded,into an integral part of the Empire.The second half of the inscription is equally indicative: a "Frank-ish citizen" was indeed a Roman soldier, for increasingly onefound one's Frankish (as opposed to more narrow Chamavian,

Both legends are of course equally fabulous for, even more thanmost barbarian peoples, the Franks possessed no common history,ancestry, or tradition of a heroic age of migration. Like theirAlemannic neighbors, they were by the sixth century a fairly re-cent creation, a coalition of Rhenish tribal groups who longmaintained separate identities and institutions. The name Frankfirst appears in Roman sources ofthe mid-third century. It desig-nated a variety of so-called Iistwaeoni tribes so loosely connectedthat some scholars have ·denied altogether that they formed aconfederation, while others, although not wishing to deny cate-gorically theirunity, have referred to them as a "tribal swarm."These groups included the Chamavi, Chattuari, Bructeri, Am-sivarii, and Salii, and probably others such as the Usipii, Tubanti,Hasi, and Chasuari. (The name Ripuarian is much later-it doesnot appear before the eighth century. The name Sigambri, usedby Gregory of Tours and others, is probably just a classical remi-niscence of the Sigambri of classical authors.) While maintainingtheir separate identities, these small groups occasionally bandedtogether for common defensive or offensive operations and thenidentified themselves by the name Frank, which meant "thehardy," "the brave," and, only later, by extension, the mean-ing favored by the Franks themselves, "the free."

These units of foederati were under the command of theirown chiefs who, while often members of families that had servedRome for generations, nevertheless owed their power to theirbarbarian followers. Archaeological evidence from the differentsorts of barbarian settlements in the Empire suggests that, whilelaeti settlements were intentionally isolated from indigenousRoman population areas and still more from Free Germans, foe-derati in the Empire not only found themselves in intimate con-tact with the local population, whom they tended to dominatethrough their military roles, but also remained in close and con-stant contact with the tribes across the Rhine or the Danube.The leaders of these groups, called "imperial Germans" byscholars, rose in the fourth and fifth centuries t~ the highestranks of the Roman military. This is hardly surprising whenone considers the overall importance of Germanic troops andthe well-established tradition of advancement through military

As long as the legions recei~ed reg"!llar recruits from the Ro-manized provincial peasantry, the reaffirmation of the Roman-ness of this military presence, albeit of a modest sort, was assured.However, since the time of Hadrian (reigned A.D. I 17-138) re-cruits were assigned to legions in their native provinces. Whilethis may have had the desired effects of increasing the numberof recruits and improving their .efficiency, since native recruitswere defending their own homes, it also encouraged the growth

The Roman legions protecting the frontiers had been an ef-fective means of Romanization for a number of reasons. First,th~y were relatively permanent-legions often remained in spe-cific sites for generations and even centuries. Second, since actualmilitary activities were extremely rare even along the frontier,soldiers, largely recruited in the first centuries of empire fromamong the Italian peasantry, had abundant time and capital tobecome involved in local agriculture and manufacture. Finally,because of the usual process of granting veterans land in thearea and the high rate of intermarriage of veterans and legion-aries with the women of the local population, the active andretired military came to dominate local life.

The conquest of this vast territory had been haphazard andthe boundaries the result of Ronian reversals rather than inten-tions. Within Gaul, divided administratively into the provincesof Gallia Narbonensis, under the control of the Roman senate,and Gallia Lugdunensis, Aquitania, and Belgica, all under thecontrol of the emperor, Romanization spread out from adminis-trative cities into the surrounding Celtic countryside. These cit-ies, with their baths, monuments, and theaters, as well as their

Still, beyond these material aspects of Roman life, provincialelites in their villas, rhetoricians in the schools of Bordeaux,Lyon, Trier, and other cities, and the cadres of Roman admin-istrators continued to cultivate much of traditional Roman val-ues. These values included first and foremost Roman justice andlaw. They included a strong adherence to traditional Romanpietas, or subordination and dedication to family, religion, andduty. And they included a love of Latin (if not Greek) letters,which were cultivated and supported by the leisured elites of theprovinces both as a way of participating' in the essence of Romancivilization and, increasingly, as a way of convincing themselvesthat the essence of this civilization would never slip away. Noneof these values would ever be entirely abandoned in the westernprovinces of the Empire.

The contrast between these two frontier negotiations :tnight beseen as representative of the decline and fall of the classicalworld. The civilized Romans of Passau were about to be overrunby Feletheus's barbarian hordes, two alien worlds on the brink ofa confrontation that would end civilization in the West for al-most a millennium. In fact, the realities behind this contrastwere quite different. By the end of the fifth century, twenty-fivegenerations of barbarians and Romans had so deeply affectedeach other that the world of Severinus of Noricum would havebeen incomprehensible to Gargilius Secundus, just as that· ofFeletheus would have bewildered Stelus. The two worlds hadlargely merged into one, as barbarization within the· Empiretransformed the Roman world while a concomitant Romaniza-tion transformed the barbarians even before they set foot inside

If we can accept for the sake of argument that Christian communities played asocially destabilizing role by serving as a breeding ground for rival cognitions, wehave yet to understand whether ascetic ideas in fact served to erode Roman ideas oflegitimate male authority. In both the west and Byzantium, the Church reestablisheditself during the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries as the guardian of the Romanlegacy, an institution in the service of legitimate public authority, whose critique ofthe ruling males was perceived as strengthening, rather than weakening, the socialorder. It goes without saying that gender ideas played a part in this process as well.But why were Frankish and Byzantine dynasties able to harness the power of Churchas an instrument of legitimacy, where their predecessors in the West Roman Empirehad not? Of course, Christian ideas and institutions were never monolithic, so thecomparison is in some sense a false one. But we may also ask whether these moresuccessful Christian empires tolerated rulers who underperformed as egregiously attheir basic tasks of victory and succession as did those of the fifth-century west.Ultimately, rival cognitions were far less disturbing when God was smiling on theruling house, the men were winning battles, and the women were producing an armyof healthy sons.

Serena’s own daughters Maria and Thermantia were famously either unable orunwilling to bear sons. The consequences of this failure were far-reaching, sinceeach sister in turn was married to the young emperor Honorius – Maria in AD 398and Thermantia after the death of her sister. Each of the sisters having failed toprovide a son, Honorius died childless in AD 423 and the succession passed to the4-year-old Flavius Placidus Valentinianus, son of Serena’s cousin Galla Placidia.More than one fifth-century author suspected Honorius of having taken a vow ofcontinence (Holum 1982: 49). Whether his childlessness reflected the divineanathema of infertility or merely Christian eccentricity, it was equally devastatingfor the western empire. Like the apocryphal tale of the matrona opening the gatesof Rome, or the episode of Serena’s protection of Melania’s vow of continence,the accusation against Honorius has the sound of a story designed to shock.A Roman emperor so far divorced from the values of Roman masculinity as todesire neither victories nor sons was unthinkable, and yet the unthinkable hadseemingly come to pass.

While the decline of Roman law was on the whole a minus for women, thechallenge to ancient religious ideals was less conclusively negative. The christianiza-tion of the Roman world made a difference to how women were imagined, andimagined themselves, not only because of the different ‘‘shape’’ of Christian ideas,but also because the cultural uncertainty accompanying the long ‘‘handover’’between the two systems created opportunities for experimentation that might nothave been open in a more successfully static system. The social tension aroundchristianization created a window of opportunity through which individuals couldrenegotiate their standing and claim acceptance for eccentricity. Given their compara-tive vulnerability, women were far less likely than men to find hidden opportunities inmilitary or political uncertainty, but cultural uncertainty could bring opportunitiesas well as disadvantages.

From as early as the second century, hagiographical sources began to link the ideaof refusing marriage to the idea of withdrawing from the city in order to be tested;the composite would be central to ascetic literature. The Apocryphal Acts of Paul, forexample, a novelistic second-century treatment of Paul’s preaching career, contains aseries of episodes known to modern scholarship as the Acts of Paul and Thecla(Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1963). These tell the story of how in Iconium, oneof the cities of Asia Minor, a young woman named Thecla heard Paul’s preaching andbroke off her engagement to the eligible bachelor Thamyris, preferring instead to cuther hair short, disguise herself as a beardless young man, and follow Paul in hiswanderings from city to city. This narrative tells us more about ancient Christianliterature than it does about the women in Paul’s entourage; but withdrawal from thecommon life of the ancient city was central to the Christian ideal of asceticism,whether this meant a geographic removal to rural areas such as the Egyptian desert,or simply a refusal to produce children to stand as heirs of one’s name and fortune

Christianity brought with it a distinctive new rhetoric of masculinity, and itsinitial diffusion among the Roman aristocracy in the fourth century had the effectof destabilizing the terms on which men of the ruling class could claim authority(Cooper 1992). Across our period, Romans and barbarians, pagans and Christiansfor the most part acknowledged a conceptual lingua franca of male prowesslinking religion, sex, and gender to male military and political success. This cultureof male prowess involved two principal modes of discerning the will and favor ofthe gods with regard to a man’s claim to authority. The first was military. It goeswithout saying that an ability to win battles was a sign that the gods smiled on aman, while Diocletian and Constantine both showed that a god’s power to grantvictory would in turn govern his standing among mortals. The second sign ofdivine favor was a matter of fertility. To be survived by a hearty son, able toconsolidate and perhaps extend one’s dominance, was the crown of male militaryachievement. That this depended on factors beyond a man’s own control, such aslongevity and the right reproductive partner, made it all the more potent as a signof divine favor.The role of reproduction in this symbolic system was changing, however. Centralhere was the relative ranking of male ascetics and male householders. While menaspiring to public or military position continued to gamble on the production ofhealthy sons, the emerging ascetic establishment offered success in the discipline ofsexual renunciation as an alternative token of divine favor (Cooper 1992). We still donot really know whether this third sign worked against the other two and contributedto the collapse of the symbolic system. An alternative structure such as the Churchcould strengthen or weaken a system depending on the other pressures bearingupon it.Traditionally, both pagan and Christian communities had seen the biologicalhousehold as a testing ground for male authority. The household was the keyeconomic unit and, since the time of Plato, Greek thought had seen allegiance tothe household as both a building block of civic identity and a source of temptation –the temptation to put the interests of one’s own kin ahead of the common good(Cooper 1996; Gaca 2003). The household was not only a microcosm of the city: itwas a potential source of disloyalty to the city. This is why household governance wassuch an effective measure of a man’s abilities and accountability.

With the early stages of Christianization, we witness among other things the ‘‘pull’’of alternative affiliations on the part of subordinate members of the household. Here,we see the destabilizing force of rival cognitions perfectly illustrated: through reli-gious conversion, the ‘‘deviant’’ member gains access to a wider community ofdiscourse, which can confirm him or her in resisting the expectations of the dominantculture. A text from North Africa, The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, written atthe turn of the second to third century, preserves the prison diary of the 22-year-oldChristian martyr Vibia Perpetua. Included is an episode in which Perpetua attemptsto explain to her father why she can no longer in honesty obey his paternal authority.What is important here is that both her status as a suspected criminal, and the equally

The position of the Roman male at every level of societywas utterly perilous and needed to be repeatedly reconfirmed through a choreog-raphy of competition and alliance-building. This is something that military historianshave always known; but social historians, and especially gender historians, have yetentirely to shake themselves free of a notion of male power as gratuitous and absolute.

A compelling alternative is offered by Peter Brown, who argued in The Rise ofWestern Christendom (Brown 2003) that the crisis of the fifth and sixth century wasnot caused by cultural factors at all, but was rather the inevitable outcome – long inreaching fruition – of the sheer implausibility of Roman military success, tensions thathad been building ever since the Roman armies had pushed the frontier to its fullestexpansion in the second century. On this view, Christianity can be understood as partof the solution – a new technology for establishing the bonds necessary to an orderedsociety – rather than part of the problem. This evocative hypothesis is in many wayscompatible with Halsall’s approach, in that it leaves open the question of how genderfits in. A far-reaching examination of the gender culture of the Roman civil bureau-cracy is urgently called for, but such a task is beyond the scope of this chapter. I shallseek instead to establish initial terms of reference for understanding the role of genderin the fall of Rome, in the light of what we now know about Roman strategies for

Guy Halsall has breathed new life into Gibbon’s view that the fall of the RomanEmpire followed from a failure of Roman manliness, by calling attention to how theLater Roman Empire differed both from the early empire and from barbarian soci-eties, in that the hierarchy of civil authority depended on a population of literatearistocrats without military experience, instead of requiring that civil authority be‘‘earned’’ through military prowess. Thus in the Notitia Dignitatum, the Roman listof offices that has come down to us in its early fifth-century form, a disproportionatenumber of the regiments had ‘‘barbarian’’ names, alongside others bearing the namesof ferocious animals, not because the soldiers were members of a barbarian people,but because certain peoples, like lions, were perceived as icons of masculine prowess(Halsall 2004). This meant that military power itself could slip away from beingperceived as an intrinsically ‘‘Roman’’ virtue, even if the literati were raised on a dietof epic poetry and Roman military history.

No military historian today would argue that the Romans were not in with achance of defending the limes in the fifth and sixth centuries, had they made doingso their first priority. (On what follows, see also Gillett, Halsall, and Vanderspoel,chs. 26, 27, and 28, respectively.) Rather, it is widely agreed that the Romanssquandered a considerable military advantage through what amounts to perpetualcivil war in the repeated succession crises of the fifth century – even the compara-tively stable fourth century saw lapses, such as the failure to capture the Gothicleader Alaric in AD 397, that can be attributed to the army’s uncertainty over whowas in command (Matthews 1975: 272). Modern scholarship suggests that, far fromthere being a continuous decline through the so-called ‘‘third-century crisis’’ acrossthe fourth century into the sack of Rome and the eventual annexation of thewestern empire by Gothic kings in the fifth, the third and fourth centuries werecharacterized largely by prosperity and economic vitality. But, faced with threatsfrom Persia and the Germanic peoples on the eastern and northern limes respect-ively, the Roman armies were repeatedly deployed to less than full advantage, oreven led against one another, as emperors tried to insure that no one generalbecame powerful enough to make a bid for the purple, while the generals attemptedto crush one another’s ambitions. A thousand self-interested decisions, many of

After the death of Theodosius the Great in AD 395, both Roman and barbarianelites continued, for the most part, to marry and to reproduce as numerously aspossible, even while a vocal minority began to live in ascetic communities. Scholars nolonger accept a characterization of male ascetics as weak or neurotic. Ascetic virtueconstituted a claim to authority (Rousseau 1978) recognizably couched in thelanguage of Roman manliness (Leyser 1999), even if its terms were not acceptableto all parties (Francis 1995). If it was dangerous, it was dangerous because ofthe ferocious single-mindedness of ascetic practitioners, not because they wereeffeminate.We can tell, from the fact that there was so much experimentation, that at leastsome influential late Romans were ready to identify and celebrate ascetic achievementas a third token of male prowess, alongside the winning of battles and the siring ofvigorous sons. Some clearly perceived it as a means to enrich Roman men’s collectiveability to harness a godly impetus, while others saw the sometimes fiercely disruptivemonks as a threat either to social order (McLynn 1992; Gaddis 2005) or to therecognition and encouragement of traditional Roman masculinity.

