The event. An event and its history ; The attacks -- Contextualising the crowd. The micro-politics of the attack on Sir John Lucas ; The high politics of the attack on Sir John Lucas -- The confessional crowd. The attack on ministers ; The attack on Catholics -- Reading the crowd. Cloth and class ; Anti-popery and popular Parliamentarianism
Summary
This book makes an original contribution to the history of the English Revolution and to the meaning of crowd behavior. It recreates one of the most famous episodes, in which crowds from Essex and Suffolk attacked and plundered the houses of the gentry, and sought to ""ethnically cleanse"" their communities of Catholics. The deeper perspective offered by history shows that this action was not ""blind violence"": the book deciphers the logic that informed the crowd's behavior, and finds evidence of both the importance - and reach - of puritanism and popular parliamentarianism