This important collection of essays, based on extensive original research, presents a vigorous critique of ` revisionist' analyses of the period, and reasserts the importance of long term ideological and social developments in causing the outbreak of the civil war.

This wide-ranging volume goes to the heart of the revisionist debate about the crisis of government that led to the English Civil War. The author tackles questions about the patronage that structured early modern society, arguing that the increase in royal bounty in the early seventeenth century redefined the corrupt practices that characterized early modern administration.

Highlights the breadth of surviving material for seventeenth century Parliaments in England.

Parliamentary Selection examines how members of Parliament were chosen from 1558-1702.

An investigation into the 'Constitutional royalists' and their role in the English Revolution.

A study of Charles I's two unsuccessful attempts to bring religious conformity to Scotland.

The Discourse of Legitimacy is a wide-ranging, synoptic study of England's conflicted political cultures in the period between the Protestant Reformation and the civil war.

This is a critical re-evaluation of one of the best known episodes of crowd action in the English Revolution, in which crowds in their thousands invaded and plundered the houses of the landed classes. The so-called Stour Valley riots have become accepted as the paradigm of class hostility, determining plebeian behaviour within the Revolution. An excercise in micro-history, the book questions this dominant reading by trying to understand the inter-related contexts of local responses to the political and religious counter-revolution of the 1630s and the confessional politics of the early 1640s. It explains both the outbreak of popular 'violence' and its ultimate containment in terms of a popular (and parliamentary) political culture that legitimised attacks on the political, but not the social, order. The book also advances a series of general arguments for reading crowd actions, and questions how the history of the English Revolution has been written.