Gibbon famously argued that the Roman Empire fell because Christian ideas hadcompromised Roman manliness, and there is still life in the question implied. If onelooks for ancient evidence to support Gibbon’s hypothesis, one will certainly find it,not least because on this point Gibbon was merely a popularizer. The originator ofthe ‘‘Gibbon hypothesis’’ was none other than the eighteenth-century historian’spreferred late Roman source, Zosimus, continuator of the New History of Eunapiusof Sardis. Zosimus was no fan of Christianity in general, or of the empress Serena inparticular. Writing during the reign of Anastasius (AD 498–518), he was the last of thegreat pagan historians. His view of Christianity, that it privileged the eccentricities ofmonks and women at a time when men of iron were called for, was the last in a longline of similar criticisms by pagan writers. There is no way of knowing how much thisstrategy of ‘‘blaming the Christians’’ was simply a continuation of an old theme,reaching back to Tacitus’ account of the Roman fire of AD 64. In any event, the grandnarratives of decline and fall on the one hand, and on the other of the rise ofChristianity with its distinctive mores, have from the beginning been intertwined.For the historian of gender and the family, it is urgently necessary to understand howchanging religious and gender ideals influenced the Roman ability to cope withchallenging political and military circumstances.

The evidence all points to the vital importance of theholy man as a mediator in village life. Anthony was imme-diately mobbed: he became 'a doctor to all Egypt'; '

The superiority o f Christianity over paganism in dynamismand efficiency was already evident in the fourth century. TheChristians could adapt themselves better to the new political andsocial situation and deal more efficiently with the barbarians.

In both cases, ordinary people needed protection and guidance.The wealthy classes were capable o f looking after themselveseither under the Roman emperor or under the barbarian kings.But ordinary people wanted leaders. They found them in theirbishops.Above all, something had to be done in order to establish acommunal life which both Romans and barbarians could share.A glance at the life o f St. Severinus by Eugippius is enough togive an impression o f what a courageous and imaginativeChristian leader could do in difficult circumstances. In the fourthand fifth centuries the bishops did not make much o f an effort toconvert the barbarians who were living outside the borders ofthe Roman empire. But they were deeply concerned with thereligion o f those barbarians who settled in the empire. In otherwords, the conversion to Christianitywas part o ftheprocess where­by the Germans were, at least to a certain extent, romanized andmade capable o f living together with the citizens o f the Romanempire. The process of romanizing the barbarians by christianiz­ing them is an essential feature o f the history o f the Romanempire between Constantine and Justinian. I f it did not save theempire, at least in the West, it saved many features o f Romancivilization.

Looking at both sides o f the empire, one conclusion seemsinescapable. The Church managed to have it both ways. Itcould help the ordinary man either in his fight against the bar­barians or in his compromise with them. It succeeded wherepagan society had little to offer, either way. The educated paganwas by definition afraid o f barbarians. There was no bridgebetween the aristocratic ideals o f a pagan and the primitiveviolence o f a German invader. In theory the barbarians could beidealized. Primitivism has always had its devotees. Alternatively,a few select barbarians could be redeemed by proper educationand philosophic training. There was no objection to barbarianson racial grounds. But the ordinary barbarian as such wasnothing more than a nightmare to the educated pagan.The Christians had a different attitude and other possibilities.They could convert the barbarians and make them members ofthe Church. They had discovered a bridge between barbarism andcivilization. Alternatively, the Church could give its moral sup­port to the struggle against the barbarians: the defence o f theempire could be presented as the defence of the Church. It is

We badly need systematic research on regional differences inthe attitude of the Church towards the Roman state. Generaliza­tions are premature. But some facts are apparent. The GreekFathers never produced searching criticisms o f the Roman Statecomparable with those o f St. Augustine and Salvian. On thecontrary, St. John Chrysostom supported the anti-German partyin Constantinople, and Synesius became a convert and a bishopafter having outlined the programme o f that party. It would seemthat in the West, after having contributed to the weakening o f theempire, the Church inclined to accept collaboration with thebarbarians and even replacement of the Roman authorities bybarbarian leaders. In the East (with the partial exception ofAlexandria) the Church appreciated the military strength of theRoman state and the loyalties it commanded. No doubt theEastern churches, too, did not hesitate to deprive the Romanadministration o f the best men and of the best revenues when­ever they could, but, at least from the second part of the fourthcentury, they threw in their weight with the new Rome.

All these rules providedapproved patterns of life and introduced manual work as a nor­mal part o f the monk’s day. They also established direct or in­direct control by the ecclesiastical authorities over the monas­teries. This is not to say that the sting was entirely taken out ofmonastic life. The monks, especially in the East, proved often tobe unruly, rebellious, disturbingly fanatical, and ignorant. Muchsocial discontent contributed to their psychology. But monasti-cism as a whole ceased to be a danger and became a source ofpower and inspiration for the Church. Ultimately, monasticismbecame a constructive force in society: it united men in a newform o f communal life and gave them a considerable amount o feconomic independence and political self-government. WhenCassiodorus added specific cultural activities to the ordinary lifeo f his monks, a new chapter opened in the intellectual history ofEurope.1 The monks were not helping the Empire to survive.Judged from the traditional point o f view o f the pagan societythey were a subversive force. But they provided an alternativeto pagan city life.

Monasticism provides the most telling test of the capacities ofthe Church in the fourth century.1 The first hermits o f the thirdcentury were Christians who in order to live a perfect Christianlife abandoned both the pagan world and the Christian com­munities and retired to the desert. This was no simple revoltagainst society. It was born out o f a deep experience o f struggleagainst the temptations o f the flesh. Where there is a hermit, thereis the devil. The devil was a powerful reality in late antiquity,and the hermit was both obsessed by the devil and determined tofight him. The devil pursued the hermit, but the hermit believedhe had the right weapons to counter-attack. St. Anthony wasthe model hermit, and his biography written by St. Athanasiusbecame the model for all lives o f saints, one o f the most influ­ential books o f any time. But the hermits were a clear menace toorderly Christian society. Each of them organized his life on hisown lines, defying the authority of the bishops and claiming tobe the embodiment o f the perfect Christian. While official Chris­tianity was now bent on organizing the world and on achievinga working compromise with worldly ambitions, the hermitsexpressed contempt for the world. On the other hand, asAthanasius himself recognized when he chose to write the life ofSt. Anthony, the hermits were the true representatives of Christianasceticism. They could not be eliminated. A solution of thedilemma was found in creating monastic orders where collectivelife according to strictly ascetic rules replaced the hermit’s indi­vidual escape from this world. First Pachomius, then Basil laiddown the rules for the monasteries they founded and controlled.St. Basil’s Rule inspires Eastern monastic rules even today.

Much can be said about the internal conflicts, the worldlyambitions, the intolerance of the Church. Yet the conclusionremains that while the political organization of the empire becameincreasingly rigid, unimaginative, and unsuccessful, the Churchwas mobile and resilient and provided space for those whom theState was unable to absorb. The bishops were the centres o f largevoluntary organizations. They founded and controlled charitableinstitutions. They defended their flocks against the state officials.When the military situation of the empire grew worse, they oftenorganized armed resistance against the barbarians. It seems tome impossible to deny that the prosperity o f the Church wasboth a consequence and a cause o f the decline o f the state. People

The expanding and consolidating hierarchical organization o f

Gibbon was simplifying a very complicated issue when heinsinuated that Christianity was responsible for the fall o f theempire. But he perceived that the Church attracted many menwho in the past would have become excellent generals, governorso f provinces, advisers to the emperors. Moreover, the Churchmade ordinary people proud, not o f their old political institu­tions, but o f their new churches, monasteries, ecclesiasticalcharities. Money which would have gone to the building o f atheatre or o f an aqueduct now went to the building o f churchesand monasteries. The social equilibrium changed—to the advan­tage o f the spiritual and physical conditions o f monks and priests,but to the disadvantage o f the ancient institutions o f the empire.

The fact that the aristocracy played a role of increasing impor­tance in the affairs o f the Church is .only one aspect o f what isperhaps the central feature o f the fourth century: the emergenceo f the Church as an organi2ation competing with the State itselfand becoming attractive to educated and influential persons. TheState, though trying to regiment everything, was not able toprevent or suppress the competition o f the-Church. A man couldin fact escape from the authority o f the State if he embracedthe Church. I f he liked power he would soon discover that therewas more power to be found in the Church than in the State.The Church attracted the most creative minds—St. Ambrose,St. Jerome, Hilarius of Poitiers, St. Augustine in the West;Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Basilo f Caesarea in the E ast: almost all born rulers, rulers of a typewhich, with the exception of the scholarly emperor Julian, it washard to find on the imperial throne. .They combined Christiantheology with pagan philosophy, worldly political abilities witha secure faith in immortal values. They could tell both the learnedand the unlearned how they should behave, and consequentlytransformed both the external features and the inner meaning ofthe daily existence o f an increasing number o f people.

Preachers in their sermons painted in violent colours the con­trast between wealth and poverty, and invariably intimated thatwealth was the root o f oppression. St. Ambrose in the Westand St. John Chrysostom in the East attacked the rich whobought house after house and field after field, throwing out theformer owners. What they say seems to be confirmed by the fewdata we have about individual estates in the fourth and fifthcenturies. Some families had princely possessions spread overseveral provinces of the empire. They lived more and more,though not yet exclusively, in the country, and their estates wereself-sufficient units. The wealthiest landowners were members o fthe senatorial class

To pay such an army a prosperous empire was needed. Theempire was not prosperous, and there are reasons to believethat insecurity and inflation curtailed traffic. We have not enoughevidence about the volume o f trade circulating in the Romanempire at any given moment. We are therefore in no positionto state in figures that there was less trade in the fourth centurythan, for instance, in the second century. But we can infer fromthe decline of the bourgeoisie in the fourth century and from theexclusive importance of great landowners that prosperous traderswere few. One has the impression that long-distance trade wasincreasingly in the hands of small minorities of Syrians and Jews.

In the third century the Roman empire had faced disintegration.It survived thanks to the strenuous efforts at reconstructionwhich are connected with the names of Claudius Gothicus,Diocletian; and Constantine. The result was an organizationfounded upon compulsion. For reasons which have not yet beenentirely explained, money economy collapsed in the third century:there were moments in which barter and taxation in kind seemeddestined to replace money transactions in the empire. This crisiswas overcome. Constantine introduced gold coins, the solidi,which remained the standard for about 800 years and served asan ultimate basis both for the fiscal system and private trans­actions. But there was a debased currency for everyday use, andthe fluctuations in the rates o f exchange between gold and de­based currency were a source of uncertainty and an excuse forextortions. The middle class emerged from the crisis demoralizedand impoverished. Civil servants and soldiers were paid less inthe fourth century than in the third. They came to rely on feesand bribery to supplement their salaries. Whatever the explana­tion may be, there developed also a shortage of manpower,while ordinary activities were made more burdensome by exces­sive taxation and the general unpleasantness of life. Barbarianinvasions and civil wars must have destroyed a great deal ofwealth. People tended to drift away from their work; and thegovernment answered by binding the peasant to the land, makingcompulsory and hereditary certain activities and transformingthe city councils into compulsory and hereditary corporationsresponsible for the collection of taxes.

It is perhaps right to S"ay that Rostovtzeff was in essentialagreement with Pirenne against Dopsch. O f course, he found thecause o f the decline o f the cities not in the intervention o f theArabs, but in the revolution o f the peasantry against the city-dwellers. But Rostovtzeff, like Pirenne, was a bourgeois in theclassical sense: he identified civilization with city life and saw theend o f the classical world in the decline o f the cities

Dopsch substantially claimed that no break in con­tinuity is noticeable in the Western world as a consequence of theGerman invasions. There was considerable redistribution ofland, but the legal forms o f ownership remained essentiallyRoman, city life survived, there was no return to natural eco­nomy, no interruption o f the great trade-routes, and no inter­ruption in the transmission o f cultural goods. Pirenne acceptedDopsch’s view that the German invasion did not put an end tothe Graeco-Roman social structure, but contended that theancient ways o f life were disrupted by the Arabs: they played thepart that more conventional historians used to attribute to theGermans. In Pirenne’s opinion the Arabs destroyed the unity ofthe Mediterranean, paralysed the trade between East and West,drained the gold away from the West, and displaced the centre ofcivilized life from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. The West,having been cut off from Byzantium, had to look after itself. Thecoronation o f Charlemagne was symbolically the answer givenby the West to the challenge o f Mohammed’s followers. Thencethe somewhat unexpected title of Pirenne’s great book, Mohammedet Charlemagne.

Since Flavio Biondo each generation has produced its owntheory or theories on the decline and fall o f Rome.2 Gibbon washeir to a long tradition of thought on the subject. Until the endo f the eighteenth century few responsible historians followedBiondo in attributing the decline o f Rome' to the German in­vasions. Rather, causes of the decline were sought inside theempire. Machiavelli and Paruta in the sixteenth century tried todiscover the cause of the decline of Rome in its constitution. Inthe early eighteenth century, more exactly in 1734, Montesquieupublished his Considerations sur la grandeur et. la decadence desRomains. By subtle analysis Montesquieu showed two o f themain reasons for the fall of ancient Rome to be the power o f thearmy and excess luxury. Later in the century, Christianity wasmade responsible for the decline o f Rome. There is an anti-Christian note in Montesquieu which becomes loud in Voltaireand loudest o f all in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. Gibbon focusedattention on Christianity as the main factor o f change and, as hethought, o f decadence in the structure o f the Roman empire. Itwas not until the nineteenth century that the German invasionscame to be generally regarded as the key to the understanding o f

The thought of reviving old Rome, old classical civilization, be­came the inspiration of the humanistic movement in Italy in thefourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This implied the awarenessthat the Christian civilization o f earlier centuries was somethingprofoundly different from the classical world o f Rome. Let usremind ourselves—because this is essential—that our problem ofthe decline o f Rome is a product o f Italian humanism. In thatatmosphere Flavio Biondo wrote his history o f Italy ‘ab incli-natione Romanorum imperii’ towards the middle o f the fifteenthcentury. He dated the decline o f Rome from the sack of Rome in410. The Goths, the barbarians, started the decline o f Rome.

What largely distinguished the Chinese experience from that of other countrieswas Mao‘s insistence that the struggle for national liberation was a way station on thepath to socialism and communism. However, many who had initially joined the CCP didnot have a thorough understanding of capitalism and lacked Mao‘s determination tostruggle for socialism, especially as it became increasingly clear as the 1950s and 1960sprogressed how difficult that struggle would be.57Mao employed a policy of unity and struggle to win them over, but the goal of apowerful and prosperous China trumped many of these party members‘ commitment tosocialism.

The bourgeoisie in the party is in a position to advocate and implement policiesthat can, if not checked, pull the country off the socialist road. These revisionist policiesdefend and widen differences in wealth, decision making power and other socialresources, and appeal to narrow self-interest, thereby creating a base of support amongmore privileged strata such as government administrators, managers, technicians andintellectuals.

The republic can have a longer life, but where there is cor-ruption in political life, monarchy is the only means of escape. This is shown in The Prince, at a time that seemed to favor a quick and decisive solution to Italy’s problems. In the Dis-courses, through the Roman model, Machiavelli proposes an objective that is more remote and harder to achieve: “living free,” the “popular state.” Yet it is not a remedy to the immedi-ate situation, and Livy’s account, which covers a wide span of time, can therefore offer an example that can be imitated.

But then, in addition to the people, the entire country was in ruins, and “where there were so many cities and so many men,” all that remained was an “almost uninhabited” terri-tory.7 Therefore, alongside the contrast between civil and un-civil, there is the relationship between civilization and liberty, which Machiavelli praised in terms that are absolute: “All cit-ies and provinces that live in freedom anywhere in the world . . . make very great gains.” There we see that “their pop-ulations are larger, since marriages are freer and more attrac-tive to men” because liberty leads to security, and “each man gladly begets those children he thinks he can bring up, with-out fear that his patrimony will be taken from him; he knows not merely that they are born free and not slaves but that by means of their abilities they can become prominent men.”

Machiavelli’s Rome, however, is not a static model of a sin-gle period, that is, taken as a whole, outside the flux of time, but it grows, it expands, civically and territorially, until the in-exorable degeneration into the civil wars of the time of Marius and Sulla. Equally, the affairs of men of his time are seen, yes, according to the principle that the past repeats itself, but liable to profound changes, according to the circumstances and the actions taken. History as “life’s teacher” (magistra vitæ) is, in short, history as the making, as the transformation, and, in the final analysis, as the perfection of human affairs. We must not seek in Machiavelli anything similar to the enlightening idea of progress; if from his way of seeing history we exclude any form of providentialism, then we note that a teleological con-ception is equally foreign to him. In the Discourses the word civiltà appears more than once, and there we find a picture of the origins of human society that implicitly contains the idea of civil development and growth: human beings, “in the be-ginning of the world,” lived “in the fashion of beasts,” and only over time, growing in number and gathering in communities, did they arrive at an “understanding of things honorable and good, as different from what is pernicious and evil,” and there-fore at an “understanding of justice.”5 As a result, they orga-nized themselves by choosing a chief: to begin with, the strongest, then the wisest and most just, and their way of po-litical life became a way of civil life

It is precisely to allow the intervention of the human will in the course of events that the politician, the legislator, the founder of republics, or— in the exceptional case of Rome— the “prudence” and “virtù” of its people must be capable of exploiting the natural tensions and the dynamic mechanisms of society. There are internal disorders and imbalances that open the way for the conscious actions of humans, once they know how to seize the opportunities offered by nature and the succession of various vicissitudes. Starting from the supposi-tion that people tend to “act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope” (1.3), and knowing that “nature has made men able to crave everything but unable to attain everything” (1.37), it is possible to bend this natural need to the common good through political institutions and laws. It is those internal contradictions that gave rise to talk of Rome as a “disorderly republic” because it had not been un-derstood that those struggles and disagreements had been the

In The Prince, written in response to a dramatically urgent situation, his focus was on the present, and he took into ac-count the critical situation he aimed to remedy. The picture he outlined was a bleak one: “The mob is always fascinated with appearances and by the outcome of an affair,” and, he con-cluded bitterly, “in the world the mob is everything.” Even

Machiavelli, however, agreed with Cicero when he stated that the conservation of the state was a norm essential to poli-tics, according to the motto “Salus populi suprema lex esto” (Let the good of the people be the supreme law) (De legibus 3.8). In fact, he wrote: “So if a prince succeeds in conquering and holding his state, his means are always judged honorable and everywhere praised.” Placing it in a more open and longer- term perspective, in Discourses he condemned the “very cruel methods, and enemies to all governments not merely Chris-tian but human” (1.26), and yet he warned with profound pas-sion: “When it is absolutely a question of the safety of one’s country, there must be no consideration of just or unjust, of merciful or cruel, of praiseworthy or disgraceful; instead, set-ting aside every scruple, one must follow to the utmost any plan that will save her life and keep her liberty” (3.41).

This was apparently the opportunity; but The Prince is cer-tainly not a work of opportunism. Its author appears well aware of the vast body of political literature produced by hu-manist culture— to some extent the continuation, albeit with other ideal principles, of the literary genre opened by the me-dieval Specula principis.4 This body of work, however, ap-peared to him to be a long way from the reality, and in the opening of chapter 15 he underlined the difference between the “many who have written about this” and his intention of focusing on “the truth of the matter as facts show it,” rather than “any fanciful notion.” And to be clear, he added sarcasti-cally, “Many have fancied for themselves republics and princi-palities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality,” to the point of discussing not “how men live” but “how men should live.” As a result, the search for antecedents and precur-sors of The Prince risks being merely a scholarly exercise, pre-cisely because the work’s innovative strength is its ability to blend the political experience of his time with reflections on classical texts, often adopted in an implicit way.5 Even the tex-tual comparisons that often recur in the annotations serve to identify Machiavelli’s readings, rather than showing sources and “authority.”

Thus he saw a situation that was amenable to various out-comes, but he feared that the defeat of France and the Swiss dominance over the Duchy of Milan placed the entire Italian peninsula at risk. As a result, he concluded that “Italy will owe that to Pope Julius and to those who do not protect us, if pro-tection can be found.”It brings to mind chapter 12 of the first book of the Dis-courses, in which he attributed the division of Italy to the pol-icy of the church. But in that climate of uncertainty the former secretary, accustomed to reflecting on the problems of politi-cal life and to taking action, may have felt forced to reorder his thoughts and immediately to write a work concerning the Ital-ian reality. The experience of “present things,” based on the “lessons of past things,” which he usually pondered in his eve-ning readings, suggested to him “a small work”; with this, he was confident that he would manage to return to his former activities. On 10 December 1513, he wrote to Vettori announc-ing that he had written The Prince and wished to make it avail-able to Giuliano de’ Medici, “because I am using up my money, and I cannot remain as I am a long time without becoming despised through poverty” (Works , 2:930). Then, to show Vet-tori how much he felt the necessity to return to work, he added: “There is my wish that our present Medici lords will make use of me, even if they begin by making me roll a stone.”

I found that in the descriptions of the wars waged by the Florentines with foreign princes and peoples they had been very diligent, but as regards civil discords and internal enmities, and the effects arising from them, they were altogether silent about the one and so brief about the other as to be of no use to readers or pleasure to anyone. I believe they did this either because these actions seemed to them so feeble that they judged them unworthy of being com¬ mitted to memory by written word, or because they feared that they might offend the descendants of those they might have to slander in their narrations. These two causes (may it be said by their leave) appear to me altogether unworthy of great men, for if nothing else delights or instructs in history, it is that which is described in detail; if no other lesson is useful to the citizens who govern republics, it is that which shows the causes of the hatreds and divisions in the city, so that when they have become wise through the dangers of others, they may be able to maintain themselves united. And if every example of a republic is moving, those which one reads concerning one’s own are much more so and much more useful; and if in any other republic there were ever notable divisions, those of Florence are most notable. For most other republics about which we have any information have been content with one division by which, depend¬ ing on accidents, they have sometimes expanded and sometimes ruined their city; but Florence, not content with one, made many. In Rome, as everyone knows, after the kings were driven out, disunion between the

However much Machiavelli’s methods resemble those of the humanist historians, he separates himself deliberately and decisively from them by basing his advice on what is done rather than what should be done. (He took the same departure in Chapter 15 of The Prince.) When reading the humanist historians, one breathes the spirit of Cicero, and one is partic¬ ularly reminded of the second book of De Republica (a work they did not know), where Cicero, with fine irony and careful responsibility, blends an account of the origin of his own republic with the development of the features of the best regime. This kind of history is both theoretical and practical because it supposes that nature and virtue are not so much in contest as in cooperation. Machiavelli, on the other hand, who did not think highly of Cicero (see especially Discourses on Livy 1 52), was no mere observer of the contest between nature or fortune and virtue; he was no Stoic nobly but passively resigned to the limits of politics. For him the end and consequence of theory are to expand the possibilities of practice. To attempt this “undertaking,” he opposed himself to the entire tradition preceding him—classical, medieval, and humanist—as too dependent on the force of morality. Whatever he borrowed from that tradition was used against it.

Although the first book appears to be merely a narration of events in Italy, Machiavelli invests it with a significance more than his¬ torical. Also, each of the following seven books begins with a chapter that discusses some general topic nonhistorically: colonies, natural enmities between men of the people and the nobles, liberty and license, the natural cycle of order and disorder, the advantage of victory in war, the difference between divisions with “sects” and those without them, and conspiracies. To be sure, Machiavelli typically contrasts the ancients and the moderns in each regard in a way that might seem historical, but he does so to ex¬ plain the superior virtue of the ancients, not merely to adduce a difference in historical context.

To begin with the latter, we find humanist historians (as well as chron¬ iclers) preceding Machiavelli who titled their works histories in the plural, above all, Leonardi Bruni’s Historiae Florentini Populi. More important,

Machiavelli does not use the word istoria to refer to an object of study; he uses it to mean only the study itself. Whereas for us history is both the object of study and the study itself, for Machiavelli history is a study, apparently, of something other than history. Thus, when he speaks of “our history” or “my history,” he refers to a study or an inquiry that he also calls “my narrations” or “my description” or “my undertaking” (see the Letter dedicatory). And since he does not have in mind history as an object, he can say “Florentine histories” in the plural if he wishes, contrary to usage today, which admits that many histories of Florence have been written but denies that Florence could have had more than one history. Further contrary to current practice, Machiavelli does not speak of “historiography”: for him, history is historiography.

The richness and diversity of Florentine historical writing over many gener- ations was, I believe, essential to the maturity the city's two great historians achieved. The works of Machiavelli and Guicciardini retain important fea- tures of the vernacular style; and this unexpected survival points, in turn, to an unbroken tradition of vernacular narratives in the fifteenth century. In sum, vernacular historiography did not disappear with the quattrocento classical revival but remained a vital force linking the origins of Florentine historical thought in the fourteenth century to its maturest expressions in the sixteenth.

This division between classical and vernacular history was not new, for the basis of the two styles had been set long before. As Erich Auerbach has written, classical Latin prose "is an almost excessively organizing language in which the material and sensory side of the facts is rather viewed and ordered from above than vividly presented in its materiality and sensoriness." In contrast, the proto-vernacular written by the early medieval historian Greg- ory of Tours is a language that "organizes badly or not at all. But it lives on the concrete side of events, it speaks with and in the people who figure in them."' Gregory's aim was to make things "vividly visible," and, unlike classical historians, he was drawn to represent a scene simply because of its vividness. Auerbach did not deny that Gregory's clumsy and unclassical language represents a decline, but he has forcefully argued that it is also much more. It is a "reawakening of the directly sensible" and lies on the path toward the modern sense of literary realism.2

In Florence before Machia- velli and Guicciardini there were two styles of historical writing, classical and vernacular, each with its own strengths. Inspired by classical example, the humanist historians concentrated on affairs of state and composed linear narratives that were clarified and augmented by reference to broad moral and political lessons. Vernacular chroniclers, on the other hand, wrote to preserve the memory of notable events, both political and nonpolitical, especially those they had themselves witnessed. Niccolo [Machiavelli] and Francesco Guicciardini drew strength from both of these styles and in different ways each made an effective combination of clarity and concreteness.

Enlightenment presupposed the transfer of armed power to the state and acommercially active citizenry controlling the state’s capacity to financearmies; but from its first appearance this development was feared as reducingand corrupting the virtù of the disarmed citizen.9 Here Machiavelli

There remains the question of the applicability of Roman history toFlorentine history. Certainly, Machiavelli’s history of Florence tells anotherstory: that Florence was never fully autonomous and consequently neverconfronted the problem of republican stability in a soluble form. No Italianrepublic was in a position to repeat the history of Rome; but why is this? Here

Insistently, therefore, we find ourselves returning to the context of history,survival, exterior danger, and interior weakness, which may be opposed tothe context of good and bad, just and unjust, redeemable and sinful, in whichancient and Christian political philosophy pursued its enterprise. It hasalways been argued that Machiavelli’s choice of this context –in which thecriteria are failure and success, audacity and prudence, ruthlessness andclemency –was of itself a political choice although not a moral one. Hechose to enjoin these values, it is supposed, because he preferred them tothose of justice or redemption. Arguably, he did; but it seems fair to askwhether recommending this choice was the sole purpose he had in writing.There was, and had been since Sallust in the last century of the Romanrepublic, a literature of libertas et imperium, which pointed out, almostexclusively in the context of Roman history, that these values might be bothinterdependent and incompatible. Machiavelli continued this literature, andwe may say that he continues to write according to its assumptions andcriteria. It may follow that his decision is primarily a matter of genre; he iswriting political history, not political or Christian philosophy, and we shouldnot read the former as a repudiation of the latter, the philosophical choice ofan anti-philosophy. Alternatively, we may say with Isaiah Berlin that he ispointing out that Renaissance Europeans lived according to two irreconcil-able value systems, the one ancient and the other Christian;8 Machiavelli’sapparent reversal of Augustine’s choice is a way of saying that the choicebetween them remains open and inescapable. From here we can proceed in ahistorical direction; the republic is a pre-Christian ideal, and to opt for it is toopt for the problematic of pre-Christian history. The republic exists amongthe problems it sets for itself; if the author of this chapter may say so, everyrepublic occupies a Machiavellian moment.

There were tensions, therefore, between the Roman republic as norm orideal and the same republic as history. An Italian city wishing to continue as agovernment by citizens might uphold, and eloquently expound, a Ciceronianideal of public virtue, prosperity, and liberty. It might identify the threat of ausurping prince with Caesar or Augustus, narrating dark stories of civil warand tyranny. A recurrent trope in the literature is Sallust’s account of thedebate between Cicero, Caesar, and Cato over what was to be done with theaccomplices of Catiline after the unmasking of his conspiracy; in this debateCaesar plays a dubious and suspect role, urging that the conspirators bespared for reasons possibly his own.4 But the narrative opened by Sallustand continued by other historians led to the violent deaths of all three men:Cato by suicide and the others by murder, with Cicero perishing in the warsthat followed Caesar’s assassination and led to the principate of Augustus.Here the overall narrative changed abruptly from history to political ideality,as “Caesar”and “prince”became terms denoting the benign world-rulerfound in the grand visions of Roman law and Christian empire. Aspiringsignori and principi in the Regnum italicum might draw on this imagery ifthey could; but it was firmly in the hands of popes and emperors, whosepower bases lay outside the Regnum but who in the end conquered it and gavethe princes legitimacy as their creatures. Machiavelli saw the subjugation ofthe Italian republics begin; others witnessed its completion.

Roman history did not present a simple opposition between republic andmonarchy, less still between republic and empire. It could not be detachedfrom the narrative begun by Sallust and continued by Bruni, in which therepublic had destroyed itself and the emperors had failed to save empire: astory to be told in secular terms, though continued into Christian history. AnItalian republic could not fail to see itself in the setting of Roman history; yetnone of them played the role of Rome.5 No city of north or central Italy hadany prospect of subduing all the others and incorporating them in a universalempire that would prove fatal to its own liberty; no republic had made itscitizens soldiers and then seen them become, first the mercenaries of a con-dottiere, then the professionals of a military state. Yet this was the history allhumanists studied; a history greater than any they could take part in, fromwhich they had to learn what they could. Machiavelli’s perception of thehistory of Rome is one thing, his narrative of the history of Florence another;whether either makes him an exponent of “republicanism”is a third problem.

The revision of Baron’s historical narrative has had two majoreffects: it has traced the foundation of the ideal of rule by citizens to timesas early as the thirteenth century, thus removing the crisis of 1400–1402 froma central or pivotal role; and it has grounded this formation in sources morerhetorical than philosophical and more Latin than Greek (Skinner).

As Lombard and notably Tuscan cities –Florence among the latter –foundthemselves in a world where rule by citizens was liable to be replaced by thatof signori and principi, the vivere civile or republic sought for a philosophicfoundation. In a memorable work of the last generation, The Crisis of theEarly Italian Renaissance, Hans Baron singled out the experience ofFlorentine humanists in a war of 1400–1402 against the Visconti of Milanas a moment when this search achieved results, and “liberty”was defined inparticipatory terms as the active involvement of the citizen in rule and self-ruleamong his equals.

The historical setting in which Machiavelli’s thought should be situated isthat of the Regnum italicum, the region in which Lombardy and Tuscanywere conceived as being situated. This was a term already paradoxical, ofwhich there already existed a sophisticated historiography. To call it aregnum was paradoxical, for the reason that no ruler had successfullyreduced it to the kingdom it had been (perhaps) under the Carolingians orhad been claimed to be by the Hohenstaufen emperors. The many wars ofpapacy and empire had so turned out that neither pope nor emperor ruled theRegnum italicum as principality or state. There had emerged a number ofpowerful trading cities, uneasily interacting with local military nobilities, andthe popes had joined with these cities in the alliance against the Hohenstaufenthat became known as Guelf. All Florentine writers (Machiavelli included)were Guelf, not Ghibelline, in their accounts of history and celebrated thevictories of the papacy and (at first, in the thirteenth century) its French allies.With the humiliation of the papacy by Philip the Fair and its withdrawal toAvignon in the early fourteenth century, the cities of Tuscany and Lombardyeach evolved in its own way, and when the popes returned to Rome in 1377and set about the consolidation of their temporal power, they became in somecases the chief threat to the power and autonomy of the cities. So, at least,historians in the fifteenth century presented matters. They agreed that, under

The way in which the term 'liberty' thus came to connote both politicalindependence and republican self-government has been traced in twoimportant studies of fourteenth-century Florentine political thought.Bueno de Mesquita has established from a study of Florentine diplomaticletters at the time of Henry VII's invasion in 1310 that when the Floren-tines took the lead in opposing the Emperor by proclaiming 'the liberty ofTuscany', their essential concern was with 'throwing off the yoke ofservitude to German rule' and reaffirming their right to govern themselves(Bueno de Mesquita, 1965, p. 305). Similarly, Rubinstein has shown thatthe concepts of libertas and liberta came to be employed 'almost as techni-cal terms of Florentine politics and diplomacy' in the course of thefourteenth century, and that they were almost invariably used in order toexpress the same ideas of independence and self-government

The occupation of the pews was more contentious. It involved at once a gesture of menace to private property and the disruption of a carefully contrived display of social hierarchy.66 The Chartists were dramatizing the equality of all men before God and particularly their "equality with their proud oppressors which is denied them else- where". They were also protesting against the establishment of pri- vate property in the parish church leaving the poor only the humili- ating free seats: "by what authority has this been done?", asked a Bolton correspondent, "who has made this into private property, which was once part and portion of the state, and still maintained by church rate?".67 To the Chartists, this enclosure of church space had

It is important to stress how compatible, indeed mutually rein- forcing, the radical Christian and constitutional outlooks were within Chartism. Both put great emphasis on the rights of labour and the poor, and both made a powerful critique of social oppression. In radical Christianity, the dignity of labour was underlined not only by the fact that Christ had come to earth as a working man but also by a labour-value theology which posited a special relationship between God and the working classes. God had created the earth as potential abundance but it was labour which actually turned the potential into fruits, wealth and property: as Chartist preacher Abraham Hanson put it, "their labour was the source of all property - they performed that labour by the physical power of their bodies, they derived that power from none but God". 10 Labour had the first claim to the fruits (usually to a fair share rather than, as the socialists insisted, to the whole produce). The people, in the popular banner motto "The Voice of the People is the Voice of God", 11 was increasingly coming to mean the working classes (whether employed or in poverty through no fault of their own). The truly Christian society was one that not only hon- oured the divine rights of labour and the poor but also embodied Christ's teaching about equality and mutuality ("Do unto others as ye would they do unto you" was a favourite text for Chartist ser- mons). 12

Historians also often argue that after 1848 divisions within the working-class were more important than divisions between the classes for shaping the forms of working-class action. For a number of reasons, the labour aristocracy were able to consolidate their position and de-velop their characteristic institutions, like co-operatives. However, it is important to stress that co-operation was not a new departure and indeed had been, in a variety of forms, an integral strand of Chartist activity since the autumn of 1839. It did not signify a real change of direction that many of the founders of mid-century co-operatives were Chartists, and not noticeably affluent Chartists at that, like the majority of the Rochdale pioneers who were also flannel-weavers recently de-feated in a strike. But it opens up the more interesting question for mid-century investigation about whether the Chartist attempt persisted to find forms for collective self-provision which were not exclusive: it is interesting, for example, that the Great Horton Co-operative Society, started by Chartist wool-combers, allowed its members to buy on credit for the first twenty-five years of its life. 6

The Chartist search, over ten long years, for an adequate and legal form of national organisation reveals what a potent shaping and ulti-mately deforming influence the State was, whether it was showing an iron fist, as custodian of public order suppressing Chartist militancy, or wearing a velvet glove, as framer of legislation giving legitimacy and protection to selected forms of working-class association. The land scheme collapsed, exhausted by its attempts to clear the hurdles of the law and debilitated by internal difficulties. This casualty coming so

Blocked by the fmancial penalties being levied on their success, the Chartists suspended their attempts to register under the Companies Act and returned to trying to amend the Friendly Societies Act. In February 1848 O'Connor proposed an amendment to extend it to cover societies formed for the purpose of purchasing land in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of erecting on such land dwellings to be allotted to members of the society, together with certain portions of such land for agricultural purposes, and of raising a fund for the advancement of money to or for the benefit of such allottees on taking possession of their allotments and of creating a fund for the objects aforesaid etc.

With members and funds increasing and with pressure mounting from the localities to enrol promptly if the land scheme was to main-tain grass-roots confidence, the Directors redrew the rules and got provisional registration under the Joint Stock Companies Act in October 1846.62 Unfortunately this was tantamount to jumping from the frying pan into the fire. However carefully drawn to prevent any more spec-tacular capitalist frauds like the South Sea Bubble, the Act was com-pletely inappropriate to a company based on mass shareholding among poor people. There was no equality before this epitome of enabling capitalist law. Registration under the act involved a stamp tax which had to be paid on every fifteen folios of signatures attached to the deed. Most companies might need only a handful of signatories for complete registration, which required, in the first instance, the signatures of at least one-quarter of the shareholders owning one-quarter of the maximum value of the share issue with the rest of the shareholders signing later in due course. In August 1847, when the Chartists got approval for the wording of their draft deed they had 43,847 shareholders, which meant that 7566 people representing a holding of £33,000 of the total £130,000 had to sign the deed before complete registration could be secured: all members would have to sign in due course afterwards. Not only that, but the Act contemplated no open-ended issue of shares, as did the Chartists, and in August 1847 the Land Company announced that it would take no more members after 1 January 1848 in order to comply with the Act: in the period of grace between August and January 'as many members joined ... as had joined in the two previous years'. G. W. Chinery, the solicitor handling the registration for the Chartists, estimated that the stamp tax alone would come to £3 ISs. for every

So attractive was the land scheme proving, that the Convention of April 1845 declared for a Chartist Land Co-operative Society, whose

The Chartists were acutely sensitive to the discrepancy between constitutionality and legality (when the law was made by corrupt factions) but none the less they wanted not only to be impeccably constitutional (in their extended definition of constitutional) but also if possible to remain legal as well. In part this was an attempt to muster all moral authority on their side.

Thus it was quite natural for the Sunderland Chartists, for example, to use their class meetings also as reading groups to consider 'works by which human nature may be elevated by the consciousness of its dignity' and hasten the time when 'each man is fit to be his own leader'. 21 The conscious-ness of human dignity was not a peripheral matter to most Chartists. Except from some middle-class sections of the movement, there were constant efforts to inculcate a vision that working people were not subordinate and in need of outside leadership, but that they were the really productive classes, not only capable of producing commodities and services, but also capable collectively of producing their politics and indeed the whole of their social lives. The class meeting system was an effective way of opening up the social roles, like teacher and preacher, which had custody over people's conceptions of their own potential.

The Chartist co-operative stores, although criticised by White, were often aware of the same dangers. The Sunderland Chartists, having found the socialist co-ops too exclusive and having failed to bring about a change of rules, set up their own store which tried to avoid 'making another middle class of the present and from the better paid portion of the working class at the expense of the poor class'. 16 They halved the socialist price of shares and made it possible to pay up shares through shopping. Chartist charges tended to be lower than those of other movements.

Women did hold office in the movement but only in segregated women's groupings, on the pattern already established in local female friendly societies. 13 They did not seem to hold office either in the mixed local Chartist associations or on regional and national bodies which would have required travelling away from home: nor did they become paid itinerant lecturers as did some socialist women. None the less activity in the movement did stretch the roles of both women and men in some ways: some women insisted that a commitment to equality meant that they too must eventually have political rights, while some men spoke 'on the duty of the men stopping at home on Tuesday evenings in order to give their wives and sweethearts the privilege of attending the female meeting'. 14 For many Chartist women it would seem that stretching their role was not so much their project as their problem. Already stretched on the rack by capitalist employers and Poor Law guardians, they grasped the chance to reconstitute in the movement, if only for a few hours, what they felt was proper family life.

Chartism spoke directly to their family concerns. By absorbing the earlier Ten Hours and Anti-Poor Law campaigns, Chartism continued to

Neither the constitutional campaign nor the ulterior measures delivered a quick Charter. As 12 August, the first day of the National Holiday, drew near and then passed, and as mass arrests began in earnest, relations between Chartists and their opponents were strained to the breaking point. These opponents, who now included almost the whole of the local bourgeoisie and gentry as well as the government, seemed intent upon enclosing the constitution and civil society for the benefit of the rich alone. Instead of suspending ulterior measures as ineffective, the Chartists knuckled down to operate them in the longer term, not only as a tactic of confrontation but also as a means of building an independent social nucleus in and against the existing social order. In the autumn of 1839 Chartist local groups extended. the practice of collective self-provision at the same time that many were secretly arming: self-provision was seen as a test of serious political intent. Robert Lowery in Newcastle insisted, 'the man that will not go to the length of the street to spend his money in the shop of a friend or a store the profits of which he may be sure, will never walk ten miles with the musket on his shoulder to fight for freedom' .8 Exclusive dealing further developed in many places into Chartist co-operative stores, while abstention from excisable articles often became Chartist teetotalism and led to the adoption of a new kind of festivity, the tea-party, soiree and ball. The logic of collective self-help extended in other directions. Religion had been hotly contested territory in 1839: this was no marginal area, for religion stood guard not only over moral legitimacy but also over conceptions of human potential. From May onwards, but particularly after the three-day holiday, many local groups began what O'Connor scornfully called 'an exclusive dealing in religion: a kind of spiritual co-operative store' by absorbing non-sectarian Christian preaching and worship into their weekly routine. 9 Following the direction of this argument into the period after the activity and repression of 1842, the national land plan and the Land and Labour bank do not seem a total departure from what had come before and cannot be written off as O'Connor's personal hobbyhorses. In some ways they were the most extended development of the principle of Chartist self-provision, promising not only escape from the wage contract but also

When their 1839 constitutional campaign began to meet with stiffening government resistance from May onwards, climaxing in mid-July with Parliament's rejection of the National Petition, the Chartists tried to increase the pressure by putting their ulterior measures into operation. To some extent, these measures were a package of familiar political tactics which had been used or mooted many times before. 5 But taken together and placed in working-class hands, they posed a new challenge: they showed an awareness of and willingness to dramatise the working-class role in the production of the social life of the nation. The tendency of uiterior measures was to undermine the hostile insti-tutions of State and society by withdrawing working-class energies from them. The Chartists wanted to deprive the State of a significant part of its revenue (by abstaining from taxed articles) and challenge its monopoly over legitimate force: not only did Chartists argue the con-stitutional and biblical right of free-born Englishmen to bear arms but after the Birmingham Bull Ring episode in which the Metropolitan Police were imported to help break up Chartist meetings, the Chartists in several places formed 'committees of public safety' to defend the people against any further unconstitutional uses of force by the auth-orities.6 By means of exclusive dealing the Chartists aimed to withhold working-class consuming power and by a run on the banks to ensure that working-class money, particularly the aggregate savings of trade unions and friendly societies, prohibited by law from carrying on bank-ing themselves, would not fmance hostile institutions: reportedly a number of Sheffield societies managed to withdraw some £7000 be-tween them. 7 The Chartists realised that a withdrawal of labour was

Influenced by the success of the Catholic Emancipation movement and the 1832 parliamentary reform agitation, the dominant Chartist strategy was 'open, intimidating constitutionalism' on a huge scale, which involved massive petitions, public meetings, appearances as non-electors at the official hustings and even in 1839 a General Convention of the Indus-trious Classes, a people's parliament elected by universal suffrage.3

. As has been said already, we lack a definitive account of the relationship between the chartist movement and the state throughout the I830 and I840s, although we have a month-by-month account, in Saville's book, of the situation in I848. If ultimately the rise and fall of chartism is to be understood in political terms, then this deficiency needs remedying. One way forward may be to try and establish some connections with the history of state formation that has begun to be written for the latter part of the eighteenth century. Both Stedman Jones and John Saville tend to treat the early Victorian state as a new phenomenon. They see it as either the vehicle of the 'revolution in government' and extension of expertise into social problems, or as the embodiment of a new middle-class concern to police and criminalize different spheres of working-class behaviour. In both cases the early Victorian state appears as a completely new departure from the sleepy, slumbering system of administration which existed before the I830s. Chartism, not surprisingly, is treated as a reaction to this new unprecedented extension of authority. But we now know that the eighteenth-century state was considerably more efficient than older comparisons with its modern Victorian counterpart tended to suggest. The work of eighteenth-century historians has begun to show how Hanoverian Britain, especially in comparison with other European states, combined a well-oiled fiscal-military apparatus with a considerable degree of decentralized authority in matters such as crime, poor relief, and trade regulation.52 Moreover, this system depended on a good deal of popular participation, particularly at a civic and corporate level.53

the centre of the language of chartism was a preoccupation with the inequitable state of taxation. Taxation was political in its origins, and economic in its effects. The tried and trusted chartist critique of the tax-gathering state allowed people to connect their own individual poverty and deprivation with the state of parliamentary representation. Such a perspective fits with the chronology of chartism. The peaks of chartism coincided with significant changes in government fiscal policy - rising government expenditure after i835 and a growing problem of government debt, the reintroduction of the income tax in March I 842, a dramatic rise in the rate of income tax together with a slowing-down in the rate of remission of indirect tax in February I848.39 Furthermore, the fiscal dimension makes sense of shifting chartist attitudes towards an alliance with the middle class - expectations of united action amidst financial instability down to the violence at the Birmingham Bull-Ring in i839,40 talk of a general strike, including a middle-class tax revolt in i842,41 and hopes for an alliance between the chartists and the 'non-monied middle-classes' in London ahead of the Kennington Common meeting in i848.42 At other times, for example in i84i and i85o, as Neville Kirk and John Saville have shown, the chartist view of the middle classes was dominated by recrimination and distrust.43 So, viewed in fiscal terms chartism is neither exclusively political nor exclusively economic, but a dynamic combination of the two, and there might be room for both a socio-economic analysis of the deprivation calised by taxation, and a political analysis of the arguments which raged over the working of such taxation.

xation also rendered the role of the middle classes highly problematic for chartists. As ratepayers and consumers of luxury goods in the towns, as importers and exporters in the manufacturing districts, as investors and borrowers in the city of London and the provincial banks and stock- exchanges, the middle classes were clearly crucial contributors to the state's revenue, yet without landed property they remained on the fringes of the aristocratic political system. Where did their loyalty lie? Was it with the over-burdened wage-earning community, or with the established governing classes? Hence chartist ambivalence towards the middle classes. On the one hand, as recognized by Stedman Jones, a need to cultivate their support, for they held the credit-worthiness of the state in their hands. On the other hand, as pointed out by Neville Kirk and Dorothy Thompson, a dire hatred of their at times collaborative and exploitative role in the system.

The novelty of the charter was that it did posit a connection between people's discontent and the present form of government. Chartist leaders argued that the burdensome system of indirect taxation - taxes on consumption - fell disproportion- ately on wage-earners, who spent more of their income on necessities, and so indirect taxes were a cause of their poverty. The only reason for high levels of indirect taxation, so chartists argued, was so that the governing classes, who paid very little tax, could continue to enjoy their luxuries and privileges. Were the system to be reformed and the representation extended, then government would be made more accountable, taxation would fall, and poverty be reduced. Chartist demands were a new variation on the old cry of 'no taxation without representation'. T

However, while the constitutionalist tradition of the vote was based historically on property rights, Chartists interpreted it in terms of working men's property in their labor. Of course, females worked as well-but the Chartists did not apply this principle to women. This blind spot, it could be argued, limited the democratic potential of their notion of labor. Despite their appeal to all working people, not just artisans, the Chartist notion of labor derived from an artisan concep- tion of the property of skill and control over labor-including control over the labor supply and subordinates.103 Men regarded their labor as a source of pride and independence (even if the reality was different), while for women labor was an alienated cash nexus. Chartist women did not seem to regard labor as a right or a source of pride but as an unpleasant necessity of getting enough to survive.104 The Manchester Chartist women continued by bemoaning that "we can scarcely get sufficient to keep body and soul together, for working twelve or thir- teen hours per day."105 The

But female suffrage was difficult to reconcile with domesticity. For instance, R. J. Richardson in his pamphlet Rights of Women used a Painite language of rights and citizenship to show that women should participate in political affairs because they were subjected to the laws of the state, paid taxes, and worked. Yet Richardson also proclaimed women were formed to "temper man" and should "return to [their] domestic circles and cultivate [their] finer feelings for the benefit of their offspring."96 The solution to these contradictions was for the suffrage to be granted only to single women and widows, for married women were represented by their husbands. Feargus O'Connor op- posed the vote for any woman, thundering that it would cause dissen- sion among families.97 These arguments continued as late as 1846-47, when Owenites continued to support female suffrage, but the majority opposed it as creating "domestic unhappiness."98 Although working men repudiated the middle-class idea of household suffrage, they therefore still linked, on an emotional level, domestic patriarchal au- thority and political rights. Northern Star editorials denounced house- hold suffrage because it would subsume radical sons' wishes under conservative fathers' votes, but they did not see the contradiction in excluding wives from the vote in order to "preserve harmony" in the family.99 Yet opponents of universal manhood suffrage could point to women's votes as the reductio ad absurdam: if everyone has the inher- ent natural right to vote, why not women? This was brought up espe- cially in the 1842 debates in the House of Commons over Sharman Crawford's motion to extend the suffrage. The Times stated, "Were they consistent with themselves, they must at least give the franchise to women."100 Chartists could only answer lamely that it was "paltry twaddle" to argue that working men should be denied the vote unless women were included as well.101 By subsuming women under their husbands, the rationale for universal suffrage as a natural right was lost. Chartists could avoid these contradictions, however, when draw

However, Chartists rarely addressed the problem of male tyranny in marriage directly, as had the Owenites. This was in part because of their strong patriarchal emphasis. But it was also because Owenite critiques of marriage had to be abandoned in the new defensive poli- tics. Radicals could not attack marriage when they reviled the New Poor Law for separating husbands and wives in workhouses.92 One exception was found in the National Association Gazette, which re- futed the notion that husbands represented wives by declaring, "Woman stands in the same relationship to a man, as the subject of a despotic government to his monarch."93

Some female Chartists also wished to transform domesticity into a more elevated sphere. Chartists claimed factory labor deprived women of an education that would enable them to transcend "the dull round of their household duties."83 Other Scottish women called for their sisters to "enlarge their thoughts beyond the domestic circle."84 An "Admirer of the Female Character" approved of female Chartist activity by refuting those who thought that women "are created for nothing but the domestic circle, and would give you no other education than housewifery."85

Chartists needed to draw on this female experience for their tac- tics of mass demonstrations, gathering signatures for petitions, strikes, and exclusive dealing-that is, boycotting shopkeepers who refused to support Chartists. One way they tried to do this was by creating a more disciplined, orderly public sphere. As an alternative to the pub, they had tea parties, soirees, and processions attended by whole fami- lies.70 Unlike most trade unions, Chartists thus provided a political role for women in the larger community. But women also acted inde- pendently, forming over a hundred flourishing female Chartist asso- ciations.71 In Bradford, for instance, the Female Radical Association was a "quasi-autonomous group of five branches with six hundred members. '72

Yet Chartist domesticity potentially differed from its bourgeois counterpart. Instead of a rigid separation between home and work, public politics and family privacy, Chartists politicized family life, de- fending it against attack and drawing on the family as a political re- source. The division of the world into the public and private was rela-

To attract women, Chartists promised to transform the old marital misery into happy domesticity. Domesticity was therefore not only a rhetorical tool to demand concessions from the government but a vi- sion used to appeal to women. Acknowledging the chronic problems of working-class marriage and promising to solve them were key means of gaining women's adherence. For instance, Mr. Macfarlane of Glas- gow proclaimed that good government would lead to "good govern- ment at home. . . . Instead of the old Tory system of the husband coming home drunk to his family, we will have him sober, contented, and happy."60 Two years later, the Scottish Chartist Circular detected that this promise was being fulfilled: "our fair countrywomen . . . acknowledged the change for the better in the 'guidman', as he comes home on the Saturday evening to read his Circular, and watch over the interests of his family."61 For women whose husbands drank all their wages, this rhetoric spoke to their experience and promised a better life

ens's followers drew on a new, and much more rhetorically clever, technique of citing the notion of domesticity to claim they wished to exclude women in order to protect and support them.54 As part of this transformation, even the more militant Chartists advocated temperance and education, lending credibility to their domestic rhetoric.55

Working men were especially en- raged at their loss of control over women, as the Reverend J. R. Ste- phens made clear when he proclaimed to a meeting, "God cursed woman as well as man ... that she should be in subjection to her own husband, her desire should be unto her husband, and he should rule over her [hear hear] and not the millowners [tremendous cheering] nor the coal pit masters [continuous cheering]-not the Poor Law Commissioners."49 Stalybridge Chartist Mr. Deegan echoed this senti- ment when he argued that English men want their wives and children in happy cottages, not "polluted by lickspittles" in the mines and factories.50 In fact, Stephens explicitly linked physical force to familial issues when he proclaimed "if society cannot be renovated [so that] every industrious, virtuous man should have a home, and the blessings of home . . . then, I say, 'Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!'

."40 Moral force men advocated a new vision of patriarchy. William Lovett emphasized the duties of husbands to instruct their wives in political affairs, so that they would not be "mere domestic drudges, and ignorant slaves of our passions" but, instead, "our equal companions in knowledge and happiness."41 However, this was not an egalitarian vision. The paterfamilias should impart his greater wis- dom to his wife at home so that the domestic circle would be happy, but Lovett did not envision an independent political role for women or believe they should work outside the home. Lovett's vision was closer to the middle-class sentimental ideal of domesticity, for he blamed working people for their own familial misery. His notion of masculinity was middle-class as well, for he stressed a masculinity based on rationality and self-control, rather than the "pugilistic skill" on which many working-class men still based their honor.4

Orators often used parts of the melodramatic narrative as threads that could connect the symbolism of popular literature with the social context of industrialization.33 Simply citing fragments of melodrama evoked the emotional impact of the whole narrative. The melodramatic narrative also functioned as a framework on which different political analyses could be hung; for instance, in the quotes that opened this article, orators variously represented the villain as Malthusianism, cap- italism, and Toryism. While authors such as Jones explain Chartists' continuous use of terms such as "factory lords" or "millocracy" as their inability to let go of the notion of Old Corruption to confront capitalism, this might also be understood as using melodramatic meta- phors in order to make a new analysis more accessible to working people.34 Contrasting the "bacchanalian orgies" of the palace with the poor man's hovel made much better copy than using the industrialist's parlor as a foil. For instance, an address to the queen for the Charter on behalf of the General Convention of the Industrious Classes de- clared, "The light laugh, the costly feast in the gorgeous hall, still waft the idle hours of the rich ruler away; the father's sigh and mother's sob o'er their ruined hopes and wretched condition intrude not

Melodrama portrayed a past of family harmony disrupted by aris- tocratic libertines (symbolizing industrialism and the New Poor Laws), blaming domestic misery not on working-class immorality but on upper-class oppression.27 Chartist Thomas Ainge Devyr firmly be- lieved melodramatic romances would inspire men to chivalrous deeds against aristocratic tyrants in order to win "woman's smile."28 Gerald Massey, a Chartist working-class poet, encapsulated the narrative neatly in this verse: Our Fathers are Praying for Pauper Pay Our Mothers with Death's Kiss are white; Our Sons are the rich man's Serfs by day, And our Daughters his Slaves by night.29 The vision of the golden age enabled Chartist orators to condense the disparate family experiences of artisans, factory workers, and laborers into one potent image. Massey proclaimed in his poem, "The Chivalry of Labor," "We'll win the golden age again."30 However, while sev- eral historians have accepted this "golden age" at face value, as a happy time when families worked in harmony,31 it is important to rec- ognize that there was little contemporary evidence for this harmony and that the golden age actually functioned in the melodramatic narra- tive as a rhetorical foil for the miseries of the present.32

Chartism also derived much of its ability to mobilize huge numbers of disparate working people from its theatrical processions and richly symbolic rhetoric. When William Lovett and his colleagues later repu- diated the "foolish displays and gaudy trappings" of early Chartism, Trowbridge Chartists wrote that this "passionate invective . . . first aroused [many working men] to a sense of their degradation, their rights, and their strength."24 Whereas in the past radicals combined earthy satire against their rulers with sentimental melodrama, in Char- tism melodrama predominated as a style, for this time working people were on the defensive.25 Not only was melodrama particularly effective as a style that combined the elevated language beloved of the self- improving Chartists with instant accessibility, but it was also particu- larly useful in evoking family misery and combating attacks on working-class morality. The task of defending working-class moralit

In response to these discourses and actions that negatively defined working people as a class to be excluded, Chartists had to create a positive working-class identity. To begin with, they united working people around the demand for manhood suffrage, which they derived both from a constitutionalist tradition and Thomas Paine's egalitarian notion of the vote as a "universal political right of every human being" rather than as a privilege of property.22 The political focus of Chartism also enabled it to transcend the sectionalism that had continued to plague the trade union movement, for they asserted all working people deserved rights, not just skilled men.2

Surprisingly enough, Chartists also used domesticity to bring women into the movement. Feminist historians, such as Joan Scott and Deborah Valenze, have suggested that by focusing on political citizenship, Chartists defined the working class as male, whereas ear- lier popular politics, based on the community, were more accessible to women.14 Yet the importance of domesticity revealed that Chartism potentially embodied a larger notion of politics than just citizenship. Furthermore, one should not assume fixed meanings for citizenship and community. While London artisans focused their community life around male workshops, Chartists tried to appeal to women by trans- forming working-class communities, promising to substitute domestic responsibility for violence and drunkenness. Yet they faced tensions between their notions of citizenship as a basic human political right available to women or a status to be earned as patriarchal head of household. Chartists also demanded the vote to insure the rights of labor-but was labor a property of skill, as men wished, or was it alienated work exchanged for a wage, as the female factory worker experienced it? The Owenite socialists of the early 1830s had begun to explore these issues, exposing the miseries of patriarchal marriage and organizing women workers along with men.15 However, the Chart

By the 1830s, the dominant meaning of domesticity was the middle- class ideology of separate spheres. There, men struggled in the public sphere of work and politics, while women sheltered in the private sphere of the home.10 But Chartist rhetoric used domesticity not in the sense of a rigid ideology but as an image of home that could carry several meanings. Chartist domesticity differed from the sentimentality of middle-class moralists. In Evangelical narratives, individual sin, es- pecially feminine indiscipline, poisoned the happy home.1' But Chart- ists, following radical tradition, preferred to draw on melodrama, which blamed familial disruption on an outside villain-the aristocratic libertine, symbolizing capitalism and corruption.12 For working people,

The idea that Chartism can be explained without reference to class is a non-starter. However, politics cannot be reduced to class either. A Marxist perspective would lead historians to expect Chartism to be based on conflict between middle and working classes. This sometimes happened but politics frequently cut across classes. Middle and working class radicals united as ‘the people’ against the allegedly corrupt aristocracy. Nevertheless, class did determine the range of life opportunities and political choices available to the individual. Class was constructed through the operation of the market and through political debate. Language, whether political or not, shaped experiences and helped determine possible actions. It was not just a product of wider social forces; it helped to create them by determining the range of possibilities available at any given time. In the era of post-revisionism, there is a place for both class and language[22].

This ‘deconstruction’ of class has had both positive and negative effects. Positively, it has been useful in questioning established orthodoxies and recognising that there is no automatic relationship between the social structure and political movements. What is disappointing is that the prominence given to language in these accounts does not help when examining the complex connections between economic, social, cultural and political change. The ‘linguistic turn’ applied by Stedman Jones and Joyce is unduly restrictive[21]. It does not deny the existence of class but is only prepared to admit very special languages as languages of class. Only if people use a language that explicitly refers to economic exploitation between classes do they allow that they might have stumbled across class. However, many sentiments and values may express feelings relating to the existence of class divisions in an indirect or oblique way.

The major problem with Stedman Jones’ work is that it operates on an unduly narrow Marxist definition and standard (‘true’ test) of class. It is based on a very narrow range of evidence that, in turn, is capable of alternative class-based reading and is insufficiently aware of the importance of context in setting and changing the meanings of long-standing words and demands. He provides too literal an approach to the study of language and ideas effectively missing the centrality of class to the Chartist movement. He underestimates the role of the ‘social’ and mistakenly portrays the movement from Chartism to Liberalism in far too easy, untroubled and narrowly political terms

The accelerating pace of capitalist transformation of the workplace and workplace relations ensured that class was central to questions concerning independence, skills, living standards and the wages and protection workers received. The nature of this change differed and class in its economic form did not assume a single and uniform expression and meaning within Chartism. Chartist speakers and writers did not use the term ‘class’ in the same way on all occasions. Sometimes it meant only waged workers; sometimes it included ‘good’ employers. Historians are increasingly aware of the complexity of usage of, and to the contextualised engagement between, flexible and often interchangeable terms such as ‘people’, the ‘useful classes’ and the ‘working class’.

There is a longstanding historiographical tradition strongly disposed towards the class-based nature of Chartism. However, where does this tradition stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century? It is clear that during the Chartist years, sources of working class unity generally outweighed sources of division and fragmentation. Dorothy Thompson[10] writes, “What is astonishing, in the light of later developments, is the extent to which the movement was able to incorporate people of different regional and ethnic origins, different genders and different occupations into a national campaign involving millions. The unifying factors were primarily a sense of class, a unifying leadership and a nationally distributed journal.” The definition of ‘class’ has been moved away simply from identification with the ‘economic’. Historians now have a more sophisticated and acute picture and understanding of the political, cultural and linguistic dimensions of class. Class had a many-sided character. Chartism was a movement whose language at all levels was class language and in which the working classes alone believed in the concepts of universal suffrage, the rights of man and of an equality of citizenship. Class also informed leisure and culture and class domination was not confined to the workplace. All aspects of social life – housing, shops, drinking places, recreational and instructional institutions, churches and chapel seating – were segregated along class lines.

More recent accounts of the movement, especially Cole, Briggs, Ward, David Jones and Edward Royle have also highlighted the centrality of Chartist attempts to draw upon the class consciousness of working class men. Apart from Jones, these authors have not paid detailed attention to the feelings of working class women. G.D.H. Cole[7] wrote, “Hunger and hatred – these were the forces that made Chartism a mass movement of the British working class. Hunger gnawed at the hearts of the people, and seemed to gnaw the more fiercely as, under the spur of the new industrialism, the means of producing wealth increased…” In 1959, Asa Briggs[8] noted, “A main theme in Chartist history was the attempt to create a sense of class unity”. The detailed local studies in Chartist Studies reinforced Briggs’ national observations. Edward Royle[9] extended the notion of class-consciousness into the areas of leisure and cultural norms and values. Similarly, David Jones in Chartism and the Chartists had earlier explored the cultural dimensions of class with respect to Chartist attitudes to religion, education and temperance.

Gammage’s class perspective found its way into the early twentieth century histories of Chartism. For Mark Hovell in 1918 and Julius West in 1920, wide-ranging class grievances and demands were at the heart of the Chartist agenda. Hovell[5] saw Chartism as “an effort towards democracy and social equality” and a “strong protest against the autocracy both of the landlord and the capitalist.” Chartism further marked, “a real new departure in our social and political history. It was the first movement of modern times that was engineered and controlled by working men…It was the first genuinely democratic movement for social reform in modern history.” For West[6], class divisions and anti-middle class feelings were essential, if unwelcome, aspects of Chartism.

Although they claimed that conservativesdeliberately distorted theircase,theirtendency toalternatebetween republicanrhetoric, in support of the French revolutionaries, and declarations supportingthe British monarchy, which reflected their reforming background and,probably,theactualviewsofmostradicals inBritain,produced understandableconfusion amongloyalists astotheirrealintentions.3

They had mixed feelings about a possible French invasion. Often theirrhetoric seemed to look forward to such anevent, but it is unlikely that manywould have supported it inreality.The Sheffield Iris wasunsympathetic totheFrench forces. The meeting of the LCS broken up by Bow Street Magistrateson 19 April had been discussing what they should do if the French landed;many thought they ought to help the Volunteers, and one prominent memberwas reported as having argued that the Society should help to repel them,because they seemed 'more desirous of establishing an extensive militarydespotism, than of propagating republican principles'.32 On the other hand,Gilbert Wakefield and others warned the government that invasion would notposetheFrench much ofaproblem.John GaleJones,onthedaytheTwoActswerepassed, said that, inthepresent circumstances, 'should theFrench invadeour Coasts, I would not take up a Musket to oppose them. I would not assisttheFrench to invade this Country, nor would Iresist them; for if I amtobeaSlave, it matters not whether I be the slave of an English, or of a FrenchTyrant.' Likewise, Thomas Spence avowed that, if confronted by Frenchinvaders, he would 'throw down [his] musket saying let such as the Duke ofPortland, who claim the country, fight for it, for [he was] but a stranger andsojourner, and [had]neitherpartnorlotamongst them'. Others,particularly theUnited Irishmen, but also some radicals in the large towns and cities of themainland,wereready tojoin theFrench andwereimpatient for theirarrival.

The radicals also called for an end to the war because of their primaryobjective, which remained political reform in Britain. The resolutions taken bythe Sheffield radicals in February 1794 began by denouncing the war, butended by declaring that 'the People have no remedy for their Grievances, but aREFORM IN PARLIAMENT'. Likewise, the resolutions adopted by the LCSon 29 June 1795 at St George's Fields demonstrated that, although 'the Friendsof Reform [were] indeed the Friends of Peace', the war to the radicals was justone of the many distresses brought upon the people by acorrupt government, ifa major one, and that it was only likely to be halted by parliamentary reform,the panacea for all these ills.

When war broke out between Britain and France, the radicals in Britainnevertheless continued to support the Revolution in France against the alliedpowers of Europe, which now included Britain. They approved of Jacobinismand defended it throughout the decade in their publications. Atrocities wereexplained by the enormity of the cataclysm: 'It could not be expected', wroteJoseph Towers, 'that so enormous a system of civil, ecclesiastical, andaristocratical tyranny, as that of which the old government was composed,could be socompletely overturned, without very violent convulsions.

In fact, however, although much more numerous andwell-organized thanever before, British radicals were only a small minority of the population, andthey were not well co-ordinated. Many societies were quite small and short-lived; Dissenters, Whigs, and working-class societies had very little contactwith each other; local issues often preoccupied provincial societies; and fewhad adegree of hostility totheexisting order in Britain approaching that oftherevolutionaries in France—the great majority called for reform rather than forrevolution. The general public alarm of early December stimulated by thegovernment's summoning of Parliament and calling out of the local militiashowed how weak the support for radicalism really was in Britain and howready thepopulation wastorally tothecall for loyalism.

The LondonCorresponding Society (LCS) address to the National Convention expressedregret that the British army was not fighting alongside the French: 'Our handsare bound, but our hearts are free, and they are with you.'2 Sheffield radicalsstaged a massive demonstration to celebrate Prussia's defeat in September,roasting a whole ox, quartering it, and taking it through the town to be given tothe poor and the debtors in jail, cheered by a crowd and cannon-fire; and aneffigy of the Duke of Brunswick was executed on Kennington Common inLondon. The French victory at Jemappes and Dumouriez's entry into Brusselsin November and December 1792 respectively stimulated celebrations in Perthand Dundee.

E. P. Thompson and later historians of popular protest concluded that the targeting of magistrates and clergy marked recognition of the destruction of the ‘moral economy’ of the eighteenth century and a politicization of the working classes. In short, social relations within local communities in the eighteenth century had been run along lines of reciprocity, in which there was an element of bargaining between the wishes of the crowd and magistrates or other authorities prepared to treat genuine grievances leniently.117 Craig Calhoun and John Bohstedt linked the nature of protest to varying patterns of authority within territorial communities. They argued that propensity to disorder and radicalism increased with urbanization and industrialization, which destroyed cross‐class community and therefore the bases of consensual authority. In this period, a middle ground was created in industrial villages and in small town and urban communities thronged by artisans and outworkers, where ‘resident authority was weak but a sense of working‐class autonomy was strong, enabling a greater degree of concerted collective action’.118 It was among these communities that Thompson located the ‘making of the English working class' and there that radicalism and other protests flourished. The social justice and egalitarian message of part II of Paine's Rights of Man, together with the massive economic and social disruptions caused by the French war and industrialization, apparently broke down this mutual understanding about the responsibilities of both parties. Hence magistrates, clergy, and landowners naturally became the targets of attack. From 1795, the cultural hegemony that Thompson believed to reside in the theatre of power of the assizes and quarter sessions and the ‘equilibrium between (p.169) paternalist authority and the crowd’ was subverted by the growth of this sense of independence. The ‘great and undeferential popular agitations at the end of the French Wars' were therefore the product of an inherent independence among artisans newly freed from the cultural and ideological paternalism of the gentry class.

This conservatism did not preclude more heterogeneous expressions of radicalism at times of distress. Local populations opposed government intervention in their own affairs as much as innovation. They could, without internal inconsistency, be ensconced within the safer bounds of loyalism during more challenging times or revert to more radical tenets when activists roused campaigns that appealed to either their economic self‐interest or their suspicions of compulsion by their social betters. Popular radicalism was often less a product of distinct or positive principles and more a matter of opposition to restrictions on the freedom of speech and assembly by government and local authorities. The suspension of habeas corpus expired in 1801. This provided a short opening for mass meetings to be held for the first time since 1795. The first major peace meeting in Lancashire was held on 5 April 1801 at Tandle Hill near Royton. Colonel Fletcher claimed that the meeting attracted ‘upwards of two thousand persons at one time and the different persons who visited the ground during the course of the day might possibly be fourteen thousand’. Inhabitants of Oldham, Rochdale, Chadderton, Middleton, and their surrounds attended the meeting. Although crowd estimates were always inaccurate, Fletcher was unlikely to have wildly exaggerated the numbers to the Home Office as he sought to maintain his credibility as a magistrate. If his report can be trusted, then the attendance is testimony to a popular interest in moderate radicalism and peace resulting from a combination of factors: the state of economic distress felt during the winter of 1800–1, the reaction to the apparently unsympathetic attitude of manufacturers after the passing of the Combination Acts, war‐weariness, and a general dissatisfaction that could not be explained solely in political terms.110 Of course, not all the participants in the demonstration would have gone away convinced that the semi‐Paineite, semi‐constitutionalist demands would solve their (p.167) problems, but the event cannot be dismissed as an aberration from a context of solid popular loyalism or as having had no effect upon the population. The magistrates became increasingly anxious about the size and scope of subsequent meetings. Revd Robert Hay estimated that over 5,000 attended the radical meeting at Buckton Castle on 3 May 1801, but ‘we had no precise information of the object of the meeting’.

UE gatherings and peace and reform meetings were often held on Tandle Hill on the outskirts of the township. The politics expressed at such events were also distinguished by the unique and markedly Paineite character of Royton radicalism. The resolutions passed at a peace meeting there on 5 April 1801, for example, expressed considerably greater awareness of the economic relationships than was apparent in the usual constitutionalist rhetoric of other addresses and petitions from (p.153) Map 2. ‘A map of the country five miles round Tandle Hill', by Edwin Butterworth, c.1824. Source: Oldham Local Studies and Archives. elsewhere. They included the assertion, in terminology reminiscent of Paine's Agrarian Justice and the political economy of John Thelwall: ‘that nothing is produced without labour, however taxes are laid in the first instance, they ultimately fall upon the labouring poor’. They demanded ‘nothing less than an immediate peace, a thorough reform in the representative system and a reduction of the national debt’. The Taylors were probably the originators of this rhetoric. The petition suggested the lasting effect of the economic depression of 1795 and 1799–1801 in sustaining thoughts of social welfare among the local populace. Paineite radicals took this connection one step further by linking it with reform. Handbills fixed to the trees attempted to conceptualize and politicize the distress by demanding ‘An equal Representation of all the People of England by universal suffrage’, ‘a Reduction of the National Debt’, and ‘a lowering of [the prices of] Provisions of All Sorts'.72 Despite the republicanism of the Taylors, the idea of ‘thorough’ reform at this point did not explicitly include an extension of the franchise and perhaps the (p.154) petition was written in a general way to appear constitutionalist enough to the magistrates as well as to parliament whom they were petitioning.

Hannah Greg, wife of Samuel the Unitarian manufacturer of Manchester and later Quarry Bank, identified him as ‘the Informer’ as early as April 1798 in a letter to William Rathbone of Liverpool. She argued that United activity and the tendency to violence in Manchester was the result of Gray ‘spiriting them up’. Greg's comment indicates a common knowledge of the UE among radical sympathisers; she indeed mentioned ‘our united friend’ having given her the information.40 Middle‐class radicals who had stepped down from active involvement in radicalism continued in the background by keeping up these connections and knowledge

The residual anti‐Catholicism, or perhaps more accurately, anti‐Irish sentiment, of the UE played a large part in fragmenting them and their plans. The UE were decidedly English Jacobins who kept their distance from the UI and were less concerned about the French invasion of the mainland and about freeing Ireland from British rule than they were about championing Paineite values of universal suffrage and equal representation. The UE, having grown out of the remnants of constitutional societies, thus had sympathies with Enlightenment atheism and were suspicious of established churches, while the identity of the UI by contrast had centred around Catholicism since their alliance with the Catholic Committee and the Irish Rebellion. Hatred of the Church‐and‐King alliance underlay much of William Cowdroy's rhetoric and his opinions mirrored those of the UE. In January 1798, Cowdroy criticized William Pitt, the ‘haughty Monarch of Downing Street’, for his attempts ‘to root out Jacobinism, to starve Republicans and to disseminate the principles of Christianity by the sword and the bayonet’.30 Such tropes surfaced regularly in radical rhetoric: Robert Walker used the character Whistlepig to allege that the ‘war‐lovink tinkor’ Pitt used his budgets (and the new income tax) to maintain ‘a parel o'French runagates, ot wurn'n komn to this kuntry, ot te kode'n t'klergy and Laety’.31 [‘A group of French refugees that had come to this country, that they called the clergy and laity’.] In his examination during the trial of the Lancashire UE, the spy Robert Gray had alleged that Cowdroy had told him that England had no defence against the French ‘as long as Priestcraft was suffered in the country’.32 This was reflective of the anti‐hierarchical elements in his radicalism and pointed towards a significant theme underlying much of Lancashire radicalism. William Clegg criticized Burke's rhetoric, which was ‘in support of a war for the continuation of popish superstition and regal despotism’.33 Such anti‐Catholic tenets continued even into the new forms of radicalism that would emerge from the later part of the war. Hence two peace petitions from Chowbent and Chorley to the House of Commons in 1812 both pointed to the fund for exiled Catholic clergy and laity as proof of the (p.143) government's hypocritical disengagement from the economic plight of the working classes.

Certain individuals sustained a pattern of radical activity throughout the wars, though they were unusual in this respect. Manchester radical Thomas Walker took part in later agitation, associating with the United Englishmen, abolitionists, and the Luddites. He was regarded by each new movement as something of a veteran.20 John Knight of Saddleworth was probably the most involved among the disparate few. He was arrested as a radical leader in 1794, joined the United Englishmen's county executive in 1801 and was again arrested in Manchester in 1812 for what the magistrates regarded as his leading part in the renewed reform activity. He became editor of the Manchester Register in 1817 and was arrested a fourth time in 1819. He was still politically active in the 1830s. His activities are unrecorded between 1803 and 1811, on the other hand, which suggests that like many others, he laid low or focused his efforts on patriotic endeavour.

The patriotism of radical activists was thus a complex mix of romantic Francophilia tarnished by dislike of Napoleon, and a love of country compared with a bitter hatred of governments pursuing what they regarded as the ‘Pitt system’ that pursued corruption and war‐mongering, against the interests of British inhabitants in parliamentary representation and foreign policy. These sentiments were expressed even more forcefully by a contemporary of Clegg's, someone he may never have met: Robert Walker, the self‐styled ‘Tim Bobbin the Second’. Walker was born in Audenshaw in 1728 and was a handloom weaver in Rochdale. He composed the comic dialogue Plebeian Politics in response to the signing of the peace preliminaries of November 1801.

During the Napoleonic wars, certain groups of activists remained committed to maintaining the vestiges of radical principles and identity. The first group were ‘English Jacobins' like Clegg, who had been inspired by Thomas Paine's Rights of Man but had not had a high enough profile in public life to suffer arrest or exile in the 1790s. They fostered a continued opposition to the war with France and braved showing their heads above the loyalist parapet, at least locally, to publish radical pamphlets and organize meetings at opportune moments. Among these were local families who maintained a radical reputation in particular villages in the region.

If developments in Ireland and exiled Irish provided part of the impetus behind revived radical activity in this period, another was provided by the renewal of connections to the LCS. Following the suppression of the Brit-ish convention and resulting trials of radicals, the connections appear to have largely lapsed.  us, an attempt to re-establish a link in 1794 by the LCS came to nothing. In late 1795, however, new attempts were made to reforge links.

e Irish connection was, as McFarland acknowledges, far from the full story behind the radical revival, however.90 In Fife and Angus, the leading  gure in the United Scotsmen was George Mealmaker, and his involvement highlights, as emphasized in an earlier chapter, the continuities in radical politics between the earlier and later 1790s. In so far as we can tell, Mealmaker’s political goals had not changed since 1793, remaining focused on universal suff rage and annual parliaments, although his political message, contained in his Th e Moral and Political Catechism of Man (1797), which was being circulated on Tayside and in Fife, was a strange mixture of menace and moderation, Paineite republicanism and conditional constitutionalism. Other United Scotsmen missionaries who were Scots included Archibald Grey, who was active in the west and west-cen-tral regions, and probably Angus Cameron, a native of Lochaber and key  gure in the Perthshire anti-militia disturbances.91 Unlike in the case of Perth, there is almost no evidence regarding the activities of the United Scotsmen in Dun-dee, apart from the exiguous details which emerged from Mealmaker’s trial for treason in 1798.  ere is similarly little information regarding Fife, although of twenty-six United Scotsmen societies mentioned in o cial sources, eight were in Fife, which, along with Angus and Perthshire, formed an east coast linen-producing region focused on Dundee.92 A list of suspected United Scotsmen members from Fife in 1797 seems to indicate that their strength lay amongst weavers from weaving villages such as Ceres.93  ere is no direct evidence of Irish in uence in such places in this period. Interestingly, Fife was to see some of the most disciplined, well-organized opposition to the Militia Act in the autumn of 1797, involving meetings of delegates from towns and villages in the county at Falkland (21 August) and later at Freuchie (8 September) to petition against the Act.94 It also, as we will see below, saw considerable support for the opposition Whig-led peace campaign in the spring

One of the main catalysts of radical revival, and the one which has in recent years received most attention, was events in Ireland. Elaine McFarland has recently explored the role in the formation of the United Scotsmen of an Irish politics of insurrection seeded by the repression in Ireland of open radi-cal politics and the defeat of hopes for Catholic emancipation in 1793–5.79 As McFarland sensibly remarks, the relative importance of this Irish in uence is hard to assess, and may well be exaggerated in the extant sources; suspected United Scotsmen under detention might well have had an interest in portray-ing the society as the product of incomers.80 Nevertheless, Irish in uence was important and substantial, particularly in Ayrshire and the west and west-central regions.  e organization of the United Scotsmen – an ascending pyramid of committees culminating, at the apex, in a national committee – was explicitly borrowed from the United Irishmen. Designed to facilitate expansion, it also aimed at maintaining maximum secrecy within the society.81 As the authorities were well aware, and as alluded to above, large numbers of Irish were arriving from Ulster in the Ayrshire port of Portpatrick in 1797, from where they were dispersing to weaving villages in particular in the west and west-central areas. Here they came into contact with former members of the Friends of the People. Union with radical bodies in other parts of the British Isles was an element of strateg y of the United Irishmen. In 1796 two agents were sent to Scotland from Belfast; and further agents arrived from Ireland in 1797–8.82 Several leading  g-ures in the United Scotsmen were Irishmen, and in some places it was Irishmen who were mainly responsible for swearing in new members. In Perth, two of the main radicals active in this period were James Craigdallie and  omas Win-luck, both Irishmen, although the former had been resident in Scotland for some time. By the summer of 1797, Craigdallie was ‘united’, although not, it seems, Winluck. It was reported that among the radicals, the system of uniting was termed ‘planting Irish potatoes’.83 Robert Sands was in 1798 to blame the spread of the United Scotsmen on the activities of ‘incendiaries from the west’.

Government repression, and fears about future repression, pushed radicals on to ever more ambiguous constitutional territory, as it did south of the border. While in some ways it is the continued adherence to prudent constitutionalism which stands out in the autumn of 1793 in the Scottish context – through, for example, the urging of radical supporters to avoid any disturbance in response to the news that Muir and Fyshe Palmer were to be removed to London, continued support for petitions to parliament in support of reform, and the preoccupation with demonstrating the constitutionality of their aims through insistence that they sought the recovery of ancient rights and the recommendation that the Bill of Rights be transcribed into every society’s minute book – the duty to defend constitutional liberties in the face of despotic government and arbitrary courts was powerfully expressed.

On the face of it, the actions of the British convention, before its suppression on 5–6 December, provide strong evidence of the hardening of radical views in response to the experience of repression and fears about imminent suppression. Steps were taken for convening a future emergency convention of British radicals should the government take measures which threatened the existence of liberty and therefore radicalism, possibly through the adoption of a convention bill in Britain.  e adoption and publicization of French forms of address and organi-zation based on those of the new French National Convention – through most obviously the creation of divisions, the singing of French revolutionary anthems, the addressing of one another as ‘citizen’, and the dating of its proceedings from ‘the  rst year of the British Convention’ – indicate an altogether less cautious stance than the one adopted a year earlier. As John Barrell has recently written: ‘It invited the charge not only that it wished to introduce French and therefore

A proposal at a meeting of Perth radicals to correspond with the French National Assembly in this period was only narrowly defeated. As one informer reported: ‘had it not been for one or two of their more moderate members, who saw & represented the impropri-ety of the measure a Resolution to that purpose would have been adopted’.146 From Glasgow, a year later, the Lord Provost warned Robert Dundas that the views of the leadership of the radicals were not necessarily shared by the rank and  le, writing that he did not ‘think the people here, have con dence in the leaders of the party, although I believe the general principles of it, have taken very deep root, and are making daily progress’ (my emphasis).

ere are other hints of the existence of these strands, although their sig-ni cance is di cult to evaluate. Although a degree of rhetorical posturing was commonplace among radicals in this period, as referred to earlier, republican sentiments appear, nevertheless, to have been widely voiced in late 1792. Wil-liam Peddie, a member of the Canongate Society of the Friends of the People, declared in late November that ‘the Era of British Liberty’ was approaching, even arguing that the outcome would be a republic, and that, in the event of civil war, British democrats could expect help from their French brothers.

What was distinctive, however, about the Scottish reformers’ stance in late 1792 was less its constitutionalism – this, a er all, was the predominant posi-tion of most British reformers and radicals before the mid 1790s, including members of the popular reform societies138 – but the strength of their urge to appear moderate and peaceable.

Other Scottish societies, in addition to the Edinburgh Friends of the Peo-ple, were strongly in uenced by the Whig reformers.  e Glasgow Associated Friends of the Constitution and of the People, the society of which Muir was a prominent member, strongly advocated cooperation with the London body.

e clearest sign that the political path on which the Scottish reform societies set out was one of prudent constitutionalism were the connections which were quickly established with the Whig Association of the Friends of the People.  e formation of this body in London on 17 April 1792 may have been in uential in

Probably nowhere, however, were such pressures felt as intensely as the capi-tal, and by the later 1790s Edinburgh seems to have proved a notably unfertile environment for radicals for precisely this reason. In 1797, one radical declared in relation to the capital: ‘ e reason for the timidity of the friends of liberty may easily be traced to its source.  ey are in general poor – and dependent almost solely for their daily support upon the Aristocracy, in whose hands all the business of the town either mediately or immediately lies.’

In these same regions, manufacturing villages, which were multiplying in the later eighteenth century, rarely seem to have lacked a radical presence. In Blair-gowrie, a manufacturing village in Perthshire, the local stamp master found himself the subject of investigation for alleged radical tendencies because a copy of the Edinburgh Gazetteer was being sent to his house, from where it was circu-lating around local weavers.44 Several years later, William Murray of Ochtertyre observed: ‘ ere are people in Crieff and a few in Comrie that have been on my suspicious list since the ninety-two’.45 It was amongst weavers and other arti-sans in these sorts of communities that opposition to the Militia Act was o en strongest in 1797 and the clandestine United Scotsmen found its recruits.46 Even several parishes on the Carse of Gowrie, a rich agricultural region bounded on one side by the Tay and on the other by the Sidlaw Hills, in which spinning and weaving of linen had established themselves from the later seventeenth century as by-employments, were home to small numbers of radicals.

In manufacturing regions, however – Renfrewshire, Lanarkshire, Dumbar-tonshire and Ayrshire in the west, and Fife, Angus and Perthshire in the east – radicalism spread very widely. In Angus, to focus on just one of these counties, all but one of the main burghs – Dundee, Forfar, Arbroath, Montrose, Coupar Angus and Kirriemuir – seem to have had radical societies or had hosted meet-ings of radicals by the end of 1792.

 e main urban centres of Scottish radi-cal strength were, nevertheless, clear enough – Edinburgh, Glasgow and Perth. In each, numbers joining radical societies probably reached between 1,000 and 1,500, although potential or unorganized radical support may well have been rather greater than that, as was the case elsewhere.35 Numbers were lower, some-where between around 500 and 800, in Paisley and Stirling, and Kilmarnock, judging by the number of societies formed and delegates sent to the general con-ventions.36 In Dundee membership of radical societies was probably no more than a few hundred by early 1793.37 Elsewhere societies seem to have been small, although extant  gures are rare. A society in Saltcoats in Ayrshire comprised 60 members in early December, although it had only just been formed.38 Some parts of lowland Scotland also proved resistant to the radical message.  ere were, for example, few radical societies in the borders or the north-east in Aber-deenshire and Banff shire. Neither were there any in Caithness and Invernesshire, not surprisingly perhaps given the overwhelming dominance of agriculture in their economies, and low levels of urbanization, although at least one individual cautioned against complacency regarding the political views of the lower orders in Invernesshire; such people were hardly likely to reveal their true views to landowners.39  e highlands remained immune to radicalism, although a Gaelic edition of the Rights of Man was apparently produced.

At the end of November 1792, Norman Macleod was to attribute the remarkable surge of interest in the Rights of Man to the impact of the May proclamation against seditious writings.22 Partly in response to the proclamation, but also to requests from radicals in diff erent parts of England, Paine arranged for the publication in May of cheap (6d.) editions of both parts of the Rights of Man.23 In July Walter Miller, a cabinetmaker from Perth, wrote to John Horne Tooke of the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI) about the impact of the work around the

Reinforcing and further stimulating popular political hopes and perceptions,  omas Paine’s Rights of Man, with its romantic, cosmopolitan vision of the French Revolution, and in Part 2 its explicitly ‘redistributive’ form of radical-ism, was also circulating very widely throughout lowland Scotland during this period.

e successes of the French revolutionaries and of their armies in late 1792 also sparked a sudden upsurge of con dence that Britain’s ‘old regime’ was  nished and that the progress of reform in Britain was unstoppable.  ere was, in short, an abrupt, and unprecedented, expansion in the sense of the politically possible.  e excitement was palpable, and popular political expression in late 1792 frequently burst free of the trammels of Whig constitutionalism

Unlike the advanced Whigs and burgh reformers of the summer, those who joined reform societies during September, October and November 1792 were directly inspired by the French Revolution.  ey watched, intently and with mounting excitement, the tense drama of the declaration of the republic in August, its apparently imminent extinction by Austrian and Prussian forces; and its subsequent rescue by the French revolutionary armies led by General Dumouriez in October and November. Events across the Channel were eagerly followed in the pages of newspapers, circulation of which seems to have risen steeply in 1792, and in a string of publications providing  rst-hand descriptions of key episodes. Newspapers furnished their own such reports, usually in the form of private letters from Paris.12  e French victories at Valmy and Jemap-pes, and Dumouriez’s subsequent occupation of Brussels, were signals for rowdy popular celebrations. On 9 November, twelve or thirteen people styling them-selves the Revolution Club met at a bon re at Langholm Cross to celebrate the success of the French at Jemappes.  ree public toasts were drunk, which were reported as ‘success to the French Revolution’, ‘George the third and last king’, and ‘liberty and equality to all the world’. Each was followed by a discharge of guns.  at evening, candles were lit in the windows of club members’ houses and a mob of boys went through the streets ‘to oblige all the inhabitants to illuminate their windows’.13  e explicit borrowing of the o cial script of civic celebra-tion of British military victories was a feature also of more serious disturbances in Perth and Dundee.14  e erection of trees of liberty, in Dundee and several other places – Aberdeen, Forfar, Strathmiglo and Auchtermuty – was itself a further manifestation of the capacity of events in France to evoke powerful, posi-tive popular responses in the  nal months of 1792; from 1790, the tree of liberty had become the pre-eminent symbol of the French Revolution.

e Scottish reform alliance as it emerged in the second half of 1792 was comprised of heterogeneous parts.  is owed much to the rapidly changing cir-cumstances and political conditions in which the alliance was formed, and its relationship to longer-standing campaigns for burgh and county reform, both of which  zzled out in 1793, but which were ongoing in 1792.  e  rst Scottish reform societies were formed in Edinburgh, Perth and Glasgow in the summer of 1792, and were the initiative of groups of propertied burgh reformers.5  ey were a response to what was widely seen as a decisive parliamentary setback to the campaign to secure reform of Scottish burgh government at Westminster, when on 18 April 1792 the Commons rejected Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s motion in favour of reform, and on 30 April even voted to reject a petition from the ‘burgesses associated for reform’ praying to be heard at the bar of the house. A belated, and in the event abortive, proposal from the Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas, for a bill to ensure regular and transparent accounting in burgh govern-ment was viewed as a blind – ‘a delusive and ine cient reform’, as a meeting of the burgh reformers in Edinburgh put it.6 Faced with this rebuff , while some, led by the leading opposition Whig and Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Henry Erskine, argued for persisting with the campaign, but steering clear of the taint of innovation and association with the French Revolution, which any broadening of their objectives might cause, others among the burgh reformers began to view parliamentary reform as the only way to pursue their objective; an unreformed Parliament was never going to concede burgh reform.7 From the middle of 1792, the in uence on these individuals of the French Revolution was essentially a negative one, causing them to redouble their eff orts to assert the conservative nature of the reform they sought and, increasingly, the independence of their cause from the political upheavals taking place across the Channel.

During the  nal months of 1792 this emergent reform movement was transformed in scale and nature, at a pace and to an extent which astonished contemporaries. Before September, the Scottish reform societies numbered just two or three; by the end of the year, the total had climbed to somewhere between eighty and a hundred, similar in number, in other words, to that of English societies by the mid 1790s, but drawn from a considerably smaller pop-ulation.8 Scotland, it brie y seemed, was becoming the most dynamic area of growth within British radicalism, and Scottish reformers might even overtake their English counterparts in importance. At the end of November, one con-temporary declared: ‘ e spirit of Association and Remonstrance is stronger in SCOTLAND, as vegetation is most powerful in soil fresh and newly reduced from the forest’.

omas Muir, the radical martyr, may have talked of ancient Scottish liberty being fuller than its English equivalent, and some radicals called on the Claim of Right (1689) – the Scottish more-than equivalent to the English Bill of Rights2 – to vindicate their right to petition in defence of reform, but in doing so they were not challenging the notion that liberty was to be created through a reformed Westminster Parlia-ment, or that by the term ‘people’ was meant people throughout Britain. As we will see further below, from the inception of a parliamentary reform movement in Scotland, alignment and connection with English or English-based reformist and radical organizations were crucial, and this dimension only increased over time, partly in response to political repression throughout the British Isles.

 e ‘cause of liberty’ was the ‘cause of mankind’; universalist languages intertwined with national ones in radical circles with no sense of contradiction.

Between, however, the summer and end of 1792 the climate of opinion changed very abruptly. Beginning with the King’s birthday riot in Edinburgh on the nights of 4–6 June 1792, the country saw a succession of popular riots and pro-tests between the summer and late autumn, which, while not in most cases linked to an upsurge of popular radical feeling, in combination with the widespread dis-semination from early July of cheap editions of Paine’s Rights of Man, the startling rise of reform societies from the autumn, the shocking events in Paris following the declaration of a republic and Austrian and Prussian military intervention against the revolution, and the edict of fraternity issued by the French national assembly in November, produced a spasm of panic among the propertied classes.

e circulation of these various English radical and reformist papers has con-siderable signi cance, not just in terms of how we view Scottish radicalism and reform opinion in this period, but also when placed alongside the weakness of the Scottish radical press in the 1790s and its total suppression a er early 1794.  is was yet one more way in which Scottish radicals and reformers were depend-ent on individuals and developments elsewhere in the British Isles for direction, although a er 1796 the Scots Chronicle, and perhaps one other paper, as we will see below, continued to give voice to opposition opinion in the Scottish press.

English reformist and radical papers had a signi cant Scottish readership in the 1790s. One of the most keenly read of these was the press mouthpiece of the Foxite Whigs, the Morning Chronicle, edited by James Perry (born Pirrie), a native Aberdonian.18 Robert Burns was a regular reader of this paper, contribut-ing several poems to it.

us, through the press and lobbying activities of various kinds by the later eighteenth century discussion about public issues was reaching down into and across a much broader cross-section of the urban and semi-urban population than had been the case earlier in the century. One further small piece of evidence which points in the same direction is three annotated lists of subscribers to a burgh reform petition of 1788 from Perth which survive in the Perth and Kinross County Archives.208 Drawn up by the local authorities at the behest of the Convention of Royal Burghs as part of a campaign to discredit burgh reform, they show how the campaign drew support from a wide cross-section of society, including weavers, tailors and shoemakers as well as the merchants more usually associated with the cause. ( is evidence must qualify the commonly expressed view that the cause of burgh reform was essentially that of the respectable middle classes.209) By the 1770s, groups among the skilled labouring classes were also beginning to use the press to defend their occupational interests, such as the Edinburgh journeymen masons who sponsored a series of articles in the Caledonian Mercury in the course of a labour dispute in 1778.210 Journeymen masons were one of several trades well represented in the capital’s reform societies in the early 1790s.

If what mattered, therefore, was removing patronage and reviving the spirit of liberty, from where in society did this message gain most support? Callum Brown has noted that in the burghs it was merchants and tradesmen who led patronage disputes, while in rural parishes it tended to be tenant farmers, mer-chants or cra smen.176 In other words, opposition to patronage was the cause of the ‘industrious classes’, precisely the social constituency invoked in so much radical propaganda in the 1790s.  e strength of support for the Popular Party, which led the anti-patronage cause within the established church, lay in the mer-cantile and trading classes, but also, especially (but certainly not exclusively), in the rapidly growing urban-industrial parishes in the west, among the weavers and other artisan groups.

Defeating patronage was, however, a matter of much more than potential electoral corruption. Patronage, it was repeatedly urged, sapped the spirit of lib-erty at the same time that it threatened the spiritual health of the church and society. In a very real sense, the proponents of the repeal of the 1712 act were arguing, liberty in Scotland resided in the free election of ministers. As Crosbie argued, it was ‘chie y’ because of settlement by calls that ‘we owe those ideas of liberty that the lower class of mankind in Scotland feel’. Only through returning to this system would the ‘people’ be able to ‘feel their own weight’ and ideas of liberty be preserved.  is case was reinforced through reference to Scotland’s past. ‘Every struggle for liberty’, Crosbie declared, ‘since the Reformation has been by Presbyterians’.

Political structures and the nature of political culture in eighteenth-century Scotland le , at  rst glance, very little space for the development of ‘public opin-ion’ as an independent force in society and politics.

As government hostilitytoward the Revolution and British radicalism intensified, women ofthese circles were prepared to risk their personal security, theirreputations, or their livelihoods for the sake of their political princi-ples. Amelia Alderson, a leading force in the radical politics of Nor-wich, was apparently under government surveillance.4 Eliza Fletcherof Edinburgh, with close friendships and connections across theradical dissenting networks, was widely rumored by her neighborsto carry a dagger under her cloak, and to behead her poultry with asmall guillotine, in practice for revolution!5 In South Molton, Dev-onshire, a young dissenting schoolteacher, Eliza Gould, was forcedby her community to choose between her radical politics and herjob. She had little hesitation in choosing her principles.

THE FALL OF THE BASTILLE in 1789 was greeted with ecstatic joyby middle-class dissenting women in Britain. They expressedtheir delight by dancing around trees of liberty, publicly singing thehastily-composed revolutionary songs, and participating in celebra-tory dinners. The tricolor badges, cockades, and ribbons sported bywomen and men alike were visible and public symbols used to sig-nify their support for the revolutionary principles.

Traces of the same practice are to be found in the early nineteenth century.During the Luddite disturbances of 1812, a manuscript handbill was circulated atHuddersfield which proclaimed: "All Nobles and Tyrants must be put down, comelet us follow the noble example of the Brave Citizens of Paris . . . above 49,000Heroes are ready to break out, to crush the Old Government and establish aNew one."27 Also it is clear that in a few places groups of committed "jacobins"remained in existence through the years of the war, a notable example being the

As E.P. Thompson and others have noted, by theend of the eighteenth century the language of popular protest had acquired adistinct jacobin tinge. Anonymous threatening letters sent to magistrates oremployers, and the handwritten notices that were passed around or posted ontrees during food riots, showed a belief that the French Revolution, if not anexample to be actually followed, at least provided means of intimidation andincitement for local purposes. During the famine of 1800 a sketch of the guillotineappeared on a handbill advocating taxation populaire at Maldon in Essex, andposters elsewhere carried messages such as "Peace and Large Bread or a Kingwithout a Head," and "Bread or Blood . . . Have not Frenchmen shewn you apattern to fight for liberty?"

At times, radicals felt constrained to produce some rejoinder to the reiteration ofthis theme. One response was that the situation of late eighteenth-century Francewas so different from that of early nineteenth-century Britain that analogiesbetween them were meaningless. Cartwright wrote in 1812 that although Francehad had men of genius at the outset of the Revolution, the people as a whole hadhad no tradition of town and country meetings for political discussion, and nofamiliar landmarks such as Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights: "The nationalmind of France, when called to the great work of political regeneration, was inutter darkness, forming a complete contrast to the public mind of England."

During the first twenty-five or thirty years of the century, attitudes were gener-ally reserved and often defensive, and it was common for reformers to steer clearof the episode in their speeches and publications. Between the mid-1790s and thelatter part of the French wars, the whole question of political reform featured verylittle in public discussion, partly because of official repression but more fundamen-tally because of a strong reaction among the politically articulate classes against"French" principles. When reform resurfaced as a subject of debate towards theend of the first decade of the century, its proponents were careful to avoid positionswhich could be stigmatized as jacobin, and the conservative Whig MP WilliamWindham commented on this in a speech of May 1809. The new agitation wasfuelled, he said, not by the "metaphysical reasoning" and "grievances of theory"which had been prominent during the French Revolution, but by discontent overtaxes and "abuses".

But it seems none the less that aninsurrection was planned at this time, independently ofFrench help. The conspirators included a number of Guards-men, and the intention was to seize the King on his way to thestate opening of Parliament, to occupy the Houses ofParliament and the Tower, and, by stopping the stage-coaches from leaving London, to give the rest of the country asignal which would have precipitated a general rising.72 Thereis evidence that an organization of United Britons did exist inYorkshire in the autumn of 1802, and that some pike-makinghad been going on there.73 But few traces of similarpreparations have been found elsewhere, and so far as most ofthe country was concerned hopes for a rising in response to acoup d'etat in London seem to have rested largely on faith.When John Nichols, a London ultra-radical who escapedprosecution, made a tour of the provinces to collect money forthe defence of the prisoners arrested with Despard, hereturned with only a few pounds and reported that theLondon conspirators had been 'much deceived' about thenumber of 'patriots' in the country.

One of the questions that such documents pose is how farthey represented the views of British radicals as well as those ofIrish expatriates. There were certainly some pro-Frenchextremists in radical circles in England who were notthemselves of Irish origin. One notable example was in fact aScotsman: Robert Watson, a doctor of medicine and formersecretary of Lord George Gordon. He wrote in the Moral andPolitical Magazine of the LCS in the spring of 1797 that thepeople would soon 'have recourse to steel'; shortly afterwardshe went down to Portsmouth during the naval mutiny with theapparent intention of turning it in a political direction; andlater in the year he was sending information to LeonardBourdon, French agent at Hamburg, to the effect that 50,000men in Scotland and 200,000 in England were ready to risewhen a French landing occurred.57 He subsequently fled toParis in 1798, following the example of John Ashley, a formersecretary of the LCS who had taken the same step shortlybefore. Ashley submitted a memorandum to Talleyrand inApril 1798 claiming that 30,000 'active and decided' Lon-doners were ready to act against the government when theopportunity arose; and Watson published in a Frenchnewspaper a highly rhetorical address in which he urged thepatriots of England to co-operate with the French in liberatingtheir country.

In Ireland by the mid-17905 the 'Defender' tradition ofsecret societies, oath-taking, and sectarian rancour had fusedto some extent with an advanced radicalism which was heavilyinfluenced by French revolutionary ideas as well as by long-standing resentments against British political control; and in1795-6 the Society of United Irishmen adopted a secret oath-

One of the principal schemes being canvassed in 1797-8was that a revolution might be staged in conjunction with aFrench invasion of the British Isles; and a subsidiary plan,often associated with hopes for an invasion, was that attemptsshould be made to subvert the armed forces. Earlier, the ideaof invoking French help had not had much currency amongEnglish radicals. Even the British Club in Paris, which washeavily stocked with militants, rejected in January 1793(though by the narrowest of margins) an address calling for aFrench invasion to rescue England from slavery;51 and whenthe Reverend William Jackson came over from France in 1794to investigate what the likely response to a French invasionwould be, he was told by his informants that in England itwould be generally resisted. He was told that in Ireland, onthe other hand, an invasion would be welcomed. Wolfe Tone,a leader of the United Irishmen, said in a memorandumwritten for Jackson that the situations of England and Irelandwere fundamentally different, in that the English system ofgovernment was a 'national' one, while the Irish governmentwas 'provincial' (i.e. colonial, or imposed from outside). Tonewent on: 'The prejudices of the one country are directlyfavourable, and those of the other directly adverse, to aninvasion.'

The fact was, of course, that a resort to arms by the radicalsseemed to offer no more, or hardly more, chance of successthan constitutional agitation, at a time when the bulk ofarticulate opinion seemed to be either hostile or indifferent tothe radical cause, and when revolution on French lines hadbeen deeply discredited.

So far as collective violence was concerned, the contexts inwhich the radicals were most inclined to contemplate it werethose of'self-defence' and 'resistance'. Thelwall wrote in TheTribune in 1795 that he was not in favour of 'violence andmassacre' but that every man should defend himself and hisprinciples when attacked; and in a speech delivered at an LCSpublic meeting in the same year he said: 'Let us cultivate ourreason; and, if violence comes, let it come from our oppressors;and that, in so barefaced and unprovoked a way, that allmoderate men shall be compelled to cry out against them.

None the less, there were some radicals in the mid-17905who showed a tendency to glorify political violence or to harkback to violent episodes in the past. In Pigott's PoliticalDictionary there were entries expressing approval of tyrannicide,and 'Citizen' Richard Lee, in one of the cheap tracts hepublished from 'The British Tree of Liberty', Soho, in 1795,included the following passage on 'King-Killing':

A Convention the only Means of Saving us from Ruin (1793),recommended 'the interposition of the great body of thepeople themselves, electing deputies in whom they canconfide'.26 The Sheffield Constitutional Society used almostthe same expression in a letter of 27 May 1793, saying that areform of Parliament could only be brought about by 'thepowerful interposition of the great body of the peoplethemselves'.27 A convention which was actually held inEdinburgh towards the end of that year was dispersed by theScottish authorities, but in the following spring the Englishsocieties were planning to arrange a sequel in England.

It was clear that the implications of the programme ofmanhood suffrage and annual parliaments which the plebeiansocieties adopted in 1792 were potentially 'revolutionary', inthe sense that if it had been possible to achieve such a reformit might have opened the way to other drastic changes.

What of the radicalism of the popular or artisan societies,the London Corresponding Society and its provincial counter-parts? Was this substantially more militant and thorough-going? Republicanism, in the sense of hostility to hereditarymonarchy, was probably more widespread among reformersof this class. Francis Place said that the majority of membersof the LCS—influenced even more, it seems, by the Americanthan by the French example—regarded a republic as ideallythe best form of government, and that many of them hopedthat a republican system might be brought into existence inEngland by a gradual process of change.18 However, given thelaws of treason and seditious libel, and given also the extent ofpopular attachment to the royal family and the genial publicimage which George III had acquired by the lygos,1 9 it made

However, although linear conceptions of revolution werefashionable in reforming circles in England in 1789 and theearly 17905, two points should be noted. One, to which weshall return later, is that from 1793 or thereabouts suchinterpretations became much less widely and positively held.The other is that the enthusiasm for revolution expressed byEnglish preachers and pamphleteers was, in the majority ofcases, rather disembodied and vicarious. Despite the sweepingnature of their rhetoric, and their general belief that theFrench Revolution marked a cosmic advance for the cause ofpolitical and religious freedom, very few of them were morethan parliamentary reformers in the British context

Language of this kind, as has been suggested above, wasnaturally associated with a conception of political change thatwas transformational, and this meant that the original connota-tions of the term 'revolution' were very largely eclipsed. Theterm, having been used initially in astronomy to describe thecyclical movement of celestial bodies around the Earth, hadacquired a political meaning in the seventeenth century, andat that time it had usually retained cyclical connotations,being used to denote a circular political process in which there

It is well known that in the early stages of the FrenchRevolution the English people who greeted it most enthusi-astically were members of the educated classes, many of themassociated with the heterodox (anti-Trinitarian) branches ofDissent. The political outlook of such Dissenters was formedby a combination of influences including 'classical-republican'ideas, Enlightenment optimism, and religious millenarianism.2In the cases of Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, the lastelement was particularly important in producing a cast ofmind that responded with something like rapture to the eventsof 1789 and the immediately following years.

In setting all hope on the moral force of public opinion, the Englishradicals assumed that the seed of the democratic revolution had alreadybeen sown in 1688-9 and, at the same time, took account of thesovereignty of the very Parliament they criticized. This was the essence ofthe strategy of constitutional information to which English radicalismadhered throughout the closing decades of the eighteenth century. It wasa strategy deeply rooted in the political culture to which the Revolutionof 1688 had given rise. But the radicals' staunch belief in its potential forreform rested on their inability to recognise the socio-political function ofthe deformations they wished to correct. They never realised, for instance,that the constitution could do without a general social restriction of thevote only because the ruling class was in perfect control of the electoralsystem through the very absurdities they attacked.32This very shortcoming, however, gave English radicalism a distinctlymoral appeal which outweighed its apparent lack of practical politicalimagination. English radicalism claimed, on the whole quite successfully,to be the conscience of a political culture based on representation. Assuch, however, it shared the fate of most consciences. For its admonitions

The radical answeron both sides of the Channel to the question of representation was, ofcourse, universal suffrage and equal representation. But this identity ofpolitical aims hides the fact that the ways in which political representationwas envisaged in the two political cultures differed in some importantrespects. Once again it mattered that the English radicals looked to anestablished representative system which they wanted to reform, while thefounding fathers of French radicalism had to work on practically virginpolitical soil. The problems on which each side focused were thereforedifferent.

Finally, Louis XVI was not the kind of monarch who inspiredconfidence in the experiment of a constitutional monarchy. He alienatedeven the moderate representatives of the new political order because hewas as unable to give up the notion of his own personal sovereignty as hewas unwilling to take the step from premier gentilhomme of the aristocraticpolitical nation to the national monarch, which alone could have kept hishead on his shoulders. French radicalism was thus inevitably driventowards republicanism. This proved to be of more than nationalimportance. For French historical experience created a political patternwhich was to fascinate and to horrify Europe for much of the nineteenthcentury